Into the Fire

There are basics in writing and storytelling. Because of this, every individual who hears the call to write must go through boot camp and understand those basics. Some of us who've loved to write ever since we learned how to hold a pencil or a crayon learned them quickly and eagerly pursued them. We read most of the assigned novels in school with gusto–except for Hemingway and Faulkner of course. 😉
 
As we lived life and experienced multiple authors, we formed our voices and our preferences and took to the pen or keyboards with earnest efforts to create fiction or poetry or both that would rock the world. However, in the course of pursuing that kind of writing we reluctantly accepted perfection doesn't exist in man or on earth, and that some people would laugh at or degrade our work while celebrating the stuff we considered paltry, weak, and unmoving. Whether it was sparse and sterile or overblown and self-centered, readers raving about what we considered rubbish spat upon our hopes and withered our confidences.
 
After "graduating" to actually constructing novels, we labored over what the Lord had for us to do, to write, over what we might want to indulge or even over what others would command us to create in order to be "successful" or to "get noticed" or to "impress and compel readers" to buy our books. And in that whole process we heard absurd absolutes and Nazi-ish musts for quality writing, and some of us decided we didn't buy into any of it. Not only did "great" writing not appear in most of the published forums, it rarely appeared, in spite of all the grandiose claims about how to write and only "the best" getting published; we discovered those were smokescreens from an elitist mentality that published books for a perceived group of readers, eliminating a great number of them in the process.
 
All that gobble-dee-gook to say this: at some point a writer decides who he/she is and they either like their own stuff or they don't. Yes, they struggle with the "This is definitive junk!" syndrome v. the "This is so good!" condition and everything in between. But if they don't like their own stuff, they're fools to continue writing or they're just pretending they don't like it.
 
The whole point of my "disagreements" with you was based on the idea of absolutes in such a subjective body of work. What works for one definitely does not for another. And both are equally championed by their fans. Some people need concrete instructions to proceed and others go on instinct. Each of them needs a basic foundation and knowledge to do the project, but both approach it differently.
 
Hurray for the articulate craft book authors. They can diagnose and diagram and deconstruct for the methodical minded, but sometimes making directions for the seat-of-the-pantsers is like force feeding me Pepsi over Coca Cola. Ain't gonna happen, baby.

With love,

Nicole

Father, you’ve created me for a purpose. I’ve squandered a lot of life pursuing my objectives. Hopefully, no more. I want to want what you have for me. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.