The Writer's Investment

I keep forgetting that being a writer--if I want to be a good one--needs to be just as investment as any other professions. I  need to really focus on it, to put time and effort into it, to think consciously about it. For example, I realise that one of my weaker areas is painting a sufficient sense of 'place', and I've always struggled with how to do that better, but it seems obvious what the answer is now. I need to gather the funds to travel to places I imagine my story is set, and really soak in those places, take pictures, wander. So a writer needs a job too. A writer can't just sit, poor, writing. No, a writer needs money to fund his ability to write, just as a lawyer needs money to fund his ability to be a lawyer (i.e. for research books on the law, etc.).

Furthermore, there are other things. I need to be a more attentive personality, if I want to be a good writer. I need to really focus on the phenomenology of being a human. I think I might start taking more pictures again, if I can snap out of my apathetic haze -- I also think I need to start writing on this blog more frequently than my tumblr.

As a somewhat abrupt final note, the other investment a writer needs to make to be a good one is to read more frequently, to find out what style he wants to write in, and to truly consider what makes that style that style, and also to read expansively, to gain skills from writing outside of the style you'd like to read from. But reading, really, isn't the only investment of this sort. Whenever taking in a story, a writer needs to focus on what makes it bad or good, why he likes it or he doesn't -- be it a film, a television programme, a song, or an anecdote. Books aren't a writer's only apprenticeship.

A writer's true apprenticeship is life, a writer just needs to be alert and reflective, and he needs to channel his experience into improving his writing, if he really wants to be a writer. Which means, a writer needs to write. Frankly, a writer that doesn't write is a fraud, and lives in a pipe dream. And unfortunately, I think I could describe my recent self just that way. I need to write more, and pay more attention.

I have huge, cataclysmic, life-changing events about to occur in my life, so now may as well be the best time to start.

I also need to find a job eventually.

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