I’ve got to stop making proclamations about what I’m not going to do. Like, blogging. I’m never going to do that.
Heh.
Then there’s that Twitter thing. My exact quote about Twitter, as recently as this past January? “I don’t care if Jesus Christ is on Twitter, I don’t want to know what He’s doing every minute of the day.”
Er. Yeah.
Quite honestly, this sort of “I’m never gonna do that” thing is how I came to be writing YA. After years of trying to squash my big fat foot into the precious glass slipper of literary fiction, I finally strapped on the orange Chuck Taylors of YA and found it a whole lot more fun and comfortable, even though it was a genre I had previously sort of dismissed as a Less Than form of literature that I would never undertake. As was sci-fi.
In other words, my list of verbotens has become my to-do list.
I can’t help wondering if this sort of irony is all-too-common or if I am particularly deserving of an ironic swipe from the universe for my previous hubris and ignorance. Or maybe it’s that I have a peculiar way of getting myself going in the right direction. Instead of just turning left I make three right turns.
So if you don’t mind my inquiring, have you ever undertaken a writing project, bound and determined to NOT write about a certain thing or in a certain genre, only to realize that yes, that’s exactly what you should be writing after all? If so, how did you come to that conclusion? Did someone else whack you on the noggin with the Cudgel of Duh*? Or did you come to the realization in the privacy of your own mind, all on your own?
I realize that sometimes it takes several wrong decisions before you get to the right one. Maybe this is part of the process of finding yourself as a writer. Looking back, though, I can’t help feeling a little dopey about it, and it makes me reticent to make any more proclamations of any kind.
Which is why I’m never going to do that again.
*If you don’t have a Cudgel of Duh, you can borrow mine, although I should warn you that it’s not nearly as effective on others as it is on yourself.
