"Zane. Whenever I hear the name of Patricia's boyfriend of six months, I imagine some woman in a lonely rural town stuck with dusty old videos of 'Shane' and 'Zorro' to get her through her pregnancy, then in the delirium of her labor, naming her child Zane in deference to them. In reality, he was probably named Jim."
That’s a witty moment from DeLauné Michel’s new novel, The Safety of Secrets. The book focuses on the life-long friendship (and secrets) of two women, a plot that dives deep into anxieties about growing older.
While her characters tip-toe into motherhood, Michel wrote her book with a toddler wandering in and out of her writing room. Today, she shares writing secrets that will help all writers with a day-job or children.
Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.
Jason Boog:
You wrote this novel with kids running around the house. What is your advice to the over-worked writer with a day-job or family? How did you cope with the stress of balancing so many different parts of your life and still finding time to write?
DeLauné Michel:
Life is never going to be perfect for me to write. And I think it is better that it isn’t. One of my acting teachers used to say that one’s work can’t be precious; it has to live in the real-world. Continue reading...
All of us talk to our babies, from the first minute that we are together, even though those sounds are incomprehensible to an infant’s ear. Babies soon learn to associate those sounds with comfort, warmth and attention, and begin to respond with amazing speed. Reading to a baby does exactly the same thing, and babies whose parents read to them rapidly associate books with love and closeness. They become bibliophiles long before they can walk, with favorite books firmly established by the time they celebrate their first birthdays.
Parents can find this to be a mixed blessing. My mother, who is well over eighty, can still recite every word of a Little Golden Book called The New Baby and I myself have Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are firmly implanted in my memory. After being handed the same book for thirty nights in a row, even the most literate parent begins to dread the request, “Read this story, please.”
This is where “Books at Bedtime” comes in. Marjorie Coughlan, associate editor of PaperTigers and a passionate advocate of reading aloud to children, has long been offering suggestions for bedtime audiences of all ages, and she’s looking for comments from you. Which books do your children love? Which ones make them look for something else to do instead? Is there a particular illustrator that they can’t get enough of? Does one of Marjorie’s recommendations remind you of another book on a similar subject? Join her in her book group for parents, teachers, and caregivers who share the pleasure of reading aloud to children, and who are looking for the very best books for any time of day—including, of course, bedtime.
