Have I ever told you that I love my "job"? I
mean, I really love love LOVE my job!!
How many people can say that?
Writing is the most perfect job imaginable for me. I love playing with words - choosing the right ones to communicate in the most effective and accurate way, playing with various combinations, musing over the different effects they might have on a reader. The same message can be phrased in many ways, each one eliciting a slightly different response from a reader.
All my life I've loved making up conversations and playing out scenarios in my head. Screenwriter James Moran has said that writers are the most paranoid people on the planet because we’re always imagining the consequences of “what if” situations – e.g. standing waiting for a train and wondering what could happen if you or someone else got pushed onto the tracks. Lol :-) That’s how stories are birthed! I’m not that paranoid (yet!), but I do love working out all the possibilities and outcomes of a situation or premise. When you find the one that really works it's a very satisfying epiphany moment!
How many people can say that?
Writing is the most perfect job imaginable for me. I love playing with words - choosing the right ones to communicate in the most effective and accurate way, playing with various combinations, musing over the different effects they might have on a reader. The same message can be phrased in many ways, each one eliciting a slightly different response from a reader.
All my life I've loved making up conversations and playing out scenarios in my head. Screenwriter James Moran has said that writers are the most paranoid people on the planet because we’re always imagining the consequences of “what if” situations – e.g. standing waiting for a train and wondering what could happen if you or someone else got pushed onto the tracks. Lol :-) That’s how stories are birthed! I’m not that paranoid (yet!), but I do love working out all the possibilities and outcomes of a situation or premise. When you find the one that really works it's a very satisfying epiphany moment!
I’m an information vulture too and love research, another essential part of writing. A couple of weeks, despite being 40,000 words into my YA story, I still hadn't quite sussed where it was set. I knew it happened out in space, but didn't know exactly where. As there were a myriad options, I had to get on and pin it down.
So, I snuggled up with Brian Cox's Solar System book and began browsing for inspiration. What an incredible solar system we live in! A gazillion beautiful, wonderful and mysterious things. So many possibilities for a writer. And in the midst of it all, I found my setting. No, I'm not gonna be more specific than that! A better and faster writer than me might happen to read this, nick off with my idea and get it published before I do!! But, suffice to say, it's an amazing setting and I'm SO excited about writing about it. Plenty more research needed though, yay :-)
People fascinate me too!
If I’d had better career’s advice at school then I might have studied
Psychology at uni rather than English Lit and Lang. I love trying to work out what makes people
tick, not that I claim to always/often/ever get it right. Why do they do – or not do – certain things? Why do they say – or, more interestingly to
me (and drama!), not say – certain things?!
Why do they make the choices they make?
Understanding a character’s personality, background and motivation is
essential in making them believable and realistically complex.
For a reformed control freak like myself, writing provides a wonderful opportunity for the remnant of that characteristic to exercise itself in a positive way. When I was pregnant with my kids, I thought it was awesome to be part of creating a new life. Naming them was a huge privilege. Now I get to do that sort of stuff on an almost daily basis - creating characters, naming (and sometimes renaming) them, deciding what happens to them! I can base them on real people (names can be changed to protect the innocent…or at least to avoid being sued!), emphasising positive or negative character traits, as I wish. I can also write scenes that have their basis in reality, tweaking them to produce a more satisfactory outcome, which can be incredibly therapeutic and fun :-)
It's like playing God…on a small scale. But even on a small scale it feels like a serious responsibility to get things right and it can be hard work - almost headache inducing - holding the characters and events together. I'm glad I'm not God!
Loving writing SO much is essential in order to push on
through the tough days - when the words that are coming out aren’t brilliant or
when my inner critic is shouting me down so loudly it’s almost deafening (more
on that next time). I hope that one day
writing will pay and I’ll be able to count it as my “proper” job! But whether it does or not, I know I’m always
gonna write…just because I love it and it suits me more than anything else I
could do with my time and energy.
Do you love your job?
If not, what would you really love to do?
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