Day 181

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. OK. Then, writing can’t be a way of life; the important part of writing is living. OK. And lastly, you have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

Wow!

How do you make sense of that?

…

Perhaps somebody else has worked out what this conundrum means.

I’ve been trawling the endless collection of Twitter descriptions provided by my fellow writers, noting that there used to be a restriction of 140 characters.

How do you sum yourself and/or your life in 140 characters, or even 280?

I started out with a few catchphrases, something that would draw followers. I’m thinking the word ‘aspiring’ will be my catchphrase. But how will my writing encapsulate that? It needs a little qualification or substance.

I’m aspiring to be a writer, or is that author?  Is there a difference? Is there a guide to what I can call myself?

My life, quite simply put, but in more than 140 characters, is married happily, two wonderful children, three amazing grandchildren, and a wealth of experience acquired over the years in parenting and surviving in a world that isn’t easy to live in.

To be honest, I don’t think anyone would be interested in any story based on those precepts. Actually, that sounds rather boring, doesn’t it?

Maybe it would be better if I were a retired policeman, or a retired lawyer, or a retired sheriff, or a retired private investigator, or a retired doctor, someone who had an occupation that was a rich mine of information from which to draw upon.

Retired computer programmers, supermarket shelf stackers, night cleaners, accounts clerks and general dogsbodies don’t quite cut the mustard. Should we try to embellish our personal history to make it more appealing?

It’s much the same as writing about daily life.  No one wants to read about it; people want to be taken out of the humdrum of normalcy and be taken into a world where they can become the character in the book.

And there you have it, in a nutshell, why I write.

I want to escape the mundanity of everyday life and become something, someone else, and, with a little luck, you, the reader, will come along for the roller coaster ride with me.

Or come out of retirement, join a secret intelligence agency and go and save the world.

Then write about it.

Then I’ll be living in such a way that my writing will emerge from it.

Yet…

Death and mayhem sound so much better in my head than in reality.