Yay! Last letter of the alphabet and day of the challenge…
Every writer, and indeed any committed blogger must agree that in order to stick to writing, it is important to have a zest for it i.e. passion. It’s so damn hard otherwise. I feel I’ve always had some sort of zest for writing but I believe that provided there’s a seed of desire there in the first place, zest can grow, so the more writing you do, the more you actually want to do and conversely, the less you do, the less you want to do which can make any zest you had disappear.
What goes hand in hand with zest is discipline. You always need zest but then you also need the discipline to sit down and write even when you don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like doing anything today. I’ve been sick all week – in bed with flu, probably due to the freezing cold temperatures we’re experiencing here in the UK, but I’ve still made myself write – not much to be honest; the blogging challenge and a couple of flash fiction competitions but at least I’ve done something. The zest is still there, even if it’s just a flickering flame this week, but the discipline hasn’t disappeared, not completely anyway. I’m hoping that I’ll return to normal tomorrow. It’s a new month after all!
I’ve come to realise that most good writing (the first draft at least) is a result of yielding control i.e writing freely from your subconscious and allowing whatever’s there to emerge. I feel that when you think too much about writing, your true voice does not come out.
Winning to me does not necessarily mean coming first, although that would be nice. It’s more about being recognised i.e. making it onto the long or short list of a big competition, and just as being rejected can make me feel rather flat for a good chunk of that day (although it’s definitely getting easier to manage), achieving any level of success can feel wonderful.
Since I’ve started writing more flash fiction, I’ve become aware of the importance of using the right vocabulary. The pieces which win flash competitions tend to be those containing images that stay with you long after you’ve finished reading, and although it’s important as a writer to have a wide vocabulary, what matters more is the ability to use the most appropriate word which will enable the reader to truly ‘see’ the image or scene.
I used to think that being successful in writing had much to do with luck. I felt at one stage that I should be getting published and that I was just unlucky. However I realise now that I was pretty naive. Since then I’ve done numerous courses, read lots of books on writing, written many pieces, and also looked at magazine and competition winning stories, and I’ve come to understand that even though there is a smidgeon of luck involved in getting published, (writing is after all a subjective pursuit), success has much more to do with hard work. It takes practice (lots of it!), focused study of the market or genre you’re interested in and an awareness of what competition judges or publishers are looking for, based on what they’ve published before. It is also important to read as widely as possible.
I thought and thought about this (!!) and decided that I’d like to recommend a great article, 
Rejection is difficult and inevitable if you’re a writer. There was one time in the early days of my short writing career when I simply couldn’t deal with it; not because I thought I had such an incredible talent that it was outrageous that someone didn’t like my work, but more the opposite. It confirmed to me that I didn’t have what it takes to make it. I didn’t consider the fact that the competitions I was being ‘rejected’ in had had hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of entrants; all I could see was that my stories were rubbish and therefore I was rubbish!
I’m a quiet person, an introvert I suppose. And yet I have many friends, adore parties and need to be with people regularly. It’s a dichotomy really. But over the last six months, since I began to make small changes to my life in order to focus more on writing, I’ve spent a lot more time than I previously did sitting in silence. I say silence, but there’s never absolute silence. Right now, for example, I can hear a ticking clock, singing birds and distant cars from the main road a few minutes away, but there’s little noise.
One of my writing objectives for this year is to become more prolific. In the past it would take me forever to write a story, edit it and get it to the stage where I was happy with it. In fact, I was very often never happy with it yet would give up on it before it was ready and move onto the next one.
Flotsam and Jetsam 