Sunday, March 3, 2019

The Love of Writing by Victoria Chatham






I can’t actually remember a time when I didn’t write. I was always scribbling something first with crayons, then with pencils and finally, the joy of joys, my very own fountain pen. My first typewriter was an Olivetti and my first computer, circa 1997, a Compaq. I thought I had finally arrived with that equipment sitting on my desk but, back then, what I wrote seemed to be far less important than what I wrote with.  

I told stories to my children when they came along, and we had tremendous fun with what we now call brainstorming. Each child had their chance to pick a topic, or start a story and off we would go, following the thread wherever it led us. I suppose I had always had a good imagination partly, I think, from being an early reader myself. Like so many teenage girls my daughter became obsessed with ponies and that prompted me to write a story about them for her thirteenth birthday.

I had no idea what I was doing, of course. I mistakenly thought writing chapters would be like writing lots of short stories and putting them together. Instead, I found that creating a narrative and keeping all the threads comprehensible was much harder work than I ever imagined it to be. However, I quickly learned that writing is a craft and can be built on. I joined writing groups and learned from other authors. I read craft books and attended writing workshops and found greater satisfaction in writing than I ever imagined I would. I started writing romance because I love a happy ending and, because my favorite romance genre is Regency romance, I started writing Regencies.

This, in turn, has led to my writing other historical fiction, The Buxton Trilogy set in the Edwardian era, and Brides of Banff Springs set in 1935 AVAILABLE HERE. I also had a hand in Anita Davison’s Envy the Wind, set in Prince Edward Island in 1905. I like discovering quirky facts that may or may not make their way into my pages and always plan the happy-ever-after ending. Of course, how that ending is arrived at depends entirely on my characters and on that note, I must return to my current couple in His Unexpected Muse.



Victoria Chatham

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