Going Social

I don't, as a rule, like talking about the writing that I am doing at the moment (as if while I am standing there talking I could be doing any writing at all; who's kidding whom?). I particularly don't like talking to people about projects that are years down the road to being finished. It just feels like so much hot air. Anybody can have an idea for a book--I've had at least a solid dozen--but actually writing one, well, as Dorothy Sayers put it so well in The Mind of the Maker, there always still the pain and the suffering of becoming incarnate before the word becomes something that can act on the world. Indeed, it seems faintly heretical (in Sayers' metaphor) to suggest that there is anything like a book to be had when all I have is ideas and plans. Why waste anybody's time pretending that I have something ready for an editor to look at when I know that it is going to take years to get anything down? I would so much rather just stay quiet about my ideas until I have them in prose.

But Prof. Boice says that writers should spend as much time socializing around writing as they do writing. And, particularly, that they should talk early in the process to those who are closest to the gates by which publications get into the world. Meaning, of course, editors and agents and all of the other scary folks who get in the end to say, "Sign here, we'd like to publish your book." So....here they all are, the editors in my field. Let's talk with them.

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Location:Kalamazoo, MI