The Dance

I just watched the finale of So You Think You Can Dance. My girl, Melanie, won! I was pulling for her from the first time I saw her at the audition. She excelled in just about every dance they tossed her way. More than once, her beautiful dancing had me in tears. Of course, she had been dancing since she was 2 years old! She was persistent, she knew what she loved, what she yearned to do, and it showed in every move that she made.

I would hope that my writing draws such emotion from the readers as her dance drew from me and millions of others watching SYTYCD. I know that sometimes when I am reading my own work, I feel flutters in my gut. Flutters that tell me that I am on the right track, that I am including emotion in my words. Emotion that will hopefully touch my readers, too. Emotion that will involve them in my writing, let them be a part of my world for however briefly.

But the other thing that I noticed in watching that show was that the dancers never gave up. No matter what they were asked to do, what sort of dance they were assigned, what choreographer they worked with, they never gave up. They pushed through the doubt and the fear. As writers, that's what we also need to do. We need to push through the doubt and fear. Doubt that our words will be read and appreciated, fear that they will be rejected.

Even though there was only one winner in the finale of So You Think You Can Dance, none of the dancers were losers. Just as no writer is really a loser. Even if only a few people ever read the prose that you create, you have done something others have only dreamed of doing - you wrote. And you put it out there. You showed yourself to the world. You danced.