Wanted: Summer Affair

Looking for: Female. Igniter willing to take risks, powerful agent for the underdog, someone who is good looking but doesn’t care, knows the streets, can stay calm and firm even when looking at yellow addicts with needles hanging out of arms, friends who trust assholes, and the newly dead.

Inside, of course, she feels it all.

I think I’ve met her, her heels echoed on concrete with a steady beat. I’ll see if we can meet again, if she’ll let me touch her face, run my fingers through her hair, hear about her worst day ever.

Summer affairs are all about fun, intensity and messiness for passion’s sake. So I will release my inhibitions and see how deep she and I will go.

Are you looking for a new character, too? Let me know how it goes.

 

Threesomes

Threesomes are way more interesting than twosomes. There’s more tension, more that’s unpredictable, and more excitement. It isn’t one against the other, but one against two or one against one and another against one, and another against one. It could even be a greater combination than that. So threesomes are the way to go to really engage your audience. I am of course, talking about writing, about scenes and dialogue between three players.

I learned the real power of this from Debra Monroe’s class.

So, as a writer, I write things that are purely for practice, but open to become something if I choose.

The practice was writing about a picture. The black and white photo revealed a man holding a fish next to a woman with a string of fish in an urban setting. I added the idea that there was another there to take the picture.

 

Warning: unedited practice piece coming up.

“I tried to warn you,” Emily said, fish scales glistening on her forehead.

“How was I to know?” her husband Jake said pulling his hat lower over his eyes.

“I failed in my warning, but I tried. There’s no fish in that spot since Clem started dumping dirt from his property.”

Jake took off his hat now and rubbed his hair back, the hair shimmered as it took on lake water from his hand.

“Always follow me,” she said.

Clem said, “Quit talking about it like that. It’s only dirt. Can’t keep fish away.”

“Dirty dirt,” she said and picked up one end of her line strung with fish. She wrapped the end of the cord around the fence post.

“Hurry up, so I can take the picture,” Clem said fiddling with the camera. “How do you work this anyway?” The bald circle of skin was sweating even in the winter’s sun.

Jake said, “Seems to me there’s something in that dirt to make it kill off fish.”

Emily said, “Jake, just get ready for the picture.”

“I only have to hold up one fish. You hang your other line. What’d you get, thirty fish?”

“Forty-four. And Clem, I think it’s more what you keep in that dirt.”

“I’m not standing around for this.” Sweat covered Clem’s face and he wiped his forehead with the back of one arm, the digital camera tight in the other hand.

Emily finished off her sailor’s knot and grabbed her longest fish. “Twenty-six inches,” she said. “Clem, dead bodies will mess up soil like that. Something about acid. You have dead bodies in your lawn?”

Clem held the camera out. “Take your own damn picture.”

“Was it Marcie, Clem? You said she ran off with some Lothario.”

Jake said, “We’re ready now,” his fish down by his waist.

Emily lifted her largest fish up to chin level.

 

So take characters from what you are working on or discover some new ones and practice a threesome. Each character has an agenda or two. Have fun!

fun and games/getting started

I never think of making my writing practice fun. Once I get going, it is fun, it’s gleeful, sometimes. Violin practice is fun, too, once I get started. My problem is (suspenseful music-dunh, dunh,dunh, dunh) getting started. I am not alone. Wise brought it to my attention that it is important to have a game in mind or something fun, planned.

For violin, she created writing her practice items on separate pieces of colorful construction paper. Then I hide them like Easter eggs inside or outside. As she finds them, she does what the card says right where she is.

I know we always talk about just get your butt in the chair and write, but I think this is more pleasant.

I will list the items I want to revisit in this latest revision on colorful paper. My daughter will be happy to hide them for me and as I find them, I will write wherever I find the “egg”.

That surprise on reading the card opens the brain up to the feeling of Aha and creativity. The change of venue also supports creativity, the synapses paths new and fresh versus the same old pathway.

There’s tried and true ways of getting started: write at the same time every day, light a candle, write in your writing space…

And there’s games afoot to discover and empower you with.

Have fun!!!

Love to hear what fun ways you use to get whatever you practice, started!

Happy Holidays!

The Perfect Word

Dear Ones,

I saw the opera, Madama Butterfly last week. Yes, I cried and cried. I sat in my maroon salwar kameez, thin program on my lap, in the small McCullough Theatre at UT. The music and Italian words folded around me and I easily forgot these were students and that an oriental male played the part of the American soldier and a white female played the part of Madame Butterfly.

How can such emotion be evoked? Part of it is the genius of Giacomo Puccini and how he writes with such soul, able to express the longing of Madame Butterfly with his musical notes and his choice of words. When Butterfly sings of Pinkerton’s promised return she sings Puccini’s words that in English mean “when the robin builds her nest”, he doesn’t just write “In the Spring.”

The words you use support your tone, building a sense of beauty, harmony, or adding a contrast to add tension and let the reader know, all is not as it appears. William Blake wrote the song about a piper in the introduction to Songs of Innocence. (Blake stood on corners, in the square or in the Mathew’s parlor and sang them.) But in most of his Songs of Innocence there is a hint of something not so sweet, perhaps a foreshadowing for his Songs of Experience. In the song about the piper, a child tells a happy piper to write his song. In keeping with the innocence of the poem, we would expect the piper to “pull” or “select”, but Blake writes the piper “pluck’d a hollow reed.” And when the piper wrote, that piper “stain’d the water clear.”  These words are harsh in a piece about innocence and affect the reader, leading him to feel a certain way. Use your words to evoke the emotions you want.

Puccini and Blake are geniuses, choosing the exact words. Like in an opera, or symphony there is only one note that can go in each spot. Only that note is perfect for the piece, making it whole and integrous.

After writing a Shoddy First Draft, and before declaring the piece finished, peruse each word and ask, “Is this the best word for what I want to say, for the emotion I want to evoke, for who the character is?”

May your work ring with integrity and beauty.

Blessings,

Laurie Cosbey

coffeehouse ramblings

I cannot leave until I write. Which is not such a bad thing as I am at a real coffeehouse: concrete floors blackish paint worn off in spaces, changes in texture, concrete lines demarcations of past possibilities. I’m sitting on a couch from the early 60s with velour, avocado green flowers: comfortable. I don’t know if there are any two chairs or tables in this place that are the same: some round tables, some tiny square ones. the coffee table in front of me is rectangular with retro circles in green and mirror with amber mosaic tile around. There are retro lamps on some tables. My favorite thing is the jazz that reaches into the room, trumpet, right now, its strands reach into my heart and pull at it. Jazz is how I know the heart has strings that can be played, plucked, pressed, crushed. If I ever leave here, I will go home and listen to Miles and Coltrane in Kind of Blue and eat the rest of my Sharffen Berger dark chocolate bar with cacao nibs.

That’s if I ever leave as I hear Ella’s voice now, singing to me.

Freely Feel Fully

Having emotions is a gift. I didn’t for years and now they are here and I am so grateful to feel, even when it hurts. It’s also so freeing to feel, to experience that feeling until it fades. I know I have felt fully. Sometimes it hurts so much, but then it ends and I haven’t run anywhere.
I didn’t get drunk, get wasted, or kill myself.
And, I still have to write.
What a glorious thing to be alive and to feel!

Character, What’s on Your Coffee Table?

Whenever my world spins too much, and I feel out of control, I can clean my kitchen island and, ta da, I use to-do lists again, keep up with my calendar and things seems to fall into place.

Right now there are too many things on my island: a green music notebook, a small cobalt blue bottle, a shot glass with a blue anchor, a black pen in three pieces on top of a receipt from Randalls, a cd of Kundalini kriyas and meditations, two oranges, a glass of rocks Wise brought in, a shriveling apple next to a vitamin bottle that says, “Alive!”, a placemat decorated with hearts, papers, a violin and a pink headband with red polka dots.

This reminds me of the coffee table game where a friend and I would sit in coffee shops or restaurants and guess what people had on their coffee tables. This also makes for a great character exercise.

Pick a character. Make a list of things on his or her coffee table or kitchen island (or in the living room if she or he is too neat to have any thing on the coffee table or island). Always include something that is a surprise, but if you think about it, it makes sense.

So start from choosing a character you are already working with, or make a list of items on someone’s coffee table or island and come up with a character from that. (Of course, some characters don’t have homes. You can list some things in someone’s shopping cart, back pack, wallet. Go crazy!).

Happy playing!

Laurie Cosbey