You Know What? Titles Are Hard. (Part 1 of 2)

That has bugger all to do with the topic for today. It's just a comment. I've come up with some titles I've been pretty happy with over my career but sometimes I just can't condense what I'm thinking of writing about into a concise enough sentence.

   My topic for today is in fact pretty much what it always is: my struggle to express myself through the medium of the typed word. (Yeah, I know, but there's actually almost a pretty good reason for once).

   In fact, yet again I've had someone tell me I write pretty well. This happens surprisingly often and I never believe it to be true. It seems more likely to me that people are humouring their friend. I don't say this to fish for further compliments, I'm simply stating the facts of the matter.

   Having said that, I was reading back through some of my favourite posts from this blog yesterday and thinking to myself that some of them were half-decent. This is clearly selection bias though: if I'm reading my favourites, of course I'll like them, I should try reading the ones I hate or (if it were possible) the ones I've deleted if I fancy getting a true measure of my ability.

   Anyway, that's why I'm here. Compliments motivate me to try and make myself worthy of them and practice makes perfect so here I am.

   Fair warning, this piece is about to go off on such a tangent you wouldn't believe it.

   I was mid-way through my annual re-read of practically everything Terry Pratchett ever wrote when the great man passed away (naturally this extended the splurge to include other of his books that I read less often). Amongst the things I took in this time around were the anthologies of his non-fiction and shorter fictional works. Between them, the notes he makes between each piece in those books represent the closest we'll get to an autobiography, which both gladdens and saddens me. It's unusual for writers to to autobiographies. Despite being the only people qualified to do so, they always have something more interesting to write about. Such was the case with Pratchett and I wouldn't swap one novel for an autobiography but from those notes in the anthologies of his work I learned there are scarcely any people whose own story I'd be more interested to read. It is all there in his fiction, anyway, once you know where to look.

   Writers are always asked what the secret is and of all the answers I've heard, Pratchett's is one of my favourites. It comes in three parts and the essence of the first and most important part is "You want to be a writer? No-one's stopping you, write something." He himself wrote at least four hundred words a day when he was starting out. If he finished a story within one night's session, he'd simply start on another story. A lot of those innumerable words might never have made it to print but that wasn't the point.The goal wasn't necessarily to be published (although I'm sure it was appreciated), he wanted to write, so he did.

   I've decided to take his advice and try to emulate him, as much as possible. Not that I expect that by writing a couple of hundred words a day I'll turn into the next Sir Terry Pratchett, he had certain advantages over me - such as a skill in the craft - but with any luck I might at some point become worthy of those compliments I've been getting.