John Kingston is a journalist and essayist
whose contributions have appeared in Huffington Post and Blue Heron. His novel, The Portraits of Gods, is scheduled to be released in 2015 by Anaphora Literary Press. He resides in the Midwest with his wife and two daughters.
You can check out John Kingston’s personal website at: www.authorjohnkingston.com
The best way to irritate and alienate other authors is to brag about your accomplishments.
For most of us, however, that’s not a problem. We deplore the self-promotion aspect of marketing our books.
That’s one reason we should have tribes. We need writer cohorts, such as you’ll find here at this site, who don’t just cheer us on, but celebrate our achievements. Which is a ‘round-about way of introducing a fact that I want to scream from the proverbial rooftops of the blogosphere. (more…)
Learning by doing isn’t the hard way; it’s the only way.
Writers, by definition, have to learn by doing.
“A writer writes.” Yeah, duh…
It’s that “doing” that separates the dreamers from the aspirants and achievers.
“A writer writes,” uttered with conviction by a fictional character, was one of the catalysts that induced me to commit to full-time writing. I wrote now and then for non-profits. I reveled in the fact that my cousins all thought I should write a book after they read my annual holiday letter. Strangely though, it was the urging in the young adult novel Sahara Special that made me start taking risks.
“A writer writes,” struck a chord with me. Ability, creativity, ideas, and aspirations didn’t mean anything if I wasn’t actively writing and developing my craft. Finding my voice.
“I didn’t know what I didn’t know.” With that, John Kingston pretty much summed up the Redwoods Society writers’ experience with launching a group website. Blogging and curating a website require different skill sets than writing a book. The Redwoods Society writers are also learning by doing—and by adjusting and growing to find our collective voice and to refine our focus.
We could try to do all that based on others’ expertise. In fact, we did—try that is. But, we didn’t know… you know… all those things that we didn’t know.
Redwoods Society grew out of a meeting of minds and purposes at the 2013 San Francisco Writers conference. We expected writers from the West Coast to join us. One of those things we didn’t know then was that four out of five of us would live in Michigan.
We also didn’t know that the mantle of “expert” or “teacher” would sit heavily on our shoulders. We’re all learning and experimenting. All of us are much more comfortable with sharing our journey as writers and authors than telling others the right way to do it.
Writers aren’t bound by a geographic region.
Writers can help themselves by helping each other.
This site will continue to be a site full of content for writers by writers, a meeting place for writers to share content and thoughts.
In addition to our blog, we’ll be rolling out some additional resources pages and prompts. No matter where our travels might take us, we look forward to meeting you here to share the road less written.
We all find ways to inspire our writing. For me, it is often a location. I am especially partial to a nice café, a local Starbucks, or a bar with a nice ambiance. Most of all I find places that inspire memories and a sense of nostalgia to be the best writing environments.
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