Once upon a long time ago, I was a member of a local writing group. Only for a short time, it turned out, since like nearly all writing groups I’ve had any acquaintance with it was more for people who liked the idea of being writers than those who actually did any.

Anyway, there was an old guy there, his face all pinched and frowny, so that I told myself I was making a judgment based on his appearance and he was probably a really nice old man if only I listened to him. So I listened, and he proceeded to tell me and those few people at the group who still let his words into their heads, that it was hard being old since you’d heard everything so many times before, and that there wasn’t anything new to hear anyway.

He continued in this vein for a while, and I realised that sometimes appearances aren’t deceptive: he looked like a crotchety old coot and, by god, he was one. And I thought, I’m pretty sure if I believed I’d heard everything before and that there was nothing new under the sun, my face would probably wrinkle up like his, in disgust at the things it was affronted by on a daily basis.

Please note that this man’s condition was not age-related. He just happened to have practiced it for a long time. I suspect that it was ingrained as far back as his twenties, when he’d have been sneering at teenagers for making the same mistakes he had, or more likely making ones he’d been too scared to actually make in his own life.

Anyway, it struck me that this was an odd attitude for someone calling himself a writer to approach life with. And I wondered what kind of writing he did. Turns out, he was writing a research-heavy historical novel about a dentist who extracted teeth from a minor American president, which he reckoned had some impact on late nineteenth century politics. No surprise that 1) it was set in the past, and 2) pain featured heavily.

And I asked myself, when confronted by this elderly wannabe and his grim worldview ‘Is this the best way to approach writing, or life in general?’. I decided it was not.

It seemed to me that a more helpful attitude for the aspiring writer would be one of curiosity about the world, since you never know where or when you might come across a story, either yourself or through listening to the ones that others share with you. And such an attitude of curiosity would go hand in hand with a non-judgmental outlook, for otherwise you might find yourself dismissing perfectly good stories merely because they happen to come from the experience of people you deem
unfit for reasons that matter deeply to you but probably don’t make much sense if you think about them. But rather than make that non-judgmental outlook something po-faced, why not make it engaging and friendly, to increase the chance of coming across people wanting you to be part of their lives and tell you the amazing things that happen to them?

The above is as close to a credo as you’re likely to hear from me. All I can say is, it’s served me well. And going through the world with that attitude has introduced me to drug dealers and schizophrenics, astronomy groupies and glamour models, hypnotists and witches, all of them with stories that have enriched my life, and led me to write stories that will hopefully enrich the lives of others, or at any rate give them something diverting to help pass the time before whatever happens next in their own story.