Hello, everyone out there in podcaster land. Welcome to the inaugural How to Write a Book from A to Z podcast, you have the story rattling around in your brain, don't you? I mean seems like a silly question since it's doubtful you would have clicked on my podcast if you didn't. So, I already know that like me, you just don't know how to get the story out. I'm your host Lisa Greinert, a writing newbie. It's been over a year since I started The Story rattling around in my brain, which happens to be my memoir. It looked like this. Write, write, write, write. Take a break. Write, write, write. Take a break. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was amazingly therapeutic, but structure characters or even my reason for writing are severely lacking. The times between the write, write, write seemed to grow longer, longer, longer. The realization that it was much harder than I thought occupied the place The Story once did. A time came when I hadn't heard the rattle of my story for several weeks until my husband handed me a newspaper.
Lisa:
Yes. a newspaper with a tiny article about the San Gabriel Writers League. The idea for the podcast was born out of a San Gabriel Writers League workshop that I'd attended not long after finding that sweet little newspaper article. The workshop was titled How to Write a Book from A to Z. and I was surprised when I saw there were over a hundred people in attendance in a small town Texas library. For me, it just validated there's a lot of us with the story rattling around inside taking up valuable space. I mean, don't we owe it to the story to get it out? And maybe we owe it to ourselves, too, if it's spending that much time in our brain. I thought you might like to join me as we embark on this journey together. You know, we're going to be going into the minds of successful writers and hopefully others who might be just like us trying to learn how to write the story.. Our guests have experience in every type of genre you've heard of, and probably some you haven't. They're willing to not only share their personal writing journey, but to provide us with loads of advice on how to wow an audience with our words. You know, those words that become sentences, our sentences that become paragraphs, and those paragraphs that become pages. And then, you know, Voila! There's a book. It just sounds so easy, doesn't it I remember my grade linguistics teacher, Ms. Chandler invited me to Mandatory morning tutoring due to my linguistic deficits. I still don't know what the word even means, so you can imagine I thought the whole class was quite painful. Then came high school English classes where focus in class was on anything non English class related. So for me, my savior has been a ferocious love of reading. Deep down, I just always knew I would write a book. I just have this freakish fascination with the reality that every book is a creation. It's made up of The Story that was rattling around in someone else's brain. You know, books like The Master and Margarita, which, if you have not read, it will blow you away. Or just even, Dr. Seuss, who taught us about rhyming in such a lovable way. So I ask for no judgment as the podcast hosts with little ability to write. I'm a novice just like you. Our first episodes are going to focus purely on the beginning and how to even start putting the words onto paper. And I also want to share the importance of listening to each bio because each bio serves as a window of that guest's writing journey all the way from beginning to their publications. Be sure to follow the St. Gabriel Writers League on Meta or Facebook. You can also join the league on their website of the same name. The monthly meetings are available on Zoom or at our local Georgetown, Texas Public Library if you just happen to live close by. So I'm excited to not be on this journey by myself. I say, let's just get ready, learn some tricks of the trade and who knows, maybe one day I'll be interviewing you. Time will tell. I thought I'd close with a quote. This is by the author Dan Pointer, who lived from 1938 to 2015. Dan was an American author, consultant, publisher, professional speaker, and, of course, a parachute designer. He wrote the self publishing manual, How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book. And there you go. That's your first resource, so check it out on Amazon. Simple but truer words I could not come up with on my own. Dan Poynter says, If you wait for inspiration to write, you're not a writer, you're a waiter. Actually, I'm back because I just realized you do need to know something else. And that is the fact that not only is this a new journey for me on how to write, I have no earthly idea of how to do a podcast. So I've also had to learn all of that piece The sound, the edits, may not be perfect, but for me, it's getting the information out there. It was time for me to start learning something new. I Need to let you know that our son has a master's in engineering and I love technology, love, love, but technology has never really liked me. He finally got to the point where I was left on my own to learn all of this. And you know what? As much as I wanted to throw the computer out the window and stomp on it and like smear peanut butter or something on it because it was so frustrating to learn something new after it, I'm kind of proud of myself. So next time you ask that son or daughter or your grandkids to help you with technology, maybe don't ask. Maybe it's time to learn something new. It's like we all knew, you know, the whole Nike commercial, just do it. I don't care if it's perfect, like I used to. So here's the podcast, warts and all. Thanks for understanding.