shakespearemom

How do the hours go by so quickly? Compared to the list that faces me today, I have way too much to do and not nearly enough time. Why can’t I ever get everything done?

I’ve managed to post pretty much every day this week, but sometimes I can barely get to it. I’ve managed to get my kids bathed when they absolutely need it (nope, not every day–not enough time), to do laundry before everyone’s underwear runs out, to deposit checks, get kids to school, etc., all the absolute necessities. But I have no time for anything else. 

Perhaps it’s all a matter of perspective. I suppose, if I didn’t have much income (I don’t, but my hubby brings home enough, thank goodness), I’d be ranting about how I can barely feed my kids the cheapest meals I can come up with, but I have no more for anything fun. No ice cream, no splurges, no new shoes when my old ones wear out. No new tires, even though the ones I drive on are balding. And these concerns would be more important than my previous rant. Perhaps I shouldn’t even be complaining.

But that is not my problem, and in my life, since the financial need has been taken care of, I have developed other ones (I cover this in another blog). My problem stems from a fear–a horrible fear–that my life won’t matter in the long run. I fear that I will die, and though my family members may be sad, I won’t have left anything memorable behind. The laundry I washed will get dirty again, and someone else will wash it. The teaching job I once did is filled by somebody else, and even if that somebody doesn’t do as good a job, no one really knows or cares. Everything goes on.

But, and I know this is selfish–I want to leave a hole behind, and, even more, I want to leave something real behind, something for people to read, to enjoy, to learn from, to change their lives with. 

And that’s why I write–when I have time…

And that is why I NEED MORE TIME!!!

(Whew! Now I got that off my chest, I need to go clean the bathrooms… No time! No time!)

If you like writing exercises, NOTHING is tougher than this one. Using a paragraph at most, but preferably a sentence, write a meaningful passage utilizing all 26 letters of the alphabet at the beginning of one’s words. Whether poetry or prose, it doesn’t matter.

For instance:

Eleven zoo inhabitants grazed within yards of strange unidentified flying crafts. The result? Behaviors, high development levels, new movement. Animals played xylophones, kicked, jumped quickly.

I went a bit extreme, allowing only one word per letter. But the result can’t be too meaningful (not with only 26 words in total). Instead, set up a scene, but then try, as you write, to include words beginning with all 26 letters. It’s okay if some are doubled, but all 26 have to be used by the end of the selection. 

Can you do it? Was it easy? Perhaps you have the ideal analytical brain. If nothing else, the exercise encourages you to think of synonyms (what word means something similar, but starts with a “K”?) and become more aware of what words our language relies upon (articles like “a” and “the,” or connectors like “of” and “so” and “and”). You may even find out what your tendencies are towards repetition.

If you don’t like the alphabet, try writing a short passage without repeating a single word. Tougher than you might think, even in poetry.

I feel like singing the song:

Feelings, nothing more than feelings

Trying to forget my feelings of love…

Not because it’s a great song (sorry, but it isn’t). Because through all the verses, the only definite images that come out of it are, well, trite and vague. All we guess is that the singer is sad, and is likely that way because she loved somebody and has to try to “forget” her “feelings of love.”

Excuse me while I gag.

It’s not because I don’t believe in love. Nope. I do think it exists, and I do believe the feelings that come from having love rejected, or losing a loved one, or falling out of love are real. 

But feelings without real reasons don’t impress me. Imagine you go home and ask your significant other, “So, how’re you doing?”

The person answers, “I’m sad, actually.”

You ask, “Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just sad.”

You start fishing. “Was work okay?”

“It was fine.”

“The drive?”

“No problem. It was fine, too. Just feeling sad.”

You might even try to help. “Would you like to go out to a movie?”

“Nope. Too sad.”

“Dinner?”

“I’d just cry all the way through it.”

The problem with this scenario is that you can’t really join in the misery. Not because you don’t love the person (or at least like them a lot), but because you have no idea why the other person feels the way he/she does. Nothing motivates you to feel as he/she does. 

And THAT is a huge problem. I’ve seen too much of it in writing, too. A woman falls in love with a complete jerk, and you have no idea why. The Mariner shoots the albatross for no reason (although I believe Coleridge had a reason for leaving the motivation out of that poem). People start sobbing in a scene before you can even figure out what’s sad–if the reason is there at all. But all that emotion without the details to justify it can be overwhelming to readers.

So here’s your task:

Create a short piece…a sentence, a few lines of poetry…and within that piece make the feelings clear without a word about what they are. Set the mood, set the feeling, without giving us anything but the reasons, not the dramatic tears, the whining, the dialogue, the words like sad, grateful, wary, cold, etc. Show us the situation, the feelings, without telling us any of it… don’t get inside anyone’s head, don’t name emotions, just show, show, show.

Here’s my example, and most of it will be dialogue (I’m in playwright mode right now):

Dr. Jones moved the plastic apparatus along the cold jelly, pressing it near Emily’s belly button.

“Oh.” His voice sounded soft, like an echo.

“What is it?” Emily asked.

“Um… let me get Nancy. Just a minute.” Dr. Jones left the room, sliding the door shut.

Emily lay back and waited, staring at the window first, then the ceiling when the light began to hurt her eyes. She heard footsteps pad down the hall, a few seconds’ pause, then the footsteps return. Dr. Jones opened the door again, with Nancy bobbing right behind. 

“Hey, Emily,” Nancy whispered. “I’m just gonna have a look, okay?” She didn’t wait for Emily’s answer, but pulled the sensor from its hook and placed it on the other side of the navel, swishing jelly along the way. Her eyes stared at the screen, narrowing at one point. She pushed harder, almost digging the plastic into Emily’s abdomen.

“Ouch.”

“Oh, sorry, honey,” Nancy said. She moved the plastic a little, not pressing so hard. Then she leaned back a little, still not taking her eyes off the screen. “How old is the fetus?”

Dr. Jones cleared his throat. “Twelve weeks.”

“Yes,” Emily agreed. “Maybe thirteen.”

Nancy didn’t look at her. “Did you find anything?”

Dr. Jones shook his head. “You?”

Nancy sighed. “No heartbeat.”

“What do you mean?” Emily asked, her voice barely louder than the hum of the machines.

Nancy wiped Emily’s abdomen with a paper towel, then gently covered it with the sheet. 

Dr. Jones placed a hand on Emily’s arm. “I’m sorry.”

Only the last word broke the rules… but the situation and likely feelings are clear. The trick is to get your readers to feel a certain way, not just make them watch characters do the feeling. Imagine the same scene if all you saw was Emily at home, sobbing as she told a friend on the phone what had happened, and how sad it made her feel. Far better if we are shown, and not told.

See what you come up with… Blow my own selection out of the water!

I know, who doesn’t haiku? I tend not to write poetry without at least a regular rhythm, especially if I want it to be funny (I know that sounds weird, but I have not way of explaining without the story taking over this entire blog)… but asking you to write a sonnet would result in NO comments from anybody. Even my devoted sister would probably write in a sonnet she’d already written, just to save time.

But a haiku can be done in relatively little time, for it’s short, simple, and has only a few rules. Traditionally, haiku:

1.  Follow an exact rhythm along three lines–line 1 has five syllables, line 2 has seven, line 3 has five.

2.  Cover one complete image at a time (remember, you only have 17 syllables to work with, anyway, so it would be silly to try to do too much). 

Here’s an example, if the instructions seem too complicated (but if they really are too complicated, perhaps haiku writing isn’t for you after all):

Soft fur fluffed over

Smooth brown legs, restful slumber

Of girl and kitten.

Here’s another:

Waves ripple onward

Slipping past the brightest gold

Of April ducklings.

You could also try a funny one:

Pinkie ventures up

Into nostril, where green goo

Awaits fingertips.

What’s cool about haiku is that it can make any idea sound posh, even if it isn’t. 

So that’s it… except I’m adding one requirement, just for this exercise: Your haiku must use a color. You pick the color, but it needs to be there. Notice how the three examples all have a color. You might want to skip colors like “vermilion,” since such colors, while sounding posh, also take a LOT of syllables.

Take two minutes, write up your own haiku, and post it. And post again if you think of something else. Who knows, I might think up a dozen more while I’m doing laundry today. Like this one:

White clothes, pristine, pure

Falter in the slurring swish

With red underwear.

Happy writing!

AAAAAaaaaaaaahhhhh! I feel like walking out the door and screaming at the top of my lungs. I have a list a mile long, and none of it–none of it except this blog–is something I truly want to do. Errands to run (need eggs, art posters, and a zipper, all to be had in different places), things to do (exercise at the YMCA, write cover letter for job, take in hubby’s jacket), and I don’t have a chance to get everything done… which means no writing (except for this, which I sneak in just before the kids I watch come over in the morning).

So I’m not writing. I haven’t been writing in about two weeks. And I would, by this time, be committed to a madhouse, straightjacket-bound, if I weren’t thinking. 

I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve read over the last few weeks–four books, over a dozen manga, a sister’s novel, two plays–picking out things I like about each thing, stuff that works, narrative voices that I feel attuned to, places and adventures and characters that strike me in unique ways. Stuff that doesn’t work, people I don’t know well enough to care about, situations that feel contrived, or take too long to come to fruition (or do so too quickly).

I’ve also been thinking about the revision of several of my own plays… for I now know how to fix them, how to make them truly worth staging (and when I don’t think they are worth it, no one else will). Now it’s a question of which play do I work on first? I think I need to work on a one-act, since it will be used for a short play festival this coming summer (yes, actors, techies, costumes, everything).

And I’ve been thinking about several novels. Three new ones (the ideas are slowly forming in my mind), a research book on ghosts (in my area), and my first novel–only with this version, I’m going to plan out the whole series, pulling events and character developments out of the original and spreading them out through the whole series. Only working on this series means planning out the entire thing before I begin to write again. It also means a LOT of research on Native American tribes here in the NW and in western Canada. Native American rituals, songs, and mythological traditions are going to play a huge role in the development of the books, and I can’t write about what I only sort of know.

So, even if my fingers aren’t typing on the next great novel–and they wouldn’t be even if I were writing (I’m not such a complete braggart that I actually believe I’ll write the best novel ever), my faculties are slowly recharging. My brain is whirling with new ideas, new paths, and new ways to keep the straightjacket at bay.

Let me give you a sentence:

The animal affected him.

Okay, so, what do you imagine? What animal is it? How did it affect him? Come to think of it, who the hell is he? 

You see, without giving a reader true detail, you leave the readers with way too much free space, way too much to imagine. And that’s scary. Even if we add a little detail, say, to let readers know that the animal was “fearsome,” or “pathetic,” we still aren’t showing the reader anything. 

A textbook I’m currently using claims that when we recall an event, we tend to recall how we felt when something happened far more than the details of the event. While that helps us move on with some sort of meaning in our own lives, that tendency of ours doesn’t help us show anyone else how the impact of the event affected you. And we readers need to feel such things for ourselves, not be told what to feel.

Now, if I change the sentence, say, to something like this…

Spreading his hands along the greyhound’s side, Ray felt its cold flesh stretched over jutting ribs. He didn’t have to be a veterinarian to know the dog had starved to death. 

I didn’t show Ray sobbing, or tell anybody he was sad, but the event would conjure similar sorts of feelings in the reader. Will every reader feel the same way? Of course not, but I’m not seeking uniformity of feeling, but depth of feeling, and readers will feel more if they have a concrete association to the events. Telling them how to feel will only distance them from the action.

What if I tried something different:

Jack woke slowly from a harsh dream, reaching out an arm as if to save himself from drowning. His hand landed on a slick, rounded sort of tube. And he still felt like he was drowning. His lungs burned; his neck felt tight. What was wrong? He reached for his neck, and found, instead, more of the slick tubing, heavy, tighter than a neck brace. It was Samson, his roommate Keith’s boa constrictor. “Keith!” He tried to gasp, tugging at the murderous snake until it loosened its grip and slithered down off the bed. 

A totally different situation, yet again I didn’t tell anybody what to feel. Just detail, detail, detail.

Now I’ll let you try it. Here are a few lame sentences. Make them into something brilliant…and remember, show us the scene instead of telling us what to feel:

1.  She touched him.

2.  The place jogged my memory.

3.  He didn’t know what to do with the situation.

You can also try out a new version of the sentence way up at the top…

Go on! Be brilliant! And all of you folks who come and read the blog but never write anything, now’s the time to chime in and impress me.

You know the feeling: nobody understands you. No one sees what you are going through. No one can possibly see the world through your eyes, see your pain, sense your true level of frustration, notice you. The feeling might come at work, or at home (I remember an ad where dishes are washed, diapers changed, etc., all by unseen hands), or online. You think nobody hears you, or if they do, they aren’t really listening. 

What can you do? You can start screaming at people around you, biting at them in the same way Harry Potter snapped at his friends in book 5. Not very effective, really. It works well to chase people away. You can also give up entirely, playing the martyr, ending your long suffering by tossing your novel in the trash (nobody wants to read it anyway, you might say). 

Or you can ask for help. 

It’s tough. Tougher if you’ve never done it. It means you have to put your own emotional vulnerability in front of people. And they might scoff. They might ignore you still. More than likely, though, they have similar feelings of their own–or have had them–and they will reach out and reassure you. 

I thought about this as I read one of my favorite blogs, and it’s funny that it came from her, since she just received an award on Today.com and her blog seemed to be going strong. But her latest blog entry was a little plea for help, a plea that someone–anyone–reply to a blog so that she knew they were there. I did, and I was one of many who wrote back, the unseen readers she’d had all along without knowing, since they hadn’t written a response to any of her entries. You should check it out, and give her a few words of encouragement… she needs them right now.

I’m lucky. My sister checks my blog out several times a day (thanks, Sis!), writing encouraging words at every turn. And I have a playwrights group now, though I don’t meet with them as much as I’d like. They read my stuff, give me feedback, and then let me do the same for them. We support each other as we all struggle to work on our craft. I have moms to turn to when the kids drive me insane, and friends who share some similar struggles, or who like to read my writing and give me a gut reaction.

If you feel alone, find a network. It might be online, it might be a meet-twice-a-month-at-a-coffee-club sort of group. It could be for moms, or dads, or writers, or readers, or actors, artists, whatever. And if you can’t find one (craigslist is a great place to start), make one up, and post meeting times. Meet at the library–it’s free–and see who else shows up. 

Believe it or not, your cry for attention may be exactly what others need… most of us go through life far more lonely than we should be, and one person, by reaching for help, can change the lives of many more who feel the same way.

So reach out. See who reaches back. You might be surprised.

Just don’t give up…

Although my main profession is writing, at least according to this blog, I actually have over 15 years’ experience teaching English and writing at the college level (with a little junior and high school thrown in). I am about 2/3 of the way through a writing class right now, and a recent conversation reminded me of an important point with teaching: expectations.

As part of my education degree, I was required to conduct “field experience” three times, including two stints at the local high school and a 12-week session in junior high. At the high school, the teacher’s lounge was an illuminating place for me. Teachers–and even the principal–sat around at lunch ranting about the lame students they had, whining that retirement wasn’t closer, and commiserating about everything. In the class I was observing, the teacher–one of those whining in the lounge–was spending four weeks reading The Scarlet Letter aloud in her classes, in a droning voice that nearly put me to sleep. Now, I really like that novel, but I nearly forgot how much I liked it because of her reading. And I could tell that the students didn’t like it, either. The only time she actually interacted with them was when she told them to be quiet or insulted one of them, telling them they’d never amount to anything if they didn’t listen. The students were naturally crabby about the whole thing, and they weren’t the kindest in response. And those same students were going to walk out of that class believing that The Scarlet Letter was a terrible book, that English stunk, and that school was a waste of time.

When I moved to the junior high, the teacher’s lounge was a hotbed of enthusiasm. The same actions that depressed the high school teachers made the junior high students rave. And I found myself drawn in by their happiness, by their optimism about their students. Instead of being encouraged to quell student discussion, I was pushed to do the opposite. “Expect them to be involved,” the principal told me, “and they will be. Encourage those who aren’t sharing to do so, and  create activities that involve the whole class, but let each kid shine.” I was teaching speech and theatre, so the task wasn’t hard, and I had a few lone resistant students, but they were won over. I had one student especially who, seeing on his progress report that he had a C+ in class, told me he’d never thought he’d pass at all. He was suddenly filled with a desire to do even better, and his final grade was a B. Overall, my classes were teeming with students who couldn’t wait to do the next activity, who raised their hands desperately, who wanted more than anything in the world to be involved.

Were the two groups of students radically different? I don’t think so. It was the expectation that changed. I have found in my own personal experience that I resist low expectations. When someone dismisses me, assuming I have little to offer, little talent, or a low capacity for achievement, I get mad, and I want to prove them wrong. However, what I’ve realized as an adult is that these same people will see what they want to see. I cannot ever prove to them that I’m worth more than they expect. So I stop trying. At the same time, I find I want to be around people who expect a lot from me. Their high expectations mean a great deal, for I know that as I grow and gain in expertise, they will be there cheering me on, watching my progress, and raising their expectations as I raise my game.

Perhaps the saying is true: “You get what you expect.” My kids know I expect a lot, but they aren’t weighed down by my judgment (you don’t want them to think they can never measure up, for that won’t help them–that is actually a low expectation), and they act better as a result. They are better behaved kids because I expect them to be.

So, what are your expectations? What do you expect from others? What do they expect from you? Can you raise those sights a bit, push yourself farther?  

Well, they’ve done it. My church has finally found a music director. 

So that should mean I’m done, right? Well… not quite. He lives in California, so he has to get all his stuff together and move up here. That means we have at least another month to wait. So, today, mixed in with all the other obligations, I’ll need to figure out what I’m playing for Sunday… four pieces of music. I’ll need to practice, practice, practice every day for the rest of the week so that no one seems too bothered that I’m playing instead of him (he played last Sunday, as part of the interview process).

Some of you might think I’d be disappointed after all this time filling in. I’ve been playing, for the most part, since September. I might be feeling a sense of loss. I might be regretting that I didn’t just apply for the job when it came open, biting the bullet and practicing my heart out so that I could get good enough to do it.

But it just isn’t so. I feel relief. Sheer relief. No regret. No sadness. No disappointment that, in a month, I won’t go so early to the church to run through everything. Or spend the few minutes before church starts frantically wiping the sweat off my palms. Or listen to the sermon to figure out when it’s ending, so that I can get up to the piano in time for the next part. Or feel embarrassed when I flub a song I thought I’d really worked on.

It’s funny, but several things have been working themselves out of my schedule lately. Because of budget cuts, I won’t be teaching in the spring term, beginning in March. That will leave me only four of my six jobs, freeing up my time tremendously (even now I am facing a stack of about 20 essays to grade, and that will continue through mid-March). 

All this shifting has to mean something. Maybe it means I’ll have time for more writing, more time to really spend on my kids during the day, instead of grading. Maybe it means I need to refocus on the projects I’ve let slip. Maybe it means something else is coming. Usually the change is an improvement–at least, I always seem to be able to think it is (part of my optimism).

Whatever it is, I can’t wait. The month can’t go fast enough for me. 

Show me another time in school when you can spend hours and hours looking at a single piece of paper, with nothing but a brush in your hand and paint spread around you. When the teacher put classical music on, and you could feel yourself slide away from every other part of life for an hour or two. Where you can get messy with clay in your fingernails, or fingerpaint colors squishing into the sleeves of your shirt, or colored chalk marks on your cheeks while, or all of these on your shirt, and no one gets mad. Where your dad is willing to let you have an old ripped shirt of his so that you have a “painting shirt.”

Yes, art class is a time of concentration, relaxation, focus, and dreaming. It’s exploring–can you really use chalk to make something besides a still life? Yes, you can!–and the exploring helps you discover what you love about the world, what you find interesting, what you detest. It can be done in absolute silence, though only a few would object if you hum while you work. (I personally hum when I paint. I hum even when I color in a coloring book with my kids. I sometimes hum while eating, if I’m nervous. Just ask my hubby.)

Do you remember art class? Remember the teacher who was just a shade shy of abnormal, who loved everybody’s work, who gave whacked-out assignments using colors, shading, and perspective, and who said to every single student, at one time or another, “Wow! You are a real artist”? I had a bunch of those… and though I didn’t take art in college, I never forgot my art teachers. And their influence made certain I never forgot art, either. 

So now I have my own art class… still, after all these years… and it’s filled with art paper, a collapsable easel, acrylic paints, pastels, charcoals, watercolors, everything I need to make myself happy. And every once in a while, I take them out, pick an afternoon to relax, make sure the sun is streaming in through the windows, and go back to art class. 

I need to visit there more often. And so do you. Start small. Buy yourself an $8 box of pastels and some colored paper. Turn on some great music. And get drawing. And if you have old art supplies, dig them out of the garage and get to it. Hum while you work, if you can stand it. Let your kids join in. My kids have had “art class” for their whole lives. As soon as they could hold a brush, they’ve been painting, even if all they end up doing is mixing the watercolors into a sort of pinkish brown. But with each class they get better. Last summer, they had art class nearly every day. They loved it. I loved it. It brought me back to those art class days, and brought my creativity out in entirely new ways.

And, just like that art teacher, once you’ve done what you wanted for the day, once the sun is going down, and you know the class is over, at least for the day, look at your finished product and declare, “Well, my word, you are a real artist!”