How to learn from other writers

You get to the point, as a writer, where you feel a bit jaded. You feel you have jumped through so many hoops that it's started to irk. You feel you have seen every version of a sentence... and daily writing starts to feel like a sentence. Of a very imprisoning kind.

ANZauthors website

Then you do something on a pure whim, and you are on a learning curve again. It happened this week. I volunteered to set up a website for the members at ANZauthors, a Yahoo discussion group that has been going strong for many years now. From the minute I dusted off my HTML tools, I started to learn. Not about how to make a website - I do it the easy way, and Yola helps with that. No, no - I started to learn from my writer friends. It was a refresher course in a way: a reminder about versatility, determination, novelty and guts.

Guts? Oh yes - one needs guts to be an author, especially today. My colleagues on ANZauthors showed me better than ever before how there are more than a dozen ways to approach the world of publishing. How one can never stop learning. How it's vital to understand what readers want. How one can never let go of empathy, understanding, generosity and purpose. How small egos matter in the world of big ideas and big money. How technology is a tool rather than an enemy. How family features in what a writer thinks and does.

I think I learned more this week than I had in the whole preceding year, and it's bound to get into my writing. It is bound to affect how I think about the human condition. As I slowly put the site together, I read each individual author's biography, blurbs, and helpful articles for writers, and I picked up tips any jaded writer would do well to read.

I learned how sometimes, being an author is something some people do DESPITE what is happening in their lives, to their families, or to their health. I also learned that some books are written BECAUSE of what some writers have experienced in a first-hand way. It is amazing how much fiction can come from a set of very real circumstances.

All the authors at ANZauthors are very busy people, and between them, they have published a number of great books (yes, and a great number of books). Do visit the new site: ANZauthors and witness, as I did, the incredible creativity that comes from applied determination, talent, and inspiration, which amounts to a lot of very hard work.

Let me know what you think below. What ingredients do you think are invaluable to an author?