Back where I began (Sort of)

By Julie

Last week, for the first time in more than 20 years, I visited Denver, the closest thing I have to a hometown.

The main purpose for my stay was a three-day Immersion Master Class taught by Margie Lawson out of her beautiful log home above Denver in Coal Creek Canyon.

The class was a great opportunity to dig deep, one final time, into my current manuscript, to take it apart, bit by bit, and put it back together shinier than it's ever been. I'm still applying what I learned, but hope to be querying again soon.

My visit was also an opportunity to reminisce -- to see some of the neighborhoods I roamed when I was developing my love of reading and writing, and to catch up with not only old friends who influenced the person I am while I lived there, but new friends I've made in recent years via the Internet.

It was bittersweet at times. My years in Colorado were not the easiest ones of my life, but there were also good memories made there, and I recognize that my writing is largely a product of that time.

Driving through Cherry Creek, the neighborhood where I lived while attending high school, was a true test of my memory. Most of the businesses from those years are gone, replaced by trendy shops, offices, and lofts.

Developers had bulldozed the odd little house where I lived with my mother and brother, together with the house next door, the lots covered now by a small, but beautiful condominium complex.

The sign for the one of the original Village Inn Pancake Houses, which appeared in the first novel I attempted to write, still hangs outside the building, but the windows are dark. Perhaps the owners found more opportunity in their suburban locations, but I remember a time when a trip to the Cherry Creek Village Inn was a special treat.

The original Cherry Creek locations of the famous Tattered Cover bookstore serve other purposes now, just as the new store on Colfax formerly housed the Helen Bonfils Theater. I attended plays there as a student on field trips. It was bizarre, but fun to see the comfortable reading nook created from the former orchestra pit. (photo, left)

My hostess for my visit, a friend and fellow writer I met through an online writing class more than three years ago, lives in a neighborhood that used to be an Air Force base. "Back in the day," we had to drive miles out of the way to get to anything on the other side – now you can drive straight through while admiring the modern, multi-use community.

A visit to Boulder, where I spent my late elementary school years, brought an emotional "aha" moment. We parked in a city lot to spend an hour or so at a coffee shop in the Pearl Street Mall for one-on-ones with Margie, then eat dinner at the Boulder Dushanbe Tea House.

My throat thickened when I recognized the Boulder Public Library at the end of the lot -- my safe haven during a time when I'd moved from one part of the country to another and struggled to fit in, which seemed to become my theme, more or less, during my years in Colorado. (photo, right)

The librarians watched me arrive each week, nearly collapsing under the maximum number of books I could check out. They'd ask if I really read all those books, mock disbelief on their faces, but I knew they were delighted I was there. I suspect this influenced my decision to obtain my master's of library science degree eventually.

Strangely, I have no memory of the mountain that forms the backdrop for the building. As one of my classmates said that night, it was probably just wallpaper at the time. It took me completely by surprise.

I could go on, but it might take all night and a day besides to take you on the whole sentimental journey. Instead, let me ask you: What visits have you made to places years later, when they were hardly recognizable to you, yet as familiar as ever? Have these places appeared in your writing? Did you find, as I did, that not only have the physical locales shown up, but also the emotions you experienced during those times? Leave a comment and share if you'd like.

An advertisement for Margie – she teaches various classes online and in person. They're worth the hard work and money invested. I do believe the woman has more energy than anyone I've ever met.

If you take one of her Immersion classes, you might just get to see this view (which I used this week to make a new header for the blog!) on a quick hike to clear your brain from all the hard work you're doing.

Check out her website: www.margielawson.com

Danger and Courage

By Elizabeth

Have you gotten here yet? Your first (or sixth) manuscript is finished, critiqued, rewritten, polished, and off to your editor or to agents in the form of a query letter. Now it’s time to get back to the drawing board, and the ideas...are not necessarily flowing.

Well, perhaps you aren’t in quite the spot I am. I hope your new story has prickled at the edge of your mind for a while, ready to be born, no need for twelve hours of Pitocin to make the stubborn thing move and no epidural in sight—oops, that’s another story. My point is, if your work-in-progress is flowing from your fingers at an easy two thousand words a day, I hate you. No, not really. (Well, maybe a couple of you.)

But if it’s not—well, then some thinking is in order. And some danger avoidance.

Most of us who’ve been in a critique group longer than an hour have seen sometimes wonderfully written manuscripts about a boy lizard and his two loyal buddies at their enchanted pool; or an impossibly attractive high school umpire with, um, really big teeth, who can’t help but notice the fire chief’s daughter newly arrived from Phenix City, Alabama—you get the picture.

It’s tempting. Here you are, time on your hands, pencil sharp and paper clean, and you can see what works, what sells. It’s natural to think “Well, I could write that”—but guess what? She already wrote it. Game over.

A few thousand words into my new work I got the sinking feeling that my premise might be a little too similar to—well, let’s just say a working title was skating close to My Sister’s Beeper. (Okay, not really, but you get the idea.) I emailed my critique partners, who assured me that my style is far different, my work is known to veer away from my original intentions anyhow and by the way, nice confidence on that talent assumption, Sister. So go for it! With some changes, of course.

The point is to write what screams at you, not what you think will sell. Mercy Jackson and Whatever-the-Heck-Mountain-Is-in-Italy isn’t your golden ticket to publication. Speaking of golden tickets, that’s been done, too: Marley and the Mock Lead Factory ain’t fooling nobody. Nor is sticking the word “wife” or “daughter” in your title (as I learned when I was forced to abandon my earlier WIP, The Janitor’s Common-Law Wife).

What is it that screams at you? So common, nearly a cliché, this advice bears repeating: write what you know. That doesn’t necessarily mean computers or lattes or kids or whatever it is you do during the day. It’s what you do in your heart, the truth that beats there, the quiet shouts of the lessons you’ve learned that demand to be shared. And since we are indeed all unique, the worry that there are only seven stories really doesn’t matter. Those seven stories times seven billion people means that how you write what you write will be different and fresh and new if you trust yourself enough to make it so.

It might take courage to put it in ink. (First danger, now courage? Who knew writing was so adventurous?) What if you try to write that which is dearest to your soul, and you fail? Well, that’s the chance you have to take—I have to take—if we are going to produce our best work, if we are going to share with the world that unique perspective we alone possess. It’s called good writing, good storytelling, and it’s out there waiting to be chased.

So steer away from The Rat and His Flat, and trust yourself. Write the book that scares you the most. Put down those words that want to fly from your pen, the ones that make you clap your hand over your mouth for the sheer baldness of the truth they tell. Your story. Your truth.

Followed by your success.