The Writer’s Nightmare

I’m back! A week off for funsies, aaand then I got a stomach bug. That was not so fun. It could have been much worse, but it was awful enough, thank you very much. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays, or tolerated them, or weren’t completely miserable at least. And if you don’t celebrate, well, I hope you had a nice couple of weeks? Hooray!

A couple weeks ago I had a dream.

Actually, it was worse than a dream. It was definitely a nightmare. A nightmare of the sort that only I could cobble together out of the miscellaneous brick-a-brack lurking in the darkest recesses of my half a brain. Well, sort of. You see, there’s this short play called The Actor’s Nightmare, written by Christopher Durang, in which the main character is mistaken for an actor’s understudy and forced to perform without knowing his lines. My nightmare was a variation on a theme, if you will.

I should mention at this point (and I’m pretty sure I have in the past) that I do my utmost to adhere to the various and sundry rules and quirks of the English language. They call me Grammar Girl at the office. I have been known to wield a red pen with a level of glee which could only be described as manic. I will never not point out an inappropriate apostrophe.

The power of the Oxford comma compels you! ::flings holy water all over::

Ahem. Pardon me. I got a little overexcited.

Back to the dream. Of course, the memory always fades the next morning, but the image that stuck with me was a paper that had been handed back to me. It was more red pen and margin notes than original text, and holy crap, if that doesn’t give a writer the wibblies, nothing will.

Like any normal human being, I suffer from a certain level of what’s known as Imposter Syndrome, where I can’t shake the feeling that sooner or later everyone is going to figure out that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

I’m just realizing that I probably shouldn’t have told you that.

Anyway, I really did wake up in a cold sweat over this nonexistent paper all marked up by a faceless proofreader. The note at the top was the stinger, though.

“I know you can do better.”

Ouch. And, of course, this led to several hours of drain-circling. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? There are so many people who do it better than I do, why am I bothering? Am I really that good at it? I mean, I think I’m above average, and I know that people look to me to rip into their stuff and improve it...heck, my COO once said ‘You have nice verbiage,’ which was the weirdest compliment I’ve ever had. People say nice things in general. But...I could do better. Right?

My subconscious seems to think so, anyway.

Then again, my subconscious is kind of an asshole, so…

There’s nothing wrong with improvement. I keep bashing this thing out in an attempt to hone my craft. I write other things, too, in different formats. Sometimes I journal.

I play a word game when I'm waiting places where I make as many words out of the name of the place as I can.

Words are a Big Deal in my life. I like putting them together. I like messing around with them. I like using them to express my frustration at the monumental douchenozzle ahead of me in traffic. (There's a whole other facet of my language fixation--the spoken word. We'll leave that for another time, though.)

I’m still going to work on my, well, everything, but damn, Dream-Me. That was a dick move.