Robin asked me about writing gigs yesterday in an e-mail, and in typical narcissistic fashion I missed it and tried for the poetic and humble (and probably missed, *wink*). Herein lies the answer to the question, for all to see, now that I finally dawned on it.
I do a lot of travel journaling, so I would be open to travel pieces, freelance.
I do write poetry, so I could do greeting cards. I know there's been the suggestion of lyrics, but I don't think I have the gift. At least, I'm not seeing it. I see the lyrical aspects of my prose, but I don't think that makes me Rogers and Hammerstein. However, I'm willing to learn anything. If it's possible, I've probably done it or will. (Except have a relationship, hehe.)
I can write a short story. The last one I wrote was in 2001, about a man who was a widower and remarried a laborador. One month after finishing the first draft my mother was diagnosed, so I felt like I had hacked into the universe and caused the diagnosis. Crazy, but I haven't written a story since. I would love to, but haven't been able to bring myself to it.
I have written a novel, long time ago, which I kept in a boot box in Missouri. I think I threw it out just before the move here.
I have written essays.
I have written reviews.
I am open to any of these things.
I cannot write: ad copy, scripts, or recipes. Recipes bore me, ad copy I used to do and it makes me nauseous, and scripts are that unchartered territory that I'm sure a lot of people can do better than I can, and I will leave it to them.
I can write of topics of nature, city, food, animals, children, slice of life, management, teaching, farming, books, music, volunteering, and pretty much anything you see in a blog, with one very large exception.
LOVE.
Professionally, as a topic, I don't have the experience, and therefore can't fake it.
You can fake sex.
You can't fake love.
Sleep well, dear reader.
5 comments:
You can fake love -- lots of people do it for all the wrong reasons. You're just intelligent and ethical enough not to.
Writing about it when you feel you haven't experienced it is also not verboten -- there's nothing wrong with aspirational writing. Most screenplays today are ridiculously over-the-top and impossible, and yet they make us laugh, make us cry, or make us think.
Nobody really saved a tower block from German terrorists. Nobody really spent a nuit blanche in Paris with someone they just met on a train. Those are just two examples of stories that just can't happen in real life, but that are someone's idea of how something "really cool" would play out.
So don't kick yourself if you think you haven't experienced The Big Important Love. And don't take the subject off the table for writing. Many of our best poets were frustrated in this department, I suspect, yet they wrote about it anyhow.
My writing of love has always come out inaccurate, at least according to my readers. I could prove this by writing a piece about love, but then I would get about a million comments about how I really don't know love at all... :)
(Thanks, Joni.)
My experience with love, or lack of it, has made any impression of love that I have inaccurate to everyone else. I'm sure that it doesn't make it less valid, but to others it makes it seems as though I am overtly making up my truth--and my truth is that at the age of 34 no man has ever loved me in a romantic sense and therefore my only takes on love are the lack of it.
Imagine someone has asked you to write a piece on modern chimney sweeping. (Watch this, I'm going to dip in the philosophy of Thomas Paine. DK would be proud...) Imagine the only heat source you had ever had was gas or electric. To get a better piece, would you:
-read about modern-day chimney sweeping?
-hang out with chimney sweep for a significant amount of time watching him or her hard at it?
-move to a home with a fireplace?
-become a chimney sweep?
The first two are a secondhand gathering of information, the last two are firsthand experience. Paine had this same position regarding the Crucifixion--if I didn't see Jesus die on the cross, what can I believe? A piece of writing is richer in my experience--even fiction is best when based on experience and THEN throwing in the what if.
Concerning relationships, then, I could write a kick-ass piece on how life is when you sleep with your almost divorced, father-of-two boss because you love him, but he doesn't give a rip about you because he won't even be friends afterward. This is no longer a complaint, but just a statement of fact--people have dismissed my opinions because that's as close as I have come to love, and therefore I don't touch love with a ten-foot pole. My experience with love wasn't love, or was the worst version, and therefore doesn't give me the authority to write on it, not even as a basis for fiction.
Not to say that anyone else has to follow this credo. It's just what my readers in the past have always greeted me with. But then, my readers in the past were insistant of lots of other truths that failed me, and perhaps my heart will debunk this final stinking and steaming pile in the road someday as well. I know my mind wants to, but the heart isn't sold.
I say if there are people who dismiss your opinions out of hand, return the favor and dismiss their opinions out of hand.
Life experience helps, sure, but writing experience helps too. First novels are usually based on tangible real-world experience, but good writers like yourself move on and expand to the imaginable rather than just the previously witnessed.
(Smiling) Ah, you and Robin seeing talents in me that I don't.
Just a quick story and I'll back up and take the challenge...being the hot day that it was in the SoMA area today (hell, it was hot when I got home after 7 pm in the Sunset, which is rare), my guys would come in from time to time and cool off in the office. One of them came in in the afternoon and sat and talked with me extensively, and he asked what I was looking at--"Oh, I'm just taking a quick gander at the blogs I check." He asked me what I wrote about and I explained this post. He seemed to be in agreement with my argument.
HOWEVER...
He's never read my stuff and DOESN'T READ REALLY (here we go, again :)), so his picture wouldn't be as complete as maybe what I am about to propose:
I will write a short story about a romantic relationship.
I will write a set of song lyrics.
How about by the end of the year? Sound good?
I will post both here and let the readers decide if more is warranted or if I should just blog and journal the rest of my days.
Ball's in your court for input.
I don't like cornering people... let's just say I'd like to see some of your writing along those lines, whenever you have it ready. No deadlines.
I promise to look at it with a more open mind than some of your previous readers.
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