Tag Archives: writer

A writer or an artist?

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Throughout my school career, I loved art. In fact, when I graduated high school, I enrolled in the Colorado Institute of Art for Computer Animation – which is how I ended up here in Denver. I thought at the time that my art was my life, but I soon learned that I was not an “artist.” I didn’t have the right type of thinking to really fit in with the hard-core “artists” around me.

Disheartened, I quit school, and felt very much like a drifter for a few years. I refused to pick up pencil or paintbrush and consequently forgot quite a bit of what I’d learned.

Then, one day, my mother sent something to me. It was a book on writing that some well-meaning relative had given me for my sixth birthday. I looked over the pages and the memories came flooding back. I used to write. Not just as a six-year-old, but well into my high school years. I had given it up to concentrate on my art.

So here I am now, a writer, and happy for it. However, my love of drawing never really went away. I still do it, but I am more cautious; I call my drawings “doodles” and no more than that.

Still, it’s a great deal of fun to combine my writing with my doodling. I like to draw the characters I write about. See, this is what s/he looks like!

I’ve done several doodles for the manuscript I’m currently working on, “Blue Tiger.” I’ve attached the latest one.

How many of us are creative in more ways than one?

Jestler, drawn by Rachel DuChene

Around the Interwebs

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A couple of agent blogs have come to my attention in the last few days, and since I had commentary on both, I thought I’d mention them here.

The first is by outstanding agent Nathan Bransford. This post was brought to my attention by our own Jeff Kirvin. It’s entitled ‘The One Question Authors Should Never Ask Themselves When Reading’.  Go and read it. No, go ahead. I’ll wait.

Don’t forget to bookmark his blog. I highly recommend it for writers at any stage.

I really like the points he made in that article, and agree. But I don’t think ‘do I like this’ is a useless question to ask yourself – as long as you don’t stop there. Consider WHY you like what you’re reading, or don’t like it. Once you’ve read it, pick it apart and see what bits you most enjoyed. Where did you skip past paragraphs, or get bumped out of the story’s grip on you, and how could the author have prevented that?

Reading with an eye to how you would do the same thing is an occupational hazard of being an author. You should still get lost in fiction – we’re readers first, after all – but there’s nothing wrong with admiring cool things as they go by, tucking them away in your head for later. And nothing wrong with reading bad fiction and seeing how you could do better.

The second article was brought to you by the magic of Twitter. This is from top agent Rachelle Gardener, entitled Managing Expectations. Go forth… read, bookmark, return.

The next to last paragraph resonated most strongly with me. As authors in a rapidly changing publishing environment, it’s really required of us to keep our expectations under control.

It’s always a wrench for a new author to realize what ‘getting published’ really means to them – usually a far cry from what they thought. Certainly the beginning of a journey, not the end.

But nowadays, with things changing so fast the word ‘book’ doesn’t even mean what it did when you were a child, it’s even more strange. We would be shooting ourselves in the foot to hold any unrealistic expectation. Ambition and optimism are good – expectation must be fluid. Discover the difference between what you desire and what you expect. The world may give you the former, if you work for it… the latter can cripple you.