Writers Helping Writers

What made you decide to be a writer? Was your head bursting with ideas for plots, characters, situations that you just had to put down? Did you have a message you wanted to put out there for others to read? Or was it something else? For instance, were there no books out that made you ache to read them; books that were in your heart? Did you read something and think “I would have said it this way” or “I would have described it thus”? Or maybe you just need to tell stories.

Whatever your reason for becoming a writer, my hat is off to you! I think writing, story telling, is a noble and wonderful calling. Most of us love to crawl inside a story and be lifted away from our cares into a world different from our own--even if it’s a book about people just like us, maybe especially then; to escape our own situation and delve into someone else’s.

As a writer it is important to remember that other authors are not in competition with you.  On average it takes eight months to write a novel, sometimes more, sometimes less.  And on average it takes three to seven days to read a book, sometimes more, sometimes less.  It would be ridiculous to think that if you write, say, detective mysteries, that another writer comes along who writes a detective mystery is trying to “steal” away your readers.

Not so! There is most assuredly room for all of us on the bookshelves out there. I would love to encourage other writers to come and let me interview them for this blog, or to give them the opportunity to guest here and would hope they’d do the same for me. Read my book and I’ll read yours and review it. I think competition/cooperation is good for us as writers as well as readers.

I have learned so much from writers who are further down this path than I am, and hope they will continue to share their knowledge and experience with me, and hopefully I will be able to do the same for others coming up behind me. If we work together, we can all succeed.

So to those authors on social networking sites who tell me not to bother them if I want to promote my own writing as they’re not interested, I ask, what are you afraid of? Open up! We can all help each other and benefit from the experience. It’s a big world out there and there’s room, more than enough room, for all of us.