The visual kind, anyhow.

This fractured fiction project I am working on for my Creative Writing class is proving to be a nightmare, as I suspected it would. I went through a lot, emotionally and artistically, last night, and all that resulted from it was a very small improvement on my first design. I have gone from “does not work” to “barely works and looks like a shitty website for the 90’s. ”

The problem is that my visual skills don’t come close to matching my visual standards. I know what I want to see but I haven’t the foggiest idea how to make it happen. I want to make something that conforms to my standards at least as much as my writing does, and of course, I am way better at writing than I am at designing web pages.

I want my project to look plausible, as there is definitely a strong “blurring the lines between reality and fiction” aspect to what I want to achieve. I want it to look like a real website, essentially, so that it can be immersive for the reader. And that would be tricky enough for someone without my particular set of abilities.

But my standards for realism are quite high. I have the sort of analytic mind that notices things that are anomalous and therefore don’t make sense. So I will notice little things that most people would not.

And the thing is, I don’t even know what I mean when I say “a real website”. I’ll know it when I see it, I guess. Hardly a good way to start an ambitious project.

Honestly, I kinda wish I was taking a more traditional creative writing course. It shames my ambition and my pride to say so, but life would be so much easier if I could just stay in the world of text and not have to mess around with anything more ambitious than a one act play.

But I will succeed at this. It will involve a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, but I will keep pushing myself to innovate and learned no matter how unpleasant it is for me. Doing the easier thing accomplishes nothing. I want to grow in strength, power, and ability, and that means leaving the comfort zone and breaking new pathways in my mind.

And honestly, if I can pull this off, the reward is not only the skills I will force myself to learn along the way, but the art itself. If I can pull this off, it will be a pretty funky cool piece of art in and of itself. Something I can be proud of.

And that’s what will be pulling me forward on this misbegotten project. The desire to make a really cool piece of art. And, hopefully, to impress my professor. Doctor Nicola Harwood.

What can I say, I still seek validation from teachers. I want them to think I am smart and special. The fact that my mother was a teacher for most of my life is probably somehow related.

But mostly, it’s about the fact that when I was a bullied kid, the teachers were the people I could impress, and I was a lot safer with them than I was with my peers.

Like I have said before, the fact that I did not value my high marks and the ease with which I did my work at the time did not mean that I didn’t crave those high marks and the validation they brang. Having an abundance of something does not erase the fact that you need it.

It just obscures it.

Similarly, the fact that I think this prof is already pretty impressed with my skills as a writer does not change the fact that I want to keep on impressing her.

I mean, I am pretty sure she has been deliberately picking me last when we read our stuff aloud because she knows my stuff will be excellent and she doesn’t want the others to be intimidated by it, and/or she wants to finish on a high note.

At least, that’s the best interpretation I can put on the phenomenon. It’s possible that she is doing it because she hates me, though I don’t get that vibe from her at all, and I have fairly good antennae. Or she is somehow trying to put me in my place.

If so, it’s not working, because the students seem pretty impressed with my work too. I guess all this bloggening has had its intended effect and made me a pretty good writer.

This, naturally, greatly pleases me. I have been working more or less in the dark for a long time. No offense to you, my dear readers, but you are all, as far as I know, people who know me personally. And even then, you rarely offer any opinions as to my work. I understand this, and I would do the same in your shoes.

But from the writer’s standpoint, nothing beats positive feedback from people who don’t know you personally. I know that sounds perverse, to value the opinion of strangers more than the people close to you, but that’s just how the ball bounces when it comes to being an artist of any sort.

And writing is such a solitary pursuit that we writers naturally develop an insatiable need for feedback. Even those of us who are otherwise extremely antisocial (not me, of course… I love you all) crave someone else’s perspective in order to answer the eternal question in every solitary artist’s mind : Is what I am making any good at, or am I fooling myself?

Even if we vehemently disagree with the feedback (good or bad), it gives us some sort of anchoring point, a sense of where we stand relative to… well, reality.

That’s why I was so happy when people laughed at the jokes in the play I wrote for college. Sure, the head of the theater society told me it was really funny, and my actors laughed a lot at the table read, but… it was the audience who would be the fuinal arbiter of my skills, and they laughed like hell.

So I guess I have some idea what I am doing after all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.