on Helping Writers become Authors:
Do you want to grow as a writer?
I know you do, simply because you are a writer. I know because you are here reading this post, either because you subscribe to this blog and others like it as a way to mainline writing knowledge on a regular basis, or because you stumbled onto this post in a search through the jungles of the Internet for the answer to one of the many, many writing questions that press down upon us all.
Many of those questions (and the available answers) are craft-based. How to write a story? How to write a good story? How to craft convincing plots, characters, theme, dialogue, narrative, action, romance, mystery, you name it? We seek to further our growth as writers in part to abate the misery of our own inadequacies in the face of such a complex art form, and in part because we are as fascinated by the patterns and techniques of story as we are the stories themselves.
I don’t believe this type of craft-focused growth ever finds an end, but it does, after a time, create a relative mastery. So what then? Where does the true and deep growth come from then?
