You never stop learning as a writer. I firmly believe Hemingway when he says \u201cWe are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.\u201d As you read, write, and then read and write some more, you change as a writer.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, that change is barely perceptible, like a rock in a desert that moves only a couple of inches a decade. Only by looking back at the trail can you even see movement. Other times, change comes in spurts. I think a lot of us at The Confabulator Caf\u00e9 are at the stage where our writing changes in spurts.<\/p>\n
Go back and read your writing from a year ago. Look at its rhythm, tone, voice, and even its content. Chances are, if you were to write that same passage today, there would be something different about it. Language, structure, or something else would change. Maybe there are passages you wouldn\u2019t have written, at all.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Over the past year, we have all challenged each other to write about a variety of topics. We\u2019ve written flash fiction based on various prompts that we may not have otherwise thought about. We\u2019ve written something every week. Certainly, there are those of us who have never written as much non-fiction as we have in the last year.<\/p>\n
In my own case, I\u2019ve also had graduate school and academic literary criticism to write in addition to the blogs at this website. All writing, no matter whether it is fiction or essay, changes the tone of your other writing.<\/p>\n
This year, I noticed two specific changes to the way I write. After reading The Road<\/i> by Cormac McCarthy, I began to experiment with shorter sentences. It added something new to the rhythm of my writing, sort of like a jazz trumpet player who finally figures out what staccato really means. At the same time, I experimented with much more fantastic subject matters. In the past year, I\u2019ve had demons, talking horses, dancing cats, and a variety of other surrealistic subjects I hadn\u2019t addressed in the past.<\/p>\n
Before this year, I considered myself a writer of primarily dark, rural Gothic literature. This year, in addition to that type of thing, I experimented pretty successfully with more traditional horror writing. I had some success in placing pieces with horror markets and solidified myself as a more diverse writer of dark fiction than I had been in the past. It may sound odd to say that I write diversely within a genre, but there is a wide spectrum of dark literature.<\/p>\n
I expect to change as a writer even more this year. I will still be writing literary criticism, and my fiction writing will still be the second priority. I will be forced to read a wide variety of literature from all over the world, written in every era of history. As a result, I\u2019m sure I will pick up things here and there for my own writing.<\/p>\n
I will continue to write short stories and try to get them published. Hopefully, at some point, I will finish my second novel and re-write the first, which will be a major learning experience. At the end of the year, I will re-evaluate where I stand as an artist, just as I am doing now.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, I will look back at my writing for this year and think \u201cDear God, who wrote that?\u201d just the way I do with all my past writing. That\u2019s how I will know that I am doing my job. I am still learning, still experimenting, and still refining.<\/p>\n
Hopefully, I always will be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You never stop learning as a writer. I firmly believe Hemingway when he says \u201cWe are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.\u201d As you read, write, and then read and write some more, you change as a writer. Sometimes, that change is barely perceptible, like a rock in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[159,362,1276],"class_list":["post-6887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-change","tag-evolution","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}