Interesting responses.
For me, people always told me growing up that I should be a writer because I wrote well. Got A's in english, literature classes. But I always got BETTER grades in math and science classes, so it was like, "If I try being a writer, then I'm really intentionally not using my best talents." Yet, a career in math or science didn't appeal to me, so I figured writing would be the free-est (sp?) and easiest way to make a living. But still, I didn't write. I jotted down ideas, I always planned to write at some future time when I wasn't working, but the day never came.
Then, over the past years, I've gotten interested in politics and philosophy and actually thinking about how to make the world a better place, or perhaps just how to make my life better. From that, arises an urge to write. An urge to share my ideas.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, for me, writing is not something to do because you are good at it, or because it seems like a fun career. I don't think you can really be a great writer unless you really have something to say. You have to figure out what message you want to communicate to the world, and then illustrate it with a story, and then you will feel passion for that story. A story is like a person, and you start by giving it a heart. That is the moral or message. You then wrap it with a skeleton, which is the outline of your story structure. Then you fill it in with all the detail work.
I never really watched a writer working. When I was younger, I guess I always thought I'd write by just sitting down and writing. Like I could produce a novel just writing stream of thought stuff. Maybe that is possible, maybe I'll even do it one day, but I know that that methodology never got me to actually sit down and create anything significant in my past. The times I'd try, I'd get frustrated with my efforts, possibly have writer's block. So I now choose my moral/message-outline-detail model. Because the desire to convince people that my message is right, and should be accepted, gives me the passion for the rest of it.
I also recall that a lot of my ideas for story's were gimmick ideas, like what if you travel through time and become your own father. I have decided that gimmicks are weak. Sitting around trying to think of the next Matrix-like idea. It is very difficult to make a writing worthwhile if you are basing it all on having a clever setting, clever circumstances. Those things are great, but they are secondary to the message and, also, to the realism of the characters themselves.
I think I can come up with good messages, and frame them with good outlines, setting and circumstances. I wonder, though, at my skill at creating real characters. I mean, I really only know myself. Everyone else I know only indirectly and can't be sure what ticks in them. Particularly women. If there is any weakness in my writing, I expect that is where it will be found. We'll see.
~psychoblast~
p.s. Oh, I like the short story idea. If it is a collection of bluelighter stories, sold as a bluelight work, then I think we would probably need to have some drug (or ecstasy) related stories. You might prefer not writing about that stuff, but I think would best give coherence to the idea of a Bluelight Stories collection.
As another (or alternative) idea, I wrote a short story on here called "The Happiest Day" that was my attempt to write out one of the best days I can think of. If you go read it, remember it is a first draft and I know it needs work. But, anyway, it seems to me that we all have a "happiest day" in our past, and that that would be something worth memorializing in writing. If enough people wanted to write their happiest day, in their own styles, and the results were good enough, we could publish a collection of short stories called "Happiness" or something like that (we can probably come up with a cleverer title). It would be something new in literature, to the best of my knowledge. An anthology of partial autobiographical pieces created for the anthology and sharing a similar theme. It could potentially lead to a series of autobiographical anthologies with different themes.
