Author Archives: Amy Jane

Spending Time to Save Time

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Well, I’m hoping that my latest “organizing” work has functioned as time-saving rather than writing-avoidance.

Actually, I’m quite tickled. (There’s another word I wonder if anyone else uses.)

I’ve gone through my story, and while I haven’t outlined subplots or motivations (beyond a shadow), I have gotten from beginning to end.

As a result I now have four categories (and assignments) for my manuscript/writing-time:

  • Started (Finish.)
  • Finished (Edit.)
  • Changed (Revise.)
  • Need (Write.)

There are 6-15 “headlines” under each.

In everything I do, this has always been my challenge: finding the next-step. Looking at the mess that is my bedroom and saying, “What do I do now?”

I now have two pieces of paper hanging from the shelf next to my writing desk, one with all the headlines in order, and one with them grouped as writing prompts within their category.

I’m looking forward to my next noveling corner. :oD

Know Your Child

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Here is a good example of why you need to know your kid.

I found Wiley and the Hairy Man at the library and snagged it because I liked a telling I’d heard once, and wanted to look at the story.

Melody (2 1/2) got a hold of it, and because I didn’t want it to be too terrible too talk about (she might have already looked at the pictures) I decided reluctantly to read it to my girls.

Melody *latched* on to it. She wanted to hear it again and again.

If you’ve never heard of it, it’s about a boy who avoids getting captured by the Hairy Man (a wicked-looking snatcher) by using his wits and following his mother’s advice.

You may guess already these are themes I like my children to absorb.

In addition, the Hairy Man is twice gotten rid of by the arrival of Wiley’s hound dogs. And Melody and I will nod together that everybody is afraid of something– even scary somebodies.

One evening I had just finished telling someone why I choose to read that story to my kids when my mother, skimming the book said, “That’s a pretty creepy thing in there. That one ought to go back [to the library].”

I don’t think I contradict my mom that much (we agree on so much to begin with), but to this opinion I just said, “No, I have my uses for it,” and felt a sudden thrill at knowing both my own purposes and my daughter well enough to be confident I was making the right decision.

A Polite Malady– a Tuesday Tale

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(This is up later than usual– I’ve been without a browser for a few days.)

A woman in China went to visit her married daughter who (according to custom) lived with her new mother-in-law.

The three women had just sat down to the evening meal when a gust of wind blew out the lamp.

“I will fetch a light,” the daughter’s mother-in-law said in the darkness, but the daughter was already rising and leaving the room, so instead the mother-in-law remained.

Thinking she was alone with her daughter, the visiting mother began a lecture on the duties of a host to see to the greatest comfort of her guests, recommending her daughter turn the choicest sides of the serving platter to her mother, in order that she might take the best without appearing greedy.

“Indeed, as the guest is your own mother, nothing less than filial duty demands you giver her the best that may be offered.”

Just then, the daughter returned with light, and the mother realized in horror that her daughter’s mother-in-law was the one listening to everything she said.

“Forgive me,” the mother said. “I have a curious malady with no known cure. It causes me so speak nonsense in sudden darkness, until the light returns and brings me back to my senses.”

The mother-in-law nodded knowingly.

“Ah, yes,” she said. “I understand perfectly, for I have a similar malady that affects me in the darkness. When the light suddenly goes out, I am rendered deaf, and can hear no word until a new light is brought.”

Also from Ragan’s book.

The Story Cocoon

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I’ve been within the membrane of a story since the movie ended yesterday evening.

Part of the longevity has to do with the type of movie (Amazing Grace), of course. But more even than that, I attribute the strength of the membrane to a post-story silence that I observed yesterday, maybe for the first time.

When telling stories– especially heavy, significant stories, and especially to an older audience– one recommendation is to take an entire five-minutes for silence after the story, before talking about it or starting a new one.

On our way to the car, and our first two minutes there, I effervesced my first impressions, and how the the woman’s role coalesced cleanly with three other sources (I may essay about later) that were on my mind recently.

This talk had made me turn off the radio (I refuse to compete with talk radio) so when we made a stop for Jay partway home, I waited in a quiet car.

There is a line in The Magician’s Nephew about the place you could almost feel the trees growing, and that was the curious sensation I felt while Jay was gone: a sense of growing and solidifying. Foundation stones, or roots of Story were growing both down and out, connecting something in my core to something in my story cocoon.

~ ~ ~

Do you know what I mean by a story cocoon, or a story membrane?

It’s not just the ability to get lost in a story, but the presence and weight of when you’re there. It’s the extra atmospheric pressure of another world, and the iridescent bubble that hasn’t quite popped, even when the story’s ended.

It’s the slowness you feel as you’re leaving a dark theater, or closing a book, while your mind works to order the myriad of sensations you’ve just received and reconcile them to your understanding of the world as it is. (Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn’t.)

And it’s that feeling of a story sticking with you, affecting you.

~ ~ ~

The idea about this first came when I was reading The Thirteenth Tale, and while it applies to books as much as to movies, I think we experience it with movies more.

I’m beginning to think that this is the strongest argument for Charlotte Mason‘s directive to read slowly. More slowly and in smaller sections than you can based simply on your ability or interest, in order to allow the content to infuse your thinking and, basically, last long enough to truly affect you.

~ ~ ~

The question, of course, remains as to how much you want a story to affect you. Good/effective writing or storytelling will create a stronger cocoon that’s harder to escape from, and this is why I always want to be so careful what I expose myself to. After all, innocence is not just for kids.

The Heaviness of Other Worlds

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Once when Melody was only a few months old, Jay and I reluctantly left off our first watching of Seabiscuit as soon as she fell asleep. In a moment of selfishness (or opportunism) the next morning, I finished it while Jay was at work.

I found the ending very moving, and felt full under the spell and weight of the story, even without having seen the whole thing at once.

I was agitated. Keyed up.

Not feeling the energy to do anything else, I took the second movie I’d begun the day before, and put it back to see if there was more.

Just as Jay had arrived home from work the night before, I was nearing the end of the new Oklahoma! and turned it off. The cast was in the midst of the Title finale. That song was the last in the 50s version of the movie I watched once with my Grandma. It had bored me to pieces then. (This version is *much* better, though kicked up to a stronger PG-13 in my estimation.)

This next morning I was curious to see if that really was the end. The move had never seemed done at that point, loose ends still dangling.

Well, it wasn’t done.

For the next 25 minutes or so I was dragged through a shiveree, a knife-fight and trial (with accompanying emotional angst) before the incongruously tidy finish.

That hour was one of the most intense and disturbing of my life. Seriously. I had buried myself in the most intense parts of two other worlds with out the diluting time between.

The atmospheric pressure was too heavy; the membrane doubled, too thick and confining. And I had no idea how to process.

I continued shaking my head like a dizzy cat most of the remainder of the day (a friend came for lunch, and this was nearly all I could talk about).

Maybe it was the bends— a theoretically preventable malady that takes thought or planning to avoid.

I know I’ve been very careful not to do that to myself again.

It All Depends on Your Definition

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The professor paced through his lecture. “Every woman is a man-hunter,” dropped from his lips as an unquestioned fact.

The year was 1950, and my grandmother was working her way through college, still a spinster at age thirty-one.

In an undertone meant to be heard, Grandma took the authority to correct the teacher’s misrepresentation.

“I’ve never met a man I couldn’t live without.”

Two weeks later, with the same quiet voice, she invited the class to her wedding.

Mocking her, the professor inquired, with polite words, whether she’d met someone new.

“No,” she said. “But I used to think I could live without him.”

Lyric

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Though your life may seem to sound a dark and minor key,
It will someday shift itself to major.
And the lyric of your life will rhyme with nothing less than joy…

From a Michael Card song

I love musical metaphors. I don’t often see them.

This is from Poiema, a CD with several *good* songs, that I’ve had since High School. Just was thinking of that last line today.

Lines about Joy always catch my mind.

Didn’t I Already Say That?

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The problem I’ve found with saying exactly what I mean, is that once I’ve said it, there’s nothing else to say. If it’s not understood or taken seriously, I am left with two unattractive options: remain not-understood, or say something less exact than I’ve already framed.

The Stolen Child– a Tuesday Tale

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The sídhe (pronounced, “shee”) are a powerful and nearly human-looking fairy folk (often distinguished from the flying, cute and/or friendly varieties by spelling it faerie). They are primarily distinguished by their unusually long, slender fingers and their sharply pointed ears.

~ ~ ~

Two women of the sídhe were walking a road that ran along the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, when they came upon a human baby, crying in the middle of the path.

Looking all about them and seeing no one, the fairies quickly wrapped it up in the shawl of one, and, taking the child with them, they hurried along faster than they had come.

At the same time, a pair of fishermen were heading home for the day, and one spotted something white on the side of the nearly sheer cliff.

His companion tried to pretend he thought it was a bird, but the first man insisted on navigating the rocks and climbing up. He rightly suspected it was some traveler who had become lost in the mist and tumbled over the edge.

It was a young woman, hurt but alive, and they brought her home, handing her off to the fisherwives to be tended.

When the girl came to her senses she immediately began to cry for her baby, and the men were sent back out to look for him. But neither up nor down the road, nor in any of the nearest villages could they hear any news of a found bairn.

When the young woman regained her strength she said goodbye to the kind fisherfolk, promising to return when she had found her child.

After much fruitless wandering, the young mother happened upon a gypsy camp where an old grandmother divined in the fire that the baby was taken by the sídhe, and advised the girl to give up her quest.

When she refused, the gypsy mother gave her some advice.

“The sídhe, for all their magical arts, have no power to create anything for themselves.

“Whatever they want they must either buy or steal. If you can offer something rich, rare, and beyond compare, that may buy your child back from the sídhe.”

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Novel to-do list and update

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I find that putting things on paper helps me focus my efforts. Chrisd, whom I met during NaNo has been nudging me to think more about my novel, and we’ve been exchanging plot points and revealing spoilers in an effort to create a pair of coherent narratives.

My initial plan for working with my NaNo novel, and, come to that, my original idea for the novel have all evolved to my current place which actually involves my first edit, even before the story is completely written down.

Three months ago I would have called this unwise, but today, as I told Chris, it seems merely practical. I’ve never worked with a 95-page (single-spaced!) manuscript before, and since I’ve already cut seven pages (written early in the month before my vision had evolved very far), I decided to learn now what is worth keeping.

The image I presented to Chris was that of wanting to unpack before I started buying things for my new house.

In this way I won’t waste time writing transitions or making elements fit that are no longer important.

Did I mention here my husband read the manuscript last weekend?

He gave me some good things to think about, like the need to add some description to slow things down a little.

I was hauling all through November and it reads that way, so now I need to marble my stake a little.

Though, to pull that meat analogy just a bit further, I’m not sure how much I will add. I’ve always preferred moose to beef– there seems to be less waste. Moose is much more accessible too. You just go to the freezer and pull as much as you want– zero mulling over whether one can afford good cuts of meat.

Okay, enough with the Alaskan metaphors.

My other organizing project is to re-frame an outline with my new vision of conflict etc. I think this will help with the editing project and staying focussed on where I want to go.

*This concludes my self-serving announcement. I now retun you to the regularly scheduled program of whatever else I feel like writing.*