Once upon a time, I posted a simple question in an online writing class: "What do you guys do for inspiration?"
I was just another student in the class. With an hour, I got a vehement reply from a classmate, and he spent two or three paragraphs telling me why I was asking entirely the wrong question. "You can't sit around waiting for inspiration," he told me. "You need to be writing." And of course the teacher then chimed in to agree with him completely.
Yep — I felt like an idiot. And I've spent many years reflecting on that one brief exchange. The response from my classmate made me feel like less of a writer, as if I was just some pretender who was sitting around "waiting for genius" or something like that. But that wasn't me. I'd taken writing workshops before — college courses, writing residencies, and other online classes. I knew how to write. I knew how to find ideas and map them out and get words on the page. By the time I took this particular course in 2007, I'd already drafted an entire sci fi novel of 190,000 words. Now, that manuscript sucks, and it makes me nauseous every time I try reading it, but I wasn't exactly someone who needed a lecture on "don't wait for inspiration."
So, it would be lovely to say I overcame that feedback, and then wrote my ass of for this course, and everyone lived happily ever after. But that's not what happened. Instead, I wrote my ass off for the first three chapters of a new novel, and then submitted those for feedback. I got some positive feedback, and then this one comment that left me feeling dead in the water. "I'm not sure what to say about the writing style," the instructor indicated. "I think it may be a bit too cinematic."
In retrospect, that was probably a good thing. Many people enjoy reading sci fi novels that are cinematic. But not that teacher. And so rather than continuing that novel . . . I lost all interest. And started my own writing website. Because I thought I knew more about teaching than that teacher.
Honestly, I should've just kept writing. I should've just ignored those comments. But I couldn't. And I'm not the only writer who struggles with outside feedback. Many of us write because we've faced difficult times, and we found escape through books. Some days, we carve our souls into the page because it's the only true release we know. And no, we aren't writing the next bestseller, and the words that come out might not be the right words at all — but they are still our words, from the depths of our feelings. So when someone comes along and just stomps on your work, it feels like a boot-kick to the sternum. And then your heart stops.