Do you ever feel you’re actually witnessing how all the world--or at least your world--is connected? I've been struggling with my next step as a writer. It's very hard to let go of the ambition to finish my first novel while I'm thirty, despite realizing that I want to paint the Mona Lisa before graduating from art school. I’ve gotten stuck, wedged between “This is your best work and it’s not good enough” and “Keep writing; it’ll be good practice and you can achieve your goal, even if you don’t do anything with it afterwards.” A lot of what’s captured my feet has been the frustration that none of those 70,000 words are the depth they need to be, and I’ve done enough editing to know that editing is twice as hard as writing. In the end, I’m completely overwhelmed by the need to do my characters, their story—and my readers—justice.
Well, this morning I had a brief, fascinating thought about guys who look like girls. So I did what any person used to researching does: I Googled it. Half the search results showcased hot Asian actors who were so beautiful, they looked like girls (if I understood the link titles correctly), and the other half of the results were how to dress up like a girl if you were a dude. Not what I was looking for. I wanted to read the experience of a guy who looked feminine and was often mistaken for a girl—you know, something real life.
Listen, you may never tell the world about your little fascinations, but I would encourage you not to be afraid to learn about them a little, to flesh them out. Don’t be afraid to Google “guys who look like girls” just because you think people would laugh at your or condemn you if they knew. You never know what you will come across. For example, my search yielded a gem of an article: two authors discussed writing characters of the opposite sex, and what that is like. One of the authors, Danny Pelletier, said the following:
"Writing badly is an important part of the process. We must first misjudge ourselves and our characters before we can truly know one another as people. Your characters will misread you and you’ll miswrite them, just as two people who have known one another for a long time squabble over petty misunderstandings.
In other words, the arguments make the marriage work."BAM. It was like a punch to the eyes. The most random of Google searches, based on nothing concrete but a passing whim, went right to the heart of the matter. Maybe only writers will understand this, but I have this irrational desire to apologize to my poor, woefully underdeveloped male character for not fully understanding him. But the dying fire was relit and now I am driven, not just to tell their story, not to finish my Mona Lisa before my birthday, but to understand my characters and write that understanding down.
So this will be the year. I am determined to write my short stories and submit them for publication. I will develop my writer's platform, seriously and as a real resource to further my career. I will faithfully write a blog, not as an obligation and not as a way to self-serve my ego, but as a sharpening of the knife against the block to keep the edge sharp. I absolutely love and believe in my novel. Maybe I will finish it before I'm 31; maybe I won't. But this is my first race and it serves as the finish line, calling me forward to learn and practice and hone my craft until I can paint my Mona Lisa.
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