Speaking Out on Nate

Who Writes

Darin Young is a writer, Chris Cortright is a writer and Samantha Peters is a writer.  All three of them have other characteristics that define who they are, but writing is the one thing that if they could do exclusively, for a living, that they would do.  All three of them love to write and all three of them are different writers.

Of the three of them, I have known Chris Cortright the longest. How I met him is irrelevant to who he is as a writer. What is relevant is that he is a self-taught, self-motivated freelance writer of comics and games.  When games used to be played at a table with other people present, Chris was writing role-playing games and rules for  his groups to use.  Even as people moved away from the tabletop to the television, Chris continues to write games for people to play.  When he isn’t writing games he is working on superhero comic books, which I happen to think is his writing strength.

I met Darin Young on accident.  Truth be told, I have never met Darin in person, he lives in Oklahoma with his wife and children.  I met Darin online when we both were working on a wrestling roleplaying game for Fantages, a company that went out of business almost as fast as it showed up.  Through that project Darin and I got to know each other.  After the project we have stayed in regular contact.  Darin is a strong writer, especially with character dialog.  While he claims that he spends most of his writing time doing small write ups for games, he has demonstrated the ability to write well on a wide variety of genres.

Samantha Peters is a new writer.  I met her through a friend and got to know her writing through her blog.  For a young writer she is still developing her “writing” voice, but has a good grasp on writing pieces that you want to read.  While her primary writings are about her and her life, she has written some poetry and is working on turning a short story into a longer format.

Why and What They Write

None of them write because they wanted to become rich and famous.  I am not saying that they wouldn’t mind becoming rich and famous for their writing, but none of them started off writing solely for that reason; Darin thought that making a living as a writer would be, in his words, cool.

So why do they write?  Darin writes because he wants the images in his head to come out and alive in words.  He started out telling the stories in his head through his own artwork.  Later, in middle school, a friend of Darin’s would write stories based on the covers of Iron Maiden albums and Darin thought “If he can do that, I think I ought to try.”  From that moment on, Darin was a writer.   Darin primarily writes fantasy-fiction that have a common man in extraordinary situation spin on them.  Scenes between his characters have excellent dialog, a self-professed strength of his, while he thinks that his descriptions are lacking I have yet to find anything missing from what I have read of his work.

Chris writes because writing allows him to get the thoughts and ideas that are in his head, out.  He also writes for a more personal reason; writing distracts him from some of his personal issues, allows him to express himself in ways that he normally cannot and provides a distraction from “real life.”  Chris also writes a lot of fantasy-fiction, although recently he has moved into the comic book genre.  He has a very vivid imagination creating unique settings and ideas for the role-playing games that he primarily writes.  Chris is not strong with dialogue, but is good with descriptions of places and ideas.

Samantha writes as a way to explore her subconscious and push herself towards goals.  She writes because writing alleviates her fear that she will forget things, thus if they are written down they can be re-read later.  She writes to express a lot of personal issues, good and bad.  Samantha writes about her life.  In her words, “she dramatizes and stretches the truth, projecting forwards, but remaining rooted in her life or personal experience.”  She feels that her honesty towards her writing is her strength; she will not write something that she won’t put her heart into.  This does mean that she doesn’t write any fiction, other than the dramatized moments of her own life.  Her self-professed weakness is being a perfectionist to the point of getting stuck fixing all of the minor errors instead of finishing a project.

Now and Then

When the conversation moved to the current state of writing, texting and communication they had two different opinions.   Darin and Chris are against texting and the effect that texting, especially the shorthand that has developed around texting, is having on the written word and people’s response to the written word.  Samantha does not see any problem with texting other than in test situation where texting can be used for cheating.

Darin knows that texting and the shorthand is not going anywhere, but hates trying to figure out the shorthand.  Chris thinks that texting comes with no responsibility, primarily due to the fact that there is no face to face contact, thus a texter can claim that they were trying make a joke or sarcasm if a texts backfires.

All three of them are disappointed that book stores and physical copies of books seem to be on the way out.  They, like most writers, have a special appreciation for a book; ranging from the feel, the smell to the physical act of reading, all of these things are what they are hoping to have by having a book or something of their own published.  As bookstores and books disappear, these dreams have to be modified.

While they are disappointed by the fate of books, all three do agree that electronic publishing is a good thing for writers.  Electronic publishing allows writers to publish their own material; they have control over their words.  Electronic publishing allows writers that most likely would not get picked up by a publishing house to get their words out.

Final Words

Three freelance writers, each with a different background and different areas that they write about, but they all share a few things in common.  They love to write.  They know that the odds are stacked against them for fame and fortune.  They write for themselves first.  They are disappointed by a few trends in the book world, but see opportunity in the future of publishing technology even if they have to read their name in print online first.