writers

It’s a Wonder-filled World

/ Gerry Wilson / 11 Comments

My third-born son and his daughter are off on an adventure this week. They are in New  York City to celebrate her thirteenth birthday. He decided a couple of years ago, when his oldest turned thirteen, that he would take each child (there are four of them) on an “adventure of choice” for that special birthday–just Dad and Kid. His son chose a rafting trip in Georgia and a Braves game. Pretty easy. Doable. A Guy Thing.

NYC

It’s a Wonderful Town!

When he asked his daughter back in the spring where she wanted to go for her birthday, she said, in her lovely, a-bit-melodramatic way, “Oh, Dad! I want to go to New York!” He was more than a little taken aback, I expect, but he’s worked hard to pull this trip together–a special time with a special girl who’s growing up fast. They do that, you know, these children and grandchildren. They seem to go from floor-walking  nights to terrible twos to first grade to “Where are the car keys?” overnight.

My son sent me a text message right after they landed in NYC. “She’s freaking out!” he wrote, which about says it when you’re in that city for the first time. They’ll see a play or two, take in the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, and Central Park, Strand Books, and do some of the usual sightseeing.

Mostly, she’ll see a world that’s very, very different from hers, even though she’s spent most of her young life in Atlanta and Memphis–cities, but not cities in the sense of New York. Not colossal. Not stupendous. Not larger than life. I expect, knowing her sweet, caring nature, that she’ll be disturbed by the street people. That’s a hard dose of reality, but I hope, I pray it won’t overwhelm her wonder. Maybe it will become part of her vision of what her life can and will be, of how she can make a difference.

What a birthday! What a gift is wonder, tenuous and rare and without price.

But wonder is something we grownups often lose along the way. Disappointments, failures, loss, illness, betrayals–the big doses of reality keep our eyes to the ground, not like we’re looking up at the Manhattan skyline in amazement. I remember that feeling. I wasn’t thirteen the first time I saw the big city. I was in my twenties, but my “freaking out” was much like this child’s. Somewhere along the way, though, I forgot to keep looking up.

Re-discover Wonder!

Granddaughter Lucy at three

So here’s a tip for you, if you’re mired in child-rearing and work and housework and tending to elderly parents, if you’ve got your nose to the grindstone and don’t think you have time to look up. This applies especially to my writer friends who, regardless of age and stage, struggle to fit the writing into a “life happens” schedule.

It’s possible to re-discover wonder. You find it in the smallest things: hummingbirds hover at the feeder; something you’ve planted takes off and grows, blooms, yields fruit; music gives you goosebumps; the waves just keep on pounding the shore, timeless and immeasurable. You find it in your children (or your grandchildren), when you see reflections of yourself and their parents and your own parents, generations come together to make these remarkable individuals. You imagine their lives years from now, who and what they may become. It’s wondrous. Miraculous, really. And that’s just the real-life side of wonder.

Wonder on the Page

There’s wonder, too, when the voices come in your head and you put words on the page. When you re-create your own life experiences. When you make characters, lives, places, worlds. When you make the stuff of poetry. When you read your words aloud, new words that didn’t exist before you put them together just that way, and really hear them. Wondrous. Yes.

This child, my granddaughter, has the writer genes, for sure. She reads voraciously. She acts, she sings, she writes poetry. I encouraged her to take a journal with her on this trip. I’m hoping she’ll share some of her observations–her words–with me.

So happy birthday, Granddaughter. Life is wondrous indeed. It’s nice to be here.

Today, look up. Discover something wondrous in your world. Write about it. Read it aloud and hear your own voice. Tell me about it here.

7 Truths A-Waiting by Lara Britt

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

Today’s Monday Discovery brings you a guest post by Lara Britt, the entrepreneur of MNINBers who has encouraged and wrangled the group—she calls it “wrangling butterflies”—beyond Robert Lee Brewer‘s original My Name Is Not Bob April Platform Challenge.

Welcome to The Writerly Life, Lara!

Laura Britt

Lara Britt writes from her Honolulu home near Nu’uanu Stream. She enjoys morning strolls through Lili’uokalani Botanical Gardens and late night walks along the beach. Between times you will find her in her favorite Writerly Nooks which she catalogs in her blog, Writing Space.

Lara is the übermom to two fully-grown, adult daughters who heeded her advice: “Degrees, before children.” She is, therefore, without grandchildren, but will be celebrating the delivery of a doctoral dissertation in the very near future.

Community organizing, gardening, travel, music, art, food, and all things that give life meaning are common threads in Lara’s work. When she isn’t wrangling butterflies in her efforts to birth a community blog or raising her Klout score to stratospheric heights, Lara is working on two related mystery series and a memoir. And she still has two pairs of slip-resistant shoes in her closet.

7 Truths A-Waiting

Most writers have difficulty in pronouncing themselves authors. They usually couch self-description with softening words like “aspiring,” “up-and-coming,” and “break-out.”

You can bet these folks never worked a 14-hour shift in slip-resistant shoes.

Talk to many servers, and you will find that they are, in their real lives—whatever that means—in fact, an actress, a poet, a philosopher, a student, a singer, an artist, a creative [fill-in the blank with highest of aspirations]. Only temporarily are they inhabiting a Swiss-Miss uniform or donning a work-shirt only a Fauvist could love. The apron, only until they get their big break. The button blinking the day’s special, yeah, one day they won’t have to wear that either.

They are waiting tables waiting for their lives to begin.

You all know what it’s like to work in a restaurant. You’ve eaten at them hundreds if not thousands of times. You’ve imagined what it takes to be a server. Or perhaps for the briefest of stints, you put on the mandatory cap and asked customers if they wanted fries with that.

No, it’s not that.

The Naked Truth About Our Waitresses

You’ve seen it in the movies. How many thousands of reel feet have been devoted to the angry chef, the obnoxious customer, the hormone-crazed dishwasher or was it the busboy, the good-hearted hook…er…waitress, well, aren’t they the same thing?

No, no, no and no.

And no, in the 35 years I’ve been a part of the food industry, I have never witnessed a chase scene through the kitchen except on the silver screen.

If not that, then what?

Waiting tables is in actuality a highly skilled profession. Like teaching and parenting, there are a thousand ways to be terrible at the job and hundreds of ways to be terrific. Like many traditionally female occupations, it is underpaid and undervalued.

But it also has its benefits. Sure, schedules are flexible. Daily cash flow. But specifically, serving is ripe with benefits for writers and other artists dealing with the human condition.

Job Description: Welcoming customers, suggestive-selling of food and beverages, order-taking, order-inputing to computerized system, salad-making, food and beverage delivering, cash-handling…

Yes…technically correct…but…

Serving is live theater meets applied psychology.

And that is exactly what I tell the new servers after about a month of training when at the end of the night, after everyone is talking about tables that stiffed them, the ten-percenters, and the other horrors of the shift that just ended, I count up my 20+% tip average after tip-out.

Here is my not-so-secret recipe.

And why do I share? Because they are in my neighborhood; as the price of their real estate rises so does mine. A direct corollary applies to the blogosphere: better blogging raises all of our boats.

  • Learn Your Craft
    “Kill” the technical aspects of your job description. Carry that tray, high and fast. Learn how to multi-task. Learn how to pace the service. Learn how to manage your time. Exceed your guests’ expectations.
  • Sh*t Happens
    The more complicated the execution, the more opportunity for things to go awry. It is how you handle them that matters most. Don’t offer excuses; offer solutions.

  • Experience Rules
    Directly related to sh*t happens: People visit a restaurant, not because they are hungry. They visit for the total experience of the evening. Food is only part of it.

  • Servers Are Responsible for the Guests’ Experience
    It isn’t the kitchen’s fault. Food is only part of it. Develop that tool-bag so when sh*t happens––and it will––you can still give the guest an exceptional experience.

  • Understand the Guests’ Needs
    The guest has two sets of needs: 1) one he thinks he has, and 2) one he really has. Your job is to address the first and satisfy the latter. Sound insulting? Think different. Think Steve Jobs. He gave us want we always wanted, but didn’t know it. Great servers do this every day, all day.

  • Match-Make
    At the end of the evening, the guests should think that the person they are dining with is the most interesting person in the room, not their server. Help them be entertaining, do not make them dependent on your presence at table’s edge. No showboating.
  • End on a High Note
    No matter what went wrong, make sure the end of the night is pleasant. This is when they figure out your tip. But this is also when they make their final assessment on their choice in coming. Make them want to make that choice again, soon.

So whether you are delivering food for thought as a blogger who aspires to be an author or you deliver food from the kitchen as you await your big break, apply these seven basic tips from a seasoned professional. Stay in dialog with your guest, but stay confident in yourself. The outcome will be something you can take to the bank.

As you have guessed, these 7 tips also apply to blogging. Which one speaks to you and your experiences? What are you wrestling with? Tell us your stories in the comment section. Gerry and I are eager to hear all about it.

“If I could write the beauty of your eyes” —William Shakespeare

/ Gerry Wilson / Leave a comment

A few days ago, I launched my Writer Page on Facebook.

Novel note card, April 2011

Over the last six weeks or so, I have gone places I’ve never gone before—on the Internet, that is. No, I have not been visiting naughty websites. I’ve been doing something the publishing industry calls “Building a Platform.” Note the caps, a signifier of importance. It seems a platform is important for writers. Even those of us without a published book are encouraged to go ahead and start putting ourselves “out there.” So that’s what I’ve been doing under the fabulous leadership of one Not-Bob, or Robert Lee Brewer, who led the My Name Is Not Bob April Platform Challenge.

April, you say? Yes, the challenge ended when April did, but the momentum continues.

I was already a Facebook person, and I “did” LinkedIn. I had signed up for Twitter, added Google+ and Red Room, and I’ve been visiting my fellow platformers’ blogs like crazy, with great admiration for their ability to write posts (daily, some of them; wow), juggle jobs and kids and lives and still write their novels or poetry or memoirs or whatever is dearest to their hearts.

My final goal was to create the Facebook Writer Page. Did I dare call myself a writer and make it a public declaration? When I finally held my nose and dived in, it wasn’t all that bad. In fact, it was fun, and many friends and fellow writers dropped by quickly and “liked” the page, so it’s gotten off to a good start.

Something interesting surfaced in the midst of all that. When I started to create the page, I had to choose a category from among businesses, organizations, nonprofits, brands, and such. I considered all the options and decided on Artist, Band, or Public Figure. I’m not an Artist (well, that one’s close; I like to think I am, with words); I’m not a Band; and I’m certainly not a Public Figure. (Notice those caps again.) The ah-ha moment came when I held my breath and clicked on Artist and saw I had choices there, too.

What kind of person am I? What’s my identity?

Two of the options were “author” and “writer.” Hmmm. Author sounds a little stilted, I thought, so instinctively, I went with writer. After all, that’s what I call myself these days.

It started me thinking. I’m a former English teacher. I should know the distinction between those two words. Writer is more generic? An author is someone . . . more established? I finally gave in and looked them up. Here’s some of what I found.

(If you hate it when people quote the dictionary, you should maybe stop here.)

According to Merriam Webster: an author is “one that originates or creates; the writer of a literary work (as a book). Author originates from the Middle English auctour, from Anglo-French auctor, autor, from Latin auctor promoter, originator, author, from augēre to increase.” The word dates from the 14th century.

A writer is “one that writes [refers to the definition of write] as a: author [one and the same? Really?] and b: one who writes stock options.”  The word traces to the 12th century.

So the word writer pre-dates author, but it doesn’t have the fancy pedigree.

My Dashboard dictionary on the Mac defines author as “someone who writes books as a profession” and writer as “a person who writes books, stories, or articles as a job or regular occupation.”

Are we splitting hairs here?

Let’s look at the word write. Merriam Webster begins with the simplest definition—to “form characters or symbols on a surface with an instrument (as a pen)”—and progresses  to “to set down in writing; to be the author of; to express in literary form.” Ah, getting closer. The example that follows is a line from Shakespeare: “if I could write the beauty of your eyes . . .”

So which am I? I think I’ll stick with writer.

A writer puts marks on a page, yes. She makes words, yes, and symbols, sentences, paragraphs, pages, chapters. Stories, memoirs, novels, poetry. She records the world as she sees it. She creates people and places and worlds that didn’t exist before.

A writer makes her mark on the world. That’s what I’d like to do. So call me writer, please. That’s the word for me.

Here’s a question for you: how do you see yourself? Do you call yourself a writer or an author? Is there a distinction in your mind? I expect there’ll be different opinions. I’d love to hear yours.