Writing is a Journey

Writing is a Journey

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash

 

Sometimes the journey is the adventure and not the destination, writing is the adventure and being a published author is the destination. Writers have no choice but to write down what is in their head. We do not have the luxury of ignoring the voices in our heads and wishing them away. They bang longer, harder, louder when ignored. We must write them down. We must begin our adventure even if we do not want to write. We can fight it all we want, we can argue with ourselves, but in the end if we are made to write, we will write. There is no other choice.

Being a writer is an adventure. We begin by writing for ourselves. We start to record memories, stories, items we have heard here or there, we stir them all together and we come up with amazing poems, short stories, fiction, and nonfiction. Finding our voice, differentiating it from everyone else’s, and writing our own style down is our journey. Little by little we make our own path. We strive to go to the path less followed and forage a new path for ourselves in being a published writer. Even though there are thousands and thousands of writers, we strive to be different. We strive to take our own journey into writing, stir it with ourselves, and write with a voice so uniquely ours that we hope someday someone will want to publish our work.

Editing and revising are two very different things we do as writers. When we edit, (before revising), we correct words, we catch grammar, we see a “there” when we meant “their”. This is the time we edit our words to get them in the correct order with the correct punctuation. This is the time to look over your own work and fix what needs fixing. This is part of your adventure. Remember to have fun with your words. I wrote a piece about my insanity of being a writer. I wrote that I was dancing with my anxiety and singing with depression. I have fun with all sorts of emotions and personifying them. Have fun with your editing adventure. Yes your grammar needs to be on point, but your words are not final at this point. Getting down the meat of what you wanted to say is what is significant at this junction of your adventure.

Then the real fun begins and we revise, revise, and revise. We let self-doubt creep into our minds though. We doubt our word choices, thought process, character flaws, and we begin to revise. Let me strongly suggest something to you, find a friend who knows about writing and ask them to look over your piece. Better yet join a writing group. They are there to aid you in this revision process and you also get that warm fuzzy feeling from helping others with their writing adventure. We see flaws in our work that others do not see, because we throw in our doubt about our power to combine words to make an impact. We believe that maybe we cannot write well and by the time we are done revising there is nothing left. We have lost all the original thought, story, characters. We have lost our way on our adventure to being a published author. What once was a grand adventure is now a ride through the Sahara without water and no end in sight.

Being a writer is definitely an adventure, but everyone has their own destination. Not everyone who writes does so to be published. I know a lady who writes for herself in notebook after notebook. Her stories, she has said are long, detailed, and marvelous, but she will never show anyone. She has them in boxes and boxes in her closet. Her goal is just to write the stories down. Her adventure is in putting the words together in the order she wants to tell her stories the best she can. I know many of you at this point are nodding in disapproval, but why? What or who is to say that yes some of us want to be published authors, but some of us do not. What is important is the journey, not the destination. We write to get the stories we hear in our heads out. We write for ourselves first. One of the best pieces of advice I received was when one of my writer friends said to me to stop giving a crap. I was trying to be politically correct in my story, I was trying to appease all my future readers and my writing was, well, crap!!! My adventure was sucking hard and fast. I started writing as if no one would ever read and my stories came off the pages, my writing begin to take on a life, and I want to publish my first book by May 2017. That’s just me though. Your adventure might end when your words hit the paper. You perhaps want to get them out of your head and locked into your closet. There is nothing wrong with that. Your writing journey just has fewer steps. 

Being a published author for most of us is our destination. (We will get right back to that, but first a thought) What is you write and never get published? There are hundreds of new books published every day. Does this mean your adventure to this point is wasted time? Most definitely not!! We started writing for ourselves; we will continue to do so. Stephen King and numerous other authors wrote and when they were published they were surprised. They were just getting their stories out of their head. They wanted to put words into an order that others would just be interested in reading. They did not think, when they were writing, that they would write, it would get published in a New York second, and they were not counting their dollars for books yet to be published. Now I would love to write and have people read my words. Oh wait you just did. I appreciate you taking the time it took to read this. Your and my adventures in writing were connected for the amount of time it took you to read this.

I hope your adventure is worthy of your destination. I hope you write like no one else will read your words. You write for you, you alone, to put together something magical that will cause people to stir inside and emotionally connect to your story or poem. I hope your adventure is filled with some fun in all the writing we do alone, in the editing we do (hopefully with a writing friend), and in the revising we do, so we have a polished finished work. May your wrong turns on this adventure be few and may your destination be astonishing. I hope you enjoyed my words, but honestly I wrote them for me. I doubt myself. I write and hear a critique in my head as I do so, but I’m learning to ignore her. Happy Adventuring!!!

Your story teller/poet

xo

Debbie