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The Erudite Writer
Writing as a career or even a 'side hustle' is serious business. It's not just sitting in coffee shops with your laptop looking hip and broody or sleeping all day, up all night slouched in a lazy chair with Doctor Who marathons on the tv.
It takes dedication and self-will to get up and write every day, or at least work on your writing. If it's your career, or you want it to be a career, then it needs to have the same scheduling as a regular job. There needs to be dedicated time to the creation of your book. On average, this is about as long or longer than a regular day job. Over the last few years people the world over have had to deal with an enduring and sometimes frustrating technological change in the workplace: working from home. With the onset of the global pandemic, workers have had to figure out how to stay motivated whilst working in the convenient environment of their own home. There are spouses, children and housemates, and pets wanting cuddles, plus the quietly humming fridge and the backlog of Netflix's watchlist waving its saucy eyebrows. So how do you carve time out of your already busy and difficult life to sit down and write? And worse, how do you validate taking time out of the rapidly shrinking allotment of unassigned time to do so? You just do. I'm not going to say that you need to make a schedule where from 10-6 you work on your writing and ignore everything else. I have a toddler and a baby and a husband that works nights and is therefore unavailable for parenting during the day. I can't shut the little demons out, leave them with the cat and hope all goes well while I work on my books for eight hours straight. I have a desk in an office that is currently used to store paperwork and presents and I work out in the kitchen. I spend time with my boy, playing and reading and learning. I do my daughter's therapy and play with her tiny toes. I write between these times; between making lunches and bottles and playtime and laundry. Nap time has become hopefully workout and shower time. The writing fits into the cracks. I put live streams of Scandinavian trains on YouTube with music playing over it and do my research while the baby sleeps and my son gets his iPad time. You just... make it fit. So considering I wrote my first book when I was three, I’ve always taken writing seriously. That said, when I decided to actually go about rewriting my first book, after drafting it out and allowing multiple people to read it, I made a pretty large shift. It's not just about gouging time out to write and work, it's about sticking to it. It's about writing when you're told that it's a terrible career idea, or when you've received negative feedback time and time again. Basically, it's about deciding that writing is something you're good at, and therefore you're determined to do it. Yes. You should listen to the feedback. You should accept the rejection. Abso-fuckin-lutely you should. That doesn't mean you should give up, or give in. As a young teenager writing a dark fantasy novel, I thought that the more detailed the better. This included things like sex and gore. I had very little actual knowledge of either subject, but having read lots of books and being rather precocious, this didn’t dissuade me. So I went about writing graphic sex scenes and borderline psychotic violence with abandon. After several blushing and/or horrified people in my life handed me back my manuscript, and I had received a publisher's rejection letter and took it both personally and emotionally, I realized maybe I was going about something the wrong way. Eventually, ;I changed my style. There’s still sex and gore and so forth, but it’s less ‘in your face every unpleasant detail crawling into your eyes’ and more ‘hey there’s a story here and things are happening and maybe keep the light on tonight’. So writing is a serious business that must be taken seriously. It deserves and needs
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This is a place of learning. You can take what you read here and do with it what you will, but keep in mind that this knowledge does not come from a place of arrogance or assumption.
It comes from experience; hard-earned, blood and tears sort of experience. I don't mean that hypothetically. The lessons I learned and now share caused too many hours of tears, and in my darkest moments, blood. Yes, I went there. So read a sentence or two, or binge away. It doesn't make much difference to me, this is all here as a simple gesture of goodwill. I wish someone had been there to take those hard hits for me, but I've taken them for you, if you'll let me. Read on, writer. I'll see you on the other side. I hope. |
A.B.B. OlsonAs a very young author, I made some massive mistakes in the writing and publishing world. What I've done here is gather my thoughts and hard-learned lessons into one space to hopefully help others treading those murky paths. ArchivesCategories
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