I know – what an incredibly self-centered PIE!
What if I told you that the thing I never had that I
regret the most is a writer – a real, live, published writer – who believed in
me? Your response?
I have several points here. The first one is that when I
joined SFFWA, I thought that I would find one of those long-sought-after
people. A WRITER. A real writer who would maybe read my stuff and then comment
on it so that I could become a better writer. A mentor, perhaps. I KNOW that
writers write. I KNOW they are busy! The problem is that not all of them write
all the time. Not all of them are busy all the time. I don’t want to monopolize
their time. I just wanted someone to reach out to me. I wanted help.
Never happened.
So I got busy. First off, I joined a local writers group
that (I think) had a name and is something I’ve written about here – http://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2013/07/writing-advice-bruce-bethkes-twelve.html.
That eventually fizzled out (as practically all writers groups do) and left me
high and dry. I tried approaching other writers at conventions or wrote to them
asking for advice, but no one was really interested in helping me.
Truth? I have heard the horror stories of writers who
offered to help other less-experienced writers, and were stalked by them, hurt
by them, or accused of copying them. One of the classic incidents is here – http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/judge-rejects-copyright-suit-against-stephen-king/nQKkk/.
That was NOT what I wanted to do.
Later, with the arrival of the internet, I joined a
couple of online writers groups and while the interaction and feedback was
good, after a few years, my writing skills had moved beyond most of those in
the group and my use of the groups has petered out to simply reading their
posts. The professional writers are busy writing and busy with life. However,
some of them don’t appear to have any intention of doing anything but promoting
their own writing with endless Facebook posts about their next “thing”…
Without any other choice before me, I finally discovered
that there was only one thing to do: become the person that I had always wanted
to have. I joined an organization that sent writers into the public schools and
did that for several years. In the classroom – the science classroom – I kept
on the lookout for young writers by occasionally talking about my own writing.
I tried starting a writer’s club one time…but that was pretty lame. I got a job
by creating a summer school class called Writing To Get Published.
Those things happened some fifteen years ago and since
that time, through concerted effort on my part and persistently reading the
manuscripts of young people from third grade on up, writers have emerged into
the world!
First and foremost is my daughter – both writer and
artist (with a BS in psychology now in search of a graduate school), she started
submitting work for publication several years ago. Another handful of young men
and women have published since I first met them in my WTGP classroom, and I’ve
met and helped nurture another handful at my school. Most of them are off to
college or college graduates – but all of them are still writing, still
submitting, or still planning to begin submitting or looking at pursuing
college careers in different kinds of writing.
Since then, I’ve even met professional writers who have
volunteered to mentor my pursuit of publication and I’ve written about one
above and under the label of WRITING ADVICE over to the right, there are
several men and women whose published writerly wisdom I’ve commented on at
length.
I suppose then the take away here is that if you want
help in your writing, you have to give help in your writing.
Hmmm. That is not where I saw this essay going, but this
is a good place to stop!
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