I have a problem with heights. I don’t much care for them. In particular, I don’t much care for being on the edge of them and looking down, down, down.
The stomach roils. The limbs turn to so much petrified wood. I wonder if someone will have to come rescue me, realize it would only make things worse, think of how embarrassing it would be. I’d still have to climb or jump down on my own power. Having an “encouraging” voice in my ear wouldn’t help with that, although it could occasionally jumpstart a streak of competitiveness and get me off the ledge.
And yet…I go to the heights. I periodically force myself to climb high, high, high and to look, look, look. I do something scary because it’s for my good. I need to get out of my comfort zone. While I’m not going to do something crazy like skydiving, I’ll climb the rock wall. I might attempt the twenty-foot leap into the lake.
I take the same tact with the writing. Writing gets boring if it isn’t forced onto and off the ledge. It needs a good scare now and again. It needs to be stretched, made to attempt something new.
The piece of writing could fail utterly, just as I could fail to take that leap into the lake. No matter. I try again. I refuse to get stuck, to be “defined.”
John Berryman says a writer should “always be writing a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise, you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere because that’s always easiest.” Orson Scott Card says something similar in his introduction for Speaker for the Dead.
The two men are right. To go somewhere, to be a better writer, I have to do something scary, so I do. I take my writing to the ledge and push it off. Again and again and again.
Image: Ting Chen (Creative Commons)