On Writing – Page 2 – Adriana Kantcheva

Owning the baggage that trips us: when they told me I shouldn’t write.

A few weeks ago, I met Garth Greenwell at a reading of his book, “What belongs to you.” I was completely taken aback by his eloquence and uplifting ideas. During the discussion, he said one thing (among many other wonderful things) that stayed with me (I’m paraphrasing): The wrong or hurtful things we hear and are taught as children will always stay with us; we can never grow up to be as if we had never heard these things; but what we can try is to turn them into something useful.

Finding that voice.

On November 30^th this year, I reached a milestone: my short story, “Clara,” appeared in the November issue of Electric Spec magazine. This is the first time that a short story of mine got published. I can’t explain what this means to me. It’s been a long road.

I took the decision to live my dream rather than dream my dream at the beginning of 2016. Before that, I had always wanted to but had never taken any real steps to live the life of a writer. In that faithful spring of 2016, a slow transformation began inside me, ending with me finally breaking through the thick wall of fear that had hitherto held me back and finally beginning to send stories out.

Oh, that elusive word count goal.

To me it seems that every writing advice out there homes in on the following mantra: write every day, no matter what. Stephen King writes in On Writing that he writes 2000 words a day. I do agree that a writer should write. I also think that if I were to write only 250 words a day, it will take me an awful lot of time to finish my novel. And what about all the other ideas in my head?