Back two Wednesdays ago, in “Your Genuine Writer Review – Part 1,” I mentioned Evan Carmichael’s Your One Word. It’s a business book about choosing a solid foundational word to build your venture around.
Certainly, reading it did help me define my goals for my business, Innovative Editing. Which was awesome and all. I truly appreciate both the concept and action of building my editorial reach around the definition of genuine – which we discussed in the aforementioned Part 1.
But what I really love is the ability to promote that definition for myself and other nonfiction and creative writers. At the risk of getting preachy, there’s a severe lack of genuineness in this world and a severe problem with people thinking they’re being genuine.
As authors and potential author though, we hold a place of power and empowerment that shouldn’t be overlooked. This is not something to be taken for granted, no matter if our final reach is one person or a million.
Armed with that recognition, let’s discuss the first aspect of what makes a writer a genuine one.
A Genuine Writer is true to himself or herself.
That sounds so abominably hokey, I know. But there’s nothing hokey about how it’s meant to be taken. Each and every one of us has our deeply held convictions and beliefs of what’s right and what’s wrong from a universal standpoint. Hopefully, those are based off careful consideration of the various resources we have at our disposal: intuition, experience, education and the like. We also hopefully have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong from a personal standpoint. As in what works well for us and what just doesn’t encourage us to be the best and healthiest version of ourselves.
Here’s a silly example that still hopefully makes my point without getting controversial…
I love colors. Almost all of them, really, though sometimes for different purposes and in different settings. Darks, lights, brights, pastels, earth tones, warms, cools: They’re all just so pretty!
Yet despite my deep and incurable love for “all the colors of the wind,” some of them just do not go with my Victorian-era Scottish skin. As such, if I tried putting on bright orange – a color that other people can wear and wear well – it’s going to look unnatural on me.
Everyone who sees me will know it looks unnatural on me. And every time I look in the mirror, I’ll know it looks unnatural on me.
Put simply, I’m not going to look my best. More than likely, I’m not going to feel my best either knowing that I don’t look my best. That’s why I avoid wearing bright orange. There are plenty of other more serious “looks” that I avoid or try to avoid as well, whether because they don’t suit me or because I firmly believe they don’t suit anyone.
As a genuine writer, it’s then my responsibility to write out that understanding into the poems, plays, short stories, novels, memoirs, guides and articles I write and/or publish. And the same applies to you if you want to be a genuine writer too.
No matter the pressure.
This means we don’t compromise when someone tells us we should throw our convictions out the window or try to be like someone we’re not meant to be. So how can this play out in your actual writing world? That’s something we’ll discuss next Wednesday. I promise.