A Writer's Guide

An updated, comprehensive guide for aspiring writers. From the first chapter: William Carlos Williams, poet and doctor, writes, "When I cannot write, I'm a sick man and want to die. The cause," he says, "is plain." Why do those of us who write feel this way about the process? Although the cause is plain to Dr. Williams, it may not be obvious to someone who chooses another way of expressing self, recording experience, processing, relating, meditating, discovering. Whatever our own personal motivations, writing is for many of us a way of self-healing, self-discovery, a path to understanding and empathizing with others and, perhaps if we're lucky, a mode of communication with a more expansive reality than the one we encounter on a daily basis. For that reason many more of us than ever admit it are writers, scribbling our responses to life in notebooks, journals, or on the back of envelopes. And even more of us are composers of words, dialogues, scenes, memories, fantasies, calling to mind worlds upon worlds of experience and reflection that somehow never actually get written down. A writer knows how transforming an experience it is, in itself, to actually write something down, whether or not anybody else reads it. That which you wrote speaks back to you over a period of time, changing you as you change it, while both affect the changing reality reflected in the writing. Writing which is shared with others has an even greater reverberation and transforming power. We discover in the process how much we are who we describe ourselves to be and the extent to which our self-awareness conditions what we do and how we do it.
About the Author: Margaret Blanchard is an experienced writer and teacher of writing. She has published eight novels, two books of poetry, and three books on intuition and the creative process. She lives in central Vermont, after many adventures in the city of Baltimore, then sharing land in the Adirondack woods. She's now retired in Montpelier. A writer, stained glass artist, and educator, she has been active in movements for civil rights, peace, women's rights, gay rights, as well as union, community and environmental organizing. Retired from teaching in the M.A. program of Vermont College, she is currently engaged in Northern Lights, the Bridge, Courage & Renewal, Unitarian Universalist Sunday School and Social Responsibility, and Creativity Circles.