I pretty much always wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I loved to read. The library was my favourite place in the school (apart from the Canteen) and I used to savour the experience of lugging home my book bag chock full of books about horses or princesses or running dogs named Spot. One of my earliest memories of school was reading Mr Men books in the library by myself. I always felt comfortable being alone and I guess by reading a book I could never be lonely.

I used to write the best stories. Totally naive and without any logical premise but these stories had imagination and wonder and people thought they were good. “You’re a great writer!” they’d say, which filled me with confidence. This confidence and their belief in me is probably the reason that I decided that I could actually be a writer. “I’m a great writer.” I believed it. Some days I still believe it but most days, I don’t.

Writing can be a real tooth and nail struggle. I love it but I fight it all the time. I fight sentences that aren’t quite right or a plot that doesn’t feel genuine, and I often get discouraged by the word counts of other writers. Perfection and writing the perfect piece of anything often leads to my biggest mental blocks.  Perfection is the most paralysing, demoralising, unattainable quality. You sit and pray, despite knowing that you’ll probably never write a perfect sentence but you stare at that blank screen and make deals with all the deities that one of them will at least grant you the power to be more than mediocre.

“There’s no such thing as perfect writing, just like there’s no such thing as perfect despair.” Haruki Murakami.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 9:06 pm and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.