Monthly Archives: March 2010

Sketching the Male Protagonist

March 17, 2010

This is a little thing I did when I got stuck on a male character in one of my novels. I wanted to know more about Charles so I did a freewriting session to see what I could learn about him. It worked.

Sketching the Male Protagonist

Charles, like pudding, loose and soft, his shape never molding, he walks the frames of each scene like blue wash background. No stiff poke, no grit, no getty-up. The tender, perfect boy who slips into the back desk in the classroom and listens, never asking questions, never offering opinion, sprung from nothing into nothing, a cartoon without color or feature, no secrets, no sins, no sinister bottom note to the perfect top.
What could I add to this poor pasty man whose life unfolds around him in passive acquiescence? What would wake him up? What does he fear? He fears fire, he fears loss, he fears being left again among the living, he blames himself for mom and dad’s grief, and his little brother’s death. It was a spark, only a spark, a smoldering error never extinguished, never put out, still burning in his soul.
I like it, the helpless go along has a reason to not make waves, not engage, fully. Not worthy to have the care of innocents, the child beneath his roof, mustn’t father, mustn’t love. It deepens the man, puts the boy back in his soul. No, he is not pudding, but water and charred wood and a long stretch of scar tissue on the upper arm that failed to pull the little brother out through the window of his parent’s farmhouse. His fault. His secret. His torment.

How did the fire start?

Stupid, stupid, stupid, everybody knows model glue is flammable. Charles, seven years old, his brother younger, hidden in the tiny back closet assembling the model of a wooden ship to sail on great oceans. They work for hours, until dark, until little brother says guess I’ll light a candle so we can see what we are doing. And Charles, preoccupied, not hearing the little brother, steps out for just a minute, just one short, sixty second minutes and then whoosh, the world bursts into flame. Oh my god, oh my god, for the rest of his life he hears that oh my god scream from his own lips, and from the lips of little brother before he died.
Charles built the boat that carried his little brother across the sea to the other realms.

The punishment? To never be happy, never cover the scar, never wear long sleeves, or care for children. Again and again he turns from what will make him happy, from Rose, his pretty woman, from her children and the children they would have together that would make him whole.

Ah, this leads smoothly to the forest fire in my story, to the sacred ring where all children are kept safe by magic and grace. Now Charles must face his fear at last or lose them all, lose his own soul.
Later, after Charles has passed the test, little Emily, precious psychic child, sees the younger brother laughing and playing. She tells Charles he need not torture himself–little brother lives in a splendid castle on the other side.

Charles looks different to me now. I find an empathy with his heart, with his suffering as he finds his true place upon the page. He attracts me, awakens my healing heart that wants to smooth the scars along his arm. Now, he is ready for Rose. Now we can discover how the man with the heavy burden meets the magical woman under a Tucson sun. He will resist, sure, and move toward and away again and again, but oh, love is strong, and the pull of destiny is even stronger. Now the high tides in the blood ruled by the moon will move them. And he will lose the fight. And he will love her. And he will heal and learn to trust again that the world is a good place–even when it isn’t.
That’s the man I was looking for.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing | Comments (0)

Women Write to Keep from Going Crazy

March 16, 2010

I found this in my file of “rants” and thought it was fun. Here it is. Jamie

Women Write to Keep from Going Crazy.

Last night I met Einstein’s wife on PBS. It slams me to realize I never gave a thought to the other mind behind the great mind. Her curiosity was as wide as his, wider perhaps because of the living physics of birthing babies and making milk—and yet she went crazy in the end, died of disappointment, alone, broke, broken. Her doors never opened like his did.
I felt kinship. It’s wild what happens when a woman’s mind is as hungry as her body and birth is not enough. And Einstein, foolish man, seduced by his male culture to see only his face in the mirror of fame and acclaim. It notched him down a level in my eyes. It put me on the side of his wife, scientist, mother, woman, peacemaker—a woman caught between a mother’s heart and her love of physics.
A woman gives a decade or two of her attention to the children and is punished and tossed away.
I tell the women in my writer’s group about Einstein’s wife. They are all older than me. When I mention that I will turn fifty soon, they call me “baby” and put age back in perspective for me. I read an edgy piece about a woman who lives in Tucson who steps out of a sunken tub, nude and dripping, only to catch sight of a woman’s body in the mirror, breasts heavy with life and grief, pubic hairs curling, a vagina proof to the woman’s place. In my story, the woman can’t imagine how she missed the fact that she is a woman.
The group reacts, relating, recognizing kinship with my character. One woman says there must be something about the southwest that makes women crazy. I lost my mind in Tucson once, she says, and didn’t want the good doctors to lock her up for being crazy, so she told them she was an alcoholic off the wagon, just a stumble, and could they admit her? This writer, this woman of seventy plus years, this mother and grandmother, slams me again. Ann, another woman, thirty years a teacher, says she lost her mind in Tucson once too. She doesn’t go into detail, but I wonder how often women lose their minds in the southwest or elsewhere. Carol jokes that we should amend the song to “I lost my heart in San Francisco—and my mind in Tucson.” The group doesn’t know my story that is set in Santa Fe this week will travel to Tucson next week where my female protagonist will loose her mind.
Women write to keep from losing their minds. Like Einstein’s wife. No need to feel shy about my edgy stories with these women. We reveal all the edgy things, once removed, honing off the sharp edges and making them less dangerous by writing. Gretta reads a story about a hit man who is after her son-in-law, a memoir. Ann reads a fuck-you story about a sorority of teachers who bar the doors when she walks by. Casey reads about Rachel whose boyfriend wants to get in her pants and later, about a father who did. Joline reads of two children asked to dig the bones of Rob Roy under an apple tree in a misty grove in Ireland. He has been dead and lingering these one hundred years. Joline’s ghosts scare her and so she must write about Robbie.
Women write to sort the envelopes of their lives like they sort laundry, to keep from going crazy in Tucson, to keep from cutting and burning, to keep from killing. We’re an optimistic lot, we women, rubbing salve on old scars, brave, enduring, ready to take it on, ready even to travel to Tucson if that is where the story begins—or ends.

By Jamie | Posted in On Writing, Personal Essays | Comments (0)

A Noun by Any Other Name

March 14, 2010

It’s a funny thing, this battle I have in my life with process nouns. Technically, they are called nominalizations—process words turned into “things”. I am a wife, mother, grandmother, woman, teacher—writer–instead of wifing, mothering, grandmothering, etc.

When a process becomes a noun it is like flowing water that suddenly freezes. All movement is gone. We have to guard against these notorious nouns.

Most of us begin writing like we begin a romance—it is a getting to know you process where we probe to better understand our world and how it works. We scribble our dirty little secrets out alone in coffee shops or on buses or in our bedrooms late at night. Occasionally we are kissed by a particular phrasing, a series of words, a delightful expression and we sit back and say, “Damn, that is pretty good. Maybe I could actually be a writer.”

I think of the rambling, personal story I wrote out of the depths of my own frustrated first marriage. The poor woman in my story was ready to be hauled out on Tuesday morning with the trash. But I rather liked the story and it beat continually writing in my bitch book of a journal so I polished it up a bit, titled it “Going South” and sent it off to a Writers Digest contest. When I got an honorable mention it scared the shit out of me and I quit writing for six months.

Even now, as I write these words, I am conscious of a duel role here. First I am a human probing her private thoughts through the process of writing. Second, I am a “writer” who wants to make a point and communicate it clearly.

The writing me doesn’t think about whether you get it or not. I don’t care. This is for me. What I write is none of your business. If I catch you looking over my shoulder, I’ll send you “the look.”

The Writer, however, is much more socially conscious and socially conditioned. Hers is a public role and she continually worries about voice and point of view and whether her message will be heard and read by others.
Writing, in its process form, is consciousness itself. Being a Writer is self-consciousness. There is a difference.

When I was teaching myself how to be a public presenter, I struggled with extreme shyness and would get almost sick every time I had to give a talk. Then one day while talking to a group of campus wives, I had an “aha” that completely turned this around. I realized that I did not have to be a speaker. I just had to be me speaking. The same is true with writing. I don’t have to be a writer, I just have to be me writing.
In fact, I could banish all the notorious nouns. I don’t have to BE anything but a human being in the process of living her life.

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, On Writing, Personal Essays | Comments (0)

The Scent of Spring

March 6, 2010

I want to feel that warm spring air on my face and be back into spending hours everyday outside. My body is already tired of computers and winter. It has been quite a time these past few months since leaving northern MN for South Dakota. We have kicked into high gear while Milt finished the film (Video Letters from Prison,) and we have made plans to move permanently to Cass Lake. We had the chance to visit our straw bale house for a couple of days on this trip and it felt so right to be there. I walked around snow drifts dreaming the gardens into place, the large flower pots protecting my front door, the berry bushes putting on fresh green leaves.

As the winter has crawled by, our plans for Video Letters have bloomed. This film moves the heart in such a wonderful way that we’ve decided to form a confluence between my family constellation work and human development passion and this film. Our plan is to begin setting up facilitated screenings that will take 3-4 hours. We’ll do these intensives with all kinds of groups for the first year but always with the idea of introducing tools and ideas for strengthening the family. We’ve already done a few trial runs with a federal judge and his colleagues, a CD counselor and his prisoner re-entry group, a group of high school students, a group of artists, etc. Each time we do this we come away more clear on how we want to do this. It is a struggle to remember that we cannot “save the world” but that we can operate in small, steady steps to have some influence on the way the world is turning. I feel in the deepest part of my soul that it is the center that crumbles–and that center is the way we do family and basic communication. Too many have left important connections up to weak substitutes such as television and video games.

I hope to be spending more time on my blog from here on out. I am never actually sure who reads it so please leave a comment once in awhile so I will be encouraged to continue.

Jamie

By Jamie | Posted in About Being All You Can Be, Personal Essays | Tagged , , | Comments (0)