Everything AND the Kitchen Sink
By Daniel Stallings, East Sierra Branch
When writers meet, we instantly want to know what the other writes, don’t we? We can’t help it. “What do you write?” is the opening salvo for every writer I know. We like to know who our colleagues are. Will they be best friends? Rivals? Our own personal Moriarty? Okay, okay…I jest. But writers have an incurable desire to learn about the stories their fellows create. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The more we experience the wide array of stories in the world, the more we grow as human beings and storytellers.
But I recall a moment I had with a fellow mystery writer. After I told her I wrote mysteries, she asked “What do you write in mysteries?” My answer? Everything! I believe that a genre can—and should—be rendered in any media we choose as creatives. Yes, novels are popular for my genre. But why should I discount novellas, short stories, or flash fiction pieces? Everyone in Ridge Writers knows by now I write dozens of mystery scripts, everything from full-length straight plays to one-acts to radio shows to even a musical! I’ve written mystery letters, journals, and diaries. I even want to try my hand at a mystery poem one day. Because why not?
Writers write. That’s the most elementary goal of our craft. We write and write and write some more. And guess what? Writers don’t stop writing when the media changes. What I want is to encourage our members and any wordsmiths out there to embrace everything AND the kitchen sink that writing is capable of achieving. Write a script. A screenplay. A poem. A novel. An epic trilogy. An article. A memoir. A nonfiction book. A short story. A song. You’ll never know how far your imagination will stretch if you don’t exercise it.
Daniel Stallings wrote this for his President’s Message in
Writers of the Purple Sage, newsletter of Ridge Writers,
East Sierra Branch of the California Writers Club.