What You Don't Know

My dog-eared conference programme

Having spent last weekend at the annual conference of the Scottish Association of Writers, I returned home with my head buzzing! From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, with a tight-packed programme of competition adjudications, after dinner talks from well-known authors (Cathy MacPhail and Joyce Holms) and seminars on a range of writerly subjects, we had the opportunity to learn so much about the art and craft of writing.

But it wasn't only the events listed on the official programme that set us thinking. Chatting with other writers (over a quick cup of coffee or waiting for the lift) encouraged the flow of information on an informal basis.

An example of this was a conversation I had with another writer about guidelines for submission of short stories to one of D.C.Thomson's magazines. When I mentioned that the editor requested no tabs in the manuscript, she asked how else you can indent a paragraph.

Until comparatively recently, I also used the tab key to indent. However, I was fortunate to have in my writing group someone who told me how to do it using Page Layout (Paragraph, Indentation). In spite of the fact that I'd been creating Word documents for many years, I'd never been aware of this method of indenting.

This highlights one of the potential pit-falls in life, not only for writers. If you're unaware that something exists, how can you take account of it in your thought processes?

In other words, you don't know what you don't know. Events such as the SAW conference offer opportunities to raise awareness of what we don't know - and much more besides.

Joan