Workshops

Over at Paperback Writer Lynn Viehl has been hosting Virtual Workshops (and mag giveaways!) for aspiring writers.

Today's missive is on increasing your range as a writer. An excellent post, filled with ideas and concepts you might like to try. It certainly rang familiar with me.

It brought to mind that I'm not a one genre writer. I started with a romance - a bad one, thought not, perhaps, destined for the deep, fiery pit of oblivion. From there, I went to science fiction, science fantasy, romantic suspense, dark fantasy and back to science fiction.

No genre is beyond me. Why? Because as a kid a lived in a house filled with books. It wasn't uncommon to see one or all of eight of us sitting around reading. When we didn't know what a word meant, the catch-cry was "Look it up!". Yeah, we had two sets of encyclopedia and a dozen different dictionaries and thesaurus. There was always a source.

My parents read everything. Morning newspapers, magazines, and more genres than you can poke a Whippy stick at: westerns, romance, thrillers, mainstream, biographies, horror, kids books, adventure, humour, classics, the list goes on.

Our shelves were crammed with Zane Grey, John Buchan, Barbara Cartland (eek!), Georgette Heyer, Geoffrey Farnol, Leslie Charteris, L.M. Montgomery, J.D. Macdonnell, Louis L'Amour, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Chaucer, Trevanian, P.G. Wodehouse, Ogden Nash, Heinlein, Welles, Verne, Oscar Wilde, A.A. Milne...

Of course, I didn't find their issue of the Karma Sutra until I was about sixteen and I thought: My God! No wonder they've got six kids!

I've always been a writer. I told stories to my youngest sister from age six, wrote my first complete story at age eleven (James Bondish, no less, though I'd never read Ian Fleming at that stage) and continued to write fiction even as a journalist. At no time did I give up reading, or writing. Fiction-wise, a complete novel didn't turn up until I was in my thirties, when I made time to write.

The stories never leave me; they are lurking in the shadows, awaiting a time I'll notice them.

Today, being a writer was brought home to me by my eldest sister. I was trying to explain one of the workshops PBW had on concepts and expressing a 200k book in 25 words or less. She waxed lyrical on the topic, then stopped, looked at me and shrugged.

"What do I know about concepts? I'm not a writer." She's right: she's not a writer, but she is an artist, a painter. A brilliant one if she took the time to put brush to canvas.

Maybe the difference was she looked at the pictures, studied them, absorbed the nuances, while I looked at the words and studied them, researched the meanings and understood a different concept.

Writing, to me, is a joy; not simply an expression of an idea. As long as I live, I will always be a writer. It's a part of me that won't die, even when I ignored it. It lives inside me, as much as an accountant dreams of numbers, or a scientist is enamoured by the need to know or an engineer needs to build.

It's nice to know there are other people out there with the same 'affliction'.