Doubting my story beginning

The following is the beginning of the first chapter of the novel I have been working on for some time now (think years; I'm a slow writer).

Elke had never liked porridge, but his dislike for the bland mush that filled his wooden bowl this morning was dwarfed by his dislike for the look on his mother’s face. He had seen it way too many times this past week, and he knew his best bet was to quietly force himself to swallow his breakfast and disappear for a few hours—but not so far that he couldn’t hear her call his name.

He averted his eyes from hers, sure that her uncanny ability to read them would only spell more trouble for him, and then he wouldn’t be allowed to disappear but instead would be stuck chopping wood, even though winter was a long ways off. He stared at a knot in the table instead and did his best to eat quietly.

Mother was sitting in a chair near the open front door, hand over her eyes and head tilted back against the frame. She usually would have been sitting across from Elke, swatting at his hand if he held the spoon incorrectly, but the head pains always rendered her more quiet and still, and she craved the fresh air without the sounds of Nostos. She looked up now and then to see if he was eating, but that was all.

When he was finished, he did his best to quietly stand up. He winced when his chair squeaked and mother flinched, then carefully rinsed out the bowl using the bucket of water mother kept for that purpose. He kissed her cheek on his way out the door, whispered that he would be back to check on her, then crept away from the house, breaking into a run once he was out of earshot.

“Arato! Get up, you slug! Can’t let Sakuunu see you in bed at this hour!” He slapped on the wood wall of his friend’s home, aiming for the spot where his bed met the wall. Elke paused to listen, then slapped the wooden planks a couple more times for good measure, moving to the front door when he was sure he heard Arato get up.

He bounced a little in his deer-hide shoes while he waited, then opened the door to peek inside just as Arato came scrambling out. “Welcome to the morning, brother!”

“Oh, go eat a pine cone,” Arato said, still adjusting his apprentice necklace, a leather strap ornamented with a metal hoop similar to those that held barrels together.

“I’d rather not be seen eating the ancestors, thanks,” Elke said. He instinctively checked to make sure he hadn’t forgotten to wear his own apprentice necklace with its accompanying miniature cloth stachel, meant to represent the full-sized ones carrying seed. He, however, was carrying a couple coins in his -- something his mother would kill him for if she were to find out.

“So do it at night, when the sane people of this world are asleep.”

“I sleep!”

They had been walking, but at this, Arato stopped and turned toward him, an incredulous look on his face.

“Most of the time,” Elke said, grabbing his friend’s arm to get him going again. “We’re going to miss it. Come on.”

They had just managed to climb into one of the trees when the first girl walked through the meadow. This one was Pylliah, who was too young to have a woman’s figure but too old to bathe with the children. She had carefully wrapped herself in her towel but was walking with a slight cower just the same, hiding herself from the world at large until she could put on her proper clothing. Elke and Arato didn’t waste more than a glance in her direction, instead fixing their gaze on the path to the river, waiting for the next female to emerge.

It turned out Arato’s early wakeup had paid off, because Sakuunu was in the small group of women who followed Pylliah out from the bathing place. Elke had little interest in her, though he could appreciate how her long black hair waved slightly as she walked and the way her towel hung from her figure to reveal its perfection. He knew her to be a tad self-centered and she had mocked him one too many times to earn his desire. Arato was another story; he had been smitten since the day he had first seen her ride one of the village’s horses through the street. Arato had walked into Elke’s home with a glazed look on his face and had stayed that way until Elke had thrown a handful of fish guts at him.

Sakuunu was one of the few to wear her apprentice necklace, ornamented with a miniature horse, to the bathing place. Some of the women were too old to have them and instead wore the armband of their trade, and others, like Pylliah, were as yet too young. Elke and Arato had only received theirs the month before, and Elke was still having a hard time remembering to wear it some days.

Arato scooted forward on the branch he was lying down on, legs holding it tightly beneath him and arms propping his shoulders and head up slightly. The movement caused the tree to shake a little, but it seemed none of the women noticed. There were four of them in Sakuunu’s group, one of whom was her mother. All were wrapped in their towels, feet clad in wooden bathing shoes. They were laughing about something.

Arato scooted forward again, bringing himself to the edge of the leaves, where even one more inch would expose their hiding place. Elke was tempted to either push him off or haul him back in, but indecision about which would be better kept him from doing anything. Besides, there were more women bathing and one may bring him to the edge of his branch, too. He didn’t have his eye on anyone, but he knew that could change any day.

Sakuunu paused before leaving the clearing, gesturing her companions onward and turning back.So she had noticed, then. This ended Elke’s moment of indecision and he leaned forward, shoving Arato to the side. His friend had been too entranced to hold on properly, and the shove sent him crashing to the ground at Sakuunu’s feet.

I like this beginning, because I think it is fun and well-written. It introduces some of my main characters in a personable way and gives each a foundation to stand on. My problem with my beginning (it is longer than this) is that it doesn't really take the story anywhere.

So this week, I had the thought to open it in a very dramatic way: a self-defense killing. I wrote it the next day, about 380 words, and am not as impressed with it as with my original beginning. Perhaps I stick my self-defense killing elsewhere in the story?

Truth be told, my main problem is I want to get the story moving but don't feel like a good enough writer to do it justice. I have a basic outline for it in my head and love it, but I feel like except for a few bright spots, like this scene, it's not all that great yet.

Maybe this post is a pep talk, a reminder that I can write well and all writers start somewhere. I defer to Ira Glass to make the motivational point:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it's normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

My column won an award!

I write a column for the Idaho Press-Tribune called the Front Porch. It has a chatty tone and contains the little news you would expect of a hometown newspaper, such as scholarship winners, class reunion notifications, and volunteer requests. It also includes the fun news that has no news value besides being interesting -- for instance, a man brought by some packets of seeds he'd found among his mothers things. They dated back to the 1970s, and he is going to plant them to see if they'll grow. He plans to check back in to give us an update.

I have also covered some small events, of the same sort, like when a local gym had a photo shoot with a few of its female members to show what "real women" look like, the sort who try to stay in shape but also enjoy cookies and milk with their kids now and then.

Even though I'm moving, I'm going to continue writing the Front Porch as a freelancer. The other news having to do with my column is it won an award! Third place at the Idaho Press Club awards for General Column. In the journalism contests I've been privy to, it's a custom that people only get awards if they deserve it. There may be a category with submissions, but if none of the submissions are any good, no one will get an award at all. There were several categories at the awards night with only a first place winner, or a first and second. That said, it actually means something that I got third place and it's pretty cool -- it means that at age 24, I'm an award-winning columnist!

Most of my columns are collections of "tidbits," short summaries, with commentary, about what happened. They are rarely over 300 words each, and a handful make up one column. For the contest, I submitted three columns that were just one massive tidbit. One such column (not one from the contest) is below so you can enjoy it and I can celebrate. It was headlined "Girl shines on 8th grade football team."

(This is the header to my column when it appears in print)

Emalie Wood wanted to play football.

She already played soccer, golf and basketball, but something about football appealed to her enough that even though her father, a soccer coach, tried to dissuade her, she joined the Middleton Middle School eighth grade boys football team at the start of the season.
And unlike the two other girls coach Bob Santi has had in his years coaching football, Emalie stuck with it to the end of the season, becoming a strong asset to the team and leading Bob to call her one of the best athletes — boy or girl — in the school.

She’s played kicker, defensive back, cornerback, defensive end and receiver; she wanted to try out the quarterback position, too, but there just wasn’t time in the season, Bob said.
It’s too bad our newspaper doesn’t cover eighth grade sports, because it would have been fun watching her trademark pink socks and long ponytail (it’s a penalty if you pull it, by the way) pop up in newsprint throughout the season alongside her No. 1 jersey.

I just had to ask Bob why she made it and those other two girls didn’t. He said part of it was because the other girls were talked into it, whereas Emalie had to talk others into letting her do it.

He also talked about his football team and the impressive boys who fill it, saying it is the best group of boys he has ever had the privilege to coach in regards to their grades, athleticism, morals and maturity.

From what he said, these boys respected her and had her back at all times.
In fact, Emalie was just like one of the guys, being smacked on the shoulder pads and helmet whenever she made an impressive play, sitting in the back of the bus and joking with her teammates on trips and greeting them in the hallway whenever they crossed paths during school.

Thanks to that last bit, of course, some of her girl friends asked her to introduce them to members of the team.

Speaking of her girl friends, she had a great group of friends that would support her at her games — even some that were away games — by cheering and waving a sign they had made especially for her.

The home crowd also got behind her; Bob said “she started out as an anomaly … and then she was still out for football, and then she was still out for football, and then people got used to it and kind of just climbed on her bandwagon.”

Her dad, Rorque Wood, recalled her first tackle, saying she was playing defensive end and the opposing team was on the 4-yard line. She tackled the ball carrier and her team got possession of the ball. He said that was her “I’m in the club” moment.

Perhaps that amount of support was another reason for her successful season. The team made it to the playoffs, by the way, and Bob said she was an integral part of that. Actually, in the playoff game itself, they were playing South Middle School and she executed a kickoff near the end of the first half that set the other team to starting on the 6-yard line. They won 14-0.

But maybe Emalie’s successful football season had more to do with herself.
“She’s pretty persistent, and she has a pretty strong will, and she has a good heart,” her coach said. He also praised her good attitude.

As for her father, when I talked with him over the phone, I could just hear his smile the entire time. Rorque recalled the moments in the stands where people would wonder who the girl was on the team, and he would get to say, “That’s my daughter!” He is, for good reason, proud of her.

He also said, and I quote: “Maybe I should have let her play (earlier).”

So what’s next? Will she be playing on the freshman football team? By all reports, she hasn’t quite made up her mind yet, but if you are watching next season and see a pair of pink socks, you’ll know who is wearing them and know to give her a loud cheer.

* Elizabeth’s Note: I didn’t get to interview Emalie for this, mainly because it was a surprise for her from her dad. Sorry about that, but I think it was a good reason. Surprise, Emalie! Good luck with basketball!

Dictating - what a concept

If I were an English teacher, I would allow people to turn in audio essays.

Now, I understand that English teachers are supposed to teach proper punctuation and spelling, but everything else they are teaching by assigning written essays -- grammar, sentence fluency, argument structure, different poetic tools, etc. -- can just as easily be worked on in a verbal form as in a written one.

It may make it tricky to grade or to give feedback on, so here's how it would go: Students would record an audio essay, then follow-up with an assignment to write it out and critique it.

My reasoning is that there are many people who have trouble writing. They have thoughts they can voice aloud, but confronted with a page, everything goes haywire. The dictation method bypasses this issue and allows a person to simply voice their thoughts aloud.

I searched "dictation" on Freepik.com and got this.
No idea why.

Typing it out forces a person to look at how they sound (an excellent tool if you're trying to become a better speaker). Past the umms and pauses, they should receive a confidence boost in their ability to write an essay. They just dictated one, after all, and that's no different from writing.

Maybe, just maybe, this would allow someone to learn how to write. They could then learn to speak with their hands instead of their mouths, because that's all writing is. Perhaps it would help them get past the page barrier.

All of this said, it's time to give a life update. I'm leaving my job at the Idaho Press-Tribune in a few weeks. I'm moving to Utah, then starting a business helping seniors write their memoirs through dictation. The memoirs will be collected into a book and printed for their family members.

So I'm not an English teacher, but I'm going to try my hand at turning this audio essay idea into a business. Wish me luck -- I'm sure you'll be hearing about it.

Final flash fiction attempt: "Existentialist"

My final flash fiction attempt for the writing contest I entered was the attempt I submitted (and was rejected based on). I originally titled it "Oranges," but switched to something like "Existentialist."

This feels like the perfect night to dress up like hipsters. At least, that’s what everyone else at the Flying M seems to have decided tonight, except me. Me and the woman at the table by the large windows, that is.
She’s wearing a blue dress without sleeves, and she’s been sitting there for over an hour, writing poetry on orange peels with hands decorated by three ring tattoos and veins that are raised rivers, belying an age that is greater than her dress, red purse, or orange peel scrawls.
“It’s as if the trees were whispering,” she’s written on one, a strip discarded near her elbow that I saw on my way to throw out my drink.
A glance out those large, garage door-style windows shows it’s still raining beneath the trees outside, and I wonder what they are trying to say.
But as I wonder, the woman gets up, slipping her oranges into her bag and leaving a tip on the table. I see her step into the evening and stop beneath a sidewalk tree to touch its trunk with one of her river hands, skin like paper and rings like old promises, as if to bid it farewell.
As far as I know, the tree does not answer, but she smiles anyway and it’s a quiet smile, a poet’s smile. She reaches back to free her hair from its clip and it falls in sheets, pulling back in the wind and settling down her back before she turns from the tree and clicks down the sidewalk.
I glance at the hipsters one last time before I check the time and see I should be getting home. On my way to my car, I too stop by the tree and place my hand on its trunk, cold and hard and startlingly white. No words, but perhaps the quiet is a message of its own.

The reason for the title change was an attempt to make this scene more "compelling," which was a criteria it was being judged by. When I wrote this, it was mostly in a poetic frame of mind and I wasn't going for a message in particular beyond "stillness is good."

Found on Livestrong.com. I'm betting she was writing
with a permanent marker.

Deep, I know. I actually purposefully do not try to be profound in my writing, because I think it comes off as sounding stupid a lot of the time.

The writing friend I asked for advice on this piece said something along the lines of, "So the weirdo writes on oranges and touches trees. So what?"

So what, indeed. I did some staring at it and decided it could be considered an existential work. Once something is assigned a philosophy, it automatically gets more credence, right? It's existential because this woman is being her own self and not caring what others think. The narrator is wondering why she is different, and a backdrop of hipsters--a stereotype that loves to philosophize and be individual, yet seeks community and sameness with other hipsters--helps to emphasize how she does not fit a label. (Unless you have an adequate label for an orange-peel poet?)

Does that make it compelling for you? I found it compelling, if only because of the poetic ambiance and beautiful imagery. But then, I'm of the (minority) philosophy that art does not need meaning.

As for dissecting this story, then. The first line was given by the contest organizers, and it reminded me of a local coffee shop, the Flying M Coffeegarage, where small bands often play and people gather to have leisurely conversations. I've had a couple newspaper interviews there, myself, one of them with a philosophy professor who chose the place. I don't know that I have seen hipster-esque people there, but I placed this story there for the hipster environment.

That said, the setting details are correct and true to life, except that I have no idea what trees are outside the place. I doubt there are aspens, which is what I used, but I'm sure I got away with it. I appeal to "Inception," where the girl is told to only use details from actual places, not complete real places.

The woman was in the audience at a reading I attended during the Death Rattle Writers Festival. I took a photo of her, but it didn't do the impression justice, so instead, I wrote this down in my writer's notebook:

And then you see her hands, and the backs of her palms are thin, the bones showing through and the blue of the veins near enough the surface that they could be a raised river and she is old, older than her style of dress or her soda choice or the length of her hair, which reaches down to the bra line in curves. It is brown, and her dress is blue and white and the heels she wears remind me that my mother, not yet fifty, rarely wears high heels. They hurt her feet, she says. Perhaps this woman keeps her age in her hands, arthritis and chafing skin and calloused fingertips, instead of her dress, hair, soda or feet. I keep mine in my shoulders, age counted in 40-hour weeks spent leaning closer to a computer screen.

 Paragraph nonfiction.

Anyway, I borrowed that woman because I was going through my writer's notebooks for ideas and she stood out to me. The ring tattoos come from a student in one of my college classes back in the day--another interesting detail I'd recorded in a writer's notebook. The orange peel poetry was also in my notebook. I have no idea where it came from, but I think I may have stolen it from someone, or else it came from a classmate peeling an orange in English class. Not sure which. But see how useful those notebooks are?!

Note on stealing things in writing: Totally fine, so long as you make it your own. Don't steal wholesale. A guy once tried to borrow pieces of my husband's love poetry to me and mine to him, because he came to us for love poetry advice and we used personal examples. It didn't go well for him. Rang completely false and didn't flow. For the record, that relationship did not last.

Back to the subject at hand. My friend's criticism of the story remains: This story is lacking in conflict. I think it is complete the way it is and would actually like to change the title back to "Oranges." What do you think? Is it compelling? Does it make you care?

Flash fiction retrospect - Jessie the traveller

As a review from last week: I entered a flash fiction writing contest, and I didn't win (whoops, I didn't mention that part earlier, did I?). I went through four different attempts. For my edification and yours, I thought I'd go through them one by one saying what I tried to do, what worked, and what didn't work. Here's the first one:

Jessie is a friend. He is one of those do-everything types, the only person I’ve known who took a break from college to work on a cruise ship and see the world. Every day on Facebook, it was something different -- “Just me and Big Ben, no biggie,” “Bike tour in Puerto Rico. My legs are killing me.” “Sometimes I practice my studious look, but only when I am brooding over my kingdom from a castle in Ireland.” “Couscous! In Morocco!”
Back in high school, Jessie and I took driver’s ed together. The teacher was the same guy who had taught my aunt, so that was weird, but whatever. I remember the first time Jessie got behind the wheel, he had to ask the teacher what a green light meant. I’m serious. The teacher just laughed at him, like it was a joke, but when we got to a light and Jessie gunned it on accident the moment yellow turned to red, man, I thought we were all going to die.
When he got back, from the cruise ship, you know, we had one of those late night talks, the kind that start in a restaurant, then continue in the parking lot for an hour before finishing in someone’s basement when one of you falls asleep. Jessie could tell stories like none other. Dramatic pauses, sound effects, hand gestures. You ever known a storyteller like that?
I’d love to hear one of those again.
I just can’t pull myself out of bed today. Even when someone is physically gone, it’s different from when they’re gone gone. And my heart is too still to beat right now.
It’s like with the blankets over my head, I can pretend the world smaller.
Dear God, help me out of bed today. Please. I need your help.

First off, this piece includes several pieces of real people from my life. I have a friend who temporarily dropped out of college to work on a cruise ship, my aunt had the same teacher as me in driver's ed, that teacher had a story about a kid who didn't know what a red light meant, I love long talks and have had some similar to this, and my father-in-law is that sort of storyteller. The last bit is real, too; it's how I felt when a friend of mine died in college, and again when an old roommate of mine died more recently.

I injected this thing with reality in an attempt to make it seem real. As another gambit for realism, I gave it concrete details, namely the Facebook statuses and the driver's ed story. Concrete details are a secret to good fiction. You are much more likely to believe a lie if the details are precise and, well, detailed. Mine could have been better.

I also gave this piece a haiku turn. The reader is reading on and on about Jessie and who Jessie is, then I turn things around and reveal that these reminiscences are being shared because Jessie is dead. It was meant to give a depth of meaning to the whole thing, touching that part of my reader that has experienced a similar loss.

Problems: I did no showing, only telling. I think that is the major flaw here. We don't get to know Jessie except as a memory, which means we aren't sad when we find out he's dead. Nothing happens after that revelation, either, except that the person is sad, no matter how honestly that sadness is reported.

It would have been improved if I had elaborated on a single scene, not thrown out three half-hearted ones, and made Jessie a person. I need to make my reader, not just my narrator, care about the character.

I have a habit of using abrupt haiku turns, and from all reports they throw readers off. I think it may be because my thoughts stop and change direction that fast; do others'? The problem with this piece's haiku turn, though, is that the narrator knew all along it was coming up. It didn't come through true stream of consciousness (Good term to know. It's where the character thinks aloud in place of an organized narrator).

I threw this one out because it did not feel real. A writer friend of mine thought it was the most compelling of my options (for the record, she didn't read the third option, about the pregnant lady), but that the prayer to God at the end was jarring because it was so sudden. She also felt like it was the start to something, not a complete story unto itself, and I ended at the climax without resolving it. I concede all these points (she also said the story was about traveling, but I won't concede that point).

I didn't resolve it because for me, it was about that moment. What happens after didn't matter so much as capturing that feeling a couple mornings after a friend dies. I think I failed at capturing that feeling, since Jessie wasn't a real-feeling person, but that is beside the point. I didn't want to write a complete story, which is an issue. It was supposed to be a complete story, not a captured feeling.

Venturing into flash fiction

I have not written much flash fiction, but then I saw there was a Boise-area writing contest asking for it. I have been trying to push myself to enter such contests lately, so I gave it my best shot. The rules were it needed to be 300-500 words and begging with one of three possible first lines.

I came up with four options for myself trying to write something decent. I'll review them next week, but here are the four, in the order I wrote them.

Jessie is a friend. He is one of those do-everything types, the only person I’ve known who took a break from college to work on a cruise ship and see the world. Every day on Facebook, it was something different -- “Just me and Big Ben, no biggie,” “Bike tour in Puerto Rico. My legs are killing me.” “Sometimes I practice my studious look, but only when I am brooding over my kingdom from a castle in Ireland.” “Couscous! In Morocco!”
Back in high school, Jessie and I took driver’s ed together. The teacher was the same guy who had taught my aunt, so that was weird, but whatever. I remember the first time Jessie got behind the wheel, he had to ask the teacher what a green light meant. I’m serious. The teacher just laughed at him, like it was a joke, but when we got to a light and Jessie gunned it on accident the moment yellow turned to red, man, I thought we were all going to die.
When he got back, from the cruise ship, you know, we had one of those late night talks, the kind that start in a restaurant, then continue in the parking lot for an hour before finishing in someone’s basement when one of you falls asleep. Jessie could tell stories like none other. Dramatic pauses, sound effects, hand gestures. You ever known a storyteller like that?
I’d love to hear one of those again.
I just can’t pull myself out of bed today. Even when someone is physically gone, it’s different from when they’re gone gone. And my heart is too still to beat right now.
It’s like with the blankets over my head, I can pretend the world smaller.
Dear God, help me out of bed today. Please. I need your help.

 “It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters,” the Dorian Gray boy said. Gorgeous, dangerous, met him in a Park City art gallery during Sundance. Surrounded by paintings of mountains, forks bent into stick men, and a bronze Last Supper sitting in front of a window that opened onto an alley, we were the only two in there just then.
It was the stupidest pickup line in the world, not even a pickup line, but I’m too easy and half an hour later saw me making out with him one steep street over in the middle of a looong flight of stairs. I figured it was Sundance. Might as well, right?
But that boy was the stupidest bad-word-my-momma-would-scream-if-she-heard-me-say I have ever met in my life, ‘cause a week later I caught him stealing more than just French fries and trying for more than just French kisses. And by that second part I mean he was trying to go all Bill Clinton all over my butt.
His pants were down and I was telling him no, this was too fast, we only met an hour ago, but man you did pick a pretty spot for this, on top of a mountain and secluded and all, and I respect you for that, and I like your nice car, too, we should just keep driving around in it or something.
That’s when he said, all hot and heavy, that it wasn’t his car, and that’s what I meant about the stealing more than French fries part.
There’s one thing my momma taught me that is the truest thing I have ever known: If you don’t want a man making love to you, pee on him.
After that, he jumped back enough for me to reach past him and open the door. He’d been leaning on that door then and so he lost his balance and fell out.
So yeah, I pushed him down the mountain. With his pants down.
Snow is pretty good for sliding on, especially when it’s steep and the snow is the dry sort that won’t stick together.
I drove away before I could see how far he went, though, and that’s a shame because it would’ve been hilarious on my Instagram. But at the time, I was more concerned about whether to return the car before or after cleaning up the pee in the back seat. Sundance problems.

Jessie is a friend. At least, I think she is. Candice is a friend and Audrey and Donna and Kate and Sara - but Jessie, I don’t know.
I don’t know because when we stood in line together in the second grade, she only talked to the new girl, who was from Russia and therefore interesting. But that was okay. She gave me a pencil later, one with my name on it, and played wolves with me at recess.
I think Jessie is my friend because in middle school, when my grandma died and I first started hating flowers, she sat on my family’s deep freezer and held my hand.
Jessie is my friend because when I was a high school freshman with a crush on that boy in my geography class, she helped me think of ways to meet him then taught me how to curl my hair into pretty ringlets so he would notice me. And then, when he asked me to be his Facebook friend, she freaked out with me in the parking lot and we went out for frozen yogurt to celebrate.
Jessie was definitely my friend on the day that we graduated. We took photos together and laughed and high-fived our favorite teachers, then went to the after party and, well, and she left with that cute guy she had a thing for. But I know she was my friend because later that night, she called me to tell me what had happened - ALL of it.
But now I don’t know, because Jessie won’t answer the phone when I call, and this year, she forgot my birthday. I need to tell her something.
I need to say I’m pregnant and scared, and I could really use a best friend right now to hold my hand. I am not ready for this.

This feels like the perfect night to dress up like hipsters. At least, that’s what everyone else at the Flying M seems to have decided tonight, except me. Me and the woman at the table by the large windows, that is.
She’s wearing a blue dress without sleeves, and she’s been sitting there for over an hour, writing poetry on orange peels with hands decorated by three ring tattoos and veins that are raised rivers, belying an age that is greater than her dress, red purse, or orange peel scrawls.
“It’s as if the trees were whispering,” she’s written on one, a strip discarded near her elbow that I saw on my way to throw out my drink.
A glance out those large, garage door-style windows shows it’s stilll raining beneath the trees outside, and I wonder what they are trying to say.
But as I wonder, the woman gets up, slipping her oranges into her bag and leaving a tip on the table. I see her step into the evening and stop beneath a sidewalk tree to touch its trunk with one of her river hands, skin like paper and rings like old promises, as if to bid it farewell.
As far as I know, the tree does not answer, but she smiles anyway and it’s a quiet smile, a poet’s smile. She reaches back to free her hair from its clip and it falls in sheets, pulling back in the wind and settling down her back before she turns from the tree and clicks down the sidewalk.
I glance at the hipsters one last time before I check the time and see I should be getting home. On my way to my car, I too stop by the tree and place my hand on its trunk, cold and hard and startlingly white. No words, but perhaps the quiet is a message of its own.

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Leo Tolstoy

Leo himself. Pretty intense beard.

(Note: This post was written less than an hour after finishing Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. My mind was still reeling a bit.)

I have finished reading Anna Karenina and am left feeling overwhelmed by its scope, its ideas and how intertwined it is with other literature I had not previously associated with it.

I almost need to sit down and read it all again for the sake of digestion, but the first run-through took around nine months and I don't know that I want to spend that much more time on it at present. So instead, I did some reading online of others' analyses and am going to use this post to think aloud.

I spent the bulk of this book wondering what it was about. Leo Tolstoy has so many characters and storylines that I could tell he had a message to convey more than a story to tell. Luckily, he took his time getting there and so it felt like a story instead of a philosophy text.

I know, I just said it is lucky it was so long. In his defense, it came out serially. If you get a few bites at a time and don't see the whole feast, you wouldn't be bowled over by it. It was meant to be read slowly.

Tolstoy addresses several themes throughout the book, and many of them would have been easier to understand were I aware of the current events and debates of the time. He wrote this for a contemporary audience and got political with it. Authors these days do it too, but you don't notice because you are living in the same world as that author.

There are some universal themes, however, most notably marriage and the aristocratic lifestyle. By "theme," I mean he is speaking to a topic without any particular message in mind. This book contains a marriage where the woman is cheated on and stays, a marriage where the man is cheated on and stays, a marriage where the spouses separate without divorcing, a new marriage, a marriage with children involved, an unwedded relationship with one child who is neglected, a healthy marriage, a man with a prostitute for a mistress, and others. Tolstoy doesn't say what is best, but he does have his characters reflect on their marriage situation. That is what I mean by theme.

His message, on the other hand, the one that transcends the era and place Tolstoy lived in, is revealed in the final pages of the book. I think I would have understood better had I known the message from the start and been able to read in light of it.

That said, I give you Tolstoy's message.

"Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That's comprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can't do anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden the same Fyodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but must live for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And I and millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now—peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thought and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing—we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. ...

Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: 'To live for God, for my soul.'"

Anna Karenina is a book about why. This universal question is the reason that despite the then-contemporary references and exceedingly high page count, it is a classic that is still read today.

You could teach an entire college writing class solely on Anna Karenina, and there is so much of it I don't even know what writing lesson I would pull for you. Here is one, though: If you are trying to be philosophical in your fiction, take your time. If your philosophical idea is good enough, it will be worth the pages it takes to get it across through story.

"Writing Tools" Notes - Who's on your team?

In Writing Tools, Roy Peter Clark brings up an interesting question: Who is in your writing support group?

He argues that every author has the following:

• a helper who keeps them going
• a helper who understands their idiosyncrasies
• a helper willing to answer their questions
• an expert helper to match the topic
• a helper who runs interference
• a coach who helps figure out what works and what needs work

Here, without their names, are the people who make up my writing support group. I gave it some thought, and though I don't have a support group like this at work, I do in my outside-of-work writing life.

Who keeps me going? I have a friend who writes a lot. Like, she writes thousands of words every day and never seems to run out. While many writers depend on NaNoWriMo for drive, I just have to look at what she's been up to and I get that kick in the rear I need to get writing and finish. The only problem is this friend lives in a different state; I'm sure I would do more writing if she lived in my basement.

Who understands me? My husband may roll his eyes, but he is used to me stopping to take a photo, grabbing his phone to text myself a note, or droning on and on about the book I'm reading and my analysis of it. He's known me since high school and has witnessed or heard about my method-authoring (such as when I had my sister gag me so I could accurately describe how it felt). He's even had himself quoted in my work and recognizes when I borrow pieces of him. He knows it's all inevitable and is supportive.

Who answers my questions? I suppose Google doesn't count? I actually tend to pepper one of my brothers with questions when I am brainstorming how things should work. He can apply logic to abstract thinking, so that makes him a good fit for when I ask questions like, "If you were to kill someone in such a way that you could capture their soul before it left the body, how would you do that?" If he isn't handy, I'll ask whoever is nearest. Be prepared.

What expert do I consult? That depends wholly on the topic, but I return to my Google suggestion. I have a nursing friend I consulted about a science fiction story having to do with anatomy; I asked my physics-minded husband about a science theory question I had for another story; I talked to a former coworker who does archery when I had a technical question to ask about it. I turn to whoever I know who would know the answer. This changes per story and per page, sometimes.

Who runs interference? The idea behind this one is someone who keeps everyone, including myself, from interrupting my writing time. I do not have a person like this and sorely could use one. If you want to apply, let me know.

Who helps me sort out the gems? This would be my sister-in-law right now. She's a reader, not a writer, which means she brings a different perspective to my work. She reads a lot and has good taste, and when she critiques my work, she gives honest feedback, both the positives and the negatives. On top of that, I trust her, which goes a long way in an editing relationship.

I'll end this post with a quote from Writing Tools. Don't undervalue any member of your team, no matter the part they play.

Talk to copy editors. Learn their names. Embrace them as fellow writers and lovers of language. Feed them chocolate.

Identity crisis

I had a small identity crisis a few weeks ago.

Ever since I was a child learning how to write, I have written stories. The first one I recall was about a fish who wanted to save a spider who was caught somewhere on land. Another used my uncle's pig for inspiration - I don't remember what it was about, but I know it was titled "Robert the Pig and His Sweater."

From the beginning, it was stories. Fictional stories, that is. Sure, I kept a journal, but I never considered that writing practice. I actively wanted to never work for a newspaper. I wanted to be a novelist.

College hit, and I wanted a job where they would pay me to write, or at least edit, so I applied for Accent editor and Opinion editor without knowing the job description for either. I just knew I did NOT want to be a reporter. At all.

The entire time I worked for the student newspaper, I did not write an article, not a single one, and I worked there for three and a half years.

I left college with the goal of finding a job where I would use my degree, and I ended up at a newspaper again.

I have since written numerous articles. I am not technically a reporter, but I do report. A few weeks ago, I had the realization that I am a journalist and I mainly write nonfiction. As I said, it was a moment of crisis, and I'm not exaggerating.

Who am I as a writer?, I wanted to know. It seemed like this blog and some meager scraps of other writing were all I had to cling to for my "fiction writer" dream.

To end this crisis, I did a couple things. 1) I told myself that people love my nonfiction writing at the newspaper. It makes people happy, even though it may not seem grand. Or fictional. 2) I am now looking at my job as a second school of writing. I am learning a new form and gaining practice and skills in writing that will transfer over when I am finished with newspapers.

I also read yet another how-to-write book, this one called "Writing Tools" and written by Roy Peter Clark. I finished it recently (a good newspaper word that makes something see timely even when it is starting to overripen) and will share my notes with you over the next few weeks, along with explanations to flesh them out.

P.S. - Being a journalist isn't THAT bad, is it?

Death Rattle Writers Festival and the State of Writing

The Death Rattle Writers Festival, based in Nampa, ID, was this weekend. I asked my husband to go to the short story event with me, and he said a writers festival sounds like it's a bunch of people sitting around, reading to each other.

Well, he's right. The event looked like this.

There were other events we didn't go to, though. The festival had a premier screening of the film "Smoke," with one of its creators there to talk about it, and there was also Art of Verse, a hip-hop artist, I believe, who draws inspiration from spoken word poetry. They had a poetry lecture and reading, a flash fiction event and a dramatic reading session of one-act plays, as well as other events.

The main thing I pulled from the short story reading (please note that I wasn't there for all of it) was a reminder of how contemporary literary (not genre) writers seem to strive for a jaded tone.

Remember Mary Robison? She's got the tone down pat.

I'm at Rhythm & Blues and their parents at an eatery called The Half Moon. Have been for every bit of an itchy hour. We're still expecting Petal. Saunders sits across from me, tearing a crescent roll into many parts. Adam's queasy and may be forced to bolt when they bring the food. He has his eyes squeezed shut, his face wrinkled in a look of rejection. I'm in attendance but feeling as if I were sketched into the scene, and maybe with an old pencil. The parents sit across the table. I haven't looked up at them. Nor will I, unless they call on me.

Do you hear it? Not the story, but the tone.

My husband said the writers sounded monotone. I think that is a good way to put it. The life is faded.

Perhaps it's the current -ism. Romanticism, feminism, Orientalism, jadism. If so, count me out. I want to sound like me when I write, or like my characters (who are all reflections of me to some extent): sassy, smart, silly, sarcastic, blunt, poetic, logical, me. That is the most unique and best voice I will ever find, and that voice will lead me to the best stories.

I did a little research into this to see if anyone else has noticed, and found that they have.

This essay, found on an website associated with the College of DuPage, notes that contemporary writers believe we live in a fallen world with no God to save us (note that this is a generalization). They are looking at the world as being without hope.

Read this one, too. It is longer, FYI, and takes in the entire art scene, not just writing. Some of my favorite bits, the parts that rang true to what I've been noticing, include the idea that contemporary art makes fun of sincerity, its tone is a defense against sounding simple and naive, and it gives a disconnected view of the world.

Thoughts? Had you noticed the trend?

The second essay I linked to said sentimentalism is probably next, with its strong convictions. Not sure if I agree with that or not, I don't know enough, but I would like the next movement to be honest.  Let's paint the world as we truly see it, individually. Honesty and truth are always the characteristics of a masterpiece.

A "Settled" Verdict

No, "Settled" was not accepted by the Death Rattle Writers Festival -- but it's okay. Here is what I heard from them, first via my professional Facebook account and then as sent to my personal email (this is the order I read them in, not the order they were received).

Facebook:

(we really liked your short story by the way, we got booked up and we just had to cut off submissions without exceptions but we would love to do a reading with you or something in the future!)

Email:

Due to the high volume of prose submissions, we are remorseful to inform you that we did not select 'Settled' to be read at this years festival.

That being said we are grateful for the submission, and I thoroughly enjoyed the read. You have a great voice and a strong sense of narrative and we would definitely like to work with you in the future. I hope you won't mind us updating you on future reading opportunities and projects the Death Rattle is working on. Thanks again for your time, and we hope you will still come and enjoy the festival.

So they like it, they are just having issues and handled them unethically. Note to those trying to set a deadline for submissions: If you ask writers for three weeks' patience in reading their story, don't put the deadline two weeks before the event. The math does not add up.

And note for writers: Even though the deadline is Saturday, don't wait until then to send it. Better safe than sorry.

Another note for writers: If you get a rejection note, and you will, know that the more personalized it is, the more they were impressed. In this case, I felt like they truly enjoyed it but didn't have the time for a longer note. Most of the email is a form letter, obviously, and the bit about keeping me updated is just them adding me to their mailing list.

If I had been the one judging my own piece, I wouldn't have been so complimentary. The writing is good, but the story is atrocious.

The anatomy of "Settled":

Character intro
Comedic prose
Character intro
Comedic prose
Story begins
Tension (a single line of it)
Climax
Comedic prose
Resolution
Comedic prose

Pulling out all the jokes, you have this:

Character intro
Character intro
Story begins
Tension
Climax
Resolution

Things that are missing: central conflict, conflict development, tension buildup.

The story arc was not at all decent, basically, and to kick myself in the butt for poor storytelling skills, I will write a few posts covering those three missing elements once I finish talking about how the festival goes (I plan on attending anyway).

Submitted! Death Rattle Writer's Festival

I thought I wasn't going to make my goal of submitting something to the Death Rattle Writer's Festival, but I was wrong! However, I didn't end up sending that story I posted a while back about lungs; instead, I set the following. The first half should be familiar. Crossing my fingers it will be accepted!

Jeff was that guy at the office whose chair had an odd habit of sinking now and then, seemingly at random but somehow always while he was having a conversation with someone. For the first month after he started using that particular chair, he had profusely apologized to whomever he happened to be speaking to at the time of each gravitatious incident. The following month, Jeff had had enough and snooped around the building for a replacement chair. Finding one in a spare conference room filled with marvelous, non-sinking chairs (he tested each), he made the swap and had approximately two days of seated bliss before a conversation was once again intruded upon by his chair sinking toward the ground. It appeared that his chair had been returned to his desk. Jeff spent a couple weeks swapping his chair and having it disgracefully return before he finally gave up. He stopped bothering to apologize when he sank a foot during any sort of parley, and instead would staunchly refuse to readjust the chair until the conversation had reached a clear end. If someone so much as crinkled the corner of their eye at his chair’s antics, Jeff would give them his best So? look.

His wife had suggested he prop the chair up on boxes, or perhaps a short filing cabinet or fridge. Mel always had ill-conceived ideas like that; unfortunately, what he had once considered endearing was by now, after 15 years of marriage, grating on his patience as he found himself telling her to please refrain from spray painting the front door with a skull and crossbones in honor of Halloween, to please put the dead leaves in trash bags instead of lighting them on fire in the middle of their suburban front yard, or even to please refrain from giving cookies to the Girl Scouts every time they knocked on the door, no matter how delicious they were or how fresh from the oven. In the instance particular to his office chair, Jeff explained to Mel, in the kindest way possible, that the chair’s single swivel leg would get in the way of an attempt to wedge a refrigerator down there.

“Can’t you just remove the leg?” she had asked.

“How am I supposed to slide my chair in and out from beneath my desk if it’s on a refrigerator?”

“By attaching wheels to the bottom of the refrigerator. Look, it would save you space—”

“That’s too much work, Mel.”

“Fine, have it your way. Let your chair sink. Heaven only knows what sort of impression that makes on whoever it is you talk to all day,” she said.

“The people I talk to all day already know my chair sinks,” Jeff said, massaging his eyes and the bridge of his nose. He didn’t bother asking what people would think if they came into his small office to find him sitting on a filing cabinet or refrigerator, never mind the fact that the nearest outlet for the refrigerator was across the room—the one near his desk was already taken up with computer plugs and a plug for a machine so foreign to him that he kept it more for the bland mystery of it than for its potential usefulness He would have to rearrange his entire office for that extra two feet-by-two feet space his wife was promising he would gain by the chair-base exchange.

“The people you talk to all day,” Mel was saying, “gave you the chair you have as a joke, a welcome-to-the-office hazing, and you should do them one better by economizing space. Who knows, you could get promoted for your ingenuity.”

Mel had enough ingenuity for the both of them, and that’s why Jeff rarely bothered to think anymore beyond whatever was necessary for his position as an assistant to the county clerk. Which, frankly, wasn’t much.

Jeff had settled into his life, settled for his life, and settled on continuing onward in much the same way, if he could help it. Whatever craving he had for excitement was met on at least a weekly basis by Mel.

On a week when Mel had figured it was a good idea to embroider a detailed, silver map of the United States onto their American flag in preparation for the patriotic summer holidays, Jeff decided to walk to work, promising Mel he would pick up some muffins on his way home. It was a promise he fully intended to keep, for although he was perpetually short on patience with his wife, he did love her and didn’t want her to have to go even one Sunday morning without her customary blueberry muffin with streusel on top.

It was raining that day, but since Jeff had never owned an umbrella, and since he had already decided upon walking, there was little he could do about it. He tossed his neighbor’s newspaper on top of his head to protect his hair from the rain, but then remembered how the ink tended to smear and thought better of it, stopping at the corner of the block to deliver the paper to the small beagle the family who lived there had recently adopted. The pup wagged his tail in overdone gratitude and began tearing the paper to pieces so that it would resemble the one already eroding on the front steps of the house.

There were few people out that morning, and of those who were, only Jeff seemed to not have an umbrella in working condition. He walked beneath every tree he saw in an effort to make up for it, but there simply weren’t enough full trees along the way to protect his now-sopping clothes from the rain. So Jeff was soon forced to give up any effort to avoid the drizzle and instead focused on avoiding the deepest of the puddles. It was hard to tell if his socks were wet because of his shoes or his dripping pant legs.

He opened the door to the county office thinking about how he hadn’t realized it was so far from his home, then crossed the stone floor of the lobby toward the elevators.

His elevator-mate was an aging black fellow wearing a fedora, and he stood beside some luggage and an umbrella. The umbrella, which was lying on top of the man's luggage, was blue and opened slightly to air out.

They exchanged good mornings and stared together at the elevator doors.

And then they fell.

This wasn't the usual slow, stomach-churning sinking into the basement; no, this was something that dropped Jeff to his knees in a puddle on the floor and nearly impaled him with the black man's umbrella, something that made him wonder that his last thoughts on this earth were going to be a four-letter word his mother would throttle him for once he was close enough to the pearly gates for her arms to bridge the distance.

But then, maybe such words are the last thoughts through many people's minds.

It certainly wasn't the last thought through the black man's mind. His thoughts weren't coherent enough to be notable at all without his morning coffee to give them a leg up.

They slammed against the bottom of the elevator shaft, and Jeff was jarred onto his belly in the darkness. Through the pain and dark, his thoughts centered on Mel and what his last words to her would be—something heroic, he hoped, or else something novel. Something that would help her world continue to revolve now that he wouldn’t be in it.

He dragged his hands into his coat pockets, fumbled out a pen and, energy failing, penned her a note on the surface closest to where his hand happened to fall.

He heard the other man move, may God bless his soul and Jeff’s, and then gave up on living.

But perhaps he gave up too soon.

When Jeff woke up, someone was slapping him. Death isn’t in the business of slapping people to make sure they have truly died, he was pretty sure, and so he blinked his way through the pulsing bass in his head and saw the ceiling panel lights of the county office basement.

“Hey buddy. What’d you do, drop one story and figure your number was up?” The slapper gave half a smile of amusement. His eyes looked a little concerned, though, as those darn fingers starting poking everywhere on his body, causing pain to strike up wherever they passed.

“Stop,” he begged. “Pain.”

“Staff of life, sir, staff of life. Hey,” he said, tugging a little on Jeff’s tie and flipping it over. “What’s this?”

Jeff moved his eyes over to look and saw that his pen had failed to give off much ink when he was writing his last words.

All that was written was “chai,” in bad penmanship.

“Shopping list,” he said. He was becoming sensible enough to be embarrassed. “Other guy?”

“Oh, this is his floor. He’s fetching some paperwork or something.”

More embarrassed.

“Yeah, don’t worry about him. He’s been in falling elevators before. Takes them in stride.”

“He what?”

“Doesn’t matter. Can I have permission to use your phone to call someone to come get you?”

“Yeah.”

“This your wife?” The slapper flashed him a picture of Mel.

Jeff tried to nod, but it didn’t really work, and he just blinked instead. Then he fell asleep.

He woke up again in the car, his face smashed up against the passenger side window and the seat belt halfway up his stomach from his slouched position. He groaned.

Mel was the one driving. “I asked for muffins, not chai tea, Jeff,” she said, her words clipped and tart. “Blueberry muffins.”

Then she glanced over at him and sighed, handing him his tie. “But here, I finished up the list for you.”

The back of his tie now read "chai, blueberry muffins, OJ, baklava, Cheerios."

Analysis of Reading Author Experiment

Charles Dickens

Douglas Adams

I let you down by not analyzing my author experiment last week. I forgot and wanted to talk about the picture book. I will analyze now instead.

First. Who knew Douglas Adams and Charles Dickens were such similar writers?! I picked those two because I figured they were so different from each other the difference in my writing would be stark. While it modernized itself a bit, I couldn't help but notice the similar sense of humor while doing the two different readings. Dickens loves to be literal and honest, to point out the silliness inherent in humans, and to present jokes with a straight face. Adams is blunt, uses silliness to great effect, and acts as if his constant joking were totally serious. The only real differences are genre and time period. I swear these two would have been friends.

Mary Robison

What it means is from what I can tell, my writing modernized between the first and second segments, but the sense of humor - they had reminded me how funny silliness with a straight face can be - remained largely the same.

Things changed more when I added Mary Robison. The book of hers I was reading from, One D.O.A. One on the Way, is minimalist to an extreme. That was reflected in my shorter sentences. Also courtesy of Robison was my turn from being silly to being cynical.

Was this on purpose? I honestly am not sure. Human error is a large factor in this experiment that could only be done away with if I hadn't known my hypothesis and purpose. Basically, if I had done this on accident or asked an unknowing person to act as test subject, it would have worked better.

Harper Lee

I do not think it was completely on purpose, though I was definitely aware it was happening. I think what happens, subconsciously, is that when reading a talented author's work, I admire it and notice the aspects I particularly enjoy. I remember how fun the silliness is, how gritty and true minimalism can sound, and I want to bring it into my writing. It also puts me into a mood that fits that author's tone.

This experiment was tiring. Writing can be tiring when it isn't flowing right (power through anyway!), but this was draining in its own right. I was getting breaks, so the writing shouldn't have gotten me down, but the constant switching from style to style wore me out. That is why the Juliet Marillier section is so short. My story wasn't pushing itself forward and I was continually disorienting myself.

Juliet Marillier

I read it to my husband, and he said it didn't sound like me. It was terse and flippant, were his exact words, which is something I am going to blame on Mary Robison. It took a while to get her tone out of my system, and by the end, it still wasn't quite gone. I think it is because her style is so domineering, whereas the styles of Harper Lee and Juliet Marillier are softer, more mellow. Maybe I needed more time reading from them to soak up their respective tones and phraseology, whereas Mary Robison's prose comes in swinging.

I had never thought about people's writing styles being strong like a personality can be strong, but I suppose it is true. There's a lesson I wasn't looking for.

Have any added observations? Let me know. I'm interested.

Reading Author Experiment

Experiment: Read an author for 15 minutes, then write for a few minutes. Repeat process with five different authors. Purpose: To illustrate how one's reading affects one's own writing style.

Charles Dickens

The hole in the ground was rather square. This would have been normal had a tractor or a gravedigger had digged it, but that couldn’t have been the case because it was wallowing in the middle of the interstate, and no respectful gravedigger ever digs there and no tractor would have braved the traffic, much less if there were no cones or other construction equipment to bolster it up.

Granted, it was a small hole, replacing, in effect, one of the white dashes that divided the lanes. I had been sent to investigate by the police, and so had set up my own road cones and sat down to get a look at it. By the tape measure, it was fifteen feet deep, and a flashlight showed its sides to be straight, as well as I could see as I peered in. And, of course, the first few inches were pavement and the rest dirt. Or rocks, but had someone sawed through rocks to do it?

Some might have suspected alien activity, but unless aliens were setting up a giant tripod, and we found similar holes elsewhere, I wouldn’t put any stock in it.

I have always been of the mind that if aliens were to come to Earth, the first thing they would do would be to take photographs. I’m sure it’s what Lewis and Clark would have done, had they been able.

The next thing to do was to take a sampling of the sides, see if whatever had dug or punched the hole had left behind any evidence of its makeup. Eggs made in a cast-iron pan will have small slivers of the iron scraped up into them; the same concept generally applies in situations like these. I think.

I’ve never really been sure, actually, but they pay me to pretend I am and so I do and no one is the wiser for it. After all, there’s no one who can truly be a professional in matters of holes.

Douglas Adams

The main thing you have to know about holes is they are relative. They are really just depressions, of the extremely vertical sort, in a level surface. If looked at from above with very good eyes, they wouldn’t seem to be there at all, so really, holes are of no consequence.

I don’t make it a habit of telling my customers that, because if they realized that holes are really just a psychological problem, I’d be out of a job. And then I wouldn’t be able to make rent or go out dancing at the Eagles lodge or anything good like that. I’d have to go make a hole in a mountainside so I could live in it, and that sounds like a sure way to insanity.

The trick is to get the bottom of the hole to be flush with the surrounding ground again—the bigger hole, if you will. Most level grounds, exempting plateaus and their ilk, are really just holes, if we consider that the highest ground is where “level” is and everything ought to be equal in height. But then, maybe the holes are correct and the bottom is where it all should be and holes are setting the world back to rights?

Every job has existential questions. An actor might think about whether a character is truly alive in another plane of existence, a philosopher might wonder whether God is really so smart as He says He is (we are taking it solely on His authority, after all), a child care worker might consider where a child has got off to this time. I simply ask about whether holes are the correct way of life and I am destroying the world around me by consistently plugging them up.

I plugged this one up with cow manure, mainly because it was the closest thing at hand and because it would fill the space better than grass clippings from the patch of ground that runs between the two directions of freeway.

The last bit, of course, was covered with tar, and just like that I apologized to the Earth for destroying its attempts at correctness by feeding it fertilizer.

Mary Robison

I have filled holes with all sorts of things. Bubble wrap, water from a fire hydrant (firefighters forgive me), cardboard, whatever is handy at the time. So long as the top couple inches is the same material as the stuff around it, and I didn’t make a second hole plugging the first, I’m home free.

Home is on 22nd Street, near the Sunrise Inn. Means I have a steady flow of neighbors. Nice, sometimes. Other times, I wonder if any of them is going to break into my house and steal something from me. I don’t know what, I’ve only got an outdated television and an impressive VHS collection that’s pretty much useless now that the player has worn itself out. Unlike a DVD, you can hand-rewind a VHS. Also unlike a DVD, you can’t play it forward by hand.

I keep the collection just in case. Maybe it will be my retirement fund until I fill the last hole with my dead body and they say I lived like I died and whatever else people say about people at funerals.

I stepped through my front door and prop my umbrella up on the doorframe, leaving it open a bit so it can dry out. No one wants to open up a moldy umbrella. Mildewy? Whatever.

Dinner is Pasta-Roni with meat sauce, except the meat isn’t there because I’m vegan and besides that, who would want to eat meat from inside a container? Back when I ate a steak a day, I bought it from a butcher nearby. That was before the doctor said I had to be vegan for my health.

Yes, I live alone. It means I don’t have to share a bathroom.

Harper Lee

The house once belonged to my grandmother. I moved in to live with her and when she passed on, I stayed put. By then I was building up a respectable reputation as a holer, and I knew if I moved somewhere else, I would have to start all over again. People take your business seriously when they respect you and you’ve saved their cattle from enough broken legs.

Being a holer is about more than filling a hole; it’s about figuring out what made it in the first place and making it so the hole won’t reappear (setting aside the wishes of Mother Earth, who I could almost call my business partner). Accordingly, I pulled out the Ziploc bag of soil I had pulled from the side of the hole in various spots and dumped it out on the table that once was a dining room table but now serves as my lab. The microscope is set into the table so I can slide the sediment across the table under it for viewing and then out again without bothering to lift it onto a platform like with a normal microscope.

I focused the lens so I could view the dirt and spent a good amount of time staring and sifting and staring. I knew well what it was—copper—but that didn’t give me much of an answer and so I continued staring in hopes that I could figure it out. Was a pipe shoved in and removed? That seemed the likely explanation, from the hole’s perspective, but from a road perspective, no one had seen a giant copper tube sticking straight up out of the interstate. I am sure it would have made the news and I wouldn’t have been asked to do the job.

I’d have to go look at that hole tomorrow for more clues. All I had so far was copper, and that’s too common to be of much use.

Juliet Marillier

The biggest hole I was ever challenged with was a mile long and two feet wide. It was as if the ground had developed a tear, and the tear was dangerously close to the perimeter of a hospital. This hole was not bizarre in any particular way, though, as there had been an earthquake the week before and the ground everywhere had given way to small chasms. I didn’t say it was the most impressive, but it was the biggest.

As for the most impressive: There was a hole in a nearby beach. Let me tell you, that was a conundrum. How to fill a hole that was softened by the water around it, which constantly fought to widen the hole? I had to wait for low tide to get to it, then work fast in dim conditions to plug it – with seaweed.

Next week, I will analyze the results.

Annotations

One of the best things to happen to me in high school was the English assignment to annotate the books we read. Annotate, as in take notes about the book in the book. At first, my notes weren't super intelligent. No, they were not stupid, they just weren't particularly insightful.

Example, from the first chapter of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered." Next to this, I wrote "forced to be happy? Loving life a ton?" in the margin. Fairly obvious observation and question, younger Elizabeth. Not helpful for much of anything.

Current me thought about the word "ever," and how juvenile it sounds, by the way. Giving the author the benefit of purpose, we see he wants us to see the narrator as young and naive.

But even though they were obvious, those early annotations were helpful -- they were practice. They taught me how to read. And that taught me how to write.

Most of the insights you read on this blog are courtesy of that skill. I began with simple annotations like the one above, marking questions, things I liked, insights into symbols and imagery, and progressed to over-annotating. That wasn't strictly useful except as practice, either.

Do me a favor and rewind memory lane to this post. Look at the pictures I posted; that is what I mean by over-annotating. While this was for a college course, it was a skill I learned toward the end of high school. It is less useful, academically, than it may look, because it is hard to find much of anything. Close reading, interpreting a passage, doing a character analysis, sure. But doing a whole book like this (I didn't go that far, thankfully) would make you lose everything. Plus, when you go back to reread, you won't want to read all those notes, too.

Over-annotating taught me to edit. My husband once looked at a query letter I was editing for someone and was amazed at how much I had written in comments. It may have been longer than the letter itself -- and all I did was annotate. Over-annotating taught me to look at individual words and phrases. It focused on the language itself, while my early attempts focused on story and character.

My current style of annotating incorporates both. I take notes on the side for the general things and write in the book itself for the specifics. I am more interested in how things work than on character or plot analysis -- notice I looked at why Bradbury used "ever" instead of commenting on the subject of the sentence, the smile. I also noticed that the muscles were gripping it -- concrete words with a connotation of force, perhaps even fear. But one value of the first style of annotations is it captures the impressions of a first read. Writers need that info from editors.

If you want to be an editor, learn to annotate. Buy books and read them with pen in hand. Or skip books -- read magazines, newspaper articles, blog posts, speeches, anything you can get your hands on, and annotate it. How could it possibly be improved? Read and reread the same stuff over and over until you have an idea. Then get your hands on more stuff to read and annotate.

The same thing goes for writers. If you want to write, learn to annotate. Buy books (or anything with words) and read them with a pen in hand. It doesn't matter if you read the notes later -- it is about the process of actively thinking about what you read, of learning how to write from an author while they write.

This is note-taking for the sake of note-taking. Think you can handle that? I promise practice will beget mad skills.

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Paul Raymond

One of the joys of my job is I get paid to read and do what I've been doing on this blog all along--review. As I said earlier, though, I get put in a tough situation when the book is not one I would normally recommend. No one would be happy with me if I lambasted a local writer's work, especially since I'm not a well-known and respected reviewer (yet). So I have to get creative.

How to put a positive spin on things without being dishonest? The last time I was faced with this issue, I ended up writing an article about what went into the book, neglecting to review the content at all. This time, I decided to do a Q&A, since the book, Paul Raymond's The Other Side: Finding the Greener Grass, was essentially a memoir with a fictional spin. The author is the main character, and the realizations he has are real, but the events are contrived to make his point blatant (I don't think that worked out well for him, but oh well, I wasn't his editor).

I thought a Q&A would go well, but then I discovered the author is a politician. I knew that before, of course, since he's on the city council, but I hadn't figured on having to machete my way through non-answers in an effort to get him to answer the question I'd asked. He kept wanting to reiterate the same points: This book is fiction, and don't judge people. That was it. I was looking for something more philosophical, since it was a reflection of sorts on his life and on judgment/stereotypes/assumptions. In essence, he wanted to talk about the book and I wanted to talk about the ideas in the book. It reminded me of an episode in Psych, where someone tells Shawn Spencer to give the answer to the question he wished people had asked instead of the one they actually posed. Annoying. It made me feel sorry for our legislative reporter. Thankfully, when I gave him a chance to look over his answers, he did a bit of good machete-work himself.

Before I let you read the Q&A, I'll say that no, I don't necessarily recommend this book unless you want to the message "Don't judge based on stereotypes" bashed into your head over and over. It is written clearly, though without much style, and will get that memo across well.

And now for portions of the Q&A, beginning with part of the introduction I gave it in the article, which can be found in full here:

The protagonist and narrator of Paul Raymond’s “The Other Side: Finding the Greener Grass,” published this summer by Nampa-based Point Rider Publishing, has an unflattering view of farmers and others he sees as not being “professional.” But when he gets laid off and takes a U-Haul truck on the road to a new town and a new start, he meets people along the way who change his attitude.

Editor’s note: The questions and answers below have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: Why didn’t you write “The Other Side” as a memoir?

A: When I started writing, my emotions came out. It was kind of caustic initially. I had to go back and ramp it back so I could let somebody read it. It was therapeutic for me. After that, I sat on it for years and never did do anything with it until a publisher contacted me and made me think, “Well, maybe I should do something with it.” I thought it was just personal for me, even though, as I said, most of it is fiction. Like Hank, at the store — the store was real and farmers came to the store, but that whole conversation, all that was fiction. I utilized fiction to better express my point.

Q: Why did you choose to use yourself as the main character?

A: Well, I didn’t necessarily mean for me to be the main character, but that’s the only way I could express it. I have not written a book before, so this is new and it came over a long process. It went from venting to becoming a book.

Q: What went into the decision to make it a road trip story?

A: I literally moved from one town to another, and I did get laid o•. Many of my thoughts (reminiscing) along the way are real, but most of the experiences on the journey were not. My thoughts are there, my feelings are there, but it was largely ÿction. I just used that trip as kind of a base line.

Q: Has anyone subject to stereotype in this book read it?

A: Yes, Dan, in the last chapter. I have just met him within the last 10 years, and I let him read it. He’s since passed away. But I wasn’t done with it at the time. I hadn’t added that chapter he was involved with. He thought it was really good. I have at least one farmer who is going to read it, but I haven’t had anybody — well, no, that’s not true. When I first wrote it I gave it to some people. It was offensive to them because I was so caustic. I was just letting loose.

Q: I hope you haven’t lost any friends over it?

A: Not that I know of.

Q: Were your parents any different from the other farmers you grew up around?

A: Well, I perceived my dad to be pretty sharp. A lot of people came to have him help with things. My mom and dad were both educated. I didn’t ever put them in that stereotyped position. I kind of separated them out somehow.

Q: In your opinion, what is the connection between self-confidence and a judgmental attitude?

A: I’m in my late 20s on that trip, and I kind of put myself back in that time. I was more realistically self-conscious than I am now. My self-confidence wasn’t quite as strong, and I think living on a farm kind of added to that. I pictured the people in the city to be really sophisticated, more affluent, and, comparatively, farmers didn’t seem to know what was going on. I didn’t want to be branded with them, but I was.

Q: Do you think you carried that “branding” with you through your life?

A: Absolutely. But I eventually got over it and realized that I was OK and they were OK. I kind of lived that book and wrote it; it’s actually kind of the process I went through in real life. Only, most of those events didn’t occur. It took a long time. I think those feelings about farmers and others went away when I got done writing the first hundred pages or so. I didn’t have the intensity that I started writing with because I was relaxed. I was able to talk to and associate with anybody, any culture; I haven’t had a problem with it since. It was a life-changing experience.

“The Other Side” is available online.

What's Elizabeth Reading? ...Bea Dubois

I was put in a tough position this week. A woman who lives in my area had written and published a book, Briarwood Cottage, and she wanted me to read and write about it in the paper. I cheerily said to send it on over.

The problem: The book isn't any good. The story is mildly interesting but has no arc, climax, or progression, and there are passages of lecture - straight lecture from teachers in the book - that does nothing for the plot or story at all. She must have done the research and wanted to use it somehow.

The characters did not make up for the deplorable story. As I said, they did not progress, and while she gave them small conflicts, each was easily resolved or forgotten. They were likeable enough, but incomplete. They weren't annoyingly 2D, if that's anything. Not deep, but there was some roundness.

As for the writing, not good. I mean, the message got across, but I got no pleasure from reading it. Simple, like if a high schooler had written the story. And this woman is no high schooler. She was writing it as a mother with young kids.

This, people, is what happens if you write a story without learning how. Not everyone can write a good story; it takes conscientious reading and writing. Please work hard so you can write something you can be proud of.

The tough position came when I needed to write something for the paper. I couldn't recommend the book. So I called the author to see if I could possibly recommend it for its one redeeming factor: It sparked intellectual interest in the Church of the Nazarene. The characters were part of that church and since one is a revival preacher, it factored in greatly. While reading, I was surprised by what these people believe and I wanted to know more. Why believe those things? How much of this was accurate, or was I misunderstanding? So I found myself doing light research into the church.

I had pinpointed the one redeeming aspect to be that it could bring interest to the church, assuming that was the author's ultimate goal.

It wasn't.

Turns out she doesn't even belong to that church, though she is Christian. Her real goal, to write a story of God helping people recover, was hinted at in the story but did not go anywhere. It was more about the characters than God.

Fail. I can't possibly recommend this book. What to write?

I ended up writing this, which was about the writing of the book and about the book, not at all a review. Safe ground. I didn't want to insult her in the newspaper - I am trying to make people want to talk to me, not push them away by being mean. The article ran in our A&E (Arts and Entertainment) section. And then I moved on to reading a cookbook someone in my area wrote. More on the cookbook later! Never reviewed one of those, have I?

Bracing Myself to Enter a Poetry Contest

Confession: I have entered fewer than five -- much fewer than five -- writing contests in my life. But I am planning on entering another soon. A poetry one, to be specific.

I don't enter them because I don't want someone to tell me what I sometimes fear: I am not all that good. Who wants to get their hopes up only to hear that they had no chance of winning? On top of that, this is my writing we are talking about. That stuff is important to me. I worked hard on them and they carry a lot of me in them.

But if a writer is going to move forward, someone else needs to be reading their work. I have submitted a couple things to literary journals without success (though one person did write me a full-length letter in response, which means it was good and they realized it), and I suppose I did get to present a couple stories at National Undergraduate Literature Conferences. Which is pretty cool. I also won regional awards for my editorials in college. My boss thinks I should submit my column next year for a journalism award, too.

Basically, I'm not a lost cause. Just a timid cause.

I don't think I've mentioned my column yet. It's called the Front Porch, and in it I relay small bits of happy news in a chatty way. If someone becomes an Eagle Scout, gets a scholarship, makes the dean's list, wins a snowmobile, needs volunteers, you get the idea, it goes into my column.

So I suppose this is a dual-purpose blog post (I didn't realize I forgot to write a post last week! Whoops). First, to tell you I am preparing myself to enter another contest, and second, to tell you I'm a columnist of sorts these days.

To read my Front Porch column, visit www.idahopress.com/heyipt/ and look for headlines saying Front Porch. I've gotten some negative feedback, but mostly the community seems to enjoy it.

As for which poem I am submitting, I'm not sure yet. I have reached out to a writer friend for some help, because the contest hasn't been around for more than a year. Without knowledge of what sort of poems they prefer, I'm at a loss. I'm thinking of entering my poem about Nisha, the Teddy Bear Buttons paragraph fiction (pretending it's prose poetry, which maybe it is), or this poem, which is called Relics.


There is a red, wooden swing
hanging from the lone chestnut tree
that shadows my front yard.
Rachel, the girl with naturally curly hair
who loves mustard yellow,
made it with a friend
before she left for Russia.
Moscow, where she learned to adore
matching scarves and hats,
old window frames,
and long train rides,
but not so much the food —
except for borscht (beet soup),
blini (pancakes),
and smetana (sour cream).

The red swing stayed with me;
I brought it in during the winter
to protect the wood from snow,
and in the summer,
my landlord’s two daughters played on it.
She also left me with a painting
of a rainstorm over a bridge that traverses a river,
beside which two people walk,
one in red and one in light blue.
Neither one is holding an umbrella,
but they don’t seem to be in a hurry
to escape the rain pelting the walkway.

Borscht

I'll let you know how it goes, no matter which one I end up going with. Cross your fingers for me.