Thursday Writing Essential

Goals: to write and,perhaps, publish a series of creative nonfiction vignettes based on stories of my ancestors and my life in the Appalachian coal fields. If I'm not published, I'd be proud to leave the stories as part of my legacy.

Purpose: To bring to life the interesting, meaningful stories my people lived--not to express emotion--but to understand how past influences converge to create present attitudes, beliefs, and values. I teach this concept from an academic perspective and would like to tell my own stories in an interesting way.

Concerns: I've drafted several short stories, but think they are really bad. I digress too much into history but wish to delineate characters more specifically and give them voice. I want to learn more about how to analyze my work: what to delete, what's needed, how to decide if I need less narrative more dialogue, etc.

Honestly, I'm new at this and don't know whether to outline first or just start writing.

Truth: I fantasize the vignettes as a 47 episode Blockbuster movie--along the lines of Centennial. :)

Thanks for asking,
Peace,
judith

My goals as a writer are many and varied. I'm a former teacher with more opinions than I was allotted listeners. So, I want to get my opinions out there where people can see them. Not so much because I think I'm right all the time, but because people forget to think sometimes. My purpose in this new life as a writer is to wake people up to their own thinking. I have no problem playing the Devil's Advocate and take the obviously wrong side of an argument, if it means that the others involved in the dialogue are forced to follow through their thinking to a conclusion, be it logical or not. Topics don't concern me so much as the take on the different topics that are discussed.

I want to make a living from home. That is my driving force for becoming published. The driving force for my writing is to push other people's buttons.

"C'est la vie"

I have some short term goals of editing anything I've ever written and making it better. The long term goal is to see my romance stories turned into novels, or a series with a bunch of short stories in them. I think every writer likes to keeping honing, always improving themselves to their satisfaction. I know I'm that way.
Well, I use all my writing as a way to get out a lot of feelings that I've kept bottled up for years. When one of my heroines stand up to the hero/villain/whoever, I get a thrill from that. As a person who was emotionally abused for years, this is a bit of a therapy for me.