Hi, folks! Today is my twenty-eighth wedding anniversary with the sweetest man ever, Tim Blaisdell. He is also a blogger and writes over at THE MUSINGS OF A MEANDERING MIND. I also am in a entrant in QUERY KOMBAT. Queries are selected by judges and they go head and head in a VOICE-esque contest. Only one query moves to next level. I'm Southern Gothic Secrets and my critique partner Ellen is Mochi Monster!
What do we win? Twenty-eight agents and editor will be looking at the queries with the possibility of landing an agent or even a contract. Did you notice 28 and 28? Feels very portent-y to me!
This week I'm writing about a deep truth. We are all born to bloom. A dear friend facing who suffers from a cancer syndrome hugged me and whispered, "I want to bloom but I feel like I'm falling apart."
I hugged her back because I know what it is like to be broken on a genetic level. Some things don't need words. What we can do is focus on the splendor of now. Blooming does not come from us but creator of all things.
I grew up with a plant-loving mom, and she surrounded my life with flowers. So this week, I'm going to share about unusual blooms that I have seen in my life. I love flowers and I pay attention. I hope you will take lessons from these blooms and realize that you are stronger that you know.
A half-of a daffodil bloomed in my mother's yard once. It was the most beautiful thing. A genetic anomaly but more beautiful because of it was unique.
One time there was a sad rhody in my yard that covered with some kind of leaf disease. I had to hack away more than half of the plant. The next year the rhody bloomed with almost a hundred gorgeous blood-red blooms that took my breath away. It had never bloomed before.
Once my mom stopped the car beside the road and made me get out and look at this field of spiky plants with these gorgeous white blooms on tall spears. She told me to soak it in because these were century plants and this might not happen again in my life time.
I planted a cemetery rose in my backyard from a cutting that was about two inches long. This year rose is the size of a small car and it has hundreds of blooms.
So this week, I was blessed by this: my daylilies bloomed during the 8 inches of rain that fell on my house this week in 24 hours. The splash of color on such a dreary day uplifted my heart. Bloom during the flood!
Maybe one of these blooms speaks to you. Just like you were born to share, to be merciful, to smile, and to love, you were born to bloom. Seize every day.
I will be back next week with a new series about the Monomyth. I hope you will join me.
Here is a doodle:
Here is a quote for your pocket:
Why should I be unhappy? Every parcel of my being is in full bloom. Rumi
Hi, folks. This has been my unfortunate refrain for a while: my heart aches. I've worked hard as a creative person and believe I have little to show for it. It's tough when the lowliest worker makes more than me. For sure, I've made mistakes on my creative journey, and those mistakes have cost me, but I have always believed my gift would make a place for me. Instead, I've found shut doors. This has led to more than a few nights, sitting in my rocking chair and staring of into the dark night.
Here is a mystery that is greater than me. Once there was man named Micah--he was my kind of person, against unjust leaders,defender of the rights of the poor, and believer in social justice. He lived over 500 years B.C.E. and yet his words connect to my experience. Here is his thought, "Though I sit in darkness the Lord will be light." I'm an American, so "Lord" isn't one my favorite words, we are not the Lord and King crowd. I recognize this Lord as the "Everlasting Intelligence" or "The Maker of the Immovable Rules" or the Heart of the Universe. When I don't know, the Heart of the Universe knows.
It's strange how light will slip into your soul in the dark night. In the midst of tough times, hope finds me. I find myself dusting myself off, and, as if I'm some mythical creature, I feel myself rising. This season has been a place of darkness for me, and yet I look up in the night and see the infinity of stars. Light always finds its way into the dark corners. There are no words to how this comforts me. I feel drawn into the light.
What is my response to this light? Light illuminates the terrain. It frees me to move forward. As an artist, I want to build new walls and pour histories into them. I can see the ground now and can see the best places to put the walls. For me, writing is an imagined history that is as real as any history. My imaginary wings are spreading. I see far off seas and the hint of unknown mountains. I have held myself back but now I must extend my boundaries. What will I find in the unexplored country?
I hope that you are comforted by this. The light will find you where ever you are. I am sure of this. I will be back next week with more reflections.
Here is a doodle for you. Waterlilies.
Good news if this is you:
Micah 4:6 ...I will gather the lame; I will assemble the exiles and those I have brought to grief. I will make the lame my remnant,...
Hi folks, I struggled with this blog. So many pressures from every side. Writing is not in a vacuum. It is in the real world, and this world is full of troubles, big and small. I began to think about an idea I have always held this weekend. If you fall in a pit, get up on the side closest to where you to want go, crawl out, and keep on going. A new idea came to me.
Why don’t you just sprout wings and fly away?
How? I mean sprouting wings would be a pretty big miracle and this is the age of information and reason. We don’t live in a world that is NOT clinging to mysterious. I wondered about the idea of sprouting wings. It felt very evolutionary to me. You know, life adapts, and a lifetime of crawling out of pits made me long for something more. An evolutionary step seemed better than the same old reaction to stupidity.
Perhaps this is the heart of what makes us human -- three dimensional thinking. Your stories will pop if you think about making your characters evolve. We tend to the ordinary, consider the extraordinary. I think the best writers don’t wrap it all up. They deal in imagery and theme. The unseen world is how they live their days. Writing is to akin to dreaming, except you are awake. Our dreams can be chaotic and meaningless, but they can also help us make sense of the chaotic meaningless world. Those words you are putting on the page, you are bringing light into darkness. Keep going!
Finally, I considered my idea of sprouting wings. There is nothing new under the sun. An old scripture whispered within me: They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They shall soar on wings like the eagles. It is strange how the words of the Prophet Isaiah from around 720 BCE resonate within me today. I love writers. They are thinking ahead. They are reaching to the ages ahead. They see into the murky darkness of the future and they see you.
As you write, think about shining into the darkness of the future. You have the potential to transform the world.
I will be back next week with more of TEENSPublish. I hope that you keep writing. Someone needs those stories.
A sneak peek at an illustration for my soon to be indie published picture book: CHICKENS DON'T TAKE OVER HALLOWEEN!
Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary,
and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary
and increases the power of the weak.
Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.
They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint
Isaiah 40; 28-31. Write this on your heart, folks.
Join Leslie Helakoski and Darcy Pattison in Honesdale PA for a spring workshop, April 23-26, 2015. Full info
here.
COMMENTS FROM THE 2014 WORKSHOP:
- "This conference was great! A perfect mix of learning and practicing our craft."�Peggy Campbell-Rush, 2014 attendee, Washington, NJ
- "Darcy and Leslie were extremely accessible for advice, critique and casual conversation."�Perri Hogan, 2014 attendee, Syracuse,NY
Last year, I did a simple survey on the list and asked writers, “What is your biggest challenge for 2015?”
The answer blew me away. You want to know, “Is my picture book/novel/short story/piece of writing any good?”
This was expressed in many different ways, of course, but at the core, you want to know what makes one piece of writing good and one piece of writing bad. Is it just a matter of opinion?
When I taught freshman composition, this was a constant problem, as well. An essay turned into one teacher might receive an A, while the second teacher gave it a C; giving grades is one way to answer the good/bad question. Research showed that the solution was simple: teachers needed to meet and discuss criteria for grading. Once they’d gone through a couple essays together, they were more likely to grade consistently.
Why the problems? What does make good writing? The answer isn’t about grammar, and only incidentally about the content of the piece. Instead, you must look at the fuzzy concerns of audience, purpose, genre conventions,
AUDIENCE
Who are you writing for? Do you take the time to search images till you find a person who is your ideal audience? Writing for a middle grade student is very different than writing for a middle-aged history professor.
Again, let me demonstrate this with an example I gave to my freshman comp students. Let’s say that an 18-year-old boy has a car wreck. Now, he must tell three people about that wreck: the policeman, his mom, and his best friend. You can easily imagine each conversation. The tone—apologetic to bravado—changes with the audience. Details creep into some accounts (To Best Friend: Mary was tickling me) and are deleted from others (To Mom and Cop: I was under control of the vehicle at all times).
Which account of the car wreck would be considered “good” and which is “bad”? Is one more truthful than the other; i.e. can you apply the criteria of truthfulness to determine good/bad? You’ll agree that tone, voice, content, style and more depend on the audience.
PURPOSE
When you write a novel, do you want your reader to weep or to guffaw? The purpose of any piece of writing should—in a sane world—determine its effectiveness. Did it accomplish what you set out to accomplish?
In other words, can we use effectiveness of communication as one measure of good/bad?
GENRE CONVENTIONS
Think with me of what you expect from a mystery novel. There’s a murderer, a detective and a dead body (victim). Beyond that, though, one common convention in a mystery is to TELL the answer to the mystery. The detective arranges for all the suspects to be present at the same time, and then explains how s/he cleverly solved the problem. When confronted, the murderer tries to run away. That sort of scene would rarely happen in other genres.
Each genre has its own conventions of characters, events, plot points, settings, and so on. If you break or bend those conventions, you risk angering your readers, who will exclaim loudly, “This is a horrible mystery.”
Is it good writing or bad writing? Wrong question.
Is it a good mystery (according to the genre conventions of today)?
Is My Picture Book Manuscript Any Good?
Do you need to know if your picture book manuscript fits genre conventions? Darcy Pattison and Leslie Helakoski will be teaching PB&J: Picture Books and All that Jazz, April 23-26, 2015 at the Highlight’s Foundation, Honesdale, PA. Learn more about the workshop.
If you can’t see this video, click here.
DOES THE STORY PLEASE YOU?
Aside from issues of audience, purpose, and genre, there’s one that looms large in my mind. Does the story please you, the author? Are you happy with what you’ve done? It’s very hard to step back from your work and evaluate it. Your worries about what others think consumes you, and you can’t separate THEIR opinion from YOUR opinion.
I recently re-read my latest novel, LONGING FOR NORMAL, and at a certain point, it made me cry. A friend read it recently, too, and I asked her, “Did you cry at XXX scene?” No, she didn’t. But when I re-read that scene, I always cry. Is it a good scene? It touches me emotionally in a deep way; but it doesn’t affect my friend the same way. Is it good? Or bad?
Do you start to see that the question is the wrong one? Or that there are really two questions here:
1. Did I write the story I wanted to write?
2. How will others respond to that story?
And the terminology that you use should NOT be good/bad.
Instead, try these criteria: useful, effective, matches genre expectations, pleases me.
Then, you need to ask a final question: Do I want this to be published?
If so, you forget the good/bad question and find a publisher whose purposes, audiences and genre fits what you’ve written. And send it in. Period.
Stop those pestering questions about good/bad. Send it in. You’ll soon find out if it will fly in the marketplace you’ve chosen. If it doesn’t, go back and ask the right questions again: useful, effective, matches genre expectations, pleases me? If you’re sure you’re on target, send it out again. And again and again. Repeat until you find the right market for your work!
English: The seconds pendulum, a pendulum with a period of two seconds so each swing takes one second http://weelookang.blogspot.com/2010/06/physical-quantities-and-units.html (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Most readers here know that I write on occasion in reaction to things in the news. I troll news feeds looking for subject matter for all sorts of things, including poetry. This morning I took my inspiration from my Facebook home page.
A couple of my writer friends had posted links to two stories that left my reactions in a chaotic state of pendulum swing.
The first story reported about a group of 64 high school seniors who were suspended for riding bicycles to school on the same day. You did read that correctly. This Michigan student group merely rode to school on bikes, escorted by police, sanctioned and lauded by the mayor, and then punished for the act.
Can someone point out to me the sanity peeking out of this story? The one official who should have applauded the students’ behavior was the one having conniptions at the other end of it. The principal’s reason for her hysterical reaction? They could have gotten hurt, hit by a car or worse! This with a police escort and the mayor’s approval?
Now you can see the reason for my immediate response. Insanity holds the reins of the school.
Okay, so that’s a bit strong, I admit. The principal’s reaction, however, was far more out of connection with reality than mine. I have my own suspicions as to the real trigger for her reaction.
The point is that just the day before it was reported on Yahoo that a four-year-old girl was kept from inclusion in her class photo because she had her hair up in a bow. Her very neat and tidy hair kept her out of a photo.
Am I the only one who thinks perhaps those presently in charge of schools need a check-up? It seems to me that the irrational responses by school leadership in the past few years are spreading rapidly. But hey, retired teachers can have opinions, too.
When I got to the second story, I could do little but smile. It was about a photographer, Bob Carey, who for the last nine years has traveled around the country taking self-portraits wearing little other than a Pink Tutu. You may have seen the Today Show segment on this man and his inspiration, his wife, Linda.
Bob’s
6 Comments on Rampant Insanity vs. Purpose, last added: 5/25/2012
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You know, when Chloe was in first grade, her teacher set up a class project to depict a nativity scene. Me, an atheist with a child in PUBLIC school, very quietly and gently put a stop to that with a compromise to build a depiction of all sorts of the student’s religious beliefs at Christmastime, making the project one of understanding and acceptance rather than a focus. (I know, anecdote, oh well, I write magazine, (and some newspaper) articles) So I do feel I’m a little responsible for what you read.
What absolutely bizarre people the world has! In my experience there’s nothing worse that a person who doesn’t have enough authority to please himself. They are the ones to push the boundaries and proclaim that what they think is right absolutely must be. Usually this is confined to border guards and passport checkers at the security gate, but it seems like it extends to school principals as well. The trick, I suppose, is sorting out the treasure from the drivel. Hooray for the husband in the pink tutu, yay for the students who biked to school and I hope there were plenty of parents who told the principal to shut up.
PS. I have plenty of friends who let their sons wear pink tutus and other dress-up gear to school. More power to them!
PPS. If my dad were a hairdresser I’d have bows every day. Wasn’t that fantastic?
PPPS. There are signs all over town, this town of 3.5 million people, proclaiming it’s bike to work month and reminding people to get their tyres pumped up.
btw, that pendulum thing is hypnotizing @_@
Whenever I hear stories like that, I wonder what other stressers these people had in their moments at that time. Are they really incompetent (which I honestly don’t think they are), or are they just having a bad day?
I tend to go with the latter.
Veronica, there will always be those who seek to extend their authority, whether it’s their right or not. Humans are like that sometimes. That’s why we get dictators, people at work who much take credit for another’s work/idea/initiative, etc.
I’ve never understood why anyone would want power over others. The energy drain trying to keep that power is exhausting and few, if any, of them ever look happy or satisfied. What a waste of good life.
Cool effect, though, isn’t it?
One can only imagine what drives another’s life. I have enough trouble driving my own without dealing with those of other people.