Tribute to Dr. Seuss

In honor of Dr. Seuss' birthday on March 2, I made a little piddle that goes something like this:

At the far end of the table

where the toast crumbs lack butter

and the grimy dishes gather in piles of clutter

and no speech is heard except hollow mutters

was the quarter of the Solitary Writer.

And deep behind the toast crumbs, you may see,

if you dare believe, instead of flee,

where the Writer once wrote

what dreams she dared float

before someone stole the hope away.

Who was the Writer?

And why did she work?

And why was she solitary in midnight lurks

at the end of the table where the toast crumbs lack butter?

The mouse still sets in the murk.

Ask it. It knows.

The mouse won’t speak.

Don’t left click its button.

It rests on the pad, no glutton

for devious cluckin’.

Its batteries glow on low

Don’t you know,

except for certain dull Tuesdays

in the middle of winter

when the moon casts its rays

toward the laptop’s dark screen.

Then the mouse might reveal

the fate of the Solitary Writer

before hope faded away.

It all started way back …

Such a long time ago …

Way back in the days when the agents were keen

and editors did glean

the words to forward careers most unlean.

When six figure advances appeared by the dozen

and publishers said welcome dear cousin.

That was when the glorious words first poured

onto paper and laptop, from opening lines to finishing chapters.

The bright sparkling words, volumes unmoored,

producing not tears but laughter.

And among the words, the nouns did play

before the hope did die away.

The verbs hopped and rumpled, all active by far.

With no tellerous was-ing to lower the bar.

To agents the query letters were let fly most trustful.

Until day by day, month by month

came the sickening smack by the gutful

of scabulous no’s, so disgustful.

The Writer said nothing. Just hung down her head.

No more words. No more nouns. No more verbs to be tried.

She silently faded away, the hope had lied.

Hearts of pride can only bleed.

On the screen, the curser blinked one thing …

“Read”

Until someone like you reads a whole awful lot,

It won’t be bought.

So read for the Writer. Treat her words with care.

Give them much praise. Put forth comments that dare.

Let no book lack.

Then the Writer

and all of her friends

may come back.

Tears on the Page

At a chat with fellow writers the other day, a friend mentioned that The Hunger Games almost made her cry. The five or six of us there all went on to list books or movies that had made us cry. I’m a crybaby so the list was long for me. Unsurprisingly, we agreed on a lot of titles. One other thing became pretty clear, movies have an advantage. As they say: seeing is believing. Or in this case, seeing is sympathizing. Plus, the visual art form also gets to weave in sound effects. How can you resist joining in a tear-fest you can both see and hear? Just like a yawn, see someone cry and you respond in kind. Hardly fair for writers, you might say. Writers have words on a page. Black against white.

But writing can run the gauntlet of emotion from the ultra blah, how to program your DVD player, to that tear-jerker novel you can’t put down. So how do the successful writers do it? Think about the scenes that made you cry, or maybe made you wish you could. (Come on, tough guys cry too.) They all have some things in common. The writer created a world or a character so real that it didn’t matter that none of it ever existed. Isn’t that what happened? You just wept over something that is complete fiction. It happened only in one person’s imagination. Yet, you felt for that fictional situation maybe even more than for a story you’d hear on the news. Emotional writing involves fully alive characters in a believable world.

And it should go without saying that, the character has to be a likeable character, not the antagonist. We should cheer when the villain gets theirs, not cry. Another given: the writing also has to be clean and have a good flow.

So why don’t writers try to provoke tears in every chapter? Obviously if writers killed off characters left and right, they would stop getting a proper reaction. Readers would give up on the book altogether or become deadened to being jerked around. So trauma must be a situation called for in the plot. You can’t just throw in a scene without reason and expect readers to react. It has to flow with the rest of the book and not stick out like a sore thumb. In other words: use super-emotion sparingly.

So what kinds of situations cause the most sorrow?

I can only speak for myself, but I boiled it down to a few situations I’ve noticed in multiple novels. The biggie: Anytime an animal is injured or killed, especial if a child is attached to it, look out. Think Black Beauty, or that staple of elementary school reading, Where the Red Fern Grows. Boy loves dogs, dogs die in tragic fashion. Not one, but both dogs. Tears galore. My personal record for crying is with the books by James Herriot, the Yorkshire veterinarian. Pets put down. Yikes, those chapters still make me break down.

Next most weepy: death of a beloved favorite character. Anybody remember Beth from Little Women? You knew it was coming, but you couldn’t help yourself anyway. Another example: Tonks and Lupin from Harry Potter. They just had a baby, sob. (Hope this isn’t a spoiler, but everybody who was going to read Harry Potter has probably seen the movie.) The list could go on and on.

There is a third shorter category of tear-jerkers: when a favorite place/setting is destroyed. The place has to have a mystic kind of perfection in some fashion to make this work. In the end of Return of the King, when the Shire is burned and enslaved. The Shire represented peaceful co-existence, a utopia that didn’t go untouched and so tore your heart to see it reduced. The rampage that wrecked Hogwarts at the end of Harry Potter is another example. Hogwarts should have been a place of safety; it was a beloved castle where loyal friendships were forged. Thus the hurt to see it torn apart.

And lastly, perhaps the hardest to pull off: the heroic sacrifice. A character makes a sacrifice out of love and loyalty to protect another. (Often this doesn’t have to end in death, thank goodness.) My favorite example is in Lord of the Rings when Merry and Pippin jump out, exposing themselves to the orcs in order to draw the orcs away from Frodo. Frodo gets away, Merry and Pippin get taken. Foolish, brave little hobbits, makes me cry every time. Another probably unknown example from Patrick O’Brian’s books. The main character was sentenced (unjustly) to the pillory as a form of public humiliation. You might remember the pillory scene from A Knight’s Tale, your head and wrists are locked in place, making the victim helpless. O’Brian’s book is similar, but written before that movie came out. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of loyal sailors came to the square to protect their Captain from being pelted with garbage or slapped around while he was helpless. A real emotion scene of pride and love. And then, there’s Dobby from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I can’t think about it with dry eyes. Dobby frees his friends, but takes a knife. “Here lies Dobby: A free elf.” Just try not to cry at that one.

So that’s my thoughts on the subject. I probably left out many important points as there are so many possibilities. Please feel free to list your favorite tear-jerkers in the comments, or any ideas you have for what makes a good sad scene.

Head Scratchers and Funnies

Not sure what to post as I fill time waiting on a nudge on a full. For non-writers, a nudge on a full means that an agent requested the full manuscript of my finished story, but hasn’t yet got back to me with a rejection or The Call. I waited ten weeks, and then sent a nudge email. It’s tricky, because you have to keep the nudge confident, but not cocky. You don’t want to sound whiny or needy. It’s kind of a fine line between being a pest and having the right to some closure on the whole thing.

Anyway, here are some funnies things that happened at work. I wish I had pictures to go with them. Please use your imagination.

A small girl eagerly waved me over to her line one morning before school started. She had something to show me. I expected the usual such as a much too close-up view of her gum where she lost a tooth, or the old favorite ‘it’s my birthday’, the ever amazing ‘I got a haircut’, or maybe the thrilling ‘these are my new shoes’. Instead, she pulled forth from her backpack a pink balloon. She proceeded to blow it up using only her— gasp—NOSE. Needless to say, I was enchanted with her undeniable skill and, truthfully, proud she wanted to show me. Ever tried it? She has a lot of lung power.


During a social studies lesson in the not too distant past, we were studying the fact that people live in different types of structures. The teacher began to quiz the class about what kind of homes they lived in, apartments and houses being the expected response. One little girl lived with her grandma, and she was having trouble with the question. She didn’t quite understand. “Does your grandma live in a house or an apartment,” the teacher asked. Completely straight-faced the tot replied, “My mom says grandma lives at the casino.” There you have it folks, social studies can be hilarious.


I once shared a school year with a pair of fascinating twin boys. Like a lot of twins, they were pretty small, making them even cuter. One was in my classroom and the other twin had a teacher across the hall. One day we noticed “Brian” limping. You get a lot of wardrobe problems in kindergarten. Shirts turned wrong-side out or backwards, jeans that won’t button, even (believe it or not) jeans on backwards (ouch). Of course, we see a lot of shoes on the wrong feet. This looked like a case of shoes that needed to be switched. I looked closer, trying to judge. Brian’s feet continued to puzzle. Both of his shoes curved in the same direction. How could that be? I’d never seen the like. He had on two left shoes. Brother in the other room had on two rights. Is that a case of two wrongs don’t make a right?

Veteran's Day

Say thanks today to the active service members that allow the rest of us to live uninterrupted lives. Their bravery, sacrifice, and commitment shelters this country and makes it possible to forget we’re a country at war. Thanks also to the former military men and woman, among them my husband and dad, who formed the line between us and chaos. They may have moved on to other professions, but they played their part in keeping this country great and would be the first to step forward again.

Priorities

Today I went back to work after a bad cold. The kind of cold that makes you miserable. A cold that stops up your head and leaves you with a constant cough at the same time. A cold you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, with the exception of whoever left home and gave it to you in the first place. They can have it back and to spare.

But after some medicine that started with the letter A, and then included close to the entire alphabet in the rest of the name, I’m better. Apparently if your med is not in line for a glossy T.V. commercial than the longer the name the more effective it must be. Five days it predicted until the end of suffering and five days it was.

A whole crew of first graders demanded to know where I was for two days. As soon as they learned I was sick, the interest vanished. Sickness has no glamour. I should have said I went to China, or, better yet, a Justin Bieber concert. That would have won their little hearts and made me a star. Next time.

In all my spare time at home, I didn’t write a thing. Instead I, strangely, spent my time sleeping when I wasn’t moaning. Sorry family. But it did give me time to remember some priorities. There’s the usually family, health, and work, but I was thinking about writing priorities. Just why was I writing?

Was it solely with the goal of being published? To earn gobs of money or to make myself famous? To impress my friends and relations? To entertain? For myself because it’s my passion?

I don’t think there is any one answer that fits the bill. It includes parts of all of them. It would be nice to be published, and miraculously earn gobs of money (not counting on that). I’d love for thousands to read my work. That’s the ambitious side of me. But that’s not the whole story.

I also enjoy hearing from beta readers that like my twiddle of stories. I like when people think a short is funny. If your coffee shoots out of your nose then I’ve done a good job. I also feel happiest when I’m writing. Creating. What could be better? There’s no reason I can’t accomplish all those goals, with luck and no more colds. But I’d better keep my head on straight on not make meeting them the end all of life. I’m keeping in mind what’s important. Making myself happy.

Pep Talk

My first passion is writing. My second is my day job. I work in a first grade classroom, helping a special needs child. My life is filled with funny comments, the gross, and the weird that only a five year old going on six can produce. It’s exhausting. It can be tedious. But it is oh so rewarding. There’s nothing like being out for a day and returning to have a child hug you around the hips (that’s as high as they can reach) and declare how much they missed you.

The other day was pumpkin day- a crazy mix of science, writing, and math standards with a whole lot of hectic. Separated into small groups, the teacher gave each group a pumpkin, paper to catch the mess, and a big spoon for those averse to using their hands. The object of this insanity being to remove all the seeds and count them. (Consider how long it takes a first grader to count to over one hundred or put seeds into piles of ten, and you’ll get an idea of why I’m tired every night.)

Did you know a kid’s first instinct for cleaning their hands of yuck is to shake them? Did you know that pumpkin goop flies when kids shake their hands? Pumpkin goop, of course, is inevitably attracted to the nearest available adult. That’s a scientific fact.

As I was hurrying from group to group, I noticed a boy holding his spoon in front of his face, staring intently at himself. His exact words, to himself please note, were: “Who’s the handsomest person?” The answer being obviously him. My first reaction was to choke off a giggle while looking to the other adult in the room to see if she caught it. She did. My second was to wonder that he used the word ‘person’. Odd choice for a five year old.

Later that night, I got to thinking about it again. He was just doing what we should all be doing, remembering to give himself positive words. As writers we all doubt ourselves. The agent rejections roll in by the dozens with approval small and far between. When we beta read for others, we’re usually focusing on the negative. What could be fixed or scraped.

In the hustle and bustle of life, don’t forget to give yourself a little pep talk of kind words. It’s the best advice I could give to anyone, writer or not. So who’s the most wonderful, talented writer? You are. And don’t forget it.