I’d been writing professionally for fourteen years, but it was as though I got anointed because Sue Grafton told me ‘you’re a writer!’ and because I looked around and was inspired by the other attendees who were serious and devoted in their intent to be writers. I’d never believed in myself as a creative writer until I attended. That workshop - and I’m not just saying this because you’re now the director - was a career changer for me. I was frustrated, of course, but I’d think, well, every year I’ve done a little better. Now, it only took fifteen years to meet that five year goal… three times as long!īut it never occurred to me that I failed. I still have the notebook in which I wrote those goals. My five year goal was to be a best-seller, because that was what I wanted. My one year goal was to sell my first book. And she taught us about the discipline of writing.Īnother tool she talked about was writing down our goals - one year, five year, ten year.
She taught us about motivation and conflict. She taught us a lot about plot, about how every paragraph should be a building block to plot or showing character. I took a workshop with Sue Grafton, and so many things she talked about still guide me. Are there lessons learned at Antioch Writers’ Workshop that still guide you?Ī. The newspaper wouldn’t cover my tuition out of the professional development fund, so I took a week’s vacation and used my own money, and we stayed in a dorm at Antioch College, and it was boiling hot with no air conditioning, and we stayed up all night talking about writing! But I knew Sue Grafton was teaching - that’s where our stories intersect! I saw an ad in the back of a magazine - either The Writer or Writers’ Digest - for the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I had no career plan for being a novelist, really. I thought, if I could write novels, I could do that. By then, I had two young kids, and I still wanted to write, but I wanted to be home when my kids got home from school. I was very naïve!īut I did work for a newspaper for fourteen years. I thought, I’ll finish journalism school, work for a paper, right wrongs, and win a Pulitzer Prize. That strengthened my resolve to be a writer and to write stories that would put crooked people in prison. So I thought, well, I'll be a newspaper reporter.
But in my family, everyone read the newspaper at the breakfast table, every morning. And then I thought, well nobody you know writes books. So at first I thought, I'll be a writer and write books. I was the kid reading inside, while my mother was trying to make everyone go outside and play.
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