Yesterday I wrote about the confusion I was having with my current WIP, wondering if it was even the book I was supposed to be writing. I could hear my MC talking to me but when I tried to put it into the book I THOUGHT it belonged in, nothing fit. I thought I was working on another verse novel, MTLB. I had a few poems, an idea of where it was going but the more I heard the MC talk the less he fit into MTLB. But doggone if I didn't keep trying to jam him in there.
I sat myself down and had a little talk about form and function and all the various WIP I have. I was so fed up that I thought about working on a picture book even though I promised my agent I'd commit to novels for a while. Funny thing was, as I reread all the bits and pieces of unfinished stories I started to see a bit of a pattern. Many of them had one really great scene, a few pieces of dynamite dialog, or an image in words that showed exactly what I wanted to show. One them had a perfect title. (I love titles and can't work on a book until I have the title.) They all featured a boy MC who was a big brother. Yet each of these bits and pieces were in different stories. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe the excitement that got me started fizzled without a plot (a common occurrence for me) or perhaps something else grabbed a tighter hold of me and begged to be written. I think a lot of these are stories that just didn't work, won't work, but I was afraid to let them go. They had "pretty pieces" in them and I wanted to save all the pretty pieces until I could fix the story to go with them. And I'm sure I was thinking that if I had 5 unfinished picture books with some good parts in them, with revision I could have 5 new picture books. I was thinking quantity, not quality, which is a bad idea with writing. I know better. I know that's not the way I work. I know I'm an instinctive writer who needs to trust herself to let go and hold on according to some invisible inner guide.
Annie Dillard says, "One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water."
It may not have been what Dillard meant but I had the feeling a few of those pieces still spoke to me and still belonged somewhere, just not spread out across 5 picture books that had no future. With some cut and pasting, I yanked the pretty pieces from the gaudy frames of poorly written stories. And as I reread them all I got that little electrical charge of adrenalin, you know the one, your personal geiger counter as Stephen King calls it. There was a voice here. Someone worth listening to. Someone who needed me.
For a few minutes, I confess, I contemplated trying to shove the pieces into the verse novel even though I knew they wouldn't fit. (Yep, sometimes I'm a slow learner.) Then I got to the title I had saved, TMT. I remembered when I first found the title. I remembered knowing that I would use the title. I remember being sure it would be a picture book.
That was about the time that Frankie tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, that's me! I'm TMT." And it hit me, yes, it was time to tell Frankie's story but MTLB wasn't Frankie's story, TMT was.
Nancy Werlin says, "When I write a thing, I write it with a ferocious trust in the unknown stuff that lurks somewhere in my mind."
Keeping that trust in mind I looked at my saved scraps again, only this time through Frankie's eyes, and the picture became a little clearer and his voice a little louder. (He even told me about the dog and the little girl.) So this is it. I will put aside MTLB and work on TMT and try to help Frankie's voice be heard. Most of all I will trust that the rest of the story is hiding in my subconscious and will be there when I need it most.
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Who am I?I was born on the Cancer/Leo cusp and share a birthday with Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams. The similarities don't stop there as I can go from depressed to ecstatic without ever passing go. I feel scared most of the time though my friends call me brave and I find it easier to believe in my friends than to believe in my own abilities to make what I want out of my life.
Who am I? A wife, a mother, a daughter, and even, gulp, a grandmother.
Who am I? A writer who never gets tired of playing with words, even when the words are hard to find. A writer of books for children and articles for grown-ups and many things in-between.
Who am I? A motivational speaker, writing instructor, workshop leader and full-time follower of dreams.
Who am I? Read and find out.
"We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little." Anne Lamott
"Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing...the rest will follow."Jane Yolen
"The whole thing is, you’ve got to make them care about somebody." Frank Capra
"As writers, we must be willing to feel our sadness, our anger, our terror, so we can
reach in and find our sweet vulnerability that is just sitting there waiting for us to come
back home." Nancy Slonim Aronie
"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours!" Richard Bach
"Yet somehow, we write; and most of the time, we like what we write. The dark place
seems less dark when we get there. It was only the journey that was fearful." Susan
Shaughnessy
"You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price
of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist
you must learn your craft -- then you can add all the genius you like." Phyllis A.
Whitney
"Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother
when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When
I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is." Anne Rice
"I write in terror. I have to talk myself into bravery with every sentence, sometimes
every syllable." Cynthia Ozick
"There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no
societies that did not tell stories." Ursula K. LeGuin
"Your first job is to get your own story straight." Natalie Goldberg
"Only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking."
Naomi Wolf
"Few children learn to read books by themselves. Someone has to lure them into the
wonderful world of the written word; someone has to show them the way." Orville
Prescott
"A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults."
Ursula K. LeGuin
"I'd always thought you had to be a special person to write. And then I realized you
just have to start." Abigail Thomas
"You will recognize your own path when you come upon it, because you will suddenly
have all the energy and imagination you will ever need." Jerry Gillies
"But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and,
two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer."
Doris Lessing
"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."Yevgeny
Yentushenko
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the
greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't
believe in magic will never find it." Roald Dahl
"I compose sometimes with a pen and notebook, sometimes on the computer; it
makes no difference. If all I had was a chisel and a rock I would write on the rock."
Ursula Le Guin
"If you want to write from a place of emotional integrity, it is important to learn
everything you can about all kinds of emotions, including those that exist in you, that
you wish didn't." Elizabeth Berg
"And this is the way a novel gets written, in ignorance, fear, sorrow, madness, and a
kind of psychotic happiness as an incubator for the wonders being born." Jack
Kerouac
"Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones
who keep writing. They are the ones who discover what is most important and
strangest and most pleasurable in themselves, and keep believing in the value of their
work, despite the difficulties." Bonnie Friedman
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