I love a good manifesto. But of course, a manifesto is only so good as the action that gets taken afterward.
That's part of the reason that I'm interested in this - the 100 Days of Writing project, as found on the tumblr The WIP Project. Was this intended as a manifesto? Maybe not, but it works, and it's also talking about something that I've noticed, that the people I know who are writers have dropped away... but maybe that's because I have. And something that I've found too - the more I talk about writing, the more I think about writing, and the more I want to do writing. Because writing should be a reflective exercise too; as the manifesto puts it:
That's part of the reason that I'm interested in this - the 100 Days of Writing project, as found on the tumblr The WIP Project. Was this intended as a manifesto? Maybe not, but it works, and it's also talking about something that I've noticed, that the people I know who are writers have dropped away... but maybe that's because I have. And something that I've found too - the more I talk about writing, the more I think about writing, and the more I want to do writing. Because writing should be a reflective exercise too; as the manifesto puts it:
Writing is not just about the amount of words we throw on the page, writing is also about developing the story further, the characters, worldbuilding, themes and all of these intangible things.
So here's the start. 100 days seems like a long time. But I can do it.
A bit of reflection about beginnings, on that note: I started off writing in fandom - specifically, my first very long, meandering fic was made before I even knew there was such a thing as fandom. It was a Simpsons fic, and I was eight or nine. I didn't come back to fan writing until I was in my mid-thirties. And the thing about fannish writing, for me anyway, was that it gave me the courage to finally acknowledge that I'm actually really good at writing; and the courage to admit that I wasn't happy with the button down life that I'd created around myself because I was scared of being different; and the courage to pursue something different (maybe also the courage to make really long sentences, but that's a whole other thing). The courage to do those things didn't just come from the act of writing. It came from the communities around the writing that I was doing, and by God, those communities have shaped my life. Literally. I found the love of my life in fandom; I found a way to parent better; I found things that I was truly passionate about, and a way to communicate those things.
So while this blog-thing might get into the other things I'm writing (art writing! academic writing! letters! codes of practice for work!), think of me as a fan writer. Because I am a fan at heart, with all the emotion and contradiction and playfulness and earnestness that that entails. I love writing; but I love the life that it's given me even more.