I wrote several essays in December 2011 during a writing workshop on memoirs I attended in Maui. Rebecca Walker was the instructor.
You walk into a room, out of the sunlight into semi-darkness, and the first question is I wonder if I could skip today? Take a detour and explain later I got sick, didn't feel like I'd be able to contribute. Whatever excuse you can come up with to avoid turning on when you've turned off for a week. And yes, small groups of writers who aren't into fiction must be handled with kid gloves. Each brings a different background, priority, setting, situation and story to the table. And damn it's a big conference table. So I feel like its work. A job, I have to do in order to fulfill some need to rationalize another trip to Maui.
That's the problem. Why do I have to have an excuse, a reason, to get away? To do what I want to do when I want to do it? How did I get into the situation I am in now? Where the dominate part of my day is all about work and what other people want me to do as opposed to what I want to do, and want me to say as opposed to what I really want to say…
The room is still dark, even when the door opens or after the man in the flower-printed shirt puts the lamp on the table and leaves. After a few moments, as the new people attempt to meet each other without passing judgment too quickly about the narrow-minded, the open hearted, the maybe I'm in or maybe I'm out, or the skeptic – the role I love to play (Or do I?) – we wait for the darkness to settle, and our eyes to adjust so we can see without the film of why would you think that? Why would you say that? Who cares?
I've taken a ton of workshops. Lately, I take workshops or participate in writing groups where the participants write popular fiction in particular romance – which by the way is the most sold, best money-making area of publishing today (and has been for about the last ten years). So there. And yeah, I have a chip on my shoulder about it. As do many romance writers when they are locked in a room with writers who disdain popular fiction, or fiction period. The only important writings were written a hundred years ago or at least on a topic with legs like feminism. Or racism, or whatever ism fits your paranoid sensibilities.
Again, I'm trying not to pass judgment because I've been in classes like these before–more often than other popular fiction writers–because I choose to be. I find the content provides intriguing insights that will benefit my writing.
When writing stories or memoirs It's the author's unique viewpoint and the soul of the story they are telling that sets it apart.