Writing Craft

At a Loss for Words: June 12

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

For today’s At a Loss for Words feature, here’s a beachy slideshow!

Can you tell I’m missing the beach? Usually, my husband and I visit our favorite spot early in the summer, but circumstances prevented it this year. We still have hopes, but not before August, and August marks the start of hurricane season, so making reservations then is iffy.

Shall we be spontaneous? Shall we live dangerously?

As I review these photos of the place we love, I think maybe so. You’ll notice that the writing materials and books always, always go along.

If one of these photos sparks your creativity—a scrap, a memory, a poem or story—please share in the comments or leave me a link. Or tell me, what, or where,  your favorite escape is. What kind of atmosphere gets your creative juices flowing? 

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Lucky 7 Meme Challenge

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

E. B. (Erin) Pike at Writerlious has tagged me for the Lucky 7 Meme Challenge. Thanks, Erin!

Now it’s my turn to post from a work-in-progress and tag seven more writers to do the same.

The rules:

  • Go to page 77 of your current WIP manuscript.
  • Go to line 7.
  • Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written. No cheating!
  • Tag 7 authors.
  • Let each and every one of them know.

Here are seven lines from Spirit Lamp, a work of literary historical fiction set during WWI in rural Mississippi. The novel is complete, and I just finished making a tough revision pass through it. Now it’s on to considering my readers’ responses and composing the dreaded query letter!

In these lines the main character is remembering going hunting with her father. They  begin in mid-sentence. She walks into the woods, following her father’s lantern:

. . . dizzying arc a few feet in front of her, but she had learned long ago to step where he stepped. Now she knew the way as well as he. When they got to the woods, he snuffed the lantern out and made his way silently among the trees. Now and then he stopped and held out his arm, a signal to Leona to be still. It meant he had stopped to listen, or he had heard or sensed movement.

She could see him in the graying light. He pointed to the base of a pine tree and motioned for her to sit. He moved twenty yards away and sat beneath another tree. She could just make him out, so still, his shape darker than the dark around him. The tree trunk became part of the . . .

Now for the tags, writers! I hope you’ll accept. Please follow the rules above, post your WIP lines, and pass the challenge on. Feel free to post here in a comment, too. As E. B. says, it’s a great way for us to share bits of our works-in-progress.

First, here’s to my fellow literary fiction peeps over at the Facebook MNINB group:

And to round out the seven . . .

I’d love to add more, but I’ll leave that to these fine folks.

 Thanks again, Erin, for the tag. This was fun!

Sunday Wordle: June 3, 2012

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

I’m not in the habit of sharing “raw” work, but I just discovered The Sunday Whirl, which offers a weekly list of random words and challenges writers to do something with them–a poem, a short fiction piece. To put “new” words out there feels risky, but it’s a great exercise, so here goes. I used all the words in Wordle 59 in this little piece of fiction:

After Chelsea and Mark split up, she left town and rented a room in a cheap motel across the street from the beach. It wasn’t far, but just far enough she thought Mark wouldn’t find her. She lay crumpled on the bed, going through boxes of tissue. The bruise had begun to fade now, going yellowish. Her ribs hurt less, it was easier to draw breath, but still. He never should have gone that far. Who would have thought they would crash and burn that way? She had tiptoed around the edges of his anger, tried to chisel away his defenses, but Mark basked in the glow of argument, he’d beat her every time, not with his fists—at least not until now—but with words. He could nail her, pierce her like that fly in a poem she’d read in high school, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

When somebody knocked at the door, she crouched on the other side of the bed. It was late afternoon; the sun filtered through the ugly drapes and cast patterns on the walls.

“Chelsea? You in there?” Mark. She thought her lungs would burst, holding in her breath that way, trying not to answer.