I've been really wanting to be a writer lately. I've been listening to writing podcasts, reading books about writing, studying the process of writing, setting up my home office with writing in mind. Doing everything I can to be a writer except... writing.
Why? Why does my passion not have me passionate about it? Why can I think of nothing I want to write about except my ancestors' stories? I want to write fiction. I want to have a great idea for a great story and write it. Greatly. But instead, I'm stuck with writing the truth. Not even my own truth, but the truth of the lives of people no one except me really cares about. They are fascinating to me and I'm passionate for their stories, but I really want to have passion for a fake story in a fake world where I can have fake things happen. But the fake never comes to me. I've got nothing.
Just now, sitting at the kitchen table with my iPad (not in my writing home office using the writing applications on my writing computer), I realized that I don't get to choose what I write. This isn't my job, where I would have to find a way to write what they told me to, whether it called to me or not. These people are calling to me-- the Mariani's, my Civil War grandfather, Grampa's ghost town, my dad-- and they are what I should listen to. I hear them; I just haven't been listening, as I've been too busy whining about not hearing the fake.
So I sit at my iPad typing this out and promising myself that I am no longer going to be a writer. I'm just going to write.
And I feel so much better.
Posted with Blogsy
It's interesting how our ancestors seem to give us direction about what we should be doing. Maybe after you finish writing about your ancestors they'll suggest that you write a semi-fictional story and include them in it?
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