Hello, friends! I’ve been away too long, and I cannot wait to get in the writing habit again. Our next virtual write-in is coming right up. It’s Thursday, August 13th from 7:00-8:30 in your home! Grab some comfy clothes, a writing utensil, and let’s get writing! It takes just $15.00 to secure your spot. Tell a friend! See you soon!
Happy New Year, friends! My hope for you is that you start one of the creative projects that has been rolling around in your head or finish one that you’ve started! We can help you ignite those ideas, and we can challenge you creatively! Join us for the January Write-In, Wednesday, January 29th from 7-9 at Twisted Vine in Papillion, Nebraska. We can’t wait to write with you. Hurry and register! Seats are limited. 2020 is YOUR year!
There are less than 90 days in this decade. How does that make you feel? Normally, this realization would stress me out to the max, but I am a self-proclaimed lover of endings and beginnings.
Here are my plans!
Finish another novel.
Publish a book on CreateSpace with my blog partner.
Write another short story.
Write some poetry.
Have you ever wondered how writers got started? Have you ever wanted to document your beautiful life, but you didn’t know how to begin? Maybe you’re already a writer and you’d just like to meet with other women who inspire you to create new work. Whatever your status is, we’d love for you to join our Writer Meet-Up July 31st from 7-9 at Twisted Vine in Papillion, Nebraska. Click here to see the Write-Up page to reserve your spot.
Previously Published by Empty Sink Publishing
Written by Tessa A. Adams
I look up from my magazine and notice the news anchor. She wears perkiness like a pair of earrings, while she delivers news of a fire that can’t reach her house. It is clear that the event doesn’t touch her personally. I imagine that kind of visual paradox is hard to pull off every day.
“Put something on. This is depressing,” my husband says. Boredom sedates his voice.
I get up, grateful that he wants music instead of television and skip over to the shelves. I finger through my collection, find the perfect one, and remove it from the others like a trophy.
The news anchor is reporting something menacing. Her voice is tinny. “The youngest suspect is still at large.”
I turn to meet the screen squarely as she reports that the murderer was twelve years old. His name is James. He joined two teenagers to kill someone three times his age. She knows this murder is different from the others, and she delivers this news as though she’s carrying a sand bag up the stairs. Her eyes don’t sparkle; she doesn’t sympathetically smile. She’s tired.
I turn back to my task of making my way to the player and remove the disk from the sleeve. Careful not to compromise the black circle before me and the magic it holds, I take the edges in my hands and flip it back and forth, inspecting its condition. There are dust spots visible, and I gently blow them away. It’s clear of debris, and I find the side I like.
Like a magnet, the TV pulls my gaze back. The suspects’ faces replace the news anchor’s image. The baby fat still clings to James’s rosy cheeks. They already have his mug shot from a previous crime, but he got to year twelve before he was a murderer. In the picture they found of Michael, the fifteen-year-old smiles with all of his teeth. It has to be a school picture. He is safe in this picture. He is loved here, but school is out in the summer. There is no picture for Marcus. He hasn’t caused any problems yet. This is his debut.
I put the vinyl on the turn table, making sure it’s cued up and ready to project sound. I rub the needle a little, ensuring it’s still sensitive to touch. The noise of a simple fingertip on the needle is deafening and startles him a bit. I turn to apologize and decide he knows it was a mistake. I enjoy the fact that if the needle is placed just right, the sound will be smooth and there will be twenty minutes of harmony. Even twenty minutes is enough. The pause will be brief, and I will have to get up to tend to the album. It’s predictable. I bring the lever down and let the music take over the room. It sucks the extra air out, making the room smaller. Extinguishing the background noise. Suffocating a hard reality.
I take my place back on the couch and grab the remote from him. Before I can turn the television’s power off, my eyes sting as I gaze through the screen at those brittle twelve-year-old eyes, and I try to let his pain wash over me. I attempt to understand his mom’s sadness. That guilt that consumes mothers on a good day is biting, and I know this is not a good day for her. I close my eyes and picture him giggling like my own kids giggle, and the joy that should have kept him from this. His actions have replaced his age. He’s being tried as an adult. Someone has taught him wrong from right. I know that to be true in my version of him, but right and wrong have different definitions where he lives. And then I try to remember the man he shot. The victim is absent from the screen. I conjure a picture of him, but his image fades to a dull silhouette. I have no choice in this ritual, because if I remove my gaze, I’m part of the revolution. Just another turn of the table. But the weight of another’s reality does nothing because my house is warm with the blanket of privilege. So I push power. I snuggle up next to my husband and close my eyes, letting the music in. And I wait for my eyes to heal and my heart to cleanse, because this sadness helps no one.
The record crackles. The distortion is perfect. It’s a barrier between me and the musician, and it keeps us at a safe distance from each other. I enjoy that I can count on this. I’ve always loved predictable change. The ending of a season. The ending of a year. The beginning of a new one. I remember skipping to choose my record, and now I cannot recollect how my carriage seemed so light. After all, it feels as though it was a lifetime ago. I breathe in through my nose and fold deeper into him. He responds with a profound sigh, and I know he feels it too.
“Do you ever think about this: What if life never turned in on itself? What if one day we realize we need each other?” I ask.
He replies, “I think we realize that. I think that’s what scares everyone.”
Hey, writers! At a recent family gathering, a beautifully creative relative and I were discussing writing projects we’d done in the past. She mentioned having written an entire screenplay from one sentence given to her by a colleague. I have also felt inspired to create work based on an idea or a word. And this got me thinking: Sometimes we feel so much pressure to create something amazing, that we clog our meaning with a whole bunch of extra. Writing should be crisp and clean, allowing for gorgeous ideas to explode through the page.
Writing exercises that help me the most are those that provide a word or a sentence to incorporate. I attach myself to a phrase I’ve read or heard, and I let the idea bloom into something original and new. My story, The Hunger, came from reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast and my flash fiction piece, Revolutions, came from a news headline I heard one summer.
Here are ten sentences. Choose one to incorporate at the beginning, middle, or end of your short story, flash fiction, poem, blog, screenplay, or memoir today.
If you use one, I’d love to read your finished piece. Send them to me at awriterinside16@gmail.com. Happy writing, friends.
Now that you’ve been writing for a week or so, I hope you’ve gotten used to the practice. If you made it all seven days, congratulations. If you only made it three or four, congratulations. You are now a bonafide author.
In writing class, we start our work with description. Painting a picture in your readers’ heads is essential to getting buy-in from said reader. Sensory detail may seem like an elementary place to start, but there actually isn’t a better place that exists.
**For our pre-write today, choose a food with which you feel an emotional connection. Is it mac-n-cheese because your grandma made it for you when you’d stay with her? Is it a t-bone steak because you’re like me and steak night was once a month? Is it tapioca pudding with nuts in it because you hate nuts, but no one seemed to care? Whatever the food may be, tap into the emotions that surround it. Think of this food with all of the senses, and dive into a description. Remove the name of the food, and let the reader experience it from your perspective.
When my students do this, they have fun with things like peanut butter, celery, pizza. In many case, peanut butter is the aggressor in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When celery is chosen, it’s simply a vehicle for what we really want in our mouths. When pizza is described, it’s often times a lifeboat in a world of drowning. Have fun with this prewrite. Take five minutes to write this and no long. Go!
Now, read over your description. Is your mouth watering? Would a reader see this food the way you do? Have you evoked emotion? Did you let the reader experience what it’s like to let their taste buds and nostrils join together in the harmony of the feast? Have you properly feasted on this description? If your answers to those are “no”, go back in and add a layer of personality to the food. Oftentimes, giving something like peanut butter a stubborn streak or mac and cheese a psychiatrist-level demeanor of comfort will really drive your piece home.
Now, tap into what exactly made your food description so wonderful, and apply that to a place that means a lot to you. Push yourself to write at least a page of description about the place, a special day there, the people there, what it felt like being in that space. Your place can be real or figurative. Describe it so that the reader understands your relationship with it. Have fun!
You know you’ve thought about it. It’s come to you while reading a really great book (or a really bad one), or perusing the shelves at your library, or in a really funny moment with your friend, or when your kid said something incredibly horrifying in public. You’ve thought, I could really write about this. I should start a blog. I should author a book. And then you get excited about the romance of that. You have dreams of experiencing Paris the way Hemingway did, with a cigarette and a beer. You imagine you’ll look like he did in the window of a cafe, thinking deep thoughts. Unlocking new truths with every syllable you write. And then a squeaky toy from your chocolate lab or a request from your child or a new suggestion from your boss snaps you back to your very own reality. And then your dream floats away, seemingly out of reach.
In our culture, we romanticize what we think writers look like. We decide they live a much more glamorous life than we do, and that’s simply not true. I’m here to tell you that the minute you put your thoughts to paper, you are a writer. You are what you dreamed you would be by simply creating. I have been a writing teacher for ten years now. Each semester, I ask my students to write something small, quickly. When the time is up,and we put our pens down, I ask them how it felt. I am met with confused faces. I repeat, “Now how does that feel?” Most of them shrug, weighed down by teenage angst, protected by the facade of being too cool to care. Succumbing to the alone. The asleep. The wasteland.
These dubious looks thrown my way only make me stronger. That is when I ask my students to do something scary. I ask them to wake up. I ask them to swim around in the reality of creating something that didn’t exist before they wrote it. To acknowledge the responsibility of giving life to a moment. To let them know that this is the most amazing realization. They gave life to ideas and things. They documented their very existence. Their perspective now lives on on the parchment. The act of putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard is permanent. It is authorship. It is a declaration of actually being awake and alive right now. And then they smile. 
Writer, if you choose to come with me on this journey of authorship, please know that I will ask you to take some risks. I will ask you to observe more than you have ever before now. I will request that you to go deep within to unlock the writer inside. You were meant to live your fullest life, and you can do that by putting pen to paper. Your first assignment: find a place to write your thoughts. Are you a notebook person? Yellow legal pad? Brand new leather-bound journal? Spiral notebook? Printer paper? Computer? Typewriter? Once you’ve test driven your vehicles of composition, let your pen fly for ten straight minutes.
Pre-Write: Make a list of ten words that make you happy. Don’t apologize for liking these words. They can be in any language. They can be million dollar words like, phantasmagoric, or they can be words you like because they make you giggle, like “bubbles”. No matter what, celebrate these words in a list. Can you go beyond ten? Look at them. Verbalize what you like about them. What feelings do they evoke? Are they similar? Different? Notice your preferences.
Assignment: Complete ten minutes of stream of consciousness writing for one week. Just put pen to paper and let it fly. Do not question it. Do not stop until your timer is up. Clear your mind and write everything that comes to it for ten minutes. Don’t edit. Don’t second guess. Once you’ve completed assignment #1, leave the number of pages you created in the comments. Try to repeat this assignment every day for a week. See if it’s a habit that might stick.
