I’ve been investigating a variety of concepts in my writerly journey, over the years, but it seems that I’m reaching a crossroads on my travels.
Yes, I can call myself a writer, in the sense that a writer is someone who writes. I do that. But a writer is also someone whose work is read. I’m trying to think when I’ve been read, and how and whether I wish my words to be read more, by a larger audience. There’s also the issue of revenue, or paying for the luxury of this writing indulgence, before we even get to the matter of a positive financial return. In the general consciousness, a writer is usually someone who gets paid for their endeavour.
When I was writing the daily diary of life in a rural Northumbrian community, I was delighted to have the ear of some 150 subscribers. My little blog exploring for joys grew slowly, but that writing was mostly a sort of self-encouragement, a quiet and ruminative search for the small delights that make daily living worthwhile — that was actually writing for myself. A few of my poetic efforts have reached a few readers, inasmuch as they’ve been published online (eg VisualVerse.org and Wildfire-Words.com) and this year and next in a couple of printed anthologies.
My work has always veered towards a larger project; novels are where my beating, writing heart lies. But it’s fair to ask the question: are my skills sufficient to the task? Am I asking the right questions of my characters, my narrative, my form and content? Am I even writing in the right genre? Three science fiction novels down the road, I’m pretty confident that this effort was an apprentice-ship, a demonstration of steadfast work on the keyboard, but not much more.
I’ve poured rather a lot of emotional investment into my attempt in a different novelistic genre: romantic historical fiction, as earlier entries in this writerly blog indicate. I’m aiming, frankly, to validate my writerly worth. The common-sense validation of any work is the monetary value that’s placed on it.
Investigating mentorship, here in Dumfries and Galloway, and considering the way mentoring and menteeing works best, however, brings a whole new perspective to the matter of being a writer. Is it ‘legitimate’ to seek commercial success as a validation of one’s writing? Is this why I write? If so, it’s been rather a long slog so far with only a few pounds accrued. Or am I exploring stories with a view to understanding more about myself? If that were solely so, then wouldn’t writing in a vacuum be sufficient unto itself? I do enjoy the solecism of my lonely writer’s garret, to be perfectly honest.
But I wept when I finished Keep Me in Your Heart (latterly subtitled The Lost Story). Some of the beta readers who have taken up the challenge tell me they were similarly moved. My heart sang as they related where, and when, their emotions reflected the protagonists’ response to their challenges. I do want this story, or my next one or my next, to reach a wider audience, to move people. I love that sense of reaching out to readers.
This is the aspiration of my later life, part of the reason during my troubled adolescence that I segued into English Literature courses while neglecting the science that later paid the rent. I believed, by the time I’d finished my degree, that I had fulfilled the requirement for both a Biology, and an English major. That exaltation of sharing a reading experience is the feeling I return to now.
That feeling, or the search for that feeling, is why I write. This is my crossroads, and I wish to take the turning that leads to a larger audience. How to make a successful transition into the role of that kind of writer, a writer who is read, is what I believe I have a developmental need to begin to answer, in a mentor-mentee relationship.
Biome NE47 