small immunities

jakec:

…

Food for thought: what if you were the weak link that brought the entry down from an Honorable Mention to a Not Mentioned At All? That’s the thing about wanting to change the past, man: you always risk stepping on the butterfly.

(in case you missed the context, I was expressing both my happiness at all the people I know mentioned in the Da Capo book for 2010, and also feeling sorry for myself for narrowly missing it)

Jake makes a good point, but it wasn’t sitting well with me for some reason. But now I think I get it; there’s a good point here (don’t regret stuff), but it’s kind of combined with something I think might be inimical to being a writer.

Look, don’t get me wrong; like every other writer (or more generally, artist) when I look at the stuff I’ve done I can only see the flaws, the things I would change now. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate good editing and chances to revise. But I’ve always said that writing takes a kind of doublethink, where on the one hand you are painfully conscious of your weaknesses (or else you’ll never improve) but on the other you are supremely confident in your own abilities (or else you’d never create in the first place). I don’t think I have that much ego about my own stuff; there are better writers than me, and worse ones. But I do think that what I do is good.

So basically my point here, which wandered away from what Jake was actually saying about five seconds after I got started, is that I can’t think of things like that unwritten blurb in this light. Can’t in both a “if I do, I’ll start thinking of everything like that and stop writing altogether” sense, and in a “it would be ridiculous to think that kind of thing” sense. In an abstract sense, I can appreciate that any new blurb (or removing any of the existing ones) could have shoved the page out of contention for the book, because the whole thing is intensely subjective. But on a concrete level, I can tell you that if I had contributed a blurb it would have been fucking awesome and it would have changed the status of the entry from an Honourable Mention to a full-fledged winner.

And I sincerely hope that all of my friends on Tumblr and elsewhere who write or otherwise create feel that way about their work, too.

(Source: girlboymusic)