To reach maximum potential, authors of fiction must discover who they are and why they write. In many ways, the telling of fictional stories is a performance that can be damaged or destroyed by ill-conceived attitudes about writing.
Here are some questions you should be asking yourself about writing:
- Do I write to master the skills and concepts of writing as an art form (or do I write stories to explain experienced emotions)?
- Do I strive to tell a creative fictional story based on imagination (or am I writing a memoir or biography)?
- Do I write for creative excellence (or for fame)?
- Do I write to provide meaning through entertainment and enlightenment (or to persuade to some presumption)?
- Do I rewrite to improve my creative story skills (or do I revise to transform my prose into obscure text with an intellectually intense meaning)?
- Do I believe stories are dramatic events for a reader to experience (or written words for the reader to interpret)?
- Do I believe stories are structures whose unity is discovered as reading progresses (or that they are meandering observations described step by step)?
By answering these questions honestly in your own mind, you will adjust your attitude toward writing to create even better work. In later posts, I will follow up with my thoughts on these.
I write to tell my story and for the love of creative writing. I am writing a biographical story of my life experiences. I have not asked myself many of your questions. Do I want to improve my writing skills, yes. Am I writing for myself, yes but also for other people who might find my writing inspirational as well as funny and entertaining. My stories are dramatic, but can be heartfelt and funny too. My biggest problem IS structure. I do tend to digress, however, it’s because as I’m telling one story it generally reminds me of something that ties into the story I’m telling and would add to the emphasis of said story. Usually making it more dramatic or funny.
Thanks for the opportunity.
Linda L. Longmire
I have been creating stories in my mind and telling them since before I could read or write. I was in a kindergarten school that hired a story teller to come in and tell us a story. She used a black-felt board with cut-outs of people and objects to tell her story. It was about life and how we should conduct ourselves as we grew and learned. It so fascinated me, I found myself making up stories to tell, just to engulf and transport anyone who would listen through the progress of the lessons they didn’t realize they were learning. About life.
As I grew older, I read a play by a playwrite named Eugene O’Neill and I felt that was what I wanted to do. I studied hard in Junior High and High School, however, being from a poor family and back in the 60′s (meaning, females were expected to marry not have careers), I could not attend a college for writing. So, I took writing classes up through my adult life and wrote a magazine artical in one of the classes which was submitted to a school magazine by the instructor. In High School, my creative writing teacher had us write short-stories and mine was chosen to put in a school magazine for the purpose of teaching.
Finally, I wrote a novel on the pure premise of many Mediums predicting I would write a book and travel to the shore of an ocean. The novel has been published by AuthorHouse, however, not without many problems cropping up during the creating, writing, editing and printing of it. I was deceived by a person I thought was my friend who talked me into signing certain rights over to her. Thank God for my publishing agent Buddy Dow at AuthorHouse, whom helped me regain all the rights back. However, I was not to discover the destructions of the quality I had so carefully put into every key-stroke until after the book was published. It is still available for purchase eventhough, it desprately needs “fixing”.
I have always wanted to know if my writing “talent” is a true one or not. I entered a poem contest and received recognition for it by the company holding the contest publishing it in a poem book (with other poems by other authors). The biggest reason I would like to enter this contest is find out if I have a “real” talent for it. Mostly because, it is near and dear to my heart, since, I still feel that same excitement now as did back in that school auditorium when I was 5 years old!
Cindy L Davids