The office

This is my parent's basement. I love it for some weird reason. Neon lighting, makeshift desk, and pipes all over the place. (Not to mention the old training potty box full of children's books and stuffed animals.)

Lamb chapter 6 exercise 2

Here, Lamb is stressing the importance of beginnings. The writer must create two paragraphs in which the character is about to meet somebody. Certain elements that she has outlined as crucial to the beginnings of stories for children ought be included:

Joanna walked past the entrance to the lane three or four times, checking her watch nervously with each pass. She had arrived twelve minutes early, and thought that such overwhelming punctuality might actually constitute an imposition. But she had been waiting for an eternity to meet him. That is, if you count three long months in the mind of an eleven-year-old as an eternity. And she did.

He was just a few houses down on the right. The big brick house with the burnt red shutters. Joanna had imagined that he would live in a home more modern, something that reflected his twenty-first century state-of-mind. But something in the traditional structure of his home comforted her. Maybe he could fix it all, cure her of this terrible memory and let her resume her life. That seemed like a lot to ask.

The exact exercise can be found on p. 42 of Lamb's book, I encourage anybody to pick up the book for his or herself.

Kiteley exercise 14

This exercise asks the writer to tell a 300 word story using only images.

Huddled in the back yard, Margot placed a small brick of discarded concrete on top of two small blocks of wood. The humble, makeshift altar barely stood above the layer of dead leaves that rose nearly to the ankles of her canvas sneakers. Above her head, the bare trees stood tall and thin, joining together at the very top to form a much larger altar on which the gray sky rested heavily. She pulled several items from her monogrammed purple backpack. A silver dollar, a blue rubber salamander with yellow stripes went on opposite ends of the monument. She then pulled out a wooden nesting doll in the shape of the penguin. With a determined pace, each doll was pulled from inside the other, reassembled, and placed on the concrete. One figure was missing, making the largest doll loom above the others.

Stepping back, Margot walked to the rusted shed and pulled out a wooden rake. From the handle, a splinter pierced the soft flesh of her hand. Leaning down, she put her teeth to her skin and extracted the sliver of dull wood. She pulled the sleeves of her gray cardigan over her hands and went over to the collection she had assembled. With little haste, she began to pile leaves on top of it. After twenty minutes of methodical raking, a large swath of dirt encircled the mound of leaves that now on top of the concrete memorial. Replacing the rake in the shed, she hastened back toward the house with the yellow siding. Margot knocked three times on the back door before stealing silently to the corner of the home. Fifteen seconds elapsed before a loud click and a heavy dragging sound signaled that the old man was sliding the glass door open. Margot shook a few crushed leaves out of the cuff of her blue jeans and turned to walk home.



The exact exercise can be found on p. 37 of Kiteley's book, I encourage anybody to pick up the book for his or herself.

Kiteley exercise 49

Exercise Overview: Kiteley asks the writer to create a story in which a man and a woman are binary opposites, then you extract 2/3 what you've written and add in as much as you've taken out. Here's what I got.

Original Text

It was hard to define exactly what brought Maisie and James together. When standing together, she came just up to his shoulders and could just barely get her twiggy arms around his thick neck. Despite his physical bulk overwhelming her petite frame, her voice carried across the plains while he preferred to live his life quietly and with purpose. Where she was a talker, he was a doer. She wrote stories in her mind about love and conquest and what exactly her crazy old cat woman neighbor did at night. When she told James the stories, he wasn’t reproachful but instead shrugged his shoulders and went back to work. Oftentimes it was said that she brought a lighthearted happiness in the relationship and he was the anchor, though this seemed hardly fair. If she was to be the sun, that would make him the moon, and that just never seemed comfortable.

Maisie loved the Spring but James flourished in the fall. When she decorated their apartment with lilies, he sneezed in the corner from the accumulating pollen. As he took her on hikes through the park to admire the changing of the leaves, and just perhaps get a nostalgic glimpse of youth playing a haphazard game of football, she wrapped heavy scarves around her neck to keep out the chill.

They kept separate workspaces for weekend projects. James enjoyed the refuge of his garage workshop. Though there were tools for woodworking and home projects, he also kept a secret stash of archival New York Times crossword puzzles and had a DVD collection of various documentaries that he knew his better half would find outright boring. Maisie’s personal space was up in their attic, which was really more of a crawl space. She loved the glimpses of sunlight that shone through the small windows and the assortment of benign spiders that crawled along the exposed brick of her space. Her hobby room was a graveyard of long-forgotten projects. A sewing machine with bits of quilt work still draped above it, a corkboard with various notes from her ill-fated novel aspirations, and recipes in search of the perfect ice cream littered the area. She didn’t mind that her room was where hobbies went to die, but she cautiously avoided this graveyard of ideas after dark.

When they sat down to eat, all bets were off. He introduced her to the joys of a steak that was still red in the middle while she surreptitiously changed out his American cheese for all things smelly. His sweet tooth frequently invaded her love of the savory but together they avoided all things potato, for no apparent reason.

Minus 2/3

It was hard to define exactly what brought Maisie and James together. When standing together, she came just up to his shoulders. Her voice carried across the plains while he preferred to live his life quietly. She told stories of love and conquest and what exactly her crazy old cat woman neighbor did at night.

Maisie loved the spring but James flourished in the fall.

They kept separate workspaces for weekend projects. James enjoyed the refuge of his garage workshop. He also kept a secret stash of archival New York Times crossword puzzles and had a DVD collection of various documentaries. Maisie’s personal space, up in their attic, was really more of a crawl space. She didn’t mind that her room was where hobbies went to die, but she cautiously avoided this graveyard of ideas after dark.

When they sat down to eat, all bets were off. Together they avoided all things potato, for no apparent reason.

Rewrite

It was hard to define what exactly brought Maisie and James together. When standing next to one another, she came just up to his shoulders. To combat any awkward movements in public situations, she frequently wore high heels and he developed a slight, and quite unintentional, stoop. Another equalizing factor was the sheer amount of noise Maisie produced. When she so desired, her voice could carry across the plains while he preferred to live his life quietly. In the silences that might fill a car ride or a wait in the doctor’s office, she told stories of love and conquest and what exactly her crazy old cat lady neighbor did at night. Though James never participated in such stories, he refrained always from giving her the quizzical looks that naturally came to him.

Maisie loved the spring, but James flourished in the fall. She rejoiced in tennis and patterned skirts, but ragweed and pollen always got the better of him. He hoped in secret to convert her to an autumn bloomer and considered their outings to football games small personal victories. To encourage her shift, he frequently made gifts of scarves and told her how attractive she looked while wearing her prized riding boots.

The couple kept separate workspaces for weekend projects. James enjoyed the refuge of his garage workshop. Under the guise of a crafter’s paradise, he kept a secret stash of archival New York Times crossword puzzles which he filled in meticulously using a pencil with no eraser. Maisie’s personal space, up in their attic, was really more of a crawl space. Though she kept bits and pieces of the ghosts of hobbies past, the main attraction was the proliferation of benign spiders that slowly made their way from one cobwebbed corner to another. Something about the accumulation of forgotten pastimes and dark spaces appealed to her, but she cautiously avoided the room after sunset.

When they sat down to eat, all bets were off. Though he preferred sweet and she craved savory, they had one enemy in all things potato. At one recent dinner party, Maisie had gotten herself quite drunk in using red wine to slosh down the aftertaste of the host’s gnocchi. James had to support her quite generously through their entire underground experience home, but he didn’t mind. Having endured years of latkes from his Bubby, this was one experience he understood.

The exact exercise can be found on p. 73 of Kiteley's book, I encourage anybody to pick up the book for his or herself.

What'll It Be?

I created this book over a month ago to chronicle my slow descent into the quicksand that is literature (the only kind of quicksand that I think might just be good). Without making a single post, however, I've spent the past month reading and reading and just recently, I've started writing again. Now I figure that my schedule really is booked solid. Between what I read and what I am determined to write, I think that the title is more apt now than it was just four short weeks ago.

Initially, I was thinking to write some book reviews. Not from a critic's point of view, or a child, or a grandmother, or whomever the intended audience might be. Just from my own. This, I thought, might bring a fresh look to what I read and help me remember, in the future, which books I liked so much and just why I felt that way.

I might still include some reviews.

But for now, I'll focus on two books that I'm using for guidance and reference in my decade long struggle to write a novel (I take it for granted that attempting to write lengthy Nsync fan fiction in my pre-adolescent years counts as the beginnings of my quest for novel).

First we have Nancy Lamb's The Writer's Guide to Crafting Stories for Children. The reviews on the book make it sound really useful and interesting. And so far, it is. The book includes insight of many writers and Lamb's take on how these writers got so damn good. It has exercises, some of which you can do on the spot, and some of which require more in-depth thought. I like Ms. Lamb, I think she and I shall be great friends . . . or at least I will get a lot from this book.

My next source of instruction and inspiration is The 3 a.m. Epiphany by Brian Kiteley. Unlike many books that are strictly exercise-oriented, Kiteley includes not only examples, but reasons for why these exercises are important. He doesn't just promote the use of images, he shows and explains why images make such an impact. For these exercises I will not focus strictly on children's literature (which tends to be my passion) buuuut I can't say that some of these elements won't work their way in.

This blog will journal my exersises daily and hopefully provide a starting-off point for something that entails a little bit more than a hobby.