Don’t let anyone tell you differently
You’ve got a weird story inside of you, begging you to get out, don’t you?
The oddest, goriest, BDSM-y, never-tell-anyone, go-to-my-grave defective platypus rattling around in that head of yours.
We all do. But, it’s too weird, isn’t it?
Maybe we should hurl that mass of exploded robin-slug guts back to the word dump.
Who in their sane mind would get our vision?
Understand these broken characters we sculpted from our pain?
No one.
And so we keep the story in.
And our weird-story soul festers. And a tiny bit of our imagination dies with it.
Nah, we can’t live like that. We’re writers.
We talk to our characters in the shower.
Scream dialogue out loud.
Cry over a missing dog that never existed.
Spend hours on the right word. Days on the perfect sentence.
So, let me tell you an odd tale about a strange author who wrote a weird story.
It was that miserable period’s fault.
The first book I wrote was about a period. No, not my monthly visit from that beautiful and persistent horror show of a relative, Aunt Flo, but about a punctuation mark.
A period. A full stop. An end dot.
The great Nanowrimo of 2012 had come around, and I’d decided to write “Hi.”
The MC was middle-aged, sad, down on life, and sarcastic.
He had a semicolon wife, and she was on the fence about everything.
It was the funnest book I’ve ever written, and no one believed I’d finish that book.
It was too weird.
Maybe you know these feelings.
When there aren’t any expectations.
Only the beaming inner joy of creating.
When you must create no matter who’s trying to convince you they have the permission you need.
And the freedom that comes when you decide you’re the only person who has the permission.
But, it’s not that easy. Getting to this point leaves lessons. Here’s the first one I learned:
Writing weird helps you get over your fears
And we writers have a lot of fears.
Fear of writing.
Fear of writing badly.
Fear of writing goodly.
Fear of editing.
Fear of publishing.
Fear of marketing.
Fear of not marketing.
Fear of measuring up to the previous book.
Fear of letting our readers down.
Woo, I don’t know how any of us keep breathing. I truly don’t.
We have so many tiny fear possibilities.
My core fear was grammar. Those tiny marks on the page caused me plenty of writer nightmares, and I wasted a bunch of time scared to take the first step.
In the end, it was a good thing. My writing style became sparse and powerful, but it took years for short sentences to become my normal.
Weird creates new normals. That’s the first reason you should write your odd tale.
The world you’ll create will create a new normal for your readers and force you to become more of who you really are.
Now, let’s get into some other reasons why your weird story is exactly what you need to write.
Freedom
Writing is all about freedom. Either we’re fighting for it or we’re accepting it.
Writing your weird story is the ultimate way to express what you truly believe in.
It gives you the freedom to create the story as if no one else exists, and that’s one of the best ways to grow.
There’s an audience for it. People love weirdness.
They pretend they don’t.
People want the out there, the wild, the strange, and the odd because it gives them a green light to be their freak selves.
But, as you write your weird story, you’ll find it’s not about what they want; it’s about what you want to explore.
With a weird story, you can remove all boundaries and barriers of what a story should look like.
Write well. Study the craft. Publish.
There are weirdos waiting for your tale.
Writing about weird stuff lets you make weird connections
If you combine lesbians, necromancers, and gore, you get Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series.
That stuff is weird. And beautiful. And well-written. And enjoyable.
And those kinds of strange connections are possible when you step into your weirdness and unlock your creativity’s cage.
Being weird is good for your soul
So, write from your soul.
And create books that’ll stick to your readers’ cores.
Here because the authors published them whether someone believed in them or not.
And you can do the same.
Write weird.
Write strange.
Write odd.
Write you.
And NEVER apologize for it.
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