Just Writing

For as long as I can remember, I’ve collected books on writing. Books about Building Believable Characters and Character Traits. Books claiming to be The Pocket Muse or telling me what should be included in The First Five Pages. Even books that simply asked What If?

More recently I turned to online resources, and the best I found were actually sites about blogging and writing copy. I subscribed to several and started reading regularly. A handful survived the first month, and I still read them every day because they are truly inspiring… but reading them has done nothing for my writing. Or lack thereof.

Book by book and Bird by Bird I read and I read, but I seldom wrote. Oh, I wanted to write, but I thought I wasn’t good enough, didn’t know enough, wasn’t ready. When I did try my hand at writing, it was clunky and awkward, and I quickly got frustrated and went out and bought another book. No Plot? No Problem! Even Stephen King was lecturing me On Writing, and while it was all very inspiring, it didn’t help me write. I was frustrated. Writing, real writing, became just a joke between Mum and I. I was going to write, she would edit, and… then we’d both laugh because we knew it was never going to happen.

Then one Saturday morning I read a blog post. The post itself was good, but even better were the comments. Suddenly I found myself in the middle of a story, and I was refreshing the page every few minutes to see what happened next, and who would come up with what. Oh how I envied these people their witty dialog and creative descriptions. I wanted to play! Not long after that day I was told that I could play. All I had to do was write.

What?! Just sit down and… and what? Start typing? Are you kidding me? You can’t just write. There was no way that was going to work. No way! And who else will be writing along side me? Oh, just the very same bloggers I’d been voraciously reading on a daily basis. Oohing and ahhing over their creativity, style and choice of words. No no no, that would never work. I couldn’t possibly hold my own in such a crowd. Oh but I wanted to.

So for the first time in my life, I made a commitment to write. I created a character profile, and sent in my request to join Escaping Reality. The site launched, and it was daunting and terrifying and so very exciting. For awhile I watched and read, observing the interactions and the writing. I noted the differing styles coming together and met some new online friends. Some were writers, some gamers and some just there to watch.

Finally I wrote my first post… and no one laughed (which is a good thing as it wasn’t meant to be a funny post). So I wrote another, and when my turn came around again I wrote yet another. They started to build up little by little until suddenly I realized my character, Lizzy, was developing a personality. It was actually happening like I’d read about in all those books on writing. Lizzy started to take on a life of her own, and I was just writing it down, and with some specific feedback from my co-writers, I was getting a little bit better at it. Each post better than the last.

I was writing! Not reading about writing. Not thinking about it. I was writing as if it was the most natural thing in the world to simply sit down at a keyboard and start typing dialog and descriptions and thoughts and fears. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but somehow (and by somehow I mean with a lot of encouragement from everyone in the community) I was OK with that. I’d spent my whole life thinking about writing instead of writing.

No more. Thank you again James and Harry. If I ever publish anything at all, you can be sure it will be dedicated to the two people who taught me that the best way to learn how to write is to just write.