A stranger said some lovely things about a couple of my poems yesterday, which left me feeling warm and fuzzy, and also a bit … sad? … perplexed? … because I haven’t written poetry since July. I turned my back on it to master the art of the short story.
Turns out storytelling is harder than poetry. There’s a strange statement. Maybe I’m good at poetry and couldn’t tell? Or maybe I suck at short stories. Maybe using words like ‘suck’ is indicative of that.
I do know long words too, honest.
Regardless, I’m sticking at it until I get good at it, for some undetermined value of ‘good’. I am supposed to read what I want to write and on balance I prefer reading short stories. Also, I’ve read a couple of poets recently (not famous ones) and thought this is out of my league, I can’t get as good as this (if I were you, I’d check out Ellora Sutton in this regard) whereas I feel prose could, one day, be within my grasp. With practice and determination.
Though there’s every chance I felt like that about poetry, once.
Watch this space, and in the meantime, buy these guys a coffee. They seem like nice people, and maybe one day they might read one of my stories and maybe, just maybe, they’ll say ‘hey, this does not suck.’
PS: they are called The Short Story (TSS) which I have just realised is not apparent from the buy me a coffee page.
Just waving 
Hi Jackie 🙂 I’m pretty sure that to be doing what you’re doing at the OU at the moment you really don’t suck! I know what you mean about reading other people’s work though and feeling as though there’s just no way you’re ever going to get up to their standard. It’s especially annoying when the number one piece of advice writers give to those starting out is to read lots.
The way I think about it is the same way I think about music though. By listening to lots of Beethoven, for example, my brain does a huge amount of heavy lifting. It stores away lots of information about how others interpret his compositions, gives me possibilites for how I might approach those works. And our brains do so much work without us being aware of it, that when we actually get down to playing the sonata, or writing the poem, ourselves, then there are secret nuggets of information which come out into our own work. We are better for having listened/read than for not having done so. Does that make any sense?!
Keep going. All shall be well 🙂
Elin
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Hi Elin, I totally agree. As Ray Bradbury says ‘it’s all mulch’.
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Beautiful blog
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