Good and bad of writing
It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.
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DECEMBER QUESTION: In your writing, what stresses you the most? What delights you?
MY ANSWER: What delights me? It is a no brainer: a story. I enjoy making up my own stories, coming up with the characters and their adventures. It’s not always easy, but it is always rewarding. When the story unfolds, it sucks me in, makes me forget all my real-life troubles. It is escapism at its best, better even than reading.
What stresses me? The lack of moral support and encouragement. For all my writing life, the only encouragement I’ve ever got for my writing was from my online friends. Nobody in my real life praises my writing or even reads it. I’m not complaining about my family – far from it. I have a great family, BUT… I and my family and my closest friends are all immigrants from Russia. Nobody among my family and friends knows English enough to enjoy reading it, including my writing (I write exclusively in English). Mostly, they read Russian books.
Furthermore, raised and steeped in the Russian culture, they don’t read light genre fiction, which is what I write. Magic with dragons? Puh! My mom never in her life read anything so frivolous. She enjoys serious mainstream novels and literary fiction. So does my sister. The sci-fi adventure flicks I write, with nothing even remotely resembling true life, is not for them.
My children, on the other hand, know English. They went to school here, in Canada. BUT… My daughter doesn’t read fiction. She is into non-fiction and not interested in my genre stories. My son – the only one of my relatives – did read a few of my stories and even complimented me. He is a good son and a good man, but we have different tastes in reading. I’m reluctant to push my writing on him too often – don’t want to over-exploit his affection for me – and he never asks to read anything of mine without a prompt. So, not much moral support there as well.
Just as I said, the only consistent moral support and encouragement for my writing comes from my online friends: here at IWSG and at WEP.
BTW: we have the last WEP blog hop of 2021 coming up on the theme Narcissus, based on the famous painting by Caravaggio. I’m going to post my story in a few days. Come read it. Give me your moral support. It’ll make me happy. A hint: it will be a sci-fi flash story, an adventure in space.
What about you? What stresses and delights you in your
