The guys who do the Writing Excuses podcast just released a fantastic epidose.
Howard Tayler, the creator of Schlock Mercenary, talks about how he has recently discovered that he’s writing satire. But what’s most important on this episode is when the guys start talking about how examining your writing too soon can actually do more harm than good. Rather, it’s better just to write and write, knowing that someday you’ll have to figure out what you’re doing.
This is more true than most beginning writers know. Now, I’m not sure if I can call myself a beginning writer. I’ve been writing more or less seriously for the past five years, and perhaps the biggest mistake I made as a beginner was focusing too much on what kind of fiction I wanted to write and where I wanted to get published.
This mistake is natural, I think, to someone who starts writing late in life (I was 29, which isn’t that late, but most writers start when they’re teenagers or in college). So from the beginning, writing was more than a hobby for me. But the problem was that I didn’t give myself any time just to write; I didn’t give myself time to learn the craft of fiction or explore what kind of storyteller I was. I was too focused on other things.
The result was that I writing frustarted me to no end. I’d write for a few months, take a few months off, and this was my habit until I decided to quit once for all last spring. This past December, however, I realized I didn’t want to quit writing. I decided to make 2009 the Year I Get Serious About Writing.
One of the big changes I made was not to confine myself to any genre — in other words, to not worry about getting published. I needed to see (a) if I enjoyed writing, (b) if I could finish a darn novel, and (c) to figure out what kind of stories I liked to tell.
Now, I grew up reading primarily fantasy and horror fiction, with a dash of SF, thrillers, and literary fiction, and today my favorite genre is fantasy. I decided to write a practice fantasy novel — The Ruins of Malzirun — to see if I like writing in the genre.
So even though I’ve talked a lot the past month or so about being a fantasy novelist — I’m not a fantasy writer yet. By which I mean to say, I’m not ready to declare myself an aspiring fantasy novelist.
For now, I’m just an aspiring writer. I’ll label myself when necessary.
