Write in first person about the beginning of history for a species. Find the voice of the tribe’s oral historian and have him or her share the tribe’s beginnings to either a formal or informal audience. Focus on establishing a voice for the speaker and putting across the mythology the group reveres.
When I can’t sleep, I read. When I read, I can sleep.
I love to read. I can do it anywhere. Long ago,when my parents would get into an argument, I would pick up a book and start reading. The sound of them would just disappear. I would dive into the story, think about the characters and what was happening to them, or read a really great line over and over, twisting it about with thought-filled hands to examine it from all angles. Hours would pass, and I would close the book to find I was so hungry I was nauseous. I had left the place behind while I read, a transcendentalist, my body snugged into a chair that looked out over my neighbor’s driveway, my mind in some other space.
Reading was essential. In many ways, it is still the same kind of essential it was when I was a child and later a teenager. If I cannot sleep, which happens fairly often, all I need do is pick up a book. Maybe I can’t sleep because I am thinking too much, lesson planning or planning a field trip or going over a conversation that just won’t quit my mind. Whatever it is that is keeping me awake disappears when I read. It is as if my mind narrows to just this one thing, the story I am reading. It fills the space between my ears. Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes later, I can turn off my Sony reader, roll over and shortly I am asleep. When I read, I throw everything out and leave room only for the story. I don’t actively examine the details; I take them in, spread them out for reflection. It is a leisurely flow of reading and understanding, putting things together without effort. When I put the book down, that meditative flow stays and rolls me right into sleep.
If I didn’t read, I would remain awake for hours.
Tuesday weekly prompt
Remember a childhood friend or enemy. What stood out as a trait unique to that child? Consider what has become of him or her based on that trait remaining true. I had a friend named Marsha for a short time in second grade. I say short because she did not let any of her friends have other friends. So I might imagine that she is busy now running the adult lives of her children since she probably lost her husband when he could not stand being smothered any longer. Or perhaps she translated her controlling ways into a successful Wall Street business but is now charged with insider trading. Pick someone you did not maintain contact with and haven’t heard about — that way you have plenty of room for imagining. You might want to change names for your character if you plan on publishing when you are done.
Writing is like driving a truck a little too big for me
My husband and I used to own an old red, full-size Dodge truck. I drove it quite a bit, and being a small woman, it always made me feel as though I was doing something unusual.
I would see my petite hands wrapped around the over-sized steering wheel, surprisingly slender, the flat bench seat seeming to push back at my hundred pounds of weight. The steering had a constant jiggle from side to side in my hands.
At first I tried to hold it steady but overtime I got comfortable enough to trust the truck to steer straight even if the wheel I held seemed to be shifting back and forth; it had play in it. My arms would just relax into the movement.
Writing is like that. It has wiggle room in a story when I am drafting, and I will feel at first that the story is drifting in and out of the center it should be in. I slow down, hold tighter, end up over correcting, and the driving of the story is not enjoyable.
As I become more involved with its inhabitants, my grip loosens. I begin to trust the story to keep the road on its own, and the tremendous view out the window gets much more of my attention, not those quick glances that are punctuated by far more intense visuals of the speedometer, gas gauge and temperature indicator.
When I have gained trust in the story, it doesn’t get easier to write, any more than that truck got easier for me to push the pedal down or steer around corners, but the writing does feel more like it has a good reason to be coming into existence; there is purpose to it, place, time, people and growth. So every story seems a little too big for me, a little unwieldy, but in time, I gain the finesse and ease of moving along the track of the story’s way.
Tuesday prompt 2
Think about a book or story you have read that made a strong impression on you. Select one of the secondary characters and imagine their point-of-view of what happened. Now write their story.
This is nothing new. John Gardner did it in Grendel (based on Beowulf) and Rhys’s also voiced other characters in Wide Sargasso Sea (a before Jane Eyre interpretation). So give it a go. What would another character say about how things went and why? Give it a week’s effort. See you next Tuesday.
Drawing pictures with a blinking cursor
I have always viewed writing as a way to create moving pictures in a person’s mind. Sometimes the movement is just the steady closing in on the moment of discovery when everything is crystal clear, intense, sharp to the senses. Other times the view is like the image made by a really fine film camera where everything in the background is slightly blurred and only a single impression is cast in sharp relief to the mind’s understanding. I love building those images.
Yesterday I was working on my story having set aside a few minutes. I had been writing intently working on a particular scene. The time seemed to have been endless, and I had stopped to back up and view what I had written. Silly, but I highlighted the new text to check word count, a bit over 500 words. Disgusted, I set to again to refine the images and dialogue to make it feel bright, deep and authentic. Even now my mind still keeps running back to the little scene, noting that I had kept the view small, never moving out to create a sense of place, a feel for the desert, the loneliness and the irony of feeling chilled in the intense burning heat of a too hot planet.
Friday or maybe Saturday, I’ll bend over that scene again, work on the distanced view, come in close again and finally find that something of what I had hoped to have wrought was on the screen tapped by the steady rhythm of the cursor blinking.