Onward and Upward

Being a writer is hard.

Heck, being any kind of artist is hard. Writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, composing or playing music, dancing, costuming, the performing arts…all of these and a few I haven’t listed require time, training, and serious dedication to master. Some people have inborn talent that lets them pick up art forms more easily than others. Some appear to be good at everything with no effort at all. But that lack of effort is an illusion and I’d say that 99% of any master who makes the work they do look easy have paid their tithe of blood, sweat, and tears.

While talent may give you an edge in some fields, most of it is acquired through long, careful study and vigorous practice. No matter how much talent Nature has gifted you, if you don’t expand and refine that gift, it will go to waste or never reach its full potential. Thanks to my mother’s side of the family, I have a decent amount of inborn talent for drawing and painting. It’s not genius level, but I look and approach things from an artist’s point of view and can draw decently without a whole lot of training. However, I could be a really good artist if I put my mind to it.

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Reality, Dreams, and Speculation

My brain is in a weird place right now. I’m currently reading The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan and just finished listening to the audiobook version of M Is for Magic, a collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman, and I’ve been on a real Star Wars kick after rewatching the VHS tapes of the original trilogy.

It’s very odd to have the realms of reality, dreams, and speculation all intersecting and intermingling in your head at the same time.

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Everything Old Is New Again: How Not To Be Afraid of Clichés

Cliché. Perhaps the most dreaded word in the history of writing. The last thing any writer wants to hear about their work is, “This story is so unoriginal. It’s riddled with clichés!”

The dictionary definition of a cliché is:

a trite, stereotyped expression; a sentence or phrase, usually expressing a popular or common thought or idea, that has lost originality, ingenuity, and impact by long overuse, such as “sadder but wiser,” or “strong as an ox.”
(in art, literature, drama, etc.) a trite or hackneyed plot, character development, use of color, musical expression, etc.
anything that has become trite or commonplace through overuse.

It’s a word, phrase, stereotype, character type, or even storyline that is way, way, WAY overused. I’ve heard some people accuse Shakespeare of using too many clichés. Little do they realize that he came up with half of the expressions that were so witty and original at the time that everyone wanted to use them until society got sick of them.

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Handling Dry Spells

Every writer goes through dry spells. Some people call this phenomenon “writer’s block,” but I think writer’s block and dry spells are two different things. Writer’s block is when you are working on a story and keep hitting a brick wall. You have a scene you need to write, or an assignment to finish and you just sit and stare blankly at the screen. You want to write, but the words just don’t come.

In contrast, I think of a dry spell as a time when your very creativity dries up. It’s not that you don’t know what to write or how to write it, but rather you don’t even feel like writing.

Personally, I find dry spells far more terrifying than writer’s block.

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Why Write? Why Not?

It’s ironic that, fifteen years ago, the last thing I wanted to be was a writer.

During my elementary years as a homeschooled student, composition class was my least favorite subject. I suppose regular schools lump reading and writing under the heading “English,” but for me they were two separate things. Reading was fun and fast. Writing was a torture that dragged on for what felt like hours. I remember my father tell me that I would probably grow up and become a great writer. I looked up from grinding out another line of loopy, childishly careful cursive and declared that I would never, ever EVER become a writer. Not in a million years!

Look who had the last laugh on that one. As it turns out, Dad knew where my talents lay better than I did. It’s interesting how it took me so long to come around to writing, considering how much I loved to read. Plus, I always enjoyed crafting stories of my own, which I would reenact with my long-suffering toy horses, Barbie dolls, dinosaurs, and Hot Wheels cars. (I believe we still have one of my stories involving My Little Ponies floating around on videotape somewhere…) In any case, while I loved “playing” stories, it took me years before it occurred to me to write them down, or that my world- and character-creation was essentially the same thing real writers did. I had other careers in mind.

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