Cousinly Love

One of my friends on Facebook is my cousin, Carmelita.  Her posts are always funny and clever and interesting.  And here’s the thing, I had never met her before.  We’re fourth or fifth cousins, and we met through her work on the family genealogy.  Carmelita lives in Austin, so I wanted to meet her while I’m here.  We arranged to meet at her house, where she could show me old family photographs—old like from the 1800’s some of them.

I gave myself an hour to get to her house, which the GPS said was plenty of time.  It wasn’t.  A smart device like that, and it didn’t take traffic conditions into consideration!  I arrived about 20 minutes late.  Carmelita wasn’t upset about that because she was working from home, so she could just continue working while she waited for me.  She came out and hugged me in the driveway.  Then she said, “Gosh!  I hope we like each other!”  I said that I didn’t have any doubt because I already like her, based on her posts.

We went into the house, and her house has lots of great photos taken by her husband, and lots of cool very Texan stuff.  I love her house!  And she has three very affectionate cats.  Yes, Cousin Carmelita and I are definitely compatible!  She brought down the panoramic picture of the 100^th family reunion, and I showed her Mom and Daddy and Grandma and my older son.  She knew my branch of the family very well.  Our family descended from a Texas pioneer couple who had thirteen children.  The family grew exponentially from that beginning, so it is a very large family.  I’m from the oldest daughter, while Carmelita is from the fifth son.

Then I discovered that we have even more in common: Carmelita writes.  Today she is starting a novel for National Novel Writing Month.  The idea is that you write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  It doesn’t have to be a good one, but it must have a beginning and an end.  This is not her first time to write a novel for the contest.  I was impressed.  I’ve written two novels three-quarters of the way through, and then lost interest.  For me, the problem is that I find real life so much stranger and funnier, more tear-jerking, exciting, gut-wrenching, and unpredictable than anything I could possibly make up.

Since I am making up for a severe Mexican food deficit, she took me out for dinner.  The food was not traditional Tex-Mex, but excellent and unmistakably Mexican.  We were surrounded by pirates, witches, fairies, and zombies—it being Halloween.  Austin people celebrate their weirdness and encourage each other to do so with the ubiquitous bumper sticker: Keep Austin Weird.  I’m sorry, but I think the rest of the world is just not weird enough.  I love Austin!

We returned to the house, carefully dodging trick-or-treaters, and I met Carmelita’s husband, Nigel.  They seem to be a really good match.  He’s just as funny and nice as she is.  Before I left them, Nigel took our picture with our great-great-great-great grandparents (well, a picture of them).

We meet at last!

You know, I think Cousin Carmelita and Nigel like her eccentric missionary cousin from Italy.  I certainly like them!  God is good!

Too Much Homework is Overwhelming!

I haven’t forgotten that I need to write Part 2 of my last post, Blessed Reassurance.  But here’s the thing: I’ve just got too much writing to do at the moment.  I need to write:

1. The script for a film about the missionary guesthouse that my apartment in Milan has become,
2. The script for a PowerPoint about the ministry,
3. A new post for the website’s blog, and
4. Part 2 of my last blog post, mentioned above)

In addition to those writing tasks, I have 2 very big translation jobs:

1. A book from Italian into English (due by the end of the summer) and
2. Our corporate paperwork from English into Italian (due as soon as possible)

All this is just overwhelming me almost to the point of paralysis.

So, instead of putting off the blog altogether, I thought I would take a pleasant little detour today, and take you on a little guided tour into a writer’s mind—mine!  I have written 3 complete books (nonfiction), and 2 that I never completely finished (fiction—I lost interest ¾ of the way through), and several plays (3-5 acts) and skits, the majority of which have been produced in schools and/or churches.  That’s not bragging, it’s just establishing that I know a thing or 2 about writing.

2 of the 3–the only ones I own copies of!

Sometimes people tell me that they feel that urge to write, but writing a book just seems like too big a task.  It’s funny but, I found books to be the easiest thing to write.  Although by word count my plays are about a 10^th the size of my books, they were much harder to write.  It was rewarding when they were done, especially when I saw my plays acted on the stage.  But writing, especially dialogue, was like do-it-yourself dentistry: painful and difficult.  Pulling the words out of my characters’ mouths was like trying to extract my own teeth with a rusty pair of pliers.  (How’s that for a colorful image?)

Books are not so hard to write if you break the task into small pieces.  The blog has helped with that—something I hadn’t imagined when I first started blogging just 3 years ago.  In addition, writing becomes easier if you make a regular appointment with yourself.  I try to write daily, but sometimes my heavy travel schedule makes it impossible to keep up with every single day.  One thing I found is that if you start to treat your writing time as an important appointment, you’ll find that your creative self will meet you at your desk, ready to write.  But you must treat your writing task as something important.  Turn off the phone, don’t answer the door, and close your web browser (unless you need to do research on the internet).

Beginning writers might find more success if they write things out with pencil and paper.  My first book was entirely handwritten before a word of it was put on the computer.  There is something about the sound of the pencil scratching across the page that unblocks the creative wells.  And, yes, even writing nonfiction is creative.  You have an incident that happened, but you choose how to shade it and frame it.

If you want to write, but don’t know what to write about, then take a look at what you like to read.  I have always preferred true life stories, how people overcame their circumstances by faith.  I think that’s why I lost interest in writing those 2 novels.  I just find real life so much more interesting, bizarre, and unpredictable.  Many of the things that have happened in my life are so strange that you simply could never make them up.  And the fact that they are true gives them a meaning that mere fiction could never attain.

It is extremely helpful to be a part of a writing group, that is, a group of writers that get together to support each other’s work.  The key word is support.  If the group you find is only interested in tearing each other’s work apart, then find or form another group.  The most helpful writing group I’ve been in was one in which each of us read what we had worked on that week.  Sometimes it’s only by hearing yourself read it aloud that you can notice things like run-on sentences and nonsensical phrasings.  The others then critiqued the writing, but always in kind and helpful ways.

In general, it’s not a good idea to share your writing with non-writers—at least not at first.  Non-writers usually don’t know how to tell you what works and what doesn’t.  Sometimes their comments will be a sweeping statement of disapproval, when in reality there is just a misplaced word or an awkward phrase.  The writing process has been likened to pregnancy and birth.  You wouldn’t give your newborn baby to an inexperienced and clumsy teenager, so you need to treat your newborn writing project with as much care and tenderness.

Editing is way more difficult than writing.  The most important ingredient for editing is time.  Put your writing aside for several weeks or even months.  That will give you fresh eyes to edit with.  So after reading your work to a writing group, making the changes suggested by your “midwives,” put it aside and work on something else or a different part of the project.  Then when you come back to it, you will be much more objective about what you’ve written.  Sometimes you’ll even be surprised by how good it is.

During the editing process, I like to add the sensory imagery that is missing from the first draft.  Sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste all add a dimension to the writing that will help your reader become engrossed in your writing.  Since my writing is nonfiction, this means going back in my mind to remember these missing elements.  Sometimes these come back to me in Technicolor, Dolby surround sound, and Odorama (does anyone else remember Polyester?).  Other times, I have to imagine what is missing.  But this is such an important element that I dare not skip this step, even if it’s difficult to remember.

So, there you have it: my writing process.  Oh, and one last thing: while praying the other day, the Lord showed me that this year I have been working on 2 books simultaneously—hallelujah!  God is good!