New Is The New Old

My turn has come to write this blog for the South Carolina Writer’s Workshop. I’m new to SCWW and to the Board of Directors. Faced with this task, I have to admit I’m a bit nervous (ask Ginny - thanks for your patience). The fact that I am posting this on April Fool’s Day is also not lost to me. Basically, my jitteriness comes from the fact that I have never written a blog before. No, I don’t live under a rock and I’m not a dinosaur…yet anyway. I just never had the opportunity or the need to write one. I also never felt I had anything awe inspiring to say. Yes, I am a writer. A writer of fiction. My characters have plenty to say. But me? What could I possibly have to say when not hiding behind my pen (laptop) or in my make-believe world? So, I got to thinking about doing new things. The whole concept of new. New according to my Visual Thesaurus means among other things: young, fresh, recent. The word is an adjective, and writers at (nearly) all costs should avoid an adjective, according to many of my writing mentors. But, the definition of the word: come into being, acquired, or discovered; is just too good to avoid as a subject matter.

I’m sitting here on my screen porch smelling fresh (yes, new) jasmine and seeing that the grass is turning green. With buds on the trees and a robin at my bird feeder, it’s clear to me that spring has arrived. Yes, the newness of spring. What was old is new again. Oh, Lord, is that one of those dreaded cliches writers are forewarned against? Adjectives and cliches. What’s next? (Insert gasp here). Well, all of this is necessary for the point I’m trying to make…this past year for me has been about newness.

The end of March marked my one year anniversary. Hard to believe. It stills feels so fresh to me. I moved here from upstate New York. A northern in the south? Nothing new there according to the demographics of my neighborhood, but, having been born and raised in NY, it’s all been a time of discovery for me. 

Okay, so a new home and new State. New accents and new foods to try. And I must admit have tried a lot of food (South Carolina peaches - love ‘em). Something else I discovered is that I love volunteering. The first place I tried was Huntington Beach State Park (HBSP). I do tours there and with that came a whole new bunch of things to learn. Then I started to take courses at Coastal University where I was very lucky to meet a wonderful woman, our own Tibby Plants. Tibby invited me to join SCWW. I did and I as a result, I’ve literally come (back) into being a writer. I have discovered, rediscovered,  and gained many fresh ideas. I can’t begin to thank Tibby enough for her help, her encouragement, and her insight. This may sound odd, but that kind of real dedication and support to help others learn and improve is new to me as well. In fact, the entire Surfside Chapter of my writer’s group has given me so much that my writing feels fresh and new.

That brings me to my next new point. Taking something old and making it new. I have been working seriously on a fictional series for years now. In fact, two of the books were published. Problem was, I was never satisfied with how they turned out, so I got back my rights to the books and began to revise them. I’m much more proud of them now and with the help of my writer’s group, they are shaping into exactly what I hoped. My new goal is to publish them by late summer and, you guessed it, find a new publisher. Notice the theme here?

My other new experience was to volunteer with a theatre group. I had assisted in theatre in upstate NY but I found they weren’t as willing to help me learn. That can sometimes be the problem with acquiring new skills. Sometimes people only want experience and overlook the pure joy of teaching and sharing knowledge. They often forget that we all learn something new everyday. At least I hope so. I have lots of experience in my bag but none of it is perfect. None of what I know is so flawless I can’t learn new things. Anyway, I missed the theatre so I joined the Murrells Inlet Community Theatre (MITC) group and, yes, once more, fell in love. They are a hard working band of people oozing with talent. They have also inspired me to try something else…I would like to write a play. It may or may not go far, but something tells me this band of professionals will help me learn this new skill. Of course, I hope I have the talent, but jitteriness over something new is the old me. This blog has helped me realize that.

So what have I learned? That new isn’t just for the young. I think (cliche alert) you can teach an old dog new tricks and that the old dog can use old tricks to aid them in learning something new. New is an attitude. A desire to redo, undo, and add. It’s an urge to begin…again. Spring does it every year. New growth on an old plant.

New is a journey. It requires an open mind and a degree of courage to let go and simply try. Of course, good friends and good organizations like SCWW, MITC, and HBSP, are great starts.

So what else have I learned? Reach out. Take old likes/loves/interests and find ways to make them new again. Search for a great bunch of people who will help. New doesn’t have to be scary. Look at me. I just completed my first blog. It may not be the best, but I did it and I bet I’ll learn something new from it. The whole point is that in the end, new can make old young again. It really can be a beginning to more new things. Oh, and did I mention? I had a birthday at the end of March. Which, come to think of it, only means I’ll be a new age. I’ve never been fif…er, never mind. Guess I should save that for another blog.   

SCWW Scott Lax Wildacres Schcolarship - And the Winner Is!

Congratulations to Douglas Wyant, Camden Chapter, for being selected as the first SCWW Scott Lax Wildacres Scholarship recipient. Douglas is a long-time SCWW Member and Camden Chapter President. He is also a past Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Award winner. The Wildacres Writers Workshop is a week-long writing intensive in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

The SCWW Scott Lax Wildacres Scholarship is made possible through an anonymous donor in honor of Scott Lax, a former Wildacres Writers Workshop faculty member. Both the donor and Scott urge those who have put their writing aspirations on hold while working, parenting and participating in all those other wonderful activities of life, to finally take up the paper and pen - or computer - and begin.

In Scott's words:

"It's never too late. Writers 50 and older have so much to offer. Yes, we have some aches, pains and losses. But we have the experience and patience and love of life to offer readers, whether one reader of millions."

To everyone who applied to our first award, thank you. Selecting the winner was a close, difficult decision.
Douglas, enjoy your week at the Wildacres Writers Workshop!

March Madness, or Just Do It

My husband is deep into March Madness. He pursues the legendary dozen Krispy Kreme donuts offered as first prize by our son's Bracketology contest. I'm not interested at all in basketball, college or otherwise, so March Madness is a chance for me to have some time to myself.

I'm spending March hard at work on a sequel to Gatekeeper. The new novel is half done. I had given it up a couple of years ago to finish one I had also half finished a long time ago. I love world building. The book is a contemporary fantasy, set in the real world, but I get to develop the rules for magic. I've invented deliciously evil creatures that resemble spiders—of which I'm terrified—but these are the size of dogs, with an occasional one as large as a horse.

That comparison with horses made me remember where this interest in storytelling all began.

In fifth and sixth grades I attended school in the tiny town of Ismay, Montana. There were 8 of us in fourth through eighth grades. My teacher was a caring and nurturing woman much ahead of her times. She encouraged each of us to follow our dreams. My dream was writing stories.

I hadn't yet read the Island Stallion series so I wasn't interested in being shipwrecked on a faraway island with only a horse for company. We were too far from civilization to have television. Aside from angleworm races with a friend and never-ending Monopoly games with said friend and my father (who brazenly cheated), I delved into my imagination and wrote stories.

One story became a saga about a girl growing up on a ranch and somehow finding the best wild horse in the world just wandering the prairie. It, of course, learned to love me, followed me home and became my best friend. We did something heroic. I can't remember what. Perhaps we rescued a lamb from a bear (I always had a soft spot for lambs). My teacher helped me turn the story into a little chapter book with a cover and table of contents and all. All hand made and illustrated by me. She helped me enter it in the State Fair. I won a blue ribbon. I still have the story and the ribbon somewhere.

My mother always told my brothers and I that we could do whatever we set our minds to. We may not achieve our dreams in quite the way we anticipate, but we'll have a wonderful time along life's highway.

Think about a time when you felt eager to write, when you felt a passion for telling stories--fiction, nonfiction or poetry--and just do it.

Maybe I'll never be a rich and famous author, but my stories are out there. And I'm having the time of my life building my worlds, be they real or fantasy.

CHILDHOOD LESSONS ABOUT WRITING

1. BE YE KIND. Read for your fellow writers and offer good, honest critique. It’s easy to look down on someone else’s work when you yourself are long passed the stage of development where everyone either longed to tell you get another hobby or just flat-out said it. Be generous with praise, but be genuine.

2. PLAY WITH THE NICE KIDS. There was an unpublished writer I greatly admired. For a bunch of psychological reasons I won’t go into, I felt like such an idiot around her. This should have been a huge glaring neon red flag, but it wasn’t. One day I listened to her chew up one of our group members and hock him out; by now the alarms on the flag were blaring. The way she explained herself to me, she made it seem like she had a reason for what she did, but not a good one. I was so enamoured with this person, I remained friends with her. But my work suffered horribly and, while I read reams of her work, she’d Email me back a few minutes after I sent her mine and lecture me on how important it was to be “serious” about my craft. One day, I was her target. Let me just say, those red flags are there for a reason.

3. STICK UP FOR YOURSELF. If you’re serious about writing, put yourself out there in critique groups. LISTEN to everything and fight the uncontrollable urge to defend your work. If the criticism is valid, it just is. Whether there is or is not a consensus about the issue, you might want to rethink things as objectively as possibly. But don’t be a pushover. When the critique is over, IF and only IF you are given the opportunity, explain your view or process. Discussing your work means you have to think about it on a different level. Amazing things come of this.

4. TEACHERS KNOW EVERYTHING. Not everything, but teachers have a bigger and better toolbox and they know how to use those tools. Best of all, they want to teach you how to use them, too. You will know you’ve had a really good teacher when you’re writing or critiquing someone’s work and hear your teacher’s voice in your head. “More sensory detail. SLOW DOWN. Let your character stretch out a bit.”

5. CLEAN THE BATHROOM…AGAIN. Sometimes writing is like cleaning the bathroom with I was a kid. My mom would always come behind me and, no matter how well I thought I done it, she’d find something I’d missed and make me do the whole thing again. When I finished the first draft of my first novel, I thought, “I’m done.” Be ready to write and rewrite and then rewrite some more to get noticed, and then, after you have an agent and hopefully a publisher, you’ll rewrite some more. Get used to it.

6. TAKE CARE OF YOUR PRECIOUS THINGS. With computers and their tiny vast minds, it’s easy to think of them like a piggy bank. When you need your work or a version of your work where you said something really cool and want to use it, you just give it a shake and there it is. As amazing as computers are, they aren’t fool-proof. Back your writing up yourself on disk. Use a back up service. Hell, print out the manuscript and put it in the safe deposit box at the bank in case the house burns down. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and just the frustration alone that comes with trying to recreate what you had or what you think you had is crazy making.

7. STOP PLAYING THAT $*%* GAME. Nobody every wrote a bestseller while simultaneously playing Spider solitaire or Skip-Bo or any of those free games on that gamehouse.com website. Sometimes games are a good distraction, the beginning of a ritual that leads to writing, but ultimately if you’re spending more time playing Be Jeweled than you are writing, you might want to rethink your calling.

8. ROLLY POLLIES, FIREFLIES AND MUD PIES. When you’re telling a story, it’s easy to get caught up in the story line that takes you from point A to point B and all the way through the alphabet at break neck speed. Some writers write their first drafts like that and then go back and layer in the small stuff that makes the writing rich. Some people call it adding texture, but it’s a lot like noticing the small things like rolly pollies or fireflies or the design the wrinkles make on your protagonist’s forehead. What do her hands look like and why? Yes, it’s noticing the small stuff, but it’s also like cooking with your Easy-Bake Oven, tasting the batch of words, smacking your lips together, and knowing what the writing needs to make it rich. Chocolate is always good, but sadly isn’t always the answer.

9. GO FISHING. If you want to be a good writer and you’ve never been fishing before, GO. It doesn’t take much more than a cane pole, a line, a shiny brass hook, and a soggy creek bank to dig worms. If you pay attention, you can learn a lot about writing just dangling a simple line in the water. Sensory detail, order, pacing, and above all patience, which will come in really handy after you’ve written your novel and are ready to sell it.

10. TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR IMAGINARY FRIENDS. For those of us who don’t really care if anyone calls us crazy, we can freely admit we hear voices in our heads. Good writers honor these voices by writing down their stories. As one who has had as many as three protagonists telling their stories at one time, and as one who grieved during the time those voices went silent, I can say with certainty, they are a gift. They give us an understanding of our characters that can never be attained with process gimmicks, charts, or outlines. They give us clean crisp dialogue and are windows into living breathing souls that exist only to have their stories told. So take good care of your imaginary friends. Talk out loud to them, and let your characters talk to each other. They allow us to do what we love. They allow us to write.

Changes

Since January, I hope you’ve enjoyed the changes the Quill has implemented.

Now it’s time to refurbish our website. We are finally in a position to begin the changeover from a webmaster-managed site to a content management system. We have negotiated the very good price of $1400.00 for this service with our current provider, Net Studios, Inc. The work should be complete in 30-60 days.

For those of us who have books, websites, and blog pages to include at www.myscww.org, the new format for submitting this information is described on the Members’ Published Work tab at the website. You’ll also see a schedule of fees for these services. The SCWW Board was hoping these fees would help defray the cost of the charges to take our website to a new level where we can maintain it with no additional webmaster charges – a big savings for our operating expenses.

In 2011 if you submitted your works using the new format, the Publicity Chair will email you within the next 60 days to confirm your information. If you haven't done so yet but would like to appear on this page, send your information, following the new guidelines, to scwwpublicity@gmail.com. We would appreciate your donation of fees as listed on the website. Thank you for your cooperation.