You only get one. And a life is not a thing to waste.
And if you were meant to write then you’d be wasting your life if you didn’t.
But if you write without living as full a life as possible, you might as well not write.
I didn’t mean that to sound as harsh as it came out
Listen, I don’t want you to think I’m telling you you have to wrestle steers or climb mountains or be a prize fighter or whatever. I’m not saying you need to abandon all caution and throw yourself into every fray.
But I am telling you to seize every opportunity to learn new experiences. And then savour them, roll them around on your tongue, describe them out loud to yourself, talk about them, talk to them, talk them through and then experience them again.
And they needn’t be big
They needn’t be small either, but if they are that’s okay too. It’s amazing what you can see and feel in even the smallest experiences. And it’s more important to be able to convince people that you were in that moment, that they are in that moment when you write about things.
Your job as a writer is to be able to lie to someone convincingly. Especially when you’re writing fiction but even if you’re writing non-fiction, you have to convince the reader that they are in the moment you are telling them about.
And the best way to do that is to be in that moment yourself as you write about it. So first you live the lie and then you tell it as if you lived it.
And the best way to do that is to revisit your memories of whatever is closest to the moment you are writing.
And the more you have experienced …
The more you have lived, the more you’ve loved and laughed and cried and laughed and were scared and laughed, the better chance you have of convincing others that you, and they, are in that moment.
I included lots of laughter there for a reason, you don’t need to suffer all the time. You need to learn and you need to enjoy it.
So take every opportunity to experience life. I have, I do.
And don’t cheat
Never cheat. You’re only cheating yourself.
Don’t phone it in. Don’t ask others about it unless you’re going to use their answers to guide you in living life yourself. Don’t read about it and then write about what you read unless there’s no other way. I mean, what if they didn’t do any living research before they wrote either? Then you’re not only writing second hand stuff, you’re possible writing wrong second hand stuff. How embarrassing would that be.
If this is what you are …
If you were born to write than you were born to live. You can’t do one without the other and you can’t do the other without the one. Live as much as you can and write as much as you can. Grab it all, and then share it around with your words.
