I think biographies and self-help book genre have been worst hit, but fake AI writers might be coming for historical fiction soon. Really? Though some people are optimistic that human content will be more sought after.
I’ve never been good at competitions. You’d have thought the first one I entered at school where the feedback to proofread, when I was still developing my skills would have put me off. And I vaguely remember thinking it unfair that this one girl in the entire school was winning prizes in every contest when all I wanted to enter was writing. A handwritten short story. Low tech back then. No spellchecker, inconsistent though it might be.
Writing prompts
Yet the surprise on the faces of my English teachers when they gave us writing prompts in class (do they still do that?). My fav lessons as I churned out stories I don’t even know how they came out of my brain. Yet no competition wins. Granted there were less competitions then. I felt like as I passed certain ages then competitions arose. How would I know about them anyway without internet at home?
So other disappointments followed but my joy of expressing myself on a blank page didn’t. I experimented with genres. Failed. Succeeded. Wrote half books and whole books and deleted lots of drafts. And after doing a degree in science, for the practicality. I took a year for me to do a creative writing master’s and loved it.
I woke up every morning saying hi to the cleaner from my desk. Read every afternoon and tried to learn as much as I could from my fellow writers.
I knew the writing wasn’t perfect, but each story honed my technique.
Here’s the thing …
As a writer, we’re always honing our technique. Always improving and stretching ourselves. Imagining new characters. Other ways of being. And as I write this now I note how AI is subtly affecting my writing. I wrote some short sentences, and one highlighted on a single line and people might scream “AI user!” at me. But this isn’t AI written. Writing like that is a technique to use sparingly.
So I’m waffling. My brain skipping from one thing to another, like it does every time I finish a book and skip to another life, another period in time … thinking … how am I going to do this, I know nothing about these people …? I am willing to learn. To expand my world.
Being turned down, constantly
I am used to rejection now. Every manuscript a chance to get an agent. Every agent rejection makes me wonder if my brain works differently from others, if I write differently as I see a lot of churned out easy to read stuff. No real author voice in the majority of cases. Perhaps I should save that idea for next month’s blog.
This month, I want to put my doubts to rest. I love the writing process. Mainly, as, I mean, there is always that horrific moment when a book enters a reader’s hands and I wonder “Am I good enough?” Will they think as I chose to use double quote marks instead of single that I am a US author writing Scottish historical fiction? I am born and bred in the UK. Will anyone leave reviews. It is soul destroying as a freelance author not to get reviews. Sometimes it is soul destroying to get a brutally honest one, from that reader’s perspective. I admit it does make me then more self-conscious as a writer.
I need to get out of my head and write without judgement, for when I do I hit that flow that writers and artists know so well. Time moves differently. A world appears before my eyes the characters alive. Sometimes I have to hurt them and watch how they react, sometimes they are telling me how the story is going to go. It is a wonderful and a terrifying thing to create and put yourself out there.
A writer’s purpose
My job, I now tell myself, I seem to speak to myself a lot, is to create. There will be lovers and haters of the outcome — myself included. Not everyone likes a Banksy … or a Jane Austen. I cannot compare myself to either of them because we all are products of our time. No one like you with your background and experiences will ever exist in a moment like this again. Realisations like this one leave me wishing to capture my perspective. I also flinch away from it. Should I share what I think about X and Z?, whatever they might be. Writers have always flirted with the political. A blog, again, for another time. Let’s just end it here. Knowing that releasing Broomhill is another brave move for an introvert like me.
It is a story passed from person to person like fairy tales and I feel a risk and a responsibility in changing such a story. Something spoke to me two ideas came together: the voices of women of immigrants lost through history to someone else’s narrative and The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley whose ending I was disappointed in, leading me to an alternative history of my own. Fingers crossed it is received well. And if not, well, another book another day another chance to put myself out there and see what happens.
I’ll leave you with my new motto: Create something only you can create.
About Emma
Emma is a real human writer not a generated artificial intelligence. In fact even the intelligence part may be questioned. As an introvert she can best be spotted hiding in the corners of storytelling festivals, or hiding in her allotment amongst the cherry tomatoes. Or, as in this photo, walking along in her own world, staring up at the sky and walking into things.
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