The Writing Gene
Or avoiding The Failed Writer Police
Here’s the truth. My Brilliant Career (thanks Miles Franklin for that phrase) as a writer has had the usual setbacks.
· The stories that didn’t get written. I could write a book on those, but would it be interesting?
· The stories that did get written, but failed to ignite the world or even one editor
· The stories that amazingly did get recognition! Hurray! But not a big paycheck 😒
· The stories that I got paid a small amount for. At least some of them did pay a little bit 😊
Summing up then, in terms of being able to live on my writing, I’d have been dead and buried long ago.
Should I give up? Put my hands up to the Failed Writer Police and turn myself in?
NO, I SHOULDN’T!
Why? Because I can’t give in as this is all I’ve been trained to do. My whole life has been lived with one aim in mind. Writing. Madness? Perhaps, but at some important point in my brain’s development The Writing Gene was triggered. I say ‘gene’ because it is so intrinsically a part of me. Along with being short (five foot two, but not eyes of blue) having Frida Khalo-esque eyebrows (sometimes that’s fashionable, other times decidedly not!) and being short sighted.
I have always been so drawn to writing it feels like it must be genetic. Which is fine. Except no one else in my family is a writer. Or perhaps they are, and they have managed to avoid The Writing Gene’s siren call?
Of course, like many other writers, some of their families might have dabbled with writing beyond long emails to friends or short notes in festive cards. Or taken it further and begun a short work on some specialised subject. Like the interesting coloration on different bullfrogs. (Which after doing a quick google image search I now discover is very interesting! That’s also a great way to have an idea, do some research and run with it.) The difference is whether they finished that short monograph or just tossed it in the bin or put it away in a desk drawer forever. I imagine a lot of would be writers do the latter options.
What we discover is that The Writing Gene if it exists (currently it is a ‘made-up gene’ as it hasn’t been proven through academic research at the time of writing) is useless if you don’t fellow it to its conclusion. So, to any ‘writers in hiding’ who might secretly have The Writing Gene this means:
- Finish your projects. Show them to your family. To your trusted friends. Not the snarky ones
- Take that final leap into the unknown and show them to strangers. Not by thrusting your manuscript at random people in the street, that could be dangerous. Self-publishing online is a far easier method than what was available to our writing forebears. And the online ‘world’ is exactly that. Your work can be read all over the world
- Writing doesn’t always mean ‘fiction’. Remember the bullfrog monograph?
Non-fiction is another interesting strand and sometimes the two can overlap. Either through memoirs or historical works that have to imagine certain things where there are no dependable archive materials.
For example, what did Boudicca, Queen of the Iceni (AD 61), feel about the best uses of woad or madder in clothing for battle situations? Yes, I’d genuinely like to know. But I can only make up her answer as there is no way of knowing.
Obviously, I am not a writer in hiding anymore. I’m more a writer trying to dodge the Failed Writer Police. If they do try to cuff me, I’d protest that if I get paid to write that’s good. But even if I don’t, I still won’t stop writing! It’s in my genes.
