Gleanings from the writers' conference.

Writing

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.”

                                                Earnest Hemingway

At the writers' conference yesterday I heard one theme spoken over and over—don't be discouraged, just keep writing. Almost all the authors were rejected and discouraged and had to jerk themselves back to reality many times before getting a book into publication. Many of them have day-jobs as teachers in colleges and do not rely on the money from book sales to pay the bills. Very few have made the best-seller list with every book.

Another take-away was, write for yourself, and with your only allegiance being to the story itself. Another was, do the research, don't make glaring mistakes in your story, because they are distracting to readers who know better. For example, if you are writing about a train coming through the town at a particular time in history, know what kind of train that would have been, how it would have sounded, and whether or not that type of train even ran on the kind of rails in the place where you've set your novel. Authors spoke of scathing letters they had received from readers for such mistakes.

One thing that is always impressive to me about people who write books for a living is how down to earth and unpretentious they are. Writing is what they do just as another person might be a landscape architect, or a land surveyor. It is their work. It is not glamorous or star-studded. It involves many long hours of work in a setting that you alone can see. It sometimes takes multiple revisions and meticulous and tedious culling and tweaking before it will pass muster with an editor. It, by and large, requires a lonely, self-absorbed existence. On the positive side, writing is soul work. It is satisfying in the same way that finishing a painting, or creating a beautiful line of clothing, or putting the final nail in a brand new house must be.

I came away from the conference thinking—these are just people like me. They don't have any special, heavenly ordained qualities. They are simply people who love words and see stories in everyday life. They allow the thread of a tale to take them, and lead them where it chooses. They have learned to trust the story's truth, regardless of how fantastic it may seem.

                                       In the spirit,

                                          Jane