Write On Wednesday: 50 Shades

No, not that "50 shades". I wouldn’t waste one second of time writing or thinking about that atrocity of modern literature and cinema (and I use those terms loosely). 

I’m talking about the shades of my own creative life, particularly my writing life, and the different types of writing I’m called to do. 

Recently I had an opportunity to return to work at the office I “retired” from about a year ago. This time, I would be helping rewrite the copy for a new website, and also helping revise their Policy and Procedure manual. This latter project at first sounded deadly boring - but surprisingly enough I’ve found it quite interesting. Their policies are old and outdated, so I’ve been researching the latest trends in policy making regarding electronic and social media. With medical information involved, it’s a touchy subject, so there is much to consider.

The website copywriting is also interesting. I wrote the copy for the current site six years ago, and I’m hoping to really streamline the copy and the site itself into a more readable, user-friendly format. 

This week I’ve been involved in creating a power point presentation about the services our company provides. Again - a learning process for me, both in terms of writing and the mechanics of power point itself.

So I’ve been pounding away at the keys, and even though it’s not the kind of writing I’ve been focused on here on the blog, it’s another shade in my writer’s rainbow. The kind of writing that involves research, clarity, organization, consistency, engaging and informing the reader...

Wait a minute - Isn’t that what all good writing should do? Aren’t those the Primary Colors for every successful writing project?

Although I’ve been spending a lot of time on these projects, which means my other writing projects are on the back burner, I haven’t felt deprived or guilty. I feel as if I’m sharpening up some old skills and honing some other new ones.

My writer’s palette is glowing with new colors that will surely find their way onto other canvas in due time.

The Sunday Salon: Reveling in Reading

This is a great winter - for reading at least. Thanks to all that time I spent recovering from the flu, I’ve discovered a new favorite reading spot on the couch and it’s where you’ll find me for more and more significant periods of time these bitterly cold days. 

This week I finished Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, which is the first of a planned trilogy about the Langdon family of farmers, begins in 1920. Each chapter represents a year in the life of the family, with this volume ending in 1953.

So, the novel encompasses a generation and half’s worth of living, loving, working, going to school, having children. And of course, dying. There’s not a lot of major excitement or action - it’s ordinary life on a fair to middling sized farm. Drought comes, the Depression happens, war intervenes. It’s 395 pages of starkly beautiful prose about the kind of life-in-general events we all experience, whether we’re farmers, carpenters, doctors, lawyers, homemakers, musicians. It’s the story of a family, of life in American during a 30 year period. 

Why should we care about this Langdon family, then? There’s nothing special about them. Not a Pulitzer Prize winner among them, nor a researcher who cures cancer, or a philanthropist who saves the lives of refugees. 

Perhaps because they are just like us. Ordinary, imperfect, living quiet lives doing the best they can with the time and talents they’ve been given. Because Smiley elevates their simple passage through life with writing like this, in a scene near the end of the book as Rosanna, the matriarch, surveys her family over Thanksgiving dinner:

She should have sat down...but she didn’t want to sit down, or eat at all; she just wanted to stand there and look at them as they passed the two gravy boats and began to cut their food. They couldn’t have survived so many strange events. Take your pick - the birth of Henry in that room over there, with the wind howling and the dirt blowing in. Take your pick - all of them nearly dying of heat that summer of ’36. Take your pick - Joey falling out of the hayloft, Frankie driving the car to Usherton, Frankie disappearing into the Italian Campaign. Take your pick - Walter falling into the well. Take your pick - Granny Mary with her cancer, but still walking around. Take your pick - Lillian running off with a stranger who turned out to be a clown but a lovable one, and nice looking, and weren’t Timmy and Debbie just darling? Normally Rosanna took credit for everything, but now she thought, this was too much. She could not have created this moment, these lovely faces, these candles flickering, the flash of silverware, the fragrances of the food, the heads turning this way and that, the voices murmuring and laughing. She looked at Walter who was so far away at the other end of the table. As if on cue, Walter looked at Rosanna, and they agreed in that instant: something had created itself from nothing - a dumpy old house had been filled, if only for this moment, with twenty-three different worlds, each one of them rich and mysterious. Rosanna wrapped her arms around herself for a moment and sat down.

It’s what we all do. Create something - a LIFE - from nothing. And if we have some luck, we survive all the strange events of our own individual lives from generation to generation and can find a point to survey it all with wonder, amazement, and pride.

Needless to say, I’m eager to read the next volume in the trilogy.

I’ll be here on my couch, waiting.

Write On Wednesday: On Desire

“I think you should write another book,” my mother said to me the other day when I started to whine about the long winter days with nothing fun to do. In fact, I almost uttered the “B” word, that one which never passes my lips. (Bored? Me?? Hardly.)

“Well, it’s not that simple,” I replied a bit peevishly. “It takes a lot of work to write a book from scratch."

“I’m sure it does,” she replied. “But you’ve already done it once, I imagine you could do it again if you really wanted to."

I opened my mouth to answer back, then closed it again. She was right, of course. Darn mothers anyway, always knowing their stuff like that.

I could do it If I Really Wanted To.

In my very small way, I’ve been stricken with second book syndrome. Life In General turned out to be a surprising and gratifying little success. And although I’ve had ideas for another book gnawing at me for a couple of years, and had plans to commence working on it as soon as Life In General was out in the world, I haven’t made a dent in it. Truth? I’m afraid. Afraid this one won’t turn out as well. Afraid to start from the beginning. Afraid of the kinds of things I might have to confront in order to tell this story. Afraid I don’t have the talent or the self discipline it takes to tell it at all.

Perhaps a more appropriate title for this post would be On Fear. 

Fear and Desire are yoked together in my writing world these days. It reminds of times when I’m walking the dogs and they are out ahead of me at the end of their long leashes - suddenly they will pull up right against one another, their sides actually rubbing, and walk for 100 feet or so as if stuck to each other with velcro. Then one of them (usually Magic) will pull away and take the lead and leave the other behind. But for a moment it’s as if they need the security of being side-by-side on this adventure, of knowing the other one is there. 

Fear is not always unhealthy. Knowing what we’re afraid of helps have the strength to overcome it. But Desire. Well that is the fuel for every fire, be it making a book, falling in love, raising a child, painting a room, cooking a meal. 

You have to Want It. Really Want It.

Beth Kephart, whose book Handling the Truth is my study guide these days, reminds me that “we can only write toward our obsession.” In her blog post the other day, she describes thinking about a new book as a  “strange existence of wading through the formidable dark toward a fledgling, heartbreaking story.” 

It can’t be about Fear. It must be about Desire. Compulsion. Obsession. An itch to tell the story. “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper - whether little or great, it belongs to literature.” (Sarah Orne Jewett). It’s not only a willingness but a need to wander into the forest of memory and experience and truth. 

So I need to turn those fearful thoughts on their head, pull them away from my side where they’ve been rubbing me the wrong way and holding me back. Let Desire take the lead. Scratch that itch to tell a story, the one that’s been teasing me every since I was a little girl. Let myself be obsessed with it.

Really Want It. 

And then Do It.

Working The Word

It was only a few weeks ago that I wrote in this space about The Word I had chosen as my focus for the year 2015.

Vibrant. 

Today I find myself chuckling ruefully about that word, because there couldn’t be a word less like my experiences so far this year.  I’ve continued to be sick, one of my dogs has been intermittently sick, Jim was sick for a while. We had a huge snowstorm a week ago, and the view outside my window is studded with 10 foot mountains of dirt-topped snow. I’ve gone for days without washing my hair or putting on makeup, wearing some version of yoga pants, t-shirts and baggy wrap around sweaters. 

A line from one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems comes to mind to describe my experiences so far this year. ”I am so distant from the hope of myself...” she writes. I am SO distant from the hope of confidence, excitement, and radiant vibrancy I settled on for my touchstones back in early January.

BUT, I refuse to concede defeat. I am determined to find a way into those words, even if I’m doing it with my pockets stuffed full of tissues. 

Finding a way to Work The Word is my challenge now, to dispel the darkness of winter days and light up my life with Vibrant color. Because I’m a list-maker, this morning I made one. What are some manageable things I can do to bring newness into my world? 

Here are a few of the things that popped into mind...

1. Visit an art museum, and admire the visual beauty of great paintings. Bring home some postcards of my favorites and frame them for inspiration. 
2. Wear RED..it’s February, it’s Heart Month, and red is a beacon amidst the relentless gray of our outside world.
3. Go to a concert and listen to someone else play music for a change. The community college right down the street hosts a free Wednesday afternoon concert series with some great local artists.
4. Sing! even if it’s just singing along with the car radio which I never do anymore because I listen to audio books.  The other day I watched a video of my Grandson singing to himself while he played, and his face was the picture of pleasure as he hummed his own little nonsense song. 

Small things, really, but I think even baby steps toward a more vibrant outlook could make a huge difference right now. At the very least, they will bring me a little bit closer to that hope of myself I had just a few short weeks ago. I’ll keep you posted on the journey.

How about you? If you chose a touchstone word for your year, how are you Working The Word so far? I’d love to hear your story.

The Sunday Salon: Time Travel

I read a lot of historical fiction, and the best of it transports me to another place and acquaints me with people whose ideas and experiences and lifestyles are very different from mine.

This week’s reading is doing all of that.

I started the week with Sarah Waters new novel of psychological suspense, The Paying Guests. Set in post WWI London, this hefty tome starts out slowly but builds to a fever pitch of understated tension that doesn’t lift until the very last pages. Waters does a masterful job of creating atmosphere - the dark grittiness of London streets amidst the roiling undercurrent of dissolving class levels perfectly sets the scene for this novel built around crimes of passion. sometimes found it uncomfortable reading, but I was compelled by it all the same... which is the mark of  a good writer, isn’t it?

After finishing it, I headed straight to the library to look out more of Waters books. I brought home The Night Watch, but was equally thrilled to find a copy of Vanessa and Her Sister, a novel by Priya Parmar about Vanessa Stephen Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf. I thought this would make a good diversion from more of Waters’ brand of suspense, and eagerly dove in.

What a delight this is proving to be! Parmar chose to write in Vanessa's voice in the form of diary entries, interspersed with letters and postcards back and forth between all the members of the Bloomsbury group. Having read all of Virginia’s diaries, as well as most of her collected letters, I love voice Parmar has created for Vanessa - warm, loving, but clever and honest. Vanessa is the de facto mother figure for her two brothers and her sister, and Virginia’s episodes of crippling mental illness are always on her mind.  “It hangs over my head like Damocles’ sword,” writes Vanessa on the eve of her wedding to Clive Bell, "that Virginia will go mad.”

Because I’ve found Parmar’s novel so infectious, I’ve was drawn to my own bookshelves and to my old copy of Virginia Woolf, A Biography, published by her nephew Quentin Bell in 1972. Because this book is divided into years, it’s easy to follow along with the biography during the years of the novel. So I get the “authorized” version along with the novelized version.

True literary geek fun, I guess. But on a dark, damp Sunday morning in February, with a fire glowing, coffee brewing, and two snoring dogs at my feet, there’s probably nothing I’d enjoy much more.