Some of you are going to find my writing horribly cheesy this holiday week. Consider yourself forewarned.
Normally, I hate cheesy holiday greetings or inspirations. Normally, I hate cheesy anything unless it’s pizza or manicotti. In which case, bring it on. And lots of it.
But I guess I got the Thanksgiving bug a little bit harder than normal this year considering how Innovative Editing was just nominated the #1 best place to work and all. So here comes the cheese with this week’s writing-related Definition of the Week.
Writitude:
This is my completely made-up word for the holiday week, and it means “the quality, act or feeling of gratitude or thankfulness for being a writer.”
Too many writers have seen, do see and will see writing as a burden, which is the exact opposite way to look at it. Writing is a gift. An amazing gift too!
It’s an act of creation designed to encourage, engage and enlighten us to be better versions of ourselves. Which is definitely something to be thankful for this week.
Don’t you just hate businesses that push holiday cheer like it’s their sole job? But since Innovative Editing has decided to be one of them, far be it from me to not give it my best. So here’s some more cheesy goodness (or obnoxiousness, depending on your perspective)…
There’s just something about the act of writing: something about getting our thoughts down on paper that’s empowering. These are our thoughts. Our expressions. Our selves flowing out from our brains and very souls down to our fingertips onto the keyboard or physical page.
This is true if we’re working on a non-fiction manuscript about bird-watching or a creative writing manuscript about alien invasions. We write about what we find exciting or mentally stimulating. What we find important or worthwhile.
Even if that is, indeed, bird-watching.
The words and sentences, paragraphs and pages we put down are a natural extension of who we are and how we feel about far more than our stated subject matter.
Isn’t that awe-inspiring? That we have such an amazing gift? It’s a superpower, really.
Yet the literary books are filled with utterly miserable human beings: writers who never once – or at least far too rarely – addressed happier emotions in their manuscripts, published or unpublished. These people lived their lives with starving artist mentalities and died the same way.
They tore their hair out literally and figuratively trying to come up with the next great thing or the next new thing, and sometimes they succeeded. But that didn’t make them happy. It didn’t encourage, engage or enlighten them for the main reason that they didn’t think such common concepts befitted true writers.
In other words, they were stuck-up snotheads. And so, no matter what epic works they did or didn’t produce, they were never truly better versions of themselves.
Don’t be that person this holiday season. Not for Thanksgiving, not for Christmas and not for the coming-up-really-quickly New Year’s Day.
Be thankful for the gift you’ve got. And then use it for all it’s worth.
Because, as we’ll discuss on Innovative Editing’s cheese-filled Thanksgiving day, writing is worth a lot.