emptyfull

Talk about writing exactly as much as you, personally, need to talk about writing.
--Seanan McGuire

When I walked away from the table, there were bruises on the unheard lyrics of my yet-to-be-born songs.
-K'naan

Creative work comes from internal fires.

--Mary Jo Putney

Today's quotes come from a file I started keeping a few months back. The title inserted itself in my head after I got to the laundromat, in a morning that looked pretty much like the picture above, and realized that I had not brought along a notebook. I had pens, but no notebook and nothing that could be pressed into service. How did I feel at the moment? Emptyfull. Technically not a word, but it fit at the moment, and it encapsulated a lot of what I've felt about writing over the past year.

Full of stories to be told. Empty of the right way to tell them. The voices of my untold stories doing their best to make themselves heard over the noise of the hypercritical gremlins who'd got into my head somewhere along the way. Since I had my e-reader with me, I delved into Marsha Canham's The Iron Rose, finished that and got a fair way into The Following Sea before it was time to fold laundry and haul it home. I've long admired Ms. Canham not only for her writing, but for her committment to telling her stories, her way. I find that a great inspiration.

A quick check of email and favorite blogs between laundry hauling and lunch alerted me to a timely post at the Word Wenchesm on writerly anxiety. If you're a writer or know one, I highly recommend this post. This. So exactly this. If the voices are going to talk to us anyway, we may as well let them have their say. Anxiety is going to happen, but we can ride it out and come out the other side, stronger. To add another quote to my list, this one from Joanna Bourne, "The only cure for the pain of writing is writing."

So yeah, I'm going to talk about writing as much as I need to. This is my place to do that. Talking is not a subtitute for doing, don't get me wrong, but I find that one revs me up to do the other.

How do you battle anxiety about your creative work and punch those hypercritical gremlins in the throat?