Veronic is on vacation this month, so we are rerunning one of her more popular posts. She’ll be back September 22, but in the meantime we hope you enjoy:
Most people are a combination of various cultures, though I think their ancestors tended to confine their marriages and unions to one continent. Mine didn’t. As a teenager, growing up in the 1960s, I was always asked, “What are you, black or white?” I’d usually answer, “Both,” or “Neither,” not because I was afraid or wanted to fit in, but because it was true: Nicaraguan and Dominican parents, Middle-Eastern and French grandparents, and Chinese and African great-grandparents. (Hope I didn’t miss anyone). And born in Brooklyn, New York. “How sweet it is!”
This ethnic mix probably explains my preferred genres; Kid-Lit, because I am always looking for someone like me in children’s books; and Historical Fiction, because like working on a jigsaw puzzle, I travel the globe, mostly through books, in search of all of the pieces of me that, once united, will make me whole.
This quest has made me an avid multicultural reader. In every reading exploration I discover something about myself. Everything I write contains a key to who I am that reveals an aspect of my essence. It’s an awesome journey.
And while I seem to connect with everyone, I don’t really fit in anywhere; yet I love the empathy toward others that these various cultures have generated in me because it leads to a deeper kind of listening and understanding, which in turn informs and directs my writing.
I’m always learning, and changing, and growing, and I often have so much to say that I don’t know where to begin, or how to put it all together…like now.
So, thank you ancestors, for being willing and unwilling globe-hoppers. I am wonderfully made and you have given me much to think of and write about.
~Veronica
Weird. Dumb-ass. Late bloomer. How wonderfully my family described me. Yeah, you guessed it. I hated me, too. At fifteen, I had the social skills of a toilet brush. I spent most of my day desperately trying to say the right thing, so maybe I’d have some friends. Only in World History did I feel accepted. With her fantastic stories, my teacher brought history alive. She encouraged discussion. Even seemed to like me.
Forty-plus years later, I still remember how the room smelled of chalk and the musky perfume of the cheerleader who sat four chairs away; how it had a cooped-up warmth from the hour-long exhaling of twenty people. We sat crammed into small desks, the kind you slid into from the side with a writing surface big enough only for a single sheet of paper. Up front sat the teacher, the green blackboard behind her filling the entire wall.
Eager to express myself, I was quick to add my opinion on socialism. I spoke against welfare and social security. Rather, I said we should take care of each other. I didn’t believe the government needed to provide these services. In fact, I thought the government did a rather poor job. I suppose I didn’t express myself well; I wasn’t clear. Even to this day, I don’t fully understand why my opinion that people should look to themselves, rather than the government, to help their neighbor, should ignite such anger. Surely, at most, I was hopelessly naïve.
For a full twenty minutes, the class raged against me, calling me mean, harsh, unkind and unfeeling. Bewildered, I tried to explain my position, but the voices only grew louder more hateful. At the end of the class, the teacher asked me to stay behind. I stood beside her desk shaking from the effort to hold back my tears. Tall and skinny, I clutched my books in front of me, my shoulders rounded down against the recent blows. I thought she would apologize to me for letting the class get out of control. I thought she saw my hurt. Instead, very gently, she said, “I’d like to tell you about the Christ.”
Perhaps I should thank her. In one sentence she managed to teach me why the separation of church and state is absolutely necessary. After all, I’d just been told by a person, put in a position of authority by the government, that my political opinions were so heinous that I must be a heathen and in need of religious indoctrination, which she was eager to supply. I politely informed her that I regularly attended church.
*
Pivotal moments in our lives are marked by strong emotions: rage, hatred, shame, regret, fear, joy, hilarity, ecstasy. It is essential that we writers learn to convey these strong emotions to our readers. Story is emotion based. If we are not feeling, we’re not reading.[1] So how does a writer learn to convey emotion? How do we teach ourselves this skill? My solution is to feel the emotion myself by first writing about a pivotal moment in my life. By grappling with my own past, by dredging up a betrayal, or the bitterness of regret, by reliving a moment of pure joy, I find that my subsequent writing tastes real. Of course, when the emotions I’m reliving are negative, the cost to me is huge, because I must bleed again, before my characters bleed at all.
I’ve spent Christmas where it snows . . . where it doesn’t . . . and where it’s truly a winter wonderland in the German Alps. The magic only gets stronger over the years for me because each Christmas I have another memory to hang on my tree.
Not a real tree, of course. But what I call my Christmas Look Back Tree.
I can pull up fun memories, funny moments, heartfelt goodbyes, and most of all the true spirit of the season. The star at the top of the tree shines year after year to give me hope.
For there’s nothing like the warm goodness and comforting embrace of family and friends to experience the real joy of the season. Like a cup of hot cocoa with cinnamon sticks that never gets empty.
So, why am I telling you this in August? It’s back to school time, vacation days lingering, time to BBQ and eat burgers and messy corn on the cob. Because I’ve been spending a lot of time recently in a little town in Pennsylvania called Posey Creek.
At Christmastime — during World War 2 in 1943.
I found that in order to create a time and place that existed only in my heart, I relived my own Christmases Pasts far removed from that time, but the sentiment, the hopes, dreams, and needs of my heroine come from a place within me. That I went back to my Christmas Look Back Tree to dig deep into my feelings to mold my heroine.
More on my story next time, but for this post I wanted to write about that even when we write about a time and place we never knew, it still comes from the heart, from our passion to tell a story that reflects a bit of us, even if we don’t know it at the time.
For me, it was Ma. My heroine’s mother. Her strong bond with her mother, her need to see her again (she goes back in time to reconnect with her mother who’s gone when the book opens), also reflects my desire to do the same.
You see, my mother passed away a few days before Christmas many years ago…
So, when we talk about my upcoming release, CHRISTMAS ONCE AGAIN, you’ll understand how joyous I felt writing those scenes when my heroine reconnects with her mother once again…if only for a little while.
NEXT TIME:
News about Christmas Once Again release in October now up for pre-order:
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07V1QT9Z6
UK: www.amazon.co.uk/Christmas-Once-Again-Jina-Bacarr-ebook/dp/B07V1QT9Z6
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Other times, you keep pondering over an idea, knowing there’s something more pronounced underneath but not able to give it the bandwidth needed to figure it out.
If you are anything like me, my to-do list is fifteen miles long and has everything on it; laundry, take my son glasses shopping, help get another son ready for college, figure out what to cook for dinner. When all I really want to do is sit down and write and breathe and let all my thoughts come to the surface. Of course even in my writing list, there is so much there it’s hard to figure out what I should work on first and what things would make the biggest impact now.
So I’m trying to figure out what got me to that moment and then ideas of when they’d happened before popped up in my head.
And voila! Something clicks. It feels right. Confirmed inside your heart and soul.
As a writer, I want these moments more than they happen, but when they do occur I can at least now recognize it as something important and write it down and move forward with it.
Do you get these moments of clarity? Where are you when they come? And what do you do when you have one?
Happy Writing,
Denise
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What’s the fun of being a writer? Everything!
And part of that includes the fact that writing is always there. It becomes part of you. At least it has with me. Everything I do, everywhere I go, my writerness is part of it. And yes, that’s an unusual word although when I Googled it, other people have apparently used it, too.
I was on a cruise to Alaska last week with family and friends. It was lots of fun. We sailed near land going north, then south through the Inside Passage, visited several cities, took a few tours, and enjoyed the onboard food and entertainment. That entertainment sometimes included dogs, and you can imagine how much I liked that.
I particularly enjoyed the wildlife we saw, including young and adult bald eagles, other birds including those that flew over and sometimes dived into water like marbled murrelets, a few bears on the shoreline in the distance, some spouting whales, including humpbacks, and small breaching dolphins.
We got to wade in the water in the middle of a river—because, as you might surmise, that river wasn’t full of water.
We visited Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and took a tour that included visiting a formerly private castle.
And, oh yes, I did some writing and editing . . . and came up with an idea for another mystery series.
Will I ever write it? Who knows? But plotting and researching it will definitely be enjoyable. Plotting is who I am, and my subconscious is always at work.
And yes, that’s part of the fun of being a writer.
~Linda
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More info →A Slice of Orange is an affiliate with some of the booksellers listed on this website, including Barnes & Nobel, Books A Million, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. This means A Slice of Orange may earn a small advertising fee from sales made through the links used on this website. There are reminders of these affiliate links on the pages for individual books.
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