I’m so sorry this is late. My life is in upheaval at the moment (in a good way, mostly) and what with one thing and another, I completely forgot yesterday was Friday (I don’t know what day I thought it was, but by 5pm I’d completely zoned out and stopped relating to days and times anyway)
So…what I wanted to write about was how helping someone else with their writing can kickstart your own writing.
Someone this week gave me some writing and asked my opinion, and asked for any help I thought it needed. It didn’t really need anything, but we had a long discussion about themes and motives and foreshadowing and character development and other literary thing-um-jigs, which was all very interesting – and all totally unconnected with anything I was working on or thinking about.
Then, about ten minutes after that, an idea for a story popped into my head, then another and another. It seems helping someone else with their own work kickstarted my own imagination.
It’s like eating cake. It’s lovely, but then you finish the cake. Then you help someone else bake a cake, and you immediately want to eat more cake.
I’d always really avoided helping other people with their writing, because I thought it would influence mine. As it turns out, it doesn’t influence my writing at all, but it does stimulate it.
I guess that explains why so many writers teach writing classes.
