Do a Different Thing
I have started hand-writing letters again. This is my new sealing wax melter.
Writing Advice from me: Start a blog.
You really need to start a blog. Like, yesterday.
If you are a novelist, you need to blog, and make sure it’s nonfiction. Make sure it’s what you don’t usually write.
If you write short stories, you are forbidden to do so on your blog. You must write poetry. Or grocery lists.
If you write nonfiction, well, good luck, you are doomed to write fiction on your blog.
Guidelines can help us to branch out, and I’m only being half serious when I suggest the above. But truly, starting a blog can change how you write. Writing into the ether, wondering who will ever read it, is a freedom not many of us can find. That sounds rather dramatic, but I do think we constrain ourselves when we say, “I write novels,” or, “I write essays,” or. “I write short stories.” I, personally, write nonfiction. Fiction eludes me. I adore reading fiction; I can’t write decent fiction.
After writing that, I stopped and thought, “Isn’t all of this fiction? You are just making these words up as you go—made up means fiction.” Of course, I understand the difference between my thoughts being true or fictional.
Of course I do.
However.
Our thoughts come from somewhere, and what is actually true? How deep is this rabbit hole? Will I go all the way to, “we are only pure consciousness, every waking moment is a dream, and our lives are only reality because we trick our minds into thinking so. Also, ‘our’ minds? Who owns the mind? My body belongs to me, so I can’t be my body. I can’t be my mind. If ‘I’ am tricking my mind, then who am I? Who or what is the I?”
Big digression. No apologies, this is my blog and I do what I want.
Back to advice: In your blog, try to stretch yourself. Write in a style you don’t usually use. Write some fiction in the character of a gender which isn’t yours and see what happens. Write some poetry with a heavy structure. Write some poetry without form. Go all e e cummings on your own ass and make up your own damn rules. Then follow them. See what happens.
I am completely serious now.
Just like the lobster who cannot grow without casting off its shell and forming a new one, and just like our muscles that do not grow without great struggle, there is no growth as a writer without a challenge. Do something different for one dang minute.
Full report in the comments, please.