Category Archives: Writing, the Passion and the Pain

Thoughts on being a writer

Writers Need Wingmen

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Originally posted on A Way with Words Blog

Writing is a solitary endeavor. When one conjures the image of a writer it is often of a lonely soul sequestered in a garret pounding away on a computer or scribbling with a pencil to transcribe the dispatches from their imagination. In truth, writers need wingmen. 

I recently reread Stephen King’s On Writing. He describes the first draft as being written behind closed doors; no one allowed as the muses impart their magic. Then in successive drafts, the door is open, inviting input as he edits. This is where a writers’ group becomes essential. Even though I am not a professional with professional editors, I do want to improve my skills. That makes writing more fun. I take classes to learn how to create scenes, characters, and dialogue. I enjoy employing the tools of the craft to make better prose and poetry. My writers’ group is invaluable as a means of testing those skills. They are my wingmen. They support me and protect me from the threats of dangling participles, passive voice, misdirected sentences, and weak prose. I get positive feedback from Jackie and Sally when they read my story. Positive feedback doesn’t mean making only affirmative comments. On the contrary, it means they look for the divots in the course. Does the story hold together? Are the characters believable? Does the narrative draw the reader in? As a solitary writer, I know what I want to say but sometimes it gets stuck in my head and doesn’t make it to the page. They spot places where something is missing in the narrative or a character. Their critique lets me know if a sentence doesn’t make sense or a scene doesn’t carry the story forward. They help me clarify my intent. That support makes me a better writer, a better communicator.

It is a pleasure to share my writing with a group of trusted friends and have them share their stories with me. Thank you Jackie and Sally. We learn from each other. In Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets we three coauthors describe our journey as a group, learning to be better writers while expanding our friendship. We encourage writers to create small groups and discover the support within that close dynamic.

Blogging and Journaling

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

I started this post with the title Blogging versus Journaling but they are not in competition being totally different mindsets. When we started this blog website a couple of months ago, I thought it would be a journal of sorts – talking about writing, talking about being a writers’ group in the same way as I do my daily journal. I journal, however, for an audience of One, Me. My thoughts come rapidly and randomly. I capture a sentence about the weather, then one of my cats gets my attention or the main activity of my day enters the page or the thought of a friend’s dilemma. Some days I’m delving into a conundrum that needs to be sorted in my life. Some days I write about clouds. My journal entries flit from idea to idea. I know I am the only one who will look at that page. I am talking to myself. Looking back on journal pages I find that I can tell what kind of day it is or will be by the thoughts that crowd my head. I try to do morning pages but that doesn’t always work so they happen when they happen. Journaling is a kind of mind clearing exercise often done outside and always handwritten.  It helps me put perspective on myself in the context of my universe.

When I sit down to write a blog it is for an audience of others. I quickly realized that the mind that writes my journal is not the mind that writes a blog. In a blog, I organize my thoughts to communicate a cogent theme.  I am writing to connect with other people. I am opening my head and inviting others to have a peek. I’m writing story. Blogging is done on the computer, edited with delete and backspace keys available.

Our writers’ group has, over the years, evolved into a kind of group journaling, sorting the meaning of life through writing. We often write from prompts. Those prompts lead us into a memory or story that illuminates pieces of our lives. I find it fascinating that given the same parameters, we three come up with totally different narratives or poetry.  I write fiction and all fiction relates to reality on some level. No matter how whimsical I get there is a kernel of my life in a character or situation. I am blessed with a very pleasant life so when I write into a dark place, I conjure experiences I’ve heard or read, then stir them into stories based on my understanding of life, my beliefs. I do enjoy writing childhood experiences and family memoir occasionally. Everyone writes what they know. Jackie writes mostly memoir. Her stories come from deep places of personal experience. She found it very hard to write fiction when we first took creative writing classes together. She learned to do it and now comes up with characters and imaginary situations more easily. They are always infused with her Midwest roots. Sally is adept at writing both fiction and memoir.  Her characters contain bits of herself. Knowing her so well now, I can spot the hint of her petticoat under the dress of her prose. She also writes from strong Midwest roots that formed her view of life. Sally and I like to write poetry, condensing a thought or experience into the fewest possible words with the most significance. That is the beauty of a long-lasting writers’ group. We riff on personal experiences to make stories we share. We explore and expand our ways of communicating in the safety of the group. Blogging is a step away from that safety, just as publishing our book, Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets is a public invitation into the ups and downs of our years together. It is a journey of discovery.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Publication

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

One of the most important elements in any relationship is the ability to laugh. What a dull tragedy life would be if we didn’t have humor as the mortar between bricks of sober reality. Humor has taken our writers’ group through times of inertia and disagreement. The three of us are blessed with the ability to find a ridiculous note when the symphony of writing rigor turns somber and Sibelius-ish. Maybe not all at the same time but whoever finds it first is quick to share it so that we all can take a fresh look to get back on track.

At one point in the editing process, we were so frustrated that we talked about futility and maybe our baby wouldn’t be birthed after all. A particular outside editing partner was giving us fits for several weeks. We were spinning our wheels trying to make sense of the snarls and tangles, the jumble of misdirection caused by the person we were relying on to help us to publication. Amazingly we were able to stay focused on our goal and keep each other’s spirits up with humor during that trying process. I don’t know how someone could go through those times as an author without the support of sympathetic compatriots.

Since Jackie now lives in Colorado and Sally and I are in Tucson, our weekly meetings are by necessity virtual. Zoom is our meeting room, our moaning room, our bitching room. We have certain phrases and code words that will send us into hysterics when things get too heavy. None of them would mean anything to others because they have developed throughout the years of writing together. Only a word or a look can send a misaligned partner into laughter or at least smiles. We can reference a silly scene that took place during one of our trips and it immediately changes the mood. Sometimes a meeting will be a happy hour when we each bring our favorite adult beverage(s) to the table and toast each other over something grand or ridiculous. And nobody needs to call an Uber. We’ve had crazy hat or crazy shoe meetings. We know each other’s foibles so well and we know how to tease each other without making anyone feel bad. Most of our meetings, even the really down-to-business ones, include gales of laughter. And we always end a meeting in good humor. My husband, who is in another room in the house when we meet, hears our voices and often comments on how much fun we are having even after I’ve warned him that we are going to be discussing really serious subjects. He says, “You guys are having too much fun for your size.” Some of those stories are in our book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets as part of our goal to encourage other writers to explore the experience of a writers’ group.

Hemingway and Me

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Originally published on A Way with Words blog

I have always enjoyed writing. My first novel, written when I was seven, was called The Girlfriends. It was a mystery printed on ten wide-lined pages in pencil. I cannot remember the plot details because, alas, it was lost sometime in the last seventy years. These things happen in life. I know how Hemingway felt when his first unpublished masterpiece was lost in 1922 by his wife on a train in Europe. Did I just compare myself to Hemingway? Yes. Not that our significance to literary posterity is similar but because we both are scribblers, people who love words and live in them. That’s what this blog and our book, Telling Lies and Sharing Secrets, is all about – sharing our enchantment with words and the worlds they conjure.

Being a lover of words I have, at hand, books about words and grammar. My new favorite is Dreyer’s English, An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer. Does that sound boring? I dare you to read more than a few pages without chuckling and eventually belly-rocking. Toss away your Strunk and White. Dreyer’s book is vastly more entertaining and equally edifying. It is a laugh-out-loud book of passion for the English language. I do not exaggerate. I read passages to several friends, non-literary types, and elicited the same response. Who knew a comma or an apostrophe, not to mention a preposition, could be so much fun? Just as Mary Poppins sang, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

Happy writing everyone. We hope you find your journey in writing is loaded with ah-ha moments you can share with a group of similarly minded friends, just as we have.

Growing Pains

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Painting by Sally Rosenbaum

We went through a lot but we finally have a website! Yeah!! It can be reached at https://writerswrites.com. My co-authors, Sally and Jackie, and I will be posting weekly to continue our dialogue about writing and life in general. Please join us.

My Happiness Engineer

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

high angle photo of robot
Happiness Engineer aka HE

We wrote a book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets. Now we need to tell the world. I volunteered to create a website. It sounded so easy. Sometimes you just have to jump into the deep end. Fortunately, I found a lifeguard to guide me safely through the turbulence.

This is my Happiness Engineer, whom I will call HE. HE was introduced in my first plea for help and stayed with me through days of online chatting. An employee of WordPress, HE was assigned to assist in building our website. HE could be a human but HE’s total availability and knowledge, not to mention patience, seemed superhuman as I chatted with him/her/it on a regular basis to set up this site. We have entered the universe of gender neutrality. In case I may have a bias regarding the male or female sex, HE maintained a non-committal, non-binary facade. In my quest to build this website, HE was my go-to first thing each morning when my mind was clear (?) and I had three or four (more or less) hours of sleep. HE became the one I said good night to when my bleary eyes could no longer focus on the screen. HE is available 24/7. I tested it all hours of day and night and on holidays. HE was patient and calm when my webby world went wobbly. HE answered every question without fail. What HE didn’t do was perceive the depth of my ignorance and the reason for my questions. HE could not advise me about things I may not know I do not know. I’m sure many of my queries like, “what is an IOS, SEO or CSS?”, created titters among the other Happiness Engineers in the office. (Imagine a whole room of Happiness Engineers – Wow). My being a total novice about internet design, led us down some frustratingly blind alleys. It generated several complete template changes for our website, trying to find the perfect fit for our needs. The learning curve was steep.

I know I can get snippy when confronted with Everest-type obstacles to overcome. I occasionally suggested we have a glass of wine together to smooth out the craters in our relationship. HE responded gently with “It might do you good.” I pondered the idea of suggesting we move in together since, over the period of a few weeks, I spent more time with HE than with my dear husband. Again, that could lead to another universe of problems. How would my Happiness Engineer respond to being a co-respondent in a divorce proceeding?

I had a feeling every time my name appeared on the call list, there was a collective “oh no, her again” as they flipped a coin to decide who would respond to the nitwit. Not sure how the coin flipping thing would happen but I’m sure they have a Happiness way to do it. I totally believed my HE claimed me every time and I was not shunted from HE to HE. If I missed a day working on the project (for mental health reasons), I received an email asking if everything had been resolved. Ahhh, HE really cared. I began to wonder if I created unnecessary issues with the website just so I could keep chatting with HE. Did I go over to the dark side? But all is well. The website is successfully launched for better or worse. The book is about to be published. My husband still speaks to me. I want to commend HE for HE’s total commitment to helping me navigate the unknown world of tech to get our site live. Many thanks, Happiness Engineer!

And So It Begins

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

This was my first post on our blog A Way with Words as we anticipated the publication of our book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets.

Welcome to our blog and thank you for stopping by. This is our dialogue with readers as well as writers.

Stories are as old as humankind. We all have them, we live stories. The oral tradition of storytelling is essentially extinct in modern cultures. Since the advent of alphabets, people have chosen to preserve their tales in writing.  As a writers’ group, we support and encourage individual flights of fantasy, rockets of remembrance, and paeans of poetry, that lead us on voyages of discovery into ourselves and the world at large. We writers thrive on words. We gobble them up, we inhale them, we cherish and revere them. They are the building blocks of our understanding. As an equation is to a mathematician, a word is to a writer. All the scribblers of the world understand why writers write. It is not necessary to earn your living by penning symbols on a page to be a WRITER. A very select few can do that. The rest of us use the written word as a pilot through our past, a magnifying glass in our present, and a crystal ball into our futures. Notes jotted on napkins, letters to friends, journals, and diaries are all ways of preserving stories. Life is Story. Write on.

Our book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets is a memoir of our writers’ group over two decades and a guide for other groups to learn, write and stay together. With this blog, we will continue our story. We invite you to share your comments and experiences with us.

Release Date for Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets

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Our book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets will be released on September 6, 2022. It can be pre-ordered at Barnes and Noble in paperback or digital Nook format. The price is $18.99 for paperback and $7.49 for digital.

Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets – B&N

It is also available for pre-order through Amazon in paperback or Kindle format. The price is $18.99 for paperback and $7.49 for digital.

Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets – Amazon

Our website A Way with Words – A Writers’ Group Blog will go live on July 25th. We will have updates on the writing and publishing process, life observations, and prompts for Writers’ Groups to use to build skills.

Our Book

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Our Book – Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets

We finally have the galley print of our book retitled Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets. Sally, Jackie, and I have worked very hard over several years to bring this project to fruition. We three are rereading the book for the umpteenth time. It is a different experience to read it as a book than as a manuscript you imagine as a book. Of course, I see lots of things I would change but it is too late in the process and, for the most part, it looks good. I don’t think a writer ever finishes a piece of writing because word choices and phrases keep popping up in your head even after you have put the piece “to bed.” At some point, you just have to let go and say done.

I am so very grateful for the support we received from the writing community who agreed to read the manuscript and contribute a thumbs up compliments in writing for our book. That includes Meg Files, Sheila Bender, Rita Magdaleno, Janice Eidus, Nancy Turner, and Dina Greenberg who took time from busy schedules to read 310 pages and comment. All three of us were awed by their willingness and responses.

I am even more grateful for the friendship and diligence of my co-authors. We had a few disagreements along the way but for the most part, we were on the same page when issues arose. Each disagreement was confronted directly over multiple zoom calls and amicably resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. The absolute trust we have with each other has been forged over more than two decades. Even after Jackie moved to Colorado we were able to keep our writers’ group alive and well thanks to internet connections, some reunion trips, and the commitment we share.

We also give kudos to our spouses who supported us in this project. They encouraged us and reserved space for us to be focused on our project without complaint. Thank you Allen Showalter, Danny Collins, and most of all Ken Kinared.

The publication date is sometime in the future, probably fall 2022, and we still have to meet with the marketing coordinator at Atmosphere Press. I am working on a website we will use to shout out our news. We will all three blog on that website to maintain awareness and hopefully generate sales of the book.

Blog reinitiated – October 2020

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I found a great reason to initiate or reinitiate my blog. I, along with two friends, have written a book. The name of our book is Telling Lies and Sharing Secrets. It is the story of our writers’ group. Many times we were challenged by teachers and mentors to record the twenty-five year journey as a group. We finally took the challenge and began work a few years ago.

The book has not been published but finishing the manuscript has been a five-year endeavor similar to birthing a fifteen pound baby in a hurricane with a parachute and army boots on. You get the idea. The book tells how we started and maintain the group and includes short stories, poems, memoir, and essays as well as our narrative. Sounds pretty simple and it is an easy read. The collaboration during COVID has been interesting to say the least. Thank you ZOOM. We managed to corral a variety of notebooks, journals, and personal recollections, culling the herd to the most manageable and taming our egos in the process.

We now take on the publishing industry to find a suitable publisher to nurture our baby. In research we discovered this may take another year. More of our journey will be posted on this blog.