I’ve started this post in my head a zillion times but it never makes it to the blog because my evil twin, the Rigid Editor, always deletes it before I hit the “publish” button.
I hate The Editor, yet have to acknowledge her hold on me. She shuts me up if I get creative by reminding me that my strength is expository writing, the how-tos and rants, dry explanatory posts that read like the business letters I’ve written for 30+ years. Creativity, she reminds, is the domain of the young and the trained.
She reminds that I’ve never had an original thought, that all plots and characters have been seen and written by other, better, funnier people before leaving me with the final admonition that my sense of humor was never my strongest suit.
See why I hate her? She’s every negative defeating thought I’ve ever had, bundled in a business suit holding a stack of check stubs reminding me that her talent has paid the bills for a long, long, time and I’d do well to remember that.
Getting rid of The Editor is a scary thing but I can’t help but think that if I did, I’d be a heckuva lot more interesting and so would this blog. Much of what I’ve been doing has been a concerted effort to put The Editor in a more balanced place, but she crawls out anyway like a whack-a-mole, waiting to strike me with lightning before I drop anything other than the conventional and the expected out on the public stream.
Worse yet, she doesn’t limit herself to my writing. She crawls in my camera, my sketchbook and my journals, always with that whiny, self-defeating conventional song. The one that says it’s just not right to do anything different because someone’s done it anyway and done it better already. Or the more insidious “you never could draw your way out of a paper bag…” This is the same voice that turned me back from studying music in college, claiming I was probably talented but not gifted and besides, classical musicians rarely made enough to get by.
Her incessant whisper: “Don’t give up your day job.” Yeah…
Well, Ms. Editor, about that day job? See, I’ve been without one for about 4 months now and there is no posse at my front door begging me to sign on somewhere else. Experience matters less than paper these days — paper that holds no guarantee the bearer can put a coherent sentence together, think critically, or have the benefit of experience when making judgment calls. Some can, some can’t. But in the world of corporate hiring, that paper is the golden ticket. The Editor is simply a bonus that rides on the expressway rolling through HR, nice but not necessary.
This is my declaration of independence from the shackles of She Who Defeats. No more. I’m putting her in a box and letting her out to write business letters and how-to posts when needed. She is otherwise banished from my camera, journals and sketchbooks, twitter stream and most importantly, my head.
Hold me to that, would you?
