ArtsDay LA was held Saturday on campus – kind of a buffet of panels celebrating the arts taught at UCLA Extension. I had a dream panel – novelist Kerry Madden (Gentle’s Holler), playwright, director and actor Leon Martell (The History Of Fairfax According to a Sandwich) and novelist Noel Alumit (Letters to Montgomery Clift). All of them terrific writers, very articulate and passionate about teaching, and very funny. The subject of our panel was “Getting Started As A Writer”. The thing about getting together with other Writers’ Program instructors is that you learn as much as anybody in the audience. At least I did; I took notes as they talked. Before doing the panel we shared experiences of – shall we say, less than celebrity status appearances at bookstores. Tragedy plus time equals humor (according to Carol Burnett) so we laughed a lot about those readings when just one person shows up (with his dog), or it turns into a one-on-one with the bookstore manager, or a loudspeaker in a big chain bookstore announces “Author on aisle three!” like you’re a box of soap.

     Earlier, thinking about how to introduce the subject of the panel, I realized there are at least three interpretations of getting started as a writer. First, starting to write. A lot of us have always written – in notebooks, scraps of paper, diaries etc. I started writing stories at age six. So it’s really that moment when you write something on your own, for yourself, whether you’re six years old or forty-six or sixty-four. Or older. I had a student in a workshop once who started writing her autobiography in her early eighties. When she died, her family told me that the biggest treasure she’d left them was the two hundred pages she’d written about her life.

    The second interpretation of getting started could be when you take yourself seriously as a writer for the first time, and believe that yes, you have a novel, a memoir, poems or essays to write, and you do something about it. You find a way to study the craft of the genre, and also a way to be inspired and nourished as a writer. This happened to me when I took a creative writing course at a local community college. Luckily I found a teacher, poet Norma Almquist, who took my writing seriously, shaped my reading taste, and encouraged me. I took her class about ten times, and six years later published my first book. (If you find a teacher who puts you down, tears your writing to pieces, and embarrasses you, leave and find another.)

     There’s a third interpretation of getting started as a writer – getting started writing every day. Or on a new project. We’re all beginners, all of us just getting started, every time we sit down to face the blank page or blank screen. When we talked about this on the panel, Kerry called the times you’re just showing up at your desk but not feeling creative, writing stuff that’s not going anywhere, “chopping wood”. And everybody agreed, we’ve all chopped a lot of wood.

     To Do: Make a list of questions or problems you have about getting started as writer – whether it’s simply having the itch to write and you can’t find the courage to start, or looking for the next step to taking your writing seriously, or trying to get started with your daily writing or on a new project. (And send us your list! See below.)