Friday, May 27, 2016

Microstory 330: Competence

Click here for a list of every step.
Natural Skill

The last story I wrote was about natural skill. It was about figuring out what any given student can do best, and fostering that skill within them so that they can pursue happiness in their own way, and at their own pace. It was about the beginning of the race, whereas competence is about the race itself. This is about what someone does once they’ve found their calling. Whenever my father and I got in an argument about my future, he would always say that I had this fantasy that I would “write the next great American novel”. I never admitted it, but that was true. I would hear these stories about Rowling, Paolini, and even Meyer. It’s not that they didn’t struggle, but once they hit that sweet spot, man did their career just take off. I kind of always assumed that, if I were going to be successful as a writer, it was going to be in the same vein. It never occurred to me that my writing would ever just be good enough to get me by, so I’ve warped my entire reality to the fantasy, and it ended up taking me just that side of nowhere. I’ve finally come to grips with the extraordinarily real possibility that this is it for me. I’m going to post very short stories, I’m going to send out little nanofiction jokes, and I’m going to add word origin of the day entries. I’m going to do that for fifty-two years, and I’m not going to do anything else of value. All my research on the future, and of this thing called the longevity escape velocity, has made me okay with that. Because I don’t plan on dying, so I have plenty of time. I’m a competent writer, and this blog is my outlet for that; something I was worried I would never, ever find. As great men say, we can’t all be winners. That doesn’t mean we can’t find success.

Steady Income

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