Month: June 2017

Writing Tip — Typing Vs. Writing

hands-1373363_1280I have a confession to make. I know this makes me a unique antique, but I am going to state it anyway: I write almost all my first drafts by hand. With a pen. On paper. In cursive. Horrifying, isn’t it?

It’s how I started writing. In junior high and high school, to relieve boredom, I wrote on any handy scrap of paper I had. No one had smart phones, or even dumb ones then. But as computers have become more and more personal until now they are practically a member of the family we take everywhere, I still can’t write directly from my head to a screen. Unless it is something very short, like “Monday Sparks”.

screen-1315650_1280There’s something so demanding about a blank screen, just sitting, glaring, waiting, waiting, waiting for me to fill it. I can write for an hour and have only one decent sentence to show for it. I can see the screen arch a digital eyebrow as if to say, “Is that all?”

On paper, if I only come up with one sentence after an hour, I may have five sheets of rejected ideas to revealing how I spent my time. Also I can go back and try to salvage some of those ideas if I want to. All those filled sheets are very reassuring to me. And seeing my writing in my own hand makes it truly mine.

I have tried, on many occasions, to write directly to the screen.  I don’t get far. Even if I’m editing an already-typed chapter and need to make a lengthy change, I have to go back to paper.

It just feels so unnatural to me to type my first draft, like sculpting with oven mitts or painting by using a remote-controlled robot. I must touch the pen, feel the paper under my hand to truly write.

I hope I haven’t shocked you. Does anyone else write before typing? Doesn’t anyone write in cursive? I’d love to hear your process from first-draft to finished product.

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Monday Sparks — Writing prompt

class-255620_1280Write your favorite memory from the last day of school.

One of my favorites was this year when my kids got out of school.  I had the car packed, ready to go, and as soon as that final dimissal was announced, we jumped in the car, heading out onto the open road, leaving the grind for the past nine months in our dust.

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Writing Tip — Writing in Time — June

class-1986501_1280More than January, I feel like June is the start of new things, the month of great possibilities. With the end of the school year and the beginning of summer vacation, the month signals throwing off our normal routines and preparing ourselves for something new.

June seems perfect for starting an adventure story, especially if your main character is a kid or a teen. The freedom from school seems to call for a story where something radically different or exciting happens to the main character. You can have the story take place over a summer, wrapping up before school starts and normal life takes over again.

one-hundred-days-baby-1616112_1280Father’s Day is in June.  It can be a setting for exploring male relationships within a family. Like I wrote in May for Mother’s Day, you can write a story, only set on Father’s Day over a number years, to show how the male characters change.

This year the summer solstice is on June 21. Many traditions are associated with this solar event, making it a perfect time for a story of speculative fiction or historical fiction. In the little bit of research I did, I read in The Summer Solstice by Ellen Jackson that the Chumash of California and the Anasazi of New Mexico created ways to mark the sun on the solstice. She also tells an abbreviated version of a solstice story involving Maui, “a mythological hero of Polynesia.”

summer-solstice-1474745_1280According to Farmer’s Almanac, the new year in ancient Egypt began on this day because the Nile started rising. Europe had many traditions to celebrate the day, the best known being the one immortalized by Shakespeare in a Midsummer Night’s Dream: fairies were out and about at this time.

With the coming of Christianity to Europe, the pagan celebrations were given new meaning because now they honored John the Baptist, St. John’s Day, on June 24.  Still superstitions persisted.  In The Folklore of American Holildays, if girls in North Carolina “pare an apple round and round without a break in the peeling and throw the peel over the left shoulder, it will form the initial or initials of your future husband.” On June 23, Midsummer’s Eve, in England “great bonfires were built” in which “people threw herbs, gathered by moonlight, as charms against witchcraft.”

June has such wonderful possibilities as a setting.  Let the adventures begin!

 

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