1. Writing Should Be Learned
I’m not, or ever have been, an insatiable reader. In my youth, I loved James Clavell’s Shogun. Our family had little capital, though, to spend on books, and I infrequently thought about using the school library for entertainment reading. The library was only a place to inquire, copy out of encyclopedias.
I’ve been a storyteller my entire life, though, so when someone proposed I write a book, I thought, Why not? (in the words of Jeremy Clarkson) How hard can it be?
Um, it’s kinda hard, and it surprised me) to learn that you don’t just sit down and fluidly pen a story. There’s a craft to it, something a practised reader knows intuitively from the many hours spent with a book in their hands.
2. Writing Does Take a Lot of Time.
Pick up a book and look at the page. See those words? Yeah, they made it into the final novel. For every one of those words, there were lots of others that didn’t make it into the book. Someone wrote all of them. That took time, the one thing a lot of writers lack.
You have to scrape time out of the day to do it. You may have a day job or a family. This time devotion can be problematic to find the time. You might need to lose sleep, lunch hours. Eventually, your loved ones will complain, and you’ll need to figure out how to balance your real life with your dream. When you do, email me your secret. My husband is starting to complain about the scant fare at our establishment.
Crime Fiction: Hardboiled Detective 