Writing

Writers are a strange breed. Successful ones seem to have found the secret sauce. For many years of practice and dedication to writing seem to improve their style and ability to elicit a response with their words. I love to read and I love to write, but I don’t profess to be good, interesting, and certainly don’t have a great tale to tell. There are those that try and impress others, but in the world of AI, it is easy to tell those using a computer to not only be a medium but also the inspiration and then secretly try to take the credit as if they have gone from no writing to producing stories others would want to read. Short stories or epic novels, they have their readership, but blogging is a world I’m not sure should be considered writing. At best, on a really good day, it is more editorializing what is on ones mind at the moment. I’m a blogger. I don’t expect some fantastic following; in fact, I don’t write to entertain others and for the most part don’t actually care much about others opinions to the subject I’m writing. I write to clear my head and free myself of the disastrous days I’m often presented with in the morning. My favorite writers are those that by day are really editorialists or columnists for magazines and newspapers. Then they churn out books largely in the realm of what they write about daily or weekly. I’m impressed at the ability to continually have something to say. Writing all the time about the same subject matter would bore me to death. In fact, it is probably why I don’t write blogs with any regularity. I probably have mush to say, but when I only want to state the same thing I said yesterday, then I find it pointless to comment.

I do desire to become a writer. My mind swirls with ideas and my imagination is vivid enough to write a story. Short, long, epic, fantasy, fiction, or non-fiction, they all are like carrots dangling in front of me. Every book I read is filled with highlight notes of what I would have said or how I would have phrased a passage. Not from a point of thinking I could do better, more from the notion that I would have done so because of my own interests and capturing my attention to read the book cover to cover. I struggle a lot these days reading. I have found that my interest stays captured when a writer tells a story rapidly with a direct style on non-elaboration. I also love reading when the writer knows the audience that will read the material they write. For instance, I’m reading a book now that the writer is touted as creating the next series like Longmire meets True Detective. He is a screenwriter trying his hand at novels with some success. What catches me in his writing is that he throws the occasional word in a sentence that most people that would be his target audience would have no understanding of the word even being used in a sentence. When you have to stop and look up a word so that context is understood seems a little off. My problem in becoming a novelist is the discipline it takes to get from start to finish. In this day of self-publishing, I imagine there is a way to become known, but generally to become someone whom who might be recognized for their ability to spin a good tale, the traditional method of publishing would be the avenue of choice. But that comes with a pitfall if you have a successful book. The contractual agreement to produce on a deadline. That not only sounds like work, it also seems why it would be easy for many writers to fail producing a sequel worth reading.

I have a cousin that is a legit writer both in film industry but also writing novels. She even has a writers club she organized where participants share what they are doing. But in talking to her, it sounded like it is not for helping others write better, in other words no critics, but more a chance to have what you have written heard. I have a niece that I wished would write. I have written many of the stories and feel she is quite good. I don’t profess to be understanding of the things she writes about, but she is good and I know there is a market for he stories. Talent is in the family, a few of us that also produce readable material though, don’t seem to have the it required. Is writing something that you can become good at? Maybe in writing style or in the use of a phrase or word for emphasis, but it is the imagination from brain to paper that most don’t have. Even knowing what it is that would allow me to furiously whip out something while vivid in my mind seems to elude me. But I dream and keep it in the realm of being possible someday.