Tuesday, 1 January 2013

Diary of an aspiring writer - New Years Day

 

New Year, new me. How many times have we all said that to ourselves? But this year I have finally realised that if I want to be a writer I am going to have to work at it. It all makes sense really. I am an accountant and a bloody good one, if I do say so myself, but to get this good I had to study for seven years and then spend the next fifteen year honing my craft. I am still learning and will hopefully continue to do so until I no longer want to be an accountant.

Look at our Olympian heroes. Did Sir Bradley Wiggins just jump on a bike and ten minutes later win the Tour de France? Was Sir Chris Hoy born with those thighs?

Why then should a relatively intelligent woman think that she could just sit down and write and be good enough to be published? Because we are told there is a book in all of us and some of the tosh we see published shows us it can't be that hard. Unfortunately this is not the case. You either need to be lucky or a "celebrity" to get poor quality prose published. Not that all celebrity books are rubbish.

I am now half way through my Open University course and I completed NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November so I have the bare bones of my first novel but this is still not enough.

2013 is going to be the year I give it everything I can, except giving up work as I still need to eat, pay bills etc. I hope you will follow me on this journey and maybe even bring some of your friends with you too. Becoming an accountant meant studying long and hard and then putting everything I had learnt into practice and that has stood me in good stead all my working life. I am going to try a similar approach here. I have received writing advice books for Christmas so I shall be reading them along with the Open University course and then I shall try to put what I have learnt into practice. I am aiming to write my diary as and when things occur to me, one short story a week and I will start to show you chapters from the novel once I have finished editing it.

I hope you enjoy following my journey and will let me know about your own journeys and experiences as we can all learn from each other. Anything I put out there in the ether can still be improved upon and I appreciate any constructive criticism that you might like to offer.

Back to work tomorrow so lets see how well my resolve holds once the pressures of a yearend are forced upon me.

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