Greetings to any regular readers of my blog! I don't keep up with this blog very regularly, and I apologize. I'm under no illusions that I actually have fans, but I sometimes imagine that people drop by just to see what I've been up to :)
I have shown some of my writing to people who are professional authors, who have actually sold books, and so forth. At least one of them teaches writing, and I believe another of them has just started a blog intended for authors just setting out to write.
None of these professional writers are very close friends, so of course they're obliged to be polite to me, and not disparage my writing by being brutally honest. When they're encouraging, I know better than to take the encouragement as high praise. On the other hand, when they're critical, I'm not immediately crushed, either. I'm beginning to really believe that writing is a very personal thing, and I'm going to be cautious with how I respond positively to negative feedback, if you know what I mean.
One recurring complaint was that my characters were all improbably beautiful. I just come right out and say that so-and-so was stunningly beautiful. I know this is a flaw in my writing, and I can jolly well describe the character as quite ordinary-looking, while I imagine to myself that the character is simply gorgeous! What's going on here is that I started writing just to have an imaginary world full of my friends, and if I'm going to do that, why not be surrounded by real stunners, however imaginary, instead of the sort of people I do find myself surrounded with?
The big drawback is that women don't like to read about gorgeous women, at least the women whom I want to cultivate as readers. I certainly like to read about beauties, but apparently I'm kind of alone in that regard. I think, even if the character is physically beautiful, it's more important that the person's motivations should be plausible. Or, in complete contrast, the person's motivations could be completely opaque, in which case there has to be something that the reader can relate to. It's nice to have an enigmatic character, but too much of an enigma is a little hard to believe.
So, anyway, I started writing a story about a middle-aged woman who was a rather unsuccessful professor at a minor college, a situation about which, on the face of it, I knew a fair amount. "Write what you know," they always say, completely forgetting that Jane Rowling could not have know very much about being a gifted young boy magician, nor could Tolkien have known much about being a Hobbit. So, to be a mediocre writer: write what you know. If you're going to be a fabulous writer, write about anything you please! Isn't that silly?
Anyway, the story I'm talking about is called Emily, after the central character. She is given a semester off by the Dean, just because her most recent classes were terrible failures. Her ex-husband has just died, and left her a nice little car, but she gets a call saying that there is a claim on her car, and she has to surrender it.
That's the last straw. Emily gets in her car, and heads out west, completely incommunicado with the Law, the College, and most of her friends back home. The story is essentially about what she does on her spree.
[To be continued.]
Kay
