My day job requires a great deal of attention to detail – I’m a medical technical writer, and I spend a lot of time studying medical records, organizing and documenting the results of all types of medical procedures.  I’ve always been rather detail oriented, so my job fits my personality pretty well, and my penchant for describing minutiae stands me in good stead at my office.  

However, I’d much rather spend my time observing the details of the world around me and writing about them.  After all, to quote a favorite children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, “the world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”   As the first days of autumn approach, my senses are piqued by the sweet aroma of grasses drying in the sun and ripening apples on the old trees in my orchard.  I pull on a sweater when I get up in the morning, and smile at the way the dogs’ warm breath makes little clouds of fog in the chilly air when I open the back door.  Sometimes I feel as if I could write entire stories about the way autumn makes me feel, or the sensation that rises from hearing a marvelous pianist play Chopin on stage in front of me. 

I love novels that are rich in detail – that describe the character’s movements and outfits and the way they hold their fork or brush their teeth.  And I love poetry that is grounded in the reality of everyday things, but which is able to elevate those things to a spiritual status, use them as doorways into our deeper feelings.  (Mary Oliver does this so well, as does Jane Kenyon, Billy Collins, and Robert Frost.)  In my own writing, I try to pay close attention to the telling details of conversation, of place, of activity, of emotion.  These are the things that transport me into the story, bringing it alive for me as I write, and hopefully for the reader as well.

Because I’m an optimist, I like to dwell on positive details…but negative details can certainly be used to advantage in writing as well.  The particular odor that assailed my nostrils each time I walked into the nursing home where my grandmother spent her last days conjures up all kinds of memories and emotions.  As does the smell of iodine in the dark stairwell leading up to the second floor of an old office building where my childhood physician’s office was located.  Or the sound of an ambulance siren, screaming down the street, recalls the panic I felt when I was being taken to the hospital after suffering a severe reaction to an insect bite.  Entire stories can grow from those kinds of detailed memories and experiences.

It’s all in the details, says the old saying.  While I spend my office hours knee deep in medical terminology and statistics, when I walk out the door I love to let my imagination roam free, my mind’s eye feasting on all the details of the world around me.

How about you?  Are you detail oriented in your writing?  What are some of the details you most notice in the world around you?  What details do you focus on in your writing – place, character, emotional?  What are the kinds of detailed descriptions you most like to read about? 

Write On Wednesday Extra Credit: As you perform a household chore that you do on a regular basis – making coffee, washing the car, cutting the grass – notice every detail of the process. The smell of the coffee grounds as you spoon them into the filter, the hiss of the water as it splashes against the car, the rumbling of the lawnmower’s engine.  Write about your experience in great detail.

The first day of school is fast approaching, isn’t it?  The stores are full of shiny new notebooks and pens, and I find it hard to resist scooping up huge assortments of everything I see.

In fond memory of school days, with homework pages of questions to answer, this week’s Write On Wednesday is in the form of a questionaire.  So, take out a fresh sheet of paper, (don’t forget to put your name and today’s date in the top right hand corner!) and answer these questions please.  Completed assignments may be posted on your blog, or in the comments below.

Begin!

1. Do you write fiction or non-fiction?  Or both?
2. Do you keep a journal or a writing notebook? 
3.  If you write fiction, do you know your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts before you start writing or is that something else you discover only after you start writing? Do you find books on plotting useful or harmful?
4.  Are you a procrastinator or does the itch to write keep at you until you sit down and work?
5. Do you write in short bursts of creative energy, or can you sit down and write for hours at a time? .
6. Are you a morning or afternoon writer? 
7. Do you write with music/the noise of children/in a cafe or other public setting, or do you need complete silence to concentrate?
8. Computer or longhand? (or typewriter?)
9. Do you know the ending before you type Chapter One?  Or do you let the story evolve as you write?
10. Does what’s selling in the market influence how and what you write?
11. Editing/Revision – love it or hate it?

 I’m never quite sure how to answer when people ask what I “do.”  Of course, I know they’e really asking what I do for a living, so I usually take the easy way out and say I’m an adminisrative assistant, or perhaps I’ll say I’m an admin and a musician.

I never say I’m a writer.

Why is that?  Since I began blogging a couple of years ago, I’ve logged nearly as many hours at this keyboard as I have at my office computer, and certainly more than I’ve spent at the ivories.  I’ve written over 600 blog posts, completed two novellas, and dozens of poems and haiku.

But none of my friends (aside from all of you) and only a few of my family members have any idea that I’ve been doing all this scribbling in my spare time.

So why am I hoarding this little secret? 

Is it because I don’t consider myself a “real writer?”  What does it take to be a “real writer”?

In the past, it’s been easier for me to define myself as a musician, because people listen to my music. The reward of playing for an audience is immediate and intoxicating. You see their reaction in the smiles on their faces, you feel their involvement in the energy that pervades the room, you hear their enjoyement in the excited applause. I admit that I love that instant reaction, that feeling of providing the audience with something that entertains and enlightens them.  But I’ve recently curtailed a lot of my musical activities, and for the first time in many years, I’m going into the fall season without any musical responsibilites other than my church choir.  Cutting back on my musical involvement was deliberate, a way to give myself more time to pursue other activities- like writing.

The writer’s “product”~the essay, the story, the poem~is “consumed” somewhere else. The feedback is rarely immediate, and sometimes doesn’t come at all.  We often must be content with a private sense of accomplishment, the satisfaction of a story well told or a metaphor perfectly placed.  The “real world” rewards – recognition and financial success – are few and far between.

The internet, and specifically the experience of blogging, has changed this scenario.  Suddenly our words can be read by someone, somewhere, who might find them meaningful. However, there are those who don’t consider blogging “real writing,” decrying it is nothing more than glorified journal keeping.  Personally, I’m thrilled that the internet has provided writers like us with a place to share our stories, our perspective, our experiences, and ~even more exciting~ to engage in a dialogue with other writers. At least in this space, I find myself much more comfortable saying that I am a writer.

Perhaps, some day, I’ll be able to say it to the rest of the world as well.

  How about you?  Do you consider yourself a writer? Do you think blogging is “real writing?” What does it take to be a “real writer”?

Mille grazie,  Miz B, one of the Write On Wednesday regulars, for honoring WOW with it’s first blog award! 

Brillante  is occasionally written as a musical direction, meaning to play with “verve and excitement.”  It requires hours of practice to achieve that goal at my piano keyboard, and the end result of our work at the computer keyboard takes an equal amount of effort.

Just this morning I was reading Natalie Goldberg’s book, Writing Down the Bones.  In her chapter entitled Writing As A Practice, she says this:

Writing practice embraces your whole life and doesn’t demand any logical form.  It’s a place that you can come to wild and unbridled, mixing the dream of your grandmother’s soup with the astounding clouds outside your window.  It is undirected and has to do with all of you right in your present moment.  It’s our wild forest where we gather energy before going to prune our garden, write our books and novels.  It’s a continual practice.

I’m really enjoying sharing part of my writing practice with all of you - your words provide great inspiration and insight for the journey.  In my book, you are all Brillante!

My son is a fabulous story teller – he always has been, even before he could talk intelligbly.  He’d stand proudly in the midst of  family circle, draw himself to a full 30 inches, and pontificate for 10 minutes in complete gibberish.  We all attempted to laugh or looked dismayed in the appropriate places, but mostly we just wanted to yell “What in the world are you trying to say?”

As he grew and developed a command of the language, his stories began to take on familiar themes – there were usually characters doing something stupid and being saved by other ultra smart characters.  Plenty of explosions and car chases were involved.  The stories got more complex as he aged, yet the basic themes remained the same.  He found his line.

I think once you’ve found your voice, your theme, your preoccupation, then your writing life becomes a lot simpler.  You begin to focus your vision of the world through that lens, and pretty soon you start relating everything you see and everything that happens to you in terms of that focal point.  There’s an old adage every writer is familiar with – write what you know.  I’d take that a step further and say write what you care about.

I’m an only child.  I’m married to an only child, the mother of an only child, and the daughter of an only child.  Does it surprise you that my writing is preoccupied with family relationships?  It’s not really even a conscious decision – no matter what kind of idea for a story or essay I come up with, somehow family relationships are involved.  I’ve completed NaNoWriMo twice, and both novels involve parent/child relationships and the emotional legacies we pass on to our children.  I’m working on a short story now that involves a young man who keeps sabotaging his love life because of an unhealthy obsession with his deceased mother’s little dog (which of course is just a cover for an unhealthy obsession with his mother!) 

Perhaps it sounds limiting, to have this recurring theme for your work.  But if you look carefully at the work of most writers and artists, you’ll notice a similar constancy of thought.  Jane Austen was certainly successful in her portraits of young women discovering life and love in the 19th century.  Jhumpa Lahiri has done quite well exploring the lives of second generation Indian immigrants, navigating the no man’s land between the traditional values of their parents and modern American culture. 

And Monet did allright with those water lilies, didn’t he?

The real trick lies in having the skill to develop your material in new, interesting directions.  Certainly I could write fantasy novels, historical novel, or mysteries and still retain the common thread of exploring family relationships and dynamics.  The things I care about. 

Sometimes writing about these preoccupations helps make sense of them in a way ordinary thinking cannot.  Jhumpa Lahiri said that, in writing about the two worlds she grew up in she “tried to weave them together in some combination that was orderly on the page in a way that it isn’t always in life.”

So how do you find your material?  Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life, asks her students “What’s your inner  voice talking about these days?”  What are you thinking about when you’re in the shower, or driving your car, on the treadmill at the gym?  If you’ve become accustomed to tuning it out, because it’s constant muttering drives you mad, then perhaps its time to tune it back in.  Turn up the volume even. 

What do you catch yourself thinking about?  What experiences and relationships in your life are the most meaningful? What catches your attention when you’re out and about?  These are the things you’re going to know, the things you’re going to care about, and that knowledge and caring will resonate in your writing. 

This is where you’ll find your line.

How about you?  Have you found your line yet?  Do you think you have one?  How do you go about expressing it?

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts about what brings them to the page.  I was enlightened and insprired by each one of you.  (A reminder that Write on Wednesday lasts all week, so if you decide to respond to the prompt anytime during then week, then feel free to do so.)

As a postscript to this week’s WOW (Susan pointed out the aptness of the acronym),  here’s a quote from I found this morning on Writing Time - it’s from a man named Frank Smith.   I especially like the last two lines…

Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed.

Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed.

Happy Writing!