This week: Digging for Gold Edited by: Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline  
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What treasures are hidden in your portfolio? How much have you learned over the years?
This week's Drama Newsletter encourages us to dig for gold, and argues that whilst it's good to grow as writers, we must not lose our own, unique voice. It has value.
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Are you NaNo-ing this year? I’m sitting this one out, but I do remember the joy of writing without the fear of imperfection. NaNo is about getting the story out there. You don’t stop to edit. You don’t fret about whether or not that last page had too little detail, or too much. There can be loose ends. Unresolved character arcs. It doesn’t matter – not yet – so you keep on going. Afterwards, you go digging for gold.
As someone who tends to worry a lot about imperfections, I found the experience rather freeing. And it works! Some weeks ago I had a look at one of my NaNo novels and I was surprised at how good it is. It isn’t perfect. There is work to be done. But I am pleasantly surprised with the depth of my characters, the original creatures I thought up, and the chemistry between my leads. There is something there – something worth developing further. I am certain that it will be the same for you.
Last week I wrote a newsletter on portfolio organization ("Action/Adventure Newsletter (November 8, 2023)" if you’d like a look). I’ve been digging through my own portfolio, reading some of my old items. I joined the site back in 2004, and the difference between then and now is noticeable. That’s good! I’ve made genuine progress! I hope that when I look back at my work in another 20 years I’ll have learned even more. Again, though, I’ve found items that – odd as this may sound – had me wondering how I ever came up with them. I was impressed with myself. They may need polishing but they are gems; they have value. It’s fun to look back. I highly recommend it. It’s good to remind yourself how you started, and how far you have come.
It’s easy to forget that writing should bring joy. That’s not to say that it will never bring pain – when we pour out our emotions, or struggle along with our characters, it can be absolutely draining. I’ve scrunched pages into a ball and thrown them in the bin with plenty a mutter of frustration. If you look at how I write poems, it’s a mess of crossed-out words and lines, and arrows pointing everywhere. Sometimes you have to force yourself to sit down and write. Whether you’re aiming for 50,000 words, or have an essay deadline, you won’t always find it smooth sailing. Writing’s tough. But, on the whole, it should bring you joy. If not, what’s the point?
There was a time when I lost that joy. I compared my work to that of others and found myself lacking. Their work seemed so complex, so artistic! I believed my poetry especially to be too simplistic in comparison and felt that I could never reach such creative heights. I tried to be like them. In the process, I left behind that what made me love writing in the first place – that freedom of self-expression, and the fun that comes with sharing the weird and wonderful characters that dance around in my imagination. I am the person who writes about lost socks and adventurous fish. About lonely spiders and an octopus in search of a home. I entered my longest writer’s block ever when I believed that that wasn’t good enough. I now know that I was wrong. My poems and my stories may not reach great artistic heights, but that does not mean that they are without value. They make people smile. Shed a little tear. They bring joy, not just to myself, but to others. We can learn from studying the work of our fellow writers, but in our search for gold we mustn’t dismiss what makes us unique. It would be a dull world if we all produced the same output.
A journey back into your portfolio, then, or your old files and notebooks will not just show you how far you’ve come; it can also help you rediscover what made you write in the first place. We learn and grow – as a teenage girl I wrote the most terrible self-insert fan fiction imaginable, and I am not going back to that – but there’s usually something at the core of our writing that’s us. If you read the works of Terry Pratchett, for example, or Stephen King, or any of your favourites, you will find that they, too, have grown over time, but there’s something consistent, something recognisable, something undeniably them that runs through their writing and connects with their audience.
Don’t lose that voice. Don’t attempt to replace it with someone else’s. Dig for it, then polish it. It’s worth the effort.
Kitti the Red-Nosed Feline
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Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Drama Newsletter Team
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Drama: November 15, 2023 Issue [#12273]
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