- List three old enemies of your creative self-worth. Please be as specific as possible in doing this exercise. Your historic monsters are the building blocks of your core negative beliefs.
I don't think I have any specific people who are enemies to my creative self-worth. If anything, everyone in my life up to a certain point was so optimistic about my writing, that I may have gotten an unrealistic idea of what a writer's life was going to be like. Everyone was pretty on board for me going out into the world to be the kid from "Almost Famous," and I was dumped out of college mid-recession. I did have one professor in college who was an enemy to creativity in that I always felt that her words were encouraging, but her actions were not. Any time I would go to her for actual advise about who was hiring and where I could get work with my brand new journalism degree, she'd try to shoo me away. I think this came from a place of fear for her because the current job market was just such a wasteland. She wanted to prepare her students the best to her ability but there wasn't necessarily anything to be prepared for. The job market was drying up right before her eyes and she felt powerless to help her students. This could all be me reading into her motives and assuming the best of her but that's how I feel. She was sarcastic and flippant with me as a way of hiding her own fear. So I went out into the world not feeling like I had any directions, not being able to use my new shiny degree to support myself, and feeling very angry about my situation.
I think ideas have been my creative enemies much more than actual people. "Your handwriting is TERRIBLE," "You can't spell," "There are so many others who can do it better." Those are the things that keep the notebooks empty and keep me from living up to my potential. In reality, none of those things should have any impact on my writing. So what my handwriting is bad? I could type everything. Typing also solves the spelling problem. And yes, people are always going to be better at things than me but if "50 Shades of Gray," has taught me anything, it is that it does not matter if you're actually any good at all. "50 Shades," is "Twilight," fan fiction written by a Mormon woman who doesn't actually know anything about the subject of which she writes and she is still a household name and her book is internationally known. And I can poo-poo her books all I want but she's still better than me because I HAVEN'T WRITTEN A DAMN BOOK.
- Select and write out one horror story from your monster hall of fame. You do not need to write long or much, but do jot down whatever details come back to you.
Eh, I don't really have any horror stories... I've only had one teacher ever who didn't like like way I wrote. Sophomore year of high school and I honestly can't remember his name... I just remember we called him Llama Man because he spit when he talked. He's the only one to ever give me low scores on writing assignments and say he didn't like my style. I thought he was lazy and unoriginal. He also had us do "peer review" a lot which is a thing I have always loathed. I would much rather have someone skilled rip my work to shreds than have someone draw a smiley face on the top of my page and say, "Great job!"
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