The Lady Chatters

For me, it’s about hats.

Yes, hats.

I used to wear them and had fun doing so. There was the sweeping leghorn I wore with a red and black polka dot dress. It gave me confidence—so much so, that I was able to blithely pretend I had meant to make a phone call when I accidently sailed into a phone booth instead of the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

There was the black fedora. Of course I wore it with a trench coat, and it seemed like every time I walked into a room where someone was playing a piano, the pianist would launch into “As Time Goes By.” Being the cooperative sort, I’d find a column or wall and lean up against it with an air of mystery.

I loved my hats. The last hat I wore was the one I wore for my wedding—symbolic, I guess. I put away my hats and began my life as a mom and later, a journalist and communications professional.

With all this talk about finding your author’s brand image, I began thinking about hats. One of the suggestions that has been made is that we dress the part of our author identity from the beginning. I started thinking about how I wanted to present myself.

Here’s a confession. I love dramatic clothes. Surprised? Okay, neither am I. I love 1940s film noir, Renaissance-inspired, rockabilly, vintage, Boho and Goth. I love color and texture. And I love hats. But as I pondered finding a few pieces to reflect my “author style,” I hesitated. How could I possibly wear a hat in public? It was so attention-grabbing, wouldn’t people look at me and think, “Who the heck does she think she is?”

It dawned on me hats could be a metaphor for writing. Even before I finish the first chapter, I’m worry about what a reader might think—“Who the heck does she think she is, writing this schlock?” Not an encouraging voice to have ranting in your head.

When I was younger and really sailing along in my career as a novelist, I didn’t care about being read. I cared about being a writer—and a good writer. I was a writer and I loved writing for the way it made me feel—just as  I loved wearing hats for the way they made me feel. I didn’t give a hoot about what people thought.

It’s been a revelation.

I’m going to go buy a hat.

It felt like an audition. I had interviewed for a job with a community weekly, and after completing the interview, was asked if I would be willing to do some freelancing.

I said, “Yes.”

The editor wanted a story on an older man whose car had just won a NASCAR race at the State Fair. It was the realization of a childhood dream, and it would make a good feature. The lead practically wrote itself even before I did the interview.

Unfortunately, it was exactly the same lead published in the area’s daily newspaper a day after I the interviewed the guy. So I had to scramble to find another way into the story.

Remember, this was something of an audition so I was nervous—I’m always nervous when I write for someone for the first time. I had to find a second perfect lead.

I did find a way into the story. It wasn’t obvious, but it worked well. And I did end up getting the job as a community editor for the newspaper.

But I did have to struggle to find that not-so-obvious lead. Without a strong lead paragraph, I find I can’t write the story. Others can write in blocks, sketching out a paragraph here, a quote there, writing the lead later when the story is organized.

That doesn’t work for me.

Then there are the times you bury the lead. Years ago, I wrote a story about Hanukah for another community weekly. I’d found a couple in the southern part of the county who were willing to talk about their holiday traditions for a feature story in the newspaper. They were wonderful people—he was Polish and she was German–and they welcomed me into their home. We sat at their dining room table and I started the interview.

The man did most of the talking. I didn’t notice immediately but at some point during the interview, I saw the numbers tattooed on his arm.

“You were in the camps,” I said.

He nodded. “I was in five of them.” He reeled off the names of the five—I remember Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück and Buchenwald—and then told me about secretly celebrating Hanukah in the camps with his father and some of his relatives, none of whom survived. That was followed by the revelation that he had met his wife in a refugee camp after the war. She had not been Jewish; in fact, she had been part of Hitler Youth. It was an amazing story and he was able to weave them together into a beautiful story about Hanukah and hope.

When I went to write the story, I was reluctant to start with the obvious lead. Why? Because so much was being written about the Holocaust and survivors and I just didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing.

Argh!

I did find another way into the story, burying what should have been the lead about six paragraphs in. The lead I used—which, of course, I don’t remember because it wasn’t nearly as vivid as the lead I should have used—was okay. It worked. Well, it wasn’t horrible.

What these two experiences show is that there are many ways into a story. Sometimes, we make decisions because we recognize immediately what will capture an audience’s attention. Sometimes, we make decisions based on our own strange thoughts or impulses at the moment. And sometimes, we’re forced to find a less than obvious way to enter a story we’re telling.

In the case with the NASCAR owner, finding a less obvious lead makes the story better. In the Hanukah story, using the less obvious lead did the opposite.

Here’s an exercise that can be used for both fiction and nonfiction. Find a feature story, a novel or a movie. How did the author set you up for the story in the first paragraph? Was it the obvious place for the story to begin?

What other way could the story open? Find a different way into the story—whether it’s a feature, novel or film—and write it. Does the new opening change how the rest of the story follows? Does it alter your view of the characters and the plot? Which opening is more common? Which gives you a unique twist into the story? Which one captures audience attention and best establishes the feel of the story you’re telling?

I don’t know about you, but when I read histories, I start seeing people marching across the pages—the famous, the near famous, the ordinary. I start wondering what a particular historical event meant to people, particularly the everyday folk. Immediately, I begin to look for conflict, tension and what one of these ordinary people might do if the historical event landed on their doorstep.

The same thing happens when I work on my genealogy only at a more personal level.

Let me give you an example from my own family tree. One of my mother’s ancestors was named Russel Twitty, born circa 1764 in Rutherford Co., NC, and died in Franklin Co., Mo., in 1834. His family is a virtual treasure trove of possible stories.

One of the eight children—three boys, five girls–of Capt. William Twitty and Susannah Bellars, Russell seems to have been the youngest of the three boys. The elder Twitty was hired by the Henderson Co. to lead a group of “over the mountain” men and join Daniel Boone’s party as they cut the trace through the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky. On March 25, 1775, the party was attacked by Shawnees and William, his slave Sam and his dog were killed, leaving Susannah a widow with eight children.

By 1778, she was remarried and her husband, Col. William Graham, became the children’s guardian. In 1780, Graham also became Russel and William’s commanding officer. No big deal—the Revolutionary War was something of a family affair in the mountains of the Carolinas, with Patriots and Loyalists fighting as much to settle land disputes and long-time feuds as they were for patriotic ideals. Regardless, one thing that is about the Grahams and Twittys—and their neighbors, the David Miller family: they were well-respected, well-off and actively involved in local politics.

But here are the pieces of that would make great fiction:

1. Loyalists attacked Graham’s Fort in September 1780 near current day Route 226 south of Patterson Springs, Cleveland Co., NC. Russel’s 17-year-old sister, Susan, was quite the heroine of the engagement, not only saving her older brother, William’s life, but braving Tory fire to retrieve a Tory rifle and use it herself.
2. While Russel’s brother William did fight at the battle of King’s Mountain on Oct. 7, 1780, there’s no mention of Russel being there and Graham had returned home on the eve of battle due to an illness in the family. What is mentioned is that after the defeat of the Loyalists, eight Loyalist prisoners were hung by Patriots, one of whom was Col. Ambrose Mills. In 1790, Ambrose’s daughter, Polly, married Russel Twitty. Since many of those supporting the Loyalist cause were drummed out of town after the war, their properties confiscated, I’ve always speculated about the Twitty-Graham family’s reaction to Russel’s marriage. Shift the timelines, change some of the facts, and you could have a great little “love in the midst of war” story.
3. The third of the Twitty boys was Allen. Now Allen was a very interesting man. He married Martha Miller, daughter of the aforementioned David Miller, one of the wealthiest men in the area and a rabid Patriot who fought at the Battle of King’s Mountain. There is no record anywhere that Allen fought on any side during the Revolutionary. There are records, however, that he was one of the biggest counterfeiters in the fledging United States, with networks running north to New England and west. The family’s prestige saved him from jail a couple of times, but he was finally arrested and convicted of counterfeiting in 1804. By that time, he had inherited beaucoup property from his very wealthy father-in-law. So why was he counterfeiting?
4. Arabella Twitty, one of Russel’s younger sisters, brought charges against her husband, Joseph Magness, for aiding and abetting her rape at the hands of his brother, Zachariah and friend William Alexander. Zachariah was convicted, but charges against Joseph were dropped. There is no further information on Arabella after this court case, though her petition for divorce was granted by 1794. So—what happened to Arabella afterwards? What was it like to be a divorced woman in the late 1700s?

This is just four examples of stories that could be woven together to make a very interesting novel. We have a few stated facts about a family, but those facts give rise to the questions from “what happened and why” to “how did it shape the people” that could lead to the development of fascinating characters engaged in their lives in the midst of extraordinary circumstances. How they deal with the circumstances and challenges as well as how these events and choices change their hopes and dreams form the basis of a potential novel or screenplay.

There are countless places where the facts of my ancestor’s births and deaths give rise to possible story ideas. Our family’s genealogy is not unique. We all have the framework for stories in our family trees—it just takes asking the questions, putting lives in the context of the history of the area and period, and reading between the lines of family histories.

Genealogy can be as fruitful as news stories for writers. I invite you to take a look at your own family trees and explore the story possibilities there. Some good starting places for genealogical resources are the World Connect Project, US Gen Web, Roots Web, the online LDS Family Search resource, Gen Forum and Ancestry.com.

I hope you find wonderful stories to tell.

“Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy.” Eskimo Proverb quotes

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.” Robert Benchley

My sister-in-law died a few days after the Summer Solstice. She was 48.

It’s amazing how humans react when grappling with strong emotion. When my brother first called, I refused to believe it and for the next couple of days, as we prepared for the memorial service and I sorted through photos to display, I was grateful for the distraction of work because I could pretend it was a work project, not personal.

As Cindi’s sister, daughter and I went through closets and drawers to pack up things so my brother wouldn’t have to do it later, when pain finally set in, we could concentrate on a goal, occasionally sharing stories and even laughing.

I figure the work is the cotton wool we use to absorb our shock and allows us to get used to the idea that someone we love is no longer walking this plane with us; time to get used to our new reality.

When I was in college, I took a class called “The Martian, the Maniac and the Monster.” It was a film class focused on science fiction, horror and terror films.

At one point during the course, the professor handed out the Gahan Wilson pocket movie generator. Wilson’s very funny movie generator allowed someone to predict the outcome of a movie by making choices about the premise, action and consequences. Check it out. It’s online.

Even though it was devised in the mid-1970s, the movie generator, set up like a system flow chart, is an interactive script. A cross between a screenplay and a computer program, interactive scripts offer readers choices about how the story—the story they want to read—will progress and, ultimately end.

We’re very familiar with the products of interactive scripts—computer games, training programs, even marketing pieces. There have been several major Hollywood films that offered hints of the shape of things to come. One that comes immediately to mind is Clue (1985), a comedy that offered three endings. Due to limited technology, audiences did not get to choose the ending they wanted in the theaters, but today, such restrictions no longer exist.

Most of us remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books for children. In the grown up world, that’s known as Interactive Scripting or hypertext fiction. And the technology suggests that writers must begin to think seriously of creating interactive stories.

For writers, the idea of letting someone else decide how the plot will resolve is scary. After all, we are the Creators of our worlds.  It means surrendering some of the control we have over our own work. Writing will no longer be the loneliest profession, something those of us who don’t really play well with others struggle to accept.

Surrendering control over the process of publishing is also frightening. For editors, publishers and agents, the rise in e-publishing and the accompanying rise in self-publishing creates its own threats. Will they become irrelevant to the world of books? I doubt it. I still count on them to vet works and help an author make a good story better.

But at the conferences I’ve attended recently it’s become clear to me that writers can no longer turn to a Maxwell Perkins-type editor who will recognize and nurture a writer with raw talent. Just as networks only give a series a couple of weeks to find an audience, publishers do not have the resources to shape the work and careers of even the best storytellers.

Authors no longer count on a publisher for help in marketing and book promotion. The business of writing is falling on the shoulders of all but the biggest of the bestselling authors—and their work practically sells itself.

For those of us raised to distrust or belittle the self-published, it’s hard to abandon such deeply entrenched faith in the acceptance of big name publishers and well-known agents. But as we move into a society enriched by citizen journalists—frankly, without them, the revolution in Egypt would not have happened—we are going to see an increase in the number of people who publish themselves.

And some of them are going to start building followings. The next logical step could be that publishers would even look at you unless you have self-published and developed a decent following, one beyond Mom and the neighbors down the street.

But good writing is good writing.

Twenty-first Century readers will still connect with a story through character, plot, rising tension, meaningful dialogue and well-sketched description, the way those stories are delivered and the conventions shared by the writer and audience are in flux. MIT has established the Center for Future Storytelling, whose mission is to “examine ways for transforming storytelling into social experiences, creating expressive tools for the audience and enabling people from all walks of life to embellish and integrate stories into their lives, making tomorrow’s stories more interactive, creative, democratized, and improvisational.”

As a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Scriptwriting program, I was told that our class was lucky to be coming up when we were because cable television was offering opportunities galore for unpublished scriptwriters.

As we face the future of storytelling, what opportunities await unpublished writers and how can we adapt to that future without losing the best techniques of our craft?

Years ago, I picked up novels by five well-known romance writers of the first half of the 20th Century and five well-known writers of the second half. Of the first set, which included Margaret Mitchell, Mary Stewart and Daphne du Maurier, ever single novel started with a description—either a character description, like Mitchell’s, “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were,“ or a location description, like Rebecca’s, “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley, again.”

Not one of the novels of the latter part of the 20th Century opened with description. Instead, they threw us into action immediately.

That’s because we have been taught to understand stories through the medium of film and television, where description is instantly communicated by images. Action is central, with dialogue landing in second place in story.

For the last century, visual media has reshaped how we tell and receive stories. And writer’s adjusted.

Novelists brought their techniques to film. In Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, author Aaron Latham writes of Fitzgerald’s work on the Gone With the Wind script. Though uncredited, Fitzgerald ruthlessly cut dialogue that beleaguered scenes when silence was more dramatic. As a brilliant storyteller, Fitzgerald knew that, Latham writes, “there were times when the most moving thing a screenwriter could say was nothing.”

Truman Capote certainly used film techniques when writing In Cold Blood, a book that is heralded by many as the beginning of literary nonfiction. Though he denied consciously knowing he was doing it, Capote incorporated script techniques such as flashbacks, close ups and intercuts between scenes to build tension. From the beginning, we know who the victims and the murderers were, but Capote is able to ratchet the tension by cutting back and forth between the members of the Clutter family going about their daily lives and the murderers racing towards the farm, intent on robbery. Even reading it, you can almost hear a musical score building, warning us that something bad is about to happen.

Our understanding of story conventions are undergoing a change once again, one that pushes us to respond to these changes quickly. In the video Social Media Revolution 2, Erik Qualman tells us that it took 38 years for radio to reach 50 million listeners; 13 years for television to reach that same number; four years for the Internet to reach that many. It took less than a year for 200 million people to sign up for Facebook.

As novelists we will have to learn how to adapt our writing to the conventions of people who think spelling out a complete sentence is a waste of time, who have played video games since emerging from the womb, and who are inundated by an overwhelming amount of information every day. These are people who are encouraged to be citizen journalists, write fan fiction and expect authors to be full participants in conversations about and comments on the author’s work.

They also have an incredibly sophisticated understanding of the technology we will be using, skillfully negotiate the boundaries between a real and a virtual world, and live in both virtual and real worlds.

The new will not take the place of old technologies. Printed books, feature-length studio films, network television will not disappear. Think about television. “During the 1950s, television became the dominant mass media as people brought television into their homes in greater numbers of hours per week than ever before…The affect on print news media and entertainment media was felt in lower attendance at movies and greater reliance on TV news sources for information.” (American Cultural History, 1950-1959)

The rise of television was a threat to film. The fear in the industry was that films would become obsolete, anxieties reflected in the 1952 allegorical film Singing in the Rain, which tells the story of Hollywood stars and newcomers negotiating changes demanded of the film industry by the introduction of sound (television).

Gradually, filmmakers came to realize that movies offered opportunities for storytelling that television, with its predominant structure of 30- and 60-minute episodes, could not provide. In fact, contrary to Norma Desmond’s assessment in Sunset Boulevard (1950), the movies got “big.” Films could also tackle topics taboo to television, something that eventually toppled the Hayes Code and ushered in film ratings.

Like film, print, particularly newspapers, seemed threatened by the immediacy of television news. Our memories of significant news events—the JFK assassination, the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers—are embedded in images broadcast on television.

But many of the details, information that we couldn’t get on television, came from reading accounts in newspapers and magazines.

There’s a lot of talk right now about the future of publishing. With the advent of Kindle-like technologies, will anyone continue to buy books in print? Well, yes, I believe there will be. But like film and newspapers, printed books will change. They will just shift to make room on the shelf—or on our computers—for the new technologies.

Thirty years ago, scriptwriter Chuck Ross retyped the screenplay for Casablanca, renamed some of the characters and submitted it to over 217 Hollywood agents as Everybody Comes to Rick’s.  His findings:

• 90 scripts were returned unopened and unread.
• 25 were lost in the mail.
• 7 received no response.
• 8 were recognized as similar to Casablanca.
• 33 were read—and recognized.
• 3 received offers of representation
• 38 were read—and rejected. Why? Too much dialogue, not enough exposition, weak story line.*

Ross’s conclusion: Many movie agents have difficulty recognizing both well-known screenplays and quality writing, and submissions by unknown writers stand little chance of getting published.

When I first heard the story, I agreed with Ross’s conclusions. Obviously, great writing–particularly a small, intimate story with great characters–was not appreciated by the Philistines of Hollywood.

I have since changed my mind.

While Casablanca is consistently ranked in the top three most important films of the 20th Century by the American Film Institute, it’s greatness would be diminished if it were made today. Why? The film, originally released in 1942 in the middle of a war without a foreseeable outcome, had one dominant message: that the problems of “three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” In other words, individual desires and needs must be sacrificed for the greater good of humanity.

That ideology was central to most people’s view of the world at the time, and we, as modern audiences recognize it as such.

We would not agree to a similar statement today. In fact, a movie with that theme would be summarily tossed in the trash—and rightly so. A modern retelling of Casablanca would need major changes like making Ilsa less of a beautiful wuss who’s only function is to inspire the men in her life into a kick-ass warrior woman who fights the good fight with Rick.

As writers, we constantly come up against the tension between world-view and story.

I spent years working on a novel set in Los Angeles during the Mexican-American War and the opening of the California Gold Rush. The romantic hero was yummy—sexy, successful and sensitive—except for one thing. He believed in Manifest Destiny.

To me, the concept of Manifest Destiny–that white Angle-Saxon Christians were doing God’s work conquering and force feeding their ideology on an indigenous culture–is so foreign, it’s hard to believe anyone saw it as an ideology and not institutional justification for ruthless greed and oppression.

You see the problem.

How could I be in love with my hero if I couldn’t get beyond my contempt for his beliefs? If he was as contemptuous of Manifest Destiny as I was, then he would be even more contemptible because his subsequent actions would reflect the cynical ruthlessness of an empire builder.

The book still hangs around in my subconscious, but it will never be written until I resolve the problem of Manifest Destiny and modern sensibilities.

Those sensibilities are integral to the agreement we as authors have with the readers about how we will tell and how they will understand a story, and those conventions are reshaped by the dominant media and ideology of the time.

We all have classic movies or stories we love. Would that story, if written today, still be  beloved? What world view do they present?

Try taking a scene from one of those classics and rewriting for today’s audience. What would have to change to make that film or write that novel today?
________

*According to the American Film Institute’s website, of the top 100 movie quotes, six come from Casablanca.

The water garden Giverny

It’s finally beginning to look like spring in the Adirondacks. Forsythia and rhododendrons offer splashes of yellow and magenta against the still-dull ground. Trees are shaking out new life, and their branches are surrounded by a nimbus of bright green leaves.

With the re-awakening of the earth, I’m beginning to think about my garden. I haven’t done much gardening for a while, but this year, I will. Sure, we’ll plant the practical things: tomatoes and peppers, zucchini and pumpkins, berries and rhubarb, but what makes my heart soar are the stories I plant.

If Claude Monet could plant paintings at Giverny, I can plant stories.

Over the years, I’ve planted and left behind many a garden of stories. I planted my first herb garden, humbly inspired by the herb gardens at Huntington Library in San Marino and the Los Angeles County Arboretum in Arcadia. Sage, lavender, rue, wormwood, thyme, chervil, tarragon, cat nip. I’ve grown them all, not just for their culinary, cosmetic or healing properties, but for the legends and myths they whispered.

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember.” Hamlet.

Legend says that rosemary never grows older than Christ’s age at death. It also tells us that rosemary flowers were transformed from white to blue when the Virgin Mary lay her cloak over the bush.

It grew at the corner of our walkway and I can still smell it’s clean, pungent aroma when I think of home.

I see tulips, named for the Turkish turban, and think of the tulip mania that infected Holland in 1637, and the economic collapse that followed when the tulip bubble burst.

Daisies, so bright and carefree, from the Anglo-Saxon daes eage–day’s eye–  remind me always of Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby’s idealized and ill-fated dream of a golden girl. The final words of the novel beat in my mind like “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Outside our front door, we have two giant rhododendrons. I can never see them without the opening line of Rebecca wafting through my thoughts, “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again,” see the image of the 50ft-tall, blood-red rhododendrons that loomed over the drive hiding the shell of the once grand house and setting the tone of the Gothic novel..

In the late spring, the fragrance of honeysuckle drifts through the windows and sends me South, to the stories of faded Southern gentry, of rockers on front porches and the tinkle of the ice cubes in sweating glasses of sweet tea. In summer, the scent of mignonette and night blooming stocks in window boxes makes me think of Josephine and Malmaison, which inevitably leads to thoughts of roses.

Oh, not the stuffy, persnickety tea roses so beloved by modern florists. They’re lovely, but they tell me no stories.

No, it’s old roses that share stories with us:

The Apothecary’s Rose, also known as the Red Rose of Lancaster (Rosa gallica officinalis), the White Rose of York (Rosa alba) and the blending of the two at the end of the War of the Roses in the stylized Tudor rose. Later the White Rose of York would become known as the Jacobite Rose, emblem of the rebels who supported the Stuart line against the Hanoverian kings.

It is a White Rose of York, brought home by John and Abigail Adams back from England in 1788 that still flourishes outside their home in Quincy, Mass.

Rose or quit rent was a feudal practice of paying a landowner one rose annually for use of land. The tradition continues today in parts of Pennsylvania. According to various histories, William Penn brought 18 rose bushes to the New World. After his death, members of his family would charge one red rose in rent every year.

Old Reliable, known formally as Souvenir de la Malmaison, survived in the old black neighborhoods of the South. Freed slaves took cuttings from plantation gardens to plant around their homes. As wealthier white landowners followed fashionable trends and ripped out old roses, the rose flourished in poorer black neighborhoods.

The English musk rose-Shakespeare’s true musk rose–was rediscovered flourishing in family cemeteries in Virginia. Like the musk rose, other old roses have been rediscovered growing in small family cemeteries throughout the country. During the Victorian era, it was common to plant a rose that reflected the personality or occupation of the deceased on the grave. Perpetual care cemeteries, which originated in Boston and Brooklyn in the 1830s and seem to reflect the abandonment of family graveyards as people left their homes and farms to migrate west, do not allow the planting of any bushes on graves.

Harrison’s Yellow, which even today marks parts of the Oregon Trail, reminders of the pioneers who carried cuttings from home to their new homes in the west. Many folks know it as The Yellow Rose of Texas.

Oh, there are hundreds of stories about old roses–tragic, lovely, romantic, mythic. Many are told in Thomas Christopher’s In Search of Lost Roses.

“They are so-called old roses, the types beloved of our great-grandparents. Once the pride of gardeners from New York to San Francisco, they were for generations virtually unobtainable, lost entirely or preserved only in the gardens of a few antiquarians. Today, they are returning, once again filling gardens with their subtle, unfamiliar colors and perfumes. Behind their reappearance lies an extraordinary story, a tale of flowers that have persisted unchanged for centuries and of the unlikely band of experts who united to rescue them from extinction.”

And so I pull out my catalogs and sketch pads and dream of the stories I will plant in my garden this year.

During the summer of my junior year in college, I decided to read most of D. H. Lawrence’s works.

May Bluebells by davelynne (http://flickr.com/photos/57384821@N00/11949544)

Two descriptions linger with me, all this time later. The bluebell woods in Lady Chatterly’s Lover and the grandmother in The Virgin and the Gypsy:

“… saw the stony, implacable will-to-power in the old and motherly-seeming Granny. She sat there bulging backwards in her chair, impassive, her reddish, pendulous old face rather mottled, almost unconscious, but implacable, her face like a mask that hid something stony, relentless. It was the static inertia of her unsavoury power. Yet in a minute she would open her ancient mouth to find out every detail about Leo Wetherell. For the moment she was hibernating in her oldness, her agedness. But in a minute her mouth would open, her mind would flicker awake, and with her insatiable greed for life, other people’s life, she would start on her quest for every detail. She was like the old toad which Yvette had watched, fascinated, as it sat on the ledge of the beehive, immediately in front of the little entrance by which the bees emerged, and which, with a demonish lightning-like snap of its pursed jaws, caught every bee as it came out to launch into the air, swallowed them one after the other, as if it could consume the whole hive-full, into its aged, bulging, purse-like wrinkledness. It had been swallowing bees as they launched into the air of spring, year after year, year after year, for generations…”

The vivid sensuality of Lawrence’s writing certainly had an effect on my writing. In fact, I can remember sitting in a coffee shop that summer, writing a scene à la D. H. Lawrence.

There were other writers over the years I imitated. I once wrote a three-page sentence after reading Faulkner. It was exhausting, but I learned.

Writing is a craft as much as an art form. To write well, you must exercise and experiment and, yes, even imitate, much as a painter will go through paces by copying the works of the great masters.

You develop a sort of verbal dexterity, learn what works and what doesn’t, what feels natural and what doesn’t. You learn the rules—and you learn how to break them.

And then, you walk away.

What you learned sinks into your unconscious where it writhes and shifts, attaching itself to the walls of your own style and incubating, only to emerge someday, in some way in your writing, now wholly and completely yours. Not that I ever really think about my own style. Style is something that just is, like the love you have for a child or the faith you have in creation.

So try it. Pick an author — it doesn’t have to be one of the literary greats. Think about what makes their voice unique, their writing strong. What appeals to you about this writing? And then, pick up a pen or open a document and write a scene in the style of that author.

Let me know if you decide to try it. I’d love to hear what you think of the exercise and what you discovered about your own writing from the experience.