To Write, To Write, To Write
Hi, I'm Lori and not to waste your time I'll get to the point of this blog and it is: the art of writing. I believe we're all blessed with at least one talent, one charge, that pumps through us and it can be no more than half a cup worth or run through us like a river, but it's the one thing that you know, without a shadow of a doubt, you can do, whether it's singing, car repair or tight rope walking, even when no one else in the world believes it but you. I can write is my belief, my calling and most days it seems to ensure my place in the world.
A little about me to get it out the way. I live in suburban Cleveland, the mother of two, I'm a full-time employee somewhere, a full-time writer everywhere and it's all made possible due to a large and loving extended family. I write fiction novels, screenplays and I've written a children's book. I write in more than one arena not because I'm so prolific, but as you writers know, some stories don't lend themselves well to the novel or the novella yet work best as a short story or screenplay. It's funny, but there is something inside that tells me what venue would best fit the story I'm writing and I try to go with it because trying to wrestle a story out of the shape it was meant to be and fit it into a different mold can be difficult, sometimes impossible and has left me an unhappy writer with a bad story.
I want to talk with you about "something" at each posting, a point of view or maybe even a dreaded theme because if I don't, why would you read this blog? I don't want you to waste your time reading this when you don't get anything out and you could be writing instead; or like me, trying to get a least a page or more out to feel like I've contributed something to the day. The "something" will of course be about the writing life which could be books I've read that may not necessarily be on writing but are what I believe are great stories that teach about writing or telling a story well. It could also be about an interesting piece I've heard or read on npr.org for example that I can't forget, that tumbles around in my mind because it throws out life lines toward the possibility of a story. And I'll like to know about your writing, what kicks it going for you.
My first something is "imagination"the key that has always opened the door to my world of story telling, as it has for most writers, and it was the only tool I had when I called myself writing my first professional novel at twenty-two years old, alone in my rented room, sitting on a futon mattress, my note book perched on top of my thirteen inch black and white television set--brand new--that stood in for a writing desk. The novel was called White God and it was about a D.C. drug enforcement agent named Jack Kinsey who was more trouble to the agency than he was worth after he tangled with the city's most notorious drug lord, Alejandro Silvera. Jack is sent to the Peruvian jungle to bring back his partner, Elvy Wyatt, who had been exiled there to fight the Shinning Path drug runners and eradicate coca leaf production by the farmers. Instead, Elvy does a Colonel Kurtz and it's up to Jack to bring him back before the agency, the U. S. government, has no choice but to take him out. And unbeknowest to Jack, Silvera has someone trailing him whose mission was to kill them both.
Of course I had never been a DEA agent or met one, and at that time I had only been to Washington D.C. once on an elementary school trip. I had never had anything to do with guns, car chases, South America or international drug cartels, yet I had the key: imagination. And a vivid one. Of course I don't write in a vacum, most of us don't hopefully because we're smart enough to allie our imagination with real world observations, conversations, communicaitons, reading and research.
I'm writing the second novel in a trilogy featuring a New York City Detective named Owen Story. Again, mother of two, suburban Cleveland and I'm African-American and Owen is my opposite in every way except human and there lies the challenge, the excitement, that pumps my imagination to keep me creating so I can make Owen and his world as real as my keyboard and these words you're reading until he's: originally from Long Island, New York; a rising star out of his division in the nineteenth precinct; has no living family except for his wife Lorna and her father; he's so loyal, it's detrimental; desparately in love with his wife and has been friends since his teens with the son of a criminal.
The ability to create through imagination, it's so limitless and so powerful it doesn't matter if I don't own two vacation homes or look like Halle Berry; when that blank page stares at me staring back at it, none of that matters, what matters is what's in my head and heart. And in yours too. And how it comes together on that page to create new worlds, places, people: Hogwarts, Scout and Atticus, Salem's Lot, Rabbit, Brideshead, Captain Ahab, Middle Earth, Holden Caufield, West Egg, The Director of the Hatcheries and Conditioning, Mr. Scrooge, Heathcliff, Bloomsday, Hester Prynne and on, and on and on....You realize that through imagination we are able to create what seems to be everything we want and all we'll ever need.
Until next time--don't stop,
Lori
