Most of the people here think I’m a lug. I know, even though they don’t KNOW that I know. It’s in their beady little eyes.
I’m sporty, and because I’m here at a writing group, that’s a crime. I go along to a football game, and that makes me dirty. I play cricket with my friends, and it’s time that could be FAR better spent curled up with a pretentious tome. And heaven forbid that I DON’T complain about Sheila gobbling up all the almond and honey cookies, since I fill my body with much better things. Like protein shakes.
But I can do both! I can like sport AND write, even if I like to write about sport. I can tell that they instantly class my short stories about the process of crafting indoor cricket nets as a lower, less important brand of tale. Oh, it’s not about a man in a forest who finds himself after a thousand pages of meditation and conversing with his spirit animal. No, no…these are actually concise, and contain snappy dialogue, and have a proper progression from beginning, to complication, to climax, to end. As in, they actually make sense to a majority of humans, and you can actually end up liking them instead of pretending to. Sure, they might be a bit skewed towards the cricket net market, and if you don’t play cricket then a few of the references might fly over your head. But there’s no such thing as a story that appeals to literally everybody. You have to make concessions somewhere, and mine are all sports netting related. It’s a much better concession to make than if I’d just written some stupid artsy story that no one really enjoys.
Come to think of it, why am I even here?? It’s summer. I could be using this time to play a bit of rugby with my ACTUAL mates.
-Damien