If I Weren't A Writer by Patricia Sprinkle

When I consider what I’d have liked to be if I hadn’t become a writer, I have a problem—I‘ve already been a lot of things besides a writer: an Avon lady, Kelley Temp, day camp counselor, cashier in a university bookstore, receptionist for a small seminary, part-time librarian, editor, denominational executive, director of religious education, hunger advocate, advocate for foster children, hospital patient counselor . . . .  And yes, I really am two hundred and three. I just wear my years well.

I’ve liked every single job I’ve had. I didn’t necessarily love all the people I worked with, and I liked some parts of the work more than others—like the parts where I interacted with people. That’s odd, since I eventually became a writer where I sit home every day alone except for my computer, and don’t even interact via Facebook very faithfully.

Writing, however, lets me be all those things and more. In past years I’ve learned what it means to be a dairy farmer, an international executive, a pecan grower, a blue grass singer, and a genealogist among other things, then I’ve sat at home and let my characters become those things.

Still, if I had become what my husband swears I’m best at, I’d be Fixer of the World. I’d go around to businesses and institutions to tell them what they are doing wrong and I'd convince them that they could make more money or make the world safer if they’d fix a few things. Never again would you have to listen to a long message on voicemail before you got to the place where you could choose one, two, or three. Clothing stores would have LOTS of clothes for short plump people (like me) and not so many for short skinny people, which is the kind they invariably have too many of at the end of the season. No more speed humps to jar your car's suspension system on streets where children never walk (since they are driven half a mile to school). Recycling would pay for itself and show a profit. High schools would put all their students in a huge babysitting room each morning and only permit those who WANTED to study to go to class, so the others couldn’t disrupt the teachers and slow down the learning process. Publishers would heavily promote new and mid-list authors and let those who already make big bucks pay for their own publicity. We would definitely live in a better world.

So if you want to vote for me for Fixer of the World, write it into your ballot next election year and I’ll give up writing. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll write a book about somebody who becomes Fixer of the World.

Patricia Sprinkle is the author of southern mysteries and four novels. Her newest, Friday's Daughter, will be out in March, 2011.

My Best Friends are All Adventurers

by Patricia Sprinkle

My friend Miriam once confided, "I always wanted to be an adventurer."

She and I recently returned from a five-week trip to India and Nepal. She wrote me a note afterward: "Thanks for the adventure of a lifetime."  It was. The real purpose of our trip was to teach creative writing for three weeks to middle school students in a small village school, but we can also check "Ride an elephant," "Visit the Taj Mahal," and "See the Himalayas" off our bucket lists.

Only recently have I begun to appreciate how brave we were. We went alone and made our own travel arrangements, staying in moderately priced hotels and hiring our own guides. Everything went exactly as planned except when our train from Agra to Delhi took us to a station across the city from our hotel. We will never forget our late-night ride through Delhi traffic in an auto-rickshaw, also known as a tuk-tuk. Most of the tuk-tuks we saw had some religious talisman swinging from the mirror or painted on the front. We know why. Riding a tuk-tuk through India's traffic does wonders for your prayer life.

Or maybe we weren't so brave. Maybe we were just finally having some of the adventures our favorite characters have been having for years. You see, Miriam and I are both avid readers. As I think about it, all my best friends are avid readers. Seldom am I with a good friend that we don't discuss at least one book.

     If people who read are adventurers at heart, that goes double for writers of fiction. We inhabit two worlds most of the time--the mundane world our bodies move around in and the far-more-exiting world our characters know. No reader enjoys an adventure in a book that the author hasn't already experienced, revisited, and honed down to its bare bones.    


Maybe that's why the authors I know are so enjoyable to be around. Every one of them is as interesting as the people s/he writes about. While the mystery writers don't generally go around killing people, the romance writers are seldom involved in torrid affairs, and the southern novelists don't spend their entire days drinking mint juleps and coming up with cute new expressions, they are all curious about life and aware that there are more things under the sun than any of us will ever comprehend. As the late Charlotte MacLeod once said, "Don't write what you know, write what you want to know."  Anybody who meets Charlotte's quirky characters will be astonished at how many things Charlotte wanted to know.

So let's lift a glass to readers and writers, people who know that life is short and ought to be lived to the fullest. As a note says on the bulletin board above my desk, "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather let's skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, total worn out and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a ride!'"

If your own life gets too dull, let me recommend a ride in Indian tuk-tuk.

Patricia Sprinkle is the author of twenty mysteries and three novels. Her most recent novel is Hold Up the Sky. A fourth, Friday's Daughter, will be released in March. 
 








   

Teachers have no idea how influential they are in the lives of some students. It's thanks to a ninth grade civics teacher that I became a writer. One day when I was absent she assigned oral reports on careers.By the time I got back, other students had taken all my preferred careers. I got sent to a box of booklets, and the only three booklets left were "Farmer," Mortician," and "Writer." I've always been glad I chose writer. I'd have made a lousy farmer.

What a revelation to read that writers spend their lives on research, telling stories, writing/editing, and talking with people about books. Next to reading, those are my favorite things to do. My gut feeling as I finished that booklet was not, "I want to be a writer," but "I am a writer!" I have never looked back. I chose a college with a good writing department and worked a year afterward to save enough to go live in a small Scottish Highland village for the winter to see if I had the discipline to write. I was delighted to discover that was still what I wanted to do. I was more delighted to get a guinea (about $5 in those days) for my first poem.

However, although I grew up in the South and have deep southern roots, I am not fond of Faulkner, O'Connor or Welty. They didn't write about southerners I know, yet a class on southern literature at my New York college convinced me some Northerners truly think southerners are uniformly weird, degenerate, illiterate, and/or retarded, based on those books and other literary depictions of us.

Granted, we southerners tend to enjoy the bizarre in life. We have few inhibitions about repeating crazy things our friends and family have done. We even repeat crazy things we ourselves have done--like the night I found myself riding through Atlanta with two men I did not know, at 3 a.m., wearing my pajamas.   

I love being a part of this collection of southern authors because in our various ways, we are educating the rest of the country about the rich variety of people who live down here. I've tried to do my part. In twenty southern mysteries and three southern novels, I've written about taxidermists, aristocratic old women, trailer trash, and blue grass musicians of international fame who live in a secluded mountain cove. My mysteries are set in Atlanta, Charleston, Jacksonville, Montgomery, and Middle Georgia, and I have tried to make each of those places and the people in them as real as I can to introduce my readers to folks they might like to know.

Recently I have put mysteries aside to write novels. Hold Up the Sky, this year's novel, is about four contemporary women who end up on a dairy farm in West Georgia one hot summer, and who have to learn the hard way that true strength for women comes not from independence but from interdependence. I think that's a lesson that applies to readers wherever they are. The book I just finished, Friday's Daughter, deals with a woman who has devoted her life to caring for her family only to discover at forty that the family never appreciated it. The story explores how one person's decisions about her own life can cause major changes in the lives of others. That, too, is not a uniquely southern theme, although the characters are Georgians.

I hope you'll visit me at my website, www.patriciasprinkle.com (it's temporarily out of order but should be up again within the week) and pick up some of my books. If you do, let me know what you think of them. I've written them for you.

And if you like, I'll tell you the story about that night when I rode through Atlanta in my pajamas . . .