Category Archives: Personal Writing

Writing Practice and Meeting up with your Muse

Writing Leap #70

Hi Writers,

You know how the flash of a memory can suddenly bloom in your heart, full of feeling and clear visual details? These beams from the past can illuminate rich, loamy soil for story-growing. Another source of inspiration!

For me, the moment comes unbidded, unlike moments I may search to remember. That’s the beauty of a memory beam. It’s our muse whispering in our ears from deep down. I’ve found the moment usually carries a lot of emotion. I’m there. I feel it in my pulse.

I’ve even wondered if these memory flashes appear to writers for a reason. To push us to write? To understand? Or for me, this time, to relive a loving closeness between me and my then six-year-old son, G.J., thirty-three years later.

G.J. and Mama in Vermont. As it Really Happened and Brought Back by a Memory Beam

The long farm table in the small country dining room was set at one end for just four people; G.J., me and the husband and wife proprietors of a small inn near Sugarbush, Vermont. We were the only guests, there to ski.

Was that LASAGNA I smelled coming from the kitchen?! I looked at the wife as she brought in the warm fragrant dish and set it down in front of G.J. “Your Mom told me this was your favorite, favorite thing to eat. I made it special for you.”

I looked up at her sweet face. “How kind and wonderful. Thank you,” I said softly. The atmosphere called for softness. G.J.’s big brown eyes grew wide and his smile was sunshine on his adorable face. (I’m allowed this. I’m his mother.)

“Wow,” He said. “That’s a lot of Lasagna! Thanks!”

And later, “She doesn’t even know me and she made me Lasagna.”

After a day of skiing we tromp back into the Inn covered with snow. We had left a copy of “Charlotte’s Web,” a book we are reading together on the night table. The husband says, “I saw your book, G.J. Hope you don’t mind that I read it. One of my favorites from when I was your age.”

This tickles G.J. who was feeling so good about his runs down the mountain. He was a great little skier, advanced for his age, and I was hoping he believed me when I praised him and that he really felt it. Like most children, he had a little shy streak. I looked at him taking off his boots. I felt our special time together.

At some point the doorbell rings at the Inn and the couple greet friends. “Evening Brother John. Evening Sister Mary. Come in!”

Perhaps they were Quakers. I don’t know. But they created an environment where G.J. and I were so happy. I love thinking of them. I cherish the memory of our trip to Vermont, just G.J. and Mama. Thank you, my muse, for bringing it back in such a gush.

So Writers. If you like, create a story around a spontaneous memory. As it happened or as inspiration for your fiction. You never know when a memory beam will light up an idea. Here’s to your very own muse,

LINKING THE ARTS

Books:  Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

Sharing a book with a child is an act of love.

Word: Kindness. As shown by the gentle innkeepers in Vermont. The spontaneous whoosh that flows out golden and can make a child feel much loved.

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Categories

Writing Leap #27

Hi Writers,

The Prose Poem

It’s written as prose but reads like poetry. 

You can sit down and dismiss traditional poetry rules.  Like metered rhyme and specific groupings of words. 

There’s an emphasis on the narrative but the prose poem helps itself to the techniques of poetry like vivid images, heightened emotions and fragments.  I often find writing in fragments frees up my writing.  In the editing process I may change them to sentences or not.

I remember grade school when we were not allowed to use sentence fragments in prose.   We ignore that teacher.

What’s the difference between prose poems and free verse, I wondered?  Typography it seems.  Free verse tends to look more like a poem on the page with shorter lines.  Prose poems often, not always, go from one side of the page to another—like prose!

So Writers.  Have fun with fragments and write a prose poem. 

You can try this story line

Heaven

Here’s Mine.

The Twelfth of August Every Year

Happy Birthday my beloved Auntie

Up there in Heaven for a long time.  One hundred plus plus plus years old.

In the way of angels are you aware how your ever-flowing love was the sunshine to my blossoming?  Still is.

When I’ve floundered about who I am

I remember and feel your loving hand holding my child’s hand

Giving me grown-up manicures.  Talking to me with tenderness about my Cynthia-ness. 

I become happy with myself.

There were a never-ending collection of little moments, some faded in detail

That became huge with the love that created them.

You found me beautiful early editions of War and Peace. 

All leathery, book-musty and tissue-papery.   We both loved books.

You knew my passion for this Russian story.

How excited you were to find the grown-up me the entire collection of My Book House.  Fairy Tales you had read to me over and over long ago. 

I was Dolly in the Grass or Snow White.

You insisted.

My adored Auntie Ceil.

I feel who I am, Auntie, because you felt who I was.

And most of all, you told me.

Happy Writing Everyone,

 LINKING THE ARTS

A Prose Poem by Walt Whitman  (first two stanzas)

From A Family of Poems, compiled by Caroline Kennedy, 2005

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content, I travel the open road.

A Word

 Many of us might say the best word in the dictionary is LOVE, here thought  of as ever flowing generosity of spirit.

A Painting

Perhaps all paintings can be considered prose poems.  Vivid imagery, carefully chosen details, flexible techniques.

Here’s a watercolor my Auntie Ceil brought me back from Paris when I was sixteen.  She had asked the artist to paint in a young girl—me.

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Categories

Writing Leap #26

Hi Writers,

       Specific details open up larger worlds.

       Generalizations do not.  And they are no fun to write or to read.  They leave no room for free floating associations.  Readers glide over them and forget them a second later.

       Generic descriptions kill deeper responses to our writing.

       A writing teacher once told me, “Don’t write, ‘She wore jeans.’  Write  ‘She wore old cut-off jeans that were tight across her tush.”  Now that’s a comment that has stayed with me for twenty years.

       Specificity.  Could this be the golden key that unlocks our imaginations and the imaginations of our readers?

       Go ahead, writers.  Have a good time with specificity in your fiction, your essays, your descriptions.  What details in your world have struck you lately?  From a book?  A conversation?  A film?

The Story Line is:

I Notice, Therefore I Am!

(Please pardon the ridiculous pun.)

Here’s mine.

      Did you hear President Obama’s recent speech on racism?  Politics aside, he used specifics that for me pierced like a laser.

       He was crossing the street one night and passed a parked car with people inside.  He heard the click of the locks as he walked by.  He was a United States Senator at the time.

       I imagine how that must feel and I am sick.  I realize this would never happen to me.

       He was followed in a store by some stranger, “keeping an eye on him.”

       I imagine what this must feel like and I am sick.

       He was in an elevator and saw the lady next to him hug her purse in tighter and look away.

       I realize this will never happen to me.  For several moments I “become” that man in the elevator and I feel sick.

       Specificity.  It’s the writer’s magic wand.

Happy Writing Everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Poem

Have you ever noticed how poets use specificity instinctively?

William Carlos Williams

                so much depends

                upon

                a red wheel

                barrow

                glazed with rain

                water

                beside the white

                chickens

You’re there, right?

A Painting

Appraisal, 1931 by Grant Wood

To me this painting is wonderful to look at not only for its artistic merits but for the clarity of the narrative.  It’s so evocative of the American farm because of the artist’s attention to specifics.  The furs, the hat pin, the jeweled bag, a city lady perhaps.  In contrast to the wool cap and rough jacket of the farm boy holding his speckled hen.  A few visual details and the whole story is there.  The viewer is there too.

A Writing Blog About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Modes

Writing Leap #21  The Writing Life

Hi Writers,

Writers are all part of the same tribe and for me it’s exhilarating to connect with members of my tribe in person, in their books and on the internet.  We all share a lot of deep joy and angst.

Many writers have written about their writing journeys.  To name just three: Annie Dillard The Writing Life, Anne Lamott Bird by Bird and Jill Krementz The Writer’s Desk, a collection of photographic essays of writers and their thoughts.

Writing about the writing life is not just about technique and “how to scribble right.”  (Crucial to the writer as those books are.)  Writing about the writing life is about your personal flight to the moon and back or aspects of that trip.

So writers, out with your pens! 

Find some of your writing moments; highs, flops, your inspirational triggers.  Be true.  Don’t fuzz over the hard times.  They may lead to new insights about your stories.

Here’s mine.

Chaos

         Gabrielle Roth was a dancer, author and sublime muse.  She created a movement practice that follows the path of our innermost rhythms: from flowing to staccato to chaos to lyrical and finally to stillness.  Dance journeys with Gabrielle through these five rhythms have in some mysterious way paralleled my writing journeys.

         I am at this moment in deep writing chaos with my middle-grade children’s novel.  My creative self is darting here, running there, going nowhere.  Help me out again Gabrielle!

         Flowing is lovely.  Like the feeling I had dancing through my first draft, my imagination graceful and never-ending.  That first draft exhilaration now seems far away.  I read it now and sigh.  So many flaws.  So much to fix.  I wake up these mornings with an ache and a certain dizzy dread.  Will I get myself out of this hurricane?

         I have all 28 chapters of my book spread out end to end on a very long table in a pathetic attempt to interweave plot lines, cut (should it be most of the book?) make my characters compelling.  The chapters blur.   I try setting them up on the left of my computer screen and a work in progress blank document to the right.  The Rules of writing technique, all of them, are bossing me around, hammering me on the head.  OK you Rules.  I’ll make Maggie, my main character, less sensitive so she will be likable.  I’ll bring in more conflict for her, I’ll create a more threatening antagonist.  I’ll bring in more details about the setting. 

         But Ha! There is a personal perk that comes along with my painful revision.  I must go back to Nantucket, my locale for the book and search out more unique physical details of the island.  Don’t shake your head.  It’s not a vacation.  I must!  I really don’t want to lose my original thrust, in this case a lyrical voice and magical realism.  I leave tomorrow.

         Here’s what I’m telling myself.

         1. Revision IS writing.  I know that, of course.  And I know what to do.  When I make a revision work it takes me to Gabrielle’s clear stillness that allows my creative self to move.  Back full circle to flowing.

         2. The love for my story and for Maggie is herculean and doesn’t waver.

         3. What I know from my writing tribe is that most if not all writers get caught in riptides.  But most rescue themselves.  Will I?  I will too, right?

LINKING THE ARTS

My Dancing and Writing Muse

Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth

A Good Word   Chaos.  In the sense of not finding the path out of many  swirling possibilities.

This painting by Mark Berson is called Chaos

A Writing Blog About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Modes

Writing Leap #20   Literary Travel Writing

Hi Writers and Travelers,

Trying your pen at writing in different literary genres and sub-genres (there are so many!) is great writing practice.  Try it and you may discover you are a poet when you thought you were a novelist, an essayist when you thought you were a playwright.  Or a travel writer!

Try something new.  It may end up in a literary magazine.

Literary travel writing is really about the experiences of the writer in a certain locale, rather than a straight forward guide or itinerary. It’s writing that aims to seduce the reader into wanting to go there, or not, and can be fiction or non-fiction.

A little caveat if you try this.  Forget everything you have read about your travel destination and write about your own experience.  This is a good place to practice showing not telling.  Put your readers there without clichés or superlatives (tricky if you have fallen in love with a place)  and let them decide what they will.

Story Line

Cultural Differences

Here’s my literary travel piece.  Not to ever compare myself to Woody Allen but I am inspired by the way his camera makes love to his favorite cities: New York, Paris, Rome.

La Place St. Sulpice Paris

    An Elegant Parisian Woman of a certain age shocked me the other day during a recent stay in Paris.

     She had short straight gray hair and was dressed in a slim suit, her scarf poofed out in that mysterious french way that only les parisiennes seem able to manage, insouciant and perfect.  She wore very high heels.

     She walked through the Place St. Sulpice, a quiet corner of Paris on the Left Bank in the 6th arrondissement, where a group of young boys were running and kicking a soccer ball around.  Bang!  The ball came straight towards her.  In a blink the woman lifter her nylon-stockinged leg and gave the soccer ball a mighty kick back to the boys.  She didn’t look at them.  She just walked on towards the church ahead.

     I took out my writing pad, delighted.

     Come sit on the bench with me here in the Place St. Sulpice.   But first, come with me to the patisserie Pierre Hermé around the corner at 72 rue Bonaparte.  Parisians and everyone else wait in line outside the shop for Chef Hermé’s renowned “edible jewels.” 

    Which morsel will you choose?  My treat!  The raspberry, litchi and rose petal macaron, Chef Hermé’s signature flavor?  Or a dark, decadent, chocolate sable cookie?

     On our way back to the bench on the square, our taste buds transported and our sense of well-being heightened, we pass the Café de la Mairie on north side of the square.  It’s a simple little neighborhood café where to me even the decaf coffee is strong and sublime.  Not to mention the tartine, a half baguette with just the right crunchiness in the crust and  fresh country butter at room temperature.  

     We pass the newsstand on the corner of the square and I nod to the vendor.  He is so grouchy, that man, but I have a fond feeling for him.

     The  Eglise de St. Sulpice sits solidly on the east side of the square.  It’s a clunky-feeling church, I find, somber and still inside with massive columns and small chapels.   Standing beside the columns is grounding and leads one to daunting philosophical thoughts like, “Where do I, an infinitesimal breath of being, fit into this Universe?”  Delacroix’s masterpiece mural, “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” is right there in the first chapel on the right, now obscured by scaffolding for refurbishing.  It’s dark too, like the church.  Leaving the church into the brightness of the outside I am always saddened by the raggedy gypsy child on the steps outside.  His mother pushes him towards me for alms.  His huge eyes are hard to forget.

    Back to the bench to contemplate the looming Fountain of the Four Bishops.  They have a kindly air.  The whopping, big stone lions who protect them are comforting too, as far as lions go.  It’s April and the Chestnut trees that surround the square are just about to bloom pink.  Not quite yet.  It’s still chilly here.

     There.  You like it here too, right?  I see that you are bringing out your book to read and are settling in.   Bonne Journée.

Happy Writing Everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Good Word  

                                       Contentment  As in a feeling of well-being.  For me sitting on my bench, writing or reading, savoring that certain feeling of Paris-ness.    

                                        Travel Literature I have enjoyed and St. Sulpice

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Playing Around With a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Literary Modes

Hi all you Writers and Readers out there,

Writing Leap #18    Writing Letters

It’s so rare, alas, for most of us to think of taking up our favorite free-flowing pen, smoothing out a piece or two of nice stationery and sitting down to write pages to a friend.  But wouldn’t it be great to reach into our mailbox and find such a letter?  Recognize the familiar handwriting right away and feel the anticipation of  a newsy chat?  

So people.  What about bringing great pleasure to a friend and writing them a nice, long, lively handwritten letter on some special paper?

Or–for you fiction writers making up a story in letter form? 

Epistolary Fiction, stories told through letters and journals, was wildly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Some say Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a collection of fictional letters written in 1740, marked the beginning of the novel as a literary form in English.  As a writing technique little else beats the dramatic, in-the-moment, intimate glimpses into a writer’s thoughts and feelings as those evoked in letters.  Fast forward to the 21st century.

Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer, just out in February, 2013, is a novel inspired by author Flannery O’Connor and poet Robert Lowell.  It’s their story told in letters.

Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, 2003, is a middle-grade novel written as free verse entries by a young boy named Jack.  It’s a charming one.

Here’s the Story Line for your Letter

Memories (long lost or immediate)

Here’s my go at epistolary fiction.  Picture this handwritten on pale blue stationery.

Breckenridge, Colorado 

May 2

Hello my friend Alice,

Wait until you hear what just happened in our backyard!  Maggie and I are still giggling and hugging about it.

We were gazing at some early snowdrops that pop up in the mountains here (Maggie remembered that you love those flowers too) when all of a sudden–gasp–a new, little spotted fawn ambled towards us on his unsteady, spindly legs.  Oh, the thrill of it, Alice.

Maggie walked towards him on her chubby three-year-old-legs.  She knew to be calm and gentle.  (I love this part of her.)  She knew not to hold out her hand.  She just looked in the fawn’s huge eyes and cooed, “Sweetie little fawn.”  The fawn stared at Maggie and came closer to her, twitching his little white tail.

And can you believe this?  They gazed at each other for a full minute, separated by a whisper.

I glanced into the woods and there was the mama standing by a leftover patch of snow.  Watching.  Just like I was.  Just in case.  The mama deer rustled ever so slightly and the baby deer skiddled off and nestled into her side.

This was an epiphany, Alice.

All our love to you, David and the twins all the way up there in the mountains of Vermont.

xxxxx Nora and Maggie

Happy letter writing everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Good Word: Verve.  As in vitality, aliveness.  Verve in letter writing can be a soft glow or a blazing fire, but the energy is always there. 

A Favorite Book

Selected Letters of Madame de Sevigné, Penguin Classics, 1982.  Madame de Sevigné is known as one of the world’s most extraordinary and vivid letter-writers.  Written in the seventeenth century her letters bring us into the sumptuous court of Louis XIV with humor, melancholy, and lots of pepper.  I find her letters irresistible.

An Interesting Painting

Woman Writing a Letter by Pierre Duval-Lecamus

Is he seriously looking over her shoulder and dictating what she is allowed to write???  Madame de Sevigné wouldn’t tolerate that for a mini-second.

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Playing Around With a Story Line in Different Literary Genres

Hello out there all you writers,

Writing Leap #17  Creating Poetry

For me reading and breathing in a poem can take me to a place deep inside from where I can swim into fiction.   Emily Dickinson’s “…page(s) of prancing poetry” can open our writer’s sensibilities to the evocative essence of words, the purity of  flow,  exquisite economy.  Poetry can teach so much to us writers.

Who with just a few words wouldn’t fall in love with Roger the Dog and by extension any dog that might have snored his way into your heart?

             “He hogs the fire, he bakes his head, As if it were a loaf of bread.

               He’s just a sack of snoring dog, You can lug him like a log.”  By Ted Hughes (A Family of Poems compiled by Caroline Kennedy)

My dear friend Carol Bell, a widely-published poet from Colorado, can expand a moment into a shimmering truth.  Here is her wonderful poem, CROWS

Main Street.

Frothing panting

jackhammers ranting

road crew cursing

sweating beside

a cottonwood

alive with crows.

Noah’s crows.

Iridescent crows.

Mesmeric wings

taunting beaks

black and bawdy

scavengers’ bodies

catch the sun.

Their Ariel magic

plucks me

from the heat,

holds me

in its hands,

and the city

shrivels

like a spent iris blossom,

a dark circle falling away.

Crows was published in Bayou Magazine, Issue 54, 2010

***

“Moments” is our story line.  Take the leap and think of your own moment and evoke it in a poem.  Yes, yes, you can do it.  Or, find a poem that inspires you, by its flow, by its subject, by its metaphors.  Use your own flow, your own subject, your own metaphors and express your  moment in fiction.

Happy Writing Everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

Here is Carol Bell’s poem “written” in watercolors

A Good Word:   kindle, as in igniting words in your poetic imagination–perhaps in metaphor, perhaps in free verse, perhaps in rhyme, perhaps in narrative.  

A Book I Love about Poetry

poemcrazy   freeing your life with words by Susan G. Wooldridge  Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1996.

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Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Categories

Hi Writers and Readers Out There,

Writing Leap # 16  Stories People Tell You.  (Or if you are snoopy, like all writers must be, Stories You Have Overheard)  

You never know when a passing comment or an amazing story whispered to you in confidence will send up firecrackers in your writing imagination.  Writers are always tuned in.

The Story Line is “Moments“

Find a moment in a story you were told and write about it.  This could lead to—anywhere!

Here’s mine.

          “I have a little story to tell you about my granddaughter,” my friend Nancy said leaning towards me.  

           We were in the middle of tea at our favorite cafe where the tables were small and round.  Just right for lovely conversations.

          “You know Mae has just turned three and her brother Grant is now five.  Well, they go to the same school now.”

          Her grin signaled something either funny or endearing.  I was in.

          “It seems that Mae took it upon herself to leave her classroom and walk down the school hallway to the bathroom.  She passed the open door to the director’s office who happened to notice her.  Mae stopped in front of her brother Grant’s cubby, put both her arms around his coat, nestled inside and gave it a long hug.  She then trotted on to the bathroom.”

          Nancy shook her head.  “She is something.”

          My mouth dropped open.  “How adorable is that?”  We both leaned back in our chairs and took in the sweet baby love of that moment in front of Grant’s cubby.

Sharing stories brings us together, captures worlds and moments face to face.  Unless we are yawning.  And those stories won’t feed our imagination anyway.  So make a date with a friend and see what comes up.  Get there early and eavesdrop–be very cool–on other people’s conversations for bits and pieces of stories to store away for future story ideas.  Eavesdropping is your privilege writers!

Warmly,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Good Word

flow    As in the flowing connection that happens between two people when one is telling a story and the other is drawn into it.   

Terrace of Cafe Weplar Paris by Francois Henri Morisset

This would have been A PERFECT PLACE for keeping your ears and eyes open for little inspirational writing gems.  You never leave home without your notebook and/or phone (full of notes) right?