AWAKE — thoughts by ollie francis

Ray Bradbury, you arsehole. You made it sound so simple. Simple things are the worst.

Nevertheless, there’s going to be some truth in it.

“Write a thousand words a day and in three years you’ll be a writer.”

There are so many tools out there to get your work into the public space, and all they have done is made it easy for Joes like me to fog the internet with my drivel. It’s so easy now. Everyone is a writer; all you have to do is hit ‘publish’ and boom: you’re lost in the pistol smoke. This can’t have been what Bradbury meant. There’s a reason Bradbury included the ‘three years’. To write a thousand words a day for three years means it has to become part of your routine; part of your character. You need to internalise writing, have it as part of your everyday thinking.

To build a habit takes six weeks; to build a lifestyle takes three years.

So, what was I to do? I’ve been writing in my spare time for years now, but I still struggle to call myself a writer. To me, a writer means more than someone who writes; it means someone who has become inseparable from their writing. I want my writing to become inseparable from me. So, here’s the deal: I’m going to open my writing to whoever wants to read it. In the background, I’m still going to be working on my bigger projects, but all my little bits — the short stories and the exercises and the sketches — they are all going out into the wild. Not just the good ones: everything. The crap, the failures, the unfinished. Unpolished and honest. It’s time to throw the whole lot at the wall.

I want to see what sticks.

Read the story: AWAKE

Originally published on Tumblr