The One-Drink Book Club is an informal, (almost) weekly series in which fellow author Emma Lee Jayne joins me and our other creative friends to talk about the life, business, and art of writing and making books … for the duration of one Friday-afternoon drink.
In this episode, we talked about:
My discovery that I can’t write a branching-narrative story, but not for reasons you might expect.
Mike asked an interesting question: How would I find the story I wanted to tell in a memoir, if I were to write one about myself? I talked a bit about finding the core “character arc” for the subject in real life and proposed one for myself … then asked Mike and Bill what the main arcs of their lives would be.
The spun us off into a side question: Does the body of work a writer makes over their lives reflect their own developmental arc in real life?
… and THAT spun me off into a spur of a spur, wherein I talked about the idea of creators (like myself) warring with the question of truly being ourselves versus being like others in the field … really leaning into our own unique weirdness. It’s truly freeing, being yourself.
That got us talking about homage versus cheap imitation of other creators, using Mike’s example of others trying to write like Douglas Adams.
We finished off with a really interesting chat about how Bill, who as a reader follows BOTH the similar-books-in-a-genre, all-you-can-read Kindle Unlimited plan with his reading … AND seeks out highly “artisan” authors from that culling.
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