Hello everyone! Renée here!
Elephant's Child, the winner of the October Challenge The Scream, won with her story Un.... Her tagline: Sometimes no one will hear your scream.
As our judge, Nick Wilford said: "The rhythm really hammers home the oppressive feel and air of inevitability, but fortunately this is leavened by having a hopeful ending. Very thought provoking."
Today EC is addressing self-exposure. So take it away, Sue!
SELF-EXPOSURE
I
write occasionally. I read every day. I am much more comfortable describing
myself as a reader than I am a writer.
What
do I read? I refuse to be limited by genre or defined by target groups.
Instead, I read for education, comfort, and escape – and am sometimes lucky
enough to find them all in the same work.
While
I am a greedy reader, I am not uncritical. Writing to strike a chord with me
and find a home in my head and heart has to be authentic. Real for the moment
(while I am reading), and/or honest for all time. This means that memoirs,
autobiographies, diaries, and letters make regular appearances in my towering
to be read lists. It does not mean that I avoid fiction. Neil Gaiman (one of my
favorite authors) summed it up for me.
‘Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.
We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine.
It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge,
and the individual is less than nothing.
But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining
that things can be different.’
Not
a comfortable place. So I thought about it. And thought some more.
That
thinking brought me to a place where I realized that all writers expose
themselves, or at least some of themselves, in every piece they create. As an aside,
I do not think that art and the artist who created it can be separated. Each
piece exposes their backgrounds, their personal values, their beliefs, their
hopes, their dreams, and their fears. Some of it is conscious, and I suspect
some of it isn’t. And by exposing themselves this way, they make themselves
vulnerable. Vulnerable to being criticized, dismissed, or not understood.
Do my
musings make sense to you? And do you agree?
Writers
have long been my heroes, and I thank them for their courage and the gift of
trust they bestow on their readers.
And
I thank WEP, both the administrators and the contributors, for making this a
safe place for writers to stretch their wings and to hopefully soar.
~~*~~
Our award-winning author, Elephant's Child is from Canberra, Australia
She says she
is in the process of reinventing herself. Even though she keeps busy with
gardening, reading, birds, blogging, and swimming.
You can learn a lot more on her blog. Just follow the link https://myjustsostory.blogspot.com/
Photo by: Photo by Alysha Rosly on Unsplash
Thank you so much for your guest post, Sue. How about you, readers? How do you feel about self-exposure? How much of you, is in your writing?
We'd love for you to tweet this post or share it to Facebook or your favorite social media site.
#WEPTHESCREAM #WEPwinner #guestpost SELF-EXPOSURE https://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/2021/11/wep-october-challenge-winners-guestpost.html @DeniseCCovey, @YolandaRenee, @LGKeltner, @OlgaGodim #amwriting #writingchalleng
#WEPTHESCREAM #WEPwinner Uh…. #guestpost SELF-EXPOSURE https://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/2021/11/wep-october-challenge-winners-guestpost.html @DeniseCCovey, @YolandaRenee, @LGKeltner, @OlgaGodim #amwriting #writingchallenge
#WEPTHESCREAM #WEPwinner Uh… #guestpost Self-Exposure https://writeeditpublishnow.blogspot.com/2021/11/wep-october-challenge-winners-guestpost.html @DeniseCCovey, @YolandaRenee, @LGKeltner, @OlgaGodim #amwriting #writingchallenge
Our next challenge will be here before we know it! We hope many of you will consider joining us for our December challenge. Narcissus! We'll be posting early, anytime between December 1st and the 15th.
See you all there!
