Category Archives: The Writer’s Quest

Date: by | Categories: Misfits, My Childhood, On Writing, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Family, Friends, and Our Stories

Lafayette Wattles & His Little Sister“Other things may change, but we start and end with family.”

What is family? For some, it is the heart, the marrow, the soul. For others, the dragon, the demon, the darkness. If we’re lucky, family is a light that guides us toward our own light, the one inside us.

I’m one of the lucky.

I don’t feel guilty for that, but I AM hyper-aware that not all families are created equal, and that when it comes to family I struck the mother-lode (and father-lode and sister-lode, so to speak).

I don’t come from money. My parents didn’t go to college. They got jobs after high school (before and after the Army for my dad, before and after my sister and I were both school age for my mom) and they spent their entire adult lives working extremely hard.

I was lucky because my grandparents never felt entitled. My parents never felt entitled. My sister and I never had a reason to feel entitled.

We did, however, feel happy! And loved!
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Date: by | Categories: On Writing, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Giving Thanks

Happy Thanksgiving by Hammer51012

Happy Thanksgiving by Hammer51012

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments
when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.” – Thornton Wilder

Thanksgiving is more than a time for gathering with family and friends, it’s a time for giving thanks.

It’s a time for remembering. And for expressing gratitude.

I have much to be thankful for this holiday season, especially related to my writing, my friends, and my family. Unfortunately, I’m battling a little vertigo at the moment which makes it difficult for me to look at my computer, which means there’s something for you to be thankful for – a short blog post.

I’m working on a post about family and friends and how they influence our stories, but I’ll save that for next week.

As a result, below you’ll find the very first poem I ever had published in a print journal.
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Date: by | Categories: Guest Blogger, On Writing, Reading List, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

What Is Elizabeth Wein Writing For?

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

Although I became “a reader” rather late, I’ve had the good fortune of encountering some truly wonderful books and remarkable authors whom I have enjoyed again and again over the past two decades. I only recently discovered Elizabeth Wein, however, and have just begun her acclaimed novel, Code Name Verity, which was recently voted #1 on the YALSA Top Ten Teen Books for 2013, but am quite confident she’ll be one of those novelists I return to time and again.

I have to say, so far the experience has been wonderful. One that has me salivating for her other books. I have some catching up to do, after all.

For the past three months, Code Name Verity has been on my To Read list and it only recently moved onto my Reading Now list. A novel about World War II that has been called “an Allied Invasion of Two,” Code Name Verity focuses on two young women (one a pilot, the other a spy) who seem to defy norms on so many levels. If the beginning is any indication, I’m sure this book will soon move to my You Have To Read This list.

So, how lucky am I to have had Elizabeth Wein write a special guest post for this week?

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Date: by | Categories: Findings, Humor, My Childhood, On Writing, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

In Defense of TV, Sort Of

Spanky McFarland & Charley Chase by twm1340“In my opinion, television validates existence.” – Calvin and Hobbes

TV has been part of my life since the very beginning (not unlike children today who grow up with computers and social media). By the time I was a teenager, we were being warned about the dangers of television.

In 1981 “children spent about 2 hours each weekday watching TV” which meant that after fifty years they’d have spent over three years of their lives watching the tube as we called it back then. The primary concerns seemed to be that kids would grow up to be sedentary, that in addition to being inundated with violence (cartoons, westerns, police dramas which were beginning to get a lot edgier . . .) kids would spend less time outdoors, less time reading, less time interacting with each other.

So glad that didn’t happen. Er, um, well . . .

“In 2000, the average number of hours spent watching TV was 1,502, or 4.1 hours per day” and by 2008, the “projected average number of hours an individual (12 and older)” was expected to spend watching TV was up to about 4.7 hours per day.

Of course, today Americans spend over five hours a day online (including approximately 2 hours each day with their smartphones) while we only spend about an hour-and-a-half with our partners.

I’m not going to pretend to know all about the dangers of TV or about the potential dangers of smartphones or other forms of technology. I certainly don’t. I actually just spent over three years without television and, in general, I didn’t pine for it much except when March Madness rolled around.

Over the past few months, however, I have discovered a few television shows (some from a few years ago and others somewhat current) that I think are excellent:

A Game of Thrones
The Walking Dead
Veronica Mars
Freaks & Geeks
The Blacklist

And those shows got me thinking (always dangerous). So, you could say this post is simply one guy’s take on the way some television shows can be valuable tools for writers.
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Date: by | Categories: Empathy, Humor, My Childhood, On Writing, Poetry, Poetry of Witness, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Try a Little Tenderness

A Mother's Touch by Electric Echoes

A Mother’s Touch by Electric Echoes

For the past week, one word has been creeping around in my head, popping up over and over and over. That word is TENDERNESS.

Maybe it’s because my mom went away for a little while and I’ve had some time with my dad that I might not have taken otherwise.

I know tenderness may not be one of those words you usually associate with two grown men bonding. It’s not typically part of the Y Chromosome Playbook they give you as a boy to commit to memory and take to heart, yet I think it might just be one of the most crucial reasons why my friends are my friends (female and male) and why my family and I are so incredibly close.

Not only do each of those very special people in my life have a capacity for tenderness, they have a propensity for sharing it (with others and with me).

As a young boy, I suppose I looked up to my dad first and foremost as this great athlete, as this man’s man to use an old-school phrase, for being strong and brave and able to do just about anything. Today, I still appreciate all that, but the thing that strikes me most profoundly is my dad’s ability to be that guy and to still share moments of tenderness.

And, in looking back, I think what truly connected us even when I was a boy, regardless of how many sports I played and how many other things we had in common, was that part of my dad’s personality, that part of his soul, which he revealed in those moments.
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Date: by | Categories: Empathy, Humor, Misfits, My Childhood, On Writing, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

A Thing Called Fear

Shark by Deja Photo

Shark by Deja Photo From Lens To Picture

“I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” – Woody Allen

Fear. At a basic level, fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. Essential, historically, to the survival of humanity. Yet a potential catalyst to the undoing of an individual.

It should probably be noted that this is just MY take on fear. For what it’s worth.

I’m not going to get all psychoanalytical here or even very philosophical, but it seems that fear can be the spark that saves a life or that gets us headed in the right direction. It can also, in a manner of speaking, end a life when it becomes paralyzing, when the threat is viewed as a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to happiness, success, dreams.

Although fear might be an instantaneous response to a specific threat at a particular moment in time (a reaction to stimuli in a present moment), some are layered. They’re not merely a reaction to that one instant, but are often threaded deeply, intricately, inextricably to other (often sundry) past experiences.

It figures, doesn’t it, that something so influential would be so complex.

Here are My Four Biggest Childhood Fears (in order of severity, not in chronological order, from ages six to eighteen):

DEATH (as in no longer alive, as in ran out of time, as in the end, finito . . . I’m talking from the perspective of a boy who had absolutely no desire to be off pursuing evidence of an afterlife or a lack there of . . . not as a youthful resistance to the concepts of heaven or hell or purgatory, but simply as an I-just-got-here reaction to the whole idea of shuffling off this mortal coil)
STAGE FRIGHT/PUBLIC SPEAKING (being the center of attention might be a more apt name for this one)
HEIGHTS (a fear of falling, really . . . not of climbing, not of being UP, for UP was one of my favorite places to be – as Xero says, being there often allows you to see what everyone else can see, but in a totally different way . . . okay, so I guess maybe I did sort of morph into a misfit on my own)
DOGS (that’s right, man’s best friend . . . although I have a genuine affinity for dogs, I was attacked by two of them when I was in first grade so every canine interaction I’ve had since then has begun/begins with all out fear)

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Date: by | Categories: Events, Feedback, On Writing, Poetry, Projects, Submiting, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

A Different Point Of View

A Different Point of View

A Different Point of View by Simon Daniel Photography

“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.” ~ Calvin and Hobbes

I guess you could say this is a post about truth, whatever that might be, which makes it about fact and reality (double ditto whatevers), which makes it a post about perception, really, a post about point of view.

And what does that even mean?

Sure, point of view is a way of considering a thing, not limited merely to our sensing the thing, but involving an attitude as well (about the thing being sensed, yes, and often about ourselves).

Cold Hard Fact: sometimes the words we least want to hear are the words we need to hear most. Sometimes they provide us (or force us to take) a different point of view.

I suppose a resistance to the words we don’t want to hear might be a form of self-preservation (of the ego, at least, and maybe of one’s dreams). I mean, giving up on our dreams seems to be more common than chasing them once we reach a certain age (that sort of cynicism seems to be taking hold in adolescence these days which is such a terrible shame).

If you’ve somehow found a way to hold onto those dreams, to chase them, your dream-preservation response is probably heightened.

Given the myriad pressures on us from so many directions to put aside the dream (you know, to let go of the “fanciful”), for the pursuit of the practical, I get the inherent need to defend our pursuit, but not at the sacrifice of reason. After all, sometimes the perceived criticism, sometimes the feedback, the insight, the advice, the idea being shared with us (wanted or not) has merit.

Sometimes it bears, at the very least, a seed of truth.
Which is often also a seed for growth.
If we recognize it, that is. If we allow ourselves to perceive it, to consider it, to weigh it, to examine it from various points of view.

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Date: by | Categories: Empathy, Misfits, My Childhood, On Writing, Poetry, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

The Thing About Being Misunderstood

Bully by S. Babikovs

Bully by S. Babikovs

The first time, there were just three of them, my used-to-be-friends, with their wild hands latched onto my arms like vines imbued with dark magic, pulling me down to the earth; their fists turned into impossibly hard knots of bone, like so many dead stars crashing down from the sky against my head, shoulders, chest, gut; their feet stomping breath from my lungs, as if they were boys suddenly reduced to nothing more than steel toe, steel toe, steel toe.

It was the darkest three-foot section of the school, just outside the gym doors, where the hallway zig-zagged back into the locker room. . . .

That’s how my memoir would begin. If, you know, I started at fifth grade. Actually, I’m in the process of writing a fictionalized account of that very story.

I’m not sure if all writers have been through a “bad childhood or a good childhood interrupted by several years of badness” as Piers Anthony suggests, but there’s a good chance they write, to some degree at least, to better understand things they’ve either lived through or witnessed.

I know that’s true for me. I write to make sense of things that, at least when they occur, just don’t deem to make any sense sometimes, like bullying, but I also write to have a voice, as I’ve mentioned before, as a way of expressing myself in the hopes of being understood.

In looking back on my life, I’m pretty sure my need for understanding and, especially, for being understood started during those dark days of fifth grade or became magnified then.
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Date: by | Categories: Events, On Writing, Poetry, Submiting, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Practice

Practice Time At The Page Working on Xero Treu

Practice Time At The Page Working on Xero Treu

Dorianne Laux and Kim Addonizio write in the opening pages of their wonderful book, The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, that 90% of what we do as writers is “practice.”

Rather than contradict myself and spend several hours on a new blog post this week, I’m going to dedicate the next few days to practice. After all, I’m attending an important conference next weekend (Rutgers Council on Children’s Literature One-on-One Plus Conference) and my goal is to have my revision of Xero completed by then so I can share it with the editors and agents I meet.

Of course, that means I need to spend all my free time right now reworking the manuscript.

I need to practice!
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Date: by | Categories: My Childhood, On Writing, Poetry, Projects, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Second Chances

Auto Polo

Talk About a Moment When You Might Want a Do-Over

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.

Art is knowing which ones to keep.” ~ Scott Adams

There’s a common saying about life, how not everyone gets a second chance. Only, I wonder if maybe it should really be more like: “Not everyone takes their second chance.”

Of course, that might be because we don’t always see the chance for what it is or we might not feel we’re in a position to act on it or because we just can’t get ourselves to give up on our original plan. Seems as though, for many people who find themselves in unbearable situations, it’s not until something negative, something unwanted, something maybe even tragic happens before we decide to make a change we probably knew all along somewhere deep down inside us was a change we needed to make.

Sometimes in life, it’s a starting over, a starting from scratch.

Most of the time though, it’s really us setting off on a new path, not from the very beginning again, but from wherever we’d gotten to before the change. It’s like that with writing too.

Funny how much life and art have in common.
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