GET THOSE JUICES FLOWING
Saturday Aug. 31, 2019
After twenty years or so writing with effort and commitment, with nearly 18 years of daily practice and millions of words behind me, I think I’m finally becoming a writer. Not that I wasn’t already, not that I didn’t call myself a writer and that others see me as one. But I mean, a REAL writer.
This became apparent to me at the writers conference I attended recently – the social convention there was not “what do you do?” as part of introductions but rather, “what do you write?”. I should have expected that – a conference full, mostly, of introverts like me who would far rather ask that question than answer, far rather talk about what they do than who they are. Yet I came away from several sessions and those awkward conversations with a far better sense of who I am, of what I write and how to move forward. My energy level in recent weeks has soared. My writing output has been about the same, but my re-writing and plot-tweaking has been fueled by creative juices.
I think fiction writing is the most socially acceptable form of self-reflection and revelation – because it is done to an imaginary person created on a page, their pains and foibles appear so real because they are reflective of real pain the author has experienced or seen, but they are hidden within fiction on the page – the writer’s experiences and aspirations they’d never tell out loud speak volumes from ink on paper …
Which makes we wonder, if you created a grocery store for writers, if the hottest thing on the shelves wouldn’t be Creative Juice?
