Writing Books

[My imaginary friend is GOD]

Well that was a head spinner lol.

Changed my mind. Not going to say the thing I was going to say. Move along.

[rexbeccarox]

I'm not a housewife, but I write books because I enjoy it. If I think something I write is marketable, I'll probably try to go for it. Every writers' group I've been affiliated with has enjoyed my writing, so why not try?

[psychoslice]

I'm not a housewife, but I write books because I enjoy it. If I think something I write is marketable, I'll probably try to go for it. Every writers' group I've been affiliated with has enjoyed my writing, so why not try?

That's great, I have a little group of people who likes my book also, its so rewarding isn't it ?.

[rexbeccarox]

I'm not a housewife, but I write books because I enjoy it. If I think something I write is marketable, I'll probably try to go for it. Every writers' group I've been affiliated with has enjoyed my writing, so why not try?

That's great, I have a little group of people who likes my book also, its so rewarding isn't it ?.

It is! There are so many rewards that come from writing. Of course, there's heartache too.

Here's a conundrum illustrating this: Recently, I started a rewrite of a popular novel written a couple of decades ago. I was having so much fun writing it until I saw a movie that did about 90% of my ideas. They didn't relate the movie to the novel in question, but it was SO similar to what my ideas were, and to the original novel, it was obvious the filmmakers' end goal was the same as mine. I decided to chuck my rewrite.

I was bummed. The excitement deflated, and I completely stopped writing for a few days. I have been working on at least three novels/novellas at a time since I can remember, and I just wasn't writing.

... but then I thought, why not let the original work and its tribute be muses for writing exercises? Shouldn't all writers be exercising and practicing outside of their art like professional athletes and musicians? And, while it's in an entirely different genre from the other two projects that I'm working on, this process is lending a depth to my characters, which I don't think I had before my current attitude about it.

The reward is definitely worth the angst that comes with it

[Clueless Morgan]

To me, writing is about expression - expressing whatever is in you that you feel you need to write down; it's cathartic as much as anything else*. Some people simply choose to publish (or try to publish) what they write. What's wrong with that? If it's crappy it'll get rejected, if it's good (or decent) it'll get published, and you've got a second income stream.

I agree that writing is a skill and an art that a lot of people don't bother to develop *coughstephaniemeyer* and because of that people have overblown opinions about their skill level, but if they're serious about it they can develop those skills.

I've mostly gotten out of fanfiction because of the sheer level of crapdom one has to wade through in order to find anything worth reading even the first chapter of. But I have found some authors that are truly talented, and what I've seen has been them graduating to original work and becoming published. And good for them.

*I've written a bit in my time, but it's more about getting ideas out of my head so I can stop thinking about them than about wanting to publish and get accolades and a second income stream. There's also the minor issue that I rarely finish something I'm writing, but more like write scenes and plot out a story and then the catharsis has been achieved and I move on. If I have a strength in writing, I think it lies in plotting rather than actually writing the scenes of the story out.

[My imaginary friend is GOD]

Hmm... man, if only this thread title said, "Playing with boobs"...