Tag Archives: Fiction

Writing and Ignoring the Grand Bargain

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What reality is this? What fantasy have we created that makes us feel more important than those around us?

The dawn comes and with it the light, the brightness and the foundations of who we are. Throughout our writing there are two things that come together as a means to halt our writing.

  1. Our lack of faith in our writing.
  2. Those who wish to distract us or deride us from the task of writing.

Each of these are part of the Grand Bargain of Writing.

The bargain is that we knowingly accept what we’re getting into, even if we don’t understand what we’re getting into.

We knowingly accept that we may become famous as other writers have done. But, we also take into account that we’re alone in our task of writing.

The solitude of writing is one the things a lot of people either can’t handle or they’re worried about other things going wrong.

For myself, the things I worry about are the ability to multitask all of the things I have going on. From day-job, blog, wife, kids and my fiction writing.

My biggest worry is that something will get lost in balancing act.

My reason for this has a lot to do with childhood and the things I’ve dealt with my entire life concerning abandonment issues, which plays into the worry of losing my wife or kids through the solitary life of a writer.

I risk losing things I care about because I’m a writer and have known that for over twenty years, it just took me a while to take a chance on it, and that my wife supports me and tells me she just wants me to write makes the risk less, but it’s still in the back of my mind every time I sit down.

My day-job isn’t much of worry and honestly if it weren’t for the healthcare I’d quit.

But a lot of day-jobs are like that.

Reality and the life we choose as writers, the solitary life of doing something we love, something that we feel in our soul, is enough for us to say to hell with the Grand Bargain and do it anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

Be the Writer not the Person Living the Day Job.

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We find our lives in creative things by experimenting and finding a happy place that we call our own.

Just as I don’t believe I’m the person who goes to a day job and slings drinks for tourists on the Vegas strip. I’m the person who stays up late writing words on the page for me.

I was listening to a song the other day, “Wild Again” by Starship. It’s on the Cocktail soundtrack.

But the lyrics in the song struck me, “Is this life I’m living mine?”

The life I’m living is that of the person slinging drinks for tourists because it pays the bills. But what if I start living like the writer I am. If when I meet someone and they ask me, “What do you do?” and instead of saying, “I’m a bartender at a Strip Hotel”, I answer the question with, “I’m a writer.”

I’ve read the once you start calling yourself a writer, others will see you as a writer.

I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, but it was the little things I neglected about being a writer.

Saying your something, but not following what that “something” is are two different things.

Believing you’re something you’re not, at least that you’re not giving your life to. That is where the divisions lays.

You need to believe wholeheartedly that you’re this person, or do like Neil Gaiman says, “Act like a person that would be able to do that thing.”

I like Neil’s idea, and in believing you’re a person that would do something the other person wouldn’t do, for me it would be being the writer and not the person who works the day job.

For you it could be, Being the artist not the College Student, or being the actor not the Single Mom.

Each of us are different in our lives, that’s what makes us unique and it’s also what makes us who we are.

Be the Person you are supposed to be and ignore the person you have to tolerate in order to be that person on a permanent basis.

Writing the story that makes you vulnerable.

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Sometimes your life ends. Not for any other reason than it does.

My life felt this way for a long time. I never understood myself the way I thought I did.
Ending is inevitable; but how do we want to go out.

I’d think about this when I was stuck on a particular piece of writing, forget about it then it would creep in, the wanting of “The One”.

I’d sit at my desk waiting for “That Story’ the one!

First, chasing the one has nothing to do with writing ability; it’s all will.

The will to write the hard story is one of the toughest things about being a writer. It’s like life laughing in your face, fate screaming your name from a well-walled, distant room.

That one story will resonate with anyone who reads it, or maybe a select few that will love it and love you for it.

The problem with this story, vulnerability.

As creatives, writers are already prone to confidence issues, we don’t need to have anyone or anything else telling us we’re doing something wrong.

The story may come from childhood, teenage years, early adulthood or anywhere else. The worse thing about this story is it opens things up we’ve kept hidden from the world.

Things we’d rather not have opened. Wounds we thought had been closed, but that story comes in, masquerading like a savior to our writing.

If only you could write it!

But you’re afraid to write it. You don’t want to seem vulnerable to others. You don’t want others to see you afraid of yourself and the person you are, were or could be.

The truth is, these people you are, were or could be, they need you to write that story.

They need that closure, they desire it more than anything. I could list the reasons, but there’s not enough space in a post.

Every writer has the story they’re afraid to write. They don’t want the judgement. The fear of being vulnerable keeps us from writing those stories.

The fear keeps us from proving to ourselves who we are, and it always stands up when we’re stuck with another story.

It sits there, the one that got away.

2014: Rebirth of Your Writing

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A few weeks ago I talked about, “The minutes you have left”, with the new year, there come resolutions; something I don’t believe in.

I do believe in a fresh start, which is what New Year’s is supposed to be about, not this whole thing about changing who you are. Be who you are, love the person you are, but make a fresh start with your writing.

If you’ve been struggling to get words out, write something for yourself and see where it takes you. Quite likely you’ll enjoy the ride more and may want to camp there for a while.

Once you’ve started your new journey, you’ll discover you’ve found something you like; writing for yourself does that quite well.

The year comes with great hope for our projects.

We hope for that breakthrough project. We hoped for it last year, but last year wasn’t this year and we’re going to kick that book’s ass.

With a new year comes new vigor, motivation and hope.

Our hope is to do better than last year.

Make a plan to have that book done within in the first four months. Set aside a time to write, Live your life and enjoy the journey, it’s your journey after all and no one can take it for you, so enjoy your writing the way you did as a child when you told that first story to your friends.

Because it’s a new year, find the time, make the time and write like your minutes are running out, because they are.

 

A Fiction Writer should be their own Platform

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Stress can kill you, take away what you believe in and recently for me, make you sick as hell.

The stress came about because of my worries for my NaNoWriMo project, a project which, like last year, fell on its face and hasn’t begun to start moving, even though I’ve prodded it.

The biggest reason for its flop is Platform.

That word is such a buzz word in blogging and writing right now. It’s very hard to get away from it.

The biggest problem I see with that word is another word, fiction.

Fiction writer’s create worlds. Sometimes we don’t know where the story is going, even with an outline, and because of that we can’t truly set up a Platform.

A Platform is supposed to be a guide for a project. 

If you’re a fiction writer, that’s more difficult because you may not know where the story is going from one chapter to the next.

Those who write self-help books can use Platforms really well, while the rest of us are left wondering why it doesn’t work when we try it.

Here are reasons why I believe Platforms don’t work for Fiction Writers:

  1. Most fiction writers don’t write for an audience, and those who do already have there established group of readers.
  2. Platforms don’t allow for movement. If things change in your life, you have this Tribe that knows you as one person, but if you go through a spiritual awakening that is different than the one your Tribe knows you as, you have to start over.
  3. Change. Life is filled with change, some of it under your control, most of it not. If your writing changes or you choose to write in another genre it may alienate your tribe.

You may want to create a Platform, but in creating a Platform you may not be taking into account your life changes, your writing changes and the biggest of all, You Change.

The change you go through personally may alienate your tribe or may create divisions in your life.

Creating a Platform shouldn’t be something difficult, for fiction writers maybe it shouldn’t be something at all.

Writers create stories, some of them have similarities that when put together as a collection ofr work show those similarities, but as we write we may not understand the similarities and may become annoyed by those telling us to write another book like our past book.

For me who’s never published, though I’ve written two novels, I just want to get a book on the shelf.

Looking for a Platform for my writing caused me so much stress in the last few weeks I became ill and with that I swore I’d never do what people expect me to write.

My Platform is I’m a writer of different genres, mostly Science Fiction or Fantasy based, but I’ll never limit myself to those two.

I choose that Platform because trying to pigeon hole myself made me sick.

Your Platform should be what makes you the person you’ve lived with for your life, never limit yourself to who you are, or your Platform.

Be your Platform!

I’d rather be my Platform than do something I wouldn’t be proud of.