Celine, thank you for this piece. I just published my first ever (!) fiction story in a literary magazine, and I was horrified that the piece they selected was the one that took the least amount of effort, pain, frustration to write. Really, THIS was the one they wanted to put out in the world? It could be so much better, and I has many …
Celine, thank you for this piece. I just published my first ever (!) fiction story in a literary magazine, and I was horrified that the piece they selected was the one that took the least amount of effort, pain, frustration to write. Really, THIS was the one they wanted to put out in the world? It could be so much better, and I has many others that *were* better! My source material was my dreams, and it felt like cheating, like I didn’t really write it. And in reading you and talking to some creative friends, I realize that it’s not that the story was effortless, it’s that I had spent my lifetime on my writing practice and this was one of the things that came out of alllllll of that work.
I really appreciate your thinking on this. And I especially appreciate how SPECIFIC and well-researched this entire piece was. I am bookmarking it and will for sure return to it several more times.
omg Dizzy—congratulations!! where can I read your story?
I also love this anecdote because it touches on something I've been thinking a lot about…how the things that "pay off" sometimes, that are externally rewarded, aren't always the things we labored the most over! The relationship between effort and reward is so obscure, and frequently feels off…the reward has to be the work itself, and getting to labor over something in a pleasurable way.
And what you said is very true—you sharpen your subjectivity and your technique and your ability to contain meaning in text over the course of a lifetime, and then it emerges (almost intuitively and spontaneously) in the work in front of you. But that spontaneous, nearly effortless expression was only possible because of the hours/days/weeks/years of effort that came before it!
Thanks so much for reading and for sharing your own experiences ❤️
Celine, thank you for this piece. I just published my first ever (!) fiction story in a literary magazine, and I was horrified that the piece they selected was the one that took the least amount of effort, pain, frustration to write. Really, THIS was the one they wanted to put out in the world? It could be so much better, and I has many others that *were* better! My source material was my dreams, and it felt like cheating, like I didn’t really write it. And in reading you and talking to some creative friends, I realize that it’s not that the story was effortless, it’s that I had spent my lifetime on my writing practice and this was one of the things that came out of alllllll of that work.
I really appreciate your thinking on this. And I especially appreciate how SPECIFIC and well-researched this entire piece was. I am bookmarking it and will for sure return to it several more times.
omg Dizzy—congratulations!! where can I read your story?
I also love this anecdote because it touches on something I've been thinking a lot about…how the things that "pay off" sometimes, that are externally rewarded, aren't always the things we labored the most over! The relationship between effort and reward is so obscure, and frequently feels off…the reward has to be the work itself, and getting to labor over something in a pleasurable way.
And what you said is very true—you sharpen your subjectivity and your technique and your ability to contain meaning in text over the course of a lifetime, and then it emerges (almost intuitively and spontaneously) in the work in front of you. But that spontaneous, nearly effortless expression was only possible because of the hours/days/weeks/years of effort that came before it!
Thanks so much for reading and for sharing your own experiences ❤️
That’s exactly right! And thank you 💛 My story is in Broken Antler: https://www.brokenantlermag.com/issue-five-fiction/recurring-teeth-by-dizzy-zaba