Kill Your Babies

I’m at a writers’ conference this week – which for those of you outside this very self contained world – means that I sit around a table with six or seven other people and we all tear each others’ ideas apart after having read manuscripts or hearing plot lines.

This style of torture is known as ‘workshopping.’ At the start of the session, you sign up for your day, the day when the class will focus all its energies on YOUR work. For introverts this can be horrific, the modern day version of being burned at the stake. For extroverts, we either get very vocally defensive or begin brainstorming (in either case, we run our mouths, big surprise).

If you have a good workshop leader (someone who is usually a working and/or published author) then the ground rules keep this experience from sending you to the far side of the earth to escape the pain and humiliation of your workshop day. If you have a poor one – then all bets are off. You may suddenly discover a passion for Algebra and never write a word again.

What is fascinating about this particular conference is that the teachers are fantastic: open, giving of their time, and also their trade secrets.

One of which was “kill your babies” or suffocate your own brilliance and get out of the way. This gem that came out in the screenwriting workshop of the past weekend. What the workshop leader meant, as we were discussing my ideas for a screenplay, was that I had to be ruthless with myself and my story. I have to be open to possibilities I might not have seen while writing it. I have to wrench every bit of personal connection out of the characters, plot, setting, etc. in order to see what will service the dramatic arc of my piece. 

Not my ego or my Message or my Plan but the actual story that wants to be told.

This can be scalding for writers as we cook up these things over boiling, fetid stoves.

But, as I found out during the workshop of my screenplay, the story will ultimately be stronger for it.

Now I have higher drama, more interesting characters, gripping scenes and plot lines.

The actual revising and updating of the thing itself, however, well, that’s another story.

Stay tuned for news on my novel manuscript (which is due to be sliced open on Friday).

What matters… a different kind of list

Making a list is a great way to keep track of what needs doing. It’s also a quck and easy way to jot down what might be on your mind. Here’s a list from a workshop I was in this afternoon. A list of what matters as of 1:45 KSA time:

  1. Sunny days
  2. Happiness
  3. Good friends
  4. Getting things done
  5. Connections
  6. Doing
  7. Exercise
  8. Love
  9. Eating
  10. A clean house
  11. A warm heart
  12. Being prepared
  13. Honesty
  14. Magazines
  15. Love
  16. Email
  17. Technology
  18. My family
  19. My nieces
  20. My love
  21. Cooking a good meal
  22. Being organized
  23. Reading
  24. Books
  25. Having what you need
  26. Sleep
  27. Soft sheets
  28. Staying current
  29. Friendships at work
  30. Love
  31. Finishing things
  32. Taking care of your body
  33. Meeting new people
  34. Doing what you say you will
  35. Having fun
  36. Traveling
  37. Hot sunny days
  38. Being outside
  39. Eating your favorite food
  40. Love
  41. Saying the truth
  42. Not holding grudges
  43. Letting go of anger
  44. Not keeping rage
  45. Fighting boredom
  46. Learning new things
  47. Having dependable friends
  48. Eliminating the toxic
  49. Finding a reason to smile
  50. Making errands easy
  51. Breaking bad habits
  52. Not giving up
  53. Planning to succeed
  54. Ignoring those that hurt you
  55. Living for tomorrow
  56. Setting your heart on the good
  57. Remembering the good
  58. Focusing on hope
  59. Sharing with others
  60. Feeling your own power
  61. Believing anything is possible
  62. Dream
  63. Search for truth
  64. Hope
  65. Believe
  66. Trust
  67. Laugh
  68. Trust
  69. Love
  70. Believe
  71. Wait
  72. Wait for patience
  73. Keep trying
  74. Never give up
  75. Letting go of the past

In search of a word…

For the past week or so, I’ve been looking for a word. Yes, it sounds crazy, not a pair of glasses, or car keys, or even a misplaced phone number. But a word. The word I was looking for was – I thought – “asture.” 

But it came up with the red squiggly line underneath it which means spell check thinks it’s misspelled. 
So I clicked on the red squiggly and this is what spellcheck offered me:

Assure
Astute
Pasture
Satire
Azure
 
None of these were the one that I wanted. I was typing away, happily meeting my NaNoWriMo goals, when I wanted this word “asture” to describe the boss in the novel I’m writing. I meant, purposefully sparse, a no nonsense man. I Googled it, figuring the internet dictionary would know exactly what I meant.
 
Turns out the Internet (and Google) have their limits too. This is what I got with a search for “asture”: lots of links explaining the word pasture.
 
I was getting desparate: had I made up a word? I am moderately dyslexic when it comes to spelling and numbers – things reverse themselves – so I turned to my tried and true source for all things literary: my undergraduate English professor.
 
Here is the email I wrote her, subject line, “What is the word I mean?”:
 
Asture? The word that means sparse, plain, reserved.
 
Would have been in Jane Eyre to describe that orphanage where her friend died from TB.
 
I can’t find it and the dictionary thinks I mean ‘astute’ which I do not.
 
Did I make this word up?
 
Help!
m

Everyday she is now living her dream of being in the Big Apple, teaching and walking around everywhere, or taking the subway, right in the middle of the city that pulses with life. After decades in North Carolina, raising three children, and teaching at a small liberal arts college, she threw off the shackles of domesticity and made me dream come true. Needless to say, with her in NYC and me in Doha, our correspondence is more precious than ever.
 
As I waited for her response, I posted to a NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/234858) forum, WORD OF THE DAY, which offers everyday a word to work into your section for that day. There were funny ones such as flies, or cut, or purple, and there were interesting ones such as abandon, or precise, or betrayal. Having stumbled onto the forum, I was ten or twelve words behind. I busily started writing in the past suggestions but I was still stumped by the specter of “asture.” So I wrote the forum moderator, a similar, but increasingly desperate plea to figure out what word I meant. (For more on my NaNoWriMo: http://mohanalakshmi.livejournal.com/2813.html)
 
She (I’m assuming, not entirely sure that is a woman) wrote me back a polite message with various permutations of words that were close to the spelling of the word I wanted, and some that were not:
perhaps you mean:
astute: shrewly discerning, acute, wiley – someone who quickly picks up what is going on from minimal information

aesthete: one who makes overmuch of the ‘sense of the beautiful’ generally someone who is not a part of the real world of emotions and dirt

apathy: indifferenct to what appeals to feelings – dont care about anything

aloof: removed in distance or feeling from, reserved stand offish, not involved

Was her tone slightly…. Impatient? 
I waited, knowing I would be vindicated by my now urbanite mentor.
 
Her opening line:
 
“I’ve never heard of it in my life.”
 
What? I thought. Eeek! I

’ve invented a word, and not only that, a word so obscure that even my most favorite literature teacher in the world hasn’t heard of it. I despaired and felt foolish. Perhaps the forum leader on NaNoWriMo was right to edit me. Perhaps I was a dolt, searching for a word that didn’t exist, stubbornly bothering people who had better things to do – like write with words that everyone knows, for example.

 
Then, in the typical intellectually curious fashion that she used on me all four years of undergraduate to bolster a burgeoning interest in graduate school, she recounted an episode of something similar happening to her:
 
But then I was teaching a poem by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper called “Bury Me in a Free Land.”  It’s in one of those used-to-be-$1, now $2 Dover editions.  One stanza starts, “I could not rest if I heard the tread / Of a coffle gang to the shambles led.”  I’d never heard to coffle and didn’t get around to looking it up.  Then the day I was teaching it, I went and left my book at home, so found it on the internet and printed it out.  There, the line read “Of a coffee gang to the shambles led.”  That sort of made sense – maybe a coffee plantation on a Caribbean island.  I made a point about how Dover can’t afford to do careful editing and still keep the price down.  Then in the middle of that night I suddenly remembered coffle, went to dictionary.com, and learned it’s a line of prisoners chained together.  So the next class, I had to make the point that the internet is even less trustworthy! 
 
Love,
 
I put this all behind me and kept going on NaNoWriMo, kept going with daily tasks like work, laundry, having a dinner party, cleaning up. 

My husband has recently started going back to school to complete a bachelor’s degree that fell by the wayside when he was offered full time employment as an undergrad.

 
“How do you know so many words?” he asked me one night while I was typing busily on the laptop on NaNoWri
Mo.
 
He was at the dinning table, typing on his latest assignment on his laptop.
 
“Reading,” I mumbled, “I read a lot and you always learn words that way.”
 
“Do you stop and look up every word you don’t know?’
 
I looked up.
 
“I don’t really have to anymore. But I used to. Sometimes I’d circle them and then come back.”
The rest of the evening went in companionable silence and we both reached our requisite word counts.
 
A few more nights go by and I’ve forgotten all about my quest for this word that no one else seems to know but me.
 
And last night, tucked in bed, feeling a little achy from a cold he had likely passed on to me, I read. I read because I always have read, ever since I can remember, from eight or nine, my mother taking us to the bookmobile to get our weekly allotment. I’ve read things she didn’t want me to read, romance novels before she thought I was ready for them, and this is how I found about many things about life as an adult she would rather have kept secret (but that’s another story).
 
So I read last night, like nearly every night for a ten thousand nights.
 
And that’s when it happened:

In the middle of SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky there it was:

“Mentally Charlie reproached her for this – he liked his maids to be thin and a bit austere – but she looked about thirty-five or forty, the perfect age for a servant, when they’ve stopped working too quickly but are still fit and strong enough to provide good service” (223).
 
THE WORD! Used EXACTLY as I meant it to describe the boss in my novel!
 
I circled it, dog-eared the page, and went to bed with a smile on my face.
 
Now even Google knows what it means:
 
Austere, bleak, spartan, stark all suggest lack of ornament or adornment and of a feeling of comfort or warmth.”
dictionary.reference.com/browse/austere
 
Thank you, Mom, for sharing with me the love of reading.
Thank you, mentor, for giving me the courage to ask questions.
 
Now, back to that novel, and that austere boss character….