After disclosing in my last post that my Muse is a perv, he’s been rather quiet. So apparently he’s also shy. Or the strong and silent type. But that means I have no inspiration for today’s blog post. That’s okay—I’ll fake it.
Yes, yes, I know, I railed on faking story tension in another post. But this is a different kind of faking it. This type we all do, as it’s a normal part of life. As Jane Friedman said in her post, you fake it until you make it.
We all fake it at some point in time as we stumble through life. In my perfectionist dreams, I’m a plotter in every aspect of my life. I have my entire life planned out in my head: everything gets neatly tied up in a bow, everything happens for a reason, and the good guys always prevail. Guess how well that works out for me in real life? Ha!
In reality, my life is much closer to what writers call a “pantser”. As opposed to plotters who have everything figured out before they start writing, a pantser flies by the seat of their pants. They might know who the main characters are… And that’s about it. They completely wing it when it comes to the plot, story twists, character development, etc.
In other words, it sounds a lot like my life.
It probably sounds a lot like your life too. Real life has a way of disrupting all our carefully laid-out plans, yet we muddle through somehow. We fake it.
When I first started this journey to becoming a writer, I faked a lot of things: knowing anything about plot development, grammar rules, you name it. When I attended the RWA conference, I faked being an extrovert. When I get rejections, I fake being okay with it. That’s just life.
But you know what? Just like Jane said, when you fake things, a lot of times you’ll eventually get to the point where you’re not faking it anymore. And that’s true, I spent months reading every grammar book and Edittorrent blog post I could get my hands on, and now I know more than most people. As long as you’re muddling through life in a forward direction, you will make progress toward your goals. You will eventually make it.
What things do you fake? Have you ever “faked it until you made it”? How did you make that happen?
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