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For a few years now I have tried to be a writer that I am not. It is very easy to claim oneself a writer provided one knows what to write about and how to do so. It is also extremely self-comforting to write a sixty pages story... or beginning of one... It looks good, does it mean it is good?
What is very comforting as well are the praise one can get from relatives and friends... are they all reliable?

Being a writer means much more than the job itself. What it involves comes very often from a blank page and/or the writer's block.

In front of a blank page, I wish to tell the story of a puppy interacting with friends and sharing with them many adventures. Great idea... how to write it and capture children's interest? I do not know, worse: I am not even sure I am willing to find out. I tried many ideas in different forms, like a 101 word short story. I found the idea of the form on a website. I wrote very cute short stories, however, were they worth publishing? Were they worth digging? I must admit that it pains me to answer "no" to these questions. That is unfortunately the sad truth... I am not cut out for that kind of writing.
Before the children book, I started a novel... That lead nowhere... I indeed face the same kind of problem than with the puppy story: after a great idea from the start, I ended up rewriting everything over and over again without getting anything right. Each result would be lame!

Most of the time, ideas are not the problem where one wishes to write, it is how to write them that is, because one has to capture the reader's interest and most importantly keep it. Does this mean that one should write with two caps on: the writer's cap and the reader's one? Or does it mean that ones imagination is not what one would like it to be? Or could it mean that ones skill as a writer do not fit that particular kind... What I know for sure is that it does not mean that one should not write.
I find that it becomes simple to write when I have the core of my subject at heart. Words then flow and the readers keep reading with interest. In the movie "Finding Forrester", William Forrester says to Jamal Wallace: "First, you write with your heart, then you rewrite with your head". This sentence is always very useful when I have to deal with my famous writer's block, and it works almost every time.

The blank page was however more disturbing to me. It would alway bring me to a place I never liked to go: self-doubt. Am I even a writer? I should be able to write a little something... why can't I? and it would go on and on in my mind, until I even reached self-sabotage!
The beauty of the blank page is that one can do anything with it... my way of dealing with it nowadays is to write what is going through my mind while facing it. I put down my inner dialogs and this is how I found out I was good at writing... only, I was not the writer I wanted to be or thought I was. I read "A Personal Tao" by Casey Kochmer and it said that being an author was just a job and being a poet was a way of life... I suppose it depends on how one defines an author, a writer and a poet...

The writer's block and the blank page exit only in the writer's head... not necessarily for the reasons he/she thinks... Being a good writer should mean that the greatest challenge is coming from oneself, not from the assignment, the book or whatever one is writing. I believe that one should know oneself first to be able to use ones creativity and inspiration in harmony with ones personality. One should know this to become the best writer, artist, one is supposed to be.

Learn more about this author, Claire Perez E.
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