Mar 15, 2014

YOU ARE NOT HEMINGWAY. AND YOU KNOW IT.

This is the story of a "young" girl who loved to travel lots, party hard and sleep late, a girl who always knew, deep in her heart, that someday, somehow, she would be a famous writer.
One day our girl happened to drink some evil potion, in the form of slums rotten water, and fell sick, just like any other respectable princess. Far from home and forced to bed, she decided to make the best of it and spent her days pouring her dreams into words, tapping away with light fingers.
Proud and impatient she woke up the morning after typing "The End" on the last page of her very first masterpiece.

Little did she know that upon reading the first two chapters of her "bestseller", she couldn't have kept reading another word, such boring and vague and confused her writing had turned out to be. Now, let's not fear for our hero, as she had never been the type of person who let a bump in the road trick her into believing life was not awesome. And so it came that, holding her chin high, our girl opened a new pristine document and set to wait for the Muse to fill it with amazing adventures. 

You see, this happened around the time when the whole realm was celebrating the green and gold of the Leprechauns, and so it happened that on such day the Muse had gone to Dublin and was presently proudly showing off a foamy pair of Guinness mustache, totally oblivious to her noble duties. Deceived and lonely, after hours and hours of uselessly staring at the blank page, our girl found herself typing a one, single word on the paper. HELP.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to send telepathic messages to the Muse, begging her to assist her writing. Nothing happened.
She then wrote one more word. PLEASE.
Nothing.
I AM STUCK.

A sudden image of a gorgeous smart woman trapped in a bottomless well as a result of the evil doing of some psycho-schyzo-weirdo inspired our girl. She forgot of grammar and spelling, jumped inside her own head, and in three months she had the first draft of her very first book. It was never a bestseller, but it got her started in the wonderful writing career. Practice did the rest. We will hear from her again, soon. Hopefully. 

Every famous writer gives the same advice over and over.
Do you want to become a writer? Write. Write. Write. Every day. Anything. Whatever. You will sweat and swear and shake your head in shame. You will wish you were a farmer shoveling crap, you will be jealous of bureaucrats with a nine-to-five office job. You won't give up . You will practice, every day, like an athlete for a marathon. You might win, you might not. After all, there can be only one winner in a marathon. Still, the best thing about a marathon is the helicopter view on the massive colorful blob of participants. Whoever has run a marathon is proud of it, and so is who has finally wrote their book. Time to go stretching.

Have a good novel!

helicopter view

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