Tag Archives: writing what you mean

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

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.

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.”

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.