Some thoughts on writing

I'm sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've gotten in another one of those ruts where I've done a lot of composing in my head, but haven't put those thoughts down in bits and bites. I'll try and be better.
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In the last few weeks, I've had two opportunities to hear from authors. Our Relief Society book group won a contest where a publisher sent us ten copies of an autographed book and arranged for us to speak with the author. The book was Chosen Forever by Susan Richards, a memoir about her experience in getting her first memoir published and the work promoting it. Richards had a rough childhood and as an adult found healing through working with a horse; she wrote about her experience in her first memoir, Chosen by a Horse. After her first book was published, she did promotional work all throughout New England. As she did book tours and readings, she reconnected with family members and old friends. And, in her home town, she re-met the man she purchased her home from twenty years earlier and found love.

Ms. Richards spoke to our book group by phone and told us some more of her experience in writing and promoting her works. She also outlined the plots of three unpublished novels she is shopping around for a publisher. I was most intrigued by her description of motivations for writing her novels. Ms. Richards has also worked as a social worker, and told us she is fascinated by the way people move past the trauma in their lives. Listening to her talk about "the walking wounded" was interesting after reading about her experience healing and finding peace in her life.
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Last week Clint and I went to a lecture at Emory University by Umberto Eco, a modern author and philosopher. Eco spoke about the difference between fiction and reality. He explained that in fiction, we accept the world that the author creates as true. In life, we are aware that we may not always know the whole story. The history we accept as fact may turn out to be not true in any number of degrees or any number of ways. He built this argument through several other points and conclusions, but I found his central premise the most fascinating.
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Just a few thoughts about literature and the process of writing. In a way, it is refreshing and exhilarating to be thinking about books and words again. As a literature major during my undergrad days, my life was reading and thinking about books. I read one of Eco's books, The Name of the Rose, in my post-modern literature class at BYU. My life has gone on since then, but every now and then it is nice to stretch those old muscles and remember who I was in my old life.