Craft/Writing Prompt-Emotional Honesty

A couple of months ago I enjoyed a spirited discussion over lunch with a group of writing colleagues. One of them spoke about struggling with a story until she had an epiphany about emotional honesty. She realized she'd muffled how she truly felt about an experience from her past that she was trying to translate for her character. It was only after she pealed back the layers of her own history that she was able to create an effective and authentic moment for her heroine.

Think about a moment in your own life that was particularly harrowing, enraging or thrilling. What about it made your emotions so raw? Mine those feelings. Describe what precipitated them in specific detail and how you responded.

Food/Easter Pie

At my Uncle Pal's 90th birthday party last week, conversation drifted to the recipes of our Aunt Susie, the most extraordinary baker in the family. Each of us has a few fragments of her repertoire, and a story I had heard many years ago was repeated that afternoon. Susie "left out" ingredients when she passed on a recipe, the family insists, because nobody has been able to replicate her amazing culinary feats. In addition to the missing item, Susie's recipes often don't contain measurements, just a list of ingredients. She was a magician, unwilling to reveal her secrets.

Somehow, many years ago, I managed to extract from her the recipe for what we called the "sweet pie" at Easter, complete with amounts. It seems to work, so if something is missing, I haven't detected it. I'll be baking it tomorrow for our Easter dinner. The recipe that follows is reduced by half from Susie's original.

Crust

(Susie made a pastry crust, but I tried this cookie crumb crust one year and have continued to use it.)

1 ½ cup fine crumbs from either macaroon cookies or anisette toast cookies

6 Tablespoons butter

Filling

1 lb. ricotta cheese

½ cup sugar

4 eggs

½ cup heavy cream

Zest of one lemon, grated

Zest of one orange, grated

½ cup orange juice

1 tsp. vanilla

Melt the butter and blend with the cookie crumbs. Spread mixture over sides and bottom of a 9- or 10-inch pie plate. Bake for 15 minutes at 300 degrees. Cool.

Beat the eggs.

Combine all filling ingredients and stir until smooth.

Pour filling into pie shell.

Bake for 1 ½ hours at 350 degrees until filling is firm.

Squeeze lemon juice over top of the pie after baking and sprinkle with sugar.

Encounters/Pal's 90th Birthday

My father's youngest brother turned 90 on Palm Sunday and we gathered to celebrate. Uncle Pal was born on Palm Sunday and hence named "Palmino." The party was the first time I'd seen many of my relatives since the funeral of another of my father's siblings, and it was truly wonderful to be together at an occasion that wasn't associated with someone's passing.

As expected, the food and wine were abundant, the conversation lively and full of reminiscences, and many of the moments were touching as faces and names from my childhood crossed the room to reconnect. Pal and his wife, Rita, were surrogate parents to my sister, brother and me. Every winter, my parents took a vacation in Florida and Pal, Rita and their two daughters moved into our house to care for us while my parents were away. It was a vacation for us as well--filled with laughter, Rita's delicious cooking and the tumult of five kids around the kitchen table.

My father's youngest sister, my Aunt JoAnn, was also at the party, looking beautiful and brilliant as she recounted to my husband tales from my childhood.

Such encounters fill me up and nourish me as much as the pasta with broccoli and chicken francese on the buffet table.

Inspiration/Counting the Sunsets

The photo at left is not to be mistaken for a sappy attempt at recapturing the cover of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. It is also not a stock photo. It is, instead, the view from our cottage on Chappaquiddick, and one of, by now, hundreds of photos of the sunset taken by my dear husband.

It is something of a mission for him every summer, capturing the nuance and texture of the sky as night approaches. Collected in one place, the photos are an extraordinary testament to the ever-changing nature of sky and sea. Not only from night to night, but from minute to minute, the scene on the horizon is dynamic. Look away and something is different--the color shifts from vibrant to muted, a cloud obscures, the wind ripples the reflection. There is nothing quiescent or dormant about the sunset.

What is continually changing in your world?

Discoveries/The Checklist Manifesto

A colleague recommended this book to me last week and I found its premise intriguing: the discipline of a checklist can have a profoundly liberating effect on one's work. It is less about ticking off accomplishments on a to-do list and more about the systematic steps--the seemingly unimportant details--that together add up to a job well done.

So often we think we can skip a step, skim over a minor point. But in life, as in writing, those details matter! I'm presenting a new (for me) workshop this Saturday at the conference of the New England Chapter of the Romance Writers of America. It's about the process of developing engaging characters through the "telling detail"--particulars that inform and shape the approach they take to the world, the choices they make and the consequences they must deal with.

I attended a meeting today with OR nurses and medical researchers. Before any of them spoke I was acutely aware of how they presented themselves--the choices they had made in interpreting the "business casual" suggestion for dress or in selecting items from the breakfast buffet, the style of their cell phones or purses, the length of their hair. Such observations become a rich library from which to pull the details that are the building blocks of a character.

What choices did you observe today?

Craft/Writing Prompt-Extreme States of Mind

This is a challenging exercise from What If? by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter, a text I turned to time and again when teaching creative writing.

Write three short paragraphs, the first "fear," the second "anger," and the last "pleasure" without using these words.

The objective is to create emotional states with precision and freshness.

Craft/Writing Prompt--Layering

Choose a scene you've already drafted and go back to it with the intention of adding a layer of sensory images. Focus on only one sense; for example:

the ripple of the wind through a stand of cottonwood trees or

the bellowing of a frightened animal in the middle of the night;

the blue of a lapis necklace against a milk-white throat;

a coarsely woven blanket crumpled stiffly in a corner.

Encounters/Ida

One of the pleasures of my life as a writer is speaking to groups about my books. A few years ago I was the featured speaker at a "Festa Italiana" held by the women's club of a small village just north of New York City. Most of the women were of my mother's generation and, like her, were the daughters of Italian immigrants. During the course of the afternoon I had the opportunity to speak with many of them individually and listen to the memories that my book, Dancing on Sunday Afternoons, elicited.

Of all the women I met that day, one in particular has retained a special place in my own memory. Her name was Ida. She was 80 years old, dressed in chinos, a pale blue shirt and a colorful vest, with short white hair in a stylish pixie cut and eyes that danced. She was full of energy and curiosity, always moving and engaging others in conversation. She was both a delight and a role model.

More and more, I find myself drawn to women who have lived long and full lives. They are passionate and generous and funny--traits that seem to me to be a fine way to live.

Inspiration/Reading Aloud

For many years I served as a lector in my parish. The role of a lector is to read aloud during the first part of the Mass--a passage from the Old Testament, a Psalm and an Epistle. The canonical years rotate the gospel among the four Evangelists--Matthew, Mark, Luke and John--and the remaining selections are tied to the theme expressed in the gospel of the day. (And yes, it is no coincidence that my two sons are named for Evangelists.)

I don't remember how I came to be standing at the pulpit one Sunday morning. More than likely, I got tapped to fill in when someone didn't show up. But I found the opportunity compelling. Reading aloud from sacred texts was a kind of calling for me, and a role I embraced. Some of my favorite passages are from the Book of Revelation:

Blessed is the one who reads aloud.

...the Spirit possessed me, and I heard a voice behind me, shouting like a trumpet, "Write down all that you see in a book...."

Discoveries/The History of Chappaquiddick

I am in the midst of creating a new story set in a very old place. Cape Poge is a strip of barrier beach on the sometimes an island/sometimes not of Chappaquiddick. As some of you know, I spend part of my summer in this isolated corner off the New England coast and I have finally decided to write about it.

Last summer I found a book in the house where we stay--a beautiful, thick, cream-colored volume filled with photographs and memories and geology. It is a priceless history, compiled with both passion and precision by the Chappaquiddick Island Association, and a window into the lives of families who have lived there for hundreds of years. Finding the book reminded me of a visit I made many years ago to the library in the city where I had grown up and where my immigrant grandparents had settled. The library had a local history collection, a locked room filled with the minutiae of daily life in the city's past. I had to make an appointment to use the room--an excursion that I fit into one of my trips back to the states. I was researching the time period in which my first novel, Dancing on Sunday Afternoons, was set. I'm not sure what I expected to find--dry tomes and dusty maps, perhaps. But what that room--wooden-panelled, windowless--revealed to me that day was a treasure.

There were file drawers filled with original documents organized by family--mine included. There was microfiche of a century of the city's newspaper, The Daily Argus. There were photographs of the neighborhoods in which my characters lived. I mined that material to create a sense of place and time that was essential to my story.

Discovering the Chappaquiddick history in the cottage was a similar treasure. Descriptions of meals created from what grew in the garden or came from the sea; childhood games; even the evolution of the ferry service that connects Chappy to Edgartown--all will find their way into my story to give it texture and particularity.

What are your sources for the details that shape your characters' lives?

Craft/Writing Prompt--First Lines

Here are a few "first lines" to use as prompts for some timed writing:

Cristina was scribbling notes in the back of a linguistics class when, in an instant, everything went black.

He said he had never been happy until he met the Egyptian chess player.

Food/Pot Roast

When Toni Dante, one of the main characters in my upcoming novel, Across the Table, starts dating blonde, 6'2" Bobby Templeton from Belle Arbor, Indiana, his mother, Hazel, gives her a cookbook for Christmas, thoughtfully bookmarked with Bobby's favorite recipes. As Toni describes:

I grew up watching my mother cook with no recipes at all except what was in her head. She would taste and adjust, with a handful of chopped parsley or a fragment of cheese hand-grated and tossed into the pot. I used to think that she had been born with the knowledge of how to cook, something she had absorbed in the womb.

Following a cookbook was a new experience for me, but I threw myself into learning how to produce the dishes Bobby had grown up with. Once a week I took the T to his apartment in Kendall Square near MIT, carrying a shopping bag filled with ingredients I’d never seen in my mother’s pantry.

One of the first dishes she learns how to create is pot roast. Here is my favorite version. The secret to its rich flavor is the combination of garlic, thyme and red wine:

Pot Roast

1 large onion

2 large carrots

3 large cloves garlic

3-4 lbs. beef chuck roast

3 tablespoons flour

½ cup olive or canola oil

2 cups beef broth

1 cup red wine

1 tablespoon thyme

1 large bay leaf

1. Peel and chop onion, carrots and garlic into small dice.

2. Pat the beef dry. Place flour in a plastic bag and season with salt and pepper. Add beef and toss until coated with a layer of flour.

3. Heat oil in a Dutch oven and brown the beef on all sides. Remove from pan.

4. Add chopped onion, carrots and garlic to pan and sauté until onion is golden, scraping up bits of meat from bottom of pan.

5. Add beef to vegetables.

6. Add beef broth, wine, thyme and bay leaf.

7. Bring liquid to a boil, then lower heat to a simmer.

8. Cover and cook on low heat for about two hours.

9. Serve with noodles.

Encounters/Women with Curly Hair

The rain in my corner of New England has not stopped for days. Roads are flooding, the ground is soggy and everything is shrouded in a monochromatic nothingness. It is the sort of weather that drives women with naturally curly hair to desperate measures and binds us in a sisterhood that transcends rank.

This evening, my organization held a symposium and dinner at which the chair of our board was to give the welcoming message. I'd written her speech weeks ago and when she arrived for the event I met her at the podium to review the details. Before we jumped into the speech however, she had something far more important to discuss with me.

"How's your hair holding up in this weather?" she asked. "Let me tell you about this new treatment I tried last week..."

This wasn't the first time we've shared war stories about our love/hate relationship with our curls, and she isn't the only woman with whom I've formed an instantaneous connection simply because of what's growing on our heads. Like Frieda in the Peanuts comic strip, we feel a certain "otherness," and it's such a relief to find someone who understands on the most intimate level what we go through with our hair.

Inspiration/Theresia

At dinner this evening (farfalle pasta with white beans, spinach and chopped tomatoes for my vegetarian daughter and with meatballs in a tomato sauce simmered with sausage and bracciola for my carnivore husband) our conversation drifted to strong, independent women.

My grandmother Theresia was one of them. An immigrant from southern Italy, she raised ten children, the last of whom was a boy with Down's Syndrome. To protect him from the taunts of their city neighborhood, she and my grandfather moved with him to the country. On a plot of land with towering weeping willow trees, a rippling brook and room for both a vegetable and a flower garden, my mason grandfather built a house of stone that became "home" to three generations of my family. After both my uncle and my grandfather died, Theresia remained in the country, living there alone for over thirty years until she passed away at the age of ninety-six.

She never wanted to move in with any of her adult children. She would visit with each of them a few days around the Christmas holidays, but steadfastly and robustly continued managing her household. She was funny, insightful and riveting in her ability to ferret out the truth.

We loved her intensely, and she loved us back, giving each one of her many grandchildren the gifts of her laughter and her belief that we were wonderful. "You're a good girl," "You're a good boy," are phrases that we all heard from her and that to this day, we recall with fondness when we gather together as a clan.

Theresia was the inspiration for Rose's mother in my upcoming novel, Across the Table.

Discoveries/Eco-Psychology

I recently stumbled upon an article in the Sunday New York Times about the field of eco-psychology--the relationship between human well-being and the natural world. Because I'm currently developing a new story that is deeply concerned with my characters' connections to a particular landscape, I found the article both fascinating and reaffirming. Fascinating because the idea that we derive our emotional and spiritual health from the physical world intrigues and excites me. Reaffirming because along the journey of writing my books I have often discovered seemingly unrelated fragments of knowledge that tie back to my original themes in unexpected and very satisfying ways.

What unexpected fragment of knowledge made its way into your life recently?

Craft: Writing Prompt

The Thousand-Word Sentence

Many years ago, when I was first beginning to think of myself as a serious writer, I had the privilege of attending a workshop with the novelist Jill McCorkle. Our first assignment was one which Jill described as "cleaning out the cobwebs in the attic." She sent us away from class with the task of writing a thousand-word sentence.

I was in Boston for a week after living abroad for many years and had foolishly scheduled dinners almost every night with old friends whom I hadn't seen since moving away from the city, thinking that I'd work all day at writing and spend my evenings enjoying the pleasures of friendship . The night of the thousand-word assignment I returned to my hotel room after a long and wonderful dinner and stared at the blank yellow legal pad I'd left on the desk. I wanted nothing more than to crawl between the covers.

But I sat down, picked up my pen and did what writers do. I wrote.

When I finished, I was exhausted and empty. But I had produced something of emotional honesty, freed of the restrictions of punctuation and editing.

Try it. Write a thousand-word sentence.

Craft/Writing Prompt--What's in the Trash

When I lived in Germany, our region instituted some stringent recycling rules in order to cut down on the amount of trash that was being collected and deposited in landfills. Food wrappers fell into the category of items to be washed and recycled, and suddenly, people began bringing their Tupperware to the deli counter in the supermarket to hold their weekly order of sliced ham instead of having the butcher wrap it in waxed paper. One day, as I rolled my garbage bin to the curb, I met my neighbor doing the same and we struck up a conversation about the time-consuming task of sorting through our debris. It turned out that she was washing the paper that her butter had been packaged in, in order to recycle it. It was one of those telling details that says so much about a personality, and I tucked it away.

You can learn a lot about a character by what she throws away. Describe the contents of someone's trash as a way of revealing something significant about him or her.

Food/Chicken "Salmi"

When my heroine in Across the Table needs to orchestrate an important conversation, she stages it with food. Rose Dante takes her husband to an isolated beach north of Boston to recreate with sun and a spicy meal the early days of their marriage on the island of Trinidad.

I spread the blanket on the sand near the shoreline. It wasn’t the azure blue of the Caribbean, but the sun caught the water at just the right angle and broke up into thousands of pinpoints of light. It was like my brother Jimmy’s girlfriend Marie, the Sicilian, had snagged one of her gaudy dresses and all the sequins had spilled across the ocean.

Al pulled me down next to him, and I swear, I would have done anything with him at that moment. But he whispered to me.

“I just want to hold you, Rose. Rest your head on my chest so that I can breathe in your perfume.”

We lay like that for a while, quiet, just listening to one another breathe, me feeling the weight of his arm draped over me and knowing with certainty that’s where I wanted to be.

When both our stomachs started growling, I stirred.

“How about some lunch?” I murmured.

“As long as you promise to lie down again with me after we eat.”

I set out the dishes I’d prepared the night before: chicken salmi that had absorbed the flavors of wine vinegar and garlic and oregano overnight and that we ate with our fingers, the olive oil slick on our chins; string beans and potatoes with some chopped up tomatoes from Uncle Annio’s garden; and the fried bananas now soaked through with rum and brown sugar. I even had managed to put a couple of bottles of beer in the basket.

What my mother called "chicken salmi" when we were growing up is a pungent dish, simmered for hours so that the chicken falls off the bone. She didn't leave the recipe, and I couldn't find one in my search through my cookbooks. But here is a close approximation.

1 chicken, cut up into pieces

Olive oil

½ cup red wine vinegar

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves

1 teaspoon dried basil leaves

3 garlic cloves, chopped fine

Salt and pepper to taste

Heat olive oil in a heavy, ovenproof casserole and brown the chicken pieces.

Add the remaining ingredients, cover the casserole and bake at 350 degrees for one hour, basting the chicken every 15 minutes.

As Rose explains, this tastes even better the second day, when the flavors have had a chance to meld.

Encounters/The Honey Dew Ladies

I have a sixty-mile commute to work, which I share with a colleague. We've been carpooling together for almost five years and have developed certain rituals to ease the ride. One of those rituals is stopping at the Honey Dew Donut Shop for our morning tea (mine) and coffee (hers). The early morning shift at Honey Dew is staffed by two warm and gracious women who welcome us with smiles and friendly banter. They look out for us, know exactly how we like our drinks and send us off on the road with good wishes.

We probably spend no more than a few minutes with them, but starting our day this way is a simple pleasure.

What or who gets your day off to a joyful beginning?

Inspiration/The Gesture

I've just returned from a dinner honoring donors who support research seeking a cure for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's Disease," a progressive neurodegenerative disease. They were a close-knit and dedicated group, almost all of whom had family members who had been touched by the disease.

In attendance was one member who has ALS. He is still able to sit in a wheelchair, but he requires a respirator. One by one, the other guests stopped by his table to greet him and talk with him at length. With him was his wife.

At one point during the evening, I watched her get up from her seat and reach into a pocket on the back of the wheelchair. She retrieved a soft white cloth and gently wiped her husband's face. His own hands were motionless on the armrests of the chair, unable to make even the slightest movement.

Her small gesture--thoughtful, loving--was an inspiration.

Have you ever witnessed an inspiring act?