Writers Blog Tour
My ticket for this virtual train came from Merilyn Simonds; like her, I don’t know where this journey started or where it will end, but I am happy to have been invited aboard. The idea is to get a whole lot of writers to write blogs, three of us per week, in response to four questions about writing, post them on our websites on four consecutive days, announce that we have done so on our Facebook or Twitter pages, should we have them, and provide links to the other writers’ blogs that have appeared on the train. The result will be a virtual anthology of what a wide variety of writers are writing at the moment, why they are writing it, how they go about writing it, and how they think their work differs from that of other writers.
It’s an exciting opportunity. As writers, we are constantly asking ourselves these four seemingly simple questions, but we don’t often sit down and articulate our responses, let alone publish them. And it is also interesting to realize once again that there are no simple questions. “What am I working on?” looks like a straightforward question, but it is, as they say, complicated. Very few of us, I suspect, work on only one thing at a time. There is a thing that I am working on at this very minute, there is another thing on my desktop that I am working on when I need a break from working on the main thing, there is a thing tickling the back of my head that I am impatient to get to, there is a thing that I started working on a few months ago and stopped but now have a few fresh ideas for, and there are things (like this blog) that I have been asked to write and have put everything else aside, for the moment, to write because I thought it would be quick and easy, forgetting that, when writing, nothing is ever quick and very little is easy.
So each day for four days, starting today, I will post my answers to each of the four questions. I have chosen, for this first question, to write about only the work I am writing at his very moment, and not about the myriad other works that are milling around on my desktop and in my brain. It is a truism that writing about what one is writing about is harder than writing the actual thing. And also that if one could adequately write about what one is writing, there would be no point in writing the actual thing. Be that as it may, I hope that in the course of responding to the four questions, I give some idea of what it is like to be a writer at this point in the process, at this point in my career, and at this point in history.
Blog Tour Posts:
Blog Tour Post #1: What I am working on, July 4, 2014.
Blog Tour Post #2: Why is my work different? July 5, 2014.
Blog Tour Post #3: What is my writing Process? July 6, 2014.
Blog Tour Post #4: Why do I write what I write? July 7, 2014.