Writing: Thoughts of the momentI have a problem. I like to refer to it as "George Lucas syndrome." It is defined as the complete inability to accurately gauge the quality of one's work and ideas. Like Mr. Lucas, if I am not assisted by a screenwriter, a producer, an editor, or just a sane friend who realizes when I need a baseball bat to the cranium, I will come up with some seriously stupid shit. I have had my own Jar-Jar Binkses, endless podrace scenes, insipid romantic dialogues, and microorganisms that whisper the sweet secrets of the universe into my ears, like how to build an AT-AT entirely out of bacon.
(Unfortunately, someone got to this before me.)How is George Lucas Syndrome (GLS for short) contracted? I can't speak for the titular example of this condition, but in my case, it came from constant praise of my writing. Now, before you start thinking that I'm intractably full of myself, I don't deserve most of it. People give praise for lots of reasons. For one, maybe they see you have some potential and want to encourage it, despite the fact that your work isn't going to win any awards anytime soon. (Kindergarten finger paintings, I am looking at YOU.) Maybe the audience likes what they see, but doesn't have the expertise to catch something that would offend a more trained eye. (Remember when you thought your dad's stick figures were the most amazing art in the universe?) Or maybe the reviewer is simply drained or crunched for time, slaps on a sticker, and calls it a day. (I've always wondered about the secret life of SAT essay graders; gods have mercy on their souls.) And sometimes - maybe, just once or twice - we actually transcend the limits of our current abilities, rise to the heavens, and spin our words out of the very stuff of the unfathomable and glorious cosmos. The veil parts, revealing a small thread of the truth of the universe; angels weep, overcome with beauty; my triple-cheese burrito hops into the microwave and
defrosts itself. Miracles, indeed.
Hyperbole aside, that last one has probably happened to most writers at least once. (I mean writing something really good, not the burrito thing.) Sometimes people surprise themselves. This is a great thing! However, if you're like me, and have mistakenly taken those miraculous abberations as representative of the usual quality of your work, you may be at risk of contracting GLS. After all, if my writing is great, and my writing springs from my ideas, then my ideas must all be awesome!
Damn, even my logic is infallible.
Luckily, most people aren't like this. The overwhemling majority of the writers and artists I have met are very self-critical, never satisfied with their work and how it compares to that of others. And even if you personally don't go to that end of the extreme, you probably realize, like a sensible human being, that everyone has their original trilogy days, and their prequel days. But I was a dumb kid, fooled around without protection, and caught the GLS without realizing it. Only the aforementioned sane friend(s) with baseball bats were able to knock some semblance of reality into my noggin through some much-needed critique. I now understand that I haven't been critiqued enough in general, and that I've been a big fish in a small pond, so to speak. The ego really does need smacked around now and again, for the sake of sanity.
So, provided you have waded through all the tl;dr, you might be wondering why I still have GLS, given the realizations I've come to. The strange and funny thing, weirder even than the fact that the city planet of Coruscant has no farms, is that I've ended up on the other end. If I'm not great all the time, then some of my ideas have to be bad. Maybe lots of them are bad. Now, that's okay. I can accept that. Humanity accepts unpleasant things, like locker room toe fungus and shitty video game movies, all the time. Some things are just facts of life. But how do I know when something is bad? I might just be tempted to put sparkling vampires in my high school drama, and then where will we be? (This is actually patently less stupid than a bunch of other things I've come up with, like an ice sorcerer who researched a way to turn his, uh, gametes into pollen, so he could have a child with his plant demon wife. No, I was not on hallucinogens.)
I know critique is the answer. I know that having someone to act as your sounding board for ideas is the first and best way to separate the gold from the pebbles and the mud. But I can't really demand time from my busy friends to ask them to look at my posts. This means it is up to me to evaluate my own ideas, and proceed without the crutch of their scrutiny. That's enough to make me wet myself, and I'm someone who held it in through a nine-hour overseas flight due to an irrational issue with airplane toilets. (Don't ask.) Right now I'm even sitting in front of a post-in-progress, wondering if this is the fanciest thing since Henry VIII's commode
(DAT BLING), or something so banal that it will confirm my deepest fears of creative bankruptcy.
I think I'll just post it and see what the eff happens.
In conclusion, I am hoping that participating on Mizahar will help me to become a better writer and get over my crippling perfectionism. I hope too that I'll eradicate the last of my GLS, and learn how to more accurately consider what the heck I'm putting on paper or on the screen. And lastly, but most importantly, I hope to meet some awesome folks and have fun telling a story. Some of the best things in the universe come out of collaboration. Together, like Mr. Lucas and the crew of the original Star Wars, we can turn a little scribble about space farmers on Utapau into a memorable epic.
Maybe we'll even get some burritos out of the deal.