Keep the Pennies:Be Diverse

So, you’re a writer?  This means you do nothing but sit in a room by yourself drinking whiskey, smoking cigarettes and snorting lines of coke.  When you wake up?  You drink coffee with more cigarettes, whiskey and cocaine.  Right?

Not remotely.

Believe it or not, writers are human beings.  While some writers do have moments or days or months, years even, of great isolation and substance abuse issues, present company included, our lives aren’t limited to this.  As said, writers are people too.

Writers are mums and dads, mechanics and shop workers. Writers are student-activists and gamers.  Writers are tech programmers and sound engineers, movie fanatics and gourmet chefs.  We are the secret agents of the art world but yet again, we are so much more.

Take me: yes, I am a writer first and foremost.  I am also a lover and a fighter who will kill and die for those I love.  I am an artist yet am no stranger to the grease, dirt and sweat of hard work.  I am a die hard philosopher yet I will tell you the dirtiest of jokes with a straight or smiling face in between sets at the gym.  For lack of a better term, for which I apologize for sounding so arrogant, I am diverse.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of writers out there who do nothing but write.  Or read.  Or talk about writing and reading. Or blog about writing and reading.  Maybe “unfortunately” was the wrong word but I tell you which word isn’t wrong: boring.  Very few things suck harder than boring.  Maybe “unfortunately” was the right word after all.  Nobody wants robots.

Me, personally, I’ve found that doing different things and taking up different hobbies only enhances my writing experience.  Human beings, we absorb energy from what we do so I feel that bringing those energies to what you create can only lead to better, more diverse creations.

In short, everything that I do outside of writing only helps when it comes time to get down to (writing) business.

How Can This Help You?  There is nothing I can say that will make any of you broaden your horizons or spice of life but I’ll leave you with this…No matter what you are, never allow it to define who you are.

That’s it for this week, guys.

Robert Orange

@WordsByOrange