ieva melgalve

This is moderately like being able to tell whether somebody is gay, or having uncomfortable strings, or really really needing to fart or being dead scared while trying to appear nonchalant. The first: yay/haha, I’m can tell! The second: OMG, I wonder what others are able to tell about me?

I am still not 100% sure I can tell whether a writer is having fun while writing (or having a smart-attack of “I’m just inserting this scene in the second draft and it’ll appear as if I knew it all along, haha!”), but I sure as hell am able to tell whether a writer has had a bad case of middle swamps, chapters and chapters of “damn it, why do I have to do this again… I loathe writing, I loathe being a writer; and while it’s sorta cool that, being a pro, I can pull this off and the reader will never know but WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS? OH RIGHT, I’M NO GOOD AT ANYTHING ELSE”, and this is depressing to no end. It makes me cry and contemplate the futility of my own writing, which will hence have the same symptoms of “oh hell why am I doing this?”. And thus the futility will spread like a disease, poisoning and suffocating more and more writers and drowning the unsuspecting readers in depression (“this book is really smart and well-written, I’ll enjoy discussing its literary novelty and then I’ll go to the closet and hang myself there because oh my god life is miserable and pointless”).
I wonder, by the way, whether this has happened in Latvian literary scene. I honestly can’t remember a book where writer was clearly enjoying the act of writing (some scenes from “Warm Earth” perhaps?).

Be as it may, I have swallowed two good anti-writing-depression-pills (Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone” and “Belle’s Best Bits” by Belle de Jour), and am on my revising-horse again. It’s not that bad when you know that it can be good.