{"id":1283,"date":"2021-06-11T02:11:25","date_gmt":"2021-06-11T10:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/?p=1283"},"modified":"2021-06-10T15:27:38","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T23:27:38","slug":"what-i-write-and-why-i-write-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/2021\/06\/11\/what-i-write-and-why-i-write-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What I Write and Why I Write It"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Deborah J. Ross interviewed me for her blog<\/a>, one of her questions made me reflect on myself as a writer. She asked, \u201c[H]ow does your work differ from others in your genre?\u201d<\/p>\n

I reflected a bit, and came to this realization: \u201cMy stories sound like my stories, regardless of what subset of the genre they fit in.\u201d\"For<\/a><\/p>\n

Then this week, I shared a couple of poems I wrote with my sister, Katrinka Moore<\/a>, who is a poet. (I don\u2019t consider myself a poet; I\u2019ve just been playing around with poetry to learn new ways of looking at language and shake up my creativity.)<\/p>\n

She made this observation: \u201cYour poems are very you \u2013 as you speaking \u2013 and yet very much poems.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think a similar observation could be applied to my essays, maybe even my book reviews. What I write sounds like something I would write or say. The only significant writing I\u2019ve done that doesn\u2019t sound like me on some core level is probably straightforward journalism. That might also explain why journalism never satisfied my writing urge, even though I found the work interesting and rewarding: It didn\u2019t have anything to do with me.<\/p>\n

My stories, my essays, my poems, all of them have everything to do with me. I don\u2019t mean they\u2019re autobiographical; except for a few pieces I call \u201cflash memoir,\u201d most of them aren\u2019t. But there\u2019s something at the core that comes from me and the way I think and look at the world.<\/p>\n

The more I think about this, the more I think this explains why I write and why writing the things I do is very important to me. <\/p>\n

In replying to Deborah, I used the word \u201ctone\u201d to describe it, but now I think the word \u201cvoice\u201d might be even more accurate. Since I\u2019ve never been in an MFA program or otherwise studied the art of writing academically, I\u2019m not always good at figuring out what different labels mean.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m an instinctive writer. It\u2019s not that I haven\u2019t learned some basics over the years, like the core rules of grammar or how to say something clearly, but what I did with those basics was to incorporate them into myself so that I tend to apply them using my gut instinct.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve frequently mentioned, I learned most of what I know about writing by having my mother, a professional editor, edit my papers for school. What I learned from her suggestions taught me more than any English teacher.<\/p>\n

(Though I still remember what I gleaned from diagramming sentences in the seventh grade. I internalized a lot about structure from that.)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>Of course, I also learned from reading.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still doing that kind of learning both directly and indirectly. That\u2019s why I took the poetry class, to take in more information and internalize it.<\/p>\n

In writing groups, I often take in information from good critiques of other people\u2019s works, because I get some sense of what is working. I also sometimes very much disagree with a particular critique, to the point where I want to argue with the critiquer and persuade the author not to listen.<\/p>\n

In getting critiques on my own work, I generally prefer commentary to line edits (except for things like typos). I listen, I internalize, and I revise the story where the comments make sense to me.<\/p>\n

It is not a linear process.<\/p>\n

The desire to write from something personal to me explains why I\u2019ve never been particularly interested in doing novelizations of movies or otherwise writing in a world created by someone else. Nor do I want to work on movie scripts or do other kinds of writing that require a lot of collaboration with others.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure I could learn to do those things, but for me they would be more like journalism and not satisfying beyond the basic pleasure of doing a job well.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why my answer to another of Deborah\u2019s questions \u2013 what advice I\u2019d give to aspiring writers \u2013 was to figure out what you really want to write. At its core, writing is a skill that can be applied in many directions and there are lots of ways to work as a writer in this world.<\/p>\n

The key is finding the kind of writing that makes you feel whole.<\/p>\n

Anyway, while my two novels are very different books \u2013 The Weave<\/em><\/a> is first contact science fiction while For the Good of the Realm<\/em><\/a> is fantasy with swordswomen and witches \u2013 I think a reader can tell they were written by the same person. Feel free to read both and give me your opinion!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Deborah J. Ross interviewed me for her blog, one of her questions made me reflect on myself as a writer. She asked, \u201c[H]ow does your work differ from others in your genre?\u201d I reflected a bit, and came to this realization: \u201cMy stories sound like my stories, regardless of what subset of the genre […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,18],"tags":[287,195,274],"class_list":["post-1283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","category-writing","tag-deborah-j-ross","tag-for-the-good-of-the-realm","tag-the-weave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1283"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1284,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1283\/revisions\/1284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}