Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

Writing is about belief. Belief in yourself, that you have something worthwhile to say, and the ability to express it well enough that other minds, hearts, people, could be touched by the words you have put to paper. Your thoughts, your emotions, become glyphs to be viewed and then translated by another mind to intrigue it, cause emotional reaction, to commune with you in the story you have made. You may not want them to commune with you, the person, but you do want that engagement with you the author, the creator, the sharer of worlds.

You need a LOT of belief to go down that road.

Best not to think about it, just pretend writing is just a series of “what if’s?” with questions posed, drama and tension then payoff. Just an exercise, a formula, sleight of hand, a trick to press emotional buttons like the sneakiest sibling ever, that knows just how to get you riled up. Writing a dry system to fool the credulous into shedding tears.

It can be both. It can be other things (therapy!) that have not occurred to me as I spitball my way through this post.

I’m still learning who I am as a writer, still spreading my wings. Don’t know if I’m still falling, or have learned at least to glide. But what I do know is that you need to believe in yourself, and believe in your writing for it to have a chance at working. It might not, but hey, at least you got in the arena with Teddy. That alone is worth it.

What kind of writer am I? Do I need to be in a box? Is there comfort in categorization? Clearly there is – we all know our star sign, many know their Myers-Briggs personality type. But do we need to be a type of writer? I’m not sure.

I think we just need to believe in what we do, and how we choose to do it. Spending years putting words in order requires a monomania of sorts, every novel is our white whale, dragging us into the deep as we curse it, love it, try to cut ourselves free of the rigging that ties us to it, the novel a measure, perhaps, of who we are.

At last we wash ashore, exhausted, the book done, that whale free of us at last. We stagger up the shore, but then, fatally, turn to look back out to sea, and behold in the distance a new spout, a new idea, a new whale to chase down, to make real and huge and overwhelming, carrying us into strange new waters, the chart home lost.

That’s the kind of writer I am. And I’m a plotter not a pantser. Categories: can’t escape them.

Believe in yourselves, my friends, and make friends with your whales because they can take you to places whose beauty you will struggle to describe, but never forget.