One of the things that is so strange about being a writer is how solitary it can be. You sit in a room at a laptop or huddled over a notebook, creating characters, making up stories and plotting them out. You spend hours, days, weeks, months, even years getting things written and polished until you are happy with the result. The brave among us then find a potential home for our work and if we're lucky we get the work out into the world and it finds some readers. For the rest of us, the work sits on the hard drive or in our notebook, unread and unseen. Most of the time I am the latter, a secret horder of work which no-one ever sees.
But I do love a Twitter writing competition. So I often compose something in response to a Twitter prompt and let it loose, never expecting anything more than a few kind comments and a couple of likes. So imagine my shock when this week I took part in a prompt set by Curtis Brown and I won! I was so stunned that at one point I was nearly reduced to tears. That something I had written and touched people and been deemed to be the best was so amazing to me. Not just anybody either, these were industry professionals, people who know what they're talking about! In life I've got so used to not coming top in anything that I don't quite know how to process what happened. I am obviously delighted and have found it hard to keep the smile off my face all weekend. And to add to the loveliness there is a prize of a place on one of Curtis Brown's wonderful writing courses. I'm still deciding which one to take but what a lovely dilemma to have.
I have been thinking about my reaction to the success of my little Twitter tale. As someone who has never risen to the top I was so surprised I had to check several times that I hadn't misread the tweet. I found it hard to speak. In fact I had to show my family the tweet as I found it hard to articulate what had happened. Why should I be surprised at my success? Well, as I've said, it's not something that I'm used to. I'm Mrs Average, middle of the pack, one of the crowd. And that's ok, I'm happy with that. But it did get me thinking. What if I were to somehow achieve some degree of success with my writing? How would that feel? How would I feel?
I don't have any answers. I hope that in the future I will get to feel like this again, it's quite intoxicating. Maybe after the writing course, when I can decide which one to take, I'll have something that will find some success and I can get used to this wonderful feeling of success.
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