The Benefits of Slowly Dawning Horror
Despite the title, this isn’t another of my Lovecraftish posts. No, it’s one of those posts on the craft of writing everyone looks forward to so much. Specifically, it is about the realization about how hard it is to get halfway decent at writing and the appropriate pace for that realization. It seems like it takes most writers a few hundred thousand words of practice to get vaguely readable (I’m not talking about prodigies who can write well right out of the gate here – we can all just agree that we hate those people and move on). But if the realization of how much work you need to do hits you all at once like a werewolf leaping out of the bushes at you, well, chances are you’ll just quit writing and become a productive member of society.
Not Helpful
No, it is best if the realization steals up on you slowly, something sensed but not seen because it is too formidable, too cyclopean, to fully comprehend. The nagging sense that you are missing something hideous and eldritch stalking your every step forces you to move faster, to get better at moving. Only years on, looking back on the naive stumbling of your earlier self, do you begin to comprehend the horror that was driving you on.
Much better
Then, of course, as you see the thing that would have cracked your mind early on, you begin to wonder. How much of my own mediocrity have I yet to see? Certainly, now I’m good enough. But didn’t I think that back then as well?
But that way lies madness.
Okay, that did get a bit Lovecraftomatic. What I’m trying to say is that without a certain awareness of how “meh” you are, you don’t have the motivation to improve – that awareness is the fuel for your writing abilities as they struggle to escape the gravity of mediocrity and attain the orbit of adequacy. But too much realization, too quickly, and the vessel of your abilities will rocket off into the sun of, um giving up-itude. So that’s what I’ve been thinking about lately.
Metaphors are fun!