Surrender the Pen

Right after you bring that crazy busy week to a close, just as you head out of town with family, as soon as you think to yourself, No chance for writing, I’m sure, there you are, surrounded by inspiration and ideas, gifted with little pockets of time. That was me, last weekend: deep in the north woods, working hard no to worry about the book I wanted to finish reading and the interview questions I had to write and the blog post I needed to draft; thinking, if I won’t have time to write, I might as well forget it. I might as well enjoy every minute of this last vacation of the season. It was then that creativity started popping up everywhere, and time expanded so I could scribble more words into my notebook than I expected.

The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.
~ Julia Cameron

Birch Tree Kingdom

Three days in the woods is ample time for kids to create a whole world under a canopy of birch and pine. The path leading up to the Kingdom was lined with twigs and moss and gave way underfoot, slightly, hinting at the years it took to form and the relief in (finally) being discovered. There were birch bark crowns for everyone (taken from a fallen soldier), designated guards, and a store that ran on a strange stick-bartering system. I took mental notes. I drew from their free-spirited imagination.

Campfire Revelations

We burned only one camp fire over the weekend, and I’m glad I didn’t skip the opportunity to sit in the circle. Besides the chocolate, graham crackers, and monster-sized marshmallows, camp fires are where stories are told, where people and real-life events spark a writer’s mind with scenes for “that novel” or idiosyncrasies for characters barely developed. I made s’mores, listened intently, then ran inside and wrote down those ideas. Because, bits and pieces of different conversations often come together to form whole, made-up stories.

Endings

Like the last few pages in a good book, the sunset on the final evening brought the rush of fun to a quiet, satisfying close. I had just walked the path of Birch Tree Kingdom when I turned and saw the shades of pink riding along the water and sifting through the clouds. The boat turned over, hunkered down for the winter, was the final image I noticed.

In that moment, I realized the whole weekend had been one long and unplanned artist date.

Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play. …[Art feeds] our creative work by replenishing our inner well of images and inspiration.
~Julia Cameron, on juliacameronlive.com

Sometimes, letting go of the work is as important as doing the work.

What surprised you this week and sent you running to your notebook?

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Favorite Lines & This Month’s Writing Prompt

Saturday marked another hour with my writing friends at the retirement center, reading stories and laughing about gaps of knowledge between generations. There was a story read about a young woman, and letters to a soldier overseas during World War II, and V-mail. “What’s V-mail?” I asked, to which I got the same reaction I gave my niece once when we stood in the library and she dared to say, “what’s a card catalog?” Mouths fell open and someone said, “Oh. You’re so young.”

We have fun around the table.

And, what I love most about meeting up with these folks each month is their excitement at being there, even when, as I found out, last month’s writing prompt proved more of an obstacle than inspiration. Maybe there were too many choices. Maybe the prompts weren’t quite clear. Maybe they just didn’t click. Sometimes prompts are like that, but writers tackle them anyways.

And, that’s exactly what they did: they wrote anyway.

Favorite Lines

One of my favorite phrases came from a woman who’s been writing flash fiction. In her piece, she described an apartment ever so briefly but quite clear: with landlord-tan walls and scuff-board floors. That’s all I needed to see an exact image. Another favorite line came from a different story, written by a gentleman in the group, about a visit to an attic: You knew right away from the musty, stuffy smell, that you were about to reach the third floor destination. That’s immediate recall for me, the attic smell that lures you to the door and begs you to step inside. We talked about that, too, about how certain descriptions like that do more for a piece (and the reader) than just saying something is “old” or an apartment looks  “run down.”

We meet again in September at a time when we will be crossing into Fall, waking up to crisp mornings and watching the sun set a little too soon in the evening. This month’s writing prompt focuses on two quotes, by Natalie Goldberg and Russell Baker, and asks us to look back, then, on the season of summer.

The Prompt

Memoir doesn’t cling to an orderly procession of time and dates, marching down the narrow aisle of your years on this earth. Rather it encompasses the moment you stopped, turned your car around, and went swimming in a deep pool by the side of the road. You threw off your gray suit, a swimming trunk in the backseat, a bridge you dived off. You knew you had an appointment in the next town, but the water was so clear. When would you be passing by this river again? The sky, the clouds, the reeds by the roadside mattered. You remembered bologna sandwiches made on white bread; you started to whistle old tunes.
~ Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away

This paragraph from the introduction in Natalie Goldberg’s book on writing memoir not only talks about the way we remember, it also hints at summer. It’s late August. Three hours north of here, the leaves show signs of weathering. The tomato plants in my garden have grown wiry, so that nothing is left on the vine but a few remnants of (what could have been) prime fruit. My kids won’t turn any more tan or earn one more freckle; the sun sits too low on the horizon. Swim goggles have been broken or lost; one last romp at the pool leaves my son red in the eyes and full of heavy yawns. It’s time.

Time to move on to what comes next. We let go, of cool June nights and unbearable July days, of too much time at the pool or not enough days spent at the lake, of excitement in new endeavors and grief in goodbyes to a close friend. We move on, but memory stays with us.

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
~Russell Baker

Tell us about one summer when the suffering was worth it. Or maybe it was a summer when the suffering ceased.

* Photo credits: alvimann and melodi2 on morguefile.com.

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Rob Riley, on Finding Our Way to Writing

Today, I welcome Rob Riley, whose book, Portrait of Murder, was released by Orange Hat Publishing in February 2012. Rob shares about the journey to becoming Writer, Author.

20120818-222953.jpgThe instinct to write novels has been within me since my earliest memories. It didn’t take form for a long time. I was a sports fanatic – football, baseball, basketball, high school letterman’s club. Academics? I didn’t even know how to spell the word until well into adulthood. (I kid; had that one nailed by age 20, at the latest.) But my imagination knew no depths, nor did it ever take a break. I loved all forms of entertainment, played the clarinet, and read books, all when the mood came upon me. Undisciplined? Absolutely. But I was unwittingly planting the seeds of what would eventually be a breakout lunge toward writing crime fiction novels.

It was a circuitous route. At age 19 I became a police aide for the Milwaukee Police Department, became a sworn officer at age 21, and immediately began working as an undercover narcotics agent. Seven hectic years of doing that led to a promotion to detective, investigating major crimes. My supervisors always said that I wrote excellent reports. They actually recruited me to do sensitive investigations because of my skills. Busy though I was, I always found time to read: Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Hammett. I was always drawn to classics of that era. And I came to think I bet I could do something like that. I began thinking of my own story ideas.

But I was a police detective, and was making a living. In my early 30’s I investigated the murder of a fellow police officer, and friend. My partner and I arrived on the scene a couple minutes after  his radio call for help. He was dead where he lay, in an abandoned pool hall, as was his killer. We were there for hours, with a dozen additional officers helping us process the scene. You could have heard a pin drop. For me, it was a pivotal moment.

That kind of experience puts gadgets in a budding writer’s toolbox. There were other similar ones during my career, but that was the worst. That one hurt.

During that time – not coincidentally, I later realized – I signed up for a correspondence writing course, writing short stories. I wrote about 20 of them, and some very patient instructors broke me in with line editing, and character and plot development. I got nothing published, but I got more than my money’s worth.

In 1994 I joined a novel writer’s workshop. The instructor was a man of high achievement in both the writing and the teaching worlds. He had 40 novels published. Lived in Dubuque, Iowa. I lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 175 miles apart. I drove to his home and back on one Saturday of each month for the next 13 years. Wrote six complete novels, each one edited by my writing “coach,” (we were not allowed to call him teacher) and critiqued – sometimes almost savagely – by my workshop classmates. None of them were published, although several hundred rejection notices showed that I was trying.

During that time I wrote five days a week, two hours a day. My coach was rigid with his instructions on my schedule. Too much writing at one time will drain you, he said. I did what I was told, and was eventually told that I was “a darn good writer.” Six unpublished manuscripts in your desk drawer leaves you with doubts, but I was determined never to quit.

The first three books were supernatural thrillers. Who could have figured that? It was simple. I was still a cop, and I needed an escape. And I’d always loved horror books and movies. Good ones, not the modern day hacker/slasher type. When I retired from the police force in 2001 I switched to my bailiwick, police procedural fiction. Crime mysteries, to be exact. The change had been unexpected: One day I began reading Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, a story about Philip Marlowe, a cynical, wise acre detective telling a first person account of how come and why he was so cynical, and such a wise acre. That was all it took.

I switched genres. The next three books are about private investigator Jack Blanchard, a former Milwaukee police detective who left the department in a huff, to do his own, lone wolf style investigating of myriad legal matters.

Portrait Of Murder.
Dead Last.
Unto The Father.

Portrait Of Murder was published earlier this year. The next two are patiently waiting their turn.

Rob Riley lives with his wife, Mary Lynne, in southeastern Wisconsin. He spent thirty-two years as a Milwaukee police officer: seven years doing undercover narcotics investigations and twenty-two years as a major crimes detective. Writing and reading have been lifelong passions, and he began by writing short stories more than thirty years ago. Of course, police work provided both the inspiration and insight for his PI mystery novel, Portrait Of Murder. Two additional novels in a series that features his main character, Private Investigator Jack Blanchard, have been completed. The author may be contacted at  rob.riley101@yahoo.com.

About the Book:
PI Jack Blanchard is hired by his close friend to find his missing sister, who has a long history of drug addiction. Blanchard has little trouble finding her, but subsequently becomes entangled in an investigation that links the past murder of her drug dealer; the current murder of a top City Official – and a mind bending expanse of government corruption that involves the police department, and leads directly to the Mayor’s office. With disparate sources providing help – a prison inmate who had been an eye witness to key events, and Juanita Velez, head of the Social Services Department – PI Blanchard comes upon a twisted tale of criminal behavior and multiple murders, and a shocking conclusion that no one could have anticipated.

Portrait of Murder is available for purchase on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle.

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