Good Morning Lovelies,
Living as a writer and writing your heart out is difficult, it is always challenging. Writing like this means wearing your heart on your sleeve in front of an audience (literally or figuratively for those who are not published). It means being willing and even enjoying being vulnerable, to show people the vulnerable parts of characters and themselves. Being a writer means being able to read people and to build upon them and their situations to create characters with issues that relate to real-world people and drama and problems.
Lots of more experienced writers have one very common piece of advice for those of us who are just starting out, “write what you know.” The thing is for me, I don’t know a whole lot and what I do know is, well to put it lightly, it would put you to sleep and that’s not what you want. So, I took their advice and modified it to this, “if you choose to write about what you don’t know, research is your best friend before and after the writing.” I always begin writing about a topic that interests me and I know little or nothing about. If I get stuck, I research and as soon as I have enough information to keep going, I write until the next blockade stops my journey.
I am working on getting a short story-novella published and it is about a world that doesn’t exist, about fighting and killing and I really don’t know anything about that, but I did some research on fight scenes and I used all the knowledge I have from movies and put it to good use. I also used my mind, my imagination to create things that I didn’t know I could create. In writing what I didn’t know, I learned a lot of new stuff and I created something worth reading, something that people might enjoy.
So, my real advice to all of you is this, write what you want, whether you know about it or not. If you know then, great, you have a head-start, if not then you get to have more fun, researching something that interests you and learning too. If I had listened to that advice, I never would have written a word of my own. So, stay good guys and stay true to yourself and your writer’s voice. After all, you are the only one with that voice, the only one who can write the way you write, make us all proud.
Rose Marie