Writing is a lonely business.

When I started to write my first novel “A Questionable Hero” I made lots of mistakes, the biggest was letting friends and family read each chapter as soon as I finished it. I would write a few thousand words then desperate for someone to read it and give me their opinion I passed it out. As you can imagine my friends soon became a little tired of this especially when I started to edit each chapter as I went along (another mistake). I would email people a chapter or two, then re-write parts and and send it off again. Friends were kind and tried to help but it soon became obvious after reading ten or twelve chapters over and over this was not going to work.

As I am new to writing I thought everyone would be as interested in my story as me but they were understandable not, I would tell friends about the plot and watch as their eyes glazed over with boredom. About halfway through the novel I listened to (on audio-book) Stephen King’s book “On Writing” this put things into perspective for me. So for the second half of the novel I tried to talk less about it, tried not to bore the pants off people with my new found addiction but I still felt frustrated because I wanted to talk about my progress.

This is when I started to feel lonely, not in my life but lonely with my writing. It was a hard lesson to learn but I now know this is for me anyway the only way forward. I have just finished the first draft of my second novel “Consumed By Fire” and I have hardly talked about it and nobody has read it. I am about to send it off to get it critiqued and am more apprehensive about it than the first novel, does it make sense? does the story come together? And it goes on and on.

This is why I feel writing is a lonely occupation but I need to do it. I need to get the stories in my head on virtual paper.