Happy New Year! And happy first Wednesday of the year, which means it's Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) day! Today's q...

The Question for a Writer: January IWSG


Happy New Year! And happy first Wednesday of the year, which means it's Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) day! Today's question is:
What are your favorite and least favorite questions people ask you about your writing?
Well do I have a fun question to answer that question (wait, what?)! This question somehow manages to simultaneously be my favorite and least favorite! It is the seemingly easiest and most obvious question a writer will get...

"What are you writing about?"

Yep, it's silly for a writer not to like that question, but during NaNoWriMo 2017, that was THE question everyone asked. I quickly learned to not tell anyone that I was doing NaNoWriMo if I didn't feel like talking about it, but it was the first (and still only) time I'd done anything like that, so it was hard not to talk about it. If it was with friends who read my blog regularly or who know me well enough to know my history, it was a good question since they were likely already aware that I write about my recovery. But with anyone else, it was, well, awkward. To say "I'm writing about my eating disorder recovery" is a lot of information. Obviously if I'm writing about recovery that means I had to have an eating disorder in the first place. Most people don't want to talk about things like eating disorders, drug addictions, alcoholism, depression, mental illness, anything real and challenging and meaningful, etc. So, that's obviously all the more reason to talk about it! Which brings me to why it's my favorite question, even though I'm not yet to the point where I'm comfortable answering it.

Being afraid of people finding out my struggles with anorexia, depression, and OCD is something I'm just going to have to get over. Assuming I ever finish the damn book, I will have to promote it. And to promote is to talk about it with everybody I know and try to spread the word and get people to read it. That's going to be challenging enough without me having some weird paranoia about people finding out the thing I'm telling publicly. Duh, people are going to find out! Yes, there will be people who will judge me and not understand. Yes, it could even hurt my actual career, which has nothing to do with mental health or eating disorders. Well it shouldn't really hurt my career, but there is a chance it could cause some weirdness since I will soon be blogging for work, so if anyone started Googling my name, they'd find out.

But I'm not going to let that that stop me. First off, anyone who decides to hold my experiences against me is a douche bag and not someone I want to work with anyways. And second, the main purpose of writing the book and baring my soul to whoever may read it, is to help spread awareness. Awareness about mental health and recovery, which is something our society desperately needs. So, in some part of myself, I'll have to want everyone in my life to find out about this because the more people know, the more I've done what I've set out to do.

Probably would've been easier to have my first book be a work of fiction about something superficial that was easy to write and talk about it. But that wouldn't be me at all!

Happy 2019!


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