A Local Writer On Writing––

Hone Your Skills, Write Something Every Day

By Dottie Evans

So you think you want to be a writer?

Finally ready to begin that novel that’s been rattling around in your head for the past 20 years?

All that is needed is the decision to begin, followed by the carving out of a specific time to write that is absolutely sacrosanct and dedicated.

“It need not be long, but it needs to be regular and inviolate,” said Sandy Hook resident Rachel Basch during a recent interview.

Ms Basch has been teaching writing, writing fiction, and participating in writers’ workshops for the past 16 years, yet she says each day she sits down to write is just as important and as painful as it was in the beginning. There are always new insights, new challenges, and new discoveries as she continues to work at her craft.

But writing is more about art than technique, she adds, because often you must give up something of yourself in the process. Good writing is as much about deciding what to leave out as what to leave in.

And like a poet, a writer just seems to know it simply because he or she simply must do it.

“You have the urge, the compulsion. There are so many different kinds of writing, you might start writing poetry, an essay or a memoir,” Ms Basch said.

Only a week before the interview that formed the basis for this story, Mrs Basch presented a book discussion and signing of her latest novel, titled The Passion of Reverend Nash, at The Homesteads at Newtown. She is currently a visiting writer at Trinity College in Hartford, working with undergraduates in creative writing, and she leads discussions and critique sessions in a writer’s workshop.

“Workshops can be instructive and supportive. Writing is so lonely, you need colleagues every step of the way,” she said.

 “If you want to write, you might start with your memoir and ask yourself, ‘Could this be turned into fiction? Can you distance yourself from the material well enough that you can write about things the way they really should happen?’”

The problem is, Mrs Basch noted, “life isn’t focused in the way fiction is. There needs to be a way to organize chaos. You need to have thought your plot out ahead of time,” she advises.

In the same breath, she admits that a fiction writer does not always know what a character might do as the plot unfolds, but there must be a vision of where one will be at the end.

Getting side-tracked is another writer’s pitfall.

“What is the tale you are telling? Is it pertinent to the story?”

 

If You Want To Write, Read

Mrs Basch said when she was growing up she was slow in learning to read.

“My parents read to me for a long time. Maybe that was why books always seemed so mystical, because of the stories. When I finally did learn to read, I never stopped,” she said. “As a child, I put such a high premium on stories I was always writing in school, for the newspaper, for the literary magazine. I took every opportunity that came my way.”

Read aggressively, she advised, “and read the sort of things you’d like to write about yourself.”

“It’s like eating junk food. What you put into your brain is what will come out in your writing, so read something you want to emulate. See how someone else does it.”

As the mother of two children, ages 12 and 14, Mrs Basch knows how demanding parenting can be.

“A writer who is also a parent is always a little distracted. Not only do you need to set aside time to write, you must believe in yourself and not let the time-guilt-money-kids thing discourage you. Writing might be a little harder for women, because they are pulled so many different ways,” she added.

“Give yourself permission to say No to outside demands, permission to get nothing accomplished, and permission to fail miserably.”

In her own writing career, Ms Basch has found that writing novels suits her better than writing short stories, though she started out on the latter.

“I found my short stories kept getting longer and longer and I wasn’t having much success,” she laughed.

Educated at Wesleyan University in Middletown with a B.A. in English, and at New York University with a masters in creative writing, Mrs Basch has been a visiting writer at Trinity College in Hartford and at Wesleyan University, an adjunct instructor in fiction writing at Central Connecticut State University, and an instructor in creative writing at New York University.

In addition to her novel, The Passion of Reverend Nash, published by W.W. Norton in 2003, another novel, Degrees of Love, was published by W.W. Norton in 1998. She is currently working on a story for Oprah Magazine.