Putting it Out There

Earlier this week, I posted a long overdue blog on The Susquehanna Writers. Revisions loomed, yet I avoided them. So, in an effort to nudge myself along, I posted a blog announcing that this was it. This was the week I was going to tackle the revisions. My critique group was meeting, and I was not going empty-handed.

And you know what? It worked. I did, indeed tackle the revisions.

It's amazing how going public with a declaration makes us more likely to follow through with it. In this case, I'm not even sure how public the declaration was. I know that one of my fellow bloggers read it because she commented, but for all I know, it wasn't nearly as public a declaration as I thought it was, or intended it to be, and yet, it was enough.

And then tonight, my group greeted my submission with enthusiasm, genuinely happy that I had something to hand out. Icing on the cake.

Writers are a funny combination of introvert and extrovert. Without the introverted piece, we'd be too busy interacting with other people to sit still long enough to produce anything. But without a certain amount of interaction, we'd have nothing to write about.

I suppose if we were truly introverted, we'd care much less about what other people think, and so public declarations and constructive criticism would be unnecessary. We would write and revise only for ourselves, and our work would never travel beyond our own devices and into the world at large. Sometimes, as in the case of unrevised work, this is good thing, but for those of us who write in the hope of being published, it's counterproductive.

I'm hoping that now that I've broken through the procrastination barrier, the introvert in my will take over and I will power through the rest of the revisions. If not, I'm sure you'll be hearing from me.