for Writers

Why we are Lucky to be Writers

It’s fun to sit around your pajamas and make things up.
It is incredibly challenging. You feel you have the perfect story inside you but because you are imperfect you can never quite get to it. However, in that struggle is immense satisfaction.
Nothing in your life—the good, the bad, the ugly—is wasted. All of it can be recycled in a very altered form into your writing.

Let’s say you have a really, really bad day. Most people just have to live with it. Oh, they might say, at least it will make a good story, but they don’t really mean it. However, you, when you say this, will.
A friend betrays you. Later, perhaps much later, a particularly villainous character with a physical defect and an unspecified disease may show up acting and sounding very much like that friend.
Of course, I’m joking. Sort of. Anyway, all the things that happen in your life do influence your fiction.
Amy Hemple wrote in an essay in a book titled Why I Write (Will Blythe, Editor) that:“Writing is as close as I will ever come to achieving the kind of self-regard that was available to my brother at the age of ten, when he composed the shapely and authoritative English theme: ‘Why I am my Favorite Person.’” Alas, this is true. When I’m writing I feel better than myself.
Sometimes when the writing is going well I feel I’m tapped into something much larger and greater than myself.
And last and also first: it’s fun to sit around in your pajamas and make things up.

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