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Today's Annex: I don't know how they do it

I am a blogger, not an author. While I may write things and sometimes they're stories, I do not consider myself an author.

Authors are these super courageous people who create characters, worlds, stories that are given to other people for their entertainment. Whether it's to make them smile, to make them cry, to give them angst or to make them cower in fear, they create them to be read by others. To be enjoyed. To give those readers something that will allow them to escape for a short while.

I am no author.

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One or two people have said I'm brave for putting my thoughts "out there" in the blogosphere. But I'm not brave. They're just thoughts. They're ideas. They're not these intimate creations and fictional beings that seem sometimes more real than fiction.

They're not an extension of me. They're not months or years of my life spent shaping them into what I ultimately want them to become. They're moments. They're random things.

But these authors who invest their time and heart and emotions into these stories they write are so very brave to allow others to read them, to judge them, to criticize them.

I don't know how they do it.

The fear I live with that people will ridicule my posts is nothing compared to the fear of being told that my story isn't good enough, my writing is weak, my characters aren't believable. Which is why I'd never shared my stories with the world at large. Which is why they'd never seen the outside of a trunk.

I don't know how they feel confident enough to allow their words to get out there, to be judged by not one, but by hundreds, thousands, millions of readers. To be snarked at, laughed at, belittled, mocked. To be voted on. To be parodied. To be denigrated.

Because, unless you are a writer paid to ghostwrite someone else's story, write someone else's life story or share someone else's thoughts, it is so very, very personal. Each word, each sentence feels like a little piece of me that will be torn to shreds if it's not good enough.

It really makes me wonder just who I am to judge what I read. To voice my opinions on someone else's labor of love. Because if the writer put their heart and soul into their work, having a random strange pick it apart, criticize its merit, can never, ever feel good.

I've rambled about taking chances, on sharing your voice, on putting yourself out there, but nothing feels quite so personal as writing a story and sharing it with the world, allowing them to form opinions on it, thus forming opinions of you.

I truly don't know how they do it.

Because for the very first time today I've shared a story I've been writing with someone whose opinion I respect more than anyone else in this world. Someone who I know will tell it to me straight if the writing's not good enough, if it needs work, or if it just deserves to be burned.

And while I know they won't be mean, just the thought that they might read what I wrote and think I'm not the writer they'd hoped I'd be, has me in such a panic I can't even see straight.

And if sharing just 63 little pages with one person who won't intentionally hurt my feelings, won't criticize unless criticism is due, makes me feel this terrified, I can only imagine that sharing the same 63 pages with an uncaring world would be that much more scary.

So I cannot, for the life of me, fathom just how they do it.

To those authors who have shared their work with me super early, allowed me to get a peek at their stories long before publication, I am in awe of you all. While some of you may have works already published, have felt what it's like to have your story digested by the world, I can't imagine the putting that next story out there is that much less scary.

It's so easy for us on the other side of the story to judge, to form opinions, to say what works and what doesn't, what makes sense and what doesn't, but when you're so connected to a story, because it comes from your head, that ability to look analytically at that work is so much harder.

You're giving a piece of yourself to someone else and asking them to tell you what's wrong with you, hoping that they'll say you're perfect, but knowing that's never going to happen.

So you try and muster up the courage, thicken your skin, ready yourself for what feels like an assault, even if it's just words. But as well all know words hurt way effing more than those sticks and stones. Bones knit back together, bruises fade, but those words leave an everlasting impression. Their cut so much deeper than any knife.

And I am not that brave. And I just don't know how those amazing authors do it. Time and again. With each and every novel they write.