Today several members of my once-a-month writer’s group read essays could one day be included in a memoir.  And what fun a treat that was.  A memoir is simply a story told about the past  that the author unravels from a current perspective.

Karen told us how she always felt like she was a poor math student.   An elementary school teacher had told her so, as had her parents. She believed them.  Karen used such clever details.  We could see her sitting in her classroom chewing on the end of her pigtail and see the disappointment on her face when she didn’t have good enough grades to get into several colleges.  Later in life when her husband left her to raise five children, she did go to college and found herself in a math class, scared to death.  Her math teacher, who said no one was bad at math, became her mentor.   Karen colorfully portrayed the relationship she had with this woman and how it changed her life.

Fletcher detailed the day when he was ready to turn in his resignation in the army.  He had made his decision and was ready to move on.  A top-ranking soldier painted a different picture of military life, and after some thought, Fletcher signed on again.  He eventually became a Colonel in the Army.   The soldier who swayed him had changed the course of his life, and a few years later lost his own.

Paul wrote of the time God blinked at he and three other B-24 pilots who almost ran out of fuel.  They were young guys who were not sure how to get to the extra fuel.  They were seven hours from land, flying way above the ocean.  At a last crucial moment, a voice told them to look in the right location on the B-24, and they were able to transfer the fuel.  ”Thank thr Lord,” Paul said.   Even with that Paul said they landed with only about fifteen minutes of fuel left.  He found out later that four other B-24′s on the same mission went down that night.  A fascinating tale.

Lucy detailed her life, how she had earned a teaching degree and gotten her first job.  She had a marvelous mentor, another teacher,  who taught her to always say something positive to her students, to make them feel good about themselves.   From the smile on Lucy’s face it was easy to see that she brightened the lives of her students.

Libbie wrote about a conversation she had with God at age fifteen, when she thought she was dying.  Before that time, she hadn’t known that God was important to her.  But here she was, bargaining for her life.  She made a confession apologizing for skinny dipping in the local pool, gossiping about her friends, not listening in church, telling lies, and for sins she may have omitted.  She promised to stay in touch with God if she could please live.  God winked at her, too.  Since that day, she’s never felt alone.

The more concrete the memoir is the easier it was for us to step inside thesea nd other essays.  The really good memoir is the one you read and it makes you feel like the author is speaking to you.

Stop in again soon.

Two Good Memoirs:

Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Hello,

It’s a sunny day here in Savannah.  In just two weeks we have 23,000 runners coming to town for the Rock and Roll Marathon.  Runners get my praise.  You die-hard souls of all ages hit the trails in all kinds of weather, push forward no matter what, with an unwavering dedication.  You go miles and miles day after day reaching personal goals of fitness.  You make it look easy, however I suspect that is a myth.

Just like sitting down to write, my guess is that becoming a runner takes hard work and requires a mountain of discipline.  I’m sure as we writers struggle to keep the creative juices flowing, you runners and bikers, and swimmers, and yes, you marvelous triathletes also must fight numerous temptations to stray from regimented patterns of training.

We writers can relate.  We know how difficult it can be to get to the finish line.  We get that I can’t keep going feeling in the middle of a book.  We think, I’m out of juice.  Why did I think I could do this?  I stink.  I should have taken up gardening.  Whatever made me think I could go down this road?  What was I thinking?  But then, we slink through the rough spots.  I guess for a writer it’s that period when observations start coming out as prose and it all feels so good — all the way to the finish line.

Okay, this was fun to write.  It makes me want to go out for some exercise and then get back to work revising my novel about the sisters, Tessa and Claudine.  It is high time we headed further toward the finish line.

PS:  Kudos to daughter-in-law Kara Thom, a writer and a runner, who is This Month’s Revlon Role Model and co-author of Hot (Sweaty) Mamas: Five Secrets to Life As A Fit Mom. She is featured in a Revlon ad in the October 24 People Magazine.  Way to go Kara.

Lisbeth

 I hope you are finding ways to beat the heat in the steamy HOT weather that has invaded a good part of the country.  The heat outside is giving me a good reason to sit my butt on the chair and work on my novel, TESSA AND CLAUDINE. 

In Chapter 17, Tessa has a disastrous experience during her first week of college and is now highly suspicious of all males.   After a short downhill slide, she gets involved in her classes and campus life and is able to move on.  By Christmas break, she’s learned to love  her freedom.  Back at home, she gets immediately slapped in the face by her controlling mother.  She feels her independence slip away.  She turns to her sister for support but Claudine, too involved with her dominating husband, ignores her.   Tessa is ready to give up on her family.  She can’t wait to get back to her dorm.

Tessa and Claudine are drifting farther and farther apart.  They are at a fork in the road.  I’m just hoping I can figure out a way to get these sisters on the same page again. 

I have read several good sister stories. Does anyone have a sisters’ novel to recommend to me?  I’m always looking for another good book to read.

Stay cool.  Lisbeth

The lazy, hazy days of summer are upon us.  It’s been super hot in Savannah — as in 100 degrees — the past couple of days) so I thought I’d share a fun summer recipe.  I took an Oriental Cabbage Salad to a party last week, and it was a big hit.  I’ve had this recipe around for a long time and had forgotten how good it is.  We’ll be having it again soon.  It’s yummy.   I’ll share the recipe at the end of my blog post.

As for writing, I’m still revising my novel, Tessa and Claudine.   (This appears to be a lifetime project.)  I’m also starting to write birthday poems for my twin granddaughters, McKenna and Kendall for their August birthdays.  Each year, I write a poem as a birthday present for my nine grandchildren. (4 boys, 5 girls)  The poems include tidbits information about each child.  At age fourteen, they receive a hardbound book with a copy of their poems that also includes a photo on each page.   They look forward to receiving their poems each year and love it when they are old enough to read their poem.   Granddaughter Rachel turns 14 in August, so will receive her poetry book. this year.

My daughter-in-law, Kara, told me that Kendall, took her poem to her first grade class to share this year when she was VIP person for the week.   The older grandchildren have also shared their poems at school, so it has turned out to be quite a rewading  project. 

Their poetry books become a great way to look back andd remember the fun things the children said and did at different ages.  I give them a copy and keep one for myself. 

Enjoy your summer.  Do some fun writing.  Do give the cabbage salad a try, and let me know how you liked it.

Lisbeth 

Oriental Cabbage Salad

 one ten oz. pkg. chopped cabbage

½ c. salted sunflower seeds

1/2 c. toasted, slivered almonds

1 pkg. Ramen noodles crushed (No need to use the noodle flavoring packet)

1 bunch chopped, green onions

 Mix these ingredients and add 2/3  cup of Kraft Light Asian Toasted Sesame salad dressing right  before serving.  (You can add a bit more if you prefer.)

I get this question all of the time.  The answer is no my book is not finished yet.  I am still revising my novel, Tessa and Claudine, so I say no, that I expect to be finished by March of 2015.  Of course, I’m just  joking.  I certainly hope to be done way before then.  

At the moment, I’m fine-tuning Chapter 16 and am about ready to tackle Chapter 17.   In Chapter 16, I cut a few scenes down in size when I felt I’d stepped out of the narrative.  I keep a sign by my computer reminding myself not to add anything that doesn’t move the story forward.  A writing instructor once told me, “If you’re writing about an Indian, remove everything that doesn’t  relate to the Indian.”   

I love it when I can read along and feel like I am simply telling myself a story.  I hate it when I discover that I’ve added narrative simply to explain things to the reader.  That means it is time for more chopping.

In chapter sixteen, soon after Tessa arrives on the huge University of Illinois campus as a freshman, she faces an experience that throws her into a tailspin.  I’m working carefully to let the reader feel the depth of  her emotion.   I want to show her vulnerability and also her strength.   She has plenty of hurdles left to jump over.   She can’t fall apart now.    

Revising is a challenge but every day I tell myself, ”Okay, your characters are waiting, sit your butt on the chair.”

June is coming soon.  Stop in and say hello. 

Lisbeth

Now that we have the royal couple married off, I guess it’s time to step out of their fairytale and go on with our own lives.  I must admit that William and Kate looked fantastic and also very much in love.  I didn’t get up in the wee hours of the morning to watch the wedding festivities, but I did view the evening highlights and check some of the details on the internet.  It looks like Kate’s pretty sister, Pippa, made a big hit.  I don’t think she’ll be lacking for dates.   Hmm, how about Harry and Pippa.  Wouldn’t that be a trippa?

Okay, okay, I know I am getting silly.  It’s time to wish the newlyweds well.  Here’s hoping the media heeds their pleas to leave them alone.  I certainly hope so.  Now, it’s time to slide  on to the next subject.

I want to give you an update on Tessa of “Tessa and Claudine” fame.  Well, my novel “Tessa and Claudine” is not exactly famous.  It’s still in the works, but I am simply getting Tessa ready for the celebrity routine.  I don’t want to take her by surprise. 

At this point, in Chapter 15, Tessa is anxious to go off to college.  Her sister is married now (to a guy she thinks is a real creep), and Tessa is eager to take wing.  Leila, her stepfather, Harry’s, mother,  a loud Italian lady from the Bronx, has just left, after visiting for a week and sharing a room with Tessa (much to her dismay).  Soon after Leila leaves, Tessa writes to her good friend, David Finkelstein, who goes to college at the University of Missouri, telling him details about Leila’s visit.  Tessa is disappointed because David has decided to go to summer school.   Before she can finish her note to David, she hears a loud pounding on their apartment door.  Tessa soon finds herself in the midst of a family emergency. 

This  chapter is not a fairytale.  Not even I expected it to end the way it did. 

Tessa is definitely growing up.

Betrayal Beneath the Spanish Moss, Leslie Stern,’s novel about  Emma, a beautiful, rich, and intelligent woman who gets involved in a relationship with, Jake, a drug addict is a real page turner.    I have discovered that, Leslie Stern, who I met at author, Rosemary Daniell’s, Zona Rosa writer’s workshop here in Savannah, has included some good advice in her book. 

She talks about the “Giant Killer” philosophy which is based on the story of David and Goliath.  She explains this theory to Jake, hoping it will help him kick his drug habit.   The philosophy goes as follows:  Do the difficult tasks in your path first, then do the easy ones.  This builds up your confidence.   Simply put, do the things you don’t want to do  right away.  (For instance, don’t check your e-mail or get on Facebook when you should really be working on your writing, write the 1000 words you promised you’d write today and then check your e-mail, etc.) 

Doing the difficult first is called using your mind instead of just doing.  “Think first. Giant killers take the high road, the more difficult path.  Giant killers not only see what they want but what the outcome will be,” Stern says in her novel.  Thanks for the great advice, Leslie.   I feel certain I’ll be getting more tips from reading your compelling novel.

Okay now that the “Giant Killer” philosophy has kicked in to get my blog updated, I’m going to nudge Tessa and Claudine, the sisters in my current novel back into action.   Much to Tessa’s dismay, at almost nineteen, Claudine is now engaged and about to marry Frank.

When I am working on a novel, I sometimes have to take a fork in the road and work on something else, just for a breather.  At a local writer’s group, I suggested that we write a short piece about our past involving our parents or grandparents.  I wrote about my great grandmother, Mae Stone, who lived in our home when I was a child, and I’d like to share it with you.  Feel free to leave a comment.  I’d love to hear from you. 

July, 1944

            Mae Stone took a tray of oatmeal raisin cookies from the oven and set it down on top of the stove to cool.  From the dining room hutch, she retrieved a silver tray to hold the cookies and a two small crystal bowls, one for mints, the other for the mixed nuts.  Her friends loved to munch while they played cards.  She heard a familiar squeak as the back porch door opened and then slammed shut.  Her great-granddaughter, Charlotte, ran into the kitchen.

            “It sure smells good in here.  May I have a cookie?”  Charlotte darted over to stove and stood beside the tray.

            “Just one,” Nana said.  “You girls can each have a cookie. The rest are for my friends.  “They’ll be here before long.  Take a cookie outside to your sister, and then both of you girls have to come inside and get cleaned up.”

            “Did you make those fancy sandwiches you cut up in little triangles?”

            Yes, honey.  I have the pimento cheese sandwiches in the refrigerator, and the iced tea, too.  Your mother set up the card table in the living room before she left for work.  Using the spatula, Mae took the cookies off the metal tray and put them onto the oval serving dish.  Next, she filled the crystal bowls with mints and nuts.  Charlotte popped a two pale pink mints into her mouth and then ran across the red linoleum floor and she headed back outside, her dark brown pigtails flying behind her.

            “I’ve got a cookie for you,” she hollered to her sister, Lisbeth, who was sitting with a neighborhood friend underneath the weeping willow tree in the side yard.  Her sister ran over to get the cookie.  “We have to go in and wash up now,” Nana’s lady friends are coming soon.” 

            “I’m clean enough,” Lisbeth said, looking down at her shorts and T-shirt.

            “No, you’re not.  Besides you have to put on a dress.  Follow me, or I’ll get in trouble,” Charlotte said.  Lisbeth ate her cookie, said goodbye to her friend, Ruth Ann, and then sauntered toward the back porch.  

            After taking her flowered apron off, Mae arranged the food in the living room, putting the sandwiches and cookies on white lace doilies on the mahogany serving table, and the small crystal bowls on the corners of the dark green card table.  Then she hurried into her bedroom past her sewing corner where she’d spent hours hand sewing quilts..            

            She used a hexagon-shaped piece of cardboard as a pattern to cut out the pieces from whatever cotton material she could find.  She often took the dresses her great-granddaughters had outgrown and used the material for her quilts.  The girls liked to help select which pieces to use next..  She’d made both of them a quilt for their twin beds.  “Remember when I was really little and wore this dress,” Mae often heard the girls say to one another as they pointed to their quilts.  She figured stitching quilts for them was a way of giving them a part of herself.  She often thought about the girls as she stitched.  She had been seventy-six years old when the girls were born.  And now they were five and six.  My, but the time had flown past.

            Mae returned to the living wearing a navy dress, a triple strand of pearls given to her by her late husband, Henry, and her new navy shoes with a wedge heel.  A small German lady, even with the one-inch heel, she still did not stand five-feet tall.  Mae had powdered her pale skin, added a touch of rouge, and pulled her white hair back into a bun.  She rather liked the new round, wire-rimmed glasses she wore.    

            “Nana, they’re here,” an excited Charlotte said when she heard the tires on the Cousin Ella’s black Ford hit the gravel in the driveway.  Charlotte ran to the window and peered out.  Lisbeth stayed in her room at her desk playing school.  She liked to pretend she was a teacher.  And besides, she hated having Cousin Ella and Nana’s other two friends, Bess and Ada Jane hugging her to death. They were nice enough, but they wore strong perfume that about gagged her.  Lisbeth always waited until they were seated and playing cards before she said hello.  At that point, the ladies were unable to give full hugs, only pats on the back or a half hug.

            “They’re here now,” Charlotte ran into the bedroom and said.

            “I know silly.  I can hear the noise.”

            “Nana wants you to come in and say hello.  You’d better come right now. You can sneak food.  Those ladies are so busy talking, no one even notices,” she said before she turned and ran back into the living room. 

            Lisbeth smoothed out her blue ruffled pinafore and walked into the living room, her Mary Janes clicking on the hardwood floor.

            “Well, don’t you look like a little princess?  I love those blond curls,” Ada Jane said.  “Come over here and see me honey.”   Lisbeth hesitated, then headed to Ada Jane’s side and received a small pat on the arm.  “Want some candy, dear?”  Ada Jane held up the bowl.  Lisbeth  took several mints.

            “Thank you,” Lisbeth said, smiling.  She quickly grabbed a few more mints.

            “How old are you now, dear?” Cousin Ella asked.

            “I’m five, but I’ll be six in September.  I’ll start first grade at Lincoln School,” Liisbeth said.

            “Well, good for you.  Oh my goodness.  Wait until I tell your uncle you’re going to first grade.  He’ll be so excited.”

            “You mean Uncle Adolph?” Lisbeth said.  All four women turned and glared at her.  A confused Lisbeth scrunched up her face, glancing at Nana, who put her short pointer finger to her chin and shook her head back and forth, gesturing no.  Lisbeth didn’t understand.  What was that supposed to mean?  She had no idea what was going on.  Was she interfering with their card game? 

            “Charlotte’s waiting for me.  I’d better go back to my room,” she said, wanting to get away from the women..   She tiptoed out of the room. 

            “She’s just a child.  You can’t blame her,” she heard Nana say as she left.

            “Did you eat more cookies” Charlotte asked when she got back to her room.

            “No, just candy,” she said.

              That evening when it was time to tell Nana goodnight, Lisbeth kissed her on the cheek and then finally got the nerve to ask what she had done wrong at the card table that afternoon.  “Honey, you must remember this.  You cannot call Cousin Ella Dieckmann’s father anything but Uncle.  No one dares to call him Uncle Adolph any more.  I’m certain I told you that.”

            “Well, why not.  That’s his name?” Lisbeth said.

            “Trust me.  It’s simply not a good idea.  Some day you’ll understand.”

Believe me, it takes true grit to write every single day.  And it takes a double dose of grit to revise a manuscript and turn it into a finished product.

I mean there is that first draft.  I struggled through that with my current book, Tessa and Claudine, and then I plodded along on a second draft, and still I found myself saying to no one in particular, “Who wrote this drivel?  Surely, not I.”

Now, I’m back at the drawing board with revision number three, and with the help of an insightful leader and encouraging cohorts in a novel writng workshop, I finally see the scenes coming to life. 

I love dialog.  It’s comes natural to me.  However, I get so involved in relaying my story via conversation that I forget to let the reader inside my protagonist’s head.   I need to pause and slow down the action.  I’ve been told that I need to blow up the balloon.  My readers need to relate to my main character.  Is she hurting?  Is she ready to make  a decision?  Is she gaining ground or losing?   Does she feel abandoned or loved?   Is she hiding her true feelings?  What is she learning?

It takes true grit to keep on revising, and it take a double dose of grit to plod along when you and your characters are running into brick walls.  But, the more you face  the truths inside the characters, the easier it gets.  And the reward will be a better finished product.

I’m beginning to like this idea of  blowing up the balloon. 

Happy writing and Happy New Year.   By the way, I saw True Grit on New Year’s Eve and loved it.   Any other movie recommendations? Perhaps this year’s blogs will revolve around movie themes.  Who knows?

I can see the light of January just around the corner, and even though the temperature outside is a bit nippy, it warms my heart. 

January means more writing time.  Hurray. 

I’m ready to shake my characters back into action on a daily basis.  That means:  sit butt on chair in front of computer and crank out the words.   I worked on Chapter Eleven yesterday. 

Tessa had to buckle up and help her Mother get ready for her marriage to  Harry, even though Tessa and her sister, Claudine, were not invited to the ceremony.  Go figure.  Her mother, Eva Mae, is a strange one.  Tessa begged to attend, but no, her mother says she and Harry want to keep it small.  Good grief the woman really is crazy.  I tried to get her to change her mind, but no Eva Mae has to have her way.  Tessa worries that having Harry move in to their small apartment will cause problems.  She’s pretty much on target.  

Her sister, Claudine, is ignoring the whole situation.  She simply wants to finish her senior year in high school, get a job, and move on with her own life.  “But what about  me,’” Tessa says.  Claudine acts like she could care less about her sister.  It’s all a big mess, and I have to figure out how to get these two girls back in synch, because after all, that is what this book is all about.  Tessa wants more than anything to have a relationship with her older sister.  I’m not so sure that’s going to happen.  This family has its share of problems.  Tessa is beginning to think she should get the heck away from them.  I can hardly blame her.   Chapter twelve awaits.  I’d better get back to the action.

Have a great New Year’s celebration.  Happy writing to all of you writers.   Remember to just sit yourself down and write.