4 Controversial Ideas That Changed The Way I See Writing

Everyone has their opinions on writing from the everyday to the overly educated and even my mother.

Some of these opinions can get people fired up as they yell over an imaginary line about who is right and who is wrong. 

But that's the thing about opinions, we're all entitled to them even though most of the time both sides are wrong, and the right answer meets somewhere in the middle for a lunch and calm discussion. 

Here are a few controversial takes when it comes to writing and my opinions on them. 

Let me know in the comments if you agree - or not. 

Writer's Block - Doesn't Exist 

This one may upset some, but once I learned that there was no such thing as writer's block… there is only procrastination or poor planning… I have never experienced it again. 

If you're stuck in a story you need to go back to the drawing board or write something new altogether. 

You can always write something putting it off and claiming you're blocked is just making an excuse to not do the work because it might be a little hard at the moment. 

There Is No Sterotypical Writer 

Writer's come in all shapes sizes, colors, ethnicities, and occupations with their own sets of goals, hopes, dreams, and motivations.

Gone are the days when the only ones who were writers were stuffy old men sitting around in their libraries with their pipes and no jobs writing down what they thought about the leaves which became an instant best seller because the only people who could read were other stuffy old men who wanted to know what the trees looked like on the same side of the city they lived in. 

You don't need to attend college you will never be able to afford to pay back the loans to be a writer. 

I bring everything I have experienced and I am a writer because I choose to write. 

And so are you. 

Writing Can Be Therapeutic 

 I used to think that writing was the act of telling a story, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. 

Writing is a place where I can take all of the experiences I have had in my life, the good, the bad, and the ones that I should have seen a professional about, and put them down on a page where I can not only help myself work through them, but possible help other than have been through the same thing. 

Writing about my own experiences brought a new depth to my writing that I never felt before. That moment when I put things I had gone through down for others to read, and I watched tears roll down my beta reader's face because she had gone through the same thing but had never been able to put it into words - is a life-changing experience. 

You Don't Have To Write For An Audience 

There is a novel I wrote years ago when I was in college that the world will never see. 

I wrote it after witnessing a traumatic event at the train station near my school as a way to deal with what I saw. 

Being a creative writing student of course, one of the things I had done with it was to submit it as an assignment in class to be told that I should continue to work on it and that it could be something the world would read. 

But I'll never share it.

You can write just for yourself, you don't have to commercialize everything just because you feel that you have to or because someone else says you should. 

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Everyone feels differently about writing and we all treat it as our own special things.

But how we feel about it doesn't make us any more or less of a writer.

We write and continue to write whether that's every day or only when the feeling strikes us. 

With love, 

B.K. xo xo