Creative writing – The Writers in Residence

LET GO AND LIVE….

by Rosemary Lord

I went to the zoo. London Zoo. With my brother Ted. We took a picnic.

It was a lovely sunny day in May, shortly after my birthday, as we sat by the fountain enjoying our sandwiches. Just like we had done as small children – just yesterday!

Oh, the pleasure of revisiting such childhood memories.

Since then, the London Zoo has improved greatly, totally remodeled with expansive, imaginative new areas for the animals with the Global Wildlife Conservation programs. We saw the wonderful abandoned 1950s Indian railway station that is now The Land of Lions, complete with abandoned luggage, old handcarts and peeling, vintage Bollywood movie posters, to make these endangered Asiatic Lions feel they are still in Gujurat, India. The Sumatran tigers have their own roaming wilderness, as do the wild African rhinos. All endangered species, now thriving in this spacious conservation program. Even the butterflies have their own newly designed habitat. Each sanctuary was as fascinating as the last. It was an educational joyride.

Yes, I was in England visiting my family for the gathering of the Lord clan. After London, my siblings and I went back to the small fishing village in Greece that we’ve been returning to for several years. Not telling you where or it will get overrun with tourists! This is where we enjoyed leisurely dinners in the harbor, overlooking the small fishing boats. Souvlaki (chicken skewers) and moussaka still favorites – at around $14 a head including lots of wine and other dishes! We spoke of books and writers. We always come back to books and writers. Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club was much discussed as a well-thought-out Agatha Christie-style mystery. Also on the reading menu were Mick Herron’s Slow Horses, Victoria Hislop’s latest, The Figurine, and Sinclair McKay’s intriguing book about The Secret Life of Bletchley Park. I love those World War II books. And am fascinated to learn more about the young women at Bletchley Park, who, having signed the Official Secrets Act, never spoke of their heroic work.

We wondered whether today’s kids will be as voracious readers as we were and still are…

We spent a couple of days in the delightful waterside town of Nafplio, an hour south of Athens. More delicious Greek food and friendly Greek hospitality.

Back in England, our wonderful, long-suffering brother-in-law, Peter, drove us to Broadstairs, in Kent – next to Ramsgate. What fun! It’s a lovely, old-fashioned ‘seaside’ town. It was one of Charles Dickens haunts. Bleak House stands on the top of the cliffs overlooking the expansive beaches. It’s a leisurely mix of old and new. The Edwardian and Victorian architecture, the Kent and Sussex painted wooden beach huts and wooden fishing and boat structures at the waters edge, unspoiled, next to charming new buildings. Beachside shops selling souvenirs, buckets and spades and saucy postcards. Fish and chips for lunch, of course. Perfect!

This was my much-needed escape from Hollywood and all the dramas of the Woman’s Club. To my jaded eyes, it seemed so much easier to be a writer in London now. Lots of cozy cafes in which to write the next best-seller and to swap literary tales with aspiring and established writers. They are everywhere in London. Cafes and writers, that is. And there are endless magazines to read, too. Several have selections of short stories. Where did the American writers’ magazines go?

And this time away gave me the chance to take a look at what I had been doing with my time and where I was going.

I read a piece by DJ Adams on ‘Letting Go of Expectations…’

She’s right. As writers and artists – how perfect do we want to be? And who decides what is perfect? “To fully embrace your creative artists or muse,” she writes, “You must learn to let go. Let go of who you think you are, releasing your idea of what your creative gift is and what you expect to achieve. This is so contrary to everything we’ve been taught in order to be successful. So instead of holding on to who you think you are (noir novelist, oil paint artist, songwriter) stand back and observe your abilities. Just like our personalities are ever changing, so our muse has many faces. Our creative consciousness absorbs. Let yourself go. Experiment without considering the outcome. Stephen King said ‘Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation…’ Let go – to grow!”

Sounds good to me.

“It’s not where you start – it’s where you finish…” wrote Dorothy Fields, lyricist for the Broadway musical Seesaw, “It’s not how you go, it’s how you land.”

And Ralph Waldo Emerson put it another way: “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

And so, as I flew back to my Hollywood home, I thought a lot about those words.

I think many of us are still working with the adjustments forced on us by the Covid nightmare. And all of those challenges that crept up on us. Life is different now. Reading and writing habits have changed, too.

Now, I decided – I wanna be FREE! I wanna be ME! I have so many untold books and stories in me, I feel I’m bursting at the seams. I gotta lotta writing to do!!

So, I’m ready for new horizons. I’m ready to let go. Not sure where or when. Not even sure who I am anymore. Just one big leap of faith into an amazing creative future.

Who do you think you are today? What do you expect of yourself? Or do you like where you are now? Eh?

LAVENDER and BURNT TOAST

By ROSEMARY LORD

“Lavender and burnt toast.” A book title? A recipe? Sounds intriguing.

I have racked my brain to figure what this was about. I had written this in a notebook of story ideas. But then I have a plethora of such notes, squiggles, post-its, unfinished paragraphs in multiple notebooks and single pages – of ideas that swirl around my head – spilling as hurried notes in these many notebooks. But, over the years, I have become a lot more organized. I have actual files – with labels!

It took me back to Professor Randy Pausch’s gem of a book, The Last Lecture, which he undertook during the last months of his life after a terminal cancer diagnosis. It was about overcoming obstacles and seizing every moment. “Because,” he said, “time is all you have – and you may find one day that you have less than you think.”

“Time must be explicitly managed, like money,” he observed. And “Ask yourself, are you spending your time on the right things?” Most useful was, “You can always change your plan, but only if you have one.”

But the thing I remember most was his thoughts on being really, super organized. Randy’s wife was against having everything filed and alphabetized. She said it sounded way too compulsive. Randy responded, “Filing in alphabetical order is better than running around saying, “I know it was blue and I was eating something when I had it.” Sounds familiar. How often have I been heard to mutter, “…It was blue and I was eating something……” as I rummage through my boxes of writing files for some specific pages of an unfinished manuscript.

“It’s not where you start – it’s where you finish…” wrote Dorothy Fields, lyricist for the 1973 Tony Award winning Broadway musical Seesaw, which was based on the William Gibson play, Two for the Seesaw. “…It’s not how you go, it’s how you land.”

I’m not so sure about that…I’ve always favored the maxim that it’s the journey that counts. It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “Life is a journey, not a destination.”

Do you ever look back at the journeys you have been on – or had thrust upon you? Journeys are adventures. Because it’s on those journeys that we discover exciting detours and encounter fascinating people.

Even if it’s literally a train, plane, bus or car journey we’re taking. Just think of people you met along the way, places you saw. This is, after all, where many of us writers find our inspiration. From the people and happenstances along the way.

We can see how things have never got back to the way they were, since the Covid lockdowns. So much changed. We’re in a different reality now. We were shut-ins. As writers, we had more time to ourselves to write during the shutdowns. But the regular writer gatherings and frequent workshops and writers’ conferences have been very slow to return. And they were such fun, where we caught up with fellow writers from across the world, met new writers, editors, experts and publishers, heard new ideas, discovered new talent. I’ve missed them. Zoom meetings are not the same.

Sometimes one feels like Sisyphus, earnestly toiling away to survive and thrive in this new world, dealing with the puddles that life frequently presents for us to jump over.

In Greek Mythology, Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of pushing a boulder up a mountain. Once he got to the top, the weight of the boulder forced it to start rolling down to the bottom, wherein he had to start again. According to Albert Camus, the Greek gods felt that there is no more dreadful punishment than this futile and hopeless labor for Sisyphus. Hmmm. Sometimes life feels like that. Oh well. We soldier on, dealing with the adventures and challenges of our regular lives and balancing our writer’s goals and dreams.

Then, just when we least expect it, something magical happens. We discover a new author whose words inspire us to try something new, encourage us to take a leap of faith into the unknown. We hear a new piece of music or see a new painting that re-awakens that creative spark. We make a new friend or meet someone who has that missing piece of life’s jigsaw we have been trying to complete. We never know where or when that serendipity appears.

And with the freezing winter and endless rain we have all been living through, hopefully now in the rear-view mirror, Spring is just around the corner. So it really is the time to start thinking of planting new seeds. New plants. New crops. In our gardens, window-boxes and in our lives. Maybe something different this year. Read something different. Write something different. But most of all – time to make fresh plans for the year ahead, seek new ventures, add new goals to our To Do lists.

Whilst I try to remember what Lavender and burnt toast was all about….

THE PRESSURE TO PROMPT

By Jill Amadio

Quick, write a sentence containing the word ‘shallow.’ Or ‘camel.’ Maybe your creativity freezes at the first word but gushes forth at the second.

The urge to prompt is overtaking the writing community, both fiction and non-fiction.

What is a prompt? A suggested word, phrase, or sentence on which to build a paragraph or two during a specified time period. Prompt and their answers can include half sentences and are all the rage these days. Indeed, dozens of books and workbooks have been written on the subject of prompts and to the why, where, how, and when to engage in this mental exercise.

Many writers love prompts as a way to get started writing of a sterile morning, to fire up the imagination, and even to provide satisfaction that you are actually working at writing something, anything, although, in fact, it has no relevance to your WIP. However, you could stick the finished prompt into your WIP folder for use somewhere if you feel your words are immortal and need to be recorded for posterity.

Frankly, I am not a fan pf the prompt phenomenon. I believe that if you are going to spend time writing, why not work on your book, article, or blog? Why spend the time fiddling around with a piece of prose you may never use, that has no relation whatsoever to your current project, and that can send you off on a tangent to which you may find it difficult to return?

Ah, say prompt fans, prompting gets you typing. It puts pressure on you to come up with some words to fit the suggestion and actually make sense. The closest I have come to prompts lately is writing a Grocery and a To-Do list. The former is boring, the latter daunting but I have a couple of writer friends who salivate at the prospect of attacking their morning prompt.

One definition of a prompt I found online, posted by Karen Frazier, notes that a writing prompt is a statement usually followed by questions. I also found a very large collection of books on amazon.com devoted to the subject including titles such as Polyvagal Prompts, Writing Prompts Balance, The Writing Prompts for Seasons workbook, Writing Prompts for the Apocalypse, and The Art of Prompt Engineering. Not sure about that last one but it was amidst the others so I assume one needs something of a mechanical mindset to tackle it.

Some prompt books include journaling pages, and vice versa. Another offering is in the form of prompt notecards in a pretty box– a nice gift and not too insulting.

The books are directed at both fiction and non-fiction writers as well as adults, children, and humans (who or what else writes?). Also targeted are genres such as poetry, fantasy, art, drawing, songwriting, and truly interesting: for dinosaur enthusiasts. I haven’t seen a prompt book for AI robots yet but one could be in the works. Or already on sale.

I certainly honor those who need and enjoy a prompt to spark their creativity but as my years advance I need as much time as possible to compete the third book in my “Digging…” mystery series, and beyond.

Could a prompt, if one writes sufficient words, be considered a short story? It could surely lead to one and that is a good thing. How about prompts for birthday and Christmas cards? They can be written in advance and stored on your computer for future use.

So, where does the pressure to prompt com in? We are urged to start writing as fast and as furiously as we can as soon as we clap eyes on the prompt. Now, that is pressure par excellence. No time to consult a thesaurus. Is reviewing and editing allowed afterwards or during? I did try prompting once and sent myself off into daydreaming, my laptop forgotten as I imagined myself back in Bangkok.

I heartily endorse the claim that writing prompts can help create characters and other elements and that, too, is a good thing. Prompts can also build writing skills, craft, and techniques as well as become story starters.

This entire subject of defining prompts has kept me away from working on my WIP. In the past four weeks I have only come up with a new title. However, part of it could be considered a prompt. Here’s a clue: Dangling Participle.

Character Flaws

by Gayle Bartos-Pool

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Through the centuries man has written novels and other stories using that plan old Aristotle, born in 384BC, came up with and documented in The Poetics. He said there are 5 Basic Elements used in writing a story: Plot, Character, Dialogue, Setting, and the Meaning of the story. He was so right. As for the people who populate said story, many authors utilize the “Character Flaw” idea to give their main character some quirk that might trip them up while pursuing their goal.

Whether it’s a private detective with a drug problem (Sherlock Holmes), a gal who drinks too much (the woman in The Days of Wine and Roses), or even the kid who can’t tell the truth (The Boy Who Cried Wolf.), when the reader learns the character has this flaw and also learns what the goal is in the story and what the roadblocks are in trying to achieve that goal, there will be anxiety on the part of the reader to see if the hero can overcome his or her problem and succeed.

This method has been used for centuries and works, but there have been other ways to toss a curve to the hero just to see how he or she handles it. A blind main character (in the movie: Wait Until Dark) or a blind detective (the movie and book called exactly that: The Blind Detective) or a hero in a wheelchair (the TV show: Ironside) worked just fine in catching the bad guys.

Rob a Bank

A physical handicap can actually make the hero stronger. I’ve known real people who had severe health problems turn into some of the strongest people I have ever seen in my life. But a drug addict or an alcoholic isn’t exactly wearing a badge of courage. I’ve also known people who had those issues as a part of their character and who had no intention of getting rid of them. I probably wouldn’t turn to them in a crisis. In a story they might be the main character with what is known as a “fatal flaw” who solves the problem or reaches the final goal as he dies on the last page. That’s been done, but it’s a bit of a downer.

But there can be other ways to give the main character something to deal with besides thrusting negative points on him. In fact, some TV characters don’t really have major flaws, but some of their friends do. The main character in the series Magnum, P.I., and Jessica Fletcher in the TV show Murder, She Wrote were basically good people, but some of their acquaintances had problems. Usually those problems were thrust upon them by someone else, otherwise known as the villain, and the hero has to solve the case before the jail cell closes on their friend.

So, are we supposed to make our main characters flawed? I’ve read some best-selling books where the hero had flaws that were rather unpleasant and I only read one of their books. I didn’t find that trait a selling point. I often say that I want my main characters to be people I would invite to my house. They don’t have to be sickeningly sweet or holier-than-thou, but I would like to respect them.

But these heroes might have a friend with a major flaw and part of the story is to get the friend on the right track so they don’t die or end up in prison. You can even have the hero mention that he almost went down that same path until somebody straightened him out. My Johnny Casino character used drugs when he was a kid while he was growing up in the Mob. They were importing and selling those drugs until a local priest challenged him to a boxing match and whooped his little butt. Johnny never touched a drug again. This revelation in one of the stories let Johnny use himself as an example to help somebody else shake their dependency.

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I’ve wrestled with the notion that the main character should have something wrong with him since that theme is prevalent in many books and movies, but I prefer my main character to have either overcome some minor flaw or never really had one in the first place. Most people I know aren’t one step away from the slammer or psycho ward, so I’m not stuffing my character in that camp. He can have doubts and reservations, but in the end his upbringing and persona got him where he is, so I’m not going to let him fall into a pit. And anyway, that’s what heroes are…heroes.

People with problems don’t usually go to people with their own troubles. They go to the guy or gal who made it through the gauntlet and survived. We learn from characters like that, so my heroes fight to keep on an even keel and get us all to shore.

Coast Lighthouse

What to Write When the (Ink) Well is Dry.

That is where I am right now.

Oh, sure, I’m writing every day: checks to pay bills, answers to emails and texts, posts on Facebook and Instagram, birthday cards to put in the mail that day, a grocery list, a “to do” list, a note to Hubby about an errand I need to do and when I’ll be back.

But creative writing? Um, no. Unless you count a quick book review I pound out in fifteen minutes, knowing that unless I do it today, it will be late, and then I’ll feel awful. Too bad I only skimmed the last two chapters… but you don’t mention how books end anyway, do you? And then I still felt awful, because I’ve always determined to finish a book – every word – before writing a review. Boo-hoo.

Oh, I do write curriculum for my third (used to be fourth) to sixth grade class* at church every week. That can be fun. The delivery can be somewhat creative, but not the text of course. It’s the Bible, after all.

In one point in last week’s lesson I was teaching how that precious Word of God is called “the sword of the Spirit” in the Bible. “Sharper than any two-edged sword, able to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.” I’d been teaching them the first sermon preached by Peter, the fisherman-turned-apostle, when I came to its conclusion. (It’s a doozy!) I pictured a duel between forces of good and evil, raised my imaginary sword and did a bit of fencing (pantomime, of course), ending up with my opponent on the floor, my sword tip on his chest. The phrase “coup de grace” came to my mind, and still holding my imaginary position with opponent pinned down, explained the French phrase. “The final blow,” I said, looking at the fifteen kids slowly. “The thrust that pierces the heart,” I said. And then I jabbed my sword right to the floor… holding for a few seconds before looking up. Then I jerked it free, held it high, then slipped it into my imaginary sheath at my left hip.

There was quietness for a few seconds, then I had the kids read verse 37 of Acts chapter 2, which was the response of the crowd to the strong finish of Peter’s sermon. It reads, “Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?'” Peter’s inspired use of Scripture had brought instant conviction.

But that was “creative” thinking and teaching, not writing. So what do you do when your ink well is dry?

Read in the genre you want to write. Read for pleasure (maybe even some old favorites). Read those authors who inspire you. Read, read, read.
Go online to the sites that list daily (a month at a time) story prompts or story ideas. Here’s one I sometimes use. (Click farther on the site for other ideas.) https://mailchi.mp/writerswrite/daily-writing-links-29-september-2020?e=befa474c79
Start (or start up again) a daily or weekly journal. I have to admit that when we returned from our (fantastic) cruise and a week later faced the monster that became Covid-19, I quit journaling. (Crazy huh? What a “ripe” season of lockdowns, scary bar graphs, no one working, everything closed, ghost freeways, that I could have used in stories. Sigh!) Well, it’s not too late. Maybe begin with a “to do” list, and comment on your doings and feelings during that day. Or… you choose.
Study books by writers that give instruction. A few weeks ago we had Sara Rosett as a guest blogger. She wrote about she used lots of things for Research in her historical mysteries. But she also mentioned a couple “How To ” books she has written. “How To Outline A Cozy Mystery” and “How to Write a Series.” Both are easily found on Amazon. (I recently bought them both and am eager to dig in, for at least a chapter a day.) Look for books on short story writing by our own The Writers In Residence, G. B. Pool.
Take note of those weird dreams. Hey, maybe your creative muse is locked down inside your head, and wants to safely, with some social distancing via dreams, give your mind some help.
Look at a calendar. Upcoming holidays are always good for getting the juices or muses working. Think back to fond memories. Think forward with some Sci-Fi or Fantasy weirdness. Let the seasons inspire.

Do whatever it takes, even acting out some scenes from your favorite book in front of your spouse, dog or cat, or the mirror. The movements, actions, even words may lead to some nice black… or maybe purple… INK in your writing well.

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*I used to teach a class of 4th to 6th graders, but now that all must wear a face covering in class, I have inherited the 3rd graders as well. (They used to be together with 1st and 2nd grade.) According to the “order,” all students in 3rd grade and up must wear masks etc. Second grade and below do not have to. The Children’s Ministry leader felt it would be hard on some in a class that have to wear them while others didn’t. But, on the fun side, I’ve discovered that those third graders are pretty sharp too and I only need a little tweaking of the lesson that I prepare for the older kids. (PS: I wear a face shield, so the kids can see me better.)