Refreshingly honest. Dedicated to the writing craft. A talented, down-to-earth author, meet our guest post writer: Amos Dyer. Amos reveals where bone and marrow meet in his writing today. I follow Amos’s blog, and you can benefit from his insights at amosdyerauthor@blogspot.com. Amos writes:

There are two things you will require before going any further: Perseverance and Resilience.

If we are to believe what Mark Twain once said, “There is no such thing as a new idea” then why write at all? When we put Twain’s words into the perspective of an entire world of stories – hundreds of cultures spanning hundreds of years –  it’s easy to accept the idea that maybe our story has been told before.

This is a question (doubt demon, writing gremlin, plot-line obstacle, etc.) that I suspect everyone who has ever dreamt of becoming a writer has asked themselves at some point along their journey. But, as with every protagonist we write, we must persevere through this conflict. I personally take comfort in the understanding that while my story may not be new, it is still unique; because the way I tell the story is different from the way anyone else would tell it. If this perspective works for you as well that’s great; or you have a talisman of your own that wards off this doubt that works, that’s great as well.  Either way, persevere and write your story, because it only gets worse from here.

Since there are no new ideas – I can imagine some agent or editor, holding the fate of our writing future (some call this a manuscript) in their hands. And, as they gauge the worthiness of our work, I can also imagine at least one of them has a print of the old adage “Don’t reinvent the wheel” pinned to their cubical wall. It serves as a reminder to always watch out for the unimaginative spin on the tale that has been told a thousand times. It is the same concept that drives them to keep a template rejection letter on their desktop, to which they can quickly copy and paste your name into and send off. Why create a whole new document? Why reinvent the wheel? To which I respond: If someone didn’t reinvent the wheel at some point, we would still have wagon wheels on racecars.

Rejection is another obstacle we face. Whether active, in the form of rejection letters, or passive in the form of no response at all; it is an obstacle which perseverance alone is not enough to overcome. We must be resilient. We must face of this adversary and accept the truth that while our story may not be new, it might still be relevant to the world today. This resilience takes form every time we resubmit our work to a new agent and every time we start a new manuscript.

Sure, we might be reinventing the wheel. Yes, we might be telling the same old story. But through perseverance and resilience, we might just tell it in a better way