We have all heard those stories. I started to write when I was four, and I just couldn’t stop. By the time I was sixteen. I had written fourteen 100k novels. And before I knew it. I was top of the Amazon list and living on a yacht while a waiter served me breadsticks from in-between his toes. And you’re like whoa. And you pop online to check out her work, and it’s a serialization of vampire adventures, or serial killers, or whatever formulaic trope she or he has plucked from the marketplace so she could hit it big time.

And I am happy for them but that is not for me. What happens if some days you just don’t want to write? Or you take an entire year out while you develop other aspects of yourself and allow your previous work to stew. I mean really stew. And in between that time, you fall in love or out of love. You go on a holiday or take a course in spiritual healing that you had never done before. Do something different that adds to your character, and when you come back to writing, this new you, feeds into your characters or scenery or style.

Maybe this is where I can talk about the difference between fiction and literature. I’m not going to get all snobby. I am of working-class descent and headed to University, and at an age where all the other students assumed I was the Dad of someone else. My focus is on writing something that matters to you and may matter more to the wider world rather than say another bog standard adventure. Now I love Stephen King, James Herbert, and Robert Ludlum. I admire the way they can weave a story, but I find it difficult to just bash out some traditional story that has about as much depth as the backstory to the Kardashian Show.

There are many different ways to write, and many different kinds of writers, but what kind of a writer are you? Are you solely hell bent on making zillions as an Amazon writer? Or are you content putting your stuff out there on a blog waiting to be noticed? Do you insist on the traditional route and see your constant rejections as some kind of masochistic attachment to suffering? I am neither here, or there. I have been writing for five years now. Sometimes I can’t stop writing or re-writing, other times I have not written for a year, and then I will write a short story and be able to see the difference between what I have written before and how I write now.

It’s kind of like when you visit your sister’s kids, and you haven’t seen them for a while. And you see how tall they have grown, or how their hair or clothes have changed. The different words they use. Of course, you don’t want to leave it too long, and there lies the knowing how and when to write. And if you do get the balance right between living a life, and writing with depth. Then what you do write just may go on to change lives and minds around the world.