Dear Writer: Please Write About My Cat

I find there are certain downsides to being “one who writes.” (I still feel awkward and embarrassed calling myself a “writer,” because I feel haven’t earned the title yet.)

One such downside: annoyance when someone (my grandma, or an old classmate I run into by accident) goes, “You should write a story about that!” and it’s something dumb, like getting cut off in traffic, or their cat, and I go, “Ha! Maybe. That could be interesting.” (Translation: Hell will freeze over first.)

It can be equally irritating when people ask, “You’re not going to put me in a story, are you?” Or worse, “You should totally put me in a story.”

The biggest question I want to ask any of these people is why. Why write about your cat or your life or how peanut butter is literally the best thing invented. If they can’t answer, my point is made. If they give me an interesting angle or anecdote, I want to tell them, so you write it, that’s yours.

I think I know why I write—I think it has something to do with human contact, a simple act of seeing people and trying to understand. We tend to trivialize people and relationships often with our instagram/snapchat/@InstaSpazzyChat#iheartgrammar#sarcasmisntfunny world.  I get depressed to imagine my brain hosting a library of people I have known that are confined to the physical structures of their "books," the simple facts about them (or maybe the things they’ve “liked” or the things they “follow”). So I try to let people know, if I can, that I do see more.  And probably, so do others.

And maybe that’s one of the particular rewards of being “one who writes.”

This past Sunday I was having a coffee with an old friend, and since we were struggling to find things to talk about after years of growing apart, he started showing me pictures on his phone from his vacations in Hong Kong.  In one of the pictures, I saw another person I recognized—a guy named Joe I had crossed paths with for one brief month of my life a year ago.  How very random/unlikely/amazing.  I’d barely thought of him in months.

But then I started thinking about all the things I remembered about him, the things I’d thought of him.  He had a fixation with oranges.  He was a barely contained ball of energy.

And almost by accident, I wrote words and words and images and dialogue about Life and Time and Relationships.  I may have also mentioned ginger-and-beet flavored smoothies.  Only at the end did I even mention Joe, and that all this had been triggered by seeing him in a picture.  And then, because why not, I sent it to him.

His response:

I’m in tears right now and I don’t even know why. 

(I should add, Joe never asked me to write about him.)

I want to tell people: I may never write about your cat. Or your job. Or your proposal-story. You might have to tell those stories yourself. But that doesn't mean you’ll never find something or someone you recognize.  That doesn’t mean what I write is not, in some way, about you.

 -Lissa Horneber, Creative Nonfiction Editor at Blue Earth Review

Understanding Why You Need to Write

Welcome to the second ever blog post from The Blue Earth Review! I'm Bradley, Fiction Editor for the magazine along with Dennis Herbert for the upcoming year. I'm a first year MFA student at Minnesota State, Mankato, and the Assistant to the Director of the Good Thunder Reading Series. 

Understanding Why You Need to Write

I was reading the October/November issue of The Writer’s Chronicle—a great piece from Michael Shou-Yung Shum called the Golden Pelt on recommendation from a friend—and I realized that I had a fear of not writing well, because I did not understand the proper importance of my own writing. The fear of not writing well can be as paralyzing as any other for a writer. This fear is even as negative to the production of new work as the dreaded writers block. It is writer’s block’s negative mother-in-law that talks down about your house and your job. But we as writers only get a limited span of years to create as much of our art as possible. We can seek MFAs, writing groups, mentorships, but all of these cannot create what we need to understand; that we need to write. That our time is growing shorter every day. Did you spend your allotted two hours yesterday writing? Or did you get caught up checking your email? Facebook? Or did you hunker down and keep yourself in that chair and write?

There’s two big implications of allowing the fear of not writing well to keep you from writing. The first, as I stated is that you now have wasted that day and your days of possibly putting out great work has just shortened by one. The second is that if you don’t keep writing, like a flabby Pectoralis major not used since high school basketball, you lose what you don’t use. I know I rhymed, I’m sorry.

When we look back at a lot of the greatest writers what do we see? We see a drive to write, a desire that is greater than any fear they have. Henry James and Charles Dickens prolific careers alone earned them their legacy. From this we have to understand that our writing is greater than not just our fear, but ourselves. The stories we have to tell through shorts, novels, essays, and poems can connect to someone else and mean something to their life. That is why our writing isn’t just for us. When we understand that, we know the true importance of our work, and writing, whether scary or not, must be done.

We've all noticed after some extended hiatus from writing, that our skill suffers. We must like gym-rats keep using our creative muscles, our narrative brawn. And if we do, we get better. We notice our smaller mistakes. We create without fear of running out of ideas. We write better, stronger, works that can portend beyond themselves and reach towards that goal of art. And at that point what’s left for us to be afraid of?


When we understand the proper importance of our writing. When we flex our flabby muscles, atrophied from fear and put them to work with the best ideas we have and continue to write, we can cast aside the fears of not writing well or rejection and put down line after line of what we need to. We can understand that we fit into a larger role in society that is needed and beneficial.

-Bradley Cole