Ok, so I am now officially scared out of my mind.
A day at google brought me to a local writer’s crit group about a week ago. So, on a whim I decided to email the leader to find out more info about it. We’ve been emailing back and forth for the past week and there is a meeting on Thursday, of which I said I’d attend.
Great…a chance to meet some fellow writer’s over a good cup of a coffee. That doesn’t frighten me.
What DOES frighten me (beyond belief) is sharing my work with real, live people. You see, the beauty of the internet is that I can sit here and hound the hell out of my keyboard everyday for you fine folks knowing that you’ll never be able to look me in the eye and tell me that I suck hard. Rejection and criticism isn’t so bad when it’s a bunch of rag tag writer’s strewn together over the world wide web tossing words around on their computer screens.
In real life, however, with real flesh and blood people who can sit across from you and tell you that your work sucks (or is fantastic!), it’s a little scary. I have no idea why I can handle criticism on the net like it’s nothing but the idea of real people from my own local area reading my work scares the bejesus out of me.
I mark it as a growing experience. A chance to branch out and make my work more “real”. So, I am forcing myself to do it, but I am doing so kicking and screaming.
Perhaps it’s because my writing has been my personal shrink for the past several years. Perhaps it’s because I have kept my craft to “private” forms. I realize that my family found my old blog and hence I’ve already had “real” people reading my work, but they never talked a whole lot about it other than to tell me that they thought I was good.
But the purpose of THIS group is “critique”, which means a focus on the NEGATIVE aspects of the pieces we write. So it’s going to be a bit different.
The meeting is going to be a “write in”, where we all get together and write together. That will be weird for me too because I am not used to writing with a group. As I’ve said, my writing has always been a “private” thing for me. The only “public” aspect about it has been the posts I’ve made on the net, but again, it’s to a bunch of people that I’ll likely never meet. And even of the one’s I HAVE met, or plan to meet, they aren’t local.
I don’t know if that makes a damn bit of sense or not, but let’s just say it’s a little scary to think about. I suppose it’s a necessary evil…a hurdle with which I need to cross at least once to get more comfortable with the idea of writing for a real live audience who can stare me in the eyes and let me know exactly what they think.
Not to devalue you, my precious, precious readers. But if you don’t get my point, I’m not sure I can explain it any other way.
Perhaps I need a good Paxil drip.
