Where art thou...art

Last night at the Chapter One writers group, I read an essay I wrote a couple of years ago about my search for a creative outlet. It chronicled my failed attempts at dance, music, and art. I found myself to be hopelessly clumsy, possibly tone deaf, an only mediocre at drawing. I've had an ad for ballroom dance lessons on my dream board forever.  It was a dream I considered unobtainable. I'd thought I was doomed to be left-brained; one whose analytic skills outweigh their artistic/creative skills.

That was until I discovered writing.  It turns out to be the one artistic venture that I seem to have some natural ability at. Up until now, I saw that as a victory.  Not just the victory of writing a story people might actually like to read.  But a victory over the left side of my brain in a "move over left brain, the right brain is taking over" kind of way.  That somehow, I had conquered my predetermined biological make-up.

Ha!  I was wrong. I did some more research. It turns out right-brained people are better at art because they think visually, and left-brained people think verbally.  Which means, left-brained people are better at putting thoughts into words instead of pictures, and therefore make better writers.

I found this to be frustrating. I'm not sure why it bothers me. Obviously it seems to be working to my benefit. But for some reason, I feel like I'm less in control.  That any talent I  have boils down to the way my cells divided when I was nothing more than a tadpole, rather than my determination, my heart and soul.

So I started taking every right-brain vs. left brain test I could find, hoping to find some evidence that my mind was more than a collection of gray matter that I had no control over.  I was intrigued by the fact that I seemed to have attributes of each side. Then I read that some people can actually consciously switch sides.

So I tried an experiment.  I stared at one of those tests that show a dancer turning in circles.  If you see her as turning clock-wise, you are using your right brain, if you see her turning counter clock-wise, you are using your left brain.  I stared, and I stared.  I concentrated hard.  Imagine my surprise when right before my eyes, she switched directions!  I did it.  I conquered my own brain!  Although she seems to switch back to counter-clockwise easier and quicker than clock-wise, I can now control which side of my brain I'm using.

I plan to keep working on switching her direction until it becomes easier.  Think of it as gray matter calisthenics.  Maybe someday my mental work-out will pay off. And maybe I just might take those ballroom dance lessons after all.

Life imitates art, art imitates life, life after death...

I have to start this out with the statement that, although I write a lot of fiction, this story is completely, absolutely, without embellishment, pure non-fiction. This is exactly how it happened, or should I say is currently happening to me as I sit and type this. Cross my heart and hope to die. 

Given what I'm about to tell you, maybe I shouldn't say that.

This week started out with my attempt to write something for this blog. My head was not in the best of places, feeling frustrated with my lack of time to do any quality writing. What I wrote, I decided, was poor at best so I didn't post it. That made me feel even more frustrated as I am feeling pressure to blog more often. Today, Wednesday, is my one day off of work, devoted to writing. I spent all day at my favorite coffee shop. Although I did some great re-working and editing on my novel, I wasn't feeling very inspired.

As some of you may know, the novel I'm currently working on is about a young woman, Katherine.  While walking through an old cemetery, contemplating the lives of the people buried there, she inadvertently ends up traveling back in time directly into the life of the person's headstone that she touches, just before their time of their death. This idea was born as my husband and I drove past a small local cemetery (pictured above). Although we'd driven by it many times, on this particular occasion I tried to read as many headstones as I could. I, like my main character, started to wonder about those names. Who were those people? What were their lives like? Did they still have family members that remember them, visit their graves? Or were they lost in time, just names and dates etched in stone? I went back to take some pictures of the cemetery. It seemed small, quaint, with a chapel at the back. There were a mix of newer stones right alongside very old, almost, illegible ones. Perfect for my novel.

In my story, which is a fair way toward finished, I needed the cemetery to be bigger, yet I didn't want to lose that small old cemetery feel. So I had my character discover a path behind the chapel that leads to a hidden section she'd never known was there. This was already down on paper, or virtual paper I should say, as everything is written on my laptop.

In fact it had been a part of the story for at least nine months when a good friend, Sue, asked me if I'd ever really walked around that cemetery. I said I'd been there once, but didn't go too far. She said she'd just recently gone on a geocache (a treasure hunt led by hand-held GPS). My first thought was, really? In a cemetery? But that thought was quickly halted when she said “Did you realize there are two more cemeteries hidden in the woods behind the church?” Well, as you can imagine, I was shocked. So today, after my less than inspired day of working on my book, I stopped there.

By my friends recommendation, I parked on the street and walked, rather than drove into the cemetery. I walked up the hill towards the church and around the back. There, winding through the woods, up a steep hill, was a paved road. At this point I heard a loud caw and look up to see a solitary crow in a dead tree, juxtaposed against the scene of the butterfly fluttering around the flowers at the base of the trunk. I made a mental note to make sure to add that to my story.

I followed the road around and up and sure enough, it opened up onto another cemetery. This graveyard also had a mix of older and newer stones and was even smaller than the main one that I had just come from. By this time my heart was beating a bit faster. I'm not sure if it was finding the hidden cemetery of my imagination, or the hike up the hill in the heat and humidity. I didn't walk around this middle cemetery, instead I searched for the way up to the third cemetery my friend had mentioned.

There in the corner, barely visible, was a narrow path in the woods. This one was not paved, it was merely mowed through the woods. The path wound around a bit, the overgrown trees and shrubs brushing against my shoulders. I made another mental note to include this imagery into my story as it was doing a good job of creeping me out in real life. My only thought was that it was too sunny, the beams of light dancing through the leaves too pretty. In my story I needed to make it cloudy, maybe even an approaching storm. Again I must emphasize, this is REALLY true. Only moments after this random thought, a rumble of thunder echoed in the distance. REALLY!

So, this path did indeed open up into a third cemetery. This one much larger than even the first and looked to be more modern. I wandered a bit but decided I would wait and come back another day, since that rumble of thunder had been the precursor to some approaching clouds that were definitely calling for rain. As I walked back toward the path, I thought to myself that it was that middle cemetery, carved into the woods, that had the ambiance I'd imagined. I started to mentally go through the gravestones and lives my character visits to figure out exactly which one(s) she would find in this back cemetery. Although I already had a description of the cemetery written along with it's hidden back cemetery, I still hadn't decided which grave she'd find there. There were certain ones that needed to be clumped together, and in the more visible portion of the cemetery, for reasons I can't tell you here (sorry, you'll just have to buy the book when it's finished). It came to me that the best one for her to find in this hidden cemetery would be the one of an eight year old boy. I would make that hidden cemetery a children's cemetery. As soon as that idea occurred to me, I knew it was the perfect choice. Just the idea gave me goosebumps.

As I came out of the wooded path back to the middle graveyard, I decided to take the time to look around a bit. I walked up to the first headstone and was shocked by the dates. It was a child. I walked to the next one. No dates, just the word infant under the name. The third stone, another child. I swear to you this is just how it happened. I thought “it should be a children's cemetery” and it was, or at least the section I was standing in was.

I started to walk briskly back to my car. I had to write this all down. As I passed a bush on the way out, a bird suddenly flew out of it. I think I jumped a foot! I'm pretty sure that will make it into the book as well.

So I sit in my car, laptop balanced against the steering wheel, still parked by the cemetery. Despite the sweltering 90 degree weather and the barely cracked windows because that rain finally came, I'm trembling and have goosebumps. I couldn't wait, I needed to write this all down as soon as I could. I've gotten inspiration, not only for this blog, but also for my novel. 

And it seems to have come from the grave.

Early Morning Revelations

I present to you, the third place winning essay of the 2011 Bo Carter Memorial Writing Contest.

Early Morning Revelations

by D.L. Marriott

I dip my foot into the water. I expect it to be chilly this early in the morning. I'm surprised by its warmth. I turn the canoe over, put a book encased in a plastic zip-top bag, a travel mug full of coffee, and a life-preserver in the bottom. I paddle my way through the channel and onto the lake. The sun has just begun its rise over the horizon. The sky is painted with hues of pink and orange. There is no one else out here. I expected to run into a fisherman or two, it seems impossible that this morning they are absent.

Once I'm in a place where I have the most room to drift, I slide down into the bottom of the canoe, and take out my book. There is nothing to interrupt me from my story. There is a highway not too far away, but at five A.M. on a Sunday morning there is little traffic. The muffled sound of the occasional car only barely gets my notice.

But then I hear a rumble that gets louder and louder, disturbing my peace. It's a train on a not too distant set of tracks. On such a quiet morning, its clattering is intrusive, disturbing. I stop reading and cringe at how it dispels my ideal of relaxing, drifting aimlessly on the water. Before long the rumbling fades away; my solitude returns.

Now that my attention has been torn away from the book in my hand, I take notice of what's around me. The lake is still, not a ripple on it other than those created by a family of ducks swimming by. My ears pick up the serenade of frogs, early morning birds, and the occasional splash of a jumping fish. There is a heron standing on the shore. His profile is majestic. At first he is so still that I'm not sure if he is real or a garden ornament. Just when I have convinced myself he cannot be real, he moves his head, turning it towards me.

I start thinking about how I would have missed him had the train not caused me to look up from my book. How sometimes we don't realize what's around us because we're too busy doing something else. How much sitting in this boat, floating along, is so much like life.

It starts out with the trip up the channel. Paddling is work. It's not horrible work. In a way, I enjoyed the challenge of working to get where I wanted to go. It's very much like when we were young, working hard to raise a family. It was work, sometimes hard work. But we were heading in the direction we wanted to go. It didn't all go smoothly. We occasionally had to shake the weeds from our paddles.

But then as our children grew up, we got to a place where we thought we could relax and enjoy life. Drift along, instead of working so hard. We thought we were coming to our perfect destination. We knew and accepted the mild disturbance of the car whizzing by, but it was so fleeting it barely registered. It isn't until something really shatters our silence that we take notice. Something big and intrusive like a freight train comes barreling into our world. Momentarily we wonder why. Why, when we finally have what we were dreaming of, does something big and ugly have to ruin it?

Like the train that disrupts my peaceful morning in my canoe, the things that disrupt our lives eventually pass. They rumble off into the distance. In their wake, we realize that there was beauty and peace all around us. It had been there all along, but we had been too preoccupied to appreciate it. Now in the deafening silence of the train's absence, it is wondrous. It's a lesson in appreciating all we have and realizing that bad things will come along, but they will pass, and we will still be here drifting on an unseen current. If by chance we are not happy with where the current is taking us, all we have to do is work up some muscle and paddle in another direction, and remember to take stock in the beauty around us. 

We can't banish the weeds, the cars and the freight trains of life. We can just close our eyes and wait for them to pass, then keep on paddling to our destination, never forgetting that there are always ducks and frogs, sunrises and herons, if we just take the time to recognize them.

 

The End

No, I haven't finished the novel yet, although I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it's getting bigger and brighter by the day. But today, I woke up with words flowing through my head. That happens to me a lot, I wake up with a story running along all by itself. It makes me wonder if I'm actually the writer, or if there's some other entity doing all the work who, once in a while, interrupts my sleep and forces me to put it to paper.

For some, starting a story is the difficult part. Putting those first words down on the page. For some, it's all the middle stuff. Making sure point A connects to point B. For me, the hardest part is always the end. Generally when I start a story, I have no clue what the ending will be. It's somewhat unnerving to start writing not knowing where it's going when the story starts telling itself. I've made the joke several times that I just take transcription for the voices in my head, but often that's exactly what it feels like.

Even when I finally get an idea of what the ending should be, writing it is the most difficult part of the process for me. Once I've built up all the drama, bringing it to a conclusion that brings the reader back down without leaving them feel disappointed is an incredibly difficult thing. I've known the ending of my novel for a while now, but had no idea how to tell it with just the right amount of tension, emotion, and completion to leave the reader feeling satisfied.

As a reader, the ending can make or break a story for me. I can be totally entranced by a book, but if the ending doesn't deliver, it frustrates me. The ending is the last thing the reader is left with. To me, it's critical to make it memorable. Unfortunately, the ending is also generally the most controversial. Some love “happily ever after” endings, some hate them, some like the story to hang, without a clear ending, others not. No matter what ending you come up with, there will be people who will sing its praises and some who will criticize every word.

I've talked about J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter before. The epilogue is probably the most controversial part of the seven books. Harry Potter fans are divided, some loved it, some hated it. I myself liked it. I didn't love it. Not because I didn't like the way the story ended, just the way it was written. I like it enough, and it's grown on me some since I first read it, but I felt it could have been stronger. I give Jo kudos though. I can't imagine how difficult it was to wrap up seven books of storyline.

One of my other favorite children's/young adult authors, D.J. MacHale, had to wrap up ten books and years of the main character's life in his Pendragon series. I actually sent him a message to tell him I thought it was the best ending I've ever read. I have read other reviews from readers who hated it. To me it was perfect.

So I guess in the end, the end has to be what the writer feels is necessary. We just have to hope that not too many people are disappointed. I'm hoping there's some fate that's telling me that the ending I wrote is the right one. An hour after I woke up with my ending in my head, my husband awoke to tell me he'd just had the weirdest dream. He dreamed that I finally came to the end of my book. If that's not a sign, I don't know what is.

The End.

A friend of a friend?

You know the saying, a friend of a friend of a friend... Or how about the adage that there is only six degrees of separation?  If you really think about it, it just might be true. I've certainly had this phenomenon present itself before. Somehow it's just a bit exciting to think you know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone famous.

This week I met the sister of a friend. (That would be only one degree of separation. Or would that be two?)  My friend mentioned that her sister came from Maine, Stephen King land as she put it.

"Really?" I replied.  "I'm a huge fan!" Nothing new or earth shattering in that exchange. I followed that up with "Actually he's influenced my writing quite a bit."

I've been reading Stephen King's books since my teens. I love the way his stories keep me at the edge of my seat, not knowing what's going to happen next. His descriptive style pulls me right into his stories.

In addition, although I've read several good books on the craft of writing, I count his book "On Writing" as the one that taught me the most. One of the greatest compliments I can get is when someone tells me one of my stories is Stephen Kingish.

So I really did mean it when I told this sister of a friend that Stephen King has influenced me.

Her response was not what I was expecting.  She told me he was one of her neighbors and sometimes saw him out and about.  My response? "Wow, cool."  For a writer, sometimes words can escape me. (By the way we would be up to TWO degrees of separation, or maybe that's three, still respectable either way.)

My friend turned to her sister and said, "Dody here is an author also."

Okay, so we were talking Stephen King.  I don't think I could ever comprehend the idea of mentioning my name as an author in conjunction with Stephen King. I laughed and pulled out a bookmark that has all the information for Finding Hope, my website and this blog.

My friend told her I was good. I blushed and told her she could check my book out if she wanted. Then, in what had to be a moment of incredible bravery, or insanity, I handed her a second bookmark and said, "Here, if you bump into your buddy Steve, you can tell him to check me out."

I know, I can hear you laughing. Me too. But you never know. Just maybe this friend's sister will actually take that bookmark back to Maine with her, and maybe instead of it getting lost in her suitcase or on her counter she'll actually have it on her, and just maybe she'll bump into Mr. King himself.

Maybe, just maybe, she'll remember the bookmark and give it to him.  And if all the stars align and the world stops rotating on it's axis, he won't toss it in the nearest trashcan, or crumple it up and stuff it in his pocket to get destroyed in his washing machine.  And just maybe he'll decide to check me out and not laugh his butt off at this little author actually doing something so bold as handing one of his neighbors my info.

IF, by chance he gets that far, and actually reads my story, and finds that I may have some future in writing, and takes the time to drop me a note and tell me so, It will all be for naught because I'd probably die on the spot!

But you just never know. Maybe that sister of a friend, who lives in the same neighborhood as Stephen King just might change my life. Or maybe I'll win the lottery.  I'm somehow thinking the lottery is more likely, but a girl can dream can't she?

Finding Hope

This is a big moment for me.  One that seems surreal.  I have released my first book on Amazon.com for download.  Don't worry, if you don't have a Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Blackberry or Android base device.  You can also download a free app for your PC or Mac right on Amazon.

It's a novelette about finding oneself, finding love and finding hope. 

If Steve knew anything, he knew that he was fine the way he was. He was a hard-as-steel tough guy. He was a detective that lived alone and was, if not exactly happy, satisfied with the way things were. One night changed all that. When asked to investigate the kidnapping of his ex-partners daughter, Steve finds more than the evidence of the brutal crimes committed in the old dilapidated house of a serial killer. He finds that he is not the person he thought he was. That night begins a chain of events that makes him question everything he ever thought he knew about himself. 

What is a novelette, you may ask?  It's longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella.  It's just over 10,000 words or 12 pages.

I've posted links on Facebook, Twitter, my website @ www.dlmarriott.net, and I put together a book trailer on YouTube which you can see here.

My hope (Ha! That was totally unintentional) is that this will give potential readers a taste of my writing style at the low risk cost of only 99 cents.  If they like it they might be more apt to read my novel once it's released.

Whether or not it works, it still gives me a thrill to type my name into a Amazon search and see myself listed as an author!

Watch the trailer, read the reviews, and if you feel so inclined, check it out for yourself.  I truly hope you enjoy it.  Either way, let me know what you think.  All feedback, positive and negative help me to become a better writer!


Buy "Finding Hope" here.

To tell the truth, the whole truth...or not

I recently spoke to a group of seventh graders and their families at St. Raphael's Catholic School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They're working together on a Build-a-Book project and I was asked to talk to them about writing and being a writer. One of the things I told them, and one of the things I've always firmly believed, is that no matter how fictionalized your story is, it has to be realistic. It needs to have truth. Even in fantasy, things need to ring true to the reader or they won't feel a connection, and subsequently will have a hard time following your story.

There are examples of this out there now. Take the Star Trek series. There's a reason we now have real life items that look and perform similar to the futuristic counterparts from the stories. They were based on real science.

When Harry Potter waves his magic wand, the spells are based on mostly Latin terminology. Since many of our words today come from Latin, the spells have a familiarity to them. We can pretty much figure out that “Wingardium Leviosa” will make something float. Many of the creatures are based on mythology that we're already familiar with. The setting is an accurate portrayal of life growing up in a boarding school albeit with some magic thrown in. These pieces of truth ground the reader in that fantasy world.

More so, if your space alien lands on the streets of New York, you need to have the details of the city accurate. If your ghost haunts a location people might be familiar with, you will lose them if describe that location incorrectly.

This has been a constant for me as I work on my upcoming novel. My main character does some time traveling. Not only does she go to many different eras, but she ends up involved with several historic events. This meant a lot of research on my part. For those of you who might not realize it, research is a big part of writing, no matter how long or short your piece is. Take for instance one of the chapters I did in “Where Do I Begin – One Woman's Story.”

My outline was simply to describe how the two main characters spent time together on a cruise ship. First I had to take her date of birth and the age she was supposed to be and figure out what year it was when she was on this cruise. Turned out to be in the 1970's. Then I needed to find out what activities were available on cruise ships during that time. If I had ignored that step and had them climbing a rock wall, or surfing the wave pool, it would have been inaccurate. Although cruise ships of today have those things, cruise ships back then didn't. I have no doubt that some of my readers have been on those cruise ships and would have been frustrated with my inaccuracy.

So as you can imagine, when writing a historic fiction/time travel novel, the accuracy is imperative. It's been a daunting task to get the myriad of details correct. Unfortunately it turns out the truth sometimes really is stranger than fiction. In one scene I have one character who's deathly ill. I actually had to make sure that during that time in history the process to lower a fever was to cool the person down. You might laugh, but you can't assume anything. While doing my research I found out that the common treatment for a burn was to hold the burned area over a flame! They believed it was better to get the burn to blister and for the blister to burst. Ouch! So I learned not to assume anything.

I recently read a part of my novel to my classmates in my writing class. Two questions came up after I read the dialog between two women in 1903, in which one of them, at age 35 is considering trying to conceive another child after losing her two daughters. The first question raised was her age, wasn't she a bit too old to be having babies, weren't women back then getting married young and having families young? My answer was no. My research showed that because of poor nutrition at that time, women didn't even start their menstrual cycles until they were in their twenties. They may have married younger, but children came much later. The second question raised was whether or not birth control, or the idea of “trying” for a child was even a concept back then. Imagine my surprise when I researched the history of birth control. Not only was it a concept, it was widely accepted and used. The condom had been around since the 1600's, the contraceptive sponge since the 1840's, not to mention lectures and pamphlets circulated about the rhythm method as well as other methods to avoid pregnancy. It turns out that the idea of birth control and family planning was so prevalent that the Comstock Act of 1873 made any kind of family planning illegal. The law was quite routinely ignored. Believe it or not you could buy contraceptive devices from the Sears Roebuck Catalog in 1930!

So now I find myself faced with a conundrum, do I tell the truth and keep the facts accurate? Or do I lean toward the commonly held misconceptions? Will I do what I was trying to avoid in the first place and possibly have readers doubt the realism I'm trying to instill in my story by telling it accurately?

It was something to think about. In the end I've decided I have to tell the truth. It feels wrong not to. Not only do I feel strongly about being accurate in my details, but I also feel strongly in never underestimating the intelligence of my readers. I have to trust that if my readers get stuck on some detail, they will take the time to look it up.

So I have to stand with what I told those seventh grade students. Keep it real. Tell the truth. As a reader I'd rather learn something new, even if it means doing some research myself, than to know that facts the author presented are incorrect. Even in fiction, I want non-fiction.

The reader needs the truth, the whole truth, no matter how unbelievable.