My first League of Utah Writers meeting
October 24th, 2008Several months ago I came across a website for local writers in my area — a statewide League of Utah Writers that is split up into chapters. I finally contacted my local chapter several weeks ago and attended my first monthly meeting on Wednesday.
The speaker was Kay Lynn Mangum, Utah resident and author of three fictional YA Mormon books published through Deseret Book (a Mormon publisher and chain book store). She was interesting and fun, and happily shared her experiences with getting published and some of the writing, organizing, and editing techniques that work best for her. I liked her anecdote about friends coming over to her house and being surprised by a wall full of notes and plot lines taped on her bathroom walls. “That’s my novel” she explained. Sounds like my kind of quirk!
I didn’t realize that her books were in the Mormon/LDS category right away, which is a good thing. She made some good points about being published first with a niche publisher that could be applied to any niche market, in my opinion. It was cool to listen to a published writer speak about the process, especially embracing rejection letters.
One of the fears I had that probably prevented me from joining the League a long time ago was that the majority of the writers would be LDS and only interested in reading and writing LDS material — and that I would be uncomfortable sharing any of my material that contained swearing or R-rated themes. But I’ve grown a little more in my skin as a non-Mormon living in Utah and though I’m still aware that I’m Not Like The Others, I’m less frightened of being myself among other local writers.
There were about a dozen people at the meeting, and Kay Lynn opened the floor to questions and comments after she was finished. People were hesitant at first, but there were some interesting discussions that arose after people got started. My suspicions were confirmed that a good number of attendees were working on novels with LDS themes, but I was delighted that sci-fi and fantasy were also mentioned.
A couple older women with no formal writing training wanted to know if they should bother attending English and/or creative writing classes. One guy who spoke up indicated that he thought they were a waste of time and just focused on over-analytic literary rhetoric, which is exactly what I thought of English classes until I had a really great college professor. Then I realized the difference between most stories and the well-written stories with a purpose — where every character, detail, and piece of dialogue is there for a reason. Of course that also inhibiited my own writing because I realized that most of it fell into the former category. Whoops.
So there was definite value in attending that meeting, and I intend to return. I also volunteered to be the local chapter’s newsletter editor which should help me stay involved and hopefully inspire others to stay involved. Ultimately, I hope to find a friend or two through this group and, more importantly, an honest and trustworthy writing support team.
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