“Just say, ‘To hell with ’em! Say it! Say it aloud!”
So says Dina Delsanto (played by Juliette Binoche), a painter and teacher in the movie, Words and Pictures also starring Clive Owen. Delsanto, who struggles to paint despite a debilitating condition, says this to a female high school student who is feeling too vulnerable to paint her truth.
“Just say, ‘To hell with ’em!”
Oh, if only… 
Instead, too many times, you may end up like this woman on the 5 of Cups from Ciro Marchetti’s Legacy of the Divine Tarot, with your back against the wall, hurt and vulnerable to the rejections, criticisms or other disappointments that challenge you on the creative path. Afraid to put out there the visions and stories that you hold so close to your heart.
It’s not like you choose to be a writer or creative because it is easy or glamorous, or because it will make you lots of money. Most of us aren’t like Richard Castle from the television series, making big money while also having fun solving crimes and playing poker with other successful writers.
Instead, it often feels as if the writing or the story chooses you. The problem is that until you sign that first contract or make that first sale, it’s hard to get others to take you seriously—including and especially yourself.
“You can’t write. OK, you can write, but a book?”
“So you got A’s in your college writing class. This is the real world.”
“You can’t make money writing. Writing’s a hobby. You need a job.”
Sound familiar? Heard any or all of those? Any of them come from you, your inner critic?
All my life I’ve been a writer. And all through my life, I’ve had to deal with those and other messages that made me want to sit with my back against the wall.
In college, I had a professor rip a short story of mine to shreds in front of other students for being too sentimental and trite (while another professor had loved it). The same thing happened in a poetry class, even though one of my poems was published in the university literary magazine. When I interviewed for an editorial position in the marketing department of the health insurance company I worked at a year out of college, the director didn’t mince words telling me how I couldn’t write (although I ended up writing articles for the in-house magazine later).
Like most writers, over the years I’ve filled a file drawer of rejections; rejections for my YA fantasy, and my fairy tale-inspired fantasy (even with an agent) and for several nonfiction book proposals as well, including my award-winning Weaving a Woman’s Life. Not as many rejections as J. K. Rowling perhaps, but enough. With all those criticisms, rejections, pats on the head, and inner doubts, it’s a wonder that sanity remains–and the desire to write.
But what are the choices? Become a surgeon? Drive a bus? Or continue to sit with your back against the wall? But if you do that then you have to ignore the voice of the Muse. That can lead to insanity, creative and addictive.
And then what happens to your story? Or your painting? Or song or dance?
Get up and get back to writing, to creating. Go ahead. Step away from the wall and say…
“To hell with ’em!”
At least three times a day…aloud.