Fumble Fingers
2003-03-14 � 10:53 a.m.

I fumble.

I think that most people have a creative urge, though few ever recognize it as such and fewer still are able to channel it and focus it to the point that it is useful to them (and by extension, others).

The creative urge is different than an actual talent that the urge can harness.

I, myself, certainly have the urge...but I lack the talent. For me, writing is like trying to pick up a needle from a sheet of ice with swollen fingers the size of sausages. I can push it around, maybe even get one end off the ice briefly, but no way am I ever going to be able to pick it up. The physics of it just don't exist for me.

Low self-esteem is a funny thing. I was walking across campus last night, and I was thinking about how socially inept I am, and why that is, and why social interaction generates such a knot of fear in my gut, and I realized something. The things that I was afraid of had never really happened to me. Outright public rejection and humiliation? Never. The majority of people just don't do that kind of thing. I've been embarrassed in public before, but usually it was my own damn fault.

Ah yes, I thought. You're afraid of yourself, aren't you?

Indeed I am.

Writing may be the same way, but I doubt it. "People" are always telling me that I am good at it, but I disagree. Yes, I can form a sentence. Sometimes even pretty ones. But I don't have any good ideas, or if I do, I don't have the power, skill, knowledge or whatever to translate that into an actual thing by using words. Forming (mostly) grammatically correct sentences isn't the same as making something that is artistically valuable. I've seen things written by people that couldn't spell to save their life, but that had the idea, the core spirit, to pull it out of the poor mechanics and make it real in a way that my own still-birthed creations never are.

And when you get someone like Vex, whose flowing grace and evocative imagery turns the mere description of a daily happening into something that makes my lungs hurt...well. It's not even fair to call those things she writes "mere descriptions" because they aren't, not when she does them. She's got both parts down cold, the mechanics and the spirit (for lack of a better word), and it's gorgeous.

Then there is Pope. I've mentioned Pope before, I am sure. I first came across Pope on an email list about, oh, ten years ago. When I spotted that she kept a journal, I glommed onto it. She's a stupendous writer, and has only just now started submitting her work to publications. No surprise that she's already got one story accepted. Her work can be found here. I highly recommend this story.

This wasn't intended to turn into a praise-a-thon for those writers I admire � we'd be here all day. I was intending to work through some thought I had vis-�-vis my low self-esteem and writing, but now I've completely lost my train of thought. Bugger.

Ah well. It would have turned out nonsensical anyway.

-t

Currently Aurally Inducing: Sahara Hotnights, Keep Up the Speed
Selection of the Lyrical Vocabulary: "Fired up, it's a smash and we're aiming to score!"

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