Blog 1596 – 02.01.2020

“A Writer Has To Write / A Writer Has To Be Read”

A lover has to love / a lover has to be loved. The title for today’s piece comes from a 2018 film called The Wife:

“A highly accomplished novelist spends forty years married to a devoted woman, who spends her life sacrificing her own talents for her husband’s career.”

The first half of the title quote is from a pretentious male writing professor and the second half from a noted female author warning his enamored female student that even as great a writer as she too was that she would never be recognized for her talents because the male critics and publishers guarding the gates in that day allowed few if any female writers to become successful.

(How is that for a run-on sentence?)

Today, due to the internet in large part and self publishing, it is possible for all writers to much more easily be read, to develop their voices, and to find their audience, including many more wonderful women writers.

I believe that we all have two distinct and different hemispheres in our brains – the right, the left, the male, the female, the reasoning and the intuitive. I also believe that both those points of view are equally valid means of coming at the truth. The best writers use both sides of their brains to create from, to develop characters from, and to develop plots from.

In the movie the enamored and talented student weds the arrogant writing professor and ghost writes many acclaimed novels for him, receiving no credit not even for the Nobel that her writing wins in his name, he receiving sole credit and solely the Nobel Prize for Literature Award. Many women of greater talents and abilities than their husbands have lived and continue to live in the shadow of men. It should have never been nor should it continue to be so. It really should be a free country and a free world in which to express our ideas and develop our various gifts, men and women, rich and poor, educated and not formally so, of every creed, color, sexual orientation or chosen sexual alignment, even asexual.

It has been said that with his invention of the .45 caliber Peacemaker revolver, and I think wrongly, that Samuel Colt made all men equal. I believe that we were all created that way even eons before the last re-birth we might have experienced, by our loving and infinite source. The invention of the internet has given all who can access it an open door to share their thoughts, opinions and points of view. I and many others who have found the traditional publishing industry a hard sell have nevertheless found an avenue of expression here online where we can all be read and recognized as writers, if not all highly praised or paid.

If you read anything of mine that touches you, please share it with your friends for it is the female side of the title quote that to me is the why all writers write, not for fame or fortune alone, but so that what we have written or said, might be read.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

We all have our stories to tell,

(The wonderful lady-writer, Harper Lee, really published but one novel. And what a wonderful one it is – To Kill A Mockingbird.)

David White

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xLJTRBlSVV7atsOMnKksI-I_DBtm_HBU/view?usp=drivesdk

DRCB 195, Old Turtle