Write Thru Crisis – Floodlight Moments

Inspiration, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Floodlight Moments. Our grandson has always had a secret smile, playing behind his composed features and in his eyes. Irrepressible, even at five years old, no matter how much he intended to play a straight-faced joke on camera-toting Grandma who had just said, “Smile for me, sweetheart.”

I cherish moments. Moments in general and specific ones. I remember them and, when I want them to return, I illuminate them with the floodlight of my imagination and fill in the details. For example, I took a photograph of our grandson on a Saturday morning in the kitchen of our house on Vashon Island in Washington state.

The sun shone through the window, and Grandson was in full cartoon garb. SpongeBob SquarePants (the hat) and Thomas the Train (the pajamas) were Saturday morning pals for me also. As I passed through the living room, I’d catch glimpses of their antics from the corner TV table Grandpa Jonathan had built.

This photograph stands on a bookcase in our New York City living room today. Though our grandson of the secret smile passed age seventeen in April, this memento radiates very present delight every time I look at it

Plus, I can add more details to the scene. We’d painted the walls yellow to brighten the frequent shadows of Pacific Northwest rainy days. Fronting the couch, a ponderous low cabinet had a top that lifted for snacking and a drawer at the bottom where Grandson kept the curious items he’d collected from the local thrift shop’s trove of recycled treasures.

I picture the scene and urge the wattage to climb in my memory floodlight. I luxuriate in the warmth of that moment. The feelings surrounding it. The atmosphere of love and ease on those mornings, when no one had yet scurried out of night clothes into daywear.

Each of us has deposited such moments in our memory banks. Smiles that touch your heart. Flashes of beauty beneath the retina of your inner eye. You can revitalize them in an instant. No intense pondering is necessary. In fact, pondering is discouraged.

Instead, grasp the moment in midair. Cradle it in the palm of your hand. Allow it to ripple through your fingers, up your arm, into your heart. Add to your visual recollection the sound of birds chattering outside, the aroma of breakfast on the stove, the touch of sunlight from the window on your skin.

In other words, revel in sensual richness brought to life. Drop gently out of the present. Loosen its hold on your consciousness until you are fully embraced by that long-ago kitchen moment, or wherever the incandescence of your imagination has taken you.

Anticipate the thrill of preserving this scene on a page, but don’t go there yet. Linger. Savor. Enjoy. Recognize the rapture. Edge aside what is now for what was then. But, do so gently, in order not to disturb the still place where your psyche has allowed itself to rest.

When you’re ready, gradually return to your now. Before the details fade, write down the adventure of your visit to your recaptured moment. Afterward, favor yourself with these interludes often. All you have to do is turn on your imagination, direct its glow within, and there they are. Write Thru Crisis – Floodlight Moments.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her professional life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells (revised version coming soon). Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You.

Experience Alice’s own Floodlight Moments in her memoir Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness. Available HERE.

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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Write Thru Crisis – Salted Wounds

Storytelling, ,

Write Thru crisis – Salted wounds. Mother’s Day was a few weeks ago. My son once said, “This is a holiday created by Hallmark Cards to sell their product.” My response to that might be, “This is a holiday created by Morton Salt to sell their product.”

I am a mother who had a mother, and a grandmother who had a grandmother. All of which does have a Hallmark card side. Idyllic resonances that could prompt sweet, four-line rhymes. Plus, a Morton Salt side, associations with wounded places, some scarred over, some still bloody, all conflicted.

Meanwhile, on a grander scale, there is the Covid-19 catastrophe. Whether you believe this to be our century’s worldwide plague or a conspiratorial hoax, we are all in the midst of a Morton’s moment magnified. This situation rubs salt into every vulnerable, sensitive corner of our psyches, the places where we most long to be left undisturbed.

Unfortunately, crisis of any kind is, by nature, disturbing. Crisis is an impertinent, belligerent, often malicious finger, rubbing the Morton’s deeper in, making certain we experience its sting to the max.

Back to Mother’s Day, which I pick on only as an example. Like the Corona Crisis, Mother’s Day is a universal phenomenon, whether you celebrate either or not. We all have some relationship with motherhood. We are all in the grips of this crisis. We all have wounded places.

Animals are a good example of what to do about the last of those. When wounded, they find a place of refuge, a crevice where they can burrow in, lick the lethal elements from their wounds and, hopefully, heal. Each of us has a similar refuge close at hand, our personal stories and the telling of them.

Here, as examples, are two of my own refuge stories. Coroneal Mom’s Day was bittersweet for me. On the lighter side, I missed my son in law’s waffles. Last year, I stuffed myself so full of them, I had to lie immobile for an hour to recover. This year, he and my daughter stood six feet from me in the street, avoiding mention of waffles or anything else we missed.

On the heavy side, my mother suffered from mental illness. Which is why I spent most childhood weekdays with my kind, loving grandma. She passed away when I was seven years and three days old. Life before then and life afterward were very different realities me and, for some reason, this Mother’s Day has brought those times close to my heart.Grandma and Alice at Two and a Half

Obviously, each of these snippets requires much more detail to become an actual story. As I said, they are only examples, starting places in search of further telling. They are also crevices I may burrow into, salve my wounds with words, and heal, or celebrate. You can do the same.

What real-life stories does Mother’s Day 2020 call forth for you? No crevice is required, only a pen, a journal, and sentences. Or draw a picture, construct a collage, compose a lyric and some music to go with it. Whatever your medium preference may be, let it wash the salt away, dull the sting, encourage healing to happen.

And don’t forget the feelings, where method and magic meet. Share your stories, if you wish, at aliceorrbooks@gmail.com, and let me know if you would like others to experience them too. Share this post also. We all have stories to tell, as we Write Thru Crisis.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her professional life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells (revised version coming soon). Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You.

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.A Time of Fear & Lovinghttps://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
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Write Thru Crisis – Write It Down

Writing Tips, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Write It Down. “Go home, get some rest. Marnin’ the world new, every time.” In White Teeth by  Zadie Smith, gorgeous Jamaican Carla Bowden says these words to down-and-out Londoner Archie Jones.

Wise advice for today’s gone-to-madness world. Go to ground for a while and lick the wounds created by simply looking at, listening to, walking through the madness. Then, drag yourself up to as straight-back a position as you can manage and, if you are an author, Write It Down.

What is my own personal Biggest Mistake as a writer? Sometimes I don’t write things down. Crucial things that are the stuff of strong storytelling, because they have lots of Emotional Content. Which means they make me cringe and want to look away or, better yet, to run away. To do anything other than drag out my faithful notebook and record the psychic carnage.

We’ve got psychic carnage galore right now, right here in River City or anywhere. So, grab that notebook. Retrieve a stick of charcoal from the charred remains of what you once believed to be a sensible existence, and start scribbling. Fast as you can come up with words to describe the devastation. Because  this  reality is storytelling paydirt.

Too bad we are also in Biggest Mistake territory. I know this has happened to you, because it happens to all of us. The chaos of life presents you with a knock-your-socks-off story idea, so good you are blown away. So good you can hardly believe this super great fortune has been given to you out of the super obliterated landscape that surrounds you.

I call it the Idea from Heaven, or maybe, in these circumstances, from the other place. What has been given is a glimpse of narrative that, though it may be ugly to others, has for you, the storyteller, elegant symmetry. It is exactly the Inspiration you’ve been yearning for. Nothing short of paradise, or the other place, could deliver such a priceless gem.

You are struck profoundly. You are certain this moment will remain with you forever. It has been imprinted indelibly upon your soul. All the same, your writer’s practicality knows you should write it down immediately. But for some reason, often fairly trivial, you do not. For some reason, notetaking isn’t convenient for you at this particular time.

You don’t intend to put it off for long. You only intend to get done with whatever you’re into right now. Besides, this is the Idea from Heaven, or… A bolt of bestseller storytelling lightning has zigzagged across the deepest blue beauty of your writerly dreams sky. You absolutely will not forget a single detail. Except. You do.

You look for your priceless gem, maybe only minutes later, but it is gone, gone, gone. You search and search. You employ every memory-jog trick and technique you’ve ever heard of, but all you can recall is the feeling. All that remains is a whiff of the euphoria that blew in on this once-in-forever brainstorm. Everything else has evaporated.

You absolutely cannot believe what has happened, but… The story kernel that was destined to catapult you to the stars has flitted off, possibly to some other authorial imagination like a fickle tease, and your own authorial instincts tell you it will never return.

Brain science may have a theory or twelve about this phenomenon. Or maybe the universe if just screwing with you. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is always the same. You plunge into mourning. The Kubler-Ross five stages of adjusting to great loss lie ahead, and it is all your fault. Because all you had to do was write the damned words down, but you did not.

Meanwhile, back to our present definitely not- easy existence. Brainstorms are crashing and booming all around you. Pull your head out from under your comforting soft-stuff-filled comforter, mine is blue by the way. Gaze around you, take it all in, every earth and heaven rattling detail. Then. Write It Down. Write It Down. WRITE IT ALL DOWN!!!

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice’s latest novel A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.  Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving: “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “Budding romance sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.” “The best one yet!”

A Time of Fear & Loving

A Thankless Season – Riverton Road Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 6 – the series finale, is in progress. Stay tuned for further alerts. And, Write Them Down!

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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