I don't want to turn it into a blog, but I guess making this part a writer's journal might be fine.

Not to sound emo or anything, but for a fiction writer (for me, anyways, lets not generalize), I think the biggest hurdle is accepting/acknowledging the... value (or what little of it there is) of your life. We're not talking about monetary values, ie. life insurance or anything. What I mean is, personally, writing is a reflection of yourself. You pour your heart and soul into the story, and despite variations in the details and all, the core of the story is still a peek into the writer's soul (now granted, a lot of contemporary works that are all action + sex + movie-like aren't like that, and that's the main reason why I disdain them... fun to read, but pretty bad writing- yes that includes Da Vinci Code, so sue me). And then you may step back and think... eh, this isn't so great after all. And you want to write something else, or maybe add a touch of something else. Expanding your horizons, lets call it. Maybe you want to write about a certain kind of story in a certain kind of genre. But you have a really hard time putting yourself in enough of the mindset to really have it work. You don't want to end up with some crappy Street Fighters movie type of writing, after all, you want something you can feel proud of.

For instance. There is a manga, ARIA, that is a slice-of-life about a group of girls who live on a terraformed Mars years into the future. Nothing really happens in the story (there're a few slow plot turns and all, but nothing major, and it's definitely not what drives the story). Rather, it's quite calm, and quite beautiful- the true draw of the series. One would think that's not quite a common cup-of-tea for people, indeed, slice-of-life is not an appealing genre to most people because they may prefer a release from reality. What makes ARIA so great, then, to have people love it so dearly? The characters are so genuinely optimistic and happy that it's almost contagious. A pretty normal story becomes alive and reaches into people's hearts in such a soothing way because of that genuine feeling. It makes you think, "ah, this is what it means to be 'beautiful in the soul. If only everyone in the world were like that..."

Why do I bring it up? Because I could never write something like that. I would love to, but any attempt to do so, in my opinion, would come out flat, forced and unreal. I am too distrusting as a person, too torn between black and white to be able to speak such pure words. And no matter how much I may try or desire, that limitation of myself as a person and the life I've lived is painfully obvious as being a limitation for what I can write. No matter how much I may like to have a character that thinks that way, my opinion is, I have no confidence in being able to bring such a character to life, and I have an incredible amount of difficulty really bringing myself into that type of person's mind. Maybe I can, or should be able to, with my failure of it being my failure as a writer. I'd prefer not to think the latter, and I'd like to wish the former, but I simply can't seem to do it.

And so I write what I can write, or at least what I feel confident writing. But perhaps the toughest thing about showing other people that kind of writing is that it, being everything you can think of from inside you, essentially becomes a mirror of you as a person. And because of it, it becomes that much scarier to show other people your all, and it becomes that much harsher when you take criticism, no matter how much you may desire it.