19/12/18

So you pitched your latest masterpiece of a novel to countless editors, even those you never heard of, and there’s no money available to publish it on your own. Actually, there’s practically no money available whatsoever.
The family’s got to eat, and writing is the only thing you can do…
You scramble around, through the familiar ground, nobody needs or wants a daily life story, cosy crime fiction or your detailed commentary on the current political situation. All you got is an offer to write poetry with a science fiction theme, a copy for new toiletry products or even ‘worse’, the possibility to hang all day on Quora and answer specific questions.
In such a situation, quite a few writers would rather resort to good friends or not so friendly banks and wait, wait, wait…
Actually, that is a syndrome, a syndrome of fearing anything that’s new, something that is personal uncharted territory. Back in the Seventies, Blue Oyster Cult, one of the better, intellectually charged heavy metal bands, had quite a hit with their song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper”. 
So if you shouldn’t fear the reaper, why fear new uncharted writing ground? Incidentally, Sandy Pearlman and Richard Meltzer, the founders of the band started out as rock critics. The switched their writing to song lyrics, and obviously didn’t look back…
The key lies in the fact whether your writing is ‘readable’ and whether you have confidence in yourself and those words you commit to paper or your word processor. If you are aware of the fact that every writing, including the most outrageous fiction, requires detailed research (whether you have an attack of stream of consciousness and particularly if you don’t), and you have already done it for your work within a familiar writing territory, that you have the initial equipment to try something unfamiliar. Have in mind that if you are able to comprehend the unknown, you are able to transform it into words, you are certainly able to write about something you never wrote about before.
Oh, by the way, those bills that are piling up don’t ask any other questions than to be paid.
​