Guest blog - Hunting the Muse

Another thing we haven't had here for quite some time is a guest blogger.

Brady Frost over at Hunting the Muse has stepped in to fill the breach. He's talking about personal rants, and if they have any part to play in good writing. Let's see what he has to say....



Hello! My name is Brady Frost from HuntingtheMuse.com. This is the first of what may become a string of periodic guest posts that I will be giving Tam for use at his discretion while he works on his writing projects and deals with some personal issues that have cropped up as of late. Tam first asked me to put together a guest post for him back in April, I believe. I guess you could say that I've been 'Fighting with Writing' lately, too.

To be honest, I haven't really given my own blog as much attention as I used to and find that some posts are an exercise of slogging through the fog in my brain more than dishing out the creative banter that I would like to post. Why is that?

How can it be hard to sit down and actually write for people who not only love to write, but feel compelled to do so? It's times like these when those of us with the best intentions feel the ever encroachment of real life on our writing domain. Long days at work, fights with our spouse, a growing annoyance at our children's seemingly endless string of thoughtless acts... they all add up and take their toll. It's easy to get frustrated when your children seem to think that their mother lives to clean up their messes, or the boss thinks that a complex operation should only take a few hours to accomplish, or the ol' wife doesn't appreciate the fact that the only thing you want for Father's Day is the pasta roller she's wanted for ages... Writing is supposed to be a release though, right? Us writers can just sit down and write stories and vent and the world suddenly becomes better, right? Ah, the value of self expression... Well, unfortunately life isn't always that sweet. Sometimes we create the arguments, sometimes kids are just kids, sometimes... well, okay you got me there, work always sucks.

I recently quit reading a book that seemed to have a decent start simply because the author put too much of her own life into the story. Honestly, I care about the characters, not about the family argument you had last week and figured you'd throw in. It wasn't inspiring, it wasn't part of the story, and I didn't just pay five dollars for your book so that I could feel like your therapist. So there you have it.
Before I was a writer I was a reader. I have much more experience reading than I do writing, in fact, I have a long list of reading credentials but I'm sorry to admit that I've only had one rejection slip that I can specifically remember. If I had any sense at the time I would have kept it, but life's unfortunate in that we seldom recognize the value of our failures while the pain from their sting still lingers. All things considered, writing for publication and venting is a mix that very few can master. Like the family argument in the book I stopped reading, our venting is often uninteresting to our readers and yet some authors feel that undying need to vent. You can tell they are emotionally attached because the level of detail differs from that of the rest of the story. They are so immersed in their memory of what actually happened that they forget to treat the rest of their 'fiction' the same way.

I suppose this is why I choose writing as a form of escape, and to fully escape I must rid myself of the mind-clutter of my worries and the interruptions of life. If I am unsuccessful in making that separation, my writing suffers. Though I try to slog onward, my output is not of the same quality that I might expect. Expectations can kill writing. Self-expectations can be more deadly than any other; I would attribute the vast majority of my writer's block to being unhappy with what I have recently written. But the fact remains, unless you keep writing you cannot expect for your output to get any better. This is why they invented the re-write.

So let's recap, there had to be something worth discussing in all that.

1. Don't vent in your writing. Write because you love to write, not because you want someone to listen. Don't be afraid to use your life experiences as material, just don't write about something and send it off to the world while you are still passionate about it. If you feel you must, run it through a good filtration process of critiques to make sure you are focusing on the right aspects of the writing.

2. Don't stop writing. If you can't keep life out of your mind while you are trying to write, take a moment to get your thoughts straight and try again. If you have to move on to another scene, do it. You can always come back to what you're working on. The important part is to write something. Even if you are unhappy with what is coming out, you can always reread it in a few days and see if there is anything worth salvaging. You never know what ideas you may uncover to use later. And who knows, maybe you are looking at things through funk-colored lenses and you'll see your true genius once you've stepped away from it for a while.

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Hats off to Brady. Some good advice in there.

I think I'm going to try and take some of it on board. Maybe I'll scribble a few things about my experiences in the last few weeks, and then bury them in a box for six months, see if there's anything salvageable.

I'll do it just now in fact, instead of writing a blog entry. (Brady's done that for me today...cheers again!)