Why should I...(fill in the blank)

When we ask ourselves “why (fill in the blank), the answer doesn’t often come easily. Why should I consider a career change? Why should I move? Why should I start a diet (for the third or fourth time when it never worked before)? The answers to these “whys” are hard because they usually have bigger consequences. And that’s okay. Take your time with the big ones!
What was my “why?” for writing? I wanted to see if I could do it, basically. I love reading, I’d been told “you write well” (whatever that means!) and I’d read enough bad writing to think, very confidently, that I could do better than what I was seeing on the page! I didn’t have a particular story to tell at the time—that came much later when I began to write my first published novel. (By the way, I couldn’t write better…at first…)
Your “why” might be that you can’t imagine NOT writing and I applaud you for that! You have a story that must come out and the only way for you to do that is to put it on the page. I get it. I also hear from many people that “I’ve always wanted to write but don’t know where to begin.” That’s okay, too. I thought I knew where to begin but I quickly found out that I had a lot to learn about the craft. And, if you are not sure where to begin, THAT must be your first step. If you want to learn to play the piano, you might sit down and plunk out a few notes but eventually, you will want to learn the craft of playing the piano. However you go about that, you are developing a skill that builds on itself until you can either play chopsticks or Mozart. It’s up to you where the ending will be.


The same goes for writing. A lot of you reading this are already on your writing journey. Some of you have published already. Some are struggling to get even the first sentence out and some can get 50,000 words down easily. Wherever you are in your writing journey, and after you’ve answered the question “why” you want to write, I believe that studying the craft of writing is imperative. No matter what genre you write in and no matter what your goals are, there is something to be gained by understanding the basics of storytelling—and that’s what writing is all about—telling a story. Whether it’s poetry, short story, novella, sweeping multi-generational saga, romance, or mystery, it is a craft, and a writer should be engaged in an ongoing process of learning, understanding, and improving. If storytelling is intuitive to you, that’s great! Think of it this way: for an intuitive writer, studying the craft of writing can be an editing process where you can learn to ‘tighten’ up your prose or your dialogue, or help you work through a plot that is going off course or not going anywhere!
As you can see from the picture above, I own a lot of books on the craft of writing. I’m going to be delving into it more in the days and weeks ahead, so I hope you’ll take this trip with me!

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