”If there’s a book that you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”  

Toni Morrison               

At one time or another, every writer has been advised to “write what you know.”  That’s valid advice- to a degree.  Sometimes, it’s possible to know too much about our subject, and our writing  becomes  imbued with a sense of boredom or didacticism rather than brimming with the excitement of discovery. 

I think writing should be a journey for the writer as well as for the reader, and the writer who carefully mines their passions and interests for subject matter will do well to look to those areas that are not only fascinating, but somewhat mysterious.

I often write about family relationships because I’m interested in the dynamics that exist in families, between siblings, parents and children, and across generations.  Besides that, I love reading about families and the way they handle the ups and downs in their lives.  In both novels I’ve written for NaNoWriMo, I’ve explored different aspects of family relationships and the legacies they leave.   During my writing I’ve come to some totally unexpected discoveries about my self and my family, discoveries that have led the story into unplanned directions.  The novel I’m thinking about for this year once again pursues this theme, concentrated on the relationship between husband and wife and the way it changes over time.

Write about what you’d like your life to be – have your characters living the dream life you’ve always wanted, and I can almost guarantee these characters will be exciting and real.  Write essays about something you’ve always wanted to explore – the Mediterranean, or Asian culture, or gourmet cooking.  Delving into your passions on paper will bring them to life in entirely new ways.

How about you?   Is there a book you’d love to read that hasn’t been written?  What do you love reading about, and how could you write about it?  What fascinates you that could become the subject for your next story, essay, poem, or blog post?

Write On Wednesday “Extra Credit” Prompt:  Make a list of 10 things you’re interested in learning more about…choose one and write about it in a way that inpsires a reader to want to know more about it as well. 

Postscript:  A couple of weeks past, we talked about The Power of Place in our writing.  Take a look at this video-post from writer Beth Kephart, as she talks about the power of place in her latest young adult novel.

Even though my week has been topsy turvy, filled to the brim with family obligations, car repairs, the beginning of fall musical activities, and of course, regular work responsibilities, I’ve felt the urge to write quite often during the middle of these hectic days.  You know what I mean – ideas popping into your head unbidden, like gifts you can’t wait to open, tickling your brain and leaving your fingers itching to pick up a pencil. 

Yet even when you get in the mood to write, circumstances aren’t always conducive to actually writing.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stop everything when the ideas start coming, and write until we’re exhausted?  Sadly, that usually isn’t the case, and writing all too often goes on the back burner of life.  So we must learn how to rekindle that urge to write, get ourselves mentally and emotionally back into the place where the imagination is free to roam.

The writer’s state of mind, says Jack Heffron, is a state of “alert passivity, a state of mind that allows us to trust our instincts and frees us to take risks.”  (The Writer’s Idea Book)   The writing state of mind occurs when our brains are alert, yet not aggressively pursuing a train of thought.  The phrase my yoga instructor uses is “willful determination without putting pressure on yourself to be perfect.” 

Have you ever noticed that your best ideas usually come when you’re doing something completely unrelated to writing?  For me, it’s usually when I’m driving to work in the morning…my brain is fresh, I’m anticipating the tasks ahead of me, and then it suddenly occurs to me that the character in my story should already be having an affair when the story starts, or that I could write an interesting essay about that one old home still standing amidst all the new office buildings along Haggerty road. 

In her book Becoming A Writer, Dorothea Brande talks about “the mysterious faculty,” which produces “the flashes of insight, the penetrating intuitions, the imagination which combines and transmutes ordinary experience into the illusion of higher reality.”  Each person has their own “individual endowment of genius,” she says.  We must only learn to “release” it.   Often, she advises, it is some totally unrelated activity – walking, driving, cutting grass or scrubbing floors – that puts the writer into a “state of hypnosis” where the unconscious thoughts are allowed to play.

The writing state of mind also occurs when you relax your brain and let your instincts take over.  One of the greatest lessons I learned as a performing musician was to let my instincts take over when I stepped on stage – to stop concentrating all my attention on each note and passage, to relax and let all the practice and preparation do the work for me.  As writers, we prepare for our writing “performances” by reading good literature, studying the way other writers work, and mostly by keeping our writer’s mind open to life experiences and the world around us, which will bring us all the ideas we could ever need.

There is undoubtedly a lot of hard work involved in good writing.  But I think there’s also something a bit mystical about the writing state of mind.  Perhaps it’s similar to what athletes call “the zone”…that place in your mind and body when you become one with the activity, when nothing else in the world matters – not hunger or pain, not ringing telephones or barking dogs -except the work in front of you.  For writers, it’s the point where you’ve tapped into that state of mind where the ideas flow freely from the deepest well of your imagination, and your fingers can barely keep pace. 

How about you?  What’s your writing state of mind these days?  How do you access that “mysterious faculty” where insight and imagination are nurtured?   How do your instincts about your writing ability help you?  What’s your experience of being in “the writing zone”?

For the past week, I’ve been immersed in reading Bridge of Sighs, a novel by Richard Russo.  The novel is set in Thomaston, New York, a small industrial town that finds itself struggling to stay alive during the post WWII era.   Lou (Lucy) Lynch, the novel’s protagonist, is doggedly loyal to Thomaston, even though chemical laden river is probably responsible for the cancer which kills his father.   This town, with it’s clear demarcations of social strata, it’s racial tensions, it’s lack of expectation and promise, becomes a focal point not just in the lives of Russo’s characters, but in the story itself. 

Reading this novel has set me thinking about the way our sense of place effects our writing.  Russo also  wrote about small town life in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Empire Falls, so it’s clearly something that preoccupies his writers’ mind.  His view is not the idyllic scene made popular by writers like Jan Karon in her Mitford series.  Russo’s characters  often seem stuck in place, as if their location were quick sand sucking them under.  They suffer, with their unfulfilled hopes and dreams tied like albatross around their emotional necks. 

Writer’s are often advised to write about what you know, and I imagine this refers to locale as well as subject matter.  Certainly it’s possible to write effectively about places you’re never lived, although to do it well would require much research and surely some personal visits.  But I think we are drawn to write about the places that have touched our hearts, that dwell within us, sometimes more deeply than we even know.  I think we develop a realtionship with the place we live, it’s geography, it’s society, it’s history, and that relationship is reflected in the way we write about place, in the location of our stories, and the environments we imagine.  Our readers will feel this deep relationship, and it will transport them more directly into the setting about which we write. 

I lived my entire life in the midwest, in the suburbs of Detroit, surrounded by working class people who live comfortably, but don’t have a great deal of “extras.”   Although my physical roots are here in the midwest, I also have spiritual roots, places that seem to call to me even though I’ve never spent much physical time in them.  The American south, home to my maternal ancestors, holds a great fascination for me, and I occasionally feel a surprising longing to be amidst the great Smoky Mountains, or wander barefoot through cool Kentucky bluegrass.  And the three weeks I spent traveling in the South of England, staying in little towns scattered throughout Kent and Sussex, felt oddly comfortable, as if I were returning to a place I’d once lived rather than visiting a foreign country for the first time. 

It makes me wonder if our spirits have a memory, if the places we’ve come from over time become engrained in souls.  Toni Morrison wrote, “You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage.  Occasionally the river floods these places.  “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding, it is remembering.  Remembering where it used to be.  Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

In her book, Writing Begins With the Breath, Larainne Herring asks “What does your piece of the earth talk about? What stories are hidden in the houses? The unpaved streets? The rusted mailboxes? You don’t have to travel the world to find your landscape.  You’ve grown up in one, and whether you connect with it or know without a doubt you’re in the wrong place, you’re still affected by it.  We’ re all people.  It’s the place we’re living in that shapes our behavior, attitudes, desires, and activities.”

How about you? How does place figure in your writing?  Do you feel comfortable in the place you live, or do you feel at odds with your atmosphere? Do you convey that in your writing?  What stories does your location have to tell?

Write On This:  

“The loss of a place isn’t really so different from the loss of a person.  Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence.”   Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo

Write about a place you’ve lost….