We Need to Have A Talk About Writing...

or Identifying with Underdogs

I follow a great little aussie writer. One of her many extracurricular activities (let’s call being a writer her main job, even though technically it’s not) is being the slushpile reader for an esteemed local sci-fi mag that has been around for donkey years.

IN the lead up to Christmas she posted a guide or set of rules that she’d like aspiring writers, who submit to this magazine, to adhere to. This would make their lives and her life and the magazine and sci-fi writing in general a better (alternate) world.

That’s all good.

Except she just added another brick in the wall that is my Writer’s bane: procrastination and its sub-categories “fear of failure” and “I’m not just not good enough”.

When real writers, by this I mean “those who can write and do”, talk about how many crap and feeble writers actually exist out there, my confidence crumbles. It’s an instant negative hit, and I immediately identify with the perpetrators. “That would be me, if I tried to write something, so why bother?”

Another brick in the wall.  

What does it mean to you when someone says “to write?”

What does it mean to them when someone says they are a natural to writing, that they have an affinity for it? That it seeps into their bones like erotic desire?

What does it mean to me? Are they talking imagery? Action? Time shift? Character or viewpoint? What is this writing that others have flocked to like bees to honey, and me, like a moth to a flame?

And, now, instead of stewing over this non-writing gig, I’m off to the hardware store to buy some cement for some fenceposts. Hmm, what’s the writer’s analogy for that? If you cement your posts (interior rules) in, they can’t keep moving away from you? Haha.

There’s a story in every moment…

…how do you choose which ones to write about?