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What are 5 Reasons why I never made it in Girl World?

Blogging, Books, Life, Writing October 25, 2012 Comments: 5

Courtesy of http://hiox.org/4241-tomboy–meaning.php.

A friend said she pictured me as the future mother of four girls.

“I don’t know about that,” I replied.

I knew I did not cut it when it came to the girl world. It was plagued with too many rules that I, as a writer, could not navigate.

During college, I got along great with guys. I watched Gameday on ESPN, talked college football and threw back Tequila. I talked about Hitler, World War II and weapons.

And, I’ll admit, I like to read books where someone is killed or something is set on fire.

Most of my writing reflects the same. Much of my fiction is written from a young man or boy’s perspective.

As a child, my friends were backyard boys with sling shots, and I looked up to my cousin who was the ultimate Boy Scout and outdoorsman. All of my students are boys. My husband and I also take our son into the great outdoors.

When my grandmother told me to remember what the professor told Jo March in Little Women: to write what you know, I am certain she never thought I would write most—not all—of my work from a young man’s point-of-view.

Growing up, I felt like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. I adored my father, lacked the best manners and I preferred the company of a trail or a river rather than a woman giving me a manicure.

A picture of me on an adventure on the Blue Ridge Parkway in September 2009.

Five Reasons I didn’t make the cut:

Lesson 1 – Read up on becoming a maid-of-honor:

I was asked to step down from being a maid-of-honor.

Apparently, maid-of-honor is more than just showing up in a dress. You plan this party, send out invites, and organize this and that.

Someone might as well have poured a bucket of ice water on my face because I had no clue.

In 2008, I lost contact with college friends as soon as I began working as a journalist. My then-editor said, “This job will make you grow up quick.”

She was right. I lost time. I forgot everything about being a maid-of-honor.

Lesson 2 — “You can’t buy friends like this.”

I joined a sorority in 2005. When fall rush came around, I was blackballed after the first night from talking to potential sisters because I voted for an African American girl and because I chose what I considered to be real, down-to-earth women.

The line thrown to girls looking into sororities is, “You can’t buy friends like this.”

When I chose to leave the sorority, our adult leader asked, “Did anyone in the sorority make you feel uncomfortable?”

I smiled the perfect grin I’d learned and said, “Absolutely not.”

Lesson 3 – Court wedding

I am twenty-seven and in my second marriage.

I know. I did not plan it that way either.

But, I cancelled the ceremony for my first marriage. What was wrong with going to the court house? There was a park and a garden nearby. That could’ve counted as flowers.

My ex-husband, mom, dad, former father-in-law and I got in line behind a teenage girl in a green dress. She had a small bump, and she stood next to who we guessed was her boyfriend. He looked like a scared wet cat with the girl’s father right behind him.

“This will do fine,” I said and I meant it.

Too many people debated about where and how I should have my wedding.

Screw the complications. Let’s just get it done.

Lesson 4 — Books over boys

I was deep in Tudor history during high school and figured I was too much of a nerd for boys to notice anyways. I stuck it out with books, and it worked out well. I went to the South Carolina summer Creative Writing program, took a writing course under author, Scarlett Thomas; worked as a journalist, became an author and met Joshilyn Jackson.

But, I also learned the hard way that romance could wait for the future. There was no need to rush something that was not there.

Books were always there.

Lesson 5 — Can’t we all be friends?

I cannot complain too much. Since three former college friends quit talking to me in 2009, I’ve been reminded of who my true friends are.

But, I once admired how guys remained close with their friends. They would argue and get over it. They were still friends.

As a teen and in college I found friendship with women more complicated than they needed to be, and I could not understand them. I thought for a long time something was wrong with me.

I learned I was just someone who was not afraid to speak out; a woman who was just discovering her voice. I was a girl becoming a woman who would not let herself be bullied or walked over anymore.

Friendship is more prominent in my writing than romance. I believe it is more important to explore. Some young adult books focus so much on the romance they forget the friendship.

It was my own childhood and high school friendships that reminded me, yes, we are friends.

There was no special code or rules. We were just friends.

By Rebecca T. Dickinson

What Writers Learn

Blogging, Books, Life, Literature, Writing July 22, 2012 Comments: 4

From http://buzzle.com

What Writers Learn

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

Not true. Words hurt. They sting.

Writers hurt more when they receive a message via text, email or phone that their work is not wanted.What writers learn depends on what they are willing to take away from their experience and apply to their work.

Think of a time when you hoped so much for something. Maybe you waited for a scholarship, and it was awarded to someone else. You wanted to make a switch from waiter to prepping food. You thought you wrote a solid news style article and the piece is rejected.

Every professional or student has lost an opportunity to meet a goal. In a time when the economy speaks for employers and says, “it’s not you, it’s me,” you might feel like the problem is really you.

I spoke with a writer two weeks ago about her work. She began writing five years ago. She was an older woman who had a lot of ideas, history and stories she wished to put to paper. One year ago, she sent a story to a literary magazine and the piece was rejected. She said, “I didn’t want to send it out again.”

In 2010, I sent work to literary magazines and anthologies for the first time in my life. I had written since I could create sentences, and I stared rejection in the face. I’ll admit I cried.

I know what you’re thinking. Rejection extends its unwanted hand from more places than literary magazines, agents or publishers. Freelance organizations, full-time and part-time employers say, “No,” give no reply, or worse, you receive a little hope and then you’re turned down.

Back at square one. No publication. No job. No money to pay the bills.

What You Do

First you stop blaming yourself. You look in the mirror, take a deep breath, and look. I mean seriously look. You say, “I’m going to meet my goals.”

Guess what? You are.

You say, “I’m going to improve ____.” The blank is for whatever you want to improve whether the challenge lies in how you edit, write a cover letter, or write AP-style instead of fluff.

You’re going take on rejection instead of it taking on you. I am not saying we’re building bullet proof word vests. You are going to map out a new plan. Ask yourself questions: What do I need to improve? What are my goals? How can I stand out in little ways?

Words make a difference. The last question could easily become frustrating if I used How can I stand out over other candidates because you begin to beat yourself up in your mind. Think of little ways to make yourself stand out.

You are going to meet your goals. They will require reading, research, and thinking out problems. Through the experience you will grow and know your answer the next time a potential employer or literary agent asks you:
What do you believe makes you stand out?

By Rebecca T. Dickinson

Falling in Love with Books

Books, Education, Life, Literature, Poetry, Writing March 9, 2012 Leave a comment

Words and Photos by Rebecca T. Dickinson

I hate plants. Perhaps I should x-out my opening sentence, and put something more appropriate. But, I do hate plants. I admire them from far away or I take pictures, but I have nothing to do with a garden.

Water nurtures the seed and soil. I know that much. Reading is the water to my writing. I feel without a strong reading life, I cannot possibly be a good writer.

A few months ago, a man interviewed me, and he asked me to audition by demonstrating my editing/ copyediting skills on his first chapter. The man worked as an engineer and understood technical writing. He said, “I haven’t read a book in twenty-five years. Don’t have time for it.”

Now he’d written a book. In his interview for a contract editor, he wanted someone well-read so he asked about the kind of books I had read.

After my audition as one of the finalists he had picked, I did not get the job. Okay, that’s cool. More opportunities have knocked on my window, but I never forgot what he said.

Books are like a great love story for me. It’s not just taking a book off my bookshelf and reading it. A story begins the moment I either look for a book, or a book enters my life.

About two months ago, my grandmother came to visit. My husband pulled some of his books out of storage. Between the two of us, we own a library and most of our books have to stay in storage for now. My grandmother looked at all the books that were once sold as paperbacks in a corner drugstore.

“Some people would look at you funny because you bought a cheap paperback,” my grandmother said and smiled. “They were considered dirty books, and now and then you just need a good dirty book.”

The paperbacks John pulled out were not pornographic. They had sold as paperbacks because they were not the classics. My books, like myself, do not share the age of my husband’s books. A good age difference exists between us, but it has not stopped us from looking at each other’s collections or swapping stories about where we found our favorites.

As for my grandmother, she felt she could not survive without books. I wrote about her relationship with literature in the post, In the Time of Hitler. My great-grandmother owned two “books” Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue and the Bible.

What is one of your favorite stories behind a book?

The Family Owned

Books, History, Literature, The Bannisters, Writing February 29, 2012 Leave a comment

By R.T. Dickinson

The Missouri man opened Joey’s Lunchroom in Bamberg, South Carolina in 1868. Joey Langston had hired workers to build a two-story wooden building. They painted it blue and added a big white sign. The post-War city developed around the railroad. Memories of cotton and slaves were but whispers among Langston’s customers.

He hired a poor white woman with the family name of Bannister. She was born in a cabin where her own mother died from fever and her father picked his teeth while he decided how to raise the girl. The broke Mr. Bannister gave his daughter to a cook. She lived near a swamp. The cook raised the girl, and taught her to fish and prepare food.

In the early days of rebuilding, Langston found Mrs. Bannister. He offered her better money than she’d ever earned. Behind her back, he called her Madame Wart because of a large red mole above her lip.

Mrs. Bannister—who made the saltiest catfish—became ill. Her heart pumped so hard a second cook swore she saw it jump out of her chest. “It was like a toad come out of nowhere,” she said.

Mrs. Bannister’s flour covered fingers started to shake. They swelled to the point each one looked like a piece of meat rolled in egg, milk and flour. Langston knew of the two women he had hired, her cooking was preferred. He could not keep her much longer. She would die on the kitchen floor. While he was not the cleanest man, nothing prospered for business if rumors circulated about a cook who died in his restaurant.

Langston thought and ordered Mrs. Bannister to bring her son.

She came with him in the early hours when empty chairs sat at empty tables, and the sun had not yet intruded. Joey stood behind the bar. He waved his hands. Mrs. Bannister gave her son, Oliver, a gentle push forward.

Wooden puppet arms and legs and lazy day blue eyes—the kind belonging to a boy who lay in a hay stack—caused Langston’s mouth to form a flat line. Not much of a boy, he thought, especially to have come from a mother with wide hips and muscular arms. He questioned what Mrs. Bannister fed her son. It looked as if he’d eaten nothing but scraps from one of Langston’s tables.

“Can the boy cook?” Langston asked.

“Almost as good as me, sir.”

“How much school do you have, son?”

The yellow hair boy looked at his mother. Joey smiled. Any boy of, what—twelve or thirteen—who still relied on his mother for every decision would do excellent work, he thought.

“He knows his letters and numbers,” Mrs. Bannister said. “He reads and writes a few words.”

“Do you speak son?”

The boy looked at his mother again.

Soon she would die from her ailments. The boy would have no mother; no person of great significance to answer his questions for him.

—–

This is the first of a series. More to come.

The Histories of a World: Real and Fictional

Books, History, Writing February 25, 2012 Leave a comment

Words and Photo by Rebecca T. Dickinson

Everything comes with history. Most people come with baggage. No matter the time period of your story, poem or the old newspaper article you have discovered as a source for a research paper, people of anytime can connect to history.

With my background in history, I have tried make it pop and sparkle for kids. In a fifth grade class—in which I recently substitute taught—fifth graders wanted to understand the death toll of World War II. How would they understand death, a reign of gun fire, bombings and some people who were at their worst?

I asked the students to stand. I selected more than half of the students, and told them to sit down. I asked those who remained standing to look around at their classmates in their seats. That might be an estimate of lives to never return home from a troop.

Or you take something with words that stirs the soul. Maybe a heavier band, Dropkick Murphies, and listen to its rendition of The Green Fields of France. You hear the story, the words, the pain and see it in the real images.

You break into a conversation about how Lord of the Rings relates to life. J.R.R. Tolkien went off to trenches with his best friends and classmates. Boys in fear laid down their lives in blood soaked mud and barbwire. Tolkien returned home without most of his friends. He started to write in the trenches.

What I admire about Tolkien is not so much the way he writes, but how much detail and history he invests into what he writes. He gives his world a history.

History of a World

A picture I took at the entrance of Mizpah Methodist Church outside of Bamberg, South Carolina. It is an original “meeting house” once used by more than one denomination.

In 2010, I sat in a class full of sci-fi writers. If I must label Sons of the Edisto, it falls somewhere in the historical/time period-family saga-coming of age genre. The guy who taught the class wrote mystery and some sci-fi. He talked about the creation of worlds.

I had to take a world lost to time and in the destruction of old buildings. When I started in 2006, I knew I had a heavy work load. I needed to research the wealth of the area and population, farming, business, style, births, African-American life, the growth of the middle class and the list goes on and on. I did this through pictures, old newspapers, books and interviews.

I learned from Tolkien. He wrote appendices found at the end of The Return of the King. I chose to write a series of prescripts or back stories. I wrote seven in all. They stand apart from my short stories, connected to Sons of the Edisto, in the way they are written. The narrator of my prescripts is more like a historian.

I plan to share parts of the prescripts in a series starting in the next week. I may have one a week or one every other week, because as you know by now, I enjoy writing about writing and books.

Why the 1920′s?

The real question for me is: Why hasn’t the period between Reconstruction and the Great Depression been explored more in modern literature? In the past few years, I’ve noticed more coming out. Besides that fact, I am falling in love with writers from the age: Richard Wright’s Black Boy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston and some work from Hemingway.

Not to mention all the fabulous clothes.

I look forward to sharing more with you. Thank you for reading.

For more information about Sons of the Edisto, please visit my ABOUT page.

A Dose of Hemingway Reality

History, Writing February 17, 2012 1 Comment

By Rebecca T. Dickinson

Of all Ernest Hemingway‘s books and stories, To Have and Have Not is not the first recommendation from an editor. The book covers I found for To Have and Have Not mostly show sailboats or ships on the ocean on a bright blue day. The cover below depicts the real colors of the book.

How I Met Hemingway

I went to a book store that sells literature for less than big brand stores. A buyer has the option to trade books for store credit. The first time I went, I thought maybe the store would play coffee house music, jazz or classical. When I walked in on a late summer day in 2011, I realized, Yeah, Becca you’re still in South Carolina.

Country music—I mean Tammy Wynette /Stand by Your Man and twang—played through the speakers. Some customers might’ve liked it. Endless biographies of Sarah Palin sat in the window. I looked for a spot to hide myself from the world and drown in words.

I hurried past the front and found the “Classics” section. I was inspired by an American Literature book given to me by my Dad’s sister. She wrote in the book, “Maybe this will be of more use to you than me.” She had worked as a librarian, but she gave me the greatest gift anyone could give me, a book. I used it to read short stories of “classic” authors and to determine if I liked their work enough to read an entire book. I took Hemingway home with me.

To Have and Have Not

Harry Morgan sets off on his first dangerous adventure from Cuba after his fishing reel breaks and he needs a way to make fast cash. He agrees to carry a group of Chinese men for good money. Once he receives the money, he kills the men’s leader. Later he is caught carrying liquor, and his boat is taken away in the time of Prohibition. His financial troubles lead him to carry a group of Revolutionaries—that stole from a bank for their cause—back to Cuba.

The book takes place during tough economic times. Hemingway examines how far one man is willing to go to support his wife and three daughters. I never felt sorry for Morgan, but I pitied his daughters. Neither Morgan nor his wife cared much for them. He is a hard and harsh man. Morgan, in my opinion, thinks he can do what he needs to do by himself.

Instead of a novel, the book reads more like a series of connected short stories. In the third part of the book Hemingway focuses on events at a bar. It includes the break-up of a marriage, and how she leaves him for another man, none of which is related to Morgan. He writes a series of characterizations of people on their yachts before the reader learns Harry Morgan’s fate. While I found some of the characters and their descriptions interesting, I could not label the book a complete novel.

I read To Have and Have Not when I challenged myself to read four other books. I read it on the same nights as Pride and Prejudice just to have something lighter to go with it. At some points, reading Hemingway’s work felt like a bad hangover when you say, “I’m never going to drink again.”

It is not a bad book. It is a masculine driven and a look at the realities of the time.

“Plenty in this town with their bellies hollering right now. But they’d never make a move. They’d starve a little every day. They started starving when they were born; some of them.”

Do not expect Morgan to have much remorse or pity for those who try to make an honest living. If you are politically correct, I would not recommend the book. If you want a challenge of classics, go for it.

Check out chewyourlipstick.wordpress.com for great book reviews.

How Place Shapes Us

Books, Photography, Poetry, Writing February 14, 2012 Comments: 4

Words and Photos by Rebecca T. Dickinson

Most people want to belong somewhere, and others never find a place to call their home. The never ending train, plane and car saga is their place. Just as characters are shaped by people who influence writers, for better or worse, land or cityscapes shape us.

I cannot thank blogger and writer, Aly Hughes, enough for her kind words about my earlier post, When Location Should Matter, in her own, Violet of the Palouse. She wrote beautiful prose and description. I decided to write a follow-up to When Location Should Matter.

If we let a sunset—like Kathryn Dawson’s work in Day Forty-Three: Sunsets & Trees—touch us, we discover the inspiration to create a character that is shaped by the land.

Every character in my book, Sons of the Edisto, and the collection of stories, Red Loam (connected to the book), owes a part of his or her character to the city or landscape. Bootlegger, farmer or wealthy son of a bookkeeper all owe something to their surroundings.

I’ve been hesitant to share anything from my book, its stories and prescript. However, the prelude poem below from the beginning of Red Loam shows exactly what I mean better than my own words.

From Red Loam

There was nothing but sand and clay there when I was born.

When time is done, there’ll be nothing but sand and clay.

Those of us born here come from that same place.

Folk say God scooped Him up some mud out of nowhere and made Adam.

That may be, but it ain’t how Bamberg folk were made.

The rich, poor, Indian, black and white were all formed from the same red loam,

and mixed and molded with the Edisto and Salkehatchie waters.

There weren’t no breath of God blown into us.

It was fire—

enough to burn down all the trees and scorch our swamps.

Cotton, tobacco and wheat rose up from that same red loam.

In the end, we all go back to the soil we claim as our own.

It owns us; all of us,

but teachers, politikers and preachers ain’t going to tell you that.

The land we fight for, pay for, and farm is patient.

It knows we belong to it.

Legends of Love in the Spring

Books, Writing February 10, 2012 Comments: 2

Words and Photos by Rebecca T. Dickinson

According to legend, spring is the season to fall in love. Everything blooms and babies are born.

In the spring of 2007, I remember thinking every animal was on schedule with the births of their babies. A duck, followed by her ducklings, crossed a walking path in April and early May. Baby rabbits hopped close to a tree or their mothers. Ah, spring the season of love.

At least spring is sometimes a season in which some writers let their characters fall in love. When Elizabeth Bennet realizes her feelings for Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the season is spring.

Do not let the spring and its legends of romance and in literature fool you.

Last week felt like spring with temperatures in the upper sixties and low seventies. Flowers started to bloom in some places. They do not have a time clock to tell them: It’s still winter.

Strange thoughts occur to me when I’m outside. My mind wonders everywhere. No fence surrounds the loose, inner-wonders of my brain. I enjoy thinking about how characters’ relationships form and friendships in my stories and other books.

From where did the idea of spring as the season to fall in love originate? Is it from the great writers, or does it stem from the fact so many beautiful things happen in the season—even in a winter that pretends it’s a temporary time for growth?

In a book as dark as The Detroit Electric Scheme: A Mystery by D.E. Johnson, a great—but dark—book, Will Anderson remembers falling in love with his former fiancé.

“Five years had passed since we fell in love. Though we had been seventeen, impossibly young, our love was destined, it seemed. But it was gone in an instant, an instant that destroyed both of our lives” (The Detroit Electric Scheme, p. 86).

A Tangled Mess

Realities of love in relationships can create a dark or tangled jungle. If characters always reflected the married life of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, a story or life would become boring. Not everyone wants the opposite end with separated fiancés, Will Anderson and Elizabeth Hume.

Relationships with depth, and often loss, attract my pen. It wants to scribble beyond the bright colors spring offers. In Sons of the Edisto, my main character, Owen Alston, struggles to understand what he feels for Aurelia Jean. She, however, is ready at one point to tell him she loves him. It is not the first thing on his mind.

Sometimes Love is …

An autumn night throwing a football with a college sweetheart.

Looking at stars and how much larger they are in an open, Georgia sky.

An hour of listening to Garth Brooks and Alabama in the car before you tell your boyfriend you want something else.

The understanding a boy has a girlfriend, who yells just as loud as all the other boys at a South Carolina football game.

Learning the art of how to say goodbye;

the knowledge to know when to let go;

and the heart’s secret that some loves last without words, rings, or ever seeing the other again.

When Location Should Matter

Books, Writing February 1, 2012 Comments: 6

I went across the bridge. I could not decide if I should wonder back, or journey toward what is unknown. The unknown is most secretive, and it shares not a single confidence with anyone or anything it knows.

Bridges, rivers, buildings, and towns - with history etched or blasted into them – have always attracted me. As a writer, I wonder what lies over a bridge. Does it lead somewhere, or is it a solitary walk for a person who seeks to escape the world?

Whenever I drove home from almost anywhere, I had to cross a bridge over the Catawba River. An old watchtower was built near the bridge and the river side. I noticed the door had long disappeared. Windows were cracked. A faded, tan rectangle—once a small tower of operation for a nearby dam—was swallowed by weeds, grass, and vines.

Did the controller who once worked in the tower have a story? What did he think when he watched the river at night? Was he a man whose wife made him miserable? Would he bring his girlfriend on the side, or was he a man who kept to himself?

What about the river? Is it the sort where water gushes over rocks after a rain storm? My husband taught me how to read the rise or lowering of the water. I could look at the rocks or even the base of a bridge. The water left a line on the place it had last touched like the sea-shore after a night of high tides.

My book, Sons of the Edisto, takes place near a river in South Carolina called the Edisto. The soil and dirt in the earth are old enough to darken the river. It is flat, moves slow, and at some points, it blends with a shallow swamp.

About two years ago, I created a place near the river for my characters to meet. It needed something to make it stand out. I ran into a problem common with many writers:

Location, location, location. That is: know the location of your story inside and out. For some, this is common sense. For others, it is letting the smallest details slip past your fingers on the keyboard.

I had done a good job traveling three or more hours to Bamberg, South Carolina. I did everything I could think of to know and understand the place with a history and personality different from my region.

I took a lot of pictures of Bamberg, and of the South Fork Edisto, a portion of the river. To recreate a setting in the nineteen twenties, I had to go beyond pictures and do a lot of research and reading. Many of the buildings on Main Street and elsewhere had been demolished.

I created a large rock in the book like the ones with which I was associated in my childhood. I had taken more trips to the Blue Ridge Mountains, played in the rivers and creeks, and at the Catawba. I knew them better than the calm-looking Edisto. My dad looked at me when I read the passage and laughed.

“There are no rocks on the Edisto,” he said. “It’s made of nothing but sand.”

He was right. I took it out. No problem. The detail of the rock appeared small at first, but I made an error on my homework. I had read about the different soils and sands around the Edisto enough to know everything about it was different. I stood nearby and photographed it.

In Books

I finished Pride and Prejudice and Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not after I went on a reading binge of five books at once. All the books I’ve read and those I am reading have a sense of place either from the author’s imagination, or his or her research.

When Jane Austen writes about Pemberley, you know where Elizabeth Bennet is walking. Austen created a character who is not only accustomed to walking, but one who often enjoys it. Each garden or path must separate itself from another place. Pemberley should not show the same garden as that of Elizabeth’s annoying cousin, Mr. Collins.

Hemingway digs darker tunnels in his worlds. In To Have and Have Not, he describes little. As in much of his writing, he is direct and leaves the reader to look in between the lines of what he has written. There are spurts of longer descriptions. He shows the bars, and what surrounds them. Hemingway is the most descriptive with water, boats, and yachts.

Both authors expose character and personality in the locations of their stories. Hemingway spends less time on lighter scenery, such as the kinds of birds flying over the water. Few moments of peace exist because his main character, Harry Morgan, is never at peace.

In what world do you place your characters? Do you have a single favorite setting? What makes it reflect your characters’ personalities?

What is your favorite location from any book you’ve read?

Please share your own stories of how you research or create your location.

Power of a Word, Part I

Writing January 16, 2012 Comments: 6

“Watch your language,” my mom would say in one of my teen angst moments.

My sixteen-year-old self replied, “Yes, ma’am.”

I waited for her to turn her back, and I muttered a smart mouth comment. The words can hurt, one word is all it takes, or the watch your words lectures entered my ears a many times. They did not sink for a long time. I thought about the phrase watch your words.

It is hard to watch a word unless you’re reading something. The power 0f one word or a phrase expands beyond the realm of teenagers who think they know everything. The idea of it knocks on the door of a writer. It waits for you to answer the door, shake its hand, and invite it onto your page. A word, any word, waits for the writer to invite it. It takes half of a second for a special guest to appear on a computer screen.

The question a writer asks his or herself is: Do I have the right word? Does it benefit the scene? The character? The thought process goes on and on to the point the mind feels numb and wants to push everything away. The creativity drains itself like the fat from beef in the frying pan. It leads to a hard knuckle punch in the writer’s own head, which I wrote about in my last blog.

Words are everywhere. Road signs jump out at us. Words are in books, on iPads, and in HTML script. Fashion models, designers, and tech-wizards all want something from words. They want to know words’ secrets. Excellent written work is in style forever. That is the power a writer has: to take a word and mold it.

I Cannot Think of a Good Description so I Turn to the –lys

In 2007, I took a class at the University of Kent at Canterbury called Reading and Writing Contemporary Fiction, taught by British author Scarlett Thomas. One day I went to my module—or class. Scarlett had a guest speaker. He placed a scene from a book on a projector screen. In editing the work, he pointed out how the writer had chosen to use many adverbs ending with

-ly.

My aunt used to bring me printing paper from her office. She tore off the sides—which if you worked or attended college in the early nineteen-nineties, you know what I mean—and stapled a booklet for me. I drew pictures of my stories. As soon as I learned how to write, I put words together like puzzles. Throughout my teen years and early college, I mostly wrote poetry. I came up with the idea for my novel, Sons of the Edisto, in June 2006. I started the research and composition. I had not realized that there was a certain science to writing fiction.

I learned more about show don’t tell listening to the guest speaker in Scarlett’s class.

Adverbs and adjectives alone are not enough to describe a character, his or her situation, or a scene. If anyone looks at alternate word for adjective, he or she will see accessory. In law, a person who drives a robber to the bank is an accessory to the crime. The person does not want police to catch him or her. If the robber is caught, he or she might give authorities the name of the accessory.

In other words, there is no hiding the –ly or a bad adjective
in front or after the noun. The noun will reveal it to readers and editors. A perfect example of an author, whose historical work I respect, is Judith Pella. I read her book Written in the Wind about three American sisters, all of whom are faced with the challenges of family and World War II. The book represents the first of four books. Pella does many things wonderful as an author, especially in her description of Russia. A repetition reoccurs like a sour note on a piano that does not fit the song. The listener hears it. The reader catches the adverbs. Passionately is a favorite word of Pella’s when she describes a kiss of any two romantic characters in the book.

Now I’m not an expert. Literary minds throughout the world have read more books than me, gone to Ivy leagues schools, and know the science of fiction and its market. I’m one of its pupils. In the years since my lessons with Scarlett Thomas, I understand more about the –ly dilemma. We, as writers and readers of the twenty-first century, live in a visual world. We must write with vision and heart.

When I Think of the Word(s)

In a general sense, many writers I’ve met with feel pressure the moment they start researching the best tips on writing a story, poem, or book. Pressure builds up, and a writer is at a loss for words. The pressure might boil down to the right word for a sentence. Joshilyn Jackson said at a conference I attended in 2010 that she wrote draft after draft of the Chapter One for gods in Alabama.

Jackson told the audience she thought her first drafts of chapters were not good. She molded one sentence out of simple words most all readers know, and created my favorite first sentence:

“There are Gods in Alabama: Jack Daniel’s, high school quarterbacks, trucks, big tits, and also Jesus.”

She pulls the reader in and demands attention with so little.

As a writer contemplates what words to place in a sentence, it should not be a game of Scrabble. I find the blank page always wins. I am guilty of over thinking. The moment my thoughts start to circle about what I’ve researched on how make a book great, I know I’m not going to accomplish much with any word I write.

The power of a first draft and its words is that it is not a manufactured item. You are not about to ship it overseas for someone else to build and then sell it back in the United States. It is all yours. Let words spill from the heart, mind, and gut. Or just talk to the gods in Alabama.

A Word or More

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