Sharpening the Pencil: Why I Write

Hello and welcome to this first episode of Sharpening the Pencil, also known as things that are relevant to this writing blog but aren’t poetry or prose, I’ll be your host this evening.

So, I have started a writing blog, and I have yet to post actual writing. Yes, I am aware of this, and I am working on something to post later if I can get it finished tonight before I fall asleep. But! As I mentioned when I got my first (yes, only other) decent post up, I was finally pushed to start this blog when Amanda McCormick decided to put together her blog challenge for the group of us who chat on her Discord server. Her first challenge was to write a post introducing ourselves as writers:

​Your challenge for today is simple! Write a post introducing yourself as a writer! Talk about what you’re working on/what you have worked on! Talk about how long you have been writing and what got you started/why you do it! And then talk about why you’re doing this challenge! Bonus points if you link to other people who are doing the challenge!

The first thing to know about me as a writer is that I hate the question of why I write. I write because I don’t know what to do with a head full of stories otherwise. I hate that question possibly even more than I hate to talk about myself. (I am an introvert who was raised to be an extrovert, which can work fairly well one-on-one or in small groups in person, but not so much online.) I think that was ultimately the reason I accepted the blog challenge as something I needed to do. If I can start posting short stories here along with a smattering of informative posts about what I’m up to, perhaps I can break out of that shell. I also think it’s important to have an existing blog (read: long-term consistency and established content) at the time I attempt to self-publish my first novel.

There it is, I finally made my rambling roundabout way to it; what is it that I write? Novels.

Novels have always been my lifeblood, and I don’t see that changing over time. Even in middle school, the stories I wrote were never finished, there was always more than I could put down, and too many stories to be able to focus on finishing any one in particular. The same is still true, I’m just a bit more structured about it.

When I was three, I dictated a story to my preschool teacher. I’m going to have to see if my parents still have it, I know they found it a few years ago but downsizing may have ended that confounding tale of preschooler logic. I honestly don’t know when I wrote the first story that had logical sense to it of the kind that adults could read, probably about the same time I could follow adult logic. There really never was a ‘start’ to my writing, it was always a part of me. I do know I was writing comprehensible stories when I was twelve, when I would borrow my dad’s work laptop and then save the files to a floppy disk and hide the disk. My family called it my “Secret Writings”, and it became a family joke that I was never willing to share. These days, I understand how hard it is to share what I write. Those who don’t write don’t seem to understand there’s part of me poured out on that page. I expect if I ever write a memoir about writing, I’ll call it Secret Writings, but that’s neither here nor there before I’ve completed a manuscript to my satisfaction.

The key words in that sentence are “to my satisfaction”. I do have a novel manuscript that goes from beginning to end with no missing scenes (that I’m aware of), so it is ‘complete’ in that aspect. But I wouldn’t call it complete, not until I can figure out a first chapter rewrite that isn’t going six places at once. I can, however, talk about the story, because it’s been a long time in its development, about fifteen years all told. I wrote scattered scenes with the same main character when I would write fantasy prose instead of taking notes during class in high school. It was a meager start, but they came to form a strange sort of whole. The problem I came to as I was working to make it a more cohesive story line was that some of the things I was writing as setting norm didn’t make any sense. Why was the main character the only one using magic? Because it was forbidden. Why was it forbidden? Uh…

Lines like that drawn in the sand for no purpose other than making a character cooler are a rather immature aspect of writing, and it revealed a hole underlying a lot of my work on the story which I would still like to publish someday. Rather than scrap the story, I started working on explaining why magic was forbidden. The resulting story has spanned a thousand years of the setting’s history, and spawned five other novels along the way which I hope someday to publish as a set of connected but not serial fantasy novels. Each has a different set of characters, and possibly hundreds of years in the setting’s history in between each, but all tell the story of the same setting and the arc of all of them ultimately concludes the plot point raised in the very first. I’m aware that without examples this explanation may fall very short for many readers, but I am afraid that this blog post has extended long enough, so Sraekin and all its stories will have to wait for another entry, as will any discussion of my style as a writer or the stories I plan to be posting here on this blog.

Please feel free to send me any questions or comments either as a comment directly on this blog entry or via the ‘Ask Me‘ link at the top of the page. Is there anything I failed to say here?