Are we thinking too small?

For those of us who've been pursuing publication without success for a long time now, why do we keep going? Romance Writers of America recently hosted three authors that took a long time to publish as part of their series of classes for RWA PROs. Two of the authors mentioned that they didn't break into print until they learned to understand the use of emotion in their work.

That stumbling block was in the back of my mind when I was reading Walking in this World by Julia Cameron. In reading her discussion about how we often rely on what is mirrored to us by others to find our way as creative people, I wondered how often we don't see something about our work - like the lack of emotion in the story - because it's not reflected in the mirror?

Cameron says "In this way [seeing only the part of our artist with which others are comfortable], quite inadvertantly we often get miniaturized. We often get fragmented."

So what's the moral of the story? Maybe it's that when we limit our exposure as artists to a homogenous group of people, we don't get an accurate view?

It's okay, but sometimes uncomfortable, to march to the beat of your own drummer.