On Being Needy

I was never popular in high school. But it wasn't like I was actively disliked either. It was more like respect with a mixture of coldness. People did not talk to me and I did not talk to them. I went to prom with a clowder of females and I was never that girl the boys usually asked to dance.

So I guess, you can say that I was always a writer.

Writing is a solitary affair, a solo dance.

It's not anything that can be done with two people in the same room looking at the same Word document (or paper, if you want to go old-fashioned). As such, when it comes to the act of writing, unless you have a go-to person that you show all of your work too, writers often do not get much input on their work as they go along. And the only input comes after the work is done are usually through the eyes of the editor, whose job is usually to tear the piece down. Don't expect any sympathy from the devil.

And the most valuable comments, those from the readers, are usually given far, far after any corrections can be made.

Stephen King said it best in his memoir "On Writing" when he said that, "Most writers are needy." And if an award-winning, bestselling author is needy, imagine what it's like for the rest of us?

As a writer, we don't write because we have such large self esteems that it's threatening to burst out of our chest a la "Aliens." Rather, we write because we lack self-esteem and our thought processes and neurosis only becomes clear when we're sitting in front of a blank piece of a paper (physical or electronic) writing down our thoughts.

Most writers will never ever tell you but we live on response and the knowledge that people are reading our work. And when that first response, that first comment comes in that says, "I agree with you" or "I think you're f***cking crazy," it fuels us and helps us to continue. "You think I'm crazy? I'll show you crazy."

Because I don't write to hear myself think. I write it both because I love the process but also, because I hope that it will help educate or clarify information for the readers.

Because inside, we're all like that awkward girl at the high school prom, hoping someone will look at us and ask us to dance. So the moral, dear readers?

Say something. Or just look over. Because in the end, we're all just standing alone in the corner in an overpriced dress.