On another note, I saw this quote today on the Gotham Writers’ website and thought I would pass it along. When you don’t know where to go with your characters, think of this:

Determine what a character wants, how far he will go to achieve it and how far someone else will go to stop him.—J. Michael Straczynski

Lists

I love lists. Lists – be them grocery, to do, or resolutions, contain an infinite number of stories. Each item on a grocery list is bought for a reason, each action on a to-do list is a scene. I once found a transaction tag from the library in one of the books I took out. It had two workout DVDs and a book on Jewish meditation. Lists can tell us a lot about characters, and one day I will write about that person.

Exercise:

• Make a list of all the things you would be doing right now if you weren’t writing.
• Make a list of all the stories you’d like to tell if the most important person in your life was never going to read them.

Write the opening to one of those stories.

Alternative:

Make a list of all the kids you went to grade school with. Pick one and write his/her (imagined) present-day story.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/946347–porter-bringing-the-city-together-with-a-good-read

I get my writing exercise ideas from a whole host of places. But two books I love are Naming the World, by Brett Anthony Johnston and Writing Fiction: The practical guide, from the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

Here’s the exercise we tried today. If you’re looking for a writing prompt, give this a try:

Characters

Characters are all about the details. When you think about what you love (or hate, for that matter) about someone real, it’s usually a detail, a characteristic, a feature. And when you describe that person, using that feature, s/he comes alive for your audience.

Spend five minutes describing a feature you love about yourself. It should be something physical. Now spend five minutes describing something that you hate.

Now, incorporating those features, write about someone fictional, in a café, buying a cup of coffee, whose hands are shaking.

http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/59439/little-ladies/

Thoughts?

“Writing is work,” I told her. Well, yes, she agreed. But certainly you can’t make a living from it.

And not that it’s any of her business how my husband and I work our finances, but there in lies the truth: everything can have a dollar-value attached to it. Do I make a living from my writing? Some months, yes. But I view the writing as a long-term career, one that I need to build my successes on from year to year in the hopes that as I publish more, I will make more money. It’s like any other job – you start at an entry-level position and work your way up. I am not under the misconception that I will one day become a millionaire doing what I am doing. But I do believe there will come a time where my fiction writing income is steady and more substantial.

This is why I resist those labels. Because while I am at home, I am working. My kids know I am working. They know I have an office and that when we have a babysitter here, Mummy is writing. I call it work. So they know about Daddy’s work and they know about Mummy’s work, and I don’t think they value one over the other just because Daddy’s work happens to be in an office.

In fact, most of the “stay-at-home” mothers I know are doing some kind of work besides parenting – whether it is contract, part-time, or going back to school. Since becoming a mother I have found myself struggling with my work/parent identity on almost a daily basis. And never once have I found the labels make anything more clear.

Photographs are wonderful tools for stories, because they have captured a moment in time and were taken for a reason. Find some photos or postcards. This exercise works best if you have no personal attachment to the photos themselves. Study the picture and write the story that you see. Alternatively, imagine you are the photographer. What prompted you to take this picture? What is the story behind the photograph? As the photographer, what is your story?

My novel, HOLDING MY BREATH, started from exactly this exercise. I was taking an all-day workshop on historical fiction at a book festival in Birmingham, England. The workshop leader handed out a pile of old photographs and told us to write what we see. I spied one of a girl standing by the pool side watching a group of young women lounging in the water. That exercise turned into a short story called “Holding My Breath Under Water”, which got published in the anthology Going The Distance, by Tindal Street Press. It later turned into one of the chapters of my book. So you never know where this kind of exercise might take you!

This week is the first normal week after Passover and Passover preparations. All told, the holiday took two weeks out of my working life. Between the cooking and the cleaning and the hosting (and of course, the eating), not to mention Boaz being off school, I had little time in the last 14 days to write. It’s not just about time, but about mental space. I probably could have squeezed in an hour here and an hour there, but Passover is like a full-time, contract position. Very all-encompassing, very intense, and then its over.

So I look up, two weeks have gone, and writing-wise I have very little to show for it.

Funny, by the end of the two weeks, I was irritable, moody and feeling very self-deprecating. This has happened before when I’ve been away from writing for too long. When I am not writing, I don’t feel whole.

On the other hand, the fear of writing makes it that much harder to get back into it. I fear never writing anything worth reading. I fear facing a book that might never see the light of day. I fear the “sophomore slump” – that my next novel will get published but no one will pay attention. It’s a lot of fear for a single person to face sitting at her computer alone.

And yet, these last two days have been good writing days. I’m coming to the end of the first draft of this book (I think). There will be a lot of work to do once the draft is complete (a LOT of work), but at this point I feel like I just need to complete the shape. Maybe with an outline of a novel I can flesh it out over drafts two and three (and beyond). Maybe (probably) the best thing for me to do is to just push past the fear and get on with it.

In the meantime, and while I ponder that one, I’m going back to menus. We just finished celebrating Passover (yes, it’s over!). My husband and I hosted the first seder, which was small, but I discovered it doesn’t matter how many people you are having. Passover is a lot of work. There are many courses (I served five), and frankly, once you’re making chicken it doesn’t matter if you cook one or four.

Dishes that worked out well include:

Tri-coloured fish loaf
Roasted chicken with cinnamon, dried fruit and apple slices
Fudgy brownies and amazing Pesach chocolate chip cookies

Dishes that I probably won’t try again for seder:
Ratatouille (doesn’t work well to reheat)
Carrot Dill soup (the onions really need to cook gently and I found my Passover burners to be temperamental, so they burned)
Matza vegetable kugel (I’ve made nicer).

If you cooked this Passover, what worked well for you?

I am easily distracted. Probably the most distracting thing for me since writing this latest book has been wireless internet. When I was writing my last book, we were living in England and we only had dial-up or maybe Broadband internet. Either way, you had to plug into a router to get online and download emails. I was very strict about not checking my email until I had finished my writing session. Now, when the writing is going well, this rule is easy to stick to. When it’s not, I have more difficulties.

I believe in routine, the safety of it, and the comfort. All the little things I do before I write help me to build the right environment for me to explore creatively. I’m getting ready to do that right now. About to fill my mug, light my candle, and turn the internet off.