Have you failed lately, my darling?
A Shameful Harlot
Have you not written enough words? Have you not written as often as you would like? Have those words you’ve managed been horrifyingly amateurish? Has your work been rejected? Have you disappointed others? Have you disappointed yourself?
Please take a moment to consider how you feel, my beauty. Not very good, I suspect; I sense that you are overflowing with shame and regret and despair. Perhaps you are even so burdened by these terrors that you find it hard to write: as if each key on your type-writing machine were weighted with brass; as if each page in your note-book were covered with foetid and stinking black slime; as if each shining idea was frozen in a block of sewage.
Writing is hard enough, you think; but it is impossible to write like this, with this vasty ocean between you and your words, an ocean filled with boiling blood and shards of glass and betentacled horrors, where tar rains down from a leaden sky, and all is lost, all is lost.
My sweets, let me reassure you that this is normal, and that you feel thus does not indicate that you’re misguided and doomed to failure. Nay! It simply means you’re human, and that your writing is so precious to you that you must protect it from all these horrors: from the tar and slime and weight and boiling blood and shattered glass.
I can help.
I am no stranger to shame, my darlings. I am excruciatingly familiar with the territory I describe, from long personal experience. Let me guide you out of this atrocious wasteland, and back to the sweetly flowing river of your writing.
The first step is to recognize your feelings of shame and despair.
The second step is to acknowledge them. My darling, no wonder you feel so horrid! Your feelings are perfectly natural. Reassure yourself of this; do not increase your anguish by struggling against them.
Finally, release them. Shout them down the sewer, blow them into bubbles and pop them, light them on fire and watch them burn away. Ahhhh, delicious, isn’t it? How do you feel now? Isn’t it quite difficult enough to write, without having to deal with all those extra layers of slime and wrongness?
Introducing the Shame Bucket
My favorite way to release my most dreadful feelings is to use the Fiction-Writing Directorate’s Shame Bucket. Simply write the feelings you wish to release into the form below, and click Submit. It’s utterly anonymous, darling, and I’ll delete your submission without reading it. No one will ever see what you say. I certainly won’t let stern Ethelie or strange Gustav read them.
Write it out, darlings. Release it.