Photo Muse

I'll be gone on a trip for a week, so this is probably my last post until I get back. While I'm away from home, hopefully I'll still get to write a little bit. Hopefully you will, too. Here's a pic to inspire you. Think about the grass being soft underfoot, a cool breeze drying the sweat on your nose, the smell of pond water,  the shifting shadows, the cold metal of the bench and the grittiness of the dirt on it, and maybe the taste of honeysuckle.

Showing vs. Telling


"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."  Anton Chekhov (doctor and writer)

I love this quote for two reasons. One, it's so glorious! It's exactly what I like so much about writing and reading, that the right words engulf your brain with a delicious wash of images and make you see what they're describing.

And two, because Chekhov says the classic  "show; don't tell" so well, because as he's telling you to show, he's showing you how.

"The Sweet Taste of Success"

(Descriptive memoir-esque fiction)

           Each breath and every heartbeat rocks my vision like a buoy in stormy water. The grip is the wrong shape for my outstretched hands. The green sponges in my ears make the noises around me sound like they do in dreams: slow, murky, and blurred. I take a deep breath, but my heart keeps racing. The detachment from my hearing makes everything surreal. Am I really doing this? 

Through the muddy echoes outside my ears, a voice reassures me. Adjusting my grip and planting my feet more firmly, I hold my breath and squint one eye, and my vision steadies. There it is, the crisp white sheet. Then I pull back the hammer, shift my pointed finger into a curl around the trigger, and squeeze. The explosion punches my left hand like a metal fist as the barrel spurts flame, and the smoke and the gunpowder that settles deep in my throat tastes strangely sweet. I lower my hands and look down the lane. The sheet of paper sways gently, a clean black hole through the circle of red. Bull’s-eye.

The Blueberries in the Muffins

Irony and plot twists are the icing on the cake (or the blueberries in the muffins or the chocolate chips in the cookies). The short story, Roman Fever, by Edith Wharton has both. At the end my jaw dropped and all I could say was, "Oh my goodness!" My mom read it when she was in English school, and the other day she suddenly remembered and told me about it. Now I'm passing it on to you. :)

Chilly Read (concluded)

               The Igloo: Part IV

After that, the temperature warmed up again. The igloo survived a couple days of 60 and 70° weather. While the snow on the ground melted and turned to mud, it stood unflinchingly in the sunshine. 

But even the nearly one-foot-thick walls didn’t last forever. Each trek to the end of the street found the igloo in a little less of its former glory. Solid ice turned to pockmarked slush. One day, while we were there, the roof fell in. A bright blue sky shone in through the gaping hole. All too soon, the walls crumbled. What had taken us four days to build collapsed, melted, and disappeared. But not without a trace.

The day after it melted, I walked down the now dry street, and looked for what was left. There was no more snow, but where our white fortress used to stand, an imprint of it was pressed into the carpet of leaves. Gallons of frozen water had stamped its shape into the ground. It was like looking at roofless pillars on the cracked stone floor of a ruined castle and picturing where the entrance and the walls of the throne room used to be.

Like when visiting the remnants of a once stately old building, there was a feeling of melancholy. In that in-between time of no longer the glittering white beauty of winter but not yet the vivid greens and rainbow palette of spring, of a sea of snow crystals replaced by muddy leaves and wilted grass, of roads scattered with sand, not blanketed with snow, of the dwindling warmth and glow of the wood stove and the dissipating wood smoke from the chimney, I was sad. It is always sad to see winter go. But at the same time, I say that it is better to have snowed and melted than never to have snowed at all.

Word Economy

          I read about "word economy" and being clear and concise in how-to-write books. The classics seem to be full of page-long sentences and endless description, but nowadays short and sweet seems to be the literary fashion. Poetry as a genre is concise, but here's an especially good example. It's a three-word couplet by Ogden Nash.

                       Fleas
                       Adam
                       Had 'em

Chilly Read (continued)

            Igloo: Part III

Wednesday, the following day, my siblings and I tramped down to the igloo, armed with a lunchbox, a tarp, a board game, and a rolled up old carpet. The igloo stood proudly against a glittering white backdrop. Its walls were solid ice, having melted partially and then refrozen. It had snowed, too, in the night; the haphazard roof we stuck on the previous night was now a smooth round dome. As a final touch, we unrolled the carpet and spread it across the icy floor on top of a tarp.

Sam came over, and we celebrated more than 16 hours of work and our finished igloo with a picnic of cookies and juice pouches! Sitting cross-legged on the carpet, sheltered from a cutting wind, we munched on cookies and played the Game of LIFE. The noises from outside were strangely muted, and inside was peacefully quiet. It looked snug and homey, especially with our boots lined up on the doorstep, but when we all finally retired in LIFE, we were half frozen. My sister and brother and I gathered up our things, said bye to the igloo and Sam, and went home to thaw out in the warmth of our wood stove.

The Almost Right Word

          When I went running in my neighborhood yesterday morning, I saw a pretty tree in someone's yard. I thought of the word spray, like a spray of flowers, when I saw it. So after I finished running I took a whole ten minutes (after I was already tired) just to walk back to that tree and take pictures of it to post. I wanted to talk about how certain images evoke certain words (kind of visa versa of the exercise in my post, Story Bells).
            I was just about to write today's post on that theme, when I thought, "Hm, maybe I should make sure 'spray' means what I think it does." To me, it sounds like a bunch of flowers sprouting in a wild manner, every which way, like a firework on a bush or tree. That was almost right, but according to the Mac Dictionary Application spray means "a stem or small branch of a tree or plant, bearing flowers and foliage." Pretty close, but according to Mark Twain, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

Chilly Read (continued)

The Igloo: Part II

           

Monday was another snow day. As soon as we could, we trekked down the street to get back to work. After we carted several buckets down to the igloo, we noted our slow progress.

            “You know,” I said, “it would go a lot faster if we had another person to help us.”

            At my sister’s suggestion, we invited Sam—our foreign-exchange neighbor—to join us. He said, “Sure!” and as soon as he got his coat and shoes and gloves on, he crossed the street to give us a hand. It was a good thing, too! With Sam’s help, we got another layer on in half the time it would’ve taken us by ourselves.

         When the walls were too high for me, Sam took over the job of placing the new blocks. We traded off doing different parts of the building process, but each of us had our specialty. I ran back and forth with the bucket, my brother shoveled snow into piles to fill it up, Sam planted it on the wall, and Rina packed snow in between to reinforce the structure.

            Our snow building grew taller and more impressive, and a few of our neighbors stopped by to admire it. One jolly man squeezed inside the narrow doorway to inspect it from the inside.

            The next day, we were back in school, and it was hard to sit in class all day after a full week of snow days. It was three days since we started our building project.

            The sun was already low behind the white haze of clouds by the time we started on our creation again. Soon it was so dark we could hardly see, and Mama wanted us to come home for supper. We scrambled to finish and put the roof on in the pitch black. Our feet and hands, like every day so far, were frozen, and we could all wring water out of our snow gloves. Finally finished for the day, we tramped home by the weak orange rays of the streetlights, satisfied with our success.

Movie Muse

         Movies are good sources of inspiration. When one rings a story bell but I'm not satisfied at the end, I take the bits and pieces or maybe just the characters or the main storyline and write it how I want it to go. It's so fun! Usually it's the characters or their actors that I take from movies. After watching The Avengers and all the movies leading up to it, Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye--who is my favorite Avenger) has been popping up in all my stories in some shape or form. He might be the badguy in a paramilitary agency or a soldier back from the war who's fixing up his ranch, but he retains his own characteristics and is just as dashing as his real self.

Who wins your contest? Is it by looks, personality, superpower, or quotes?

Do you recognize his or her face among your characters?

A Chilly Read For Summer

The Igloo: Part One

            Three days after I played tennis in shorts and a t-shirt, school was canceled for the beginning of one of the worst snowstorms I've ever seen. From Tuesday to Friday, I spent my glorious free time relaxing. I read books, worked on a short story, practiced piano, and looked out the window at the steadily falling snow. A few times, I and my younger sister and brother ventured outside to enjoy the frosted scenery, the close feeling of a snow-laden world, and the slippery patches of ice on the road that had brought our sudden winter vacation.


         Fun as it was, sledding on gripless boots down a steep hill gave me a fair share of bumps and bruises (I still have one on my knee), so on Saturday we decided on the safer activity of building a snowman in a field at the end of our street. The snow was the perfect stickiness. Our snowman smiled at the world with his licorice eyes and pebble smile.

            We thought about having a snow-creature art contest, but instead one of us said, “Let’s try building an igloo like Papa made when he was small.” So we did. Between the three of us, a turquoise bucket, and a matching shovel, we laid a solid foundation for it. It took us until nearly dark to add another twenty rectangular blocks of packed snow for the second layer.

            Sunday after church, we got back to work. Our shouts of “double-time!” as we shoveled, shuttled, and shaved snow made it more exciting but did little to actually speed us up. Again, we worked until the sun disappeared and there was only a little smudge of pink on the horizon. The igloo now stood hip-high and was beginning to take shape.

To be continued...

Book Review: Inside Out & Back Again

       Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhha Lai, is the story of a Vietnamese family fleeing their home country for the U.S. Written in poetry form, main character Ha tells about a year of her life, from missing her papaya tree in South Vietnam to wondering about her father (who went missing when she was a baby) to being amazed at her new blonde-haired, tall-hat-wearing American neighbors. She struggles with feeling dumb because of her language barrier and being bullied for being different, but through her trials she grows closer to her mother and three brothers and makes new friends. For 260 short pages, we see what America looked like in 1975 through the eyes of a ten-year-old girl. A poignant yet hopeful book worth reading.

Gaps

"Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time…The wait is simply too long." Leonard S. Bernstein
 (musician).

Though some lucky people are just brimming with ideas and are always in the right mood to put them on paper, I definitely have long waits between bursts of inspiration. Some handy things that helps me during the gaps are writing prompts.

*This one  helped me recently to write a 3.5-page story: "Write an incident about an umbrella--one that jabs and stabs, protects, introduces your character to someone, or..." The umbrella was the right kind of random, and the words jabs, stabs, and protects grabbed my attention. Characters ran up to take their places at the tolling of that story bell, and pretty soon a plot (which is the most reluctant to make an appearance for me) emerged, too.

You can find prompts all over the Internet (plus apps). Try one if you're stuck in a gap! :)

*Example taken from page 5 of So You Want to Write a Novel, by Lou Willett Stanek, Ph.D.

Snippet

Yay--it's the weekend! And here is a snippet of my short story "The Soldier." (Historical fiction is one of my favorite genres) "The Soldier" takes place in Kent, England on February 24, 1942 (during World War II). The narrator is nine-year-old Frances, who is eavesdropping on her sister and a young soldier's conversation.

I heard the familiar rattle of the back door handle, and I ducked behind a column. I peeked out as far as I dared. An older soldier stuck his head out the door. He nodded to Maggie then waved a magazine at Neil.

            “This your copy of LIFE, mate?” he asked. Neil said it was. “Been passed around to the lads now.” The man tossed it to Neil, who caught it neatly out of the air, before retreating inside. I closed my eyes and smiled and leaned my head against the column.

            “All right, guess my birthday,” Neil said to Maggie.

            “Wait," she said. "Is that yesterday's? ”

            I opened my eyes and pictured my sister with her eyebrows drawn together.

            “The magazine?” Neil asked. “Yeah, twenty-three February. Why?”

            “Could I see it?”

            “I don’t think,” Neil paused. “I don’t think you’d want to read this. It’s not a pretty article.”

“I know.” Maggie swallowed.

I got up quietly and risked putting my face up to the bench. Through the space between boards, I could see neat rows of soldiers marching across the cover of the magazine in Neil’s calloused hands.

Neil ruffled his hair, mussing it even more. “Do you know what it’s about?”

Maggie looked down at her clasped hands. “When I went to town with Gran yesterday we stopped by the newsagent, and she picked one of those up to read in line. I was about to open one too, when she told me to put it down.” Maggie touched the cover.  “It’s about those camps.”

Neil nodded, and Maggie sighed. “I’ve heard talk here and there at the green grocer’s and from some of the older girls at work, but never a word from Gran or Granddad. Especially because Frances, I think.”

Me? What didn’t Granddad want me to know?

C.S. Lewis

If I could go back in time and spend a day talking to one author, it would be C.S. Lewis. He is one of my favorite (if not favorite) authors. I love The Chronicles of Narnia. When I was small my dad read them to me, and anytime I was sick in bed I listened to them on tape. C.S. Lewis narrates so clearly and simply, but somehow the language he uses is so beautiful (that's a broad word--but you'll understand if you've read his books). If I had to pick a favorite Narnia book, it would probably be The Horse and His Boy. Every page is an adventure, whether it's dialogue or background story or description of a scene.

Here is a quote from C.S. Lewis: “Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”

I agree! During school I often feel like I go from schoolwork to homework to getting ready for bed. Those are the days that I like to spend a happy hour at the kitchen table, slowly chewing my lunch while reading a book propped up on a stand. I have to be careful, though, or I'll end up eating a little more so I can read longer and then reading a little longer so I can eat more! :[

Story Bells

      Sometimes as I'm reading, a certain word or phrase stops me, because it gives me a glimpse of a story. It's a nice feeling, like watching a single firework. I call those things story bells because they're like the echoes of stories that haven't been written yet. I've started a list of them in my writing notebook, and just yesterday I rediscovered an exercise that goes perfectly with them. I think I got it out of a how-to-write book. This is the prompt:

"What images do certain words evoke?"

 It's simple but so fun! Here are two of mine:

The word penciled makes me imagine

The standard yellow notebook

And a plain brown wooden #2 pencil

Sharpened to a fine point

Hovering over a beautifully written

Sentence in small, neat cursive

The word marine makes me imagine

Rocky shoals and otters surrounded

By kelp, and aquariums full of air bubbles

It makes me imagine rocks under my feet

And the wind whipping dress and hair

The cry of seagulls not far off

Now you try it! Here are some words from my list: rambunctious, lichen, chess, glittering, burnished (but if those don't strike any story bells, use words that do).

Writing Notebook

     This is my writing notebook. It's just a plain spiral notebook, so I'm not afraid to ruin it. I can write for my own pleasure, and I can bear not to write my best. I can go on for pages and pages, or I can stop in the middle of a story when I'm tired of it (which happens a lot). The drawings on the front are bookish things that inspire me and put me in a writing mood.

      Having a notebook is helpful, but it's not the magical cure for writer's block--I got so stuck yesterday. I think maybe it's time to forage through old things: stories I didn't finish, poems that I forgot I wrote.

Here is one of those old (but finished) poems that started out in my notebook:

Sonnet 1: Memories

What else possesses so much strength

But a Bengal tiger ready to spring?

What else transpires such sweet perfume

But the shiuli blossoms in full flower?

The tiger’s pounce can pin you down

Paralyzing past and future

‘Less you ride the brawny back

Forward through woods by leaps and bounds.

The shiuli flowers at dawn will fall

And drape the ground in honey-white drifts.

Then slowly on the day will plod and

Though they’ll wilt as twilight falls

From sleeping buds new life will bloom.

A snow of flowers will fall again soon.

Welcome!

 "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart..." Colossians 3:23

Welcome! I decided to venture into the blogging realm, so here is The Well in the Wood. I will be posting a variety of things on writing in general, on other people's writing, and snippets of my writing.