Jane Doe Writes

NOTE: I AM NOT IN THE ABOVE PICTURE

Writers can be frustrating. They all get together at little conferences, and frustrate other writers with their extensive book ideas, and frustrate themselves because they never can quite figure out which character does what, and just how many of them will die by the end.

Most amateur writers always have to have someone die, have you ever noticed that? I’m an amateur writer at seventeen, so you can imagine my first book at age twelve. Every body died. Another thing we all do, is put a fantasized likeness of ourselves into our books. I met one (putting it gently) extremely large girl at a writers’ conference, who’s fantasy character happened to be 300+ lb.

It’s funny how many of us want to be something other than ourselves - even if for just a minute. And you know what’s awesome? We all get to do that through every frustrating character in our soon-to-be-novellas. And then we can step back and discover that we are happy with ourselves - regular old Jane Doe’s after all.

I wonder sometimes if every writer has been like me at one point. When I first started out, my sole supporters were my family. But by my 12th poem in church, my kind of impressed brother told me to get lost, and my Dad told me to read more Bible and take less “notes”. I thought my work WAS Bible. I was certain no one else had ever written like I did, and I would have set off to publicize my work immediately, if I had not feared the ever-present-evil that someone might steal my work.

But then, I upgraded to “free verse poetry”… mad slashes of unrhymed and unashamedly un-metered lines. It was great. I loved it. Before I knew it, I was writing descriptions of my poor family members and my unaware seatmates on air planes. I kept a journal, where I wrote good things about my brothers and sisters, just in case they found it and read it. In fact, I penned in large letters within those precious pages, “I love my brother and sisters SO much, I would never read their journals behind their backs”, so they would feel guilty while they read. It sounds like I didn’t want people to read what I wrote. Right? Wrong. I was constantly shoving my work in people’s faces, but I only wanted their praise, not their opinion. So I remained unpublished and very unsure of what people in general wanted me to write.

Writing does a lot to the writer. It grips them with a powerful hold to entice them towards great lengths of drama just to produce emotion…reaction…anything in the reader. So, while I’m off killing the last grandma in my book, I am thinking, “Cry! I DARE you to cry!”
I think sometimes, as writers, we tend to over-dramatize, over-think, and over-produce a work because we want it to be that hit, amazing piece that will make the world take notice and fall deeply in love with us.

It’s easy to forget that the real literature comes truly from what we believe, what we’ve experienced, and ends however happily our characters - fantasized likenesses of ourselves - deserve to end.

Writing a work should be a resolve to teach a point and encourage a real life experience. If my motive is merely to sell a piece, it is quite possible I am trying too hard to write what I THINK people want to hear, instead of writing THE TRUTH. My story… your story… from the pure gut-wrenched heart is real and different from every other average piece people write just for money.

If it’s your story, you can’t possibly be told that it has been heard before. No one else can shuck out that genius piece logged deep inside of you like only you can. So get up off your writer’s block butt and find the niche of your pencil, where the eraser is half chewed. Tell all like you would give it all to pour your soul on the audience that is captive to hear YOUR story.

Oh. One warning. Be prepared for a reaction.