Why Do You Want to Write?
Writing is an emotional endeavor. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, want to educate or entertain, the end goal is to stimulate an emotional reaction or response from your readers. The fastest and easiest way to do this is to understand your own emotions and what brings you to the computer or the notebook to put your thoughts, emotions, knowledge and stories on the page.
So, I challenge you: What is it? Why do you want to write?
For me, from a very young age, I loved hearing and reading stories. Some of my earliest memories are of my father reading to my brother and me before bedtime. Once I learned to read on my own, my dad made sure I had a number of books to keep me occupied. The Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Orphalines, Black Beauty, and The Black Stallion were among many. I read biographies, books about art, history, and world events. I fell in love with immersing myself in another world, living other people’s experiences and realities, and traveling to different settings, either real or imagined. I found myself wanting to provide that kind of experience for others through my own creative imagination and started writing stories and poetry as early as the third grade.
My favorite things to write are historical and contemporary mysteries, along with my own blog, because I want to educate and entertain. I also want to lose myself in a world of my own creation with characters I’ve created from my imagination, or from people I have met and known, or from famous people in history.
My agent, the wonderful Paula Munier, once told me that people love to read and write mysteries because they love puzzles. They want to create and make order out of chaos. She also wrote this in her book, Plot Perfect. I had never thought of it before, but when she said it, it made perfect sense to me.
Once I started to understand what emotionally motivated me to write, my passion for it grew even more. Sometimes we need to sit down and think about what really makes us tick before we can take the big leap and commit to such an ambitious endeavor. Writing a book can be many things. It can be liberating or healing, it can be exhilarating and fun, and it can be daunting and overwhelming, all at the same time. But for whatever reason it is that you want to write, it helps to understand why you want or sometimes need to be married to a project for weeks, months or even years. I use the word “married” because writing takes the kind of commitment required for such an emotional experience and sometimes life-long journey.
In February, I am teaching an online course called, “So, You Want to Write A Book?” along with clinical psychologist Dr. Benjamin Perkus at The Aroma Freedom Academy. The class uses the Aroma Freedom Technique (AFT) to help people break through the emotional blocks that are preventing them from achieving their goals and dreams. The course is presented as a workshop to help people who want to write a book but don’t know where to begin, or those who have started the process, but got stuck somewhere along the line, or for those whom, for whatever reason, have not achieved their goal of writing a book. The first lesson we will take students through is discovering why they want to write a book. We will also be working on a non-fiction book in conjunction with the course and are looking for people’s stories of transformation, either with writing or other life experiences, to include in the text.
If you are interested in the course, have a story of transformation, or just want to discuss why you want to write, please feel free to contact me!
I look forward to hearing from you!