Writing Full Tilt

“You’re in pretty good shape,” Dr. Ivers told Norman. “Any questions?”

“No, not about me, but I think my wife’s hearing is getting worse.”

“I see. Well, here’s something you can try to see if you’re right.”

        Norman went home and followed the doctor’s advice. As soon as he stepped in the front door, he saw Sylvie down the hall and in the kitchen, her back to him as she stood at the kitchen sink.

            “What’s for dinner?” Norman called out.

            No answer.

            Norman moved halfway down the hall. “What’s for dinner?” he asked again.

            No answer.

            He came up behind Sylvie and said once more, “What’s for dinner?”

            Sylvie turned to him and answered, “For the third time, we’re having lasagna.”

This joke, like most jokes, is about lots of things: hearing, relationships, perceptions, and self-awareness. But it’s also a good place to start talking about dialogue. What exactly is it? How does it work? How much do we let our characters say directly to each other, to themselves, to the world at large? For lots of writers, it’s easier to control the story with a narrator who speaks directly to the reader. Dialogue, on the other hand, can feel riskier. What if our characters reveal something we hadn’t intended them to? Or express annoyance at the way the story is going?!

Dialogue comes from the Latin dioalogus and from the Greek dialogos: dia meaning across or between, and logue meaning roughly to speak. Therefore, dialogue means a conversation between two beings. But characters do just what we do: they give monologues, have inner dialogues, give diatribes, one-sided conversations, talk at someone, and talk to themselves. Which means writers have numerous ways to let our characters be out loud even inside their own heads.

Dialogue accomplishes several things at once. It gives an immediate and often intimate sense of a character, while also establishing and developing relationships between characters and the reader. It can inform us of backstory and, at the same time, ratchet up plot tension. Dialogue allows a character to be developed through their way of interacting with others. We have plenty of examples: television, films, and plays are nearly all dialogue partnered with visual information. Most of what we know about the story comes from what characters tell us. In life, conversations happen around us all the time: coffee shops, supermarket aisles, public transportation, museums. We often hear only one end of the conversation. As we listen, we fill in the voice on the other end. We notice what catches our attention; what keeps us listening; how the conversation is pushed back and forth; what is essential and what is filler; what questions surface; what happens when no answers arrive; and what agenda each speaker has.

Am I condoning listening in? Yes, with polite respect. We have a real-world classroom where the rhythms and conversational shortcuts can be learned. If we were the proverbial fly on the wall at Norman’s and Sylvie’s house we might laugh, but we would also learn their assumptions and acceptances of each other. We would want to know what happens next. Unlike a good joke, dialogue doesn’t always have a punchline, but it does allow the reader to be present as the characters grapple verbally with the lives they are living. Listen in and let your characters have their say.

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

Prompt Photo

On December 21^st, 2006, a massive blizzard hit Ft. Collins, Colorado. It was a storm that pummeled the region and thrashed the trees across the city. Its winds blew down powerlines and the thick snowfall whited out neighborhoods, piling and drifting multiple feet high. This was a storm that challenged even the experienced citizens along the Cache La Poudre River and up into the Colorado Front Range mountains. While the snow, wind, and cold took hold of the city, a woman, who believed she was prepared, went into labor. Her apartment door was blocked by a wall of snow. She called for an ambulance, but it had no chance of getting through. The police told her to hold on. She waited, listening to the storm shake the building and felt the intensity of her contractions increase. Her phone rang and a voice said, “Put on your warmest clothes, and wait by your front door.” She did as she was told. Within the hour she heard a repeated horn blast. She opened her door and saw headlights and coming toward her over the snow was the bucket of a front-end loader. “Get in!” yelled a voice. She crawled over the wall of snow and into the bucket, which had been padded with blankets. The truck backed away from the building, turned and carved its way through the streets, carrying her aloft and swaddled as the storm wailed and walloped everything around it. The truck came to a stop beside a waiting ambulance that took the woman to the hospital where she safely delivered her baby.

If ever weather was a character in a story, this is one such tale. The weather is the antagonist, developing as the story unfolds. It runs the plot before it and shapes the actions of every other character. And need I say anything about atmosphere?! It’s not too dramatic to say in this instance that the story would never have happened if it hadn’t been for the blizzard. And I do wonder if we writers allowed more weather into our stories, what might happen? It may be merely a minor difference between light fog and thin mist or a few degrees that change a balmy conversation to a sultry argument. Weather or a change in weather is often just enough to shift a mood or an action or a tone of voice. And if you have doubts, consider these opening lines and what happens next!

                        The sun did not shine.

                        It was too wet to play.

                        So we sat in the house

                        All that cold, cold wet day. 

                                                The Cat in the Hat

                                                Dr. Seuss

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

Prompt Photo

When my daughter was about six months old, she was asleep in her bedroom, or so I thought, while a friend and I had a challenging discussion. We talked for about half an hour then he left. Ten minutes after, I heard my daughter repeat the conversation verbatim. Well, verbatim is Latin for ‘word for word.’ She wasn’t using words. She repeated the conversation in the exact sounds my friend and I had used—rising and falling rhythms and tones, stressing certain combinations, and letting others fade. I could hear our voices in hers. In her ‘preverbal’ phase, she captured the essence of communication: a pattern of sounds that have meaning.

In the writing workshops I lead I very often hear a writer say before reading their just-written work: I didn’t get to where I want to go. What does this statement and my daughter’s nonverbal articulation of a conversation have in common? The mystery of language. How it gives us voice and how we use it to find meaning.

Like my daughter, we writers know that the rhythms and music we use in language are closest to the emotions we want to express. Through that expression we can then make better sense of what we mean. As the linguist Robin Lakoff once said, “How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?”

I’m no linguist or neuroscientist, but the experience of hearing my daughter and hearing many writers brings me to a question about the inner dialogue every writer of every language is having when they begin to write. It’s a conversation among feelings, thoughts, memories, imagination, ideas, and words. What we have in our heads, hearts, and bones transforms and leads us as we give it expression through writing. If we let our writing come directly from that near-nonverbal place, we get closer to what we feel and want to let onto the page, and it’s no wonder that our writing is then leading us rather than us leading it. Perhaps this is part of the mystery of writing. I hear curiosity, wonder, and frustration when people say, “This didn’t go where I thought it would.”

As I listened to my sixth-month old daughter singing the conversation she had overheard, I marveled at the intricacies of human speech. An argument is understood as an argument no matter what language we’re listening to. The music in language gets us closer to the meaning we want to convey. Letting the music lead us rather than insisting it follow what we want to say very often results in stunning examples of work that is moving and true.

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

Prompt Photo

The other night the wind bellowed through the high pines, tearing through, and cracking branches, scattering them across the ground like sentence fragments. It howled in a song of pressure, tumult, and global currents. The white pines thrashed, and the black birches jittered; the wind shook them to their roots.

Last week my ninety-two-year-old uncle talked about caring for his wife in her dementia before she died. He spoke of watching her pain and her anger at him when he tried to help, and his grief because she no longer knew who he was. His voice, no longer sturdy, held every moment of her confusion, their shared exhaustion, and his steadfastness. He spoke of his beloved, then he told me that he was preparing the Feast of 7 Fishes for his family of twelve. “Linguini and clams to begin,” he said.

The voices of the trees and my uncle got me thinking about the writing I hear every week. My job is to listen, to attend, to comprehend, to be attuned. I am witness to and participant in the universes created in my presence. I think deeply about the quality of listening that every being needs. Both the wind and my uncle have hard and loving stories to tell. Listening is my job. I have the privilege to receive not only what is being told to me but to witness the creation of story. One very revered book says: ‘In the beginning was the word.’

It is my honor to witness without putting myself in the way of the narrative. Listening has become a kind of devotion. In these short, dark days, the light we afford each other is through leaning in, quieting the busy mind, the striving nerves, and opening ourselves to another being’s truth and mystery. My years of teaching and writing have revealed that every creature has a profound and fundamental need to be heard. By listening, we allow for breathing, healing.

The treetops swept and scoured the sky, cleaning the debris and bringing clarity to the air that followed. We can’t always bring the stars, the miracle oils, the frankincense, the angel bells, or the feather dusting of pure, driven snow. A great deal is asked of us in these short, dark days. We are remembering, hoping, waiting for the return of light. We fear the dark and the silence, but it’s when we’re out of the glare and in the quiet that we most often recognize what we need most: to find each other and listen to the whispers of our hearts.

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

Upcoming Events

Weekly Writing Workshops

I offer a free-range writing experience based in respect, serious exploration and a sense of play. Each workshop includes a variety of voices and an opportunity to share a manuscript with the group.

This eight-week session is $360 Contact: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Monday Evenings: 6:30 a.m. – 9:00 p.m. EST January 16th – March 6th

Prompt Photo

We ask ourselves and each other this season what makes us feel grateful. We are told It is better to give than receive. So why then, do I hear so often a kind of grudging appreciation for or a disbelief in one’s own gift of writing? Is it because we need so little in order to do it? Is it because so many of us believe we are not really doing it at all? Or not doing it correctly? Or is it because so many writers tell us that writing should be painful and difficult?

I’m going to offer a kind of blessing or meditation, if you will, on accepting the gift that is writing.

Writing allows me to:

See inordinate humanity through characters

Open to the details that construct the universe

Enter times and places not physically possible

Let go of the static that clouds and drains the mind and spirit

Examine difficulties like turning a prism

Join a community of fellow writers

See and hear a true voice

Play with created beings who surprise

Grieve with birds and oceans and stones

Separate the inconsequential from the necessary

Fall in love with an ant

Rain fury on a bully, an invader, a scourge

Recognize the genius of unexpected phrases

Slow the onrush of fear or face it fully

Hold shadows up to the light

Drive everywhere and stay curled tight

Listen to animals speak, or silverware, or shoes

Call upon ancestors to say their truths

Remember everything even when there are gaps

Alter the atmosphere within

Change the fabric of stubborn beliefs

Calm the heartbeat and steady the sails

Offer fragility and honesty

Simply be

Come home. Always come home

What we create is of value for all these reasons and more. To write is to use the gift that allows us to be ourselves. Add to the list; create a new one; notice how your writing brings you to your truest self. This gift is yours to give and keep.

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

Upcoming Events

Weekly Writing Workshops

I offer a free-range writing experience based in respect, serious exploration and a sense of play. Each workshop includes a variety of voices and an opportunity to share a manuscript with the group. The ten-week sessions are $500 Contact: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Tuesday Mornings: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST November 29th – February 14th

Friday Mornings: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST December 2nd – February 17th

Prompt Photo

When I was in high school, one of the best surprises was to come home and find my mother’s friend, Sophia, sitting on the couch, smoking cigarettes, and gossiping in a throaty voice, her high heels kicked off and her lipstick leaving kisses on her coffee cup. Sophia was a writer’s dream. She was a bit shocking and laughed from deep in her chest. I was riveted. She was, literally, a character. But she was also a lesson on characters. What made her dress the way she did? Why did even her light-hearted comments contain a bit of sharp wire? What exactly made this woman tick? Sophia spoke to me with respect, but I was soon dismissed by my mother who knew how strange her conversations with Sophia could become. Reluctantly I went off to do homework, but I harbored all my observations about Sophia.

Fictional characters are the same, they arrive, and we writers are not teenagers easily shooed away. Lots of great books on writing techniques offer strategies for developing a character. These techniques include making a list of what a character has in their pockets or glove compartment; what they eat for breakfast; their favorite color; what keeps them up at night; whether they went to the prom, and if they did, what did they wear? All great questions that can result in vivid and useable answers. But it’s a bit like cataloging ingredients rather than tasting the cake. Spending time with Sophia was delicious.

Our characters need to surprise us, just as Sophia did one day when I arrived home and found her weeping on the couch. A fearless woman, Sophia cared little for other’s reactions. Being fourteen, I only got the broad strokes, but Sophia had ‘legal troubles’ which I later learned meant she had been arrested for shoplifting. It’s fine to not know everything about our characters. Their mysteries offer philosophical questions. If Sophia was a character in a novel, I would ask for her side of the story. I would let her give it to me evasively, defiantly, shamefully or fiercely. I would accept her lies and her truths, because all of it tells me who she is. So, take a pie to your character’s house, meet them at a coffee shop, walk up to them at the copy machine at work, or ask them a question at the school open house. And keep asking yourself: What is going on here? How did this happen? Why would they do that? You will and you won’t get straight answers. Write both.

Have a question about writing that you would like to have answered in the newsletter? Send me an email with “Newsletter Question” in the subject line. I will choose questions that best suit the writing community: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Publications

Maud & Addie “Sure to enchant, Maud & Addie is a touching novel complete with old skeletons, new friends, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.” Vivian Turnbull, Foreword Reviews. To purchase: https://regalhousepublishing.com/product/maud-and-addie/

blessed are the menial chores “Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.” Sue Brannan Walker, poet laureate of Alabama 2003 – 2012. Purchase here: https://www.writingfulltilt.com/author/

Upcoming Events

Weekly Writing Workshops

I offer a free-range writing experience based in respect, serious exploration and a sense of play. Each workshop includes a variety of voices and an opportunity to share a manuscript with the group. The ten-week sessions are $500 Contact: maureen@maureenbjones.com

Tuesday Mornings: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST November 29th – February 14th

Friday Mornings: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST December 2nd – February 17th

Prompt Photo

As writers, we look for meaning in just about everything. Our lives are woven with metaphors and significance, often in objects, random images, or bits of conversation. We wonder what’s underneath the surface, and, because we are writers, we ponder and wrestle to make something of it.

Years ago, I searched for toothpicks in the supermarket, which I thought was a logical place to find them. I looked in the baking aisle because people use toothpicks to test a cake. No toothpicks. I looked in the vegetable section, thinking people use toothpicks to hold canapés together. Nope. I checked the section for drink mixers picturing olives in martinis. No dice. I went to the hardware aisle remembering my father using toothpicks for shims or breaking them into small bits as filler in furniture repairs. Nothing. I wasn’t particularly frustrated, because I do like the thrill of the hunt, but I was increasingly puzzled. The lure of the search and discovery is another fine trait we writers share. But I had limited time, so I broke down and asked a store clerk. Now, asking for help is not only a reasonable part of any research, it can also lead to rich and unexpected interactions. The clerk led me to household cleaning products and pointed to the top shelf. Next to the row of bottles and cans of furniture polish were the toothpicks. I was baffled. “Why are they here,” I asked. The clerk looked at me as though I was rather dim, and said, “Because they’re wood.”

I have considered that answer for years. First of all, it is downright poetic and a gift at the end of my determined exploration. I continue to find those words incredibly funny and satisfying. The why of where toothpicks should be stored is a question leading to the profoundly infinite logic we humans use to act out our lives. I also realized that an adventure contains a likely surprise if we let it find us. But I think my favorite meaning is that even a toothpick can lead us deeply into ourselves and an understanding of others. “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Upcoming Events

Open Spots in Weekly Writing Workshops:

These three-hour workshops offer the belief that every writer is developing their craft, that respect is the foundation of all artistic support, and that each session is a time for serious and playful exploration and experimentation. Workshops include the opportunity for a manuscript review. Please join me! maureen@maureenbjones.com

Tuesday Mornings 9:30 – 12:30 EDT Online September 13 – November 15, 2022

Friday Mornings 9:30 – 12:30 EDT Online September 16 – November 18, 20222

Photo Prompt

I have been refurbishing my kitchen cabinets. No small feat, given they were built by hand in the 1940s by someone who apparently enjoyed eyeballing the measurements. One of the issues was the top facings that attach to the ceiling. For some reason the ends of these structures were not closed off.

Simultaneously, I have been teaching a flash fiction course to high school students. They were struggling with their endings. “Don’t we all?” I said, to which I received blank looks. I suggested that endings are over-rated. But most readers need some sense of landing or further direction.

The cats in my house love the open-ended nature of the empty cabinets. They had free range in the upper levels of the shelving, leaping from one gap to the next. The students, however, wanted better resolution. We all got back to work.

To solve my cabinet problem, I went to the hardware store and, without the proper vocabulary, described my problem. A solemn man in suspenders listened without blinking then said, “Soffits.” I said yes, knowing we weren’t talking about exactly the same thing, but did have the same concept. Endings are tricky like that: How to close off a running leap, a character on a trajectory. The answer is to not close off the story completely or maybe offer surprise. When the students read their endings, they all had breathing room, a bit of ventilation for the reader to consider. My cabinet ‘soffits’ are not airtight either. Their endings leave just a bit of mystery for the cats.

Upcoming Events

Maud & Addie has been selected by the Children’s Book Council for inclusion in their upcoming Kids Choice Awards! If you know any kids who love to read adventure tales, please pass the word! Voting is open until August 22nd. Only kids can vote!

Ages 8-11: Favorite World Changer

Ages 12-14: Favorite Book Cover

Photo Prompt

Narrow Conversations

When I was in college, a journalism professor gave an assignment to keep a journal. Not a radical idea, but the further instructions were to choose one subject and keep to it throughout the semester. The professor gave us her own example of living in China on a year-long assignment, during which her father died. She couldn’t go home, couldn’t be with her family, couldn’t share her grief with anyone. So she kept a journal for one year in which every day she wrote something about her father. It was her only way to honor him, grieve him, and keep him close. We students, of course, could choose any topic. I was surprised to find the limitation of one subject to be very reassuring. It was doable. My empty page did not have to, should not, include the universe. The journal pages became small, strong structures that held me to a focus and let me run crazy within the page dimensions. This is the function of form, whether in poetry or prose. Experimentation with form is always invited, and relinquishing ourselves to boundaries can allow a different kind of independence.

But over the years I forgot this lesson. Even as I offer form in my own workshops, I often feel clumsy and inept in the face of a sonnet or the strictures of flash fiction. And then my dear friend, Jan Haag, who leads writing workshops in Sacramento, offered a 30-day version of my professor’s assignment. Every day, four lines. No need for more. Now, my friend did not specify that it had to be one subject, but I chose to combine the original journal keeping idea with this current journey. I decided to have a conversation with a very important person in my life. The four lines became a support or scaffolding, not a restriction. They became a conversation the You and I could finally have. As a result, 30, four-line poems express aspects of my chosen subject. And the thing about this way of writing is that it becomes a meditation, a tight lens, and a close examination of someone’s way of speaking, the way they licked their spoon, the thickness of their hair, the bitterness or joy as they walked away or toward, or the way they pointed to a red winged blackbird and said, ‘Summer will come again.’

Upcoming Events

Maud & Addie remains a finalist, no gold, silver or bronze in the Foreword Reviews best juvenile fiction awards. Thank you for your crossed fingers! The books that did win are beautiful creations: The Beatryce Prophecy, Tiger Skin Rug, and Oddity. I am proud to be in such company!

This summer I will be teaching a Flash Fiction course for high school students at Smith College. After which, I just might give myself time to work on the second Maud & Addie book as well as my adult novel Slide Show.

Prompt Photo

I was raking the leaves yesterday, clearing away the decayed vestiges of last year’s foliage even as this year’s leaves flaunt their newly minted green. The idea of a tidy forest floor is actually an oxymoron. No one rakes in the woods. And, as usually happens when my hands are occupied with a physical task, my mind went on its merry way somewhere else. I was imagining the decomposition of the leaves, and the busy activity that happens underground, connection upon connection, and the phrase “Mycorrhizal fungi mutualism” surfaced. A subterranean world came alive with a vast network of connections multiplying into the gazillions. Connections, information, sustenance, and mutual assistance for survival. So busy! So purposeful! And so dependably trusting. Even in a one-liter potted houseplant, one kilometer of these fine fungal filaments can be present to assist the plant’s growth with access to water and nutrients. What on earth (pun intended) does this have to do with writing? I think our brains are like the Mycorrhizal fungi if we allow them to be. We have been taught to make sense, which is necessary for survival. We need to communicate our need for food, safety, warmth, shelter, comfort. We need to be clear and direct to manage healthy relationships. But in our creative minds we need a vast organism that willingly, trustingly, makes connections out of random bits of knowledge, experience and sensations when we first begin to write. Knowing exactly where we’re going takes the fun out of tunneling, surfacing, and tunneling more. Our memories and our imaginations work in tandem. They, like mycorrhizal fungi and most of earth’s plants, have a mutualism that forms the foundation of creative inspiration. Building connections and free associations is how we make meaning, which is an organic cousin to making sense. Creating a metaphor requires going deep, letting the detritus and debris become fertile. By roaming and excavating, committing to the deep nutrients of our imaginations and memories we invite vibrancy and a living, green voice to our pages. We are sprung from within.

Upcoming Events

Winners for the Foreword Review Best Books of 2021 to be announced in June

Maud & Addie is a finalist for Middle Grade Books! Stay tuned for news and keep your fingers crossed!!

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