playing it safe

although I'm doing fine on my word count, 8099 as of end-of-day yesterday, i have hit what might be called a psychological wall. it's not that i'm having trouble getting the words on the paper, it's that the words on the paper are disappointing me. i know i'm not supposed to worry about quality, but as i was waiting for the subway to take me home after jeerleader practice last night, i was thinking, thinking HARD, about my novel. something is amiss. and suddenly i had a moment of panic. what if i'm not good enough to write a book? what if i'm not skilled enough, what if my experiences don't mean enough, what if i'm just simply unable to capture that thing that makes good books good? what if, in my description of bodies and events, i am unable to capture the soul?

to this point, i feel like i've been limiting myself, writing safe. at this point, my grandmother could read my manuscript, if you know what i mean. i feel inhibited. i feel like i'm writing for my most conservative audience, and it's driving me crazy. i need to break out of this, somehow. i want edgy characters. i want REAL characters, not the boring, flat, uninteresting characters that i found in all of my "christian" novels growing up.

I'm reading a great book called "Writing Past Dark" by Bonnie Friedman that addresses a lot of the emotional aspects of writing. In her essay "Anorexia of Language" she says about fear to write what we really mean, "So many of us, practiced in administering our own internal morphine, wish to preserve harmony at all cost, to be good wives and virtuous daughters, yet write. We disregard the fugitive emotion we are not supposed to feel, and whose presence we do not understand." I'm trying to be virtuous, but virtuous is not what or who i am. i am writing, not from my heart or soul but from my head, which is sanitizing everything that i'm saying, bleaching it to the point almost of unrecognition. when i mean to have vibrant, complex, flawed characters, they are coming out static, fuzzy, and gray. i'm not sure how to break out of this, but if i don't, i'm going to have one hell of a boring and useless novel.