I don't know if this is the same tree that stood out in the crowd yesterday, but let's pretend it is, even if Andi tells us it's not. So, this was the fellow with the Voice that could be seen from far away. Now here we are close to him. Hmm. He seems to have all the same parts the other trees have. Trunk? Branches? Check. Twigs? Check. Leaves? Check. Sap? Check. The only difference is that he's more colorful, and he's more colorful because why? Because he's earlier. Earlier? What's that got to do with writing? Sometimes, a lot. The early writer gets the publishing contract, and by "early" I mean any one of a number of things. . .
You may be among the early ones who write a kind of novel that eventually becomes very popular, like female private eye books. And why were you smart enough to do that? Because that's what you really wanted to write, even if nobody else was writing that, and so you followed your heart, which gave your voice resonance.
You may be someone who has a true story that a lot of people *could* tell, but you're one of the few who actually does it.
You may have a style of writing that's unusual and very "you," and so you put it out there, becoming a red tree on a green hillside.
There are a lot of ways to be either early or colorful, or both, and some of those ways are even genuine. But I think that the simplest and most obvious way to be colorful and "early" is to release as many inhibitions in our writing as we can, write what is truly "us," and start to do it now, rather than later on. Of course, it's also possible to be "too early," or "too colorful," and those writers do NOT get the publishing contracts, but that's another tree of a different color for another day at the blog. . .
I'm leaving tomorrow (Wed.) for a driving trip in southeast Kansas.
