What is this strange feeling? Is this the humility people have always talked about?

One of the recurring themes I've tried to capture in this blog over the years is the internal struggle between believing in yourself as a writer enough to stay the course and being wise enough to realize when you need to change. It's the most difficult part of developing. Without heeding advice and changing here and there, you'll never improve. But without believing in your vision as you see it to such an extent you're willing to ignore all the advice, you're unlikely to write anything worth reading.

Be it bad advice or just too much good advice, sometimes, listening too much to various flavors of focus groups just produces crap. 

I've bounced around between the two poles, trying to find the right mix that works for me. I tend not to find a settled place in between, but more to swing back and forth between the two. One day I'm an island, the other I'm desperate for someone, anyone to tell me what I'm doing wrong.

The other day, though, I experienced something that wasn't quite either. I got a notice that someone was publishing a story I'd submitted. That now makes eight total acceptances (including the book) against maybe 250 rejections. Until now, when I've managed to snag an acceptance, I feel about two seconds of gratitude to the universe for allowing me some small measure of success, followed by the inevitable greed: it's great that I got it accepted, but maybe I should have held out for a bigger name journal? Last week, however, I didn't feel that at all. I didn't feel justified or relief or any of the expected feelings. I felt unworthy. Not fake unworthy, like in an Oscars acceptance speech, but really unworthy.

I think it has something to do with how I view artists as secular prophets. It's an extension of my former evangelicalism, which even though I now completely reject, continues to pervade my view of the world. If artists are prophets, then they should be wiser and holier than I am.

If that's not true, though--if prophet-artists are just screwed up, utterly lost people like me, then that invokes another old ideas from my Bible-toting days: grace and election. Artists aren't artists because they are better people than others. It seems like they should be, since part of art is to show us a better way to live, hopefully. But that's not how it works. Stories go where they choose to go. It's easy for anyone who's ever written to understand where the idea of muses came from. You work and work and work at a story, and the story eludes you, until one day you wake up and something totally different from what you were working on just shows up in your brain and you write it in three days and it's just right and it's exhilarating but also utterly humbling.

So I guess that's what I felt last week: another holdover from my days at Faith Bible Church, humility. I don't know what that means for how I write. Maybe it means I should try to exert less control over my stories, because they aren't really "my" stories. But I usually hate that kind of talk. It sounds like a writer being pretentious and trying to sound like an author. I think for me, it serves more to contextualize the failure I have such a hard time with. If I am "chosen" to write stories (by whom I do not know--I'm still as agnostic as ever), then I am also chosen to go through the failure.