Thoughts on Writing
I write for the joy of it. I don’t know that I’ll ever get money for it-but that isn’t the point. Writing for me is soothing and cathartic. I build worlds and create people. I’ve been doing this since I first learned to write in cursive. Yet I wouldn’t dare say that what I’m doing is art. Literary “art” is lauded in literature courses: I write what pleases me and what I think would please other people. Yes, I have “themes”. No, it isn’t fan fiction (I think… despite dark-haired jocks and spoiled blonds). But it still isn’t literature. Unlike the modern literature I was forced to imbibe in my mercifully brief stint as a lit major, my novels have sensible stories. By this I mean that they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Most of the threads of the story are tied together by the time I finish. I do not try to mimic real life, with its complete lack of narrative clarity, as some “modern” critics would advise. How silly.
Thus I rather doubt that I will ever be considered anything other than a lowly genre hack. Of course, that puts me in pretty good company (Terry Pratchett and Mercedes Lackey-not to mention Jane Austen-not that I’ll ever fly that high).
At present I’m coming out of a period of writing apathy. It isn’t writer’s block because I’m not banging my head on my desk in frustration. I could write, if I wanted. However, what I would write would not be worth writing, if that makes any sense. I just don’t feel like it, and I don’t think about it. The surest cure for writer’s block is writing, I know. The cure for writer’s apathy… is reading and turning off the computer, oddly enough. A good book will usually inspire me to write, even if it is a style and a world wholly foreign to my own.
So I have been indulging in Terry Pratchett-Miss Susan is my hero-and embroidering a convoluted Celtic knot I drew two years ago. And now, I have a scene writing itself out in my head. My spoiled blond and his little friends are going to go get into mischief which will help to unravel the complicated political plots in which they, as aristocratic children forced to live in their conqueror’s court, are immersed.
By going away from writing I always seem to go back. Is this cycle of activity and apathy familiar to other writers? Has anyone else been surprised to reread their work and find it… good? I hate rereading my own stuff: I am usually embarrassed to find that I have done so badly. So to reread with an eye to revising (or, as is my unfortunate impulse, to mind-wiping my poor computer) and find that even to my perfectionistic self no substantial revisions are needed, is a shock. It is as if I can’t really believe that I, myself, have created this world, chosen and organized these words and had a result I wouldn’t blush to read aloud (except when the boys grow up and things follow their inevitable course-I’ve embraced the slash). Is this surprise familiar to anyone else?
Thus I rather doubt that I will ever be considered anything other than a lowly genre hack. Of course, that puts me in pretty good company (Terry Pratchett and Mercedes Lackey-not to mention Jane Austen-not that I’ll ever fly that high).
At present I’m coming out of a period of writing apathy. It isn’t writer’s block because I’m not banging my head on my desk in frustration. I could write, if I wanted. However, what I would write would not be worth writing, if that makes any sense. I just don’t feel like it, and I don’t think about it. The surest cure for writer’s block is writing, I know. The cure for writer’s apathy… is reading and turning off the computer, oddly enough. A good book will usually inspire me to write, even if it is a style and a world wholly foreign to my own.
So I have been indulging in Terry Pratchett-Miss Susan is my hero-and embroidering a convoluted Celtic knot I drew two years ago. And now, I have a scene writing itself out in my head. My spoiled blond and his little friends are going to go get into mischief which will help to unravel the complicated political plots in which they, as aristocratic children forced to live in their conqueror’s court, are immersed.
By going away from writing I always seem to go back. Is this cycle of activity and apathy familiar to other writers? Has anyone else been surprised to reread their work and find it… good? I hate rereading my own stuff: I am usually embarrassed to find that I have done so badly. So to reread with an eye to revising (or, as is my unfortunate impulse, to mind-wiping my poor computer) and find that even to my perfectionistic self no substantial revisions are needed, is a shock. It is as if I can’t really believe that I, myself, have created this world, chosen and organized these words and had a result I wouldn’t blush to read aloud (except when the boys grow up and things follow their inevitable course-I’ve embraced the slash). Is this surprise familiar to anyone else?