Cut & Dried

My work as a story maker isn't for everyone and I wouldn't want it to be, I never read another writer's work and thought any of them expected theirs to be either. That kind of writing is okay for instruction manuals, warning labels, labels of contents and weather reports but not for what I want to come from my efforts. I have been asked what it is that I hope to accomplish from the things I do write and the answer is in front of you now; only that someone will read it. I guess I write for the same reasons an artist might paint a picture or a poet tells stories in the genre they work in. That someone else will bother to look at it and appreciate it.

Story maker, you might ask? Yes, I turn experiences and opinions into stories, I don't write fiction or create characters, I write about real people, places and things. This blog is an example of things I have written and published in print books and eBooks and I started it to hopefully send readers from here to book retailers where there is a chance they may want to sample, or even better, begin collecting my other stories. I am an author who wants to be known as one. For a number of years I was known as a radio announcer and for many more as a cop. Two professions that I am very proud of but neither any longer something anyone will ever care about aside from me. Things like that only matter day-to-day as you do them and then when it is over everyone forgets that you were even there.

A time comes when those of us who can, do move on and this is where I decided to move to. Most people will forget that I ever was a voice they could have heard on the radio every day and just as many will forget that I spent twenty years of my life putting on a uniform every day and working out of a cop shop but what might be reviewed from now on is what I am doing now with a keyboard and enough of an imagination to believe I can make a story come to life and endure, hopefully long past my ability to even breathe.  To date I have published seventeen books and if I never write another one I am comfortable with where I was able to go with it, even if it stops here. I do plan to write and publish more but we don't know if we will even be here tomorrow so until I launch another project I will be doing this.

I want to believe that by the end of each story I share the reader will understand it, even if they don't like it or if they don't get it. I think I have a pretty good idea of who you are if you have read this far into this one even if I don't know much more about you. I cannot describe you but I think you are someone who likes to read and someone who either knows me or are only curious about my latest intention. Those who do like it will always tell me and those who don't might tell me that too but that is rare. Those who say nothing at all either didn't like it at all or are people who didn't stick around long enough to see where it is going. I am safely deep enough into this post to tell you who that last group is without any of them getting angry; they won't get angry because they didn't make it this far.

Just as writers differ from one another so do readers; I know people who will only stay focused on subjects that have to do with fun times, politics, religion, sports, entertainment, making money or opportunities to be silly. They are people whose mindset is...well, set, set on what they are only passionate about when it comes to reading anything at all. I liken them to some newspaper readers; like anyone who reads the sports pages before they focus on anything on the front page or the entertainment page before they read the index to know where to turn for the obituaries and never read anything on the front page. They pick up the paper in search of what they want to know more about; the scores, TV logs, who died, who got married, who had a baby or what their favorite comic strip character or movie star is up to.

My blogs and my social networking posts are like newspapers to those people. If I post something to do with one of my favorite sports teams only those who like a different one will respond. If I show anything to do with police work only those who are, were or hope to become a police officer will find it very interesting and weigh in. But if I post something that might suggest to them that I am open to talk about booze, sex or entertainment I can almost always know who will want in on the discussion. It works here as it does in my books. Sometimes I will bait readers with little more than a subject that really doesn't have a lot to do with the body of work and I will always know who the first respondents are likely to be. They aren't responding to the story itself, they are reacting to a few words that gave them an opening to say something clever.

Those people are writers also; their stories are much shorter than mine and they rarely go much further than they were when they started but still they are stories. They tell us who they are and what trips their interests. Those people aren't likely to join in discussions that might really matter to anyone who worries about where we are headed as a whole and I suspect the reason is because they never really took the time to read or try to understand things they don't or anything that requires putting what they do know out there for anyone to scrutinize. Some of the best known people who have very important jobs will never weigh in on a subject other than what their life is all about because they really don't want any one's opinion of them to change. 

They have created an image or a persona they want you to see and hopefully like but they don't want anyone to know that they live and breathe behind a veil, one that someone else might pull back to show who they are beneath the image they designed and continue to nourish. They are people who only read and write talking points they believe will benefit them. Those local politicians who we pay huge sums of money to, to make decisions we entrust them to make can only articulate about their jobs, they rarely have an opinion on anything outside the realm of what they do to earn a living. Foreign and domestic policies are only words they heard at one time or another when watching the news to see if they are in a story somewhere. The only bottom line they might care about is one of theirs, either how the one on the job affects them or what their bank account shows.

Issues of poverty, hunger or the overall world economy probably doesn't keep them awake at night or searching for written dialogue about it and they probably don't care as much about you or your family as they try to make you believe. Because they too are among those I have identified here who have not read as deep into this post as you have. What separates those readers from the others who only hope to read an opening where they can get silly is that they are more well known. This sort of journalism is the same to them; if they don't spot something immediately that they can converse intelligently with, or if it isn't something that resides in their personal world then they have no reason to invest the time to see where it might go. 

A more successful writer than me once said, don't worry as much about the size of your audience as who is in it. I trust that he is right anytime I grab a bunch of words and sort them out to make a story.

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