During an interview with Kristen Tsetsi on Jane Friedman’s blog, Nikki Nelson-Hicks says embracing the concept of “a real writer” can inhibit your imagination. “It’s the societal expectations of the Writer or Author title,” she explains. “As if I have some special training or education that makes me, god forbid, an expert on some subject. I am not. Every story starts as the same muddled soup of an idea and I flail around until I find a workable vein and I write my ass off making it into something understandable. I’m not gifted; I’m just really stubborn.”
Nelson-Hicks says no one needs special training or permission to write. This is compounded by high school and college writing classes, which teach rigid structure and Meaning with a capital M. Potential writers come away believing they need to know everything to tell a good story. “It took me years to unteach myself all the crap that was poured into my head,” Nelson-Hicks says. “How only literature was worth writing. That horror, sci-fi, insert your genre here, were wastes of time and not ‘real writing.'”
And if you don’t feel sufficiently “literary” as a writer? What’s so bad about that? “I think it’s a scam. A title you can hang yourself with if you get too caught up in it,” Nelson-Hicks writes. “Stories are stories are stories. Write the story you want to read. Write the story you want to tell. Don’t get hung up on marketing and genre.”
