Coffee
helps me search. For me, searching is always
the most fun after a good day, and while jacked up on a mix of coffee and slight
overtiredness.
**
Often
it’s best to search alone. No one there
to criticize or comment, no one to distract or enlighten. Just me and my fingers, searching. The danger to this is that searching can
become an exhausting and lonely task.
**
Sometimes
I like searching with a partner. Someone
to compete with, therefore pushing me forward, or someone to talk things out
with, making my search all that much more rewarding. The danger here is that once you’ve shared
things with people, it becomes partly theirs.
Often those you’ve shared things with feel obliged to add their own
ideas and criticism. Share an idea too
early, get the wrong feedback, and suddenly the idea that once lit up your soul
now seems empty, hollow, and useless.
**
Searching
can sometimes take so much out of you that you hit what professional searchers
call a “Wall.” Walls are dreadful things
to live with, always gnawing at you from the inside, sucking the energy and
life from your body and mind. Walls have
a way of convincing you that searching isn’t a real profession, and even if it
were you would never make the cut, so why bother trying?
"The danger here is that once you’ve shared things with people, it becomes partly theirs. Often those you’ve shared things with feel obliged to add their own ideas and criticism."
ReplyDeleteI worry about this a lot in teaching. The conventional wisdom is for teacher to praise a student endlessly to bolster 'self-esteem.' Problem with that is that the teacher is colonizing the student's writing--either expecting thanks or praise in return or becoming the dispenser of approval and disapproval, none of those healthy approaches to teaching. The writing belongs to the writer and no one shares in it. So, when I comment I try to concentrate on the writing itself and mostly reserve the adjectives, though sometimes that's hard! (I intentionally use and overuse 'nice' as my go-to adjective as it has minimal emotional charge.)
"Share an idea too early, get the wrong feedback, and suddenly the idea that once lit up your soul now seems empty, hollow, and useless."
My wife is the perfect audience for my own writing as it's developing: smart, non-judgmental, great sounding board, unbiased. But I certainly have had the experience of floating material too soon and finding it dead afterwards.