Ellie Holmes: Writers Rock!

Welcome to Ellie Holmes who writes for the blog on living up to the ideals of being a writer.

I recently had the good fortune to visit the Winchester Literary Festival.  The keynote speaker was the

charismatic and energetic performance poet Lemn Sissay.  If any of you are unfamiliar with this powerhouse of a talent do check him out on social media or better yet in performance – I promise that you will not be disappointed.

Lemn touched on many themes during his inspirational speech one of those being how hard it is to be a writer.  As he put it: ‘There are not many areas of life where you sit down to do your job and are faced with the prospect that you may be crap every day’. 

I know I am not alone in finding it a constant struggle to live up to the ideal of all that I hope to achieve with my work, to capture that perfect idea and wrestle it on to a page or to hit a self-imposed word count on a day when the words are harder to pin down than jelly to a ceiling.

So often we get caught up in the push and pull of deadlines, the demands of our work in progress, the desire to post, tweet, pin, blog and vlog our way to that elusive sunlit upland called success that we lose sight of who we are and why we started down this road in the first place.

It’s a tough gig this writing lark. The fact that we turn up and keep going, often in the face of adversity, is something we, as writers, do not give ourselves enough credit for, I think. 

Writers must have the soul of a poet, the hide of a rhinoceros and, above all, the heart of a lion.

The wounds inflicted by disappointment, rejection or broken hearts are subsumed into our writing psyche to feed the well as much as the joy, excitement and fun we experience. We then take that pain and re-live it, using it to inform our characters and plumb the emotional depths needed to reach out and touch others.

That is the reality of life as a writer and yet we still find the courage to sit down and do it anyway,

facing the fear, doubt and pain and working our way through it. Go, us!

As Lemn says, ‘Writers rock!’ and he’s right, we do!

About Ellie:

Ellie Holmes writes commercial women’s fiction with her heart in the town and her soul in the country. A member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and the Alliance of Independent Authors, Ellie’s latest book, White Lies is out now.

Link to Amazon

Thank you, Ellie and good luck with White Lies!

Would you like to write for the RNA blog? Contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com