From the monthly archives:
I am walking my two dogs through my neighborhood. It is early morning. A father and son are walking down their front steps to their car.
The father said, “Say hello to the dogs.”
The son said, “But they can’t talk.”
The father said, “That’s okay; they still like to hear nice sounds like ‘Good Morning.”
The son stopped and stared at the dogs, considering his father’s advice.
I said, “Woof.” And smiled.
Make nice sounds at someone today. Even if they don’t speak your language.
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I am staring at this line: “I wanted to ask Momma again…”
It doesn’t matter what the character wanted to ask. What matters in this revision is the “again.”
First I wonder, “Did the character ask it before?” I go back through the manuscript.
No, she didn’t.
So I ask myself, “Should I write a scene where she asks it the first time?”
I answer, “No, that seems redundant.”
“Well,” I say, getting sort of chummy with myself about the process. “I could cut ‘again.’ That would solve it.”
“But,” I say. “Maybe my inner writer wrote it for a reason. Maybe that ‘again’ means something.”
“Okay,” I agree. “It means she’s frustrated. She’s feeling pushy. She wants something to happen so she’s nudging her mother again about it.”
“So is the frustration there?” I ask.
I go back through the manuscript. Again. I look at all the places where the frustration builds and where it doesn’t. I get to the line: “I wanted to ask Momma again…”
“Again” seems a pale way to express frustration. I cut it and move on.
This is revision. This is the dialogue going on in my head. At times, it is hilarious. At others, maddening. It is a puzzle, trying to piece together all the bits of inspiration to make sense so that when it is done, the whole of it lands in someone else’s heart and touches them in quite illogical places.
So that when it is done, they want to read it again. And again.
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For Spike Gillespie, it is an odyssey that is her life.*
For Liz Scanlon, it is an entwining of her life, her poetry, her books.
For Brian Yansky, it is his thinking about the craft of writing.
For Carmen Oliver, it is an exploration into the craft of picture books.
For Cynthia Leitich Smith, it is the world of children’s literature and her embrace of it.
For Chris Barton, it is news and notifications about his career as a children’s book author.
For Don Tate, it follows his ups and downs (rants and raves) as an illustrator of children’s books.
I could go on. These are just a few of the Austin bloggers I follow and just a small portion of the bloggers that I read worldwide.
So what pray tell is a blog? A diary? A news bulletin? A teaching spot? It is all those things. The challenge I think is to find your voice among all those voices. Not your brand. Your voice. The one that is uniquely yours among all the voices out there blogging and speaking and musing. The one that your audience will surf to on a Monday wondering what Lindsey has to say today.
My todays have been sparse. Partly it’s because I have been immersed in the MFA program at VCFA. Partly it’s because I been reading blogs and thinking, “Hmm, what is a blog? What is my blog?”
Check back in and see how my blog odyssey develops.
Oh, and if you’d like to share your own blog odyssey or the site of a unique blog and why you read it, please do.
*These are my summaries of their websites.
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