After Christmas I did a blog about gifts on Writers at Play. You can check it out on the link below.

http://www.writersatplay.com/wordpress/?p=817

One of the gifts I mentioned was the joy of a book I have fallen in love with this year, Inside Story, the power of the transformational arc, by Dara Marks. (http://www.daramarks.com)

Well, another lovely gift has fallen into my lap. My CP heard that Dara Marks is going to be giving a workshop in Vancouver this weekend (Jan. 31-Feb.1). It was all very last minute—one week to make the arrangements. But we both wanted to hear this woman who had written such a great writing book. The price of the workshop was reasonable. We got special discounted prices to fly to Vancouver. Even the hotel rooms were at a great conference rate. So we are off to Vancouver Jan. 30 and anticipating a great workshop.

Here is the transformational arc as taught by Dara Marks.

Yup. That’s why I need help.

I enjoy spying on other writers. I like sites that show their offices. Some are little cubby holes, others are beautiful big rooms with views you could sell. I like reading about their daily habits as well and comparing my own. So today, I have brought you some glimpses into the habits of famous authors.

These quotes  are from a site:

http://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/

Alice Munro

As a young author taking care of three small children, Munro learned to write in the slivers of time she had, churning out stories during children’s nap times, in between feedings, as dinners baked in the oven. It took her nearly twenty years to put together the stories for her first collection, Dance of the Happy Shades

Toni Morrison

INTERVIEWER
You have said that you begin to write before dawn. Did this habit begin for practical reasons, or was the early morning an especially fruitful time for you?

MORRISON
Writing before dawn began as a necessity–I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, Mama–and that was always around five in the morning.

My comment: I’m tired just thinking of this. How did she function throughout the rest of the day.

Continue quote: Many years later, after I stopped working at Random House, I just stayed at home for a couple of years. I discovered things about myself I had never thought about before. At first I didn’t know when I wanted to eat, because I had always eaten when it was lunchtime or dinnertime or breakfast time. Work and the children had driven all of my habits… I didn’t know the weekday sounds of my own house; it all made me feel a little giddy.

I was involved in writing Beloved at that time–this was in 1983–and eventually I realized that I was clearer-headed, more confident and generally more intelligent in the morning. The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down.

Recently I was talking to a writer who described something she did whenever she moved to her writing table. I don’t remember exactly what the gesture was–there is something on her desk that she touches before she hits the computer keyboard–but we began to talk about little rituals that one goes through before beginning to write. I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee and watch the light come. And she said, Well, that’s a ritual. And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space I can only call nonsecular… Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transaction. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

My comment: I wish I had a ritual that would signal to my brain that is has to start producing intelligent thoughts RELATED TO THE STORY. Instead, I spring up and head for the fridge. I tell myself there are no ideas there. But there is food. And it’s a good substitute. I return to my computer and beg the ideas to come. I sweat and bleed from ears. Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed for this.

Continue quote: I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

My comment: At least I know what I like about surroundings. I like being able to see outside. I like my things about me, sometimes in apparent chaos because as I work on a story, bits and pieces of research, lists, books I’m referring to, tend to pile up at my side. As to chaos outside my door…well, there is a level of chaos I can close the door (and my mind) to and then there is unusual chaos that requires I check on it. (Think crashes, hollering, moaning, etc.)

INTERVIEWER.
What about your writing routine?

MORRISON
I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space–a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [she indicates a small square spot on her desk] everywhere I am, and I can’t beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out–life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in. I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that–mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time.

The Paris Review, Issue 128, 1993

My comment: I laughed at her ideal writing routine which she has never experienced. Yup. That’s me. In fact, I think if everything was what I considered ideal  I wouldn’t be able to work for being nervous that something dreadful was about to happen.

Truman Capote

INTERVIEWER
What are some of your writing habits? Do you use a desk? Do you write on a machine?

CAPOTE
I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially I think of myself as a stylist, and stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.

The Paris Review, Issue 16, 1957

My comment: if I tried writing horizontally I would fall asleep. Besides my arms hurt just thinking about it. But I do some of my best creative thinking while horizontal. I often use a small light to write notes during the night as my ideas begin to sort themselves out.

Isaac Asimov

His usual routine was to awake at 6 A.M., sit down at the typewriter by 7:30 and work until 10 P.M. 

In “In Memory Yet Green,” the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1979, he explained how he became a compulsive writer. His Russian-born father owned a succession of candy stores in Brooklyn that were open from 6 A.M. to 1 A.M. seven days a week. Young Isaac got up at 6 o’clock every morning to deliver papers and rushed home from school to help out in the store every afternoon. If he was even a few minutes late, his father yelled at him for being a folyack, Yiddish for sluggard. Even more than 50 years later, he wrote: “It is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6 A.M. anyway. I am still showing my father I’m not a folyack.”

The New York Times, April 7, 1992

My comment: LOL. Sounds like a great work ethic. Sometimes, too many times, authors wait to FEEL like writing. Issac’s comments prove that getting at the work is more important that sitting around waiting for something inspirational to drive us to it.

Roger Ebert

Morning routine: I usually get up around 7. I make oatmeal in my rice cooker. Then I take an hour-long walk: outside if the weather’s good; on my treadmill if it’s cold. Then I shower, shave and go to the first of three movies I see on many weekdays.

The New York Times Magazine, February 13, 2005

My comment: What? Going to the movies is work? Bring it on. Shaping thoughts and whispy ideas into a story and getting words on the page, now that’s work.

‘Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.’

I like reading how other authors work. Listen to a famous author tell of his day.

Ernest Hemingway

INTERVIEWER
Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?

HEMINGWAY
When I am working on a book or story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and you know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.The Paris Review, Issue 18, 1958

Doesn’t he make it sound like a magical, wonderful process?

It can be. It often is. Other times, for me, writing is like trying to swim in peanut butter. I struggle through a sticky mess trying to find a rock, a bit of shore..something…anything that is clear and solid. Bits of ideas try and make it to the surface. When they do, they are often fragmented and chipped and bear no resemblance to anything solid. It’s a magical, scary, frustrating part of my writing when the story is stiff and unwieldy and when I wonder how, in the past, I ever got from a beginning idea to a fully formed story.

It’s times like this that encouragement about my writing is valued the most.

Someone tells me they enjoyed a book. Or I read a good review. Or I get copies of a new release. This week I did indeed receive copies. Not of a new book but one in which I have a story reiussed.

This book will be on the shelves soon. I guess it proves (to me) that I can somehow, with perserverance, figure out how to shape this current mess into a story.

I am fascinated to hear how authors get the idea for a particular story. I can never quite remember how it all started. Usually the seminal idea is a little flash or a scene, one that often doesn’t make it into the book but gives me a feel for the story. For instance I wrote a book Unchained Hearts (Also available in the recollection Alberta Brides) that began in my mind as a dream where I saw this scarred, withdrawn man hiding in a cave with a pretty young woman. She is trying to console him as he sits huddled in the opening of the cave looking out at something that fills them with trepidation. So I had to figure out this story and write it.

It’s one of the few I can remember WHY I started writing it.

Except for the story to be released next week with Love Inspired Historical release. I had a contract for 3 books set in the Depression Era. I had only written one (The Road to Love). I came up with the second, The Journey Home. But I was near the end of the second story and still had no idea for the third when Emma walked on to the final pages of The Journey Home as Charlotte’s new friend and bridesmaid. This is what it says in my book, “Emma had joined the hospital staff during the summer, and she and Charlotte soon became fast friends. Emma, practical to the core, seldom bothered to dress up. She usually kept her thick blond hair in a tight bun, as suited a nurse, she insisted, when Charlotte tried to talk her into letting I hang loose. But Emma had allowed Charlotte to have her way for the wedding and her hair hung in shimmering waves halfway down her back.”

So I had my heroine. Now I needed a hero and into my computer leapt Boothe Wallace, a widower who is running from his life back east. Not for his own sake but because of his little son, Jessie. I immediately knew why because both my husband and myself have relatives who were born in the Depression and taken by friends because of economic circumstances. In both cases, the parents were powerless to prevent it as the courts considered such things as how many children the biological family had as opposed to the family wanting to adopt the child. As well, they considered the fact that the adoptive family was better off financially. This happened far too often and left permanent scars in the child and the family who lost their child. But it seemed a natural fit for my story.

I needed something to happen to Boothe’s wife that would make him resent the medical profession. About that time I was visiting my daughter and son-in-law (who is a doctor) and we talked about medical mistakes in the 30s. While I was visiting, he received a medical journal that mentioned the history of quinine—guess what? The drug that was used widely in the 30s and caused death in certain cases. (I love synchronicity.)

I needed one last element—something that made Emma irresolutely committed to being a nurse to the exclusion of marriage. I again drew from my own experiences and the guilt one feels when things go badly wrong and one feels they are responsible for that bad event. I don’t want to give any more details from my book on this matter because it is a secret that isn’t revealed in the story until close to the end.

Doing research was also fun. Of course I had done extensive research on the drought and how it affected residents of the Great Plains but now I had to research medical things.

One books was Yes, Father, Pioneer Nursing in Alberta written by Alvine Cyr Gahagan.  

I don’t remember where I found the copy I originally read but enjoyed it so much I wanted my own. I searched for it on Alibris and found a copy at a nearby city so didn’t have to pay postage. And it’s signed by the author. How cool is that? The book is full of personal details and specific details about nursing in that era. Some of the things she shares emphasizes the difficulties of the era. She mentions that a grateful mother had crocheted a bit of lace around a little hanky as a gift. The material used was a bleached salt bag. She talks about dressing a lye burn. Lye was used freely in making soap and bleaching the wide unfinished floorboards. Lye burns and scalds were too frequent as boiling water was used widely on washday or when rags were dyed for making braided rugs.

Dust Bowl Diary by Ann Marie Low was another excellent book.

The author mentions in an early entry that she went to the first talking movie then at the end of the book mentions a movie in Technicolor. She worked part time in a library for twenty-five cents an hour and considered herself fortunate. Under a 1931 entry she says ‘The heat deaths in the country total 1,231. I mean humans. Lord only knows how many animals have died.’ Her description of the conditions is heartbreaking.

I found a children’s book that was excellent. It is part of the series Dear America and called Survival in the Storm, The Dust Bowl Diary of Grace Edwards. 

 Her descriptions of how they made things from flour sacks and working as a volunteer in the hospital where people were dying from or recovering from dust pneumonia were so good.

My story was fun to write because so much of it seemed to fall into my lap—a gift.

I hope you pick up my book or order it on-line and I hope you enjoy the story. I love to hear from readers about what they like about it. (Or didn’t like so long as you’re gentle about your criticism.)

Happy New Year to all. I wish for you health, peace and happiness.

In my own life (the writing part of it) I’m working on a story that seems destined to be written entirely in the dark. First, I was in the dark about my story. I couldn’t find it but I pushed on ahead and created a synopsis. Of sorts. I wrote over 100 pages but every day it felt wrong, stilted, and worse, I dreaded facing the keyboard the next day and trying to figure out what next??? So Dec. 23, I gave up and threw it all out and started again. This time I did two things I know I need to ALWAYS do. First, I made sure I had a clearly definable conflict that put the 2) motivated characters in opposition. Duh. How basic is that?

Still, the story is being stubborn. I can blame the holiday season when it’s hard to pull my thoughts into the office and force them to remain on the words appearing on the screen. Or I could blame it on a touch of the flu. No brain power.  But the last couple of days something miraculous and odd has occurred. When I go to bed, my story becomes a living organism in my head. I see the characters moving, talking, laughing. Like a mixed up dream, I see bits from different scenes. I have to jot things down in the dark. Last night I ended up with four pages of notes that will translate into 20 pages or more in my story. I could complain about missing my sleep but after agonizing over this story, I am not about to whine about that (though I might steal a nap during the day). In fact, I intend to do all I can to nurture this particular event.

It’s like I have fallen back into my childhood when I always made up stories to put myself to sleep. (One big difference-this is NOT putting me to sleep.) It just goes to prove that I can nurture the creative process but I can’t control it.  Not that I intend to trust my future to this method. In fact, I strive always to prepare well for writing a story. I don’t know all the details (in this case it seems I know none of them) but I need to know the major turning points, the emotional journey, and have a feel for the theme (which often changes and develops as I write).  As I said,  I need to have understandable motivation, and then, clearly definable conflict. I have learned the horrible frustration of trying to write a story without and vow every time it won’t happen again. 

Oh yes, a pen with a light in the tip or a little book light at the bedside are absolutely essential as well.

Here are the light and pen I use.

BTW, my newest book, The Path to Her Heart, is out mid January so watch for it.