The pastry shops I love keep going out of business.
The week before Maggie McCullough's closed some seven years ago, I bought all their brioche to put in my freezer. About three years ago, I brought my daughter to Babette's Feast to celebrate with her favorite pear tart as was our tradition, only to find a note taped onto the door. Not long ago, I stopped by the Belgian bakery in town and noticed it was now a bagel store. At least my daughter wasn't with me when I walked into the store.
The store lo
oked more or less the same. The only difference is the food in the display cases. One was filled with bagels and the one that usually tested my willpower the most, the one showcasing beautiful cakes and tarts, was sparse and sad.
I asked for pear tarts, they had none. I looked at my other favorites: the almond croissants didn't have sliced almonds on the outside. The palmiers were thick and not of the right color.
(Rather then posting pictures of sad foods, I thought I'd post ones that reminded me of what used to be.)
"So, how long have you guys been here?" I asked, as nonchalantly and as non-accusingly as possible.
The woman behind the counter regarded me with suspicious eyes. "It's been a while."
I should have come more often, bought more pear tarts, helped them stay in business!
"We bought their business and all their recipes."
I looked up at her. There is hope yet. So what if the baked goods don't look the same. All I need is for them to taste the same. They have the recipes, so all is not lost!
I bought an almond croissant and a palmier and got into the car with my little baggie of hope. It was a while before I took my first bite because I knew my hopes would either be buoyed or shattered by it.
Recipes ain't everything.
The croissant was limp and unflaky and the inside undercooked. The almond paste was the only thing that tasted the same. The palmiers tasted the way they looked: inexperienced.
All those writing rules out there, they can't promise success. All the shows-don't-tells and three-act-arcs and what-the-character-wants will not give us the products that thrill and haunt and satisfy.
What will?
Recipes + experience + well-honed taste buds + desire + working at dawn everyday.
Oh, and maybe consumers who won't practice self-control when encountering our work.
It's that time of the year again, when we look back on the year and take stock, noting the highlights and milestones, and of course, my year-end contemplation is incomplete without remembering the books I've read. Here are some that have touched me in some way:
Loveliest book to read aloud with children:
The Magician's Elephant by Kate DiCamillo
Authors new to me whose work I must check out:
Nick Hornby
Aimee Bender
A book in which plot, character, language share equal weight, marrying genre and literary seamlessly:
In The Woods by Tana French
A middle grade series featuring two young adventurers, a boy and a girl, a trait that characterizes several other series, but manages to feel fresh and captivating:
Leviathan by Scott Westerfield
A book that rewarded careful, slowed-down reading
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: The Pox Party by M. T. Anderson
A book that is much less gimmicky and much more pleasurable to read than at first glance:
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
An irreverent book that made me think about important stuff:
Lamb by Christopher Moore
Two favorite books that captured me, stayed with me, and completely baffled me as to how the authors managed to come up with what they did:
Let 
The Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan
Let me know which of these book you've read and share some of your favs this year.
Reading critiques of my work by my writing group
Reading their works-in-progress to offer my critique
Figuring out why a book I'm reading works so well
Figuring out what makes another book not work as well
Reading advice from screen writers about dialogue and exposition
Reading writers' and agents' responses to different loglines and opening paragraphs
Identifying elements of story in movies and other art forms
Daydreaming of what-if situations for my characters
Writing down new story ideas
Writing blog posts
These are all things I do n my quest to become a better writer. They are all important, some perhaps even necessary.
But none of them takes the place of actual writing.
I chose not to do NaNoWriMo because I wanted to celebrate my birthday and my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, without having the word count over my head. I also needed to concentrate on my WIP, a YA novel I had started three times without being able to go past a particular point.
November is now over. Its December 1st and I don't have that much to show for it. No planning, no specific goals: that was my problem.
When The Rejectionist invited her readers to do a Pre-Resolution, a mini one before embarking an a full-blown I will exercise an hour everyday and eat only raw fruits and will treat everyone with the utmost respect and work for world peace type thing on New Year's Eve, I answered the call.
Small is good. One month is doable. I am in. Here are my pre-resolutions:
- Every weekday at 10 a.m. I will be working on my YA novel. Actual writing, no research, no brainless switching sentences and words around or other busy but useless work.
- Every weekday at 2:30 p.m. I will be practicing piano. My solo gig in August doesn't seem that far away anymore.
- In Tae Kwon Do, I have a midterm coming up in less than a week and a national tournament in 6 1/2 weeks and I have specific training plans I've drawn up that I will stick to.
- I will stick to my (more reasonable, less ambitious) house cleaning plan.
You are welcome to nudge or remind or ask me questions.
I made some decisions in my writing this week. They had to do with sentences that have either struck me or my critique group members as being too much.
Kill those darlings.
or
Don't get rid of the very distinctiveness that is your voice.
How do I make such decisions?
By following my gut, that's how.
I ended up keeping one of the sentences and deleting a few others. The one that I kept occupies an important position. It is the second sentence of the opening chapter. To me, its over-the-top sentiment sets the tone for the protagonist. It tells us not only about the character of this 12-year old girl, but also the things that matter to her.
The ones that I took out fall into the category of being "too clever by half." No matter how much I try to convince myself of things that I don't really buy, there is always that honest, stable part of me that will call b.s. every time. Learning to pay attention and recognize that call has been one of the most valuable things I have learned over the last few years of writing.
Who knows. Maybe my deleted darlings should see the light of day, and the sentence I've kept will turn away readers. But until I find a more fool-proof way of making these decisions, my gut is all I got.
What about you/ Does your gut call the shots as well? And how long does it call before your hear?
Thanks for the good wishes for my blog hiatus. I thought I'd provide an update.
I finally completed the revision of my MG novel and sent it off. There was so much energy from the high of having completed an important task, I thought it would carry me to my new task, which was to work on my WIP, a YA novel.
But I couldn't write. There were too many thoughts, all going at high speeds heading toward different directions, in my mind. Scattered, cluttered, over-energized. The only way to calm down, I found, was to read.
I picked up three books, all different from one another, and from what I tend to write: The Underneath by Kathi Appelt, The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Frazen, and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Attwood.
When I went back to my WIP a few days ago, my mind was relaxed and refreshed, and I was able to see how I needed to proceed.
And now, I seem to have found a flow for working on this book that I don't want to let go. Blogging has to take a back seat yet again.
I wish I could write and blog and live as a member of my family in a balanced way but I am apparently wired to focus on only very few things at a time.
I will see you all, if you're still around, when I next surface from my writing.
I will be unplugging from blogosphere to prepare my ms to send out.
Good week, everyone.
I was at a piano teachers' workshop many years ago, eagerly absorbing the wisdom and advice from a master piano teacher I admired greatly. My notebook was filling fast, my mind was challenged, and my coffee was ignored and cooling in the flask.
Teaching piano, like writing, can be a solitary occupation, despite the fact that the job itself requires at least two people to be present. It's solitary in that a teacher has very few opportunities to discuss and argue and share their aha moments.
I felt that aloneness most acutely when I started my own piano studio after spending three years teaching and apprenticing at a community music school. I missed the camaraderie I'd had with my colleagues who were always ready to talk music or teaching or music and teaching and life. I learned as much from our discussions in the kitchen over ramen noodles (kitchen pedagogy sessions as we affectionately call those times) as I did in formal classes.
Back to this particular workshop. The last event on the program was this teacher- extraordinaire teaching a group of children from the piano preparatory department of the music school that hosted the workshop. He engaged the students on stage and the piano teachers in the audience the entire time, and helped the performers make changes to their pieces that immediately made the music better and the children more confident. I was spellbound and so blown away that I was almost in tears.
"Do you have any questions?" He asked as the students left the stage. Hands shot up. He nodded at one person.
"I was wondering about the cardboard boxes that these students had?" Many other teachers nodded enthusiastically. More questions and comments arose about those boxes, about how they would motivate students to practice (huh?) and where they could be ordered.
Anyone who could read my mind at the time would decide I was a total snob. But I was dismayed and almost crushed by what I was hearing. Here was a brilliant person offering us thoughts that he had distilled over years of teaching, and they were interested in the cardboard box? Sure, the boxes were nifty but how, how, how could anyone possibly be more interested in a gimmick than the real thing? *
That was probably the beginning of my intolerance for gimmicks. And now that radar is being trained on fiction.
It's inevitable, I supposed, that any time a lot of people clamor for attention, somebody will resort to gimmicks. And of course, what qualifies as a gimmick is up for interpretation and depends on execution. I wouldn't be surprised if someone calls my work gimmicky (and stabs me in the gushy bit within my chest in the process.) In other words, I am totally aware of the subjectivity of it all.
Even so, I'd like to know: what do you consider the most intolerable gimmick in fiction?
*The more mellow (and hopefully more humble) me now realize that just because most of the comments were on the box didn't mean that it was the thing that made the most impact on the teachers in attendance. Getting older does have its benefits.
oked more or less the same. The only difference is the food in the display cases. One was filled with bagels and the one that usually tested my willpower the most, the one showcasing beautiful cakes and tarts, was sparse and sad.
