Wednesday, November 4, 2020

TO WRITE OR NOT TO WRITE - THAT IS NEVER THE QUESTION

This post is part of the monthly blog hop/therapy session known as the 
Insecure Writers Support Group founded by the one and only, Alex J. Cavanaugh. If you're a writer, insecure, or just supportive of writers—insecure or not—please join us. It happens the first Wednesday of each month. It would be sweet of you to visit at least a dozen or so new blogs and leave a comment. Your words will be appreciated.  Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.   

 

My awesome co-hosts for the November 4 posting of the IWSG are Jemi Fraser, Kim Lajevardi, L.G Keltner, Tyrean Martinson, and Rachna Chhabria!

November 4 question - Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write?


To me... 

Writing is like breathing...

I have no choice...

Ideas come to me from out of nowhere...

And I don’t even get to choose the format or genre. 

When I was young it was poetry...

Next came short stories... 

And then my first novel came to me... 

In the shower no less...

Random bits and pieces flowed to me...

And I had no idea where they were coming from...

But I felt compelled to write them down...

So, wrapped in a towel, I ran run to my computer... 

And wrote everything that was coming into my head...

It felt like I was taking dictation.

After a year of this...

I looked at what I’d written and thought...

I have a book here...

And I did.

But after clumsy submissions and scads of rejections...

My insecurities took over...

And I closed the file and didn't open it for over a decade. 

Then...

With the encouragement from writer friends...

I opened the file again...

And after editing until my eyeballs fell out...

I sent out more queries...

Then more rejections...

But I wasn't going to give up...

I decided to Self-publish. And here is the fruit of my labor.


And still...

Every morning while I'm writing on my computer...

I thank my muse... 

Because if it was up to me and my brain...

I couldn’t write a word. 

And yup...

I still get inspiration in the shower.

So?

 What about you?

Why do you write what you write?

 

Always,


Em-Musing 


P.S. AZAEL'S LOT  is available on Amazon under my pen name: 

Karen Lee Baldwin. And surprisingly the genre is supernatural thriller...

not humorous women's fiction.