Month: November 2024

Writers, Don’t Go It Alone

Writing is by and large a solitary activity. It isn’t something generally done in a group save for perhaps writing jams and community workshops. However, when writing your novel, short story, poetry, or any other project, you’re probably going to spend the lion’s share of your time by yourself, with only your ideas and thoughts to keep you company on the journey.

However, writing is not an isolated activity, as I have discovered. While writing a novel draft may be done in private, what comes afterward needs other people: submitting drafts to beta readers, finding editors to review your work, maybe even sharing passages with a local writers’ group. Why? Well, partly because we all need a few extra pairs of eyes to see the good and bad in our work that we can’t see ourselves. But we also need a smidgeon of encouragement from time to time.

I don’t say this out of selfishness or self-pity. All writers must build confidence in their work if they intend to publish. But let’s face facts. We all feel discouraged at some point or another. Perhaps we’ve hit writer’s block or we look back on our recent work and want to gag. Or maybe, even though everything is going swimmingly and we’re hitting all our deadlines, we still can’t shake off the inexplicable doldrums we’re feeling. And we need someone to talk to, someone we can trust and confide in.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, writers are not cut off from the world. We need other people, and we need encouragement. Being left alone with only our own thoughts to keep us company – well, I don’t know about you, but as a writer I tend to be a very harsh critic of my own work, always asking if it’s really any good.

Writing can become a lonely journey. Find someone, or a couple someones, willing to stick with you through it all, give honest feedback, be supportive, and most of all, be a friend. Writers shouldn’t live in a vacuum. It’s not healthy (or even really possible), and after all, half the fun of writing is to see people’s reactions to the things we create.

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Exactly Where I Want to Live

If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?

I would live in a comfortable cabin in the middle of a sparse but lush forest with no neighbors within shouting distance and located exactly one hour away from the nearest town. I would also have electricity and a hot tub.

Those who read my musings on my city of the future may be aware that when a daily prompt asks me what I want, I go whole hog with exactly what I want. Will I ever get it? Probably not, but my imagination doesn’t have to agree with reality. I want a cozy cabin, I want peace and quiet, and I want to huddle up on my couch and watch my big-screen TV while the birds chirp outside. And when I need to go shopping, I want the store to be an hour’s drive away.

Fantasizing about an idyllic, Arcadian existence is all fun and dandy, but actually living it is a different case entirely. Loafing around on a tropical island is fine until you need to take a shower and have no soap and shampoo. Or towels and washcloths. Or plumbing. Not to mention the bugs and the heat and the storms. Yes, I admit it, I like modern amenities as much as I like nature. So, I would live close to nature, but not too close, thank you very much.

Civilization strove for millennia to invent the modern conveniences we currently enjoy, and some of them were invented for very good reason. Who am I to throw aside all that hard work?

Okay, maybe I could go without the hot tub …

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Do I Need Time?

Do you need time?

Asking whether I need time isn’t a question I can easily answer. Do I want time? Yes, I want time. To stop it in its tracks for as long as I desire and do all the things I want to do in life … that would be wonderful. But I can’t. Because we all only have a set amount of time, and we can’t get any more, regardless of whether we need it.

Maybe what can be said, then, is that we have enough time if we don’t spend it on frivolous, short-term trifles that don’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things. We are given the time we have. It’s clocked in at birth and clocks out at death. I don’t need time, but rather, maybe I should think harder on how to use the bundle of time I still have.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, no, I don’t need time. I need wisdom to use time rightly. Not an easy thing to live up to.

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.

Deep Questions about Deep Literature

Do you remember literature classes in high school? How you would spend hours every day discussing the symbolic value of the billboard in The Great Gatsby and analyzing what each character represented in The Lord of the Flies? A spade is never just a spade in lit class. There is always a deeper meaning.

So can anyone explain to me why all the books students have to read are so dang depressing?

Looking back, this is what I feel that we were doing: Taking a beautiful flower and plucking its petals and cutting the stem and digging up the roots to see why it was a beautiful flower. And we very scientifically removed everything beautiful about it.

But darn it, we got educated about great literature. We knew what metaphor was. And allegory. And the subtle social critiques and genre deconstructions that mark all literary classics. We obtained knowledge! We justified our tuition!

There are people who make their living by reading stories and telling other people whether they are good or not. And their word is law, because there is no such thing as an opinion they understand the rules that govern quality writing. Where they obtain this arcane knowledge is unknown. Presumably, they dissected enough flowers.

Good stories seem to be a case of majority rules. If enough people say it’s good, it must be good. Maybe. But I didn’t like The Great Gatsby, so does that mean it’s not a good book or I’m not a good writer? Or perhaps if I had read it on my own time instead of being forced to analyze that darn stupid billboard I would have liked it.

What does it matter what color the curtains are or what suit the one character is wearing in each scene? It matters because somebody important says it matters, but what if it’s not the author saying it? Are we seeing what the writer put there, or what we think is there? Are we seeing meaning where there is none, or is the meaning not what we think it means? Does it mean what people say it means, or does it mean something else, which means that what I want it to mean means that it means the wrong thing from what everyone else thinks it means? Because that’s just mean.

Or maybe we’re just really good at gaslighting ourselves into thinking a book somebody wrote to pay their bills is a magnum opus. The writer wings it, hears what critics say, nods sagely and says, “Yes, that’s exactly what it means.”

Many thanks for visiting my blog. I post updates on my writing career, I muse over storytelling and fiction, and I reflect on the curious and wonderful things in life.