AUTHORING AS A NOUN
BY CANDACE J. THOMAS
Someone argued to me that there are no authors and that every author is a plagiarist, grabbing from history or different experiences. She said, “To AUTHOR as a verb is to create something new and there is nothing new in literature.” By her own definition I could see her point. I think that everything that someone writes is in a way a reflection of the writer’s experiences and what they draw from to create something unique.
My rebuttal to her, as an author, was I don’t really care.
It’s not about authoring as a verb, but as a noun.
Author- a writer of a book, a creator of a world, one who constructs a document… the essence of being an AUTHOR.
To me there are factors that should be accounted for:
THE THERAPY. If you didn’t know that many writers use writing as therapy, than you are not a writer. We write because it keeps us sane. Somewhere in my brain is an overactive gland that produces thousands of creative thoughts and images all the time. This is a way to let the creative juice drain out. A build-up of creative energy without an outlet would make anyone go crazy. Writing gives my brain something to do, keeping it healthy and thinking. Life is hard, and without allowing my fingers to fly on the keyboard, I would be a psychotic mess.
THE EXPERIENCE. Try writing a novel, if anything, just for the experience of doing it. It surprised me when I first started of how many ideas came that I wasn’t expecting, like peeling a ripe orange and finding candy inside. The characters came to life. It was like these characters were peering over my shoulder waiting for their names to appear on the paper, feeling just as excited as I was to find out what was about to happen to them. People complain that it’s hard, but of course it is. It has to be or it wouldn’t be rewarding. We know it’s hard, but it’s also fun as hell.
THE READER. The reader is the most important component to the author. A single individual, who lives and breathes in and out every day, goes to works, eats three square meals, sleeps forty winks… doesn’t get a chance to adventure, to explore, to escape. That’s a writer’s job—to give someone a chance to experience life through words. The reader is why we write, so they can escape for a few brief hours to a different time or dimension in their own subconscious. And if they take away some of our experiences with them. . . Great! That helps enrich their lives vicariously through ours.
Just as a baby has a rich pedigree given in the genetics it has to make up a body, a story has the similar creation. It’s full of experiences, events, history, and personal development that is so ingrained in a writer’s soul that no one could extract the origin, just like your brown eyes.
It’s not the story but how we tell it, how we live up to the noun, the definition of being an Author.
Candace Thomasensures her mental health through prolific writing from her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she lives with her husbandl, two daughters, and a tailess cat.
Released in April, Vivatera, Book 1 of the self-titled series, earned Candace the League of Utah Writers Diamond Award for Best Novel of 2013. Her follow-up offering, Conjectrix, is slated for release in April 2014. Candace’s short story, “The Hawkweed”, will appear in The X’s 2014 winter fantasy anthology, Moments in Millennia.
