A Note on Writers and Writing from My Cousin

This week is a reading-writing-workshop week and so I thought it was a wonderful, happy accident that a "guest blog" arrived in my email in-box from my cousin, Spring Warren. Earlier she had offered to write a on writing. After all, she is a published author of several works, including her latest on gardening! (She has a sister named Summer, and a brother whose middle name is Winter . . . my parents chose such boring names for my sisters and me!) So, here she is:

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ARE WRITERS BORN, OR MADE?

One of the questions I get asked the most when I give readings or appear on a panel (where I have to pretend to know something), is if I think writers are born with the talent or if I think that fiction is a learned skill. When I answer that I think storytelling is a skill people are born with I usually notice several people sagging in disappointment. I figure those folks who look bereft are people who likely want to write stories, but have noticed that it isn’t a skill they themselves seem to have been fortuitously born with. I sympathise. I am one of them. And so I clarify.

Humans are born storytellers. Telling stories, both largely factual, or greatly fictional, is how we communicate and so we practice every day. “How was your day?” prompts a story. “Did you hear about the break in?” prompts a story. “Why didn’t you get your work finished?” prompts a story. Even jokes are tiny stories, and maybe the best indication that we are all storytellers at heart. Jokes have characters, a setting, a beginning, a middle, and a great ending. Everyone loves to tell a good joke.

But often someone will point out that lots of people can’t tell a joke well. Admittedly, lots of people can’t tell a story well, either. Lots of people bore the pants off lots of other people in life yammering on about dull stuff or good stuff in disastrous order.

True. Some people are better at telling a story than others. And some people work on it and become better storytellers.

Writers work on it. That they like telling stories enough to work on telling them better is pretty much the thing that makes writers sit for hours, days, weeks, and years in order to make books. So perhaps the real question is, are writers born with the talent for sitting for hours and days into weeks into years? That, I couldn’t guess.

GROWING food AND EATING well on -
www.thequarteracrefarm.com

TURPENTINE!
http://springwarren.com

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Check her out at Amazon.com!
Hope you enjoyed these insights from cousin, Spring!