be who you are (avoid mediocrity)

On a rainy Saturday morning in Krakow, we found the artists. I found her.

I recognized her in an instant—this big-hoping, bird-cradling, barely-standing creature in a field of poppies. She ponders. She wishes. She is, for now, alone. It's an image that contains every claim you might make against my writing. And every claim you might make for it.

We have, as writers, the voices we were born with. We cannot authentically become someone else's idea of who we should be, of what the market might bear, and besides, this purported market shifts and tumbles, misdirects, is responsible for far more mediocrity than excellence.

Be who you are.