Word Play . . .

1: Spring Haiku

Plump blossoms hide bark.
Tiny leaves sprout umbrellas.
Spring: forget-me-not.

2: Spring Haiku

Plump blossoms hide winter's bark.
Green leaves sprout tiny umbrellas.
Spring rains, first flowers, forget-me-not.


This morning I mapped out the current tough chapter. Mac and Fadge are now 300 feet deep in a 19th Century coal mine. Bits of dialogue come first, then a description, and conflict. It sounds so flaky but now that my characters are 'in place,' they will show me their reactions. Trust the process.

Now, tonight, inspired by those lovely spring blossoms that fade so quickly, I'm playing with words. The first poem follows the traditional haiku format of 5-7-5 syllables. The second has 5-7-5 words.

Today, from the Internet Writer's Workshop forum on writing, comes Michele Riccio's suggestion to try Wordle, a free app that generates an image based on the frequency certain words appear. The more repetitions, the larger the word!

I copied some 20,000 words in from Section 2 of Years of Stone (draft in progress) to find my characters -- Mac, Deidre, and Mary most prominent. That's fine with me. Now I'll do a search and replace to see if I've used 'back' appropriately. An interesting play on words.

Today's post continues my May challenge: to write something every day, inspired by what someone else has written. The haiku (one form of word play) comes from Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides (Writer's Digest March/April 2012) prompt to write a haiku.

May Challenge #1: Write the Fear

Sometimes our fiction takes us to dark places.

Because I write intuitively, sinking down into my characters, sometimes I'd rather skirt along the top of how they're feeling about the predicaments they've gotten into. The 'real' conflict happens off stage. Sometimes my characters are too polite.

In the chapter I'm working on, Mac has been transferred to prison coal mines in 19th Century Tasmania, a horrible, brutal place of no hope. I don't want to write about what he sees or what happens to him.

Some would say that's the muse talking. Back off. Let the story unfold. Or it could be conflict avoidance. To push on, I could draft the scenes for this chapter and let them rest. Cut them later.

But for May's Magazine Challenge #1, I found this lovely article by Wisconsin poet laureate Marilyn L. Taylor, "How to Write the Poem that Scares You" (The Writer Feb 2012). She offers this advice:

1) Wait. She's talking about letting real time pass before you write about a traumatic event. Some writers wait years before tackling the traumas they cannot forget. But the traumatic events here happen to one of my characters.

2. Tell the poem in third person. This is for emotional distance, and as Taylor points out, "to avoid self-pity." This idea helps me because it suggests emotional punch is possible in third person.

3. Try using a traditional form. Taylor explains that raw emotion can be controlled and transformed through the discipline of form.

4. Use a metaphor to replace literal details.This points the fiction writer to consider all images as vehicles to shape the setting, the scene, and the senses.

5. Use humor. Aha! Humor may be all that's left to these men who face sentences of 7 or 14 years or life. Humor could shape dialogue.

Now I'm ready to go to work, part drafting, part research. My purpose: emotional and historical truth. My poor character should be afraid, for he is going to suffer.

May Magazine Challenge . . .

Last month I jumped in to write the "A to Z Blogging Challenge," a blog a day around the alphabet with the added challenge to visit as many bloggers as I could. Some pre-wrote their entries, some wrote shorter entries, some wrote about a specific theme. Last month I dove into my research and along the way gained some new interesting insights.

So this month, the merry month of May, I offer the MAY MAGAZINE CHALLENGE.

Maybe like me, you have a stack of magazines that you read once in a while but sometimes not at all. These magazines may be about writing, nature, archaeology, history, current events. What do you think about what you read?

The challenge: Select one article and write a reaction. Maybe a scene or story. Maybe a poem.

That's it! Share your post and try to read any other bloggers (try 5-7 bloggers each day) who pick up this particular glove. And then happily recycle that magazine.

I hope you join me.  Write on!