Member-only story
You Never Know What Impact the Story You’re Writing Now Will Have
Which makes writing it all the more important
Maybe you’re sitting in an empty room, or maybe it’s a crowded coffee shop. You could be using a laptop or a pen and paper or even a battered Underwood typewriter (if so, you have my respect, especially if you lugged it to the coffee shop). What you surely have at the beginning is a blank page and little idea what will happen once that page isn’t blank anymore.
That lack of certainty can be daunting during the writing process, but it doesn’t stop there. Even when the work is finished, polished, and as ready to go out into the world as a new college graduate, there is still often a lingering worry, almost dread, about what will happen once it’s out there. There is no telling how many great novels, short stories, plays, songs, poems, and any other kind of writing languish in desk drawers and on hard drives even after completion simply because of this fear of letting them go.
It’s understandable, of course, especially in an age when some moronic flash mob can descend on your Amazon author page like a swarm of locusts and savage your work without ever having read it; at least here we can block the trolls. And attacks on our writing, as opposed to legitimate critiques, can be as painful as physical blows…
