Walter Bargen

Walter Bargen, Missouri's first poet laureate, was the speaker at my first writing group meeting. I was afraid that I would not his talk terribly useful since I am not a poet or really aspire to be a poet, but I could not have been proven any more wrong.

I loved his presentation on writing. He started with some of the same advice that I have heard or read from other sources, such as your job as a writer is to get the words down as fast as you can, and if you want to be a writer, you need to be a reader. He even went as far to say that you should be consuming a book a week in the genre you are writing. (A little problematic--since I am not sure of a genre or where my current idea really fits).

Another piece of advice that I dearly loved was "write through what you know to what you don't - only to discover that you are capable of doing." He urged us to work on surprising ourselves with our writing. He stated that he does his best writing when he is surprising himself. "Write to lose control." I love that statement.

His last piece of advice: "Out of the silence comes first lines." Now of course, he was speaking of poems, but I think there is some truth to that for a novel. He also said that out of the silence comes and poem and it works its way back to silence. Isn't this what a lot of writers are talking about when they say that "the story had to be written" or "the characters demanded that their stories be told"?