Tag Archives: literary genres

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

To my email subscribers.  Click on WRITING FUNNY above for complete blog and color

Hey there Writers and Readers,

Writing funny is funny.  If you overthink it–it falls flat.  If you try to sound like someone else who is funny, it won’t work.  But if you just happen to think of a situation or comment that makes you laugh everytime it pops into your mind–that’s it!  Write about that.

Bonni Brodnick is a wonderful friend.  She is also a dynamite writer who has a spot-on sense of comedic timing that brings on the big laughs.  Bonni is my guest blogger, an end-of-the-year treat for all of you.  She writes a very snappy, sassy column for the Huffington Post. 

The New Storyline is

Moments

Home For the Holidays: Children Back in the Nest

It was 12:30 on Friday night when the telephone rang. Panic jolted my heart as I picked up the phone. Who calls this late?

“Hi, Mom,” my college-age daughter said.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Laughter ensued. (On her end of the line. Not mine.)

“Everything is fine,” she said. It sounded like her head turned to the side as she yelled, “Quiet!! I can’t hear!”

“Is everything okay?” I asked again.

“Yes, Mom. I finished my final exams and a bunch of friends and I decided to drive home tonight rather than tomorrow afternoon,” she said.

“It’s almost one o’clock in the morning,” I said. “Aren’t you tired after finals?”

“My friends and I thought we’d save time,” she said.

(Although there is never [n-e-v-e-r never] traffic on the roads it takes to get to her school in upstate New York.)

“We took the wrong turn though and we’re lost in the Poconos,” she continued. “But I have the GPS on.”

This was pathetic on a few levels:

1. My daughter is in her senior year and has driven from home to school to home to school about 500 times.

2. She had the GPS on and still got lost.

“Anyway, we should be home by about two,” she said. “Also, it’s sort of late to drive my friends home. Do you think everyone could sleep over? Do we have any extra sleeping bags we could use in the guest room? Would it be a pain to fill up the air mattress, too?”

Just what I was in the mood for at what was now almost one o’clock in the morning.

“Sure,” I said. “Just drive carefully.”

I raided the linen closet for sheets and towels. Sleeping bags were laid out and the air mattress was blown up — (which is what I literally wanted to do with it).

It was well past three in the morning when five sleepy-eyed college kids dragged into the house. Driving through the Poconos at night looked to have been as challenging as their exams were earlier that morning.

But finally, my 22-year-old daughter was home for the holidays. As she fell into my big mamma bear hug, I was brought back to her being my little girl. I looked at the shape of her fingernails and remembered watching how adroitly she picked up Cheerios with her thumb and pointy finger. I remembered the feeling of dropping her off at preschool and my son at kindergarten and thinking, “I have three-and-a-half hours to myself.”

I remember the feeling of having what felt like a broad horizon of time before me.

Life truly flies by in a second. As fast as my children were babies was as fast as they were teenagers, is now as fast as they are in college. It goes by in a snap and a flash.

Embrace the little moments of your children being home this holiday week. Don’t fret at the 100 pounds of laundry they lugged home because they didn’t do it all semester. (Now I know why my daughter kept saying she had nothing to wear.)

Leave their room alone. Don’t get udgy if their suitcases are left unpacked the entire time they are home.

Soon, once again, you’ll have all the time in the world when they take flight and return to school. With your nest newly emptied — once again — you might even find yourself yearning to do their laundry.

(I didn’t actually write that, did I? Cancel, cancel.)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bonni-brodnick/empty-nest-home-for-the-holidays-college-children_b_2362659.html

LINKING THE ARTS

Classic Funny

(To my email subscribers.  Click on the title SETTING AS CHARACTER in the above box for full post, links–and color.)

Playing Around With a Story Line in Different Literary Genres

Writing Leap #8   Setting as Character

Hi there Writers,

You have a feel for a certain locale and love/fear/wonder about being there in your imagination.  If your character shows the same involvement with your setting then the locale can become a character as well.  They interact.  Physically and emotionally.  Flat description doesn’t bring a place to life.  For writer Donald Maass it’s about, “…exploring the ways in which a character experiences a place.”

Where would you love to be right now?  Imagine a character (you?) involved with the place and write about it.  Doesn’t writing give us the gateway to “live many lives” of our own creation?”  And for you readers out there–Isn’t it extraordinary to feel what it might be like to be plunked down in a new locale?   As the character and as yourself?