Writing Wednesday
Write something that you’re never going to publish. Write something that you’re never going to submit for a grade, or for editing, or for any sort of critique or peer review of any kind. You can show this something to other people if you want, but make sure that they understand that you didn’t write it for critique or review or for anyone else’s approval.
You are writing this thing entirely for yourself. An audience of one.
It doesn’t have to be long – a few hundred words, if that’s all you really want to write. I’m not asking you to invest the time it would take to write a novel that you’ll never show anyone else, that would be ludicrous. If you WANT to write a novel that you’ll never show anyone else, god fucking speed.
The reason I’m asking you to do this is because writing something without the intent of someone reading it at the end of the day does two very healthy things: 1) It helps you blow off steam. It gives you the freedom to write anything you want – you want a shotgun blast to knock down a building, then that building is toast. You want the main character, who is typically a sheepish and polite librarian, to call someone a cunting asshole gobshite, well then she just said that shit and it was the sickest burn of all time. You can get this kind of tomfoolery out of your system, and that helps you stay on point when you’re writing ‘for real’. 2) It helps you develop your literary voice. Too many times a writer will be trying to emulate someone that they admire all throughout their work, and it more often than not comes across as a cheap knockoff, as something derivative and shallow. Instead, what most writers want to do is to internalize those things they like most about their favorite authors. Writing for yourself allows you to digest these things, and rather than just regurgitate what you THINK they are, you can make them a part of yourself. Instead of being homage at best and derivative at worst, your work can be reminiscent.
Both of these things are of crucial importance to any writer, casual or serious. Bottling yourself up can cause some seriously debilitating writer’s block. I’ve gone weeks without writing all because I wished the main character could just shoot the bad guy’s dick off and call it a day. So I opened a new file, and as if writing for an alternate universe, made that shit happen and it was goddamn awesome. Having a poorly developed voice will get you lost in the sea of work that’s out there. When you think about your favorite author – I don’t care if it’s Hemingway or Tolkien or Bendis – you can immediately think of things that are them. Certain stylistic choices they make, certain words they love to use. Things they seem to have a really firm grasp on. Writing for yourself can help you develop those choices that you’ll be making, and it’s the kind of thing that I can’t even properly give you an example of, because if you’re reading my work and recognizing certain things that I like to do a lot – for example, I kinda like italics sometimes and I find the occasional intentional run-on sentence super hilarious because it reminds me of when someone is trying to explain something quickly in a conversation that they’re super excited about so they can’t get their head on entirely straight to make a concise statement about why this or that thing is simply the coolest.
Doesn’t have to be long. Doesn’t have to be good. Just needs to be yours.
There are millions of ways to go about doing something like this. I usually write alternate dimensional versions of my current works in progress (where the good guy can shoot peoples’ dicks off!). Sometimes I show what I wrote to certain friends who will probably find it hilarious, but other times I write something that’s either too personal, too offensive, or just so god awful that I squirrel it away and make it my little secret happy accident. Some people use their blogs for this sort of thing.
Until next week, you cunting asshole gobshites!
Coming up Cypress 