Advice from an Old Guy
On Being Who You Are vs. Doing What You Do
July 13, 2024 by Harvey
In today’s Journal
* A New Short Story
* Two Reminders
* Advice from an Old Guy
* Of Interest
* The Numbers
A New Short Story
“Pancho & Lefty: An Alternate Ending” went live yesterday on my Stanbrough Writes Substack.
Go check it out. See if you can spot the fatal omission.
As I wrote in yesterday’s edition of TNDJ, some of the better hooks I’ve ever written are in that story. It also illustrates one way to divide a short story into “chapters.”
If you enjoy it, tell Everyone. If you don’t, shhh! (grin)
Two Reminders
The Challenge—You in the Bradbury Challenge, remember to get your story details in to me before TNDJ goes live on Monday.
Free Paid Subscription—Awhile back, writer Bob Beckley paid for a one year subscription for anyone I choose.
If any of you who receive TNDJ only occasionally would like to vie for a paid subscription, email me and let me know where you are with your writing.
There’s a lot of great advice to help cut your learning curve in TNDJ, and much more on the way. Also, TNDJ won’t be here forever.
Advice from an Old Guy
On Being Who You Are vs. Doing What You Do
Awhile back in a post for paid subscribers, I mentioned that advanced Stage 4 and 5 fiction writers typically no longer fret over levels and stages and other labels. They simply write.
They have cleared out the myths so thoroughly that they have achieved a new level of self-confidence, and more. On Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs pyramid, they have attained or very nearly attained self-actualization. That is a wonderful feeling.
Fiction Writer is not only what they do. It is the essence of who they actually are.
For most people, What We Do is very different from the essence of Who We Are. What we do is a role we assume for a limited, specified period of time, maybe eight hours a day five days a week.
Who we are is very different.
All of us fill various roles in our life, but the more fortunate of us have One Big Thing that has always held our attention and drawn us back. That one thing is who we are overall.
My one big thing is Writer.
It isn’t a conscious decision I made. I didn’t “decide” or even “know” early on I would be a poet or essayist or novelist. Like most of us, I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
My youngest son is one of the fortunate few who knew his passion from the time he was 3 or 4 years old. His life would be dedicated to telecomminications. Today, almost four decades later, he has never wavered.
In my life, I have “done” (worked at) many things.
I’ve worked as a cowboy, a roustabout in the oil fields of New Mexico, and a preacher. I’ve worked as a Marine, a cop, and a truck driver.
I’ve also worked as a dishwasher, a landscaper, a janitor in a high school, a proofreader, and a copyeditor. I’ve worked as a guitarist and the lead singer in a small band. And I’ve probably worked at a few more things that I’ve forgotten about.
I’ve also worked as a writer.
But of all of those roles, Writer is the One Thing I’ve always come back to. I’ve been a writer, off and on, since about age 6: essayist, poet, songwriter, and fictionist (short stories, novellas, and novels).
Some of you are fortunate in that you found Heinlein’s Rules and WITD in your 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s. I didn’t discover them until I was 61 years old.
Had I found them much earlier—had my awareness matched up with my One Thing—my life would have been considerably different. But I didn’t, and I much prefer to look forward.
So this is a self-assessment opportunity for you. Give some conscious, critical thought to What You Do vs. Who You Are.
Then think about a month or year from now. And five years from now. A decade from now. Two or three decades. Your roles and the priorities that accompany them will change.
You can’t always control the roles you play, but you can always control your priorities. Only you can set them, or decide to let someone else set them. It’s up to you, but you only get the one life, the one set of decades, years, hours and minutes.
So ask yourself that old clichéd question. Not what you want to be doing in a month or year or five or ten years, but who you want to BE in that time.
Then set your goals and get busy working toward that.
Talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 790
Writing of Blackwell Ops 26: Tailor Moses
Day 1…… 2069 words. To date…… 2069
Day 2…… 3438 words. To date…… 5507
Day 3…… 1464 words. To date…… 6971
Day 4…… 2089 words. To date…… 9060
Day 5…… 1037 words. To date…… 10097
Fiction for July…………………….….… 17305
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 424196
Fiction since October 1………………… 709948
Nonfiction for July……………………… 15710
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 226590
2024 consumable words………………… 633481
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 10
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)……………… 92
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 241
Short story collections…………………… 29
Disclaimer: Harvey Stanbrough is a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog he teaches Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing are lies, and they will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. Harvey will never teach the myths on this blog.
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Great article, Harvey.
>>> you only get the one life, the one set of decades, years, hours and minutes
and they are all ticking down.
I searched DWS's site for Heinlein and came up with his series of posts entitled Heinlein's Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing, Dated December 2015. I read his first post and the comments yet again. While I believe he mentioned Heinlein in 2013 or 14, if not earlier, this was the first time he did one of his treatises on the subject. I recall waiting for every single post that couldn't come soon enough in that series.
Good advice from an old timer.