Posted on

Suspended in Time

Have you ever carried around a passage of writing by an amazing author and hoped that – maybe, through osmosis – one writer’s craft will meld into yours?

I can dream, can’t I?

I read a passage recently, in James Salter’s Light Years, that made me immune to the sounds of life at my house — kids running around, washer spinning, grandfather clock ticking.

Immersed in the life of a character so unlike me, I hung on each word as the images unfolded on the page.

Her father in distant Pennsylvania towns already had within him the anarchy of cells that announced itself by a steady cough and a pain in his back. Three packs a day for thirty years; he coughed as he admitted it. He needed something, he decided.

‘We’ll take some x-rays,’ the doctor had said. ‘Just to see.’

Neither of them was there when the negatives were thrown up before the wall of light, dealt into place as rippling sheets, and in the ghostly darkness the fatal mass could be seen, as astronomers see a comet.

…

The usual prognosis was eighteen months, but with the new machines, three years, sometimes four. They did not tell him this, of course. His translucent destiny was clear on the wall as subsequent series were displayed, six radiographs in a group, the two specialists working on different cases, side by side, calm as pilots, dictating what they saw, stacks of battered envelopes near their elbows. Their language was handsome, exact. They recited, they discussed, they gave a continued verdict long after Lionel Carnes, sixty-four years old, had begun his visits to the treatment room.

…

The Beta machine made a terrifying whine. The patient lay alone, abandoned, the room sealed, air-conditioned because of the heat. The dose was determined by a distant computer taking into consideration height, weight and so forth. The Beta doesn’t burn the skin like the lower-energy machines, they told him.

…

It hung there, dumb, enormous, shooting beams that crushed the honeycomb of tissue like eggshells. the patient lay beneath it, inert, arranged. With the scream of the invisible, it began its work. It was either this or the most extreme surgery, radical and hopeless, blood running down from the black stitches, the doomed man swerved up like a pot roast (pgs. 126-127).

Just words.

Black print on off-white paper.

Yet, the way James Salter wove them together had me frozen in time.

My husband asked me what was for dinner, so I had to look up from the page. But, the moments with Lionel Carnes, the doctors, and the machine stayed with me.

That’s what I strive for in my writing: storytelling that suspends the reader, and then leaves them with a lasting image long after the book is closed.

Amazing.

***

Salter, James. Light Years. New York: Random House, 1975.

[tweetmeme]

Posted on

The Devil Wears Red, Black, and Green

This week, Wordsmith.org celebrates sixteen years of Logophile mania by choosing words that are all related to the number 16.

Today, Revelation (16:16) brings forth the word of the day:

Armageddon. noun. a decisive, catastrophic conflict.

The final battle between good and evil.

May we begin this writing exercise with a moment of silence….

*****

Betsy tapped the brass door knocker three times. When the door opened, she stood face to face with Mrs. Anderson – long, brown (hot-rolled) hair, big blue eyes dressed in shimmering eye-shadow and thick mascara, lips of crimson red.

The lips spoke. “Bessie! Great!”

“It’s Betsy.”

“Yes? Right. Come on in. This is Michael.”

Michael peeked out from behind Mrs. Anderson’s legs. Betsy saw only the right side of his face, one blue eye the same color as his mother’s and half a head of brown hair. His timid smile suggested an easy night of babysitting.

“I’m so glad you returned my email. I took a chance on the neighborhood Nanny Service. It’s so hard to find a good sitter. Michael is one of a kind, and I hate to hire just anybody.”

Mrs. Anderson guided Betsy into the front room. She said Mr. Anderson made reservations for a last minute dinner with an important client at a fancy downtown restaurant. She had to meet him in 15 minutes. She hurried through directions for Betsy, while Michael disappeared down the hallway.

“Dinner at 6, bath at 6:45. Books at 7, bed at 7:30. Then, the rest of the night is yours! Here’s some money for pizza. The number for delivery is on the refrigerator.”

With manicured nails, Mrs. Anderson thumbed through a stack of $20’s and gave Betsy three.

“Oh, and if Michael makes a little mess, no worries. He’s four. That’s to be expected!” His mother was all smiles.

Betsy waved good-bye as Mrs. Anderson clicked down the sidewalk in her three inch heels.

The house was quiet, except for the sound of slamming doors and cabinets somewhere in the distance. Betsy followed the noise down the hall, past Michael’s bedroom, a study, and a spare room scattered with scrapbooking supplies. She found him in the master bath. His feet poked out of a cabinet opening underneath the sink. Betsy grabbed his ankles and pulled.

“Michael? What are you doing in there, little buddy?”

He turned around and stood up.

“Whoa,” Betsy whispered.

The right side of his face looked the same as before, but the left side appeared altered. A thick line of red lipstick ran from the corner of his mouth all the way down to his collarbone. Eyeliner shot out from his eyebrow into three directions that resembled a pitchfork. Mascara oozed across his eyelid and down the side of his nose. Half of his hair stood on end, held up with sticky, green goop.

“Digging around in your mother’s make-up, little guy?”

“Mine!” He blew past Betsy, and his feet pounded down the hall.

She traced his path using the destruction he left behind. Scrapbook confetti still hung in the air. Blocks from his room tumbled out into the hall. The desk chair in the study lay on its side like a casualty.

She found him in the kitchen, standing on the counter.

Continue reading “The Devil Wears Red, Black, and Green”

Posted on

I am my own boss.

Christina Katz, at The Prosperous Writer, sends out a weekly e-zine in which she writes about the 52 Qualities of Prosperous Writers. This week’s topic is Accountability.

I don’t have an agent. No publisher is knocking at my door begging me to sign a contract for a book not yet complete (does that even happen in real life?). I don’t get paid to write –yet. So, what makes me accountable?

Why keep writing?

I spent years dreaming, thinking, saying out loud, “Some day I want to be a writer.” My mother believed in me. Not concerned if I could tackle story structure and character development, or if I could decipher theme and irony, she asked me to pen a story about her. If she were still living today, and reading this blog, she’d make me accountable. It’s hard to say no to your mother.

The day I signed up for my first writing class – no, strike that – the day I sent my first nonfiction piece to a legitimate literary magazine, I named myself a writer. Since then, I’ve had visions of quick success, flashes of failures, and heavy doses of reality. I wondered if I would ever be a serious writer. But, not once did I consider returning to the days of not writing.

Accountability keeps me engaged in what I love.

This blog makes me accountable. Every Wednesday, I write on the Word of the Day. No one pays me, and I happened to choose a day of the week when my time is always scrunched. Still, I post a flash fiction, a short essay, something.

Writing salons keep me accountable, and connected. If I’m too quiet in a group, someone sends an email, because – as writers – we know that silence can be a deadly.

And, oddly enough, Twitter makes me accountable. When I tweet that I #amwriting, I commit myself. I doubt all 109 of my followers are waiting, with bated breath, to read the end result of whatever it is I am #writing. But I’m a people-pleaser, and I can’t bear to think I might leave even one follower hanging.

Accountability.

Christina Katz is right when she says:

You understand that your success is contingent upon this ability to be dedicated to your work and you don’t shirk your deadlines or commitments or take them for granted.

What makes you accountable?
[tweetmeme]