Come, thou Fount of every blessing

"Come, thou Fount of Every Blessing."

It is, quite simply, my favorite hymn. Spiritual, beautifully written, simple and direct in its meaning. I'm listening to it as I begin to write this. One day -- long from now, I hope -- it will be sung at my funeral.

But this blog isn't about something so deep, spiritual or religious. It is about words. In particular, one word.

Now as a writer, I love words, of course. But there are some words I just love more than others. For example, there's both loquacious and logorrhea. Anyone who has actually spoken to me -- or, more correctly, who has listened to me -- would certainly say both can be applied to me, particularly when I'm nervous.

Then there's serendipity. I love the meaning but it's the wonderful sound of the word that truly touches me.

Serendipity.

And, of course, there's callipygian.

I started with the word callipygian in mind when I wrote an entire Kendall Hunter murder mystery story. It was my sole inspiration. (You can find my story titled Callipygian in The Fine Art of Murder, a short story anthology published by Blue River Press for the Speed City chapter of Sisters in Crime.) Plus, those who know me well will certainly testify as to why I love this adjective.

All this gets me to the single word I am thinking about today.

Fount.

It is such a niffy little word. Middle English, I think.

Although I am sure I have heard or seen it used before, I don't remember the word fount used in any context other than in the hymn, "Come, thou Fount of Every Blessing." It means source, of course, so in the hymn, the source of every blessing refers to Jesus.

Like I said, a niffy little word.

But I need to correct something. I didn't remember seeing the word used other than in the hymn until I ran across it last week while reading Rhys Bowen's newest book, In Farleigh Field. And when I read it, I sat up and poked my wife. She knows how much I love the hymn.

A character in Rhys' novel used it to describe his father as being a fount of knowledge about history. And he was right. The old man was.

So there you have it. A word I love. A word I find inspirational. A word I will probably start randomly dropping on people.

Now go forth and be a fount of knowledge about something.

And thanks for reading.

      



  

National Novel Writing Month -- Update 3

Oh my goodness, I just made myself cry. Damn, I hope this stuff is good. I'm too close to it to know for sure.

I just wrote the scene where my main character, Rachel, a black Jewish woman from New York, meets her paternal grandmother in Virginia for the first time. It was more emotional than I thought.

But then again, I am playing the theme from Love Actually in the background, so that -- and not my writing ability -- could be the reason I shed a tear or two.
  
It's been a slow week and while I'm still on pace to reach 50,000 words by the end of the month, I am far behind my personal goal. I know the important thing about NaNoWriMo is writing but word count is always important to me. I know this first draft will be crappy. I accept that. But it will have -- or should have -- all the elements I will need whenever I get around to re-writing it. And I hope this new scene survives in the re-writes. It feels good.

You can't improve your writing until you write it. And so, I will plunge forward, hoping to up my pace so that I can finish close to my personal due date.

Thanks for reading.

 

Writers retreat

Just finished packing to leave for the Speed City chapter of Sisters in Crime's second writers retreat, which again will be at Bradford Woods, 30 miles south of Indianapolis. The chapter sponsored a weekend retreat in 2014, which was tremendously successful.

Looking forward to work sessions, talking and working with other writers, and just spending time alone to write or just walk through the woods and think.

I plan to finish an essay I have been working on for a while and a somewhat long short story. Also to bounce a couple of ideas I have for a novel in November.

Should be great. Looking forward to a great weekend.

Thanks for reading. See you in October.

Don't make me come over there

WARNING: I gonna get real up in here and so all my Christian readers may want to cover their ears or look away. I just saying . . .

I was in Alexandria, Va., all week, and just got back today. Had a good time. Ate well, even had a couple of glasses of champagne from the bottle the management at the Hotel Monaco sent up for our wedding anniversary. (Last time I had a drink was about three years ago.) Walked around a lot, shopped, did tourist-y things, took a boat ride on the Potomac River, went to Ben's Chilli Bowl (one of my favorite places in Washington).

Generally slept late because, after a day of just fun, I usually wrote well into the night. So it was a good time all around.

After one last walk around Alexandria today, we left for the airport, Reagan National. When we got to the departure gate, there were people standing around everywhere. The flight was both delayed and over-booked. When asked, we opted to take a later flight, which allowed a young mother from Carmel, Ind., to make the flight home. But in the end, the airline also got us on the flight we were originally scheduled to take. We departed about 45 minutes late.

It took a while to get to the runway because we were following a number of other flights out and authorities were using that same runway for incoming flights from the south that was used for departing flights taking off to the north.

When we were second in line to leave, a Southwest flight landed. And as the US Air flight ahead of us moved onto the runway, a guy on our plane across the aisle from me said, in a voice loud enough for everyone on the plane to hear above the sound of the jet engines, "This fucking airline sucks."

What did he just say? I couldn't believe it.

In this day and age, when people are normally nervous about anything out of the ordinary happening at an airport or on a plane, thinking it could be the prelude to a terrorist attack, this jerk decided to get big and bad and loud. All over a situation which, for the most part, wasn't the airline's fault.

I looked across the aisle and said, "Don't make me come over there and bitch slap your sorry ass and then throw your fat ass out onto the tarmac so we can all get going."

Well, I actually only said that it my head. Aloud, I said nothing. I did what everyone else near him did; stared at him with death beams coming out of our eyes.

I'm a fiction writer, as you know, but some of the best stuff I get is real, such as with this jerk. This situation isn't much but it would be a great part in a short story. The fat guy who gets thrown from the back of a plane. Didn't happen but everyone of the plane probably wished it did. And as a writer, I can make that wish come true.

Man, it's great to be a writer. Because the only limitation is one's imagination.

Now what I should have said . . .

Well, maybe next time. But for now, thanks for reading.



  

A writer's block blocker: Someone walks into the room . . .

As writers, we have all had to deal with writer's block; that condition when we are staring at the blank page and nothing is coming out. It's a difficult and scary situation.

Writers have written about it so much -- in books, blogs, videos, newsletters, in person, etc. -- that it's a small wonder that the problem still exists. Yet it does.

And so I decided to put in my two-cents worth.

That's not to say I have the remedy. If I did, there wouldn't so many novels, short stories and essays that I have started and never finished. Plus, if I had the remedy for writer's block, I'd be a millionaire. What writer wouldn't be willing to pay me a king's ransom for the cure to a serious problem that affects us all?

For some time, I have thought writer's block is basically just boredom. You are bore with what you are writing. And if that is the case, then so will the reader.

I think the quickest cure to that is to write through the problem as quickly as possible. Instead of a lot of imaginative description and detail setting the scene -- the look of the flowers, the smell of the air, the feel of the breeze, the sound of the birds, the feel of the dying person's pulse -- just write "Helen died on a Monday afternoon" and move on. The faster you get through it, the faster you put wirter's block behind you.

But a couple of years ago, someone told me about a wonderful cure to writer's block. Obviously, it really only works in fiction, and not in all fiction. It's best probably in mysteries or suspense fiction, although it can still work in a romance or other genre.

When you don't know what to write next, have someone walk into the room with a loaded gun in their hand. Regardless of what's going on in the scene prior to that, having someone walk in with a gun will change and energize everything. There are so many possibilities. Is it a man or a woman? Are they there for good or ill? Are they even in the right room? It doesn't matter because a load gun dramatically changes everything, both in fiction and real life.

So, the next time you are blocked, try adding a loaded gun, or at least some other weapon. You will be amazed with the results.

And hopefully, it will help your story. If nothing else, it could put a smile on your face as you consider all the possibilities.

Thanks for reading.    

Do you know Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

It's a joke, of course. "Do you know Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?"

I first heard it on television many years ago, as a child, actually. I think it was on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The punchline is: "I didn't know he moved."

To get the joke, you need a modicum of knowledge of U.S. history and even as a child I got it. And later, as an adult, I used the joke as the baseline (and a low baseline, at that) for determining whether a person had any understanding or knowledge of history. You'd be amazed at the number of people who don't.

As a writer, you need to hit the sweet spot between people's knowledge and understanding of your topic or subject, and your presentation of something new and imaginative. Lean too far on the former and the reader will get bored and stop reading. Can't have that.

But to lean too heavily on the latter could result in the reader lacking context. And again, the reader could stop reading. Can't have that.

My beta readers -- a select group of friends and colleagues and others -- like my writing, which is great. Members of my critique group are great at pointing out problems in both my writing and storytelling.

But as a fiction writer, I am still insecure. Am I giving my reader something new and imaginative but without a context they can understand? Am I just writing what others have written before? I truly don't know.

I was much more confident as a reporter. I generally knew what I wrote hit the mark. But fiction seems so much more subjective, although I know it's not.

 Anyway, I'm working on it. But in the meantime, do you know Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

Thanks for reading. 

After the opening line, what comes next?

So, what's the next line?

From writers to editors, from agents to teachers and writing coaches, from publishers to Internet bloggers, everyone in the writing and publishing industry stresses the importance of a good opening line. It's almost as if you don't nail the opening line, you might as well give up and go home. While I doubt readers care as much about this as writers do, I don't doubt its importance, which is why I -- like so many writers -- sweat that first line.

Oddly, we don't tend to get as insane with what comes next -- the second line. And why not?

That question came to mind thanks to a friend and former colleague.

The venerable sage Joe Boyce was a Chicago cop back in the late 1960s -- sit back and contemplate that for a second. A black cop in Chicago in the late 60s -- before getting the journalism bug. He spent time at the Chicago Tribune before heading off to Time magazine, and then finally to the Wall Street Journal before retiring. He's a musician now and enjoying retirement.

Last month, on his Facebook page, he started posting a one-sentence prompt -- the opening sentence -- and asked his friends to write the next line. But one line only.

Some people wrote an interesting sentence, full of thought, full of promise. But frankly, some people wrote unimaginative, boring stuff. They seemed to give it no thought at all. And other people failed to read his instructions fully and wrote more than one sentence.

But I took it seriously. And I followed Joe's  instructions.

Regardless of the prompt, I tried to write something as compelling as the first sentence. Because it's the next sentence and the next sentence and the next that makes for good, consistent writing and storytelling. I knew that, of course, but Joe just reminded me of it. Your writing can lose a reader at any point. Therefore, the next sentence is always important.

So, Joseph, thank you, as always, for keeping it real.

And to everyone else, thanks for reading. And keep writing.

Iconic science fiction writer Ray Bradbury dies at 91

Iconic science fiction writer Ray Bradbury dies at 91

Ray Bradbury, perhaps the world's greatest science fiction writer, died today. He was 91.

Probably his best known works are Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked this Way Comes and The Martian Chronicles, of which I particularly liked Fahrenheit. But he was more than just those early works. His short stories are classics of the genre.

He was a great writer and like with all great writers, he will be missed.

Keep him and his family in your thoughts and prayers.

Thanks for reading.

In the beginning . . .

A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)


This is very true. Where to start is an arbitrary thing. But it also an important element of storytelling.

As I look at novels today -- and, more importantly, as I consider the advice of other writers, agents and higher ups  in the literary food chain -- I see that modern novels need to have some action very near the beginning. I don't always think that is the best approach but what you hear is that there needs to be action near the beginning to hook the reader in.

That is why I shortened the first chapter of both my last two novels in order to get to some action sooner.

But the actual beginning is still somewhat arbitrary. With The Last Tontine Survivor, I kill off an old guy in the first three pages. But there is a reason for his death dating back seven decades. While I do cover that period later in the novel, I could have started there.

And the ending -- the bad guys are vanquished and the protag survives. But she is entering a new phase in her life and I could have written a little more about what that happens to be.

I like the way the Harry Potter series starts and finishes. It doesn't start when Harry is born, or just before them, when his parents are terrible danger. It starts when Harry is 15 months old, on the day his parents are murdered. (That's Oct. 31, 1981, just in case you were wondering.) And at the end, there is an epilogue, which set 19 years into the future. Or, more correctly, 19 years after the conclusion of most dramatic events of the series. (Which means, the last scene in the last book won't occurred for another five years, in Septemeber 2017.) But even then, Harry and his friends are only in their mid- to late-30s, and presumably have much more life to live. And more stories to tell.

While I sometimes struggle with where to start, I generally know where to stop. It's at the end, which is where I am now.

So thanks for reading and keep writing.

The End

Smash -- a new show on television

I discovered a new show on television this week. It's called SMASH and airs on NBC, I think on Monday nights. I remember seeing lots of ads for it several weeks ago before its premiere but I missed seeing it and the show fell out of my mind. And I don't remember seeing any ads for it recently.

But my daughter was watching in On Demand one morning this week as I was passing through the family room and I sat down for a moment and was quickly hooked.

That is what good writing and an interesting story can do.

There were several storylines introduced in the first episode -- I think four episodes have aired so far. At least that is how many I have now watched -- but they didn't seem crowded. The characters were interesting, though not always likeable, and the plots and sub-plots were believeable and fun. The writing was crisp and enjoyable. And the songs, both lyrics and music, were wonderful.

(Made me wish I had studied drama when I first went to college, which what I wanted to do in the first place. But I ultimately studied history, which, fortunately, I do love. But being on stage would have been wonderful, too.)

I really enjoy this show and plan catch it at its original time next week. And despite the great performances, it is the writing that pulls me it. It is so good, I rarely venture outside the universe the writers have created. It is crisp, which I said before, and moves at a good pace so that the viewer never gets bored. That is a real gift -- it put everything needed in a scene into that scene without extraneous material. It was well done.

Good writing always inspires me to work harder. It may not lead me to getting published any sooner but it truly doesn't hurt.

Gotta run. I'm reading through AN UNTIDY AFFAIR once more before I submit it to a contest. But in the meantime, thanks for reading.