The Personal Side of Writing
The Ups, Downs and Insecurities I have being an author sometimes
Oftentimes I find myself wondering why do I write if I’m always so afraid of what people think of my opinion. I would shut myself out and constantly doubt my talent, giving any excuse as to why I should hold back on this idea or fall back on the next. Maybe this was an outlet to change that, we’ll see.
Okay, I’m starting to get the hang of this blogging thing. I add a little bit of my own storytelling into it, and I seem to keep myself afloat long enough to interest you I hope. If not, you can gladly stop reading.
Just kidding.
But seriously. It’s only come to me a bit recently that I have been stumbling on my own dreams as of late because I have been failing to put anything into action. Keeping myself out of the house and into a more uplifting environment, namely my laptop, seems to keep me sane. Maybe on some notion that it wasn’t my time yet, or I was too young to move on my dreams…but I just didn’t seem to acquire the drive that was needed yet for a writer’s perseverance.
When people ask me what I wanted to be from about after the age of thirteen up until I graduated high school, I often didn’t give them an answer. It’s not because I didn’t want to. Okay, I didn’t. But merely because I didn’t know how to explain myself without not knowing entirely what I was talking about. Telling someone you want to write books for a living is a lot easier than explaining how exactly you’ll go about doing that. You can tell someone you’ll publish a book and make enough income to sustain yourself annually, but will that really happen?
Obviously not.
So. I told them I wasn’t sure, while understanding that this was a goal I would have to pursue entirely on my own accords, without my parents knowing as well. Sure you’d be lying in a sense. But I’m positive the payout would ultimately be enough to make up for the lie.
That was my goal. It still is. And it’s a work in progress.
It’s not that I didn’t want my parents to pursue my dreams, who wouldn’t? But, I know they wouldn’t understand. Maybe in a future post I’ll go deeper into my family. When I have a few dedicated readers I’m comfortable sharing that part of my life with.
Sidebar: I didn’t notice how much I’d written in the past few minutes. This is what I’d call being in the zone.
Anyway, back on track.
Telling someone you want to be an author for a living and actually doing it are two very different things. Unfortunately, something I wouldn’t have any experience with currently. I’ve written. I’ve written books. A few actually. Finished, unfinished. Some I considered complete garbage and scrapped on the first fifteen pages. While others I considered possibly my next best-seller. They may still be. Haven’t published them to find out. I will someday. But for now, I’m focused on sustaining myself enough to get to that point.
I asked myself why authors were oftentimes older. Perhaps because their writing was simply a supplementary craft they began to take seriously in the latter stages of their life? Maybe they’d been writing their whole life and only began to take it seriously decades later (this won’t happen to me)? I wouldn’t know for sure. But this would be my best guess. Writing has expanded more than ever, and I’ve finally realized this through the Internet. I could do things I couldn’t do before. Write things, in places people could prolifically see. I could build.
I would build.
I was shy growing up. A bit torn away from the crowd of usual kids my age. I took my fair share of insults and teasing back in the day, but who didn’t? We were kids. We had so much to learn and to understand. Especially when it came to treating people.
I usually practiced my writing in the classrooms of my Catholic school years, where I spent the majority of most classes writing more than I did paying attention. I wrote stories, vast and untold beyond most imaginations thirteen year old boys had at the time. I was told I was very creative by most of my teachers. Hell, I even took up a few art classes consistently for about seven months before I stopped. I consider myself a bit of a jack-of-all trades. I just decided to settle down on writing.
It’s where I can get my voice out the best. I resolve to get more personal in my writing from here on out. Perhaps this was sort of an empty declaration.
