One day my mother came home with a slogan from her workplace. “Lower Your Expectations,” it read. Not really the gung-ho mentality of today but hey, it was the ’70s. Anyway, my father saw it, found it somewhat ludicrous, and came back with the flip side: “Up Your Aspirations!” He even had it printed up on a t-shirt.
This probably tells you more about my father than it does my mother.
The point of this (and I have one) is that, as writers, we must manage both our expectations and our aspirations. This came home to because my wife has recently begun to ply her hand at writing, and tonight we had a discussion about what aspirations she might have, as a writer. Sensibly (I thought) she said that, at this point, she doesn’t have aspirations of writing for a living or even for profit. Right now she just wants to play with it and to learn how to be a better writer. I know I’ve harped on this before, but I believe it’s important; writing is a lonely business, and publishing is a cutthroat business. Writing for profit ain’t for the faint.
I’ve been trolling the blogs, the last few days, reading fiction from new/unpublished writers. I see the same thing, over and over, the same mistakes, repeated.
I have been a “Stratfordian” all my life…so far, anyway.
I’ve been reading about Gustave Flaubert and his writing method. “What a bitch of a thing prose is!” he wrote to his friend and lover, Louise Colet. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo.” And redo he did.
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 