Merry Christmas Day 5

Ann Dee always makes it snow on our site at this time of year. Have you noticed?

Once, when I was in Florida (which is where I grew up) is got so cold the water dripping from our hose (to keep the pipes from freezing) formed a four-foot icicle. Mom and I were so surprised, and excited, we took a picture by frozen water.

Imagine your character has never seen snow. It’s her very first experience. In 250 words, write about this event, using all the senses. If you only know snow, you are going to have to stretch. If you’ve never touched or walked through snow, or seen 25 foot snow drifts on the side of the road, you’re going to have stretch, too.

Here’s is the second part of the challenge. Think outside the box. No glistening. No freezing. No sparkling (Geez. Am I describing a vampire?). Make this new and original.

 

 

Lynne Snyder

Last week, my dear friend Lynne Snyder died.

When my daughter approached me, her face had this look like–how do I tell Mom? I knew another person had died. But Lynne? She was just diagnosed with leukemia.  How could this be?

Don’t think you know Lynne? She’s the person who commented so often here on the blog. Always words of encouragement. Man, am I going to miss seeing what she thinks of what Ann Dee or Kyra or I have written.

I love Lynne and I will miss her. She was funny, extremely kind, and man, had she hoed the road. I remember she told me she walked around for a week–in agony–having no idea she had a broken leg (had she broken her femur?). Her writing was incredible. I met her years ago when someone trashed her work–along with the work of many other writers–and she was determined to never write a gain. Then I read her stories. I was blown away. So much talent. She painted (watercolor) and made caramels that would make you cry, they were so good. But what she did best was love people. All people. No matter who they were or what they did. She opened her arms to the world. Lucky for me, I made it into those arms.

I asked a dear friend, DeAnn Campbell to say a few things about Lynne. Here is her tribute.

Years ago, when I lived in Utah, Carol Lynch Williams introduced me to Lynne Snyder. “You should be in a writing group together,” she told us. And so we were. Our small group of three and sometimes four met weekly. We wrote, we critiqued, but we also loved and laughed and cried and shared each other’s lives. I once heard an author say that all writing in its heart is about loss. Now we’ve lost our beloved Lynne Snyder.

I will tell you that she was witty and funny. She had a great, big open heart. She was a whiz in the kitchen. She painted beautiful watercolor paintings. Her family was her everything and she loved everyone she met. She was a writer. Lynne had had her share of loss and she wrote about it, beautifully. She had a lot to share as a writer, but the part of herself that she shared as a person was always greater than what she gave as a writer. Because of this, there are no published books with her name on the cover. I don’t know if her essays and writings are hidden in notebooks in a drawer somewhere, or on a hard drive or if they’re in a sampling of letters in a shoebox. Knowing Lynne, they are probably in all of those places, scattered like feathers.

Lynne wrote amazing stories. Some were poignant, like the one about the death of her baby and the dream she had of that baby – a dream that taught her how to keep living after such loss. Some were funny, like when she almost ate an entire cake and so she baked another before her husband came home from work. Some were difficult, like the story of when her first father took off in an airplane while her mother begged him not to go; he died when that airplane crashed. Although Lynne wrote fiction her personal essays, the stories of her own life and losses, were especially beautiful.

In “The Lonely Man” Louis L’Amour wrote, “And if I have not written words upon paper as I should like to have done, I have written large upon the page of life that was left open to me.” That was our Lynne. And I wonder if is it okay not to write grandly or far-reaching. Not all of us will publish or have our names in lights. Maybe for some of us the writing is simply for the sorting out of our own souls. Maybe the writing is to help us navigate the loss, the difficulties, and even the joy that comes to us all. Those sorts of personal stories were Lynne’s greatest writings and I was lucky enough to have heard some of them. Not all who knew her were able to read her stories, but all who knew her were the recipient of her great love, her great generosity, and her ability to take you as you are. There was never any judgment or trying to fix you. There was just candid, honest conversation and love. So much love.

To know Lynne was to love her. She was famous for homemade caramels and bottles of delicious sun-dried tomatoes. She doled out love on the lawn swings in front of her house. She doled out love everywhere. I will tell you that her family was her everything, but everyone was family. Her love cast a wide, wide net. It reached everyone she knew. She was funny. She saw the world in a beautiful way and she believed in all of us. She believed that we would be the best versions of ourselves.

I remember talking with her not long ago after the death of her son. “I am changed,” she said. “I will continue to live and love, but I will never be the same.” She understood that loss changes us. Her life changed us; now her loss changes us too. When my own mother died fifteen year ago, the faith that I had carried for a lifetime dwindled to only a hope. Despite my public declarations at a pulpit, the reality was that I knew nothing. I only hoped. I hoped everything. I hoped that everything I believed was true.

Now, I hope it for my dear friend Lynne. I hope that she is welcomed home by all those that she has lost. I hope they love her as much as we do. I believe they do. And I believe that the reunion is grand.

Heartbreak at 36–When Life Doesn’t Go the Way You Hoped

(Are these titles bringing in more readers?)

(Can you believe we are at #36?)

Emotion grounds our reader in such a way that the reader should be changed at the end of the book. It is our duty, as writers, to allow the reader to feel. We do that by putting emotion on the page.

Once, many years ago, I asked a few amazing writers, how they put emotion on the page so that their books rang true-so they felt like real life. Jerry Spinelli said this:

“You need to experience that emotion yourself. You don’t have to be experiencing it as you’re actually writing, but you need to be able to tap the keg where the memory of it resides and, so far as you are able, relive it.”

Martine Leavitt gave me this advice: “Create a powerful story, and you will create powerful emotion. Novice writers sometimes try to spoonfeed their readers the emotion they want them to feel, but language has the great knack of diminishing emotion. Put an emotion into words and you will undoubtedly drain it of power. All you must do is write a great story, a story full of love, honor, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice (Faulkner’s six), and your reader will feel every emotion you want her to feel.”

David Gifaldi answered the question this way:

“For me, emotion comes only when I have become close enough to the character

to feel what he/she feels at every turn in the story.”

#36

List important events in your story.

What do you feel as you write these parts?

How do you want your reader to feel?

How does your character feel?

Are you getting the emotion across?

How?

How can you de better?

Do you have Faulkner’s six in your story?

Do you know how your character feels at every turn?

Are you tapping into your memory keg?

15 Minute Monday

These past few days have been really good for me.

My agent, Steve Fraser, was here. He gave a terrific talk on Wednesday night to a crowd who sat on the floor and up the stairways and all around the room (INCLUDING sitting in chairs!). He spoke of joy. It was lovely and inspirational.

I’ve been thinking of my writing life. What I want to do with it. How I need to change things or not change them. What is important to me.

And there has been this other stuff.

And the other stuff has gotten into my very heart and stabbed at it with ice picks and as the stabbing has gotten worse, I’ve begun to build this wall around me and how I feel.

Can a writer do that?

Well, yes, they can. I have.

Should they?

I’ve got all these new, weightier things to think about. Personal things.

Most times I don’t want to think about them. Feel them. Hurt from them.

But

but the deal is, all this stuff, will, in the end, influence my writing.

So I have to be available emotionally. Not just for the good of my life and the people in my life, but otherwise, what good am I as a writer?

We write Truth. That means we have to be willing to feel all things icky and hard and gross and awful and happy and joyous and amazing because our readers need that Truth.

As I have peered sideways at things going on lately, even when I see I don’t like me very much as I gaze on these weightier things, I can see that this has been a good few days.

Sad. Hard.

Emotional.

Yes. Good.