DONIS CASEY: Write Errant

Happy Cinco de Mayo, Dear Readers, and for those who celebrated, I hope the 4th was with you.

My novelist friend Karen Odden has a great piece of advice for writers: If you want to maintain your career, keep writing the best work you can, AND as you work, keep busy with “writing adjacent” activities. An active online presence, personal appearances, conferences, writers’ groups, teaching…

This has been my life lately – writing-adjacent activities. I’ve recently finished conducting a 10 week hybrid writing workshop (in person and Zoom) for retired professors in the Emeritus College at Arizona State University. Emeritus workshops are different than regular writing classes in that people who spent decades teaching and researching and writing scholarly works don’t need to be taught how to create cogent writing. But there’s a big difference between peer reviewed scholarly work and writing fiction (I hope!) A scientist writing a research paper has to maintain an emotional distance and approach the subject as intellectually as possible. A fiction writer, not so much. So it’s quite interesting to explore the the fantastic, the world-building, the human emotion, the skills of “putting oneself on the page” with a bunch of brilliant, steely-eyed pragmatists. They were all in. Conducting workshops teaches me a lot by the questions I’m asked and the insights the participants offer. It helps me, too, to clarify my own thoughts about the art of fiction, to valiantly attempt to explain the unexplainable.

I’m still writing, of course. For the past year I’ve been working on another historical novel set in the late 19th century here in the U.S. If you’ve read my books, you’ve seen my “heroine” before – a slippery character who I like to think of as a cross between Moll Flanders and Mr. Ripley. There’s a little Odyssey thrown in there, as well.

Speaking of the art of writing, don’t miss my Tell Me Your Story guest this month, former crime reporter Lori Duffy Foster. (https://loriduffyfoster.com) Her books have won the International Impact Book Award and have been nominees or finalists for Agatha, Silver Falchion and Shamus awards. Check out her story right here on this site beginning May 20.