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Two Great Writing Books and a Prompt

Whatever kind of flash you write, fiction or non, the Rose Metal Press offers a book full of essays on craft and beautiful writing that will feed your creativity. I’ve mentioned the Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction before: each time I open it, I bookmark pages and highlight and say yes, yes, yes.

Last Saturday, I met with my senior citizen friends for our creative writing class, and I read from Barbara Hurd’s essay in the Fieldguide, “Pauses:”

In music, a rest note can, by its command, make me lift my fingers. ‘Shh-and-shh,’ my piano teacher says as she counts out quarter-note rests, those squiggles on the score that look like weak-willed iron gates rethinking their prohibition to proceed. My hands hover over the keys; I listen as sound recedes; I’m poised and waiting. Yes, wait, I tell myself, out of habit; for inside such possibilities might be the world in abeyance, the music both gone and still here. . . . Wait. Linger. No need to rush.

Then, I presented the group with a prompt from Midge Raymond’s Everyday Writing that, in a way, corresponds with the idea suggested in Hurd’s essay:

Write about a time when something small – a chocolate bar, a smile from the right person at the right time, a martini – made you happy.

In other words, I asked them to write about a moment that caused them to take pause, to take note.

Around the table, one person read about the moment his two brothers, discharged from the war, saw each other for the first time in three years. Another person described the thrill, as a ten year old boy, of watching a man cut blocks of ice from atop his wagon, knowing he’d toss frozen chips to him and his friends waiting in the heat of the sun. I wrote about my son, how his pause in one moment filled my heart and stayed with me:

The life of a fifth grade boy is busy. With a flip of the light switch in the morning, the wheels are slow to start. But, once they get moving there is breakfast and the comics and where is the sports page and check the weather and do you know how cold it is in Fairbanks, Alaska? Can I wait in the car, Mom? I’m ready to go, I don’t want to be late for school, I don’t want to walk in with the first graders, can we go already? Mom!

I don’t move fast enough for my son. To add to the tension, his sister puts on her coat with such precision that we are always two minutes behind. By the time we reach school, my son has one hand on his backpack and one on the seatbelt release, and he is out the door and on the curb with barely a moment for me to say goodbye.

So it is especially important to note the day he jumped out of his seat, waved to me over his shoulder, and started to close the car door when he stopped. He turned back, then, and looked me in the eye. For a full second.

“Have a good day, Mom.”

Just like that.

He could have tossed the words over his shoulder, could have mumbled them under his breath. But he turned and looked at me, as if to be sure I was paying attention. To be sure.

Have a good day.

A simple and common farewell took on much more meaning in that second. It was puzzling and endearing, and I thought about it all day long.

These pauses in his day are rare, I know. So, I hold memories of them close; I sneak in my own unprompted affection in subtle ways: a pat on his knee, a kiss on the top of his head when he is deep into his morning cereal. And, when I can get away with it, I hold his hand; in the car, as I ask him about his day at school; on the couch, when I sit next to him briefly to see what show he and his sister are watching.

This holding of hands, it is usually fleeting. But he allows me that small gift, and it carries me.

When was the last time you were caught poised and waiting, and remembering? And, what happened?

Next month’s prompt (via Lisa Romeo’s Winter Writing Prompts Project): You look just like __________.

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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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Writing Prompt: Focus on the Details

I was back with my friends at the retirement center this last weekend. What a gift, to sit at the table and listen to their stories. Some of these folks are new to writing, others more experienced. But, what I’ve learned is that no matter how much time we’ve spent working at the craft, we can all use practice filling in the details of a story.

“A lot of people [have had] an experience that other people might want to read about. But this is not the same as “being a writer.” Or, to put it in a more sinister way: everyone can dig a hole in a cemetery, but not everyone is a grave-digger.”
~Margaret Atwood, in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

Regardless of our differences in age or in life circumstances, there are certain experiences through which we all connect: falling in love, falling out of love; our first taste of independence; the death of a parent; the loss of a friendship; the day we noticed how grown up our children had become. And, while anyone can tell a story revolving around these connections, what we, as writers, most want is to tell the story well enough so that it lingers in the readers mind long after they’ve reached “The end.”

This is where details fit in. Lisa Cron, in Wired for Story, says, “A story takes a general situation, idea, or premise and personifies it via the very specific.” It’s in the specifics where the story comes alive with images and readers become emotionally connected. A great example is Carolyn Miller’s piece, “Afternoons”, found in the August 2012 issue of The Sun Magazine. Here’s a teaser:

The dinner (lunch) dishes had already been washed and put away, and the leftovers – fried chicken, mashed potatoes, milk gravy, peas or green beans or corn or tomatoes from my father’s garden – were in the refrigerator, protected by plastic covers held on with elastic, waiting to be eaten cold at supper. The rooms were filled with the smells of food. The only sounds were those of the house slowly settling around us….

Rich details. Details that were not tossed into the story without serious consideration. We experience the world in three dimensions, but we each tune in to the specifics of our day or of an event that have meaning for us as individuals. We see, hear, smell, feel, absorb details that help us define and interpret the world. Think about those kinds of details when you sit down to write this month.

The Prompt.

Choose one:

  1. “Yesterday’s coffee.” (via The Writer Magazine)
  2. “It came in waves.” (via Patricia McNair’s Journal resolution ~ a daily prompt)
  3. “The lie.”

As you approach the prompt….

Keep in mind what specifics you, as a person (or your main character, if you are writing fiction) notice. Use one to three of the questions* below to guide your writing:

  1. About how old are you?
  2. What is to your left?
  3. What is to your right?
  4. Is anyone else in the image?
  5. Why are you there?
  6. Is there anyone who just left or who may be coming?
  7. What are some of the sounds in the image?
  8. What does the air smell like?

* these questions originate from a writing exercise given by Ariel Gore.

Just for today, don’t worry about writing well. Just write.

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* opening photo credit: kakisky on Morguefile.com