Some good advice

Advice?

I was chatting with a good friend of mine about my effort here and retold the trouble of trying to enroll in a class earlier this year.  I do miss the structure and feedback I would undoubtedly get from a writing course but as I said to her, “Ernest Hemingway didn’t need a writing teacher to help him.”  To which she replied, “Of course, you know he was also a raging, chaotic alcoholic.”

Yes, well I guess that’s another way to go about this?! I will keep chugging along here, seeing what comes of all of this.

The revising begins…

Allie and me.

I know it is short and very slow going, but here’s a revision of my first few graphs.  I think it is improving, getting better but that isn’t what matters.  What matters is what others think.  So, here goes:

It had been almost ten years since she calmly locked her husband out of their home.  She had just poured a glass of wine and hacked into his voicemail.  He was out of the county at the time, on a business trip, he said, to win a new client for his firm.  A South American paper manufacturing and timber company with M&A needs.  Odd, since he spoke no Spanish,  and specialized in slip and falls.  She let the lie stand though.

Later she would publicly imply that her advanced maternal age and postpartum exhaustion had conspired against her, privately she knew her truth.  Held it close like a newborn in the night.

The wine was fresh and jagged, bone dry, parched.  It was a bottle she’d taken from the “off-limits” shelf in his cellar.  She knew the shelves were named for her, they were boundary markers daring her to defy them:  “cooking,” “everyday drinking,” “special occasion,” and “reserved” were the others.  “Reserved” was the one that troubled her most — it was vague, open to interpretation.  Unable to discern meaning, she skipped that shelf every time.  She preferred things clean, defined, with no room for slithering.

The hoarded voice mails, half a dozen or so, were trite and juvenile and filled with breathless exclamations of true love and longing.  The voice was that of a child, a young girl, with just the slightest hint that English was a second language.  She laughed as she listened, then gagged and washed the acrid taste of bile from her mouth with the sharp wine swiped from the forbidden shelf.

Okay, more to come.  I just can’t say when.  Next assignment though is conversation.  I’m off to eavesdrop and record.  Be careful what you say out loud, I will be listening.  Cheers!

Getting black on white

Here’s my second first worst thought.  I, personally, think this one has more potential than the last one.  It’s still in need of editing and depth, but it’s off to a better start.  I don’t know where it ends, but I’m going to follow this one through.

It had been ten years since she calmly locked her husband out of their home.  She had just poured a glass of wine and hacked into his voicemail.  The wine was fresh and jagged, bone dry, parched.   It was a bottle she’d taken from the “off-limits” shelf in his cellar.  She knew the shelves were named for her, they were boundary markers daring her to defy them:  “cooking,” “everyday drinking,” “special occasion,” and “reserved” were the others.  “Reserved” was the one that troubled her most — it was vague, open to interpretation.  Unable to discern meaning, she skipped that shelf every time.  She preferred things clean, defined, with no room for slithering.  The hoarded voice mails, half a dozen or so, were trite and juvenile and filled with breathless exclamations of true love and longing.  The voice was that of a child, a young girl, with just the slightest hint that English was a second language.  She laughed as she listened, then gagged and washed the acrid taste of bile from her mouth with the sharp wine swiped from the forbidden shelf.

Getting black on white

He was out of the county at the time, on a business trip, he said, to win a new client for his firm.  A South American paper manufacturing and timber company with M&A needs.  Odd, since he spoke no Spanish,  and specialized in slip and falls.  She let the lie stand though.  Later she would publicly imply that her advanced maternal age and postpartum exhaustion had conspired against her, privately she knew her truth.  Held it close like a newborn in the night.

First Thought, Worst Thought

Not sitting alone in a room.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything but rest assured, I’ve been getting in shape — as a writer, I mean.  I’ve been learning how to “write around the block,” “become a writer,” and develop the ability to “sit alone in a quiet room.”  That last one has been a bit of a challenge for me.  However, my instructor (who, by the way, doesn’t know he’s my instructor) John Dufresne, included a wildly motivating quote in his book:  “Most of the evils in life come from a man’s being unable to sit still in a quiet room.”  

He also writes eloquently about the role of the first draft.  Way too many beginning writers, he suggests, try to write their story in one draft.  NOT POSSIBLE.  In my actual work, I love to say to the smug colleagues who edit, “Yeah, well where were you when the page was blank?” (usually muttered under my breath).  I recently learned another, less aggressive, way to convey that:  “first thought, worst thought.”  It’s critical that we remember the role of the first draft, it has only one purpose and that is to get the ink on the paper.  It is a start.  Nothing more.

So at the risk of having to endure some amount of humiliation, here’s one of my first worst thoughts.

_________ (still searching for her name) slid into the seat across from me.  She looked wretched and I almost said so.  We’d been best friends since we were 15, so we often shared comments like that with each other.  Less insult and more an opening for our real conversation.  For 20 years we’d spent Saturday afternoons together.  First wandering around the newest mall in our typical Midwestern home town.  And now meeting for lunch on Saturdays every time I went back.  This was one of those lunches.

We ordered wine and laughed, still not believing we could actually drink wine in public in the middle of the day.  “Hey, listen,” she whispered.  “Why are we whispering.” I asked.  “Stop it! This is serious,” she shot back.  “I did a bad thing last night and now I’m in a jam.”  _______ was not new to jams.

She’d once been the smartest friend I had, the one with the most potential.  She was pretty, in that thoroughly middle America way.  She had an easy going, natural way about her.  While the rest of us plodded along, trying too hard, she seemed to float by gracefully, getting it right every single time…

Honestly, it’s right out of some bad chick lit, but let’s see where it goes over time.

Ca suffit!

Ca suffit!

So I’m missing my accent, but you get it.  That’s enough.  Mystery solved.  No more interactions with the cranky tech guy.  It turns out that my fiction writing class, the one that existed in the course catalogue in December, does not exist in real life in January.  It’s been mushed into the 11:00 AM section, no good for a working girl.  But I remain determined to go it alone, I want to write.  I do.  Now I will need to find a sympathetic but critical audience to help me do this, and do this right.  Willing?  I hope so.  I read somewhere recently that “most of the evils in life come from a man’s being unable to sit still in a room.”  I hope I’m able to sit still in a room and create something worth while.

Five Minutes, Five Fingers, Five Times

That's twice now.

Not again?!   Tried to get to my writing class tonight but was foiled again, this time by bureaucracy.  I went to room 205, but that was English 303, whatever that is, not “The Write Stuff: Intro to Fiction Writing.”  So, I returned to see my grumpy friend in the tech support lab and he allowed me to call the registrar’s office.  I felt important, as if I’d won a prize of some sort.

The woman who picked up the phone in that office answered with a hearty, “Yeah?”  And then proceeded to tell me, “Your class is at 11:00 AM on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”  “That’s not right,” I say. “I signed up for a class at 5:30 PM.  I work, why would I sign up for a class at peak work time?”  She simply replied, “Got me sweetheart.”   Oh well, I’ll figure it out tomorrow since everyone in charge of continuing ed students had left the building by 5:15.

I guess I’ll just go it alone, for now.  I’m still determined.  And since I’ve done all my homework, dutifully, I think I’ll share a bit of it here.  The class that I’m apparently not in was assigned 80 pages of reading and an exercise called “Five Minutes, Five Fingers, Five Times.”  Which is basically five quick writing warm ups that you have to complete in 25 minutes, so about 5 minutes each.  I’m still trying to figure out what 5 Fingers means, I actually used all ten of mine.

In the last exercise, number 5, we had to choose three words and write about those words.  The only requirement, besides the 5 minute limit, was that the writing had to show someone doing something.  So I chose:  honey, silk, and crib.  One of these is supremely cheesy, okay maybe more than one.  But remember, it is just a warm up and it was really fun.

1) Honey:  The honey flowed like liquid gold from the thick, plastic, bear-shaped bottle landing gently, with the occasional plop, on the creamy peanut butter.  They liked these sandwiches on white bread with the right ratio of honey to peanut butter.  They adamantly rejected using a knife to spread the honey, preferring it to spread itself like red wine on white wool.

2) Silk:  She was running late and didn’t have time to consider clothes.  The blouse she grabbed felt soft and sueded, like a friendly hug.  It was slightly rumpled but clean.  She turned on the iron and began to smooth things out, the heat and steam mixing with the silk.  Soon the room started to smell sweet and antiseptic, oddly like her dentist.

3) Crib:  She carefully placed her new boy in his bed.  She always placed him on his back to help prevent him suffering SIDS, the warnings were dire and everywhere.  She noticed that the bed was not at all like her baby bed, it was devoid of nearly everything.  No bumper allowed, SIDS; no stuffed toys, SIDS; no blankets, SIDS.  No mobile, SIDS — no that can’t be right, must be some other danger.  “Sad,” she thought.  No comfort in that little jail we call a crib.

Back to School…it ain’t what it used to be!

Our still spunky heroine. Undaunted.

I’m not a New Year’s resolution kind of girl, but this year I did make one:  to be fancier!  Oh yeah and to get back to writing (I suppose that makes two resolutions).  Writing was my first love when I was growing up and coming of age and all of that.  It was an escape, a place where I could be totally in control.  I really loved it, but as most first loves go, we went our separate ways and now the writing I do is mostly jargon filled or delegated.

So, to force the issue a bit, I enrolled in a Fiction Writing Class at one of the local universities here.  Tonight was to be our first class.  I punched the address into my GPS and off I went.  What happens next is a long and predictable story, one in which the almost middle-aged, but still spunky, heroine discovers the Internet and how it is being used at colleges all across America by teachers and students alike.  One in which our heroine, who feels oddly superior to her classmates, gets her comeuppance, and all the rest of it.  The happy ending:  class is cancelled and no one, other than the grouchy tech support guy, knows of her ignorance and arrogance.

But all is not lost: earlier today I along with two colleagues tried our hands at writing mini-sagas.  This exercise is one that Daniel Pink discusses in his great book, A Whole New Mind.  It’s fun and really a great exercise for people who need or want to be succinct and have an impact at the same time.  Mini-sagas are stories (complete with a start, middle and end) told in 50 words.  No more, no less.  Here’s mine.

Standing amid boxes she shuddered, exhausted and teary.  The house was 103 and looked it.  “Why’d you buy this shit hole?” her dad had asked.  She had no answer.  Later, as she tucked her girls in, she said out loud, to no one in particular, “Because it feels like home.” 

Maybe all is not lost after all.

Hello world!

Welcome!  This is an experiment — nothing more, nothing less.  I think I can write. I even think I can write stuff that people want to read. Now, I’m going to find out.