Several weeks ago, on my way to my yoga class, I noticed an elderly man pulling weeds in his front yard. He was kneeling on a paper bag, working his way slowly through what looked to me like an impossible task.
Because the yard was nothing but weeds. And the house itself, in my ungenerous opinion, was a sort of weed, with sad, faded blue paint, a sagging front porch, and a sidewalk that was crumbling and cracked.
So now that I’m in my 50s, I’m proclaiming it the official “I don’t give a damn” decade.
I made this proclamation after dropping my teenage daughter off for three weeks of summer camp. Though she was handling this milestone in a calm, mature way, I found myself remembering the kinds of thoughts I had at her age when I went to camp…(read more)
In the sixties, there was a TV show called Dragnet with a detective named Joe Friday who insisted on gathering “just the facts.”
If you’re old enough to remember that show, you’ve been around long enough to have lived an interesting life. Even if you’re younger, you’ve most likely faced some challenge worth writing about.
So let’s say you want to write a memoir. Where do you start?
Since the publication of my memoir last fall, I’ve been reunited with my first love—fiction—and it feels so…..good. Mostly.
It also feels daunting and overwhelming and fills me with uncertainty and doubt.
But I believe ideas have their own timeline, and that, when we pay attention, we see tiny sprouts of magic when the time comes to begin the novel, or return to the memoir, or noodle over a poem.
I’m from Holland, Michigan, and when I was a kid, my grandma taught me a children’s rhyme in Dutch. She didn’t speak Dutch fluently, but her parents had and this little ditty was one of the things she remembered.
She wasn’t completely sure of the meaning, just that it was something about a cart before a horse.
As I was staring at my blank computer screen this morning trying to decide what to write, I decided to check my email, because, you know, checking email is always the answer to being more productive.
In this case, my answer was right in front of me. My friend Kate sent a message asking for some blog writing suggestions. Since I love to nerd out over the nuts and bolts of writing, I thought I’d share my 5-Step Blog Blueprint as a guide for keeping your own blogs personal and to the point.
Last week, I wrote about how ‘Keeping it Real’ can be hurting your writing. I shared the reminder that if our goal as writers is to create dramatic action (and of course that’s the goal!) then we need to remember that fiction is not reality. It’s concentrated, intensified reality.
I told the story of my humiliating attempt, at age nine, to jump off the high dive at the local pool. Both that story and the idea of turning real-life events into fiction elicited some great responses that are too good not to pass on.
I heard the word “springboard” the other day and it made me flashback to the summer I was nine years old and went off the high dive for the first time at the community pool.
Except that I didn’t. What really happened was pure humiliation: I climbed the long ladder for what felt like ages, shuffled to the edge of the diving board, looked down, and froze. Uh-uh. There was no way I was jumping. With shaking knees, I backed up and started down the ladder, which was a slow process because I had to wait for all the kids behind me to back up too. And then I went home.
I attended the Chicago Writers’ Association conference last weekend and, after two full days of workshops and socializing, I collapsed in exhaustion, both inspired and discouraged by all I learned.
Do you know the feeling I mean? Or, rather, feelings, because it was a stew of both excitement and self-doubt, bubbling between I can, I might, I will… and I could, I would, I should…
Today I feel like writing about mistakes. Heck, I’m even open to making some. Not that I haven’t already made my fair share. From the workplace to the home front, as a parent, wife, or friend, my mistakes sometimes include big life moments and, other times, small sweaty details.
👉 Enjoy dedicated writing space just steps from Lake Michigan
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