Tell Me a Story

Whenever I tell people what I'm about to tell you, it feels like I've opened the closet door, and the skeleton has clattered to my feet. I hope you'll think only a little less of me when I confess: I listen to audiobooks.

In my English-major days, I never dreamt of it. That would be like skipping the book and watching the movie. Or like reading the Cliffs Notes for Moby Dick.

Only wait - I did read the Cliffs Notes for Moby Dick. I did it because I was cornered: I had five literature classes, and was assigned to read a novel a week for each one. If you know anything about my reading style, you know I might better have majored in Physics, because I was more likely to discover Cold Fusion than to read five novels in a week. Ever.

It was a similar desperation that drove me to audiobooks.

I was a young mom, with a home-based night job that kept me entering data long into the next morning, and then left me cross-eyed the following day. With a toddler. And no time to read.

A story-deprived life is no life at all.  And besides, something had to keep me awake so I could enter the data. For a while, it was a whacked out radio announcer named Art Bell, who interviewed UFO abductees and werewolves. But even Art Bell went to bed before I did.

Enter Blackstone Audio. In those days, you could go to their website and stream their books - for free, sometimes - over the internet, and they had authors like John Gresham and Maeve Binchy, and those two can keep you awake for hours. Free books, and they helped me stay up and make money. People have gotten hooked on cigarettes for less reason.

I eventually quit the job, but by then, my relationship with audiobooks was established. I found I could exercise and take in a Ray Bradbury story. I could clean house and hear what Malcolm Gladwell had to say.

I could light a candle, lower the lights, lay back in a warm bubblebath, and close my eyes while someone with a wonderful voice read me an absolutely delicious story.

Can you tell? I love that best of all.

Now that my life is busier than it ever has been, I need my audiobooks more than ever. Otherwise I'd starve on only the few minutes in bed I'm awake before I drift off to an exhausted sleep. In effect, I'd practically give up reading altogether. And a story-deprived life is no life at all.

Now Amazon has a nice little thing they call Whispersync, which allows me to read for those few minutes before I fall asleep, picking up right where the audiobook last left off, and then starting the audiobook in the morning right where I stopped reading.

But it's more than mere necessity, this vice of mine.

I'll tell you a secret: Some readers perform the character's voices in ways that make stories even more delicious. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss is like that. So is The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Or The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow by Rita Leganski.

How about you? Do you listen to audiobooks? Got any favorites, any with wonderful voices?

Please do tell. I'd love to find another story for my candlelit bubblebath times.

Write the Story you Want to Read

"Filled with restlessness and longing, he began to read." The History of Love by Nicole Krauss (page 74).

We've all heard it before: write the book you want to read. We give mental assent to this phrase: Yes, yes. What I want to read. Only that.

And yet.

We sit down to write and the screaming memes drown out the book we mean to write. The voices of people who would judge the work before it sees light of day (we ascribe this, usually without knowing if it is true or not). The voice of mom, or our Sunday School teacher, or whoever. If only we could be left alone with our thoughts.

Dig around for some cup of courage that allows us to write through the din of voices. We tell ourselves no one will read the darn thing anyway, save some glassy-eyed agent's assistant. Who will know if we pour our misunderstandings onto the page?
Banish the memes and what is left? The basket is lighter. Honest prose. True story.

And yet.

There is the doubt that we are not up to the task. A story grand as one we want to read certainly requires a steady hand. And look. Our hands tremor. Our word reach is puny. We must look up the word rigour in the dictionary because we most certainly are using it incorrectly.

Sign up for NaNoWriMo and learn to let the words fly, land where they may. We sprout wings and realize trusting ourselves isn't the point. That writers are, primarily, untrustworthy folk. There's joy in that.
Memes exiled, the issue of self trust resolved, we solider on with the scraps of truth left to us. The basket is nearly empty. True story.

And yet.

There is the story. The tapestry in our minds has turned to a single clanging gong on the page. Stiff, shrill, obvious. We have misplaced our campfire enthusiasm, shelved our wide-eyed curiosity in favour of experience. By accident we bought into the social media gimmick that word count and to-do lists, and deadlines mean we have arrived (where, exactly?).
It turns out we must rid ourselves of ourselves. Dissolve ego in the acid of honest prose, good story. The basket is empty.

And yet.

We are left with exactly all we had in the beginning. Nothing more than our restlessness and longing.

The Special Chair

For the month of December, we're offering Sharon K. Souza's Christmas novella, A Heavenly Christmas in Hometown, (read 1st chapter here) for $5, including shipping. It's a fun story for the entire family, in a beautiful hardback, with dust-cover  To order, email Sharon through our Contacts page. Order early to ensure you have it before Christmas.







I used to dream of standing before a book club of smart, interested readers who loved a book that I had written. I saw myself answering their questions about my characters, the setting, the unexpected twists of plot, the symbols and hidden meanings.

I'm here to warn you, dreams come true. And that's good - if you're flexible about how the whole scene will play out.

Happily, Sharon was with me to hold my hand.

The difficulty began the morning I was to meet with her friend's reading group, when I stood before the mirror and thought to myself that I didn't look like an author. I looked like me.

I did my best with the makeup and hair, tried on a few erudite expressions, shook my head and tossed them away, then got in the car.

Annette's home was wondrous: we all sat in an intimate family room/kitchen. If Mr. Tumnus had hosted the Narnia-War Drobe Book Club in the home of Mrs. Beaver, it might have looked almost as welcoming. There were delicious treats and hot coffee.

And there was a special chair just for me, front and center. Already, both good and bad, for an author who, for all her dreams, craves both literary success and personal obscurity.

I started by reading a selection from the first chapter, and found to my relief that, even though it was only me sitting in that special chair, I still felt proud of what I had written. I straightened my back and sat a bit taller.

Then it was time for the readers to talk. They began shyly, but soon warmed to our conversation, and to my relief, they did like my book. They asked good questions - great questions - some of which made me blush. They seemed to see more in the story than I saw, but I already knew the magic of storytelling: that things creep in below the author's line of sight, and wait to be discovered like Christmas presents. They certainly came as a gift that day, when I sat nervously in the spotlight.

With readers like these, who asked such great questions, who made me so comfortable, I began to doubt my earlier judgment. Maybe I did l look like an author, after all. I'd have to check.

Then came the best question of all, a question so astute, it left me speechless:

"On page such and so, how does this character turn up in this place when just two pages before you have her in that other place?"

You can see me, can't you? The mouth opens. The mouth closes. The face goes slack.

I look to Sharon, who is laughing - with me. Because then I am laughing, and so is everyone else. "Because," comes my only possible answer, "I goofed."

No one ever told me - as I am telling you - that an author's dream moment could make me feel less like Nicole Krauss, the author of The History of Love, and more like her main character, Leo Gursky:

A few months ago I saw an ad in the paper. It said, NEEDED: NUDE MODEL FOR DRAWING CLASS. $ 15/ HOUR. It seemed too good to be true. To have so much looked at. By so many. I called the number. A woman told me to come the following Tuesday. I tried to describe myself, but she wasn’t interested. Anything will do, she said.

To have so much looked at. By so many. And anything will do.

They even gave me a little Japanese Maple. It's growing in my back yard, and it's beautiful.

Please share your book club stories, from the "special chair" or from the couch. I love to read what you have to say.

Get Out Your Purple Notebook

A cherished writer friend recently planted a flag in the literary sod and vowed to build a brand based on Magical Realism in fiction. I cheered. Someone gets it, I thought.

Rightly or wrongly, it seemed that this writer understood that the tradition of Magical Realism uniquely - and ironically - suits itself to Christian Fiction.

Why ironically? Because when we think of Magical Realist Fiction, we generally think first of novels written in places where the Western European, "Christian" culture has colonized and marginalized the native culture, and those novels often subvert the imposed worldview and re-claim, re-dignify the lost or nearly-lost native worldview.

Oh my. Don't I sound like a school-marm on the lecture circuit? And this after Bonnie's brilliant post last Friday that had us all laughing all weekend.

But remember her step number three?

Invent a perpetual motion machine. Give it a catchy name. Then, hide it in a closet for at least one year. After the appropriate amount of time has past, take the machine out of the closet, tinker with it until it moves at double the speed. (This step ensures you are able to do the impossible – at least twice.)

Good Magical Realist fiction does the impossible, with grace. So bear with me, and consider that perhaps the colonizing culture was more rationalist than Christian. I know, the church was always deeply a part of Western colonization, but would I get in much trouble if I suggested that at least on occasion the church had first and long before been colonized itself by the Enlightenment mindset (too enlightened to believe the impossible), than by its native Biblical perspective?

Certainly by now The Age of Reason has outgrown its need to get the church on its side, and, it seems to me, left a sadder world as its legacy in its last days.

I'm less inclined than some to feel persecuted or marginalized as an American Christian (I realize things are different in other places), but at the very least, as one who believes that Van Gogh's stars tell the Gospel truth, that the world is charged with the grandeur of God, that he dances and whispers sweet somethings in our ears, that rocks cry out and donkeys speak and a virgin brings forth a son and water turns to wine and the lion will lie down with the lamb... at the very least I often feel lonely.

You too?

Then take a look at this short list of the attributes of good magical realist fiction:

• It blends the mundane with the fantastic so seamlessly as to challenge perceptions of what is real and what is not.
• It elevates the mundane to the sublime.
• The story’s message is subversive to the dominant worldview.

Got any angels in your closet? Do you see something sublime in a lunch of bread and fish? Has this list brought something wondrous to mind?

Then please write it down in your purple notebook.

But first share it here, please, in the comments. We love to read what you have to say.

PS: For inspiration, try the Magical Realist classic, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Or try two newer novels, "The History of Love" by Nichole Krauss, and "Peace Like a River" by Leif Enger.

PSS: "I am after painting reality impressed on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream, but I am not after painting dreams as such, or fantasy." - George Tooker

PSST: "My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separates what seems real from what seems fantastic" - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Take Your Character to Lunch Day

I'm going to share some quotes with you, short snippets from two of my favorite novels. When you have read them, you will want to know the characters who said these words. You will want to read their stories:

"Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that's been burning me up all my life. Truth, I say inside my head again, just for that feeling."
— Kathryn Stockett in The Help

"...and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!"
— Nicole Krauss in The History of Love

See what I mean? Don't you want to know what might have happened to somebody to make her so passionate about truth that she feels it on her skin? Or why another person might jubilate over such an ordinary moment of time? In a few words whole characters have materialized in all their mystery and complexity. Wonderful, isn't it?

I read passages like these and determine to create story people just as rich. And then I look at the character creation sheets they pass out at workshops:

Place of Birth:
Height:
Favorite Color:

Questionnaires like these might help me track certain details so I don't turn the blue Toyota that drives through Chapter 6 into a green Honda by the time it arrives in Chapter 14. But by themselves they do little to help in character formation, not if what I'm after is the texture of a human soul.

For that, I might want to take my character to lunch. Sure, I'll ask her place of birth and favorite color, just to break the ice. But eventually I'll want to know about her childhood, and I won't let her get away with a simple answer. You know characters, don't you? She might answer, just peachy, when I suspect it wasn't, not living in the town she lived in, with a brother who ate salamanders on the back porch... So I study her body, searching for clues. I lift the cuff of her gabardine jacket to reveal a tiny tattoo on her wrist, a salamander swimming inside a teardrop. "Tell me about this," I say, and then wait out her silence while she looks away and studies her fingernails, till at last she tells me about the summer day when she was ten.

Once the ice is broken, any character will spill her guts if you listen. She wants the story to get out; otherwise she never would have brought it to you in the first place.

Let it go deep enough, and this gut-spilling will give you a story-tellers dream come true: characters with histories and scars, attitudes and points of view, and the little spark of something that makes us stand in wonder at their uniqueness, their transcendence.

And all of these things will lend a priceless quality to your novel: subtext. It's the way your characters say the things they say, the things they never say or always say, that tells us that there is more to this story, an untold past that the reader may never know but only guess at.

One of the best books I have ever read on the creation of story-people is Getting Into Character by Brandilyn Collins. Here's a bit of what she has to say:

"Understanding the use of subtexting in dialogue is particularly difficult for inexperienced writers. Often a new novelist's tendency is to use WYSIWYG conversation because he has not yet grasped how to convey meaning without actually saying it. Since novels call for at least some dialogue in the majority of scenes, a lack of subtexting presents a major problem for a story. When a novelist learns how to employ subtexting effectively, dialogue that had once been lifeless and on-the-surface is transformed into vibrant interchanges between characters, pulling the reader into the story."

I'll bet you've found some vibrant characters in your own reading. Why not share snippets from their stories that made them leap from the page?

We love to read what you have to say.