Very Wet Snow

What I learned while shoveling snow today:

1) trying to clear a sidewalk of standing water is as futile as trying to shovel a lake empty;

2) all it takes to sound like Monica Seles is to lift a shovel-full of this stuff; and

3) when you hear the rumble of a 10-ton snowplow barreling down the road toward you (and spraying a 20-foot arc of slush across lawns, sidewalks, and sides of houses along its way) ... the driver will slow appreciably if he sees you freak, throw down your shovel, and run for cover.

Call to Order

Go ahead -- anthropomorphize.

Take the dysfunctional drama that lies beneath the calm facade of meetings at your workplace...

...and bring it to life in this group of bird-brains.

Younger, Prettier?

Once upon a time, there was a settled, committed couple. They’d been together for years and had twice become Mom and Dad to sets of triplets (triplets!). Incredibly, they seemed to be on their way to another set again this spring.

Then a younger woman showed up at their house and started hanging around. Mom alternately tried to befriend her and get rid of her, turning at times to vicious behavior. Then, suddenly, it was Mom who was gone -- out of the house and away from the young ones, who immediately regressed. Next thing anyone knew, there’s Dad and the new girl, taking up together.

I hear your response: "Such a cliched story! Give me something surprising."

Well, would it help to remove the personification -- to realize that the story’s characters aren’t human but rather American bald eagles? Their unfolding drama surprised everyone who watched the Norfolk Botanical Garden’s Eagle Nest-cam over the past week.

Scientists are already hoping for new eggs from the new couple this season. I’m a scientist too, but I need a little more time to remove the last traces of personification before I wish those birds my best.

Delivery

I hear an engine idling on the street below. I hate that our house seems to be the perfect spot to pull over to the side of the road and take care of business. Sales reps stop to look through big binders on the passenger seat. Cautious moms make cell-phone calls.

When the low rumble continues, I look out a window. Ack! -- a FedEx truck. They require a signature for delivery and here I’ve been, working upstairs, out of range of the doorbell. I race downstairs, hoping to get the driver’s attention before he leaves the arrange-for-redelivery slip and zooms off. I throw open the front door.

The truck is still there! But there’s no package, no slip; I check again. Then I stand at the door and notice the driver’s seat is empty. He must still be in the back, looking for my package. He appears at the door of his truck, a Gatorade bottle in hand. He leans out the door and tosses a few ounces of pale liquid across my parkway.

Oh.

Ewww.

That pisses me off and I stand behind the storm door, hands on hips and scowling, hoping he’ll notice my disapproval before he drives off. Instead, he hops out of the truck and carries a large box up my sidewalk.

I open the door. “Thanks,” I say neutrally.

“You are so welcome!” he says, and he winks, and I let him win me over.

Prompt Yourself #3

I’ve collected writing prompts by flipping through TV channels, but today’s come from my answers to someone’s query: What book titles are complete sentences?

Consider the titles below as a dialogue. The “hard work” -- crafting the words -- is done! Now just play with transitions until the conversation flows…

A Complaint is a Gift
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Are Your Lights On?
Does Anything Eat Wasps?
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
I Could Tell You Stories
I Feel Bad About My Neck
I Like You
I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Middle School is Worse Than Meatloaf
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ron Carlson Writes a Story
Something Happened
The Devil Wears Prada
There Are No Children Here
This is Your Brain on Music
We Are All Welcome Here
What Einstein Told His Cook
When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull up a Chair
You Are a Dog
You’re Lucky You’re Funny

Lesson Learned

I studied Spanish for two years back in high school, and remember the exhilarating moment when I caught myself thinking in Spanish.

I've studied writing for longer than that now, but felt the same exhilaration this afternoon when I noticed that the snow was sticking like whipped marshmallow to the east side of everything.

Oh, Right...

... You need to vent the potatoes before you bake them.

What caution did you ignore and then things blew up?

They're Back!

American bald eagles are headed back into parenting mode at the Norfolk Botanical Garden!

Since their three chicks fledged last summer, this pair has built a new nest in a different tree, and spent January courting and mating.

The Norfolk Botanical Garden has relocated its terrific eagle nest-cam (linked on my blogroll), and upgraded it with night-vision capabilities to provide 24/7 streaming video of the nest.

Cross your fingers for egg-laying in early February.

Cloak of Invisibility

You probably haven’t hidden in a cabinet during a Nazi attack, as this little guy did in the screenshot from the film Life Is Beautiful.

But you've been inconspicuous somewhere. What did you see and hear?

Be inconspicuous again today. See which eavesdropped details gather juice, and put them together into a story.

Rebate

Say it isn't so.

Tell me Americans aren't getting another government rebate check.

I was happy enough when the first check was announced, $600 per couple, back in the spring of 2001. They were going to be distributed in consecutive order, according to the last digits of taxpayers’ social security numbers. And you couldn't get numbers lower than mine! Except -- it went by the (grrr) Head of Household’s number, and you couldn't get higher than my husband’s.

We could afford what we needed then, and most of what we wanted -- overall, we’re not big consumers. But we’d been heads-down in work for a very long time, and it was fun to spend June, July, and August mentally putting the check toward an end-of-summer splurge.

Until finally, the last checks were mailed.

And the next week was 9/11.

The $600 is still in our bank.

Rental Agreement

Consider this: A white man asks to rent the basement of a house deep in a black neighborhood.

What’s your story?

It’s the premise of Walter Mosley’s 2004 novel, The Man in My Basement. Into the story, we learn that the white man wants the basement for 65 days, starting July 1, paying $750 per day.

Now what’s your story?

[See the comments for a non-spoiler take on what Mosley did.]

American Pastoral

Your basic farm, one of thousands in the breadbasket that is America's rural Midwest. Except...

... what's that tower about?

Cry Room

A teenage boy sat alone in the cry room at the back of my church yesterday, his 15- or 16-year-old self vertical against the back wall, head propped neatly in the join of the back and side walls -- and still asleep despite the entire church having emptied out past him.

The obvious story involves some late-night adolescent exploits versus an early-morning service.

But what if his story were opposite of the obvious? That’s where it leaves stereotype and gets interesting, since each writer’s conception of opposite will be personal ... and unique.

Used Books

I keep about half of the books I buy, but sell or give away the rest after I've read them, taking great care to clear out any stray marks or papers before I part with the book.

Maybe I shouldn't be so careful?

Happy New Year

Big, Fun, Scary

I love the new year.

It’s like the morning -- or a new piece of writing -- that stands ahead, wide-open and welcoming.

The possibilities are infinite.

Wanna read about some possibilities? Check out what the NaNoWriMo folks have put together at The Big, Fun, Scary Adventure Challenge (read the overview here). Then read the list of challenges people have taken up for themselves. Guaranteed, some will resonate as ideas for your characters.

Maybe even for yourself.

888 Challenge

I’m taking the 888 Challenge: "Read 8 books each in 8 different categories in 2008."

It feels big -- 64 books! -- since I’ve read only ~45 books per year in each of the last 5 years. But my choices are well-screened: every book (except four) in the first 7 categories comes from my to-be-read shelves -- books I already own and am so excited about that I’d buy them again in a nanosecond.

And the best part? I left a whole category open for books I discover in 2008!

I’ll be posting updates ... accessible through the link on my blogroll.

------------

Biography/Memoir
Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman
Girl Sleuth by Melanie Rehak
I Could Tell You Stories by Patricia Hampl
Journal of a Novel by John Steinbeck
Letters to a Young Doctor by Richard Selzer
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr
Under the Duvet by Marian Keyes
Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

I’ve Started and Want to Finish...
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Story by Robert McKee
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

By My Favorite Writers
Airframe by Michael Crichton
Gold Coast by Nelson DeMille
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie
Talk Before Sleep by Elizabeth Berg
The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
(tba)
(tba)

Children’s/YA
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Holes by Louis Sachar
Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
(tba)
(tba)
(tba)
(tba)

Nonfiction
The Annotated Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
The Quantum Zoo by Marcus Chown
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Zen of Eating by Ronna Kabatznick
This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin

Short Stories
Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber
Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Best American Short Stories 2007
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
(tba)

On Writing
Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri
Dialogue by Gloria Kempton
Fingerpainting on the Moon by Peter Levitt
If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland
Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
The Anatomy of Story by John Truby
The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler
Writing Alone and With Others by Pat Schneider

Discovered in 2008!
(all tba)

Number 1,014

At 8 a.m. one week ago, at a Marysville, Washington Starbucks, a woman paid for her drink and then extended season’s greetings to the next customer in line by paying for that drink, too.

That customer did the same, as did the next, and the next, creating a pay-it-forward chain that grew through Wednesday and Thursday and involved 1,013 customers by Friday morning.

For now, put a pin in whether you think this kind of cheer chain is spontaneous or a corporate PR tactic. Instead, imagine a writerly interview with Customer #1,014 … conjure the story that led him or her to break the Marysville chain at 6:20 last Friday morning.

Say Yes

"Scales fell from my eyes" … a couple years ago when I learned that, in good improvisation, the actors always say yes to one another. Not a literal “Yes” of dialogue, but a creative Yes -- an agreement to openness; that whatever is offered from one actor is accepted, built upon, pivoted on, by the other. Saying yes moves the improvisation forward; otherwise, it dies.

Yesterday, while marinating on Astrapo’s comment about how to construct ideas, improvisation came again to mind. But how could a solitary writer use it to develop a story?

A few hours later, a writer-friend handed me Ron Carlson Writes a Story. Discussing first sentences, Carlson writes that, disregarding (during the writing phase) whether it’s good for the reader, a first sentence is good for the writer if it creates...

What I’ll call inventory -- there’s something in it. The writer David Boswell says it perfectly: “ ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ is not a terrible sentence from a reader’s point of view, but it is a terrible sentence for the writer because there’s no help in it. ‘Lightning struck the fence post’ is much better because there’s that charred and smoking fence post which I might have to use later.” I’m constantly looking for things that are going to help me find the next sentence, survive the story.

Say Yes to your drafts. More scales!

On Storytelling

It's worth taking 5 minutes each to watch these four video snips on storytelling from Ira Glass, host and producer of public radio's (and now, premium cable TV's) This American Life:

#1 Components of story: action and reflection

#2 Finding the story ... trimming the story ... and (sigh) sometimes killing the story

#3 Pursuing through the it's-not-as-good-as-you-want-it-to-be phase

#4 Finding your voice and including others' voices