All right, this post will be my last love letter to Orson Scott Card and his Boot Camp, I promise. At least for a while.
I’ve been thinking about the lessons I would take away from Boot Camp. And I think they come down to three big ideas I am walking away with:
A book is not a precious thing
One thing I learned last week is that I can come up with five good story ideas like that. *snaps fingers* And I can write a story like that. Which probably means I can write a book like… well, I guess probably like thaaaat. But you know, pretty quick.
I do not have to treat my book, or any other I write, as a precious artifact to be husbanded, honored, and shielded from all mistreatment. If I screw it up somehow in my efforts to get it published? Sucks, but I can write a new one. If I never get it on the shelf? Same deal. I will treat my work with respect, but I will understand that there is always more where it came from.
I have a career
I have been treating myself like a person who hopes to join a profession. But the fact is, I have joined it. Getting published and making sales are obviously huge parts of my job, parts I have not mastered yet. But they are not the things that make me a writer.
I will no longer be ashamed to call myself a writer or to answer questions about it. I will no longer apologize, with my attitude or with little self-deprecating jokes, for not yet being published.
I am a writer. I write. That’s what I do.
I am not going back
I have returned to my home, of course, but I am not going back to the life I lived before Boot Camp. A life where I fear my work, worry about it, and put it off. I am going to do everything I must to stay in the Boot Camp mentality, where I work very hard and am exhausted and happy.
One idea I have is to designate the first and second of each month as “Story Days,” during which I’ll do a repeat of the Boot Camp assignments to construct five story seeds and write one story. But I think the biggest thing that will keep me in this mentality is just the knowledge that I can exist there, and the memory of what it can give me.
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So, maybe this is three ways of saying essentially the same thing. Whatever. Suffice it to say that I feel I have returned to Atlanta a changed woman..
Excellent, Jane. I am encouraged by your assessment of the boot camp. It really was a life changing experience. I am going to adopt one of your take-home lessons in particular: the one about no longer being ashamed to identify myself as a writer. It’s so hard to take one’s self seriously as an author when one has not been published yet, but Mr. Card definitely proved– to all of us, I think– that we ARE writers.
I will try never to doubt that again.
Wow, Jane. That was beautiful. I need to plagiarize your heart.
Thanks, guys! George, as big as I talk in my post, this is not going to be the easiest attitude shift for me to make. But I think I can get there.