I must have been five years old the first time Mama warned me about the river. I let go of her hand and ran into the cold water ‘til it covered my bare feet up to the ankles. Before I could go any further, Mama grabbed my wrist and yanked me back onto the shore.
Her gaze blazed through me. “Don’t you ever go trying to cross the river, girl! Even if you make it, the evil on the other side will do you in.” Though young as I was, I sensed that I ought not try to explain I only wanted to cool my feet.
In the thirteen years since, I’ve heard that warning from her hundreds of times. She varies the words some, but she always puts the same stress on the last three words, “do you in.” Every time she says it, the same fear that shook me at five years old comes back to sizzle through me from head to toe.
Sometimes, I sit on a boulder and watch the river and the forest on the other side. The dangers of the river are clear. Water plunges down a bunch of tall, steep drop-offs that line up one right after another. Lose your balance on the slippery rocks and the river will sweep you away, knock you unconscious, and make you helpless as water fills your lungs, bit by bit, ‘til you are dead.
I respect Mama’s warning about the river. What I don’t get is the part about the evil on the other side. I asked Papa about it once. He just pursed his lips and said, “Mind your mother, Jilly.” I never asked anyone else. ‘Cause if I spoke Mama’s business to anyone but her, she’d ground me for weeks and not let me talk to anyone ‘til she cooled off.
Now, I feel a bitter, deep loneliness. Papa died last year. High school graduation day has passed. Things are changing and Mama stays the same. She wants me to stay the same, too. But today, for the first time in thirteen years, I stand barefoot in the river with cool water up to my ankles. Staring, staring at the other side.
“Writing: Somewhere between torture and fun.” – The Write Practice
“I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.” — P.G. Wodehouse
Frustration
My current project, an historical novel, started as a short story written during a creative writing class. The sudden death of an important, but minor, character propelled the scenes to a heartbreaking conclusion. After reading my final version aloud, I looked up to see tears flowing from the eyes of several classmates. Pleased that my work received the emotional response I desired, I shelved the story with no plans for further development.
For several years the characters continued to invade my thoughts insisting I reveal more about their lives. I finally relented and gave them proper historical names, added more dialogue, and expanded their storyline. My short story became the catalyst, but not the beginning, of a novel.
The words spilled onto the pages for months until suddenly the plot stalled because my characters rebelled at the direction I took them. The character who died now wanted a more significant role than originally planned. This character asked for, no, demanded to be resurrected to find a place in this world, to see the changing seasons, to experience adventures, to feel loved.
This frustrated me because that character’s inclusion changed the entire plot forcing me to do more research to add authenticity to the details.
Call me crazy if you wish, but I now believe what some writers have said about their characters talking to them. The characters know their story better than I do. After all, it is their story, not mine. I’m only the storyteller or historian whose job it is to simply tell their story in a convincing, thought provoking way.
Do your characters speak to you? If so, do you listen? Have you changed a storyline to accommodate your characters’ desires?
Tempted by the forty free online writing classes available at my public library, I enrolled as an experiment. The full catalog of 350 courses competed with MOOCs (massive open online courses) and delivered a shorter continuing education opportunity in writing and other business topics. I joined with a hundred online learners from across the country and Canada for a brief six weeks of creative writing lessons. The interaction and other classmates were as interesting as the course content.
The exercises began innocently enough asking each student’s reason for taking the class. I’ll share several of my submissions. For instance, here’s my introduction:
The dog made me do it. He worries about neglecting important things like watching sunsets, skipping rocks at the lake and hiking nearby trails.
It was irreverent compared to the other classmates’ expressions of genuine excitement and unbridled nervousness. They used their first name, their full name or a nickname like Jelly Bean, Milwaukee Maiden, GalSal or Mother Bird. The anonymous classroom became a haven for over sharing. I discovered, most of the class was currently in crisis – death of a loved one, newly retired, birth of an infant, empty nests, schizophrenia, cancer, abuse, graduates from high school or college, English lit major wanna be’s, traumatized veterans, divorcees, joblessness, dead end jobs, stressful “on the verge of quitting” jobs, sexuality concerns, and caregivers to parents and spouses. The class offered an outlet to cope, a catharsis for the traumas of the past, present and future.
To that note, I was not so far removed from crisis myself. One of the assignments required writing about a candle. Pent up emotions spilled into this exercise. Yes, tears fell on the keyboard over an imaginary candle with a fictitious past.
The tin box sits next to an empty and worn book of matches from a Mexican restaurant near my mother’s old house and a cigarette lighter I confiscated when my teenager flirted with smoking. Graphic whirls of block printed roses decorate the lid. The image resembles both my college hand-carved block printing and my Connecticut rose garden including the wicked, hateful thorns of the floribundas deceptively named Cinderella. Yet, the tin hints of a different Cinderella – purses, crowns, wavy flourishes and little flower dots of pink – and a costume, plastic face mask on top of a printed rayon tunic visible through the cellophane window of a shallow cardboard box. I lift the candle’s lid, smell the sickly perfume of roses and remember my mother. I spark the lighter. The candle wick, a charred nub at the bottom of a melted ring in the wax, fails to light. I return the heart-shaped tin and matches to the drawer with other keepsakes and throw the lighter in the trash under the sink.
Two months after writing about that candle, I reread my passage and still feel the complex emotional mother child relationship, filled with roses, thorns and cigarette lighters. Fortunately, the next assignment was safe from my own memories and focused on a prompt, an ex-spouse arriving on a bus in a snowstorm. Each student chose a point of view and present or past tense. My classmates, more savvy to the woes and causes of divorce, wrote of anger, betrayal, infidelities, abuse and addiction. Instead, I wrote of a homesick young man uncertain of his future.
John jolted awake at the bus driver’s announcement of Grand Haven. The snow globe effect of pelting white flakes obscured the view of his hometown bus depot. He grabbed his backpack and rushed to the door to find whichever family member drew the short straw and had to pick him up in this miserable weather. His mom probably paced at home at the front door waiting for him, having planned a family get-together to hear his tales of living in New York, the small bit part in an off Broadway theater and his new friends in the city. Bounding down the steps, John slipped on the last wet step, tumbled out the door and landed spread eagle on top of a woman waiting with her bag. Expecting her to be angry or hurt, John jumped up only to discover Martha hysterically laughing and joking about his daring dive and poor timing to wait until their divorce was final for a grand effort.
The most joyful assignment embraced free writing – unfiltered and unedited. The instructor explained about Galumphing and Bricolage. Galumphing was to select an item from three different categories – a person, a place, and an object. I chose Bricolage which was to write whatever comes to mind about trivial objects, such as a candy wrapper.
The iridescent candy wrapper rested in my palm, a tidy two inch square of yellowish cellophane. In my kitchen, I sucked on the hard candy, mystified at the pleasant, yet unrecognizable, exotic flavor. And when I glanced again at the wrapper, it was twice the size. I scratched at my head, pondering where had I found this odd candy. Oh yes, it was in the console of my car after I had let my lost, and recently found, relative Larry take the car for the week to Burning Man. I wanted to ask him about the candy, but Larry, was still sleeping in my guest bedroom, a walk-in closet if you want to be precise, and by the sound of his snoring, probably out of contact for the next four to six days. Now, the candy wrapper was weighing heavy on my hands and increasing to the size of a poster board. I reached for the ruler in my kitchen drawer and found I was too short. The wrapper had not grow; I had shrunk. Naked, I slipped out of my very large clothes and tore a bit of the wrapper to use for petite clothing. I vaguely remembered seeing other candies in different colored wrappers. If the yellow wrapped candy made me small, what did the others do? Which color should I eat next?
For each of the assignments The instructor urged the class to follow the golden rule of feedback – give comments to receive comments. My fragile crisis-fraught classmates needed support, encouragement and praise for their brave undertakings. And every evening, I returned to the class website to see the comments left for me, such as the ones below on my Bricolage candy wrapper exercise.
Jenn on 5/28/2015 10:09:51 AM
What a great twist! I love it! Makes me think of Alice in Wonderland or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. So creative!
GalSal on 5/28/2015 12:46:57 PM
Wow–I was so fooled until you said you had shrunk. Great imagination!
Chuck on 5/29/2015 8:17:01 AM
Great creativity, it kept me spellbound. Are we having fun yet?
Joy on 5/29/2015 5:27:38 PM
I struggled with bricolage but you made it seem easy to be creative with something so simple
Dave on 5/30/2015 10:10:56 AM
A great start and you could take it in two interesting ways. The obvious, fantasy way, is to go on a hunt for the other candy. The other way, the candy having come from Burning Man, is that the character is tripping and she might have some explaining to do to people that wonder why she is running around naked with a piece of candy wrapper for clothing.
Lea on 5/30/2015 6:42:35 PM
It also makes me think of Alice in Wonderland! I like the normalcy at the beginning while it slowly starts to become magical. Great 🙂
Mama Crow on 6/1/2015 5:53:07 AM
What an adventurous piece! Great job keeping the imagination vividly strong!
Milwaukee Maiden/Linda on 6/3/2015 4:52:21 PM
Very good storyline with a twist. I enjoyed reading it. You will make a great writer.
The course made me appreciate the ability of technology to engage humanity across the country. The encouraging comments were fun and an unexpected treasure. Before the class ended and all the words deleted, I copied the comments to a file and saved them for a time when I might need generous and supportive comments. For now, another class begins.
With less than one week before my first public reading, I panic. Oh sure, I’ve read at writers workshops, but other writers expect flat expressionless words and concentrate on the print. I usually flub a few words, stumble along internally editing as I read and neglect any attention to how I sound. I’m a terrible reader, and now I’m subjecting an innocent and unsuspecting audience not only to my words but also my reading.
My story of 1500 words takes almost fifteen minutes to read aloud. Ten minutes is the ideal length according to Randy Susan Meyer of the Huffington Post in “Ten Tips for Writers Reading in Public.” Now if I could channel my inner George Saunders, I might finish in five minutes. He races through the audio recordings of his stories in the Tenth of December. His reading pace creates “excitement” which is one of the goals for writers reading in public.
Meyer recommends to either “entertain, enlighten, excite, engage” and always smile. From the four E’s, I decide to “engage” the audience. Eye contact is the key. And if I remember to smile, that’s an added bonus.
Now comes the tough part – practicing. I find an old copy of my story with critique comments. My writing group’s questions, comments and quandary float in the margins of my hardcopy. The comments are my target list of places to add extra emphasis and accomplish the equivalent of saying, “Don’t miss this. It’s important.”
I underline words and mark places for voice inflection. My story becomes a musical score with crescendos and decrescendos. I add a few staccatos and mark the tempo changes fast and slow.
My biggest struggle is conveying changes in speakers – the ones without attribution tags. In print, a reader can see the carriage return to the next line. My solutions include moving a non-verbal action by the speaker to the beginning of the sentence, pausing before changing speakers, and varying the rate of speech for each character.
I draw on what I learned at previous jobs. Big companies with hordes of human relations people — scheduling training every time you stand from your desk to fetch a cup of coffee — develop employees with twenty-first century skills, such as presenting and communicating. I benefit from years of presentations and public speaking classes.
Thank you HR. I love you and take back all the mean things I said
about your training programs. You made me a better person.
I know how to stand and where to look. Practice eliminates little distractions, such as turning or flipping pages. My pages are in a leather binder to prevent my shaking hands from spoiling the illusion that I know what I’m doing.
Writer’s Relief, “Open Mike Night: Ten Tips For Reading Your Writing In Public,” provides useful tips: arrive early, use a big font, and dress professionally. As a writer, however, I want to know how early, how big and what is considered a writer’s professional clothes. Will I have a podium to set my notes? Or will I stand alone behind a microphone? I choose slacks and heels and rock the “I just left the office thirty minutes ago” look.
My preparation includes watching videos of accomplished writers at public readings. I’m fascinated by Sherman Alexie. Critics call him a stand-up comic. He writes. He jokes. He makes films. He entertains.
Writers Relief also advises what appears to be obvious. “Maintain an audible volume.” At my reading, my personal cheering section sits beside me. When another writer stands to read, one of my cheerleaders whispers, “Read louder and slower than that.”
Thanks to my pre-worries and research, my nervousness disappears when I begin reading. I make eye contact and people smile at me. At one point in the reading, I notice the room is silent and listening. This wonderful audience cares about my crazy made-up characters. They laugh at the right spots and respond with thunderous applause. Thank you, gracious audience. Then, I remember to smile.
Tags: Public readings, Randy Susan Meyers, Huffington Post, Writer’s Relief, George Saunders, Sherman Alexie
Although I might plan to relax or sleep, writing ideas germinate at the oddest times. I jot a note on Monday to write about one topic. Tuesday counters with a new subject or two. Wednesday offers three more choices. After the month passes, I have pages of new ideas for short stories, posts, and even novel worthy topics. The difficulty comes in choosing and debating the strength of each idea.
A genesis process begins before each project. An idea fragment initiates a chain reaction. In true Genesis fashion, here’s what happens to an idea for something as simple as a blog post.
The Paris Review tweets a 1980s interview with Raymond Carver which begat rereading “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” which begat watching Birdman and the use of Carver in the movie which begat finding other films directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu which begat studying Inarritu’s co-writers and the two years to write the script which begat researching cinematography for a one-shot narrative which begat discussing the similarities between Birdman and a play which begat outlining theme connections between Carver’s story and the film which begat finding examples of magical realism . . .
Now Darwin, the scientist whose name symbolizes survival of the fittest, comes into play. The possibilities for the Carver idea within what I call my “genesis stage” are numerous. I keep this idea, and who knows, it might be a post on this blog in the future. The subject interests me much more than one of my other ideas about the financial funding of literary magazines. Although valuation practices and financial topics are potential dinner conversation at my table, the rest of the world might be in REM sleep after appetizers. Unless a topic can evolve, the idea turns cold, extinct and not fit to survive in my black and white world of words.
As the deadline approaches, I enter the “Machiavellian stage” of decision making. In the example of this blog post, three ideas remain – the Carver Birdman Connection (CBC), Writing of Mom (MOM), and Genesis, Darwin and Machiavelli (GDM). Now, my brain wrestles with the competing ideas.
CBC: There’s research into my idea. But how will it hold together? MOM: Remember mother’s birthday is on the post date. GDM: There’s not much time. The MOM topic is a bit too sentimental. MOM: What about “writing secrets” kept from mom? CBC: That could be rich. GDM: MOM is too fluffy for June. That’s an August topic. CBC: I suppose it is between GDM and me. I have a wealth of material. GDM: Carver-Birdman is too heavy for a June post. CBC: My topic is fascinating. It could be more than a blog post. GDM: You’re right, it’s too big for a blog post. Discussion over. Now write.
With the argument settled, the post topic practically writes itself. Tomorrow begins a new round of genesis, Darwinism and Machiavellian debate over which story to finish or whether it’s time to return to the manuscripts.
I must have been five years old the first time Mama warned me about the river. I let go of her hand and ran into the cold water ‘til it covered my bare feet up to the ankles. Before I could go any further, Mama grabbed my wrist and yanked me back onto the shore.
