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in a world without some of our favourite authors ; no Charles Dickens, Isaac Asimov or JRR
Tolkien - not if they had not had enough of a ego to make themselves the centre of

attention. Not just novelists and short story writers but songwriters, screenwriters and

poets. And this belief that you are good enough to write as a professional bring us to the
natural next step - what if one really is not good enough? We are taught from the very first

days of school that we cannot always do exactly what we want so a good knowledge of

other areas is needed. Writers of all descriptions have suffered lapses in confidence. This is

particularly prevalent when one fails to find a record company for their album or when an

author is asked to edit and rewrite a good book simply because it is not what that publisher
is looking for.

Authors who fulfil their technical writings quota were published in an instant. Such authors

include Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Austen particularly has spawned a wealth of big
and small screen adaptations, spin-off novels and updated retellings of her books. They are

not great novels by today's standards. There is no big climax as such, no relatable incidents

or characters and few examples of wild imagination. None of this is present in Woolf either

but they both enjoy a lasting fame and an eternal audience. For their respective times, each

was offering a few moments escapism, a definite sense of place and time, one-dimensional
characters. Simple and tender story-telling is what people may have wanted then, or maybe

as much reading was read into their stories as is now.

A further point on communication as effective communication rises above everything in
writing. Writing would be a redundant profession if readers were unable to imagine the

story one was painting in some form.

'Over many centuries writers have devised ways
to communicate the vibrancy of meaning to an

audience through inert media.'

(Sharples, p59, 1998)

A writer with a great idea is nothing without the means to express it and vice versa. And so

we must use all available tools in writing but remain watchful of using them in such a way as

to not force a reader to see the same image on the page as we did when we wrote it. Jim

Steinman writes so that an image will carry a new piece of meaning every time. Music