In the beginning, and end, is the word
“You are enough,” Positive Writer’s fifth contest, asks writers to convince our counterparts to “believe in themselves and their writing abilities.”
I won’t pretend to be a successful writer who can light that fire under your fingers. I haven’t published a book yet. My Medium platform for fiction, poetry and non-fiction has a modest following — okay, maybe modicum of followers is more accurate — although my Facebook Medium page is hovering at around 1,000 “likes.”
I won’t pretend I’m in the same league as more established authors who pass along all our writerly and worldly knowledge to help you overcome the stuckness of getting words out of your head and onto a page or computer screen.
What I can say is this: It matters. Only it matters.
I mean the written word.
As Rachel Toor noted, “You just do the work. The work gets done.”
Easier said than done, especially if you sometimes feel your words are but whispers in a whirlwind of other writers’ words and your attempts at publication have been met with polite, form-letter rejections or worse — complete silence.
Take my comic rock opera Rockaria!, based on the music of the Electric Light Orchestra.
Never heard of it? You’re not alone. There are almost 7.5 billion other people on Earth who have never heard of my musical either.
In fact, only a handful of people read my written pitch for Rockaria!, including a guy who said he would forward the idea to the management team of Jeff Lynne, the musical genius behind ELO. I never received a response.
My 2006 pitch — a bit ambitious but enthusiastic and, in my humble opinion, brilliant — was that the world needed my musical. I explained how inspiration struck me after watching the hit musical Mamma Mia in Toronto which I enjoyed despite the music of ABBA.
“Why isn’t there a musical based on the songs of a cool band?” I wrote. “Why isn’t there an ELO musical, where girls can fall in love all over again and the guys won’t be embarrassed by the music?” Kinda like Titanic: Women loved the love story, men loved the engine room scenes and special effects.
I never did write the full musical but I had fun sketching the rough ideas and themes, characters and conflicts that would make up Rockaria!
“In the end,” I wrote of my imagined musical, “cast and audience will clap their hands and tap their toes to the sounds of ‘Rock and Roll is King’ as everyone lives happily ever after.”
Or not, as it sometimes goes.
Still, it matters. So I keep on writing. You should too.
With the short fiction and poetry in the “cd’s flights of fancy” category of my Medium publication, I do have some completed works. They include a story called “Bus Stop Bus Goes” which riffs on the music of The Hollies and others. (You may notice an obsession with music in some of the things I write.)
At the beginning of 2014 I reached out to Alistair MacLeod, the great Canadian writer and a former English professor, for feedback (ah, that music in my head again!). I did not know then that he had suffered a stroke around that time. He died at the age of 77 on April 20, 2014.
I never received a response. I doubt he read my story.
MacLeod, whose path I’ve crossed many times and was the subject of one of my tributes, was the trickling water tap of writers to the firehose of someone like Stephen King. MacLeod wrote one novel and a collection of short stories that appeared in three books; King has produced 58 novels, six non-fiction works and some 200 short stories (and counting) under his own name and as Richard Bachman.
Still, whether you’re prolific like King or painstakingly particular like MacLeod, what matters is only it: the writing. Heck, King knows it. It became one of his greatest successes!
Whatever your art, whatever your passion, just get down to it and create.
I work with surrealistic artist Stephen Gibb. He paints every day on his lunch hour. He constantly creates and his output is prolific. Lately, interest in the artist has been hot and it’s coming out of unlikely places because of his album cover design for the rapper Trippie Redd.
Gibb knows what he does matters. His art matters.
So write. Write anything and write all the time. Like constant reading makes you a better reader, writing all the time will make you good at it. Maybe great.
I have written a kind of daily blog to myself for about seven years that I call Flotsam and Jetsam. It is the stuff that floats to the top of my mind and spills over onto a computer ‘page’: quotes, book reviews, rough drafts of poetry, fiction, observations, rants, inspirational material — basically anything and everything just as long as my fingers get to type out the words and form them into sentences and paragraphs. I write daily, with one recent exception — the day my best friend died.
Ignore the ignorers and abhorrers of your work, especially the self-proclaimed high priests of taste like this writer who Rex Pickett completely and justly denounces.
Be inspired, be motivated and believe in what you write and know that it matters.
If you need a place to start, here are a few things that may light that fire:
• first, “Ya Gotta Try,”
• listen to the actor Viola Davis who said recently, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” and
• read Valerie Trueblood’s first sentence in her story “Beloved You Looked Into Space”: “Our father married a woman who took an axe to a bear.”
Stumbling upon that in a New York Times book review about an unfamiliar writer sent a tingle to my fingertips and got me writing.
Like the boogie woogie in the boy in John Lee Hooker’s song, you just gotta let it out because it’s in you “and it got to come out.”
Claudio D’Andrea has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazine and online publications for 30 years. You can read his stuff on LinkedIn and Medium.com and follow him on Twitter.
