The Most Important Question
I had the good fortune of serving as a guest speaker in a fiction writing class at Bluffton University on Tuesday. I’ve been to classes there different times, but this is the first actual writing class I’ve spoken to. I’ve been invited to education classes, theater classes, and Mennonite history classes, which have great students, but not necessarily ones who want to know about the actual writing.
The class came up with some great questions, such as:
What is the best way to include personal experiences in your writing?
How many drafts do you do of a book?
What do you think of books where people die at the end? (which led into a whole discussion of how much I hated the end of Pay it Forward, and they agreed)
Who are some of your favorite authors and why do you like them?
How do you avoid cliches while you write — in prose as well as plot?
Fun questions to talk about. And, being writers themselves, they had some personal anecdotes to share, as well. There was one student who has already completed two manuscripts! Hard to believe with the busy-ness of college life.
It was interesting, though, that the question I had the most passion about what this: Do you have a writing community? Does one need one? And is your blog your writing community?
I’ve written here about this before, but it bears repeating — the mystery writing community is one of the best I’ve ever been in. And yes, the blog definitely is part of that community. An important part. I also have Sisters in Crime (national and local), conferences (such as Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, Magna cum Murder, and Murder and Mayhem in Muskego), and a whole phalanx of on-line friends that I get to see in person maybe once or twice a year, if I’m lucky. But I’d be lost without them.
As writers, we spend the majority of our work day alone in our office pounding away at the keyboard (or staring at it) and I, for one, need that human interaction, even if it is on-line. Tonight I’ll attend the local Sisters in Crime meeting, which I haven’t been to for months and have really missed it. If any of you want to head over to Lima for some great talk about books, come by The Meeting Place on Market at 6:00. We’d love to see you.
