Reading, Writing, No Arithmetic

I’ve been sitting on this for a few days because it made me so irritated that I needed to fully mull out in my mind what exactly made me so angry. Now that I have done just that, I have to share it.

I follow a writer on my Twitter account, and she recently tweeted that she was going to stop writing/participating in online forums until she’s written something someone wants to read. My immediate response was, “You’re published. STFU and STFD.”

It took me a while to understand why I had that reaction.

An author doesn’t serve their audience, they serve the story. If they think that writing for a specific set of people is a guarantee that the story will be good, they’re sadly mistaken. An author’s wanting to please their audience =/= a perfect (or even a good) story. Trying to please other people is like trying to paddle upriver with a hockey stick; it isn’t going to happen.

Stephenie Meyer wrote the Twilight series as her own personal whatever. I’m not saying that they’re good or anything, but you can tell that she poured herself into them and that effort served the stories. If she had been writing them to cater to the fans, there would be a whole different level of crap in them. (Not saying that they aren’t crap anyway, but that’s my personal opinion and not necessarily relevent.)

If you think that writing begins and ends with the story, then moves directly on to someone buying the book and publishing it, that’s… totally not true. And kind of insane. It’s a lot of work to make everything work. I still haven’t gotten there. I may never get there. But if I do, I’m not going to forget that I serve the story.

The story = GOD.

And if I am so lucky as to get published in any way, I’m not going to get huffy and flouncy because “no one wants to read my stuff”. I don’t write for the elusive audience that may or may not exist; I write to get the damn story out of my head so I can sleep.

I don’t know how much of this makes sense. It’s been a long day.

Can’t there be a way to wire my brain into Word so I wouldn’t have to sit and type?

I could be writing right now, but I’m twitching a bit about work tomorrow, so I’m sitting in front of the television (Food Network!) with a cat named Gaz on my lap.

I’ve been writing for a long time. That being said, making effective use of my available spare time isn’t my strong suit. A lot of times, I feel like I’m too tired to properly articulate my thoughts, or that there’s a giant jumble of words that refuse to resolve into something more concrete. I’m not a formula writer, and most of the time, I’m not a pre-plotter; there are certain plot points that make themselves known, but the road connecting the points is a mystery. That’s what makes me who I am as a writer: those unknown spaces that suddenly connect by a stray sentence or paragraph, making everything a giant circle of “well, duh! why didn’t I think of that before? I really must be stupid today!”

However, again, there are just those days when the words refuse to come. All too often lately, those days outnumber the days when I can think clearly enough to bring life to the images dancing around my head.

When I go on vacation in a week, it’s my intention to take Englebert and Ernie (my laptop and flash drive) with me and force myself to write rather than watching History International and Nicktoons for the duration. It might make me crazy, but there’s no excuse for laziness on my part when I don’t have to be up at the ass-crack of dawn to go to work.

(I should also buy a bag of Jelly Bellys while I’m away. They seem to help with the random channeling of verbosity.)