The Write Focus

As I’ve mentioned before, I got my writing start with poetry. I was a poet through most of high school. It was my “thing”. I was a poet.

Then I started writing short stories, most of which turned into rather long stories. These stories were all in the fantasy genre. I was no longer a poet, I was a fantasy writer.

When I ventured into novel writing I still considered myself a fantasy writer. Now I was a fantasy novelist.

I took a writing for children course. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. My focus shifted to writing for children. I was a children’s writer.

It was a very restrictive way of thinking and I did myself a great disservice in doing so.

I would lock myself into one method of writing, to the exclusion of all else. And when I started to stall, so would my writing. I would be so focused on whatever kind of writer it took to write that piece that I couldn’t consider any other writing.

When I was writing short stories I wouldn’t write poetry - I was a fantasy writer, not a poet. When I wrote for children I set aside my novels - I was a children’s writer, not a novelist. My fantasy novels never really succeeded because most of my plots were hopelessly romantic in nature. It never occurred to me to write them as romance, I was a fantasy writer after all.

Thank God I out grew this mind set.

Now I don’t limit myself to genre or length. I accept the ideas as they come and write them all down in the same notebook. Writing is writing.

In the end, that’s all that really matters.