Thoughts on the Journey
Over on another page, someone noted that some writers mentioned that their characters talked to them, and other idiosyncrasies some writers display. His real question was "Do you need to be a little unusual to be a successful writer?
Here are my thoughts on that:
To be "successful" a writer needs to treat writing like the profession it is. That is, write regularly. Read as much as you write. And write even when you don't feel like it and when every word you staple bleeding to the page feels like it's being pulled screaming in protest from your fucking brain or when every word you write looks like total crap on the page at the moment. To be successful, you have to write well, and write something people want to read. How you get there doesn't make a difference to anyone but you. You have to finish the story in front of you and press the hell on, and not worry if your characters talk to you or if you tell them how it's going to damn well be. You know what your readers give a damn about? What you write. Not how you write it or how odd you might be when you write it. They care about the moment when they pick up your work and get their souls sucked out of them and into your world. They don't want to know HOW you did that to them...they just want you to do it to them again and again. In the end, THAT is all it takes to be a successful writer.
Simple, right?