Michael Diamondstein

NEW JERSEY: In a classroom at the South County Regional Library branch in Winslow Township, about two dozen people gather once a month for input on their writing. They come armed with laptops, handouts and binders packed with notes and drafts.

Patty Gioffre, 41, of Winslow Township reads the prologue to her novel-in-the-works, Destiny. Her writing comes from the experience of raising four children.

The story is about a nurse. But the prologue tells of how this mother lost her husband in a plane crash, woven around the anticipation of waiting for him to come home from a business trip.

She moved quickly through the pages taken from her manuscript.

“I know I read fast,” she said. “But I get nervous.”

Discussion ensues about whether the prologue should be the first chapter. There’s a danger, some counterparts said, of readers skipping the introduction and heading right for chapter 1.

“You do have a buy-in to the family,” said Art Wolk, librarian and author who leads the South Jersey Writers group. “You don’t want to move away from that.” And so goes the life of a novelist — writing, refining, editing and, perhaps eventually, shopping for a publisher.

Writers have many reasons why they put pen to paper. But the underlying theme is they do it for themselves.

While getting published would be nice and is often a goal, many people hope, at the very least, to create a family heirloom that can be passed down to the next generation.

Gioffre picked up a Nora Roberts novel a few years ago and decided to try her hand at writing. A stay-at-home mom, she is a Girl Scout leader and is active in her church and the community.

“Somehow in the midst of that, I wrote a novel,” she said, adding that much of the writing takes place between 2 and 3 a.m. “I just started jotting things down and passing it around to friends and family. I call it my mid-life crisis book.”

Jim O’Brien, 76, of Mount Laurel, started writing when he was 70 years old. He tried his hand at it when he was in his 20s, but it didn’t take.

“Nothing came out,” he said. “The pads were empty. It was pent up, like a dam.”

O’Brien has finished his work and is deciding whether or not to shop around Wives Drinkers and Demons or publish it himself. Since he started writing, he has given up golf.

“No matter how old you are, it’s never too late to start,” said O’Brien, who retired from the real estate business. “For some people, it comes out when you’re ten years old. For others, it comes out when you’re 70.”

Wolk and others gave pointers to Jim McMahon, 53, of Washington Township. The latter is working on a mythic adventure and suspense novel that starts with a journey from California to Guam to a submarine.

“It’s very creative,” Wolk said. “I like it.”

All writers have a story.

Sisters Tricia and Tracey Ferdinand are writing a book loosely based on growing up on Trinidad in the Caribbean. The story weaves memories of living with their grandmother, testing the curfew in the middle of the 1990 coup, climbing mango trees and visiting with relatives who lived on the same street.

“We always wanted to work on something together,” said Tricia Ferdinand, 23, of Voorhees.

Writers group leader Wolk started penning gardening articles and published a book, Garden Lunacy, in 2005 which contains many of those articles. He has been working on a novel for the past 1 1/2 years.

He started The Gifted — the novel’s working title that probably will change — by fleshing out the main characters. He set out to write a book about “an insane garden group,” but it turned into a romance-suspense story. The dialogue almost is finished. When it’s done, Wolk will look at each page from the readers’ perspective, making sure everything is engaging. He also plans to edit the book down to 80,000 or 90,000 words. Right now, it stands at about 130,000.

Laura Kaighn, 43, of Williamstown, is a professional storyteller inspired by Star Trek. She has been working on a series of science fiction books since 1991 and hopes to publish them simultaneously.

“The writing has to be done,” she said. “It has to come out. You write for yourself . . . with the hope others will like it.”

Michael J Diamondstein had no plans to write a book until he was hit one day with a vision. It happened after he went to see Rent with his wife. Freshly-hired in the Philadelphia prosecutor’s office, Diamondstein said was set to spend four months of boot camp for newbies in what’s called “the Charging Unit.” There, he would inspect faxes coming in from police departments, looking at charges that could be leveled against recently arrested suspects.

“The idea hit me coming out of the theatre,” said Diamondstein, who graduated from Cherry Hill High School East in 1988 and now lives in Lower Merion Township, Pa. “If I was going to waste four months of my life, I decided to write a book.”

Cloaked in Doubt, the tale of a Philadelphia prosecutor tapped to try the case of the city’s mayor charged with murder, started with the first and last chapters.

“I knew what the beginning was and what the end was,” said Diamondstein, 37, who is now a criminal defense attorney in Philadelphia. “The ideas came from stuff I’ve seen . . . stuff I’ve seen in court, people I’ve met. The book is written in my voice.”

When the book was done in early 2001, Diamondstein cold-mailed about 25 publishers. The rejection letters rolled in, except for one phone call of interest. In the end, that company also did not bite.