Posted By Scath on December 26, 2008

I believe I’m about to break a rule about blogging; the one about keeping your posts at around 500 words. Wait; I break that rule a lot.

But those are usually excerpts or short stories, so there’s my excuse for them. This one is about being a writer/writing.

What is a writer? The obvious answer is ‘one who writes’. If you’re talking about a fiction writer, like moi, then ‘story teller’ might be your second response.

I consider myself a writer/story teller. I write about imaginary characters and tell their stories in hopes of providing some entertainment to those who come along and visit my blog, or who purchase a copy of one of my books.

I am a writer with three strikes against me:

• 1. I’m new. I’ve only been seriously pursuing writing as a ‘career’ for just over a year now.
• 2. I self-publish.
• 3. I am not the Best Writer in the Universe. You might even think I suck, which is okay, because everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.

To me, writing is both a creative outlet and a way to earn income. It’s also an ongoing learning process. I believe that I’m steadily improving with each story I finish, and I’ve been lucky enough to become friends with some people who care enough to beta read, critique and push me to polish my skills.

The characters and stories are mine – even though they may be of a type that’s been done a thousand times before. Everything’s been done before, or so the saying goes. It’s putting your personal touch on them that makes them different and yours.

I often visit the message boards at Amazon.com to lurk about and see what readers are saying about their favorite authors and the books they’ve recently read.

Man, oh man! It’s a madhouse over there! People get downright vicious when their favorite authors (or once favorite authors) don’t write to suit them. When they take characters in directions some readers don’t think they should.

Out come the accusations of Mary Sue-ism; in some cases, the author’s personal life ends up being bandied about (in the case of one well-known author who has a blog and regularly posts details about her daily doings in it).

Being a writer, albeit one that may never become well-known, I have a few points to make to people who gleefully trash authors over the way they handle their characters and stories. I’m using myself as an example, btw:

• They’re my characters. They’re my stories. You’re more than welcome to not read them if they aren’t to your taste. In the case of a series, if you hit a book you don’t like, you’re more than welcome to stop reading the series. Or, better yet, why don’t you sit down and write your own stories, and stick them out for people to read? Walk a mile in my shoes.
• I write for myself first. Why? Because I’m afraid my brain might rupture from the pressure of all the voices in it that are demanding to have their stories told. New voices join the crowd regularly. If I stopped writing, I’d probably end up in a strait jacket at Happy Manor, drooling continuously while staring blankly out a window and doped to the gills on something or other.
• I write for an audience second. If I’m going to go to all the effort of birthing these babies, I’m going to stick them out there so that people who might find them to their taste can discover them.
• I do not write a paragraph or two then race off to get the opinions of 300 different people to see what they think I should do next with the story. No one does that. If writers did that, no one would ever finish anything and there’d be no books for anyone to read except technical manuals.
• The cries of Mary Sue-ism are becoming sooo very tiresome to see. Plain facts: my characters are going to have something of me in them because they are my characters. They come directly from my brain. Where in my brain, I’m not sure, but they do come from it. Sometimes, they scare me, and make me wonder just what the hell’s in those dark recesses. But then I remember who my favorite authors are, and know who to blame.
• I read what I like; I put a book down and don’t finish it if I find it’s not to my taste after all. I don’t go and post on Amazon about what a bad mother the author is, or how mentally ill they must be because they had this or that character do something two dozen readers think is disgusting or beyond the pale. I just don’t ever buy or read a book by that author again.
• It takes courage to create something then put it out for people to see. Doesn’t matter if it’s a book, a photo, a painting, whatever. Creating something and having people come along and trash it stings like hell. And the Internet’s anonymity tends to bring out the shitty factor in a lot of people. If you’re going to trash something I wrote, at least take the time to actually read it first. And then be prepared to have your comment deleted if you’re just being a troll and not offering any constructive criticism, because I’ve outgrown the baiting into flame wars phase. Or better yet, if you didn’t like it, just don’t bother coming back.
• There seems to be a lot of readers who take things way too personally. While it’s any author’s dream to have fans that become emotionally invested in their characters, there’s a point when those fans have got to step back and remember: THEY AREN’T REAL PEOPLE. They’re figments of my imagination that I’m sharing with you. Sometimes, even I’m not in control of what they say and do! Seriously!

I want to write, and I want to sell what I write that I do release for purchase. I also put stories up for free download or free reading on my blog. I do this so that people can try before they buy. If you don’t like the excerpts, etc that are in my blog, you’re not going to like any of my books. I’m saving you the trouble of returning something; isn’t that nice of me?

I guess what I’m trying to say is: reading is meant to be entertainment. If you switch to something that’s not entertaining to you on the TV, what do you do? You change the channel, search for something that is. You don’t sit there and yell at the TV for having that particular show you don’t like on it. You just skip it, and move on.

Reading is the same way. If you find an author that doesn’t entertain you, move on and find one who does. I know that the stuff I write isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste (hell, you should’ve heard D after he read Season of Shadows! I got endless opinions on how I should’ve handled things differently in accordance to his tastes, LOL). I also know that the stuff I write IS going to be to some people’s taste. There’s an audience for everything, that’s what’s so cool about life.

This post may come across as an ‘eff you very much’ thing; it’s not meant to be. All I’m trying to say is that it’s impossible to please everyone all of the time. Instead of bitching about not being pleased, or worse, resorting to trashing an author’s personal habits/life/parenting/etc that they’ve chosen to share, spend that energy finding other authors who write stuff that is to your tastes. There’s enough negativity in the world.

Obviously, none of that applies to those who write book reviews; but those who do that tend, on the whole, to provide a balanced POV of what they’ve read in an effort to be helpful to others curious about this or that book. At least the ones whose blogs I visit do.

So, I’m signing off now, because this was a longer post than I meant to write. Just remember: writers are people too. We work hard at what we do, and if we’re serious about it, we try hard to continually improve.

I know I do.

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Categories: Self-Pubbing, Writing
Tags: Babble, writing