Kat Choe

Feeling kinda vulnerable and want to share some reflections from my writing life. Scroll by if that's not your thing at the moment.

I've been pretty much paralyzed in my writing for about two years. Looking back, there were some consecutive "failures" - bad reviews, good reviews but no transfers, uniform rejections from publishers, a production I was thrilled about suddenly gone, etc. - and another problem:

I was spending the writing time I did have trying to tell stories for other people. What does my manager want to see in my pilot, what does that AD at that fancy theatre want to see in my play, how do I wrap up these commitments without letting people down, all that.

The result was that I hated everything I was currently writing and felt ashamed about what had been my prides and joys. Because of those feelings of shame and guilt, I stopped showing up to a lot of things. I couldn't handle being seen by my successful peers.

(That last bit is very dumb. If you're a young writer, don't do that. Show up for everyone else. They aren't seeing you in the lobby of their show thinking "oh look at them, their play bombed, they suck." They're happy to see you and they deserve your support.)

The rest kind of unfolded as you might expect. More drinking, less writing; because of the less writing, more drinking, which made me less able to write. I'm only really coming out of it now because it was so unhealthy it was damaging much more than my writing.