Rachel A. Brune

I’ve always enjoyed reading, and at some point, I realized that actual people were behind the writing of the stories. There was never a moment I could point to and say, “Yes, that there, that was the beginning of my writerly origin story.” But at some point those two things came together and I’ve been writing ever since.

How much time do you have for this answer? I’ll read anything with words on it if it stays still long enough. Fiction. Nonfiction. Funny T-shirts. Bumper stickers. I have a particular fondness for speculative fiction, especially urban fantasy, dark fantasy, and horror, but I’ll read pretty much anything that’s out there. My reading does tend to go in cycles of concentration. So, for example, the other week I binge-read the entire Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey. I’ve also been reading a series of nonfiction books on military professionalism and ethics. Next up, I have a couple of books on game theory, the new Michael Connelly, and Just Kids by Patti Smith. My bookshelves are a riot of random themes, authors, and subjects.

I might be showing my age here, but when I reached middle school and high school, I hit the fantasy and sci-fi section of my library hard. The books of Ray Bradbury, Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, and Tanya Huff were some of my formative literary experiences.

Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing is a terrific one. Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story has a permanent place on my writing bookshelf. When it comes to the craft of editing and revision, I keep Susan Bell’s The Artful Edit by my side at all times.

If I’m lucky, I can write my way into a flow state and just think about the story. If I’m not lucky, I’m thinking about going to get another snack, or who just commented on something on Facebook. And by lucky, I mean exerting a modicum of self-discipline.

I wish I had known that the most important thing to writing is that you need to just keep doing it and doing it. Early on, I wrote one big thing, and spent a lot of time trying to make it happen instead of moving on and building up a body of work. This is a lesson I keep having to re-learn, so I’m not really sure how helpful it would have been to have known it … Oh well. The other thing that I wish I’d known early on is how helpful it is to find the right community of writers to hang out with, to do manuscript critique with, to learn from, etc. Writing is a lonely business–the actual writing, anyway. Everything else from the editing to the publishing to the marketing is a lot more pleasant if you’re doing it in a supportive community of like-minded creatives.

Some of the best writing advice I ever heard came from Richard Kadrey at a panel at the 2020 Saga Genre Writing Conference in Charlotte. And it was only three words. “Don’t be afraid.” I think that encompasses everything a writer needs to internalize to keep at it, to take the right kind of risks, and to just keep moving forward on their journey.

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