As a writer, you are going to become familiar with what I call ‘The Exchange.’ This is how you pay for the talent, the gift, and your humility to the pursuit of this craft.
The Exchange is this:
Life happens in three ways: to you, through you, and around you. It your job as the writer to record, decode and make sense of what seems to not make sense. As a writer, you constantly exchange time for talent, work for experience, heartbreak for word count.
Being a writer is one of thee most maddening things I have ever done! For every project that I want to do, there are 4 others that spring up. They seduce me from the current work, and then I leave them–jilted and guilty –to return to the first love. Determined to finish what I started.
This is what writers do though, dear ones! We create! And in the fury of creating, we have these side loves that call to us. These things we start when the first love (read: current work) has us in a funky place with no way out. I mean, Octavia Butler wrote Fledgling as a side project because the other work she was writing was ‘too much’! Wri
Think about your word choice: what you say, how you say it.
Remember they story–good or ill–belongs to you. All words done or crafted by you.
Writing is equal parts bravery and calamity! There is portion of you which will have to be brave enough to verbally admit what you have only whispered. Then there is the personal shock (aka ‘the calamity’) which happens when you begin to write something–you become shocked at how this is coming together.
There is a power in remembering. There is a power in looking into life events and choosing how much you want to reveal to people: good, bad or ugly. The beautiful thing is when you tell this stories–they are yours.
Remember that when you become ashamed or shocked upon the reflecting of your own life. You own your story.
We have made it through the first quarter of this new decade, fellow oracles! This is cause for celebration, believe it or not. With that new found confidence, write today.
Write what you love, the things you love or the people you love.
Be brave when you open the things you thought, just knew, were dead.
Open them up.
The work will remain unfinished as long as you ignore it. As long as you believe what is before you is not worth finishing, it will remain so!
I want you to know one crucial thing–the work is only dead if the artist is. The work is dead only if the artist is!
I need you to look at what you have created. I need you to look at what you have created, in order to get the faith to finish it. I want you to realize when you abandon a work, it doesn’t vanish.
It doesn’t matter how long ago you created the worlds, made the heroes, vanquished the villainous or preserved the righteous, or made the supernatural mundane. The work is not gone, you are still here to finish it.
It is yet still there. Waiting on you.
Still.
The pen, paper, and computer file is your shovel. Start digging. Give it new life, added perspective, new experiences or a stronger voice. Rage against the dying of the light. Break the ceiling with surround it! Shatter the cocoons.
Be ruthless with the talent, my fellow Oracles. There is a power in it. What power is that you ask? The power in knowing what you have on the inside of you is itching to come through your hands, because it has been boiling your head so long.
It is–it will be–scary and exhilarating and the journey is yours.
