Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by PJ Colando, Jean Davis, Lisa Buie Collard, and Diedre Knight. If you’re a writer, and if you feel insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group.
I didn’t do any blogging last month (aside from last month’s IWSG post, of course). I didn’t work on my current WIP either. I didn’t make any real writing progress last month, now that I’m thinking about it, but that’s okay. There’s more to being a writer than writing.
To be a writer, you need to live a rich and fulfilling life. Experience the joy and beauty of the world, but don’t ignore the ugliness or the cruelty. As a writer, you need to recognize the ugliness and cruelty of the world even as you celebrate the beauty and the joy.
To be a writer, you need to take risks. You need to try new things, even if they’re stupid things. You need to embarrass yourself. Allow yourself to make mistakes. Big mistakes, sometimes. It would be nice if we writers could learn everything we need to know the easy way (by reading about it in our favorite books). But we can’t. Some lessons can only be learned the hard way.
And after every success and every failure, you need to take the time to feel your feelings, no matter what those feelings might be. Laugh at yourself. Cry. Start plotting your revenge. Doesn’t matter if these thoughts and feelings are rational or irrational. You need to feel them. To be a writer, you need to understand the human condition, and the only way to do that is to experience it in full for yourself.
Meet new people. Meet people who are just like you. Meet people who are totally different (or who seem to be totally different at first). Get to know them. Try to understand their goals, their passions, their challenges. And if these people happen to open up to you, try to understand their fears and regrets. Don’t judge. Never be judgmental. To be a writer, you need to have empathy for everyone. That is a tall order, I know, but I do mean everyone. As we writers like to say, each villain is the hero of their own story. Learn that lesson (and other lessons like it) in real life, by talking to real people, and your writing will improve.
And then, once you’ve done all those things, get back to writing as soon as you can. The muse will be patient while you’re out there living a rich and fulfilling life, leaning all these things about the world and the human condition. But the muse can only be patient for so long.
So if you’ll excuse me, I think I better get back to writing.
Planet Pailly 
Start plotting your revenge – I like that!
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It’s what many of our protagonists would do. So even if you don’t go through with it, plotting revenge is an experience you can use for writing!
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Good suggestions for writing. Once I accepted my writer mantle, I found how much fun people watching is, not just what they do but what might be motivating them. There are a ton of stories out there.
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Exactly! People watching is a great writing exercise!
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I like your perspective on writing–get out and live your life! I haven’t written fiction for over two years, yet I still consider myself a writer.
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Amen. And after two years away, I’m sure you have lots of fuel for writing.
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Can’t claim to be much of a risk taker, but I’ve had spells of taking risks which hopefully give some insight into people who live there all the time. And I do enjoy watching people and learning from their strategies and the results.
But definitely if you’re going to write characters with any depth, it does seem like empathy is a crucial characteristic. I also read somewhere that modern literary fiction does more to spread empathy than anything else out there. To read from a character’s point of view is to empathize, even if that empathy is horrifying. And of course, the author has to trailblaze that empathy.
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I hadn’t heard that about literary fiction, but that makes sense. Maybe this contradicts what I was saying over on your blog about Sapir-Whorf, but it is remarkable how reading a good story can change the way we think. It’s almost like it rewires our brains, in a way.
Kind of a silly example, but I remember how super self-conscious I felt about taking a shower, washing dishes, or doing literally anything involving water for days after I first finished reading Dune.
If a book can change a person’s perspective about something like that, even for a short time, just imagine what else a book could do.
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I hear that. We need to refill the creative cup or we are doomed. 🙂
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Very true. “All work and no play…” as a certain Jack Nicholson character once said.
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Thanks for stopping by my blog last month. Sorry it took so long for me to make the rounds. I really like this post. Thank for sharing your words.
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Thanks, friend! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
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