Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love talks about how your successes and failures do not matter when it comes to creativity. All that matters is how you accept your creative self and enhance it to its fullest potential.
Personally, we all have our own successes and failures. They keep coming up every day and we cannot change that. From my experience, I always have a problem with writing opinions. Somewhere in the middle of three chapters of a story that I write, the fear of my audience sinks in: Will the book turn out okay, will it be bad, will it be good; I don’t know what runs in my head during that moment, but it makes me stop writing.
As of this moment, I have written 3 drafts; all of them having three chapters each and suspending in the air like puffy clouds, just because of my intense fear of my audience. As for my current draft, I did buck up and write three chapters, and true enough; the same scenario occurred.
But the difference between this particular one and the other three was that I made an extra effort for this particular draft. I did love it a bit too much and parting away with it because of my insecurities seemed a bit too lame from my part as an author.
So I decided on asking and searching for advice by looking up for posts, articles, speeches – anything that said: “I too face the same struggle.” And yes, I did get my solution.
Elizabeth Gilbert taught me that I shouldn’t give space to my insecurities, but instead, I should give space to my creativity. There will be so many people who would judge my work as a success or as a failure because, at the end of the day, it all comes down to how I accept my own work and what I think. Because the art of creativity is my safe haven; and nobody is allowed to judge that. I make my words and my creativity flows, but what I say about MY work matters; and not the opinion of an audience who has multiple opinions that has the possibilities of changing by the hour.