Monday, June 9, 2014

Writing and stuff



I stopped writing for a while.  All sorts of reasons:  I was depressed; I had a health scare; I felt my writing was not very good ....

A big part of the problem as that I felt I had to write stuff which other people liked, and then that I had to promote it on Twitter and Google+, and blahty blah.  And somewhere in that process I lost interest.  My guys stopped talking to me -- and they had always talked to me, always; they came alive to me.  In fact, whereas I had once really loved writing,  I started to find it a chore.

I've had several chats with my daughter who is an artist, and it seems to me that creating--writing, art, gardens, food, it doesn't matter--is essential to our happiness, to our well-being.  But what you create is you.  It comes from your heart and your soul.  If you alter it to please others you will lose that pleasure and satisfaction.  And for me, at any rate, writing because I have to, as opposed to because I want to, leads to bad writing.  Thin, uninspired, dreary.  I'd been admiring Lois McMaster Bujold, such a clever and humane and satisfying author, and I wished I could write like her.  And then, I suddenly thought to myself that I can write like me, that I also have good things in my writing, and that it was silly to try and write like someone else no matter how good (or how well-off!) they be.

I also worried that I was writing about bisexual characters, and that my 'market' was gay men who might not like that.  And once again, I've decided to ignore this.  I write to please myself.  That way, I hope also to please you, but if I don't ....

So I'm writing again, with pleasure.  For me.  Creating worlds that I want to visit and people I want to see and meet and listen to.

And I've started reposting my Majorca Flats episodes (first of the new series here), eager to find out what will happen to these ppl.  I certainly don't know.  But they seem to have an inkling.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can identify with your situation. I started my blog just for the purpose of venting some rants and to hopefully convey some political and anti-religious message. It turned out that the blog that I wanted to promote was and still gets from 200 to 300 visitors a day. The other one, filled with erotic pictures and stories of sex and conquests I write myself, is the one that now gets over 6,000 visitors per day.
What do you do? I began to include some of my political and other stuff in there so that they get to see it. I doubt many actually read the stuff...but I write it for my pleasure.
You have a great blog and should keep writing even if some people might not like it.
saludos,
raulito
http://fromtop2bttm.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...

I can relate to everything you say here, even though I don't have the same problems with what I write, and am writing more for a female audience. My main problem has been that, even though I work from home, work is still very tiring and I just don't have the energy to write or, if I do have some energy, only have enough to scribble down new scenes and never go back to write the rest of the story.

Inspiration comes from the oddest places though. Last week I went to the Seekers' 50th Anniversary/Farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall and, in the middle of a song, I can't even remember which one, I had a vision of a scene from something I last worked on in 2005 (at least that's when I last did a computer update). I dug the first novel containing that scene out of the filing cabinet and discovered that, while it was complete, it reads awfully like a not very well fleshed out draft. I've done an enormous amount of work on it in the last few days and plan to do a lot more when I finish work today.

Hopefully something like that will inspire you and get you writing, despite all the other things going on in your life. We don't choose to write after all: it's what we're meant to do, so we always come back to it.

Good luck.

Janet


Janet Ellicott
0208 985 0426
janet.ellicott@virgin.net

NPT said...

Thank you both for your comments. Raul, I've noticed that myself. One of my blogs, the one with the pretty pics, gets 3 times as many visits as the other more serious one. And Janet, yes, I have exactly just that epiphany.