I want to be a writer
Posted on
There. I said it. I want to be a writer. It's not new information. The fact that I spend time every month trying to come up with two new blogs should have been a clue. But as much as I enjoy writing these little pieces for you (and only for you), dear reader, I'm not doing the kind of writing I want to do. In fact I'm not writing anywhere near enough to do the kind of writing I should be doing. By any serious writer's standards, I'm hardly writing at all.
Recently I started following yet another literary agency on Twitter. They're new. And annoyingly they're looking for writers who are writing the sort of thing I want to be writing; the sort of thing I've started so many times but haven't finished. As is so often the case when I see something like this, I get excited. I start thinking that this could be the one that gets me published. Of course I'm brought crashing down to earth moments later by the reminder that I have nothing to publish. I have a head full of ideas, but despite many thousands of words locked up in documents on my computer, I don't have a finished piece that I'd be happy to hand over.
Writing aside, I have several of the qualities I would associate with an author. I constantly have new ideas for stories. I even make notes whenever I can. I read a lot. Some of my friends think I'm weird because I prefer books to films. The rest won't be drawn on the specific reason.
On the few occasions where I do actually manage to write something of my own, I often find that my first edit is longer than my first draft. My fourth or fifth edit, if I get that far, usually takes the form of a note that begins 'goodbye, cruel world' and is signed in dribble. It's a long process, but one I wish I could spend my days doing.
Life, however, seems intent that I should do other things. The problem is that it's never been that clear on what those other things should be. I play several musical instruments well enough to be a web developer and develop websites well enough to want to be a writer. Since 2007, I have tried to blog twice a month to give myself another excuse to keep writing. My readership is small enough and irregular enough not to notice that I ran out of anything interesting to say two years ago.
I blame my attention span, which is sometimes similar to that of a moth in a light bulb showroom. It's not that I don't want to do any one thing. It's that I want to do lots of things. And that I have lots of other things to do that need doing, whether I want to do them all not. All of these things take time, especially if I actually get around to doing them. And it's time that I run out of.
There is of course an irony here. I've made time to write 616 words for this article. That's 616 words that could have gone towards my submission. But blogs won't cut it. Each day that goes by without something useful being tapped on my keyboard is another day when this new agency, or any other agency for that matter, will not hear of me. It's another day further away from my dream of having something published. And as I finish this article, whatever novel I should be writing is at least another 616 words shorter than it could have been.