Month: November 2013 (Page 1 of 2)

I need a critique group. I need the imposed discipline. I need the conversation. I need the support. But mostly, I need the brutal truth about my writing. I don’t want, “oh that’s really good.” Or, “I like this.” What I want is––”no, you used that same word five times on the same page,” or, “collapse this part it’s definitely too much information.”

I’m lucky, I get it all from my critique group. But today, it was less about the writing and more about where I was going with the writing. What was I trying to get to. I’m writing a non-fiction. I’ve been toying with ‘is it a biography or is it just about a historical time period?’  I’ve worried that the subject matter is not easily translated into kids-speak. And, what is less history and more my life, I am concerned that the stuff that I think is important maybe isn’t.

So, I’ve been reading a lot of NF and trying to work out what makes a good NF tick. I don’t want a straight time line, you know, born, schooled, lived, died type of story. I’m not working for the kind of book a kid picks up and reads because of a book report. And, I don’t want it to be so full of fundamental facts that a kid will start to read and his/her eyes will glaze over. Oh, my! No! I want a book a kid will pick up and say, “Hey, this is cool!”

The problem is always, where do you start? At the beginning, and if so, which beginning, whose beginning. I’ve tried starting at the very beginning, but if you don’t know the historical figure, then WHOMP, who cares where he’s been born and lived, even if castles are involved. If you start in the middle, where he stepped onto the national and international stage, well, again, who cares. He’s just some dude who was important in the last century. So last century! It you start where he’s made a huge impact on the world––well then, why isn’t he remembered already?

So I was going for the mystery and trying to articulate what that meant to me, the whole raison d’être  of writing this book. And there is was. And one of my critique partners said it out loud.

 Yes. Yes, indeed. It is certainly, most absolutely about the WHY.

It’s the end of the week. I like endings. I like beginnings and, truth be told, I like middles too.  Much like chocolate, lol, dark, milk, you name it, I like it.  Today I feel the need to clear my desk and my head and focus. I’m into a nonfiction subject that doesn’t translate well to popular, or children. It’s academic, it’s elitist, and it’s very specialized. Not only that the underlying subject isn’t all that popular.

Wow! So why am I doing this? Why have I spend time and money visiting sites, both virtually and physically? Why have I spend time and money reading directly about the subject and indirectly about that which few remember and when they do it is more because of a trivia game rather than the importance of the subject?

The answer is that there are more people than I probably even know who are totally invested in this subject. And, the fact that two posters [that have to do with the nonfiction subject] I purchased back in the 70’s from an artist who was a Immaculate Heart of Mary nun, from Mary of the Bushes, as my mother used to say…[sorry, inside joke, the school is in Scranton PA, Marywood College] who became internationally famous for painting a couple of gas tanks off the route 93, right there near the Dorchester waterfront, have stayed with me for all these years. They’ve hung on my wall, my real wall, in my study, in my den, wherever I wanted to be reminded of what it meant to not only have a social conscience, but to have the power to act on that consciousness. It is about being reminded of what it means to have a belief tattooed on your spine, be of your essence, be of such importance to you that to not believe it would be a black hole, a never-ending darkness. My own Catholic and catholic faith is that way for me. In many ways, this subject is of the same ilk, the catholic with a small ‘c’, a word I have always cherished as much as I hold dear the faith with the capital ‘C’. So, back to it!