Writers and Rituals

From all the reading I’ve done on writers and writing (in the interest of procrastination), one thing I’ve learned: writers use rituals to help them write.

Some writers have to write in a specific notebook (Moleskine seems popular among writers), while others have to use a specific pen (with fountain pens the preferred utensil). Some have to write first thing in the morning, and almost all need their coffee. I suspect many have lucky shirts they wear every day (and unlucky roommates). I myself compose and revise on the computer (as my doctoral mentor taught me,) and do not believe in lucky shirts, but I always drink coffee.

The purpose of ritual in writing is not to court luck, but to court the Muse. The Muse, the whisperer of wildness in one’s blood, the source of inspiration, the bringer of strange harmonies. The writer courts the Muse, but never captures him*.

Tomorrow, I will be starting a new novel, without having any of my previous novels accepted by agents or publishers yet. I will begin this with my favorite ritual, which is spending a couple days out of my usual milieu (this time at a nearby park cabin). Because the middle of nowhere in this case has Internet, I may update occasionally. This is where I will seek the Muse** over the next couple days.

* The Greeks’ Muses were female. I’m not Greek. Therefore …
** I am in search of a Muse. Duties include intriguing, enamoring, and occasionally bewildering the writer. Please send applications to lleachie@gmail.com.

To my Mother, after all these years.

My mother died a little less than ten years ago, six months after she got me married off. If the last sentence left you wondering, my mother always despaired of me ever marrying because, in my father’s words, “[I] … believed in unicorns”. Dad’s statement exaggerated the case, but I did (and still do to some extent) feel more comfortable in fantasy than in real life.

I believe I got my love of unicorns honestly. My mother decorated the house every Christmas until it resembled a Mary Engelbreit print. She possessed a wardrobe that she collected to wear to the perfect setting, someday, creating the perfect scenario in her mind (some of those clothes still had tags on them when she died.) She created — from sketches of pin-ups while she spoke on the phone to tantalizing dishes for dinner to embroidery projects that owed more to poster art than they did fuzzy cross-stitches of kittens.

Mom created personas — the bold, outrageous woman who hung out in the bar after work; the confident employee who got promoted past her comfort level at the Census Bureau; the slightly hassled mother who nonetheless kept up a witty conversation with my sister’s classmates. Sometimes, however, my mother would show me who she really was: a bewildered woman who never knew if people around her loved her or loved her personas — her chosen, not real, selves.

My mother couldn’t give me what I needed, because she couldn’t give it to herself. She could not give me acceptance of who I was, the student the teachers praised to the point of embarassment; the moody teen who fell in love (unrequited) again and again; the child who looked in the mirror and saw only her own obesity. I grew up with the sense of not-okayness that my mother did.

In the end, illness stripped my mother of all her personas — she grew weak and gaunt. She fell to the ground when trying to walk. She could not see well. The medication caused occasional hallucinations and uncensored commentary. But in dying, she became herself, and she was magnificent. She planned Christmas from a hospital bed (she would not make it) and picked out the jewelry she would wear. She requested (almost demanded) that a priest apologize for the emotional abuse the Church had committed. And her last words to me were: “Go out and have some fun.”

Happy Mother’s Day, Patricia Louise (Hollenbeck) Leach.

Drinking With My Characters

Baudelaire, C. (?). Be drunk. Available: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/be-drunk

My characters motivate me to write. I meet them in my mind over coffee in the cafeteria I remember from my college days — butterscotch and white walls and pale green formica tables. Or over pints in a tavern with dark wood scarred with the names of years of customers. Or in a gazebo under glowering clouds as the wind picks up.

They tell me stories: “Did I mention the time when I spent three hundred years looking for the famed Shaolin Temple in China? I could not find it no matter how I tried, so I gave up trying and settled in a monastery in the South of China for some eighty years. Much later, I discovered that I had found the Shaolin Temple in that most unprepossessing of places.”

Or “Su approached me one evening because I had apprenticed myself to her, given that I had just been engendered and she was the oldest and wisest of the Archetypes, having been engendered to serve the pre-human Denisovans. We transported to a strange place — a cave in the middle of InterSpace, with stars where there was no sky. She whispered to me, ‘I need your help — our compatriots hatch a plot that would hold the humans in subjugation …’ It was at that moment that I knew I would surrender my life to assist her, whatever that meant to a near-immortal species…”

Or “If you ask me about the story of my life, at this late point, I will start by pointing out that it doesn’t have a plot. I have been a Jewish girl who became a convinced Quaker in college, a pacifist who nonetheless knows how much damage can be done with a picket sign, a liberated woman who chose as a lover an abuser, and who walked out of that relationship — literally — with my infant son. I have organized protests, shouted down political figures, and founded an ecocollective, which I think I will be most remembered for. But I have never been in love.”

My characters develop and interact with each other. They walk into stories, which weave around each other. My characters are not me, but the creations of my imagination. When the stories are written, my characters occasionally wander back to have a drink with me.

Death and the Writer Part 2: Essay to prose

I decided that, in the interest of “showing, not telling”, I would quickly take one paragraph of the previous essay and make it more storylike:

After the internment, the crowd reconvened at the local chicken joint, a meal paid for by the deceased.

*****
Just as raindrops began to fall, we parked our car outside of Chicken Mary’s, an iconic restaurant outside of Pittsburg, KS. Richard opened his car door at the same time as a frail white-haired woman who walked with two canes had; Richard pulled his door back quickly.

“I really have to go,” the woman cackled as she climbed out of the car. “With a crowd this old, all we do is go to the bathroom. Better prepare for a line.”

On the front door, a hastily scrawled note announced, “Private party only. Restaurant opens at four.” So Aunt Norma had arranged a private party for us, then.

Inside, I noticed that Chicken Mary’s hadn’t bothered much with the indoor decor. Dark paneling, occasional random items decorating the wall, wagon wheel chandeliers, a wrought iron fireplace placed in a narrow aisle where it could never be used lest it set the servers on fire.

A couple tall, rangy women with shirts with the Chicken Mary’s logo embroidered over the left breast circulated around the tables, formica and metal, to collect drink orders.

I sat down next to a plump, white haired woman who was probably Richard’s aunt, given that she looked like two others in the room. She hugged me and said, “Didn’t Norma look beautiful in her coffin?”

I recognized this as a place where the truth would not be welcome. “Yes,” I said, “she looked lovely.”

Death and the Writer

Death drapes itself in all sorts of drama — who has died, how did they die, who did they leave behind, how did those left behind feel, and the overarching mystery of whether there’s life after death and what it looks like. (I know I just told you instead of showing you, but this is an essay and not prose.)

I just attended Richard’s aunt’s funeral. Norma died of cancer which she had battled for several years. She died at 79 and left two stepchildren and numerous nieces, nephews and grandchildren. This I learned from the priest who gave the eulogy.

The family practiced Missouri Synod Lutheranism, which meant they had no doubts that Norma would go to heaven to be with her Maker, because Lutherans are covered (despite their total ineptitude) through baptism. This I learned from the funeral service.

Nobody cried, but many commented on how beautiful she looked in the open coffin. Everyone caught up on how everyone else was doing before the funeral.

After the internment, the crowd reconvened at the local chicken joint, a meal paid for by the deceased.

I wrote this as an observer. Not so much drama, right? Imagine this as the backbones of a story …

Editing the Next Book Again

I’m done editing Apocalypse, which means three of five (actually six, but I don’t count that one) edited. I have learned a lot about the editing process, with the most important things being:

1) Read what I’m editing aloud, or at least aloud in my head — it slows me down.
2) Action verbs.
3) Don’t describe how people are feeling — get into their thoughts and physical sensations.
4) Don’t write tentatively — “Perhaps he wanted to torch the building a little bit, maybe” does not engage the reader.

I learned none of this from rejection slips. I’ve learned NOTHING from rejection slips other than “This doesn’t really fit with my interests.” I’m not kidding. Maybe I’m spoiled, because when I get rejections from academic journals, I get PAGES of critiques. And usually, if I address those, I get published.

Oh well, I’m editing “Reclaiming the Balance”, which is actually in pretty good shape already. Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter:

Ahead of her, off in the grass, she saw a long black boxlike construct, large enough to walk in, tapered slightly on one end. From what she could tell when she peered into it, it looked like a portable photography gallery with well-lit, artfully framed pictures on the wall.

Curious, Janice strolled over and stepped into it. She recognized herself in the pictures along the walls, and the hair stood up on the back of her neck. She recognized the first picture — she was only five and she wore her almost black, wavy hair back in a ponytail, but her mother had worked to make her bangs big. She preferred to play with her brother rather than sit like a lady, so her next picture featured that same Sunday outfit muddied, along with her hands and face. She stopped at a picture where she wore a mascot outfit – a cardinal – in her high school gym. Her father had foregone all of her extracurricular activities because his career kept him busy. Her mother had not attended either, claiming other responsibilities.

Janice didn’t see the door behind her close, so curious and unsettled she felt by the pictures of herself. How did someone get them? Why were they there? When she saw the photo of her kneeling in front of her grandmother’s coffin, Janice turned and fled toward the door she had entered, which had disappeared like in a nightmare. She turned and ran the other way down the corridor, toward the open door, toward the light.

Before Janice reached the light at the end of the corridor, someone grabbed her wrist firmly. When she turned around to look at who had captured her, she saw a young man with frantic eyes. Or a young woman with frantic eyes — she couldn’t be sure.

“I can’t let you past. If you go through that door, you’ll die,” he — she? gasped.
“But there’s no door out!” Janice yelled. “How do we get out?”

“I’m Amarel, and this is my grandmother, Lilly.” Amarel indicated a short blonde woman who looked little older than himself. “She’ll transport us.”

“Transport? Okay, just get me out of here.” Janice had this. She’d learned the word ‘transport’ from her now ex-boyfriend. To transport meant to feel her molecules tear apart and coalesce back together in another place. Her last coherent thought before she felt herself dissolve was, “Not the rabbit hole again …”

An excerpt from what I’m editing today …

“The Triumvirate,” Luke stated, “expect us to be scared. Conversely, they expect us to be arrogant to cover our fear. We should communicate neither.”

“But wouldn’t fear cause them to under-prepare for the battle because they think we’re pushovers?” Stephanie Rogers, a member of the telepathic women’s rugby team, inquired.

“I suspect they will be underprepared no matter what,” Luke grinned savagely. “They believe themselves to have superior weapons — strength, transportation and teleportation abilities, near immortality and quick healing. The Nephilim have similar characteristics, but are less difficult to kill – or injure in this case. The Triumvirate expect us to conduct typical human warfare — with guns, which would fail us; with edged weapons, which they consider themselves better at, with martial arts, which some of them have mastered. They have not fought a battle against subterfuge.

“I fear, though, that if we send a cringing, cowering message, we ourselves will take it to heart and create our own fear, and they will win.”

“So, we send them the type of message we’re good at sending?” Ilsa asked. “Calm, strong, sure of our convictions?”

“I think that’s a good way to start,” Luke nodded. “How should we address them?”

“‘Dear assholes,’” Allan Chang intoned.

“Ah, no,” Alan Sutton replied.

“How about ’To our adversaries,’” Raina Prince suggested.

“Although I like that, we are not an adversarial people. In an ideal situation, we would seek to find unity with them.” Ilsa stood up. “How do we address them in that sense?”

“Dear Triumvirate,” Addie Majors stood up and answered. “We regret that you have chosen this action. We will be ready to face you on the appointed day.”

“We should be ready at any moment, though,” Luke said. “But we don’t tell them that, of course.”

“Frankly,” Dan Lance stated, “this sounds like a perfect message. Short, sweet, to the point. Not overly aggressive nor overly passive.”

Sarah Kinder jumped in. “I agree. That’s the message I would like to send.”

In the end, the collective entrusted Luke to send the simple message.

Write as if people want to read you.

I’m okay as a poet. I’m better than I used to be, but I still feel like there’s something I don’t quite understand, maybe how poetry distinguishes itself from lyrics (the latter of which I feel I do well at), or how to show what I want to say instead of telling.

On the plus side, I write poems better than I used to.

The breakthrough was when I needed to write poetry in the voice of one of my characters in a novel. Josh turned out to be a much better poet than I was. This should not make sense, as Josh existed only in the novel and he couldn’t write any words I didn’t put in his pen. In other words, I was Josh. yet his style held mysteries mine didn’t. It held stylistic experiments I’d never tried.

The biggest thing, though, was that Josh wrote as if people wanted to read him.

I put that into italics because that just occurred to me. Self-doubt puts limits on our motivation, our daring, even the effort we take to write. And it’s an uphill battle for many, even most of us. It keeps some from writing, and others from seeking publication.

Something I need to think about.

This paragraph may be the one that pushed me to write novels

And if you, the esteemed reader, should read to the story’s end, the spell contained within this book shall bestow upon you the powers of the heroine, and grant you your wish. For indeed the moment the page is turned, the story will become reality.”

—The Universe of the Four Gods, Manga Chapter 1

The above came from a manga/anime called “Fushigi Yuugi” or, in approximate English, “The Mysterious Game (or Play)”.* This classic anime series served up more than just the inevitable love triangle — with ancient prophecies, love beyond death, and shadow archetypes, it certainly hooked me in.

Watching it now, FY hasn’t aged as well as I’ve liked, or perhaps it’s that I’m no longer a high school girl **. The female protagonist Miaka keeps making stupid mistakes, her male protector Tamahome gets sappy, and everyone falls in love with her despite her clumsiness***.

But that line of the legendary book that starts the adventure of Fushigi Yuugi! Don’t we all wish our writing will bestow powers upon all our readers, captivate them, become their reality while they’re reading, grant them the wish of going beyond what they feel are the confines of their lives?

*Note: I do not speak Japanese (or any language other than English).
** I’m 52. No duh.
*** Twilight did NOT use this idea first.

An excerpt — just to tease you.

This is an excerpt from the story I’m currently editing:

The sun had barely peeked over the horizon when Luke Dunstan strode around the site of the coming Apocalypse. He observed a brightening sky streaked with fuschia, an apple orchard etched in grey, squat houses surrounded by shadowed herbs and flowers. As an Archetype, Luke needed no sleep; because few of the humans were yet awake, he could walk alone.

He considered the plight of the collective against beings of his race and their vicious Nephilim fighting force, who fully intended to kill not only the humans of the collective, but the Archetype who held all women’s lives — his daughter Lilith.

Luke concealed his tears.