AM I A WRITER?

By Ruth P. Saunders

Am I a writer or a person who sometimes writes?

According to Wikipedia, “A writer is a person who uses written words in various styles and techniques to communicate ideas. Writers produce various forms of literary art and creative writing such as novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, and essays as well as various reports and news articles that may be of interest to the public.”

I have communicated ideas through written words for many years. Early on, it was a task, such as the reports or essays assigned at school, or the memos, letters, reports, and academic journal articles required for work. I did not consider myself as a writer because my compositions fulfilled job requirements.

After years of publishing academic articles, I authored a textbook. I enjoyed the challenge of expressing and organizing the content in my specialty area for students, practitioners, and researchers. It felt good to contribute to my professional field as an academic writer.

I retired from academia and now write creative nonfiction stories, essays, and poems. This has led me to wonder, “What is a real writer?”. Here are some reflections on this question.

Do writers need a certain type or amount of education? I can see some advantages of this, but beyond literacy and ability to express thoughts, educational credentials don’t seem necessary.

Does it require that one publish, earn a certain amount, or at least aspire to make money through writing? That describes being a professional writer rather than a writer per se. I write for motivations other than financial rewards, although some writers earn pay for their work.

Do the literary products have to be judged “good” for one to qualify as a writer? I hope not and don’t think so. We may agree the quality of written pieces varies, but they are all created by writers. Some are simply more skilled than others.

So, am I a writer? I don’t have a degree in writing, haven’t published my creative work, don’t aspire to earn money, and get mixed reviews on the quality of my products.

Yes, I believe I am.

There are two reasons for this. First, writing is what I do. I engage in the writing process, which involves a way of experiencing the world as well as the act of regularly putting words on a page.

Second, writing defines who I am. As part of my self-identity, it connects me to the larger world of past, present, and future human beings who strive to harness the power and ambiguities of words to express thoughts and ideas.

Embracing my writer identity removed a shadow from my worldview, allowing me to see and write with increased clarity.

WRITE ABOUT AN 80-YEAR-OLD CHARACTER LIKE SHE WAS MAUDE

By El Ochiis

There was this little place in downtown Manhattan that showed art-house films or “little cult gems” as they called them. On the marquee was Harold and Maude. I plunked down my ticket price and meekly entered the ornate wooden doors, really an old New York brownstone turned movie theatre.  

The film had been described as a dead-pan disillusioned nineteen-year old, obsessed with suicide and a loveable, fun-loving, eighty-year old eccentric. Harold, an only child who dropped out of school, was obsessed with death. He spent his time around his house, a huge mansion in California, staging his own suicides – hangings, slit throats, drownings, guns, gun shots, fires.  

Harold’s odd behavior was engaging to the viewer, but extremely troublesome for his mother, who decided it was time for him to grow up and find a nice, young wife. She purchased him a new Jaguar and signed him up for a match-making service. Harold promptly retrofitted the Jaguar into a hearse and staged more suicides to scare away female suitors. 

There seemed to have been no cure for Harold, until, ironically, he finds new life at one of those funerals. Sitting in the pews of a church, at some, complete stranger’s demise, he befriends Maude, who visits funerals for her own amusement. The two strike up an instant friendship and Harold is fascinated by Maude’s free-wheeling approach to life. Maude would steal a car if she needed a ride or uproot a tree from a city street to be replanted in the forest.

When asked to explain her unorthodox actions, Maude replied: “I’m merely acting as a gentle reminder: here today, gone tomorrow.”

Exposed to such a breath of fresh air, Harold would come to learn Maude’s perspective: that there is nothing but beauty in the birth, growth, death and rebirth of all living things. Maude was captivating and electrifying – the actress who played her, Ruth Gordon, was seventy-six. David Kamp and Lawrence Levi, the writers, became my heroes and I wanted to write about age, especially those years beyond fifty-five, better; we all should – coming of age wasn’t the problem; ageism was.

  

If we, as scribes, are going to take the authority to write about something that we all will, eventually, experience, we should have the responsibility to do so with greater creativity.  

I have a character in a story who I have described as having eaten blues for breakfast for thirty-five of his eighty-seven, melancholy years before he sat down at a restaurant where a young lady, who looked like a roadie for the Black Crows, stole his heart.

Yeah, I will always keep the script from Harold and Maude in the back of my brain when I pen stories with individuals who are heading towards the ninety-year milestone in life – you should too. If you don’t like the movie, then, think about yourself, how would you want to describe you when you are eighty-three?

THE BRIDGE

By Kasie Whitener

After workshop last week, I spent 45 minutes digging through boxes of old CDs looking for the Haydn trumpet solo described in the pages I took for critique.

It’s a 90-second piece that opens a concerto and it’s on a low-budget compilation album I bought at Sam Goody in 1993. It’s achingly beautiful, moving, deep, rich, and soul-healing. I can close my eyes and hear it to this day. But I couldn’t find the CD anywhere.

In the follow-up to my recently-published novel After December, the protagonist and first-person narrator, Brian hears that trumpet solo and is moved to tears. The scene takes place in a church about a year after Tony’s suicide. Brian is looking to reconnect with faith, to heal his soul after the loss of his best friend. Music is the bridge to healing.

Workshop is great for so many things, but the best thing is the confusion, disorientation, and sometimes blatant irritation the readers express over something you’ve submitted. I don’t want a workshop where the readers tell me how wonderful the pages are. I don’t get any better if what I brought in satisfies you.

So, tell me you hate it. And tell me why.

Brian sounds feminine. Is that because a woman read it aloud?

The music connection seems forced. Is that because we don’t think 23 year-old men have an appreciation for classical music?

And more useful than any other feedback was, “I don’t remember that from the first book.”

This is the first time I’ve written a sequel and this point is an important one. The readers who pick up Before Pittsburgh will not know After December as well as I do. The connections from one book to the other have to be made explicitly clear.

It’s not enough to mention Brian listening to the Haydn trumpet solo with Tony. It’s not enough to describe the connection he feels to the piece or how it moves him, a year later, to tears in a public place. If I want the reader to believe the moment, I have to deliver the memory and the present action in equal detail.

On WriteOnSC Saturday morning, we talked about Chekov’s Gun, the literary 'rule' that including a detail in your story obligates you to make that detail matter. If After December’s classical music discussions are going to be relevant in Before Pittsburgh, I need to remind the reader what those discussions were.

I wouldn’t make any progress in my work without my workshop readers. They hold me accountable. They force me to be responsible. They remind me the reader is as much part of the story as the writer is.

I’ve written before about how important critique groups are. I rely on them in a million different ways. Now, if they could only help me find that old CD. I swear it’s here somewhere.

ARE YOU a TORTOISE or a HARE?

By Kasie Whitener

I am probably not going to be one of those writers who makes a living on book sales.

In 2019, I was fortunate to publish my GenX novel After December with Chrysalis Press.

Just 20 years after the first version of the book was written. Just six years after the modern version of the book was dusted off and shared in a workshop. Five years after beta readers. Following a developmental edit and two line-level copy edits, we now have the ninth iteration of the text.

What I’ve learned is that the really good work takes three things: time, persistence, and professionalism.

The story needed to unfurl. I needed to mature as a writer, get some distance on the text, and become capable of recognizing what works and what just doesn’t. (Then cut the latter mercilessly.) Working out character arcs and tracking plot points, tightening scenes to get the most out of them, deepening characters past clichés and into realistic people.

I really wanted to tell this story. I stuck with it. My workshop readers didn’t like the main character. My friends suggested the entire thing was nostalgia. My sister said it was too autobiographical to be public. But Brian’s voice is in my head and so I stayed with this story and I pursued publication knowing when the time was right, I’d know it.

There are a lot of things I’m capable of. Even when it comes to books – writing, designing, marketing, sales – there are a lot of things I know and even more things I could figure out if pressed. But there are professionals who already know those things. Who can be trusted and paid to do the things I am only “capable of.” I hired them.

I’m a tortoise. I take my time, understand the end goal, and move steadily toward it with purpose and intention.

The hares dash by, put their books up on Kindle Unlimited, reduce expenses on marketing by working without a distributor, and work the strategy that volume will cure low margins.

I may not make a lot of money for my publisher (sorry, Alexa!) and I may not build a career for myself that enables me to walk away from teaching. The goal has always been to tell the stories inside me. So I’ll keep writing them. And polishing them. And publishing them (hopefully) so that others can experience them.

Not by the hundreds. But there may be a dozen. And maybe I’ll be invited to speak at literary festivals. And maybe my work will be required reading in an American Lit class. Or maybe it’ll be someone’s favorite book.

Maybe it’ll make someone else want to write, too. Even if it takes 20 years to see the fruit of that labor dangling over the path as the tortoise inches by.