It’s OK to Say It
It’s an Essay
Here I am, tooling along, writing consistently and promoting studiously day in and day out. When I first came to this heaven/hell of a platform, I had been lugging along an old steamer trunk of fiction — ok, rejected fiction — and was beside myself with joy to have found readers for those sadly overlooked stories (you know who you are!).
It didn’t take long, however, to realize that even though my carefully crafted fictional stories were finally getting eyes on them and readers to engage with, they just weren’t flying.
What flew?
You’re not surprised. I guess I’m not either. I wasn’t even particularly put off or anything. It’s fun to write these pieces of non-fiction and fun to have them grab readers’ attention. They were certainly easier to write than something like this:
Or this:
Fun as these non-fictional bonbons are to zip out, I’ve still been pushing myself to do the hard work and create new fiction. Once I’d accepted that I’m not destined for stratospheric greatness on this platform, I was ok with the meager results I got for my fiction. I’ve written a number of new fictional stories and they’ve done ok without opening great holes in the sky or anything.
Here’s the funny thing about this other stuff I’ve been writing, the stuff that does get the attention, the claps, and (yes) the money.
I didn’t even realize it until recently that I’d get stuck on calling them essays.
That’s what they are. But essays, those are written by serious writers. Writers whose work does not get rejected and/or simply ghosted when submitted anywhere other than this gatekeeper-less haven. Not candy-slingers like me. Not the writers who simply walk away from the “follow-me-and-I’ll-follow-you” crowd.
But here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary says an essay is:
“A short piece of writing on a particular subject.”
Isn’t that interesting? It doesn’t say that essays are only written by white men sitting in walnut-paneled studies by a roaring fire. It doesn’t say that essay-writing is reserved for multiple-degree-holding geniuses. It doesn’t even say that essays are spun of purist non-GMO silk issuing from the butts of angels. Nope. None of the above.
All that exists only in my admittedly over-thinking brainbox.
And until I simply told Neil recently that I have a new essay that I’m working on, I didn’t realize what a big deal it was to just say it. I write essays. I am an essay-writer. I am a writer who writes fiction sometimes and who writes essays other times.
Right now I am writing an essay. Tomorrow I’ve got the second to last installment of Our Hours to work on (that’s fiction for anyone not clued into the writing project I’m collaborating on with my partner).
See? That wasn’t so hard, now was it?
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