Writing what you mean Archives - Writing Like a Dancer

WRITING A CHARACTER DESCRIPTION

Posted on June 5, 2015 by writ7707 Posted in Character Description, Description, The Writing Life, The Writing Muse, Writing, Writing Description, Writing Inspiration, Writing Moment to Moment, Writing what you mean 2 Comments

Writing Practice and Meeting up with your MUSE

Writing Leap #54

Writing a Character Description

Hi Writers,

I belong to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (S.C.B.W.I.) They have a new offering for their members. Write a 50 word description of a character for a children’s book, using the word wart. They will post it on their widely-subscribed website (scbwi.org) for agents and editors to see.

At first I dismissed the idea. I wasn’t inspired by warts. Then my closed mind decided to open up and I had an idea! Big lesson: Consider everything as inspiration for your writing. Don’t be an inspiration snob like me. Stretch!

Writing a 50 word description of one of your characters is great writing practice for showing not telling. Fifty words is a challenge to try and evoke, not describe, something about your character that is real. Try it Writers! It’s really satisfying, I found.

Here’s mine inspired by the word wart.

The plump Queen had a wart on her bottom. So embarrassing. Especially when she sat on her throne and cried, “Ouch!” Her round cheeks blushed cherry red, her round mouth resembled a doughnut and her round eyes opened as wide as two apple pies. She heard everybody giggling quietly.

Happy Writing Everybody,

LINKING THE ARTS

The Queen, trying her best.

A Favorite Word: Evoke, as in to summon or suggest. This is one of the jobs of our muse.

WRITING HIGH EMOTIONS

Posted on October 8, 2014 by writ7707 Posted in Literary categories, The Writing Life, The Writing Muse, Writing, Writing High Emotions, Writing Inspiration, Writing Muse, Writing what you mean 3 Comments

Writing Practice and the Muse who is ALWAYS THERE

Writing Leap #46

Hi Writers,

Writing high emotions is tricky. Too much high drama and blatant telling and the emotion is lost in a superficial blur. But if the emotions are high and also deep and written with restraint the reader can feel the intensity as if it were his own.

Try this writers! Imagine or remember an intense experience and write it so that your reader believes you. I think it’s great practice for creating characters who demand empathy from the reader.

For me this requires many revisions. The right phrasing or word can be so elusive. But I find that if I just put myself back into the emotion and quietly breath it in over and over, the words will come.

Here’s mine.

When I hold my infant grandson, Teddy, the son of my much-loved son, next to my heart, his new little body nestled into mine, I close my eyes and an unbelievable tide of love for him flows through me, calm and peaceful. He chirps and I’m delighted. It’s almost like holding his father, when my son was an infant, all over again. Memories of those same, first bolts of love surge up once more.

And now, just a few weeks later and 24 hours ago, Layla and Sadie, my daughter’s twin bundles are here too. It’s hard to breath with so much happiness in my soul.

I put together a bunch of pink balloons, three dark pink and three light pink since my daughter wants her twins to be individuals, with lots of flowing ribbons and tiny white flowers.

“I’m sorry, you can’t bring those up to the room. They’re latex and not allowed in maternity.” The receptionist behind the front desk at the hospital was apologetic.

I looked at her. She couldn’t mean it. My daughter just gave birth to twins! I have to bring them up.

“I’m so sorry. I’ll keep them for you.”

No. My disappointment magnified inside me out of all proportion. But I want her to have them! I thought.

“Wait here,” her colleague said. She returned and gave me two non-latex balloons from the gift shop that said ‘It’s a girl.’ Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. These balloons were not my lovely pink creation but they were filled with warmth and understanding from one woman to another.

What can I say about holding my little granddaughters two hours old? I can’t quite tell them apart yet. I just look at them and they blur into beauty, daughters of my much-loved and beautiful daughter. I snuggle them next to my heart, one at a time, and the profound love I feel is so deep and so magical that I close my eyes and feel sure that I am in heaven. My own baby daughter again times two.

Now I must figure out a way to hold all three little ones in my arms at once.

Many writerly blessings for your work,

LINKING THE ARTS

Elizabeth Gilbert in her new book, The Signature of all Things writes a scene of intense emotion for her main character, Alma. Alma learns that her secret and unsuspecting love is to marry a ninny. I felt the hurricane inside her so intensely I clutched the sides of the book, yet the author’s depiction was measured, albeit tense. Alma’s outward demeanor was a mask.

WRITING THE LITERARY SNIPPET

Posted on May 30, 2014 by writ7707 Posted in Literary categories, The Writing Life, The Writing Muse, Writing, Writing and Editing, Writing Muse, Writing the Snippet, Writing what you mean Leave a comment

Writing Practice and The Muse Who is Always There

Writing Leap #41 Writing the Literary Snippet

Hi Writers,

A literary snippet is just what it sounds like; a snip of a moment captured on the page. It’s immediate, just a few sentences and complete in and of itself.

Ideas for snippets can pop into your imagination from anywhere; a memory flash from your childhood, an observation on the train, a glimpse of something moving in the natural world.

Want to try it? Snippets challenge our ability to write what we really feel and what we really mean with no extra words. I think distilling thoughts is harder to do than it may seem. It takes deep pondering as we revise and delete in our heads. But it’s what we all must do in all our writing. Offer moments to our readers that toll like a steeple bell and appear effortless.

Here’s my attempt.

Once, when I was four, I held my mother’s hand and lifted one leg after the other up the high stairs to get on the bus. She let me reach up and put the change in the money collector.

I stared at a lady who sat up very straight, hands folded in her lap. There she was. Hair rolled up under a brimmed hat with flowers sticking up in back. A mouth that was a thin, straight line. An umbrella by her side. The lady frowned at me.

“Mommy.” I pulled my mother down and whispered loudly in her ear. “Is that Mary Poppins?”

My mother’s cheeks flushed. She directed an apologetic smile to the lady and led me to a seat. She winked at me and gave me a hug. Then she said, “Maybe.”

Happy snippet writing everyone and Happy Spring

LINKING THE ARTS

Original drawings by Mary Shepard for Mary Poppins and Mary Poppins Comes Back, by P.L. Travers

A Book I Love

Recommending Again: Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg, former op-ed writer for the New York Times. I would sleep with this book under my pillow if I believed I would absorb all of his insights permanently in my creative unconscious. It’s about writing sentences that say what you want them to say.

A Word I Love

ponder, as in relaxing into finding the right tone, the right rhythm, the right word in your writing

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

Posted on February 14, 2014 by writ7707 Posted in Literary categories, Literary Genres, The Writing Life, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Inspiration, Writing Muse, Writing what you mean 1 Comment

A Writing Blog to Explore Different Literary Genres and Literary Moods

Hi Writers and Readers,

May your love and passion for someone and for your writing self be so soul-shaking as to travel with you in downward dips and soar with you in upward swoops

Go ahead. Let cupid pierce your heart

And write about it

William Shakespeare

Love to all you Writers,

Happy Valentine’s Day my Garrett. Bacon first, then later French Champagne and Chocolate Eclairs

WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION

Posted on November 16, 2013 by writ7707 Posted in Fiction Based on Fact, Literary categories, Literary Genres, The Writing Life, Writing, Writing Historical Fiction, Writing Inspiration, Writing Moment to Moment, Writing Muse, Writing what you mean 4 Comments

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

Writing Leap #32

WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION

Hi Writers,

Historical Fiction is a blend of historical facts and your imagination. It takes place in a definite period of time and place in history. Your characters are involved in a conflict or situation that is real for that time period.

The serious challenge for us writers is to eschew historical cliché. We have to do our research and then plunge ourselves back there. You don’t have to spell out the historical facts but they should be hovering underneath your fiction.

So writers. Do you have a time or moment or place in history that feels curiously familiar? Or that you are curious about? Take yourself back there and write.

Background on my fiction piece: The First Thanksgiving

Juicy, fragrant turkey with the stuffing you’ve loved since a child. Tart cranberry sauce and candied sweet potatoes. Yuuum. Creamy pumpkin pie with the flavors of autumn. Cinnamon, nutmeg, a pinch of ginger and maybe allspice. Thanksgiving.

But not anything like the food served at the harvest gathering in the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1621. Based on two slim accounts, 32 colonists and 90 Wampanaug feasted together on duck, geese, venison, maybe pumpkin and squash. Nobody knows if the Wampanaug were even invited or just showed up. With five deer. But they were welcomed. Chief Massasoit had signed a peace treaty with the Pilgrims.

Over the last 392 years since that gathering in Plymouth the romance of Thanksgiving has blossomed in our country’s fanciful mind. It is a uniquely American way of saying grace. Here’s my imagining of the first gathering.

The First Thanksgiving

He would eat standing up. To sit next to an ash-skinned man at a crowded table, maybe have to touch arms, would kill him.

He was fourteen.

He was a ferocious warrior.

And he would stand.

As far away from those moon-colored faces showing all their teeth as he could.

Which wasn’t far. He felt his father’s eyes flashing fire at him,

But even if his father suspected his thoughts he would never see them on his son’s face. The muscles around the young warrior’s eyes and mouth were as still as stone.

His weapon hung loosely at his side begging him to grab it.

Lots of gunfire this morning from this white settlement. Surely an attempt for a full out attack on his whole tribe. His blood raged. He would devour them. Chop them up like whale meat. He was well aware of how easy that would be for him.

She brought him a platter of paleface overcooked venison and stupid-looking cranberries. She was his age, he thought, but mush. Not hard and magnificent like his mother and his sisters.

“Seconds?” she asked. Washed out blue eyes. Worst of all she had yellow straw for hair. A freak.

He just stared.

He pinched her breast through her starched apron. Hard.

Her mouth flew open and her eyes rolled back and she collapsed to the ground. In a dead faint.

He didn’t have to look at his father to see the gesture of fury directed at him. It said, “Leave. NOW.”

Happy Writing Everyone and Happy Thanksgiving!

LINKING THE ARTS

An Evocative Engraving

The Pilgrims Receiving Massasoit

Charles Henry Granger, 19th century

Maybe my fuming young warrior is in this crowd?

A Word I Like: Grace. In the sense of generosity of spirit. Like the young warrior’s father who surely must have harbored some fury against the pilgrims who stole their corn and worse, yet rose above it.

I Like this Book.

Thanksgiving by Sam Sifton, National Editor and former restaurant critic for The New York Times. He is very funny. His book is full of tips and comments both culinary and amusing.

WRITING THE EMBARRASSING CONFESSION

Posted on October 29, 2013 by writ7707 Posted in Uncategorized, Writing the Embarrassing Confession, Writing what you mean, Writing What You See 2 Comments

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

Writing Leap #31

Writing the Embarrassing Confession

Hi Writers and Readers,

Embarrassment. It can flush you red. It can sit inside, an uncomfortable secret. It can make you feel foolish or ashamed.

Getting it out onto the page can be great writing practice for saying what you mean. So edit and edit your journal outpourings or your memory sketches of shameful moments until your words evoke your embarrassment in your readers themselves. Even if you are the only reader.

What has made you cringe at yourself? Or secretive about your thoughts? Personal embarrassment is a rich garden for writers to dig around in. You can try it as a sentence, a personal essay, a prose poem.

My embarrassing wish deepens around Halloween when we are surrounded by a lot of toothless witches and ink black cats. Wiccan witches call this holiday Samhain, a time when the veil between the living and the dead is lacy thin.

My Embarrassing Halloween Wish

Wiccan High Priestesses, sometimes referred to as Witches, have evolved into their role through study, levels of training, much time and much heart. They have absorbed the soul of Wicca, a pagan, nature-centered religion, legally recognized in our country since the early 1970’s.

While I too look to nature as one source of my spiritual life and while I revere the Wiccan moral code, “An ye harm none, do what ye will,” it’s pretty certain I will never become a Wiccan High Priestess.

No, my wish is much more ethereal. And unrealistic.

I want to create magic, the kind that happens in dreams.

I would like to be able to close my eyes and alter certain moments as they occur. Assure that someone I love knocks that interview out of the park, another closes a well-deserved business deal, another has a thumbs-up result after a doctor’s appointment.

On Halloween night I would love to hear a beloved relative who has passed away whisper in my ear from the red leaf clusters of my big maple tree.

My magical self and I would open a Witchy Café. The menu?

Banshee Mulled Wine with Brandy and Witchy Spices

Honey Pumpkin Mead for kindness

Barmbrack Bread with secret star-charged herbs

Witches Brew Coffee with my other-worldly nutmeg and robust vanilla bean

Each bite would heal, or sooth, or inspire my guests in some small way.

Go ahead readers. Laugh. Raise your eyebrows at me and say, “Right. Nutsy. Come back to earth.” I say, “OK, but not all the time.”

Happy Samhain/Halloween Everybody and Happy Writing.

LINKING THE ARTS

A Great Word for October: BOO! As in startle yourself with your writing.

Recipe for Barmbrack Bread or Soul Cake. A traditional Celtic bread served during Samhain with tea. Or whiskey. It is Halloween after all.

A Delicious Quote:

“The fire was nice and bright and on one side of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea.” James Joyce, Dubliners

edible-ireland.com:2011:10:31:barmbrack

WRITING HAIKU

Posted on September 22, 2013 by writ7707 Posted in Writing Haiku, Writing Muse, Writing what you mean, Writing What You See 7 Comments

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

Writing Leap #29

Writing Haiku

Hi Writers,

Haiku is magic. An ancient form of Japanese poetry it lasers into the heart of an experience in seventeen syllables arranged in three lines in a 5-7-5 order. Some Haiku poets in English take liberties with this structure. Not Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate. “I want the indifference and the inflexibiliy of a seventeen-syllable limit to balance my self-expressive yearnings.” Here is Billy Collins.

The dog stops to sniff

the poems of others

before she recites her own

Dag Hammarskjold ignores tradition.

In the castle’s shadow

the flowers closed

long before evening

Either way writing the haiku is the ultimate practice in taking a huge, multilayered feeling or observation and finding the simple, deep heartbeat.

So go ahead writers! Poets, fiction writers, non-fiction writers. Practicing Haiku is a magic little secret to writing what you mean. It will spill over and clarify your writing voice in all genres. I promise. Try it over and over until your poem gives you the innermost seed that evokes so much more. The form itself edits the writing.

Haiku often has references to the natural world juxtaposed with other thoughts. The story line is: Observing Nature

Here is my attempt. Very non-traditional.

Rosy wedding sunset

illuminating the love in his song

for his son and new bride.

I heard the music of his soul.

(The additional fourth line may eliminate my poem as Haiku. Not sure.)

Happy Haiku everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Wonderful Book

Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years. Edited by J. Kacian, P. Rowland, A. Burns, 2013.

With his delightful touch Billy Collins’ introduction opens up the world of Haiku.

A Lovely Word

Essence

as in the very marrow of things.

Paintings by Georges Rouault, French Expressionist 1871-1958

Maxim Bugzester, Polish/Viennese Expressionist 1908-1978, said of Rouault, “He was able to paint the picture of a rose with three brush strokes.”

WRITING WHAT YOU MEAN

Posted on September 1, 2013 by writ7707 Posted in Art and Writing, Literary categories, Literary Genres, The Writing Life, Writing, Writing Inspiration, Writing Muse, Writing what you mean 1 Comment

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

Writing Leap # 28

Hi Writers, Readers and Movie-Goers,

Writing What You Mean

As all of you writers know this is not easy. No, no, not easy at all. We may think that the reader experiences our words just like we did when we wrote them. Not always the case.

A writing friend, Bob Zaslow, implored me to read Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. It has brought some diamond clarity into my writing life and I bow down deeply to both of them.

We have to close our eyes and let our thoughts focus on one sentence at a time, Mr. Klinkenborg said.

Letting new thoughts happen.

Writing the words down and changing them until we get that delicious deep down feeling. Yes, these words evoke just what I mean to say.

So writers. Let yourself ponder your descriptions, your opinions, your character’s voice until you get that feeling that says, “I’ve got it.”

Don’t stop thinking and changing until the moment you can say, ‘This is why I write.’ It can feel like the ringing of a beautiful clear bell.

Try the same story line as the last post: Heaven

Here’s mine.

“42” is a movie about the beginnings of Jackie Robinson’s career in major league baseball. In 1946 Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed up Jackie Robinson, a first for a black baseball player. There were never-ending humiliations, lots of hate and boycotts. A Cardinals player spiked him in the calf with his shoe. On purpose. Robinson played incredible baseball throughout.

Rickey stuck with him and never wavered under the negative pressure from the baseball world.

Here’s a slightly paraphrased scene from the movie where the words evoke just what the screenwriter intended. Granted Harrison Ford who plays Rickey breathed life into them. But he had the words.

Robinson asked, “Why you, Mr. Rickey?”

“We had a victory over fascism in Germany and now it’s high time we have a victory over racism,” said Rickey.

“Naw. C’mon. Why you? Tell me.”

“I love this game. I love baseball. Given my whole life to it. Forty odd years ago I was a university coach in Ohio. My catcher was a Negro. Best on the team. Great guy.

I didn’t do enough to help him. Told myself I did. But I didn’t. There was something unfair at the heart of this game I loved and I ignored it.

Then you came along.

You let me love baseball again.

Thank you.”

Happy Writing Everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Painting of Jackie Robinson by Stephen Holland.

The writer says what he means with words, technique and heart. The visual artist says what he means with color, light, shadow, technique and heart.

A Good Phrase: Settle in. As in settling in to the truth.

A book to carry around with you to help you find that “I’ve got it” feeling.