Books Are Magic: Write From Your Soul..

Thursday 9 August 2012

Write From Your Soul..

- Guest Post by Derek Blass

I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian right now. I read No Country for Old Men before that and knew instantly I had to read everything this man had ever written. The title of the latter book is somewhat of an irony to me, because the violence in it pales in comparison to Blood Meridian. Blood Meridian is one of the first books I've ever read where I nearly had to put it down, the distaste and rawness pooling for too long in my mouth.

Which gets me to my point. There's nothing better than an author who writes from his or her soul. Conversely, there's nothing as unconvincing and trite as one who doesn't.

I wonder where to go from that conclusion. I'm not attempting to hold myself as an author that can deliver the stark human nature that McCarthy renders. I'm simply a reader that has seen the pinnacle on a few occasions, and who wonders at those who don't try for it.

Which...gets me to my point. I'm trying, I swear. Especially as an indie author, it's a confusing world. We hear about numbers of book sold and envy those authors. We see high Amazon rankings and we ache for the same. We see books that we know are churned out to create a “backlist” and we wonder if that's the path to success.

My point is that there's a light shining out in the middle of this waste. A light lit by the likes of Homer and maintained with the written pages of Shakespeare, Melville, Hemingway, and McCarthy. You can turn around one hundred and eighty degrees, and walk into the darkness. Or, you can strive to reach that light, despite the fact that it may seem to move further out every time you get close.

My advice to authors who are just putting pen to paper for their first or even twentieth book is to leave a little part of your soul in it, whether it be in a single sentence or the whole damn thing. We owe it to the people fending back reality with our novels.