Writing - Be Yourself

 The following is from Lincoln Michel's Seeing with an Artist's Eye.

I think this critical brain is also the brain that admires the achievements and analyzes the craft of great works. It is the “artist brain,” to be reductive. The artistic impulse comes—in my experience at least—from noticing the gaps in existing art and wanting to fill them. The opposite instinct might be called the “fan brain,” which lauds turning off your mind in favor of “enjoying” the work. I thought of this distinction this afternoon when I saw yet another round of fans being upset at a George R.R. Martin quotation about Tolkien....

If I had a "critical brain" when younger, then my memory is even worse than I think it is. Maybe that is why I threw my hands up and quit when I realized I could not write like Willaim Faulkner and I had nothing like what he had to write about.

Right now, some young writer is reading ASOIAF and thinking, “Okay, Westeros is pretty cool but I hate how Martin does X and the world skews Y and is missing Z.” That will be the seed of the next great fantasy series that will inspire someone to find the gaps in it. Or perhaps their eye is looking at the worlds of N.K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy or Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, to pick two of my own favorite recent fantasy works. Or they’re reading horror or postmodern fiction or lyrical poetry. It’s the same in any genre and medium. For another example, horror writers have noticed Lovecraft’s racism (hard not to notice, of course) and then taken cosmic horror on a different path: see Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom.

It took me burning down my life and a friend telling me I needed to write again before I understood that I could not write like William Faulkner because I was not William Faulkner. Too little, too late, but persevere in doing what I gave up once upon a time.

Writing Tips: Be Yourself by Melissa Donovan us from her Writing Forward blog:

Being yourself doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement — and here’s where I always struggle with the be-yourself advice. I’ve encountered plenty of writers who feel that study and practice are unnecessary, that writing should be “raw” or “from the gut.” But many elements of good writing must be learned, from the act of typing to using correct grammar, story structure, and even the process of getting a book from concept to publication. There’s this myth floating around that art doesn’t need to be studied, practiced, or improved. Which is ridiculous. Anyone who’s picked up an instrument or a paintbrush knows that your first attempt is just a bunch of noise or color, but in time and with patience, your hundredth or thousandth attempt could be something worth sharing with the world.

So I believe in being yourself — in being true to who you are and what you love, but I also believe that everything should be tempered, and that we should strive to improve our craft. We can simultaneously accept who we are and where we are on our writing journey while keeping in mind where we eventually want to land, and all the landmarks we’ll pass along the way.

An Interview With Three Finalists for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction 

 By the way, it was reading Joyce Carol Oates that I understood it was possible to transfer Faulkner's use of history to the North. Orhan Pamuk gave me a clue about what to write about, the failure of empire. It has been pretty much a steady stream of rejections since then! But every rejection feels better than quitting. Each one makes me think harder about what I am trying to do. Good luck! Keep working, please!

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