The Evolution of Our Approach to Writing
Your passion for writing doesn’t fade when life gets hard, but your reasons for doing it can shift in ways you never expected. In this candid reflection, AG Flitcher traces how personal loss and hard-won growth reshaped his relationship with the craft, all circling back to one deceptively simple question: “Why am I writing this?”
When you start out as a writer, the excitement in putting yourself out there for the first time creates a tingling sensation that can make you hold your body of work hostage. Or set it free without looking. In which the anticipation of responses can make you hold your breath. At first, negative feedback, or personal attacks (intentional or not) can make you shelf your next body of work.
Over time, you gain confidence or at least a more practiced hand in the craft and even marketing as you familiarize yourself with your kind of readers (and how marketing works in the world of writing). You become less or more fearful of what you can do in the world of storytelling. However, there is one thing that continues to move with a mind of its own. Whether writing is your primary source of income or something you do on the side.
That one thing is life’s changing circumstances and how you grow as a person. Which can alter your why as a writer. It’s not that your passion falters when life gets busy or you go through trauma. It’s that your priorities around writing change and, therefore, alter the tangibility of the context of your writing.
You see, when I was first writing, I wasn’t thinking about my purpose as a writer. I was a son grieving the loss of his mother. Someone who had no clue how to grieve or ask for help because he was afraid to. So, I wrote to cope, and eventually it became the seed that fed more coping mechanisms that strengthened the desire to use writing as a crutch to distance myself from the reality of life. Therefore, tainting the value of storytelling.
I was making it all about my selfish need not to live my life in the present. Shelter myself in the past. To not add value to tangibility in life. I wanted to use writing as a tool to coast in the still current of the ocean in the world of fiction.
Eventually, after going to therapy for a year, my relationship with writing evolved. The only thing left I had that kept me connected to writing was passion. It’s all I needed. This is not to say that my journey is the same as other storytellers, nor are we all going to take the same path. It’s to say that we can’t know what our writing means to us as life continues to change around our writing. It may slow us down or inspire us to write differently, ask for help in the other parts of writing (marketing, education, finance, priorities, publishing, etc). But how we approach each body of work will evolve.
Because of one question: “Why am I writing this?” Some writers’ purpose can be as simple as I love writing and I want to have fun doing it. That’s wonderful. However, some of us, or at least I, ask ourselves: “What am I trying to say?” In addition, we want to know if we have anything else to say in our next body of work and how long it will be before we act when we’ve actualized that thought.
So how does our approach to writing evolve over time, really? It’s when we can take several steps back from our writing, look at what we’ve done, and answer the question: “This is beautiful, but what do I do now?” If the answer is, I’ll keep living my life because this is part of who I am, and I can handle my life inside and outside of writing, no problem, then your purpose is clear, and you can take on hurdles, heartache, and happiness, like nobody’s business.
But if the answer is: I don’t know. Then take a beat, go for a long walk (or however you process fear and anxiety), then come back to what you created, and see if the energy in what you made changed. I cannot tell you, nor can anyone but yourself, what your approach to writing will be day to day, month to month, year to year, but I can tell you that whether you work on yourself, or your responsibilities change, or you begin a new chapter in life, you will pause more often and evaluate time and time again what it means to be a writer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AG Flitcher is a fourteen-time award winning author. In addition, he has taught many the art of storytelling to novice writers and avid readers. His obsession with questioning the good and bad in life, the grey areas, tethering and frantic metronome of life and death, is what makes his work enthralling, confounding, and colorful. Fear has become a powerful aphrodisiac to him. Making it a haunting yet delectable component in his stories. Fear is not what scares us, it’s what follows when we respond to it.
WASP OIL
Not long after Chelsea Tygrah left her mark on Halburton, the city became encompassed by an electric, heavy, pulsating power, embracing and encouraging unprecedented anger in everyone it could get its gnarly grip on. Through a strange orange light following everyone’s move, a creature emerged with its own anger, casting its mark on the bravest ones who would dare defy it.
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