Five Rules for Writers*

 

and read:

I would say that I keep a novel going all the time, but there is a moment between books where I'm searching for another.

I read, not because Steven King said, "If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write,' but because I love reading. And selfishly, I want to have beautiful phrases running through my head as encouragement, and with the hope that they will teach my brain how to write decent phrases and descriptions.

I don't tend to be flowery with words, and poetry boggles my mind, like someone writing music—how in the heck do they do it?  That Dolly Parton keeps perking them out. "I write the songs that make the young girl's cry," Oh, that wasn't her song. Bruce Johnson (1975) wrote it. And in 1977, it won a Grammy for Barry Manilow.

At first, Manilow didn't want to sing the song, for unless you really listen to the words, it sounds like an ego trip for the lyricist.

"I Write the Songs," wrote Joanna Landrum, "isn't just a self-aggrandizing anthem for the gifted songwriter; it's a poetic ode to the universal power of music. At its core, the song celebrates the emotional and transformative impact of music on humanity, suggesting that the essence of music itself is the actual creator of songs."

 

"I wrote the very first song." The MUSE. GOD, MUSIC?

 

Finally, in my search for novels, I decided to check out the best and found Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, a Pulitzer Prize nominee.  Over the years, I had heard of that book but didn't know what it was about — a scholarly book about Christianity or the Bible? No, it was a bestseller about the Congo, with religion, philosophy, and politics intertwined in a way that only a deft hand can achieve.

It deeply impacted me.

 Poisonwood has two meanings; one is a plant in the Congo that, when touched, will give a terrible rash. The other means Blessed.  There are many words, especially in primitive cultures, that have multiple meanings.

The Poisonwood Bible was set in the Eisenhower era when the US was trying to bring Democracy to the Belgian Congo. (Or force, and it looks as though they are trying again.) The Poisonwood Bible is about a Missionary family who move to the Congo to give them Christianity. The father, the Preacher, is so obsessed with bringing Christ and baptizing all the little heathens that he would let his family starve to do it. And starving is what the natives of their village are constantly on the verge of while trying their damnest to avoid.

The viewpoint is from the wife, the mother, and her four daughters. Each of the five has their own voice, which Kingsolver said she wrote their monologues over and over to get their tones and perspectives.

One point I took away was that democracy doesn't work when people rush to a vote without having a viable discussion and coming to some consensus. As an old chief said, "When a vote is 49 to 51, half the population is angry all the time.

Kingsolver lived in the Congo for a time, and she said she researches the devil out of her books. She wants to be honest and have her readers trust her. One point that surprised me is that Kingsolver isn't afraid to use cliches, idioms, and everyday speech in her writing, something writing teachers try to drum out of writers. "Your writing is too good to use convenient slang." Well well.

I also read Kingsolver's The Bean Trees, which I loved. It warmed my heart; it didn't tear it out. I got a kick out of her description of Oklahoma, where my husband and I attended school for two years. In The Bean Trees, I gained some insight into the Cheyenne Nation of Oklahoma.

And people read more non-fiction because it teaches them something. Hum.

Kingsolver won the Pulitzer prize for Damon Copperhead, which I've chosen not to read for I don't want to endure a little boy getting slapped around by a man his mother marries.

I can take just so much angst.

I read a sweet little book this past week titled The Family Journal by Carolyn Brown about a divorced mother who finds her 14 girl smoking marijuana and her little 12-year-old boy sneaking out at night to drink beer. She decided that tough love was in order and moved them to a small town where she had inherited her family's old house and rented it to an agriculture teacher. (Enter a hunk.) It's handy to have an inheritance, but then, that is the stuff of novels. It reminded me of how much fun it is to grow up on a farm, as well as how much work it entails. Children seldom get bored on the farm and often begin to love and care for the animals.

The kids hate her at first, of course.

When I closed the book, I said, "Now that was refreshing."

 

*Here are Barbara Kingsolver's five rules for writers:

1.     Give yourself permission to write a bad book.

2.     Revise until it isn't a bad book.

3.     Get cozy with your own company.

4.     Study something besides writing.

5.     If you're young and smoke, you should quit.

She goes on to say that you want to live to an old age, for it is then that you do your best writing.

There's hope for me yet.

 

Where Do You Want to Go?

 

“When I write something that really happened, people read it and say, ‘Sounds like bullshit.’When I pull something completely out of thin air, I hear, ‘Wow, that was so real.’”—Steven Pressfield.

 

 

 

Where does this leave us?

 

Write what’s real, or make it up?

 

But don’t lie and say it’s real if it’s not.

 

Pressfield’s point is, Write everything as though it is fiction, even if it’s true.

 

I’m trying to learn to write since, for some stupid reason, I feel compelled to do it.

 

I remember the day it began. Well, not the specific day, but the place. I had driven my two girls to school, a 45-minute drive from home. One daughter was in the first grade, the other in the third. Sometimes I didn’t want to drive right back home, and often I would stay away the entire day. It took 45 minutes to drive back home, do a little work, then drive 45 minutes back to pick them up. That’s when I started to write.

 

Bless their hearts, they gave me a profession. 

 

 As I sat on a hill above Fashion Valley in San Diego, California, having just ordered orange juice and coffee, I asked one of those pertinent life questions. I had graduated from college and had my children. Now they were in school. My question? What do I want to do with my life?  

 

“Well, I’d write if I had something to say.”

 

I wrote my first little children’s story that day. And I haven’t shut up since. I am not a verbose person, but I enjoy putting words on a page. 

 

Am I an illustrious writer? Nope. However, I have filled copious notebooks since. I didn’t know about blogging then—come to think of it, neither did anyone else. 

 

Some 40 years later, I had a book published. I remember reading that it takes 20 years to become a writer . I said I would do it, but I wanted a guarantee at the end of those years.

 

Life doesn’t come with guarantees, but I’ve had a damn good time with the process. This adventure has taken me to fascinating places. I studied and wrote about Cosmology—which is the origin of things. I told another writer what I was writing about, and he thought I said Cosmetology (About make-up and hair.) 

 

I studied metaphysics and came to some understanding about where I was regarding religion and such subjects. I wrote about Africa, and I made up stories. Then, somewhere in the midst of it all, I became involved with horses and self-published a book called, It’s Hard to Stay on A Horse While You’re Unconscious, that no one can manage to spit out the title. To my detriment, I was rebelling against the need for short titles. However, it was pertinent, and in Hawaii, Mrs. Chiropractor got it right off the bat. You can’t navigate life too well when you are unconscious. 

 

The unconscious part is both philosophical and literal. Sierra, my mustang, once knocked me in the nose, and I didn’t know what happened until I woke up on the ground. And there followed a week where I had racoon eyes.

 

I’m still trying to learn how to write. I still can’t keep my fingers on the correct keys, but so what. You plunge ahead, right?

 

So, Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones) was correct when she said, “Writing will take you where you want to go.”

Charlie

 I don't know why this impacted me so.

 

I've lost pets, and I've grieved over them. However, when I checked in again to www.dailycoyote.net. I was impacted a second time over the loss of Charlie, the coyote. And for Shreve Stockton, who is still grieving. 

 

Charlie was almost fourteen years old, a good age for a coyote, and he lived a happy life on the farm with Shreve, Mike, her partner, a hound dog named Chloe, and Eli, a tomcat. 

 

And I found that Shreve had taken a year off from writing. 

 

I have followed Shreve's site since reading her book, My Daily Coyote in 2009. She was riding a Vespa from San Francisco to New York when she stopped in Wyoming and found a home. She made it to New York but went back to Wyoming, where she fell in love with the land and a man. When her partner brought home an orphaned coyote pup after his mother had been shot for killing sheep, she had a family. That family expanded to another dog, two cats, numerous cows, and chickens. And the one coyote who entered the fray as one of the gang. 

 

Someone wrote that this story wouldn't have a happy ending. They thought the coyote would eat the cat and bite Shreve's face off while she slept, but Charlie cuddled with the cat and dog, and they frolicked and played together. When Charlie was sick, a magpie came to Shreve. As magpies were not familiar in that area, she felt it was Eli, who came to help Charlie transition to the other side, or maybe it was to help Shreve.

 

Over the years, I worried that he might get shot, but he lived to a good age and died of natural causes. The story ended sadly, but his legacy lives on, and his life was happy.

 

Thousands of people fell in love with Charlie. And a ten-day-old, eyes-not-yet open coyote pup became a phenomenon.

 

I thought of how we become embroiled in other people's lives, and although Charlie was a real flesh and blood animal, I only knew of him through Shreve's magic words and photos. She is an excellent photographer and began taking a picture a day of Charlie and sending them to friends who sent them to friends. And with the blog and a nod from Rosie O'Donnell, it got national attention. And I know Charlie and Shreve more intimately than some acquaintances in real life.

 

Fiction can be that way as well, for we know the characters in ways real people will not share. We know their thoughts and feelings. We ache with them, are embarrassed with them, and take joy in their joy. I remember reading that in England, when Jo, a character in the novel Little Women, died, the country went into mourning.

 

 

For a fun read, check out, A Journey into Inner Earth by jewell d on amazon.com

 

 

SCUBA, whales, a school bus, six kids, and a journey to the North Pacific and into a land inside the earth. (A review would be lovely.)