Friends

 

 

I think it’s safe to say I’m very self-reliant. I’ve always had to be. 

The extroverts among you can most likely say you have lots of friends. You can probably say you have a core of friends you can rely on. You can even, I suppose, say that there are people who encourage you in your endeavors.

I cannot.

I’ve met with a lot of you can’ts in my life. Once I was responsible for myself without parental interference in my decisions, there were a lot of “hold my beer” moments from me, some successful, some not.

This runs through every aspect of my life, most importantly, my professional life. I’ve had bosses who had a certain image of me – usually wrong – and tried to stick me in the corner as a gopher to do their bidding, without any interest in what my professional interests were. As the youngest in my family, I will take the liberty of saying, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner!”

And I left each of those jobs because I won’t work where I’m not respected.

When I was studying for my career, I had teachers who simply weren’t available. They were either too busy cozying up to the higher-ups who might advance their careers, or trying to be cool by ingratiating themselves with students they wanted to socialize with. And some were just not interested.

I remember going to see one instructor during her stated office hours to discuss an issue with a project for her class. It would have taken less than 5 minutes of her time, but she simply breezed on past with, “Make an appointment for another time,” and left with another instructor.

One wasn’t supposed to need an appointment during office hours. And when something in my project was wrong as a result, she wanted to know why I hadn’t bothered to ask.

Well, I tried. She blew me off. I was putting the finishing touches on the project when I went to her to ask the question. I had already waited a few days until she actually had office hours, and the project was due the next day, so “making an appointment at another time,” wasn’t feasible.

I had other instructors who, after complaining about how needy my classmates were, couldn’t understand why I hadn’t asked for help.

Well, past experience had taught me, for one, and their attitude for another. They wanted us to stand on our own two feet and be independent, then complained when we did just that.

I didn’t have friends from class to get feedback from, either. My classmates were too busy, didn’t know or couldn’t be bothered.

And I’ve always loved the, “If you didn’t understand the assignment, why didn’t you come to me to ask?”

Really? See above for the answer. I recall telling one instructor that I wasn’t aware that I didn’t understand the assignment or I would have tried coming to her.

One teacher told me my mind always seemed to be elsewhere. Yeah, it’s trying to figure out a solution because I couldn’t get hold of an instructor who would take two minutes to answer a question. I also spent two solid years of being a commuter student who was utterly exhausted all of the time.

The job I truly loved, writing, hasn’t met with much success. Oh, I have books out there. On Amazon, because I can’t seem to entice an agent, a publisher or anyone else. Good story, but not what we’re looking for just now. (Form letter, and they probably didn’t bother to read the story.)

No, they’re looking for mystery stories or romance novels. I never read mystery stories because they make no sense to me, whether in book form or on TV. Romance novels make me ill. I can’t write what I can’t fathom.

Or they’re looking for non-fiction. I’m clearly in the fiction world. Real life is too hard and angry and – Kardashian. Fiction is far more interesting. Besides, if I tried to write non-fiction, my sarcasm gene would kick in too strongly.

I’ve participated in Author’s Day at Princeton Library several times. Sounds like something that should be really cool, right? I’ve seen people there who have great success. Once or twice some of my friends even attended – and I tell everyone I know every time I’m going to be part of it.

Once or twice I even sold a couple of books there. But most of the time people look, but don’t buy at my table. They don’t stay long enough for me to attempt a conversation with them, while they cluster at the next asking the other author all sorts of questions, and buying those books.

I’ve listened to fellow writers in my friend set, who have far more success than I have, talk about email lists and all sorts of things that are mysteries to me. How do they find these people? Where do these lists come from?

Oh, ask your friends. I have 10. Maybe. Now what?

Get your colleagues to fill out questionnaires. I’m retired. 

Even when I wasn’t retired, I knew no one in my life who would bother with a questionnaire. I did try.

Not long ago I asked someone I didn’t know well to read a piece. It was far from finished. In fact, I was just getting my feet wet on the story, and didn’t have a good direction for it yet. After some initial questions, I didn’t hear back. Since I didn’t know the person well, I simply concluded after several months that I wasn’t likely to.

I was surprised to get feedback long after I’d despaired of it. It was actually quite harsh. It was kind of a relief from the, “That’s really good!” that I often get with no other comment. That’s not what I’m looking for. I want to know what works and what doesn’t. What’s interesting and what’s boring?

This person told me what was boring, what didn’t work and what they didn’t like. It actually sounded angry. Kind of like handing in an assignment late that the teacher didn’t like, harsh. I let the comments sit for a bit – a couple of weeks, actually. Then I read them again, along with the story.

The person was quite right. I was telling, not showing, etc. But it was only more of a concept of the story I wanted to write than the actual story. And the critique actually spurred me on to rewrite the whole thing (I’m glad I wasn’t farther than chapter 5, and the chapters were all short). I have, so far, written far more than is going to be in the book because I need to know the background, history, geography, civics and characters of the world I’m creating. But at least now I know what I’m not putting into the story because it doesn’t work as part of the story.

Not long ago, my husband finished writing the novel he’s been working on since before I ever met him – we’ve been married for 31 years. About the same time, I finished my most recent novel, one of which I’m particularly proud. It took far longer than any of my others to write.

I read his novel. I think it’s well thought out, and a fantastic story, even if that seems like a biased statement. Ever since then, he’s been doing re-reads and revisions of his book, getting his friends to read it and give critiques. He has some friends who are really brutally frank about giving critiques, and have great suggestions.

Oh, has he read my novel? He has not. He never reads any of my novels, ever. And it isn’t because I haven’t asked. The only writing of mine he’s ever read/edited/critiqued are my blogs, and he gave me excellent advice on those.

But I seldom ask anymore. I got tired of begging. Have you read the blog yet? No, I was too tired. No, I didn’t get to it yet. Three weeks later: did you read the blog yet? Oh, I forgot all about it. Then, perhaps spurred on by guilt, it gets read and critiqued.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been re-reading, editing and so forth with my novel.

I tried taking a page from his book, and asked if any of my friends would be interested in reading and critiquing  any of my novels. Three people raised their hands, so they were sent manuscripts.

One of the three came through for me with some helpful critiques. That’s a first for me.

The others? I assume life got hectic, but I had no response. I got back to them. They apologized and said they would read it. They didn’t. When several months later I got back to them again, they had not read it, and now had reasons why they could not do this for me.

I suppose I’m unreasonable expecting people to do something if they said they would. But that’s probably just my internal ethic, not theirs. Am I the only person on the planet who, when I give my word to do something actually does it?

So, I am self-reliant out of necessity.

I told my husband I wished I had friends like his. He claims he had to hound his friend to get their responses. Yet when they’re together, they’ll spend hours discussing plot and structure.

What has happened for me in the past is this: The first time, the response would be (if there even is one), “Oh, I didn’t get a chance to finish reading it because of X,Y, & Z. My life is busy. But I’ll get to it.” The second time, perhaps weeks or months later, the response would be, “You know, I just don’t have the time to do this. Sorry.” I’m simply bothering them by even asking if they’ve done what they promised to do. How dare I?

This makes me want to scream. Why did you volunteer if you couldn’t do it?

I mean, really I should know. Even my blogs don’t get a response. Maybe five blogs out of the over one hundred I’ve written since 2017 have had a comment, and some of those have been sarcastic comments that are an attempt to be funny.

I was told to start a writing Facebook page. I did. No one responds to anything on it. I’ve invited people to follow, and apparently they missed or deleted the invitation, and because they didn’t respond to it, I can’t re-invite them. I don’t know how. There doesn’t seem to be a way.

I was told to go onto Twitter, or whatever it’s called now. I did that. What do you do there? No one was home. Where are the people on Twitter?

Oh, you have to follow people. Where are they? And even if I followed them, then what? That’s their interests. Even if I respond to them, I would either get nothing more than a thumbs-up or get blasted because they didn’t agree with what I said. I did make a post there once. Apparently to the void. No one responded.

And if I bring up my writing, maybe someone will say, “Oh, you write? That’s cool.” And then silence. I don’t have to go on twitter to know that.  I’ve lived it on Facebook, in AOL chatrooms, on Myspace. Why would yet another forum be any different?

I recently tried Reddit. It took forever to find anything. It looks more like a space for the tall-thin- gorgeous- raccoon-eyed blondes of my youth who now have followers and are called “influencers.”

I’m not looking for people to influence me. I’m not a sycophant who distributes cutesy hearts on people’s fan pages. Nor am I looking for people to do that to me.

My husband provided me with links in Reddit that specifically are supposed to be for writers. I read some posts, even replied to a few, and made my own post.

Silence. Well, not silence, exactly. I did get a thumbs-up. One.

All I want is to be able to engage in serious conversation about writing, exchange information and not be called names by someone trying to inject politics into absolutely everything. I would like someone who knows answers to the questions I have to provide me with information the way I provide information to people who ask questions that I know answers to.

I thought about going back to college to get a master’s in writing, just so I could get some critique of my work. My husband doesn’t think I need a master’s degree. According to him, I already know the necessary things to be a writer.

But I’ve been told the most horrible thing: Somehow, I’m supposed to find strangers somewhere, and talk to them. Be able to think of questions to ask them that would further my chances of getting my books out there. Actually talk to them, send emails and follow-up emails if they don’t answer (how many times are you supposed to do that before you finally realize that they will never reply?)

Are you kidding me? Talk to strangers? Actually be able to say something, follow them, don’t take no for an answer until you get a door slammed in your face (which believe me, happens faster than you’d find a second question)?

Put me on the stage at Carnegie Hall and let me sing for thousands by myself – or, hey, I’d gladly sing a duet with Josh Groban. Or Johnny Mathis. Or Paul McCartney. Piece of cake. I’d love it. I’d have the time of my life!

Let me act in a play, as long as I don’t have to do some dance routine. Equal love there. I don’t need to win an award, just have the chance to do it.

Don’t get me wrong; I love writing as much as I love singing or acting. It’s like breathing for me. I couldn’t not do it. It’s all the other stuff that goes with promoting my work, the begging with zero results because I don’t know how to do it, the finding things when I don’t know where to look that’s so maddening. There's no card catalogue! I need someone who knows how to do those things. Yet, those are the same people with the form letters: sorry, we’re focused on a different type of writing just now.

But talk to strangers? Are you kidding? I don’t know how to do that.

Yeah, yeah, the people who know me will swear I talk non-stop. They’re not strangers, and we have common talking points. And yes, I’ll ask a stranger – usually a policeman – in New York for directions.

But talk to a stranger? Do you have any idea how hard that is? Have you ever tried it, especially when you’re asking them for a favor? I wouldn’t know what to say. I’ve been through this before.

In college, I went through 11 roommates in 13 terms. I know people are thinking (although they don’t say it), “What’s wrong with you?” Well, beyond asking their name, their major and where they’re from, it’s desperately hard to think of something to say to them. Sometimes, “What kind of music do you listen to?” works, and you are lucky enough to find common ground. Often, we don’t like the same music, and maybe after several weeks I’ve thought of some other things, but by then, usually, they’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t like them, or we’re not compatible or whatever their excuse is, and they move out. Sequence rewind.

Yes, alone, I could probably formulate questions, and maybe even anticipate replies. But then, try whipping out a piece of paper when you want to talk to someone. They’re gone before the paper is unfolded. And if they stay, they never stay on-script. How can you ask the follow-up when they go off-script?

Maybe I should just try to figure out a way to get a singing gig at Carnegie Hall and hope Josh Groban hears it and is interested in joining in.

To Blog or Not to Blog – Is That Even a Question?

 

To say I’ve always known I’d be a story-teller is probably not entirely true. It stems from something that happened when I was three or four years old.

My mother read me a bedtime story every night. Sometimes they were from the big fairytale book, and sometimes they were Little Golden Books of my choosing.

I chose my book by the cover. I don’t think I ever chose The Happy Little Dump Truck because the truck driver looked like the bad guy in Popeye, and I thought he was ugly. The one I picked most often was called A Day at the Playground. I didn’t pick it for the story. For all the times my mother read it to me, I couldn’t have said what it was about. I only knew there was a cute blonde girl and two little boys on the cover.

My mother hated that story, mainly because it wasn’t really a story, merely a string of possible activities to do at the park.

I didn’t know that. I had my own idea what the story was about.

When she started to read one night, I stopped her to tell her that’s not what the story was about. She handed me the book and told me to read it, then. At three or four I was unable to read.

Undeterred, I began telling the story I wanted on those pages, naming the people, and telling a tale of what they were doing from page to page. My mother was impressed.

“You’re going to be a writer when you grow up,” she said.

“No, I’m not!” I replied, thinking that was definitely a boring kind of job.

But I made up stories about my various dolls while I played. I tried to figure out the plot of our play when I was playing with my friends, and even occasionally told them what they should say so that the plot in my head could advance.

My friends resisted. They clearly didn’t want to be told what to say. We weren’t in a play, after all. That was a source of many of my arguments with my friends.

I learned how to write in school. It wasn’t the sort of writing I wanted to do. Creativity wasn’t encouraged beyond trying out synonyms of commonly overused words. Our compositions, though, were precursors of my blogs.

Had anyone told me when I was 10 that I’d willingly write what I knew then as a “composition” or an essay, I would have told them they were crazy. At 10 I was trying without success to write a novel. At 13, I was writing terrible poetry. Only when coerced by teachers did I write essays, and those essays were uninspired, to say the least.

Perhaps if we’d been given the chance to write about something that interested us instead of expecting a student whose parents never took us on vacations to write an interesting essay on “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” things might have gone better. I didn’t need a whole essay about my vacation; I could have summed it up in one sentence : We didn’t go anywhere.

Of course, if I’d dared, I could have invented the vacation I wished I’d had, and written about that. But Catholic school teachers didn’t want fantasy and invention. They wanted truth, and my truth was, we didn’t go anywhere.

We couldn’t afford it (or we needed a new roof, so our money was spent on shingles, and my dad spent his vacation putting them on the roof.)

I don’t know whether or not my writing is any good. I like my novels because I write what I could never find in the library. I write for me.

But my books don’t sell well. Maybe it’s because people don’t know they’re available on Amazon, or they don’t know just how many of my books are actually there (16 at present). Perhaps it’s just that people don’t know I use a pen name, Bridget McGowan. I’m sure in large part it has to do with my lack of knowledge about marketing. (Nudge me to keep me awake after saying that word.)

One thing that my novels and my blogs have in common is, I don’t know if they’re good or if they’re rubbish. I can’t get feedback from people. A few will say, “That’s really good.” I don’t know what that means.

I think it means people are impressed that I can write because they don’t think they could. No matter what I say, people who don’t think they can write don’t think they have the right to criticize someone who does. (Do they think that's lit shaming?) Perhaps they think I just want compliments, and I’d get mad if they told me what they didn’t like. This is not true. I really appreciate when people are honest with me about my writing.

I’m not interested in someone saying, “That’s horrible,” and nothing more, either. I’d like to know what you liked, what you didn’t, what didn’t work, or if the piece was simply a subject that didn’t attract your interest.

When I can get people I know well to give a critique, I often ask a lot of questions and sometimes explain what I’m trying to accomplish in the work. Sometimes people just miss things. If I know what they missed, I can fix the narrative. It’s definitely not just being argumentative – although, if you tell me the grammar is wrong and I know it isn’t, I will argue with you on that.

I’m not defensive about my work. It’s my baby, but if my baby doesn’t behave as it should, I want to know so I can correct it.

The most honest critique I ever received was from a class of third graders. Eight-to-nine year-olds get it. They were kind and very aware of not hurting my feelings, but they asked questions about what they didn’t understand. They were criticizing a book for preschoolers called I Think I Will Have to Eat You Now, about a tiger that is left behind when the circus leaves town.

I learned what they thought was important. “What’s the tiger’s name?” “What happened to his mother?” “I think your drawings are good, except – and I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but the bunny looks like a dog.” “Could you maybe have more pictures?”

Based on that, I was able to make improvements. They got to participate in naming the tiger, and I invited them to draw some pictures for me, which were much better than mine.

My blogs seem to be hit or miss. Some attract 30 or 40 readers; others attract fewer than 10. What do people  want to read? After four years, I still don’t have a good read of my audience.

Sometimes I wonder if there’s an advance committee of two or three people who brave the blog and then pass along a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to the rest of the group, which determines whether or not they read it. Or maybe that’s just a conspiracy theory.

I know I have one reader who reads all of my blogs, and you know who you are.

I have asked whether people preferred short stories or essays, what subjects interest them, and what they would rather not see. I’ve been met with crickets. I’d really like to know.

If I write something that people really don’t like, I want to know so I don’t write something else on a similar topic that will send people away in droves.

I realize summer is difficult. People are on vacations and probably don’t want to read a blog. Holidays are also tough. With decorating, parties and religious obligations, not to mention shopping and dealing with relatives, people don’t have the time. But I don’t have a better idea of what people want the rest of the year.

What I’d really appreciate are comments. There’s a comment section on the blogsite. If it’s difficult to get to, make a comment on the page where you found the link to the blog. I think they have even added a way to be anonymous. Just keep in mind we all need to be respectful of one another. No blasting someone one who didn’t like a blog you thought was good.

If you’d rather a bit more privacy, I have no objection to PMs about the blog.

Just a line or two about what you liked or didn’t like, or what previous blogs you really liked – or didn’t. It doesn’t need to be long, or even in a sentence.

I try to make my blogs humorous whenever I can, unless the subject matter shouldn’t be joked with.

You’ve heard from me; now, I’d like to hear from you.

Muse Clues

 

“You write? It must be really hard to write a novel.”

That’s been said to me many times over the years. I think most people picture someone locked in a small room, ink-stained hands, and pieces of paper wadded up, lying about the room, the writer red-eyed, with hair tangled and standing on end from all the times they’ve run their hands through it in an anxious attempt to find the perfect word.

So, when I say, “Not really; it’s kind of like breathing,” I destroy their image. They don’t know what to do with that.

If I’m sitting and not reading, I’m frequently writing something.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

This is another question I’m asked, especially by those who aren’t so awed by hearing someone admit they write novels.

Often ideas hit at 2 a.m. on those nights when my brain won’t shut down, and old scenes from my life – especially upsetting ones – invade my head, magnify, and keep sleep from being a possibility. Mental rants and things I wish I’d said, morph into a scene, as yet unwritten, for whatever story I’m working on.

Or not.

Sometimes those rants morph into blogs or just something to keep me from falling asleep.

Unfortunately, 2 a.m. to sunrise is usually not a good time for me to write. If I’ve gone to bed, I’m tired. My usually meandering ADD mind is even more unruly than usual, making it difficult to put pen to paper – although I have done it once or twice. Instead, I toss and turn, trying to embed a particularly desirable turn of phrase into my mind to commit to paper the next day, when I can actually hold a pen.

And pen to paper is how I write. I’ve never been able to compose at a computer, I suppose because computers didn’t come into my everyday life until I was in my 40s. Yes, I’d used them before that, but I never had one of my own until then. I can write an email or a paragraph or two, but nothing longer.

Sitting in front of a keyboard doesn’t inspire me. In the dark ages, I couldn’t compose at a typewriter, either.

But whereas a typewriter only had keys and that cute bell at the end of the line, a computer is a dangerous thing, with many enticements: I wonder if I have any emails. Did I do my Wordle today? Is it time to make a click to feed shelter animals? I can’t think of the word I need; maybe if I play a game of solitaire, I’ll think of it – just one game (HAH!)

No, it’s safer to stay with what makes writing come easily: a pen and paper, and the satisfaction that my cursive looks relatively nice sometimes (yes, cursive).

I admit I’m as undisciplined as they come. Add a layer of attention deficit, and it’s amazing I’ve ever finished anything. It certainly explains why, although I started writing at about age 10, I didn’t finish a novel until I was 38. I actually had to put away one I’d been trying to write since I was 18, and decide it was never going to be finished. I started something new. It’s actually more surprising that I’ve written 25 novels and a cookbook.

As I said, I’m undisciplined. I can’t say I’m going to write from 10-12 every day. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a writer to work at it from 9 to 5. I write whenever and wherever. I use loose leaf, notebooks, legal pads, paper towels, whatever is available. I actually love writing on C-fold paper towels. I write at a desk, a table, floating in the pool, in railway stations, in the doctor’s office. All are fair game as places to write. (That sounds so Dr. Seuss: I will write on the train, I will write on a plane. I will even write by the Seine. But I will not write on a phone!)

I am your high school English teacher’s nightmare. He or she likely told you writers plan out novels and make outlines. They consult a thesaurus, and have the very best dictionaries. They consider every word carefully, and plot the story climax, leaving heaps of foreshadowing along the way.

My response to that is a carefully-planned eight-letter word beginning with B and ending with T.

I once had to do a research paper at my university for an OT class. Our teacher had us do an outline first, before we even did a review of the literature. I thought that was stupid, since I didn’t know whether or not I’d find the things I thought I would. But it was a good way to organize ideas, and have a sense of the order of the topics.

But even when you do a review of the literature, some books on your list may have only a mention of your topic as an aside, with no useable information.

I assumed we would do a revised outline once we found out what topics were out there. I thought that was a reasonable assumption, but when it wasn’t listed as part of the project, I asked the teacher if I could revise mine, because some topics I wanted information on had not been researched. She said no, that the outline was just a preliminary guide.

So I wrote my paper, and handed it in, along with the footnotes, bibliography, review of the literature list, and the outline (which she’d already graded.) I did get a B for the paper, which was on brain lateralization and handedness (yes, we lefties are always on about that stuff), and she said it was well-written. She also wrote in the comments that it didn’t receive an A because I hadn’t covered all of the topics in my original outline! Apparently, I was supposed to make something up about the things that were not to be found in other people’s books! It makes me understand why some people falsify their data.

It also makes me resist the idea of using an outline unless I write it after the fact.

Perhaps writers of historical fiction, or non-fiction writers use outlines and find them useful. But I’m not them. I find a character – or build one – and chat with them for a while. Then I give them a name, a particular height, hair and eye color, nationality, and other particulars that are only of interest to me as background information. I often make a family tree for them so I know their relationship to the other characters. If I like them a lot, I’ll make them left-handed (because I am). Then I give them a nudge to see what they’ll do.

They take me on their adventures, and I discover their story along the way. I don’t plan anything in advance. The characters tell me when it’s finished.

Yes, I have some idea of what the story is about when I start, but it doesn’t always stay quite where I expect it to. That’s why writing is an art, not a science.

Sometimes I want a character to say some phrase I particularly like. Having a great title or an interesting remark is better than icing. It’s more like cocaine (from what I’ve read).

But some characters aren’t enablers. They will put their hands on their hips and tell me, “I’m not saying that, and if you make me, I’ll make it sound stupid.”

Often, it takes several pages to even reach the point where the character will say the line. And usually, it sounds stupid. Then I have to delete all of those extra pages.

It’s usually best to simply trust the characters.

“I don’t want to be some character in one of your novels!”

That line has been flung at me more than once when someone was angry with me for something I’ve done or said (and never having anything whatever to do with my writing). My response is usually, “You wish!” or, “Not bloody likely!”

I write fiction. I do not use real people as characters. I don’t even base my characters on real people. I find that characters I’ve made up are much more amenable.

Something I actually do when I’m not writing or reading is to observe. I watch people. I pay attention (yes, really!) to situations I’m in or that others are in. I store them in my head for later use. Then I will use the situation, only peopled with my characters, who behave as themselves, not like the people who were in the actual situation.

An example is when my father died. It was obvious to me that he was already dead when the EMTs took him out of our house. He had CHF, and his heart simply slowed to a stop. He went peacefully.

However, the doctors at the hospital worked on him for well over an hour before anyone came to the waiting room to tell my mother and me that there was nothing more they could do.

I suppose because I knew it was coming – or perhaps I was in shock – I felt like an observer in the situation. When the nurse came to tell us, and asked if we wanted to see the body, my immediate thought was, “No, that’s all right. I believe you.” I had seen the arms and legs sprawled as he lay on the ambulance gurney, before they got him appropriately positioned at the house. I didn’t actually say anything to the nurse. My mother immediately said, “Yes, of course.”

So, when they were ready, we were led into the room where his body lay peacefully, dressed in a hospital gown and his trousers. I felt like a video recorder, observing as my mother smoothed his hair, kissed his forehead, remarking on how his head was still warm – which I thought was a bizarre thing to say.

I have never and will never kiss a corpse. I know, other people have no problem with this. The person is no longer there. Frankly I find many of the rituals associated with death somewhat on the grotesque side.

But I watched and the memory of everything about that room and my mother’s actions are etched in my mind. And then I accidentally brushed up against the icy hand and was shocked. She’d talked about his head being warm. His hand was not. I knew from experience that the body hoards its warmth in the core to protect the brain and other vital organs, so hands and feet are the first to lose heat. I simply hadn’t expected to come into contact with that hand.

I used the loss of heat in a hand of someone who had just died in a story, although the other circumstances were completely different.

And I used the hospital scene in another, as yet unpublished, novel.  The person in the same position as my mother in the story had nothing in common with my mother beyond being a woman who had just lost her husband. The experience fit the story. I just didn’t use real people.

While I can’t write the original on a computer, I can edit there. Once I put the written story onto the computer – which in itself involves several edits, I can read and edit, then let the story rest before having another go at editing.

My blogs are edited several times from being put on the blog site and scheduled months ahead of when they go live, until – sometimes – 10 minutes before the blog is available for anyone to read.

So, while I don’t prepare for writing the way my English teachers taught me – and English teachers and lit. majors are often some of the worst writers I’ve encountered – I do have my own methods, even if they’re somewhat scattered.

I mainly write the stories I want to read, but can't find in the library.

I’m sure many, if not most writers have their own method of creating a story that is not necessarily in keeping with what their teachers taught them. You do what works for you, and if it happens to be what the English teacher taught you, all well and good. If it isn’t, that’s okay, too.

Readers Wanted

 

Until I was 10, I hated to read.

Smelling salts for the librarians, please.

I wasn’t anti-books. In fact, I loved having someone read to me.

And libraries were my passion. I loved going to the local library and picking out two or three books with interesting covers, even when I couldn’t pronounce the titles. It was the actual sitting down to read that bothered me.

To put things into perspective, my mother sold me on the idea that school was the place where 1) I would make lots of friends, and 2) I would learn to read.

Neither thing happened much for me as far as I could tell in first grade. Initially, school was heavy on phonics, but without anything much to read.

As we learned the sounds of letters, consonant blends and vowel diphthongs, I misunderstood some of the explanations my teacher gave, like telling us if a word had a tail on the end, the vowel had a long sound. While she meant the silent E, I missed that as a tail completely. So, I gave any word ending in y, p or g a long vowel sound. It took some time before my mother figured out what the problem was.

With mild, undiagnosed, and at the time, unheard-of dyslexia, I had a few other problems with reading and writing, like starting from the wrong side of the page, that made my mother curse herself for not switching me from left to right handed years earlier when she had the chance. She didn’t realize that wouldn’t have solved the problem.

However, most of my difficulties had been resolved with my mother’s hard work by the time we finally got readers. She did such a good job that I was moved from the second reading group to the first in only a few weeks. No Bluejays for me; I was a Cardinal!

Getting readers wasn’t the thrill I was led to believe. The first “story” wasn’t what I was expecting, having been raised on Little Golden Books.

                        Look

                        Look, oh look.

                        Look and see.

Seriously? How about the Tawny Scrawny Lion? Even A Day at the Playground, which was so plotless that I made up an actual story to go with the pictures when I was four, was more interesting than the stories in our reader.

Subsequent “stories” weren’t much better.  “See Spot Run” wasn’t a story, either. Even the introduction of the family, Father, Mother, John, Jean and Judy as well as Puff the kitten and Judy’s stuffed bear, Tim, didn’t offer plot. The first actual story was the last one in the book. I read it the day I got my reader, and was ready to trade the book in on the next one.

But no.

We had to read every single “story” in the book before moving on. This was no way to spark a love of reading in anyone, in my humble opinion.

I discovered I could actually read the Little Golden Books, and eventually the Big Book of Fairy Tales, even if the words in the newspaper my dad read looked like spiders crawling along the page.

In the second grade, I discovered the community library. An old building with creaky stairs leading up to the actual room of books, it had a wonderful scent of old paper, leather and furniture polish. That scent should be made into a cologne, perhaps “Booklover’s Dream.”

I was only allowed into the junior fiction section, a more open area with lower shelves than the stacks. But I looked enviously at the big kids who emerged from the stacks with an armload of books. Because of them, I always took two books out at a time, even though I chose chapter books that I couldn’t read one of completely in the two weeks allotted.

I didn’t have a favorite genre. I scrupulously avoided thin, chapterless books that looked too much like my school readers.

But I struggled to be interested in the books I did choose.

"Oh, you’ll love the Bobsey Twins books,” I was told.

I didn’t. The first chapter of each of the gazillion books in the series was long and tedious, laboriously setting the scene without any hint of action, as opposed to what I was taught years later in university writing classes, that if you didn’t grab the reader by the throat in the first paragraph, you’d lost them. 

The Bobsey Twins lost me. No amount of my teacher’s telling me you had to get through the first chapter and then it would get interesting could sway me. 

The Cherry Ames, R.N. series wasn’t any better. As a child who dreamed of being a rock star, stories about girls in any of the acceptable girl occupations of the time did not inspire.

If only someone had introduced me to The Chronicles of Narnia! Where the Wild Things Are wasn’t written until I was in third grade, and if my parents had even heard of it, I was beyond that reading level by then.

In fifth grade I received a novel as a Pollyanna gift at school. While it was a step above the hated jigsaw puzzles I received nearly every other year of elementary school, I didn’t hold out much hope. Good grief, a book! 

“You’ll love this!” my mother said when she saw the book was Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott. 

To my surprise, I did love it. And I’ve read it more than 15 times throughout my life. I’ve also read nearly everything else that author ever wrote. 

Thus was born my love for reading, which gave my father and me talking points. Whenever looking for my father at the mall, I knew he would be in the bookstore. The best gift to give him was a gift certificate to Walden’s Bookstore. And when we read the same books, we could launch into lengthy conversations about what worked and what didn’t. 

After reading Alcott, I branched out to Science Fiction, and eventually into vampires, starting with Dracula. I tried playing catch-up, reading as an adult the “classics” I’d missed as a child. While I still haven’t managed to retain enough interest to crawl through A Wrinkle in Time, I’ve gloried in the Narnia stories, loved the Wild Thing and Shel Silverstein’s books, and am currently interspersing Roald Dahl’s children’s books with a variety grownup books.

On my bookshelves, The Horatio Hornblower series shares space with a collection of Dickens, Morgan Llewelyn and almost everything by Bernard Cornwell except the Sharpe series (because I didn't get to that yet).

The reason I became a writer was probably due to my initial hatred of reading: Trying to find something that would hold my interest led me to write the stories I couldn’t find in the library.  I only wish my dad had lived long enough to see my first novel completed. I would love to have had his feedback.

My journey went from hating my readers at six to reading the unabridged version of War and Peace and most of Dickens in my teens and twenties, and more recently, venturing through the eight-book Outlander series, at about 1400 pages per book.

And of course, as any avid reader does, I have shelves of books that are waiting for me to finish what I’m currently reading so they can have their turn.

Librarians and booksellers can now relax. I’ll be in to see you.

I’d Like to Thank … My Muse

My brother-in-law gave me a mug that reads, “Please do not annoy the writer. She may put you in a book and kill you.”

I found that hilarious – and a perfect gift for a tea-drinking writer when I received it.

People who don’t write assume – from my experience – that writers use people they know as their characters, as if they couldn’t create characters on their own.

I’ve had people tell me – usually during an argument – “I don’t want to be a character in one of your novels!” To which I reply, “You wish!”

This is not some conceited retort. I think, at least to some degree, the people who say things like that do fancy themselves as the perfect “character” for someone’s novel. And there are writers who fancy themselves characters for their own stories.

Those of us of a certain age are familiar with Alfred Hitchcock making a cameo in every one of his films. And if he weren’t a screenwriter, Woody Allen wouldn’t have an acting career. Don’t believe me? Name one movie he was in that he didn’t write.

But seriously, I don’t use real people to play the part of my characters, and never have – even when I was 10 and made my first aborted stab at The Great American Novel.

My inspiration consists more of taking a line from a conversation. For example, a recent blog was inspired by something a friend wrote me in an email.

Another example comes from one of my novels, where one of the main characters’ father dies. The whole aftermath at the hospital is a recreation of what happened when my own father died – and that was only a year earlier, so it was still fresh.

Everything the wife did and said was what I remember my mother doing and saying. Yet the wife, a very minor character in the series, is otherwise nothing like my own mother. I only used that particular scene.

I also find it amusing that people who have read my novels will say, “Oh, so-and-so is you.” And they’re usually wrong. Yes, I am a character in nearly every one of my novels.

 But before you start thinking I’m a complete narcissist, let me clarify. My books are not autobiographical. I never set out to write a book about me, and so far I’ve succeeded.

One character in each book is who I wish I were instead of me.

And it’s never the character people think. (Okay, maybe in the first Unicorn story it is.) It’s always the first left-handed character you meet.

I am essentially a watcher. I observe the human condition, and apply it to my stories.

This is not unique. This is what writers do. Yet you never hear a writer receiving an award say, “I’d like to thank my muse, so-and-so, for giving me the line that inspired this film.” No, they thank the academy, their parents for sending them to a good university, their wives, partners and kids for giving them the space to create.

Yet it doesn’t all come from them. Someone sparked the idea. Anyone could be that muse. Writers just don’t usually talk about it.

Now a word of warning to all of you non-writers out there: Lest you think of making some grandiose speech you think I’ll include in my next novel, forget about it. The thing I find particularly inspiring is usually something insignificant that you say when you’re not particularly paying attention.

Besides, the wrong thing could annoy me, and I might put you in the next story and kill you.