Or Finding Your Complimentary Writing Passion
When I had my first baby, we lived near the Oregon Coast. Anyone familiar with the Oregon Coast will tell you how breathtaking and beautiful it is. So naturally, it was hard to move away from miles of coastal wonderland to the more stolid and drier Midwest. For the first year or so, I pined so much after the beach that I’d find my mind drifting into spontaneous plans of getting into the car and driving in a straight line to the west or east (it didn’t matter which) until I hit the sand.
And then I made a startling discovery.
As a life-long westerner, I’d never imagined that an ocean might exist anywhere other than, well, the ocean. But what my geography teachers had failed to convey to me was the little fact that the Great Lakes are so large that these bodies of water not only look like but behave much like the ocean. On my first trip to Lake Michigan, I stood there, dumbfounded and enchanted. Why hadn’t anyone told me? Why were people hiding this from the rest of the world? Crashing waves, golden dunes, piers shooting off into the sunset…it was all right here in my backyard (relatively speaking), even down to the lighthouses.
I would like to say that life is chockfull of similar surprises, but I regretfully admit that it is not. However, life is not entirely void of such surprises either, and not just in the ocean category. For instance, sometimes you find yourself wishing that Jane Austen had written just a few more books and then one day you discover Georgette Heyer – who is nothing like Jane Austen but somehow feeds the empty space for quality-written Regency just the same.
So it is with writing. If a writer is so rigid as to believe that she was only born to write in one niche category, she may be in for a pleasant surprise. Writing isn’t only novels. Writing is poetry, writing is book reviews, writing is marketing, writing is journalism, writing is scholarly essays, writing is blogging.
What I’m trying to say in a long-winded way is that a writer’s passion is often paired with a second passion – a giant lake to compliment your ocean. Different, yes, but in so many ways the same. Every writer should always be exploring their inner landscape for new subjects which compliment in surprising ways the things you are most passionate about.
Write poetry.
Write essays.
Write articles.
Write memoirs.
Write a blog.
There’s almost always a second- but similar- body of untapped potential for you to add to your publishing portfolio. Seriously. Be prepared to be enchanted anew.
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