April 2007 Archives

I'm a joiner, and every once in a while, I'm reminded why I love groups so much. Last night was one of those times.

I spoke to the Raleigh Write to Publish Group, where everyone had a chance to talk about their current project, whether that was a novel, a poem, a childrens' book idea, or a work of serious non-fiction.  The thing everyone had in common was a desire to be published (some already are) and a passion for writing. Being in such company is always heady for me, but then there's the networking aspect of such a group, which can be phenomenal. I learned that there's a public access film studio in Raleigh, that one member's husband is a singer/songwriter/novelist, that my favorite bookstore, Quail Ridge, is having a presentation Sunday on publishing, and that the Write to Publish groups are spreading throughout the state. If I'd stayed home last night, I wouldn't have gathered any of that information. I also made some new friends, people I look forward to seeing again in the future. A few of us went out afterwards to continue chatting. Above, from the left are: Stacey Cochran, who is a novelist and a real mover and shaker. He's the guy setting up the Write to Publish groups everywhere, so if you're interested in getting a group in your area, he's the one to contact; Sharon Kurtzman, who's working on her second novel; novelist Andrew Baltzegar, Eileen Batson, who does the promo for Write to Publish as well as for her hubby, author/songwriter Jon Batson; Maureen Sherbondy, who just had her first chapbook of poetry published and who I met at the Opium Den (Starbucks) soon after I moved to Raleigh. I went up to her and asked if she was a writer--she had that daydreamy look about her as she sat in front of her laptop. We've become friends and she's the one who invited me to speak to this group. And that's me on the right, looking kind of like a beached whale in red, but I hope it's just the angle of the camera. Below, the woman flanked by Andrew and Eileen is Jean Hedges, who moderates the group with class and compassion.

One of the cool things about speaking to various groups is being able to be a part of them, even if only for an hour or two. I belong to too many of my own already, but I still get to soak up a little of the group spirit with every one I visit.

Do you belong to groups that share your passion, whatever that may be?

First, I have to confess I bought the following books at a chain bookstore. I try to support the independent bookstores whenever possible, but I was in Borders with a friend and there were all these books I wanted and . . . you know how it goes. So here's what I bought: Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, which I plan to start tonight. Lionel Shriver's WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, Jodi Picoult's NINETEEN MINUTES, and Anne Lamott's GRACE (eventually): THOUGHTS ON FAITH. I adore Lamott's writing--if you're a writer, surely you've read BIRD BY BIRD. Then there was OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS, about the first year of her son, Sam's life (Sam arrived without "operating instructions"). I was hooked by her funny, candid prose.  Then she began writing about her spiritual journey and this is the third book she's written with that theme. Reading her non-fiction is like looking through a window into the emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual evolution of a woman who is "just like me," only funnier.  Can't wait to read this new book. A word on Lionel Shriver. I bet few of you have read her. I've only read one of her novels, FEMALE OF THE SPECIES, and that was a long time ago. Frankly, I didn't realize there were more (I believe there are seven all together), so I was excited to hear about her latest. FEMALE OF THE SPECIES is on my Special Shelf. My Special Shelf is reserved for books that inspired me when I was beginning to write. It's full of Ann Tyler, Alice Hoffman, Ann Rivers Siddons and many others. I liked FEMALE OF THE SPECIES because the narrator is not the protaganist. Rather, the narrator is a young man infatuated with an older woman, and he tells her life as he sees it, and when he can't see it (when she's making love to someone, for example), he imagines it. I was taken by Shriver's writing skill. It will be interesting to see how she's evolved. Both Shriver's new book and Picoult's latest have to do with a very troubled teen who winds up taking his violent fury out on his classmates. There's irony in both the fact that their books have similar themes as well as in the timing of their release, given the tragedy at VA Tech. I look at my new haul and wish I could devour them all at once! Too many books, too little time. . .

I'm excited! Mary Alice Monroe will be speaking at a nearby Borders Monday night, April 30th and of course she'll be staying at my house. It's been too long since I've seen her. I know many of you love her books, so I'll see if I can get her to stop by to say "hi."

If you're in the Raleigh area, stop by the Cameron Village Library Thursday evening (6:30, April 26th) where I'll be speaking to the Write to Publish group. Should be fun!

A few years ago, I took a writing workshop with songwriter Carrie Newcomer. She gave us a "prompt" to start us writing, with the instruction to "be brave, detailed and don't stop to think or censor." The prompt was "I've kept it all these years." Here is an abridged version of what I wrote: I still have my childhood braids, wrapped in blue tissue paper. My hair has always been a problem, ever since I insisted my braids be cut off when I was six. In junior high, my hair was very short, coarse and dark brown--not black and smooth like my sister's. It was frizzy with stubborn curls. . . I wore it with a bow in front to match my clothes or my pink glasses. In the ninth grade, I started ironing my bangs. I wanted them to be eyelash long, like model Jean Shrimpton's (whose sister Chrissie was lucky enough to be Mick Jagger's girlfriend). My mother was always at war with me over my bangs. She wasn't impressed when I showed her pictures of Jean Shrimpton. When I started making hundreds of dollars a day as a model, Mom said, I could wear my hair any way I liked. At that point, Newcomer stopped us. She told us to skip a line, then write the phrase "but what I really want to say is. . . " Here is what I wrote: But what I really want to say is--I was normal. If Mom and I hadn't argued about my hair, we would have argued about something else. If my hair had not been the focus of my angst, something else would have taken its place--perhaps my glasses, my skin, my stick-like legs. It was normal girl stuff and I wish now I could have seen that and taken pleasure in that normal aspect of myself instead of focusing on how I was different and imperfect. What a great exercise this is! I employ the concept of digging deeper ("but what I really want to say is. . ." ) all the time with my characters. First, a definition: I've used the term "meta-emotion" for years, but before committing it to my blog, I thought I'd look up the "real" definition. I discovered there are many, and none of them fit exactly what I mean, so I'll offer my own definition. Meta-emotion: that emotion that is beneath a character's actions, words and  superficial feelings. A good example: a mother can't find her child in the grocery store. She searches frantically for him. When she finds him she gives him a small swat on the bottom and scolds him, "Don't you ever leave my side in a store again!" Her action, words and superficial feelings are angry, but her meta-emotion is fear, pure and simple. We do this all the time. I bet you can think of an incident in the last few days in which your behavior and words implied a certain emotion, while your meta-emotion was something else entirely. In Newcomer's exercise, she tapped into our meta-emotions when she prompted us with "but what I really want to say is. . . " My job as a fiction writer is to understand the meta-emotions of my characters. The first draft of any of my Works in Progress is always full of dialogue and scene setting. There's very little detail. I save that for the third draft. The second draft, which I'm working on at this time, is where I search for the meta-emotion. Today, I worked on a scene in which Sara (the Mom in the story) is in conflict with (Marcus) her former brother-in-law. She says a lot of mean things. I like the scene a lot, but I (and the reader) need to understand what's behind her angry demeanor. So I asked her, "What is really going on with you?" She had to think about it for a few minutes, but then she told me how she was feeling on a meta-emotional level. It was up to me, then, to determine how much of that insight to share with my readers and how much to leave to their imaginations. But either way, I now understand Sara better and that will make for a richer character. ps   After writing that exercise in Newcomer's class, I donated my childhood braids to Locks of Love.

My books have been translated into more than 10 languages. I've been lucky enough to meet some of my readers from the Czech Republic, France, Norway, Italy and Japan. But this was a first! At a dinner party the other night, I met a reader claiming to be from Mars! I thought he was just some guy wearing a tinfoil-covered collander on his head, but he swore it was a Martian reading machine. You never know who you'll run into at parties these days!

Well, this has nothing to do with writing, unless you count the fact that my parents were always bragging about me (as well as about my other siblings), but I can't let Don Ho's passing go without a little tribute to him and the joy he brought into my parents' lives. After retiring, Mom and Dad rented a condo in Oahu for two months every winter, until they were well into their eighties. They went to see Don Ho's show one evening, and when he asked who in the audience had been married the longest, they were the clear winners. He invited them up on stage, quickly discovering that they were born hams. Dad told his goofy jokes and Mom did the hula. They were invited back several times, practicing their routine in their condo in between "performances." They had a blast. When Mom broke her hip one year after returning to New Jersey, Don Ho called her at the hospital, which let the nurses know just how special their patient was. It was very kind of him. If there's a heaven, I know John and Nan Lopresti are greeting Don Ho with open wings right now. What a lovely reunion that will be.                        

Sorry about being so quiet the past few days. I'm having some blog snags that I hope will be cleared up soon. Meanwhile, my friend Cher and I had a great trip to Topsail Island. Here are pictures of us in our respective rooms at another friend's adorable little cottage, just footsteps from the beach.    I'm getting down to the nitty gritty on the research now, filling in all those blanks I left in the manuscript as I wrote it, so it was great to spend a few days figuring out exactly where the fictional church fire would be, the location of my main characters' houses, etc.   The best part was having dinner with Ken and Angie Bogan. Ken is the Fire Marshal for the Surf City fire department and his wife Angie is a volunteer fire fighter. Since two of my central characters are fire fighters and since an arson fire and its investigation play such an important role in the book, I had many many questions for them. 45 questions, as a matter of fact! We had dinner at Sears Landing, where the manager, Chip, made us feel very welcome despite the fact that he's hobbling around on crutches and a shattered leg (four wheeler accident). Afterward, Ken and Angie took me back to the fire station so I could see some of the equipment they'd told me about firsthand. They were a huge help! Finally, I got another look at the condemned houses on the beach in North Topsail. I imagine the fictional round house (The Sea Tender) in my story to be in the location of this house, and in equally sad shape, having survived one too many storms. It stands so isolated and vulnerable on the beach, with the water inching too close. So, now I'm home. Cher, who's a college prof in California and who has been a good friend since our own college days, leaves tomorrow after a too-short trip. We had quality catching-up time, though. Now it's back to work for both of us.

My long-time friend, Cher, is visiting from San Diego, and she's going to accompany me on another research trip to Topsail Island tomorrow. We're staying in a generous friend's cottage until Wednesday. Yippee! Can't wait. I just hope the weather warms up a little. Brr. I hope to have some internet access there so I can blog. Hope you had a lovely holiday.  

Well, if you've been following my blog for a number of months, you know the various problems I've had with the character Lori, formerly known as Sue Ellen, right after she was known as Joanna. :) (An aside here: John says "never let them see you sweat" when it comes to protecting one's professional image. I tend to be too open in my life, but I prefer that to being too closed, so I may share more of my writing trials and tribulations than another writer might. I know that many of  you visit to learn about the process of writing, and that process comes with plenty of situations that make a writer sweat. I'm assuming you'd prefer I write about the reality of writing rather than about all the glamourous trappings of the writing life. . . but if I'm wrong, please tell me and I'll struggle to think of something glamourous that's happened to me in my twenty years as a writer!) Something has not felt right to me about Lori/Sue Ellen/Joanna. I had the other point-of-view characters down perfectly: Andy is a guileless little charmer, Maggie is believably conflicted, Marcus is both human and noble. But I kept forgetting Lori's name (well, duh. . . ) and she hadn't come to life the way the others had. Tuesday night I met with my critique group. If you're writing, I highly recommend getting together regularly with a group of (good) writers. I'd given them a Lori chapter to see how the character came across. Everyone felt something was missing. They couldn't quite identify what that something was, but I can. Throughout the chapter, I told rather than showed what Lori felt. That's often a problem for me in an early draft, but I'd gotten past it with the other characters. I realized I didn't know Lori well enough yet, even after months of writing about her. So I spent today getting to know her better. Part of that required yet another new name: Sara. I did some of the getting-to-know-your-character exercises I teach in my workshops. I found a picture of a woman who looks like her and taped it on my whiteboard. Then Sara hung out with me as I worked, as I went to a doc's appointment, as I grocery shopped. I really began to feel her fierceness as Andy's overprotective mother. I'd known all along what she was like, but I hadn't yet felt her heart. Today I did. Tomorrow, I'll rewrite that chapter.

While in New Jersey, I finished a book John recommended to me: THE VOYAGE by Philip Caputo. This is definitely not my usual fare, but I was engrossed by the coming of age story of three teenaged boys in the early twentieth century. At the beginning of summer, their father shocks them when he puts them aboard the family schooner, telling them he doesn't want to see them again until September. I was immediately hooked. Why would a man throw his sons to the wolves--or rather, the seas--like that? The adventures the boys have during that summer are captivating. That part of the book would get four and a half lighthouses from me. But Caputo frames their story with the historical research of the modern day granddaughter of one of the boys, which created distance from the heart of the story. The granddaughter's involvement in the novel earns a meager two lighthouses, leaving my final review at three and a half. That said, I couldn't wait to get back to the book in the evenings, and I think older adolescent boys--those who enjoy reading, at any rate--would love it.   Now I'm about two thirds of the way through MARCH by Geraldine Brooks. A yummy historical (what is it with me and history all of a sudden?) that I'm reading for my neighborhood book group. MARCH is the story of the LITTLE WOMEN's (remember Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy?) father, as imagined by Brooks. So far I'm loving it. It makes me want to reread LITTLE WOMEN What are you reading?

Wow, a whole week with my sister! We haven't spent that much quality time together since we were kids, and she couldn't stand me then so that wasn't a lot of fun. While in New Jersey, I got to see my older brother Tom  and even my little brother Rob and his wife, Terri, who were visiting from Washington State. I also had breakfast with my agent, who lives near my sister and who is such a joy to spend time with, on both a professional and personal level. Of course, the highlight was getting to cuddle with  Foxy and Duchess.  I thought you might like to see the two other writers in the family. On the left below, my brother, mystery writer Robert Lopresti and on the right my nephew, screenwriter Chris Messineo with two of my favorite people--his wife Liz and daughter Joanna.  Chris has a bunch of websites, but his latest is really cool for any aspiring screenwriters out there. Check it out.  We all had a lot of fun comparing family memories and realizing that none of us remember the same  stories the same way.  Rob and I remember our grandmother saying she worked for Thomas Edison. I remember her saying she was in an elevator with Edison's son and he tried to kiss her and she stuck her chewing gum in his mustache. My sister remembers her saying that her boss chased her around his desk prior to a gum-in-the-mustache kiss. So if you're still lucky enough to have living grandparents (or parents), get those stories straight while there's still time.  It was great returning to spring here in North Carolina. Hope it's lovely wherever you are as well.