In this episode of Sonitotum with Matthew Wayne Selznick, we examine the claim that if a writer isn’t enjoying the act of writing, the reader will know it… and we declare shenanigans. Writing is hard. If, as a writer of fiction, you’re enjoying the act of writing — if it’s not challenging you, pushing you, changing you — you’re not doing your best work.
Let me tell you why. Listen!
Links and topics mentioned in this episode include…
- My day job is providing a variety of creative services (like my writer’s coaching service and my beginning indie author consulting) to authors, podcasters, and other creative professionals.
- My next book is a work of non-fiction. Pre-order Indie Author Marketing Infrastructure today, help push the book up the charts, and be among the first to read it!
- Hazy Days and Cloudy Nights: “How It All Got Started” is my free serial available via email subscription
- I mention the particularly challenging writing session that inspired the discussion that inspired this episode… the session in question became part of my novelette “The Perfumed Air at Kwaanantag Bay,” a follow-up to my novel Light of the Outsider.
- Two examples of a reading experience well worth having even though you might not enjoy them in the usual sense of the word: Ulysses by James Joyce and Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
- Sometimes we want our entertainment to blatantly manipulate us. The movie Forrest Gump from director Robert Zemeckis is an example.
- Get to Know Your Worst Self and become a better writer and maybe even a better person.
- Saltine crackers. You know. Those things we use to make soup less flavorful.
- Frank Norris is the first to have expressed the sentiment, “I don’t like writing but I love having written.”
- Responding the question of whether writing was a chore, Red Smith first said, “Why, no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” Before him, Paul Gallico wrote, “It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader.” Explore the origins of this quote.
- Do you want to write Fun With Dick and Jane, or The Wind in the Willows?
- How’s your creative week going? Tell me about it in the comments.
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