After my grandfather’s death, I helped my mother sort through her father’s trunk. Stuck inside were ration cards from the early 1900s with pencil scribbles in his familiar hand. Written no doubt during WWI by firelight and faded almost beyond recognition.
Ideas are always circling us. Like young children with butterfly nets, it is our job to catch a few and develop them into stories with strong leads, robust middles, and fabulous endings.
Think about the last time and place you got a great idea or solved a problem that’d been plaguing you. Where were you? The answer is a cliché: You were probably in the shower – Christine Carter
Becoming a grandmother coincided with the big five-o. I pondered what legacy I could leave my very first grandchild. I decided upon a journal. I am after all a writer. I was anxious to chronicle how special this life was to our family.
What do I need to reach the delicious writing goal? You need a host of fresh characters, imaginative plotting, soupçon of back-story, descriptive settings, minimal but creative description, tension leading up to conflict, theme, subtext, allusion, pacing, climax, resolution, logic, whimsy, surprise, and prose.
