If y'all haven't read L.T.'s great post about The Great Genre Debate (and why haven't you???), you should probably head over their first so some of what I'm saying makes sense.
Go ahead ... I'll wait.
*plays solitaire*
Everyone back? Good.
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: similar, but different to L.T., I write in a whole bunch of different styles for a bunch of different audiences. Except I don't always write novels, or short stories, or even things relating to fiction at all.
I write feature articles for websites, news articles for local papers, blog posts, movie reviews, book reviews, and sometimes even press releases. The point is that I write whatever I can whenever I can. Why do I do this? Well the answer's rather simple: I am a writer.
Writers write. In whatever form they can, for whatever reason they can. Being a writer doesn't mean you can only write novels or only write feature articles or what have you. Being a writer means, at least to me, that you love words and using them to communicate things to people. Writers are almost universally word-a-holic by the by. We're the folks who have lists of favorite words, love books like Weird and Wonderful Words, and spend time hunting through dictionaries and thesauri for the exact right turn of phrase to communicate what we mean.
It's immaterial whether you write speculative fiction, romance, or mystery novels. Or if you only write feature stories on health, travel, or entertainment news. If you're a writer, then you write. Whatever you can.
2 comments:
Well put, Matt. I think this is probably one of the most important things to take away from this whole thing-- no matter what, we write.
Amen! I've been dragging my feet on my current WiP. I finally took a break from it because I felt like I wasn't writing so much as staring at a blank computer screen. Lately, I've been doing some journal writing by hand. The words are pouring out, but it's mostly just whatever pops into my head. In other words, it has no direction. But, it has spurred some great ideas for future projects and produced some beautiful phrases. It isn't for any audience other than me, but it is writing, which is what it's all about.
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