Writer's Dilemma 

There are multiple dilemmas in writing, really. One of them is lacking confidence in one's own voice, another is simple indecisiveness, another is being too enamored or distracted by other writers and subjects... Reading others and continuing to let their voices lead and guide, inspire and somewhat overwhelm your own.

Laziness, apathy, lack of talent, or perceived lack, lack of encouragement, which most true writers seem to blaze through.

Eventually.

Lack of vision? Sure. Many other faults exist...

But we keep trying.

 

I read the credits of many authors and writers that I appreciate and I am inspired by, entertained, educated by. They thank close loved ones, professional editors, other close friends, and sometimes a host of the sources and subject matter experts that they resorted to to create their fictions and non-fictions.

Those people and resources do not happen by accident. There is a lot of hard work, determination, and synergy to make those writings happen. The author has his or her own will for creating, composing, crafting, and then collaborating to make their works come to light.

Rare is the author like Franz Kafka who wrote brilliantly, yet somewhat tortured in his own loneliness and mental and physical conditions, and eventually produced great tracts and books, but by the end of his shortened life wanted it all to end with him. One friend relented, did not destroy his writings as requested, and we know his works today. 

 

Ernest Hemingway had many who supported his talents over the years, but one wife was blamed for losing some valuable transcripts on a central European train, and despite those who supported him he had his own detractors, as well as a few rivalries that spurred or perhaps discouraged him.

I feel like Hemingway was a force of nature that would rise in the world of literature no matter what, supported or not by those around him.

Maybe the same was as such for an oddball as the infamous J.D. Salinger. He was a loner, and he had his editors, but it seemed it was he himself who was his own best and worst critic. Maybe he lost his mind, or maybe he just disengaged with outer humanity, which always becomes a subject of interest and scrutiny for the literary world, as it were. Some think it is all overblown. Maybe so, like so much bubble gum T.V. and social media and it pabulum for the dopey masses. (Me included, of course.)

And there you have it on a sunny, cool, crisp, late November day in the year of the Wuhan flu pandemic, and thinking about writing the next big thing. Important, pertinent, significant.

Worth writing.

A dilemma worth thinking about and working on through.

Thanks Isabel Allende and all the others. Thanks for putting pen to paper (finger tips to key boards), and sharing your visions, your dreams, your thoughts and inner-most feelings, your grandiose designs and your formations of the inner and outer universe. You make us more whole, fuller, richer. And so much thanks to those that have supported you, helped you in your prolific craft. Unnamed friend of Kafka? Good looking out.

You reacted well to that Czech's dilemma.

His dilemma, some one hundred or so years ago, his problems, issues (mental, psychological, existential), are mine, are yours, are the world's.

Thanks for putting them to paper and thanks for friends who recognized their value and import.

Every writer needs at least one reader. And maybe that is the author themself (himself, herself), in their own world. Maybe the author and finisher of the script is the sole lector.

Dilemma solved, in one way.

You just had to write it down. It all starts somewhere.