Lea Wait's Blog, page 77

Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory and Other Craft Musings

Kate Flora: I was driving around yesterday, doing errands, and listening to Friendship Point by Alice Eliot Dark, the book my book group has chosen for September. At one point, one of characters refers to Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory.” As an English major and long-time writer and consumer of writing books, I was surprised that I had never heard of the theory, at least not attributed to Hemingway.

For years, I’ve known about the iceberg theory of research, where writers, and especially crime writers, do a ton of research for our books, and then choose the best, most pertinent bits to include in our scenes or our descriptions, letting all the research we’ve done underpin what we finally choose to use in the book. Often, we find ourselves distilling pages and pages of notes about any particular topic into a few pertinent sentences. It seems that this is pretty much what Hemingway is advocating, but with a difference.

The paragraphs below are taken from the Wikipedia entry about Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. Something that I found very telling—and important—reading them is what he had to say about what you choose to leave out. You leave out the things you know, not the things you do not, making a deliberate choice about why the details omitted are chosen.

In 1923, Hemingway conceived of the idea of a new theory of writing after finishing his short story “Out of Season“. In A Moveable Feast (1964), his posthumously published memoirs about his years as a young writer in Paris, he explains: “I omitted the real end [of “Out of Season”] which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything… and the omitted part would strengthen the story.” In chapter sixteen of Death in the Afternoon he compares his theory about writing to an iceberg.

Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker believed that as a writer of short stories Hemingway learned “how to get the most from the least, how to prune language and avoid waste motion, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth.”[6] Baker also notes that the writing style of the “iceberg theory” suggests that a story’s narrative and nuanced complexities, complete with symbolism, operate under the surface of the story itself.

For example, Hemingway believed a writer could describe an action, such as Nick Adams fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River,” while conveying a different message about the action itself—Nick Adams concentrating on fishing to the extent that he does not have to think about the unpleasantness of his war experience. In his essay “The Art of the Short Story”, Hemingway is clear about his method: “A few things I have found to be true. If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless. The test of any story is how very good the stuff that you, not your editors, omit.” A writer explained how it brings a story gravitas:

Hemingway said that only the tip of the iceberg showed in fiction—your reader will see only what is above the water—but the knowledge that you have about your character that never makes it into the story acts as the bulk of the iceberg. And that is what gives your story weight and gravitas.— Jenna Blum in The Author at Work, 2013[9]

https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/3267/the-art-of-the-short-story-ernest-hemingway

Reading the statement that you omit the things you know, making that choice about them, immediate shot me back to a seminar at Vermont College, where I was working on an MFA before I dropped out because I had too much writing to do. We were discussing a student’s short story about a careless father who had left his young child somewhere during a night of drinking. The story felt unsatisfying, and when asked whether the child was okay, the writer admitted he had no idea. Not a deliberate omission, and not a carefully created void to be filled by the reader’s imagination and what could be read between the lines. Maybe my reader’s feeling dissatisfaction came from the writer’s not knowing?

I admit, I’ve never been very fond of Hemingway, but I do now want to go back to reread more of his short stories. And stirred by that, and by pulling John Gardner’s book off my shelves, I can see spending part of September rereading some of my many books about craft including two books I’ve always found inspiring, Save the Cat, which is about screenwriting but has valuable information for writers as well, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which uses the technique of what soldiers in Vietnam carried to tell his readers about then.

Reading about the iceberg theory also brought to mind two exercises I love that I have often used with my writing students. Both exercises challenge the student to use language to show what is happening without explicitly describing it. Both come from John Gardner’s book, The Art of Fiction.

 Exercise One: Write a paragraph describing a building from the point of view of an old man whose son has been killed in the war, without mentioning the son, death, the old man, or the war.

Exercise Two: Write a paragraph describing that same building, some time of day and time of year, from the point of view of a happy lover.

I was just going to tweak it a little . . .

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, with a cautionary tale for writers. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I am in the process of creating omnibus editions of some of my backlist books. The Face Down series is now out in three volumes and the Diana Spaulding 1888 Mysteries in one. The current project was supposed to be a read through/minor revising of the three historical romantic suspense novels I wrote for the Harper Monogram line back in the 1990s.

That was the plan. Then I started rereading Winter Tapestry, the earliest of the three and the one with the most checkered history. It started out as a mystery novel, but it hadn’t sold to any house publishing that genre by the time I was at a mystery conference and ran into an editor I’d worked with before, when she was at Silhouette. She mentioned that she’d been working at St. Martin’s when my manuscript was submitted there and that she’d wanted to buy it, but she’d been overruled by a senior editor. She asked if it had found a home and when I told her it had not, she suggested that if I revised it to heighten the romance elements (and to bring the word count up to 100,000 words) she could publish it as part of a new imprint she was editing at Harper Collins. I did and she did, which was great at the time. Winter Tapestry became my first published historical novel written for adults rather than middle-grades readers.

There was only one problem. The paperback original was labeled “historical romance” on the spine when, really, it was not your typical historical romance novel. Neither could it any longer be categorized as historical mystery. The front cover called it “a romantic adventure in Tudor England,” which was closer to the reality, but still not quite right. It did okay. It earned back the advance and a bit more and apparently had Spanish and Italian editions, although I never received copies of those. In 2003, after the rights were returned to me, I did a bit of tweaking to produce an e-book edition. One of the tweaks was to put back a couple of scenes that had been cut out of the expanded Harper version—scenes that elaborated on a subplot that had to do with spies and rebellions in England in 1553-4.

cover for the first ebook edition

So, back to the present. I expected all I’d have to do was a quick proofread, maybe eliminating some of those instances of ’tis and ’twas that I used to think gave my character’s dialogue the “flavor” of the language but that, these days, I just find annoying. I was about halfway through the second of twelve chapters when it struck me that there was a lot more I could do to make the book better.

I’m a much better writer now than I was thirty-plus years ago. Passages that seemed essential back then now screamed “information dump” and “wordy.” To be honest, although no one thought my writing needed self-editing at the time, rereading this book felt like going through one of my manuscripts at the second or third (of four or five) draft stage. I even found several instances of head-hopping, something I knew, even back in the 1990s, should be avoided at all costs! There was a lot of repetition, too, probably because I was following something called the “rule of three”—anything important for the reader to remember should be mentioned three times at various points in the text.

typical “improvements”

It didn’t take me too long to realize that, instead of combining three slightly edited older novels into an omnibus edition, I needed to do a complete rewrite of Winter Tapestry. The plot and characters would remain the same, but the text would be “substantially different”—enough to allow me to bring it out under a new title. My original title was The Die is Cast after the code words used to identify conspirators (the good guys) in the plot. The heroine’s murdered father is deeply involved in spying on those plotting rebellion against the English Crown. A quick check of titles on Amazon, however, showed me there are way too many books out there with that same title. That’s probably why my editor insisted on changing it back in 1991. I decided to go with, tentatively, After the Die Was Cast and started going through a printout to cut passages, substitute better word choices, and occasionally move scenes around for better flow, while also improving the pacing and emphasizing the mystery elements.

The new plan was to self-publish the novel as a single title but to keep the original e-book version available as well. If nothing else, that would provide a study in contrasts for those interested in such things.

Onward I went, producing page after page that look like the ones illustrating this post. And then, partway through revising and cutting a lot of excess, I realized that the real problem with the original was a divided focus, compounded by multiple point-of-view characters. Yes, there can be a rebellion/spy aspect to the story, but it needs to be a subplot. To return the emphasis to the mystery, I needed to make more cuts. A lot more cuts. And cutting was probably a good idea anyway—let my readers make discoveries at the same time as my protagonist.

So, it was back to the drawing board. Main plot: who killed a former royal mapmaker and why? Subplot One: his daughter’s certainty that the motive has to do with her father’s secret mission, a mission she’s determined to complete. Subplot Two: her efforts to avoid being married off to someone who appears to have an agenda of his own. You’ll notice I’ve avoided naming the characters. I’m torn between leaving them the same and changing them to further make this a “new” book.

I’ve actually written some new material—the first new writing I’ve done in a couple of years. I’m putting everything in the daughter’s POV, so there’s a lot to redo to give the reader information that used to be included in scenes that took place when she wasn’t present. I’m trying to condense the historical stuff to what’s absolutely necessary and not get bogged down in excess details. Some of the secondary characters are real people, so it’s always a challenge to keep them true to what’s known about them. In some cases, I know a lot more about them now than I did when I wrote Winter Tapestry, so there are some changes to make there, too.

What started out to be a fairly simple if time-consuming project has turned into much more. I have no idea how long it will take me to finish. Both the advantage and the disadvantage of not having a deadline is that I don’t have to rush. It will be done when it’s done. In the meantime, it’s good to have a goal. And, of course, after that’s met, I still have two more historical romantic suspense novels to take a look at. Will they be combined into a two-book omnibus? Or will they, too, demand a total rewrite?

Stay tuned.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others, including several children’s books. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. Her most recent publications are The Valentine Veilleux Mysteries (a collection of three short stories and a novella, written as Kaitlyn) and I Kill People for a Living: A Collection of Essays by a Writer of Cozy Mysteries (written as Kathy). She maintains websites at www.KaitlynDunnett.com and www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.

 

Meetin’ The People

Maine Authors Publishing, my publisher, just hosted their annual BookFair event. It’s always a great day because I get to talk with folks who read my books.

I have no idea how it is with other writers, but I’m always surprised that these folks act as if they know me. Of course, they do in a way – they know what I am passionate about (e.g., environmental issues, Maine’s coastal waters, the everyday life of scientists). Each of those themes comes to life in my most recent book, “The Shark, The Girl, & The Sea”.

That’s what writers do – we dig down deep and bring to literal life issues that consume us and that we hope others will care as deeply about.

Who but Mark Twain, for example, could bring Huck and Jim together as fellow travelers on the Mississippi River so we really know Jim as a man and not just a runaway slave.

A very different book, “1984”, is a dystopian science fiction novel, that takes place in an imagined future with mass surveillance and repression. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party which uses Thought Police to persecute independent thinking. Terms now common include “Big Brother” and “Doublethink”. Anyone who cares deeply about issues such as gay marriage and abortion can relate to “1984”.

I’ll end with “The Catcher In The Rye”, J.D. Salinger’s novel about alienation told through the voice of Holden Caulfield, a depressed teenager who lives in a sanitorium at the end of World War II. “Catcher” is both one of the most censored and second most taught books in U.S. public schools. Challenges with “Catcher’ include undermining family values, frequent use of vulgar language, and promotion of smoking, drinking, and the like.

 

Weekend Update: August 27-28, 2022

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Charlene D’Avanzo (Monday), Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Thursday), and Kate Flora (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

In case you missed it, John Clark’s anthology of Y/A stories is now available as a print or e-book. https://www.amazon.com/HardScrabble-Kids-Semi-magical-tales-Maine/dp/B0B6XZ2RX2/ref=sr_1_1?crid=W1X2BPGWBH7X&keywords=John+Clark+Hardscrabble+Kids&qid=1661561267&sprefix=john+clark+hardscrabble+kids%2Caps%2C130&sr=8-1

With the end of summer upon us, you’re probably busy out recreating, but in case you’re reading this, we’d love to know what readers of the blog would like to see more of. Writing advice? More about why Maine is such a draw for writers? Information about our upcoming books? Crime writing is a community, and we like to think there is also a community of Maine Crime Writers and our readers.

 And here are a few photos from this Maine summer to enjoy.

Mushrooms at the Crystal Springs farmers market

Musicians at the Farmer’s Market

A very inventive little library on Bailey Island

Porcelain Peak – a mini mountain of old toilets, sinks and tubs at the Harpswell transfer station

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

It’s a Mystery Where Ideas Come From by Matt Cost

I’m often asked where the ideas come from for my plots. With my historical fiction, the answer is easy. I pick something of interest to me from the past, research, and write about it. With mysteries, it is not quite so cut and dried. Of course, the topic does have to interest me, but what is the plot going to be?

More often than not, it is stories in the news that spark my interest, giving me the seed of a notion, and then I plant that idea and nourish it. Sometimes it springs forth quickly like a sunflower, and other times it is more like the fruition of the pawpaw tree.

My first mystery, Mainely Power, was spawned in a bar having a beer while sitting next to a clam digger. In the course of the conversation, the man mentioned that he often harvested the flats outside of Maine Yankee, and that there was little exterior security to the plant, and that he could walk right up to the front door. Spark went my imagination. It took some time to burn but eventually found its way to the pages. When I told this story during an interview on Maine Calling, the former security supervisor of Maine Yankee called in to say that this was untrue, and that the facility was well secured. I’ve had many people contact me since with stories that contradict her. It is possible that she was just upset because she read the book and discovered that I killed the head of security on page four.

My fourth Clay Wolfe/Port Essex mystery, Cosmic Trap, coming out in December, kindled with a news spot on UAPs. Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Not nearly as snappy as UFO. But inside my mind the UAP blossomed like the night sky. It is quite clear that sightings of these aerial phenomena are real, as they’ve been caught on video by many pilots, but what are they? Aliens? Russians? Chinese? Or somebody or something else? That, for me, is the origination of a mystery plot.

In April of 2023, I will be birthing a new mystery series. I’ve decided to combine my love of histories and mysteries into a historical PI character named 8 Ballo who lives in 1923 Brooklyn. Velma Gone Awry started out as simple as a missing person and grew from there, much of the plot being the characters and the setting as much as the case, as legendary figures and events fill the pages.

Nuclear power plants, ice storm vandals, blackmailed senators, heroin smuggled through lobster traps, cults in Maine, pandemic angst, human genome editing, UAPs, wiccans and wendigos, and buried treasure have all made the hurdle from a notion to the written page in the course of my writing life, but there are many more tidbits germinating in the dark recesses of my mind

Right now, the operation of that particular gadget called the creative process is whirring into life as I prepare to write book two of the Brooklyn 8 Ballo historic PI series. A hit and run ruled accidental death. Or was sit? The Eugenics Movement. Spark. Time to build the fire.

Write on.

You Can’t Hurry Love . . or Anything Else Good

OK, short and sweet today, as it is my birthday. All greetings gratefully accepted, and in the immortal words of Eubie Blake: “If I’d known how long I was going to live, I would have taken better care of myself.”

First: the news. There will be an in-person launch event for The Last Altruist at Longfellow Books in Portland on September 21 at 6:30 PM. Longfellow Books has been a long time supporter of the Elder Darrow books and I hope you’ll find a way to give them some of your book business. We are blessed in this city to have so many options. If you’re unable to attend the launch, you can pre-order signed and/or inscribed copies from Kelly’s Books to Go. Enough with the commercials. Let’s talk about speed.

No, not that kind. Pace.

I recently started into the fourth draft of a new novel, knowing I still had a great deal of work to do in terms of character depth and smoothing out the plot.

Knowing what a slow writer I am, I wondered if I couldn’t speed up my process a little by doubling the number of pages I worked with in my daily session and thereby halve the time I spent on this draft. As you might predict, I tried this for three days and discovered I was so intent on getting the pages “done” that I wasn’t paying anywhere near enough attention to the quality of what I was doing. So I relapsed.

Those of you who know my good wife will recognize her as a highly energetic type who thrives on getting things done. (When Anne and I had marital counseling before the event, the minister accused me of “plowing a slow straight furrow.” It was New Hampshire.)

One of the enduring push-pulls in our marriage has been between my slow straight furrow and her reflexive drive for action. We must have figured something out, because we’ve made the partnership last this long, but I was thinking on my long (slow) walk this morning about all the things that cannot be improved by speed.

Portland is a harbor for fine chefs and fine meals. With the pandemic waning somewhat, we’ve gotten out more than we had been. Any meal we’ve had in one of our fine restaurants has not been something to gulp and chew.

Reading is another of my deepest pleasures and though sometimes I find myself impatient with a writer and try to get ahead, my best reading experiences are when I slow myself down enough to savor the good words and taste the ideas fully.

You will have your own list of activities that profit from a slow hand: breadmaking, gardening, cooking, flyfishing. Shelling peas, hulling strawberries. I know Diana Ross knows “You Can’t Hurry Love.”

What hurts us sometimes is the feeling that the pressure is always on, that it is better to get something done quickly (and possibly half-assed) than to render it slowly and carefully. It’s not out of the question to posit, though, that the path to joy is through slowness. As always, however, your mileage (and speedometer) may vary.

My First: Nothing Racy. But It is Crafty.

In 2017, Brenda Buchanan invited me to send in a guest post. I am grateful to her and all our team over the years and, still getting better after some knee surgery, have been reading lots of our past work. And found myself taking some notes of what we’ve shared over the years I’ve been a part of the Crime Writers Team.

Here’s my first. (Thanks Brenda.)

I’m delighted to welcome Sandra Neily back to Maine Crime Writers today for her thoughts on the craft of writing. A native of East Boothbay, Sandy’s novel Deadly Trespass has won a National Mystery Writers of America award and was a national finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association’s “Rising Star” contest.

The Maine outdoors is Sandy’s element, and her deep commitment to conservation of the woods and its creatures shines through in her work. If you enjoy crime fiction where the immensity of the natural world is a character, you’ll like Deadly Trespass. Sandy’s lively prose and the intriguing plot will keep you turning pages late into the night.

She now divides her time between Westport Island and Greenville, or as she puts it, between the Sheepscot River and “Antler Camp” on Moosehead Lake.

Today her topic is the craft of writing. Take it away, Sandy

                                                 CRAFT & CRAFT-Y

I burst into tears when I first held my fingers over the keys to write fiction. I paced around, knowing I needed help. Lots of help. I stemmed the tears by turning the names of five friends into a mantra, sure that if they were in my living room, they would be cheering me on. Then I taped paper up on my camp wall, and scrawled “CRAFT. BE CRAFT-Y” at the top.

This ever-growing advice list, collected from webinars, seminars, workshops, friends, author mentors, articles, books, and the writing cosmos, is my compass and bible. It goes everywhere I go. (Looking pretty ragged now: squashed bugs, grease smears, and something that looks like squash, but I don’t really want to know.)

I like the word crafty because it’s an adjective we can put in front of our names telling us we are sly, creative, skilled, calculating, and potentially proficient. And that we are people who assemble something out of raw materials. Like artists who work in clay, metal, or paint, we shape something raw into a novel way of seeing the same old world. We are builders of stories. Assemblers of unique worlds. Creators of unforgettable characters. Sly typists who bury clues, calculating how we can hang readers out there until we skillfully reveal the unexpected.

So in no particular order, here are some craft and craft-y items from my wall with the kind of internal commentary they trigger for me.

Sandy, fly fishing.

Authentic Self: Go deep and use it. I memorized this from the craft master, Donald Maass, author of Writing 21st Century Fiction, a must-have: “To write 21st century fiction, you must start by becoming highly personal . . . You must become your most authentic self.”

After a few boring drafts I saw that Maass meant, go deep. Very deep. Undress. Use your own life and its truths to pump real life and emotion into the story. So I offered up the frustration of having to wrench a wedding ring off an aging arthritic finger, the deep sadness from touching the soft nose of a dead moose, and the anger of losing wild places to greed.

What’s at Stake? Failure Must Have Huge Consequences: A “high concept” novel is one where, if the protagonist fails, there are significant consequences that ripple out to touch more people or impact the larger world.

Huge is relative but still huge. It might be the demise of the family clambake business and loss of their livelihood, as in Barbara Ross’s Clambake mysteries. My protagonist saves a pack of wolves, hoping they’ve saved a forest. The threat of failure must always loom, threatening pain and loss.

Out among the wind turbines

Want & Desire Drive Character & Characters: Each scene, everyone must want something, even just a class of water. To track each character’s various thirsts, large and small, I make a “gap” chart for what each wants and if I will give it to her or to him.

Create 5 Things Readers Expect; Disappoint Them on 2 or 3: Of course, the resolution should not disappoint, but expected story elements, once frustrated, contribute to the surprise of turning a corner (or page) and meeting the unexpected. This advice is from the amazing Elizabeth George. When I shared it at Crime Bake, even famous authors bent to take notes.

Imagine the Worst. Make It Happen: Go there. When Kate Flora forces us to watch someone cooked alive through the terror of her protagonist, Thea Kozak in Death Warmed Over, she has certainly imagined the worst for her readers.

“Don’t do it! Don’t do it!!” Goes with imagine-the-worst, but create at least one scene where readers want to scream this at your protagonist.

Sex That’s Not Sex: Sex is rarely about sex. Hallie Ephron had us listing reasons for sex: anger, fear, revenge, lust, reward, curiosity, farewells, boredom, gratitude. Pretty endless. She told us to match up two characters who had different reasons and write the scene. Boom! I think Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge does this so very well.

Backstory: Most is not interesting. Here’s the whole Stephen King quote from On Writing: “The most important things to remember about back story are (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are.”

4 Cups of Tea: Compress time with action that always moves plot or characterization forward. Cut slow stuff. Four cups of tea later, Helmand was dead on the floor. After a week of burnt toast, Anna stuffed clothes into a paper bag and hitched to Idaho.

Research: Maine author Paul Doiron reminds us to avoid too much book stuff. Go there if you can. I spent time with some dead moose and some live wolves. When researching Deadly Turn, my upcoming mystery, I hung out at wind power sites.  The book’s narrator Patton is hired to collect dead birds. Who says it all has to be fun research?

Edward Abbey!   Get up! Get out! Fill up! Yes, whole quote’s on my wall and fridge. From The Monkey Wrench Gang: “…: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space.”

Now You: There’s more on my wall, but it’s time for the writer and reader community to weigh in. Thank you!

Sandra Neily

Sandy’s debut novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine” won a national Mystery Writers of America award, was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest, and was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. The second Mystery in Maine, “Deadly Turn,” was published in 2021. Her third “Deadly Assault” is due out in 2023. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.

 

 

Weekend Update: August 20-21, 2022

Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Sandra Neily (Monday), Maureen Milliken (Tuesday), Dick Cass (Thursday), and Matt Cost (Friday).

In the news department, here’s what’s happening with some of us who blog regularly at Maine Crime Writers:

 

 

 

An invitation to readers of this blog: Do you have news relating to Maine, Crime, or Writing? We’d love to hear from you. Just comment below to share.

And a reminder: If your library, school, or organization is looking for a speaker, we are often available to talk about the writing process, research, where we get our ideas, and other mysteries of the business, along with the very popular “Making a Mystery” with audience participation, and “Casting Call: How We Staff Our Mysteries.” We also do programs on Zoom. Contact Kate Flora

Maine Writers Share Some Favorite Maine Summer Activities

From time to time, we like to get together in a group post. Sometimes it is writing tips or writing books, sometimes it is Maine food or how we celebrate holidays or the books we’re giving or want to get for Christmas. Today, we’re sharing some of our favorite Maine summer activities.

Kate Flora: I wish I had some photos from last week, when I took a wonderful trip down memory lane to my childhood on a Maine lake. The farm was perched on a hilltop in Union, with a long hill running down to the pond. One summer afternoons, that’s where we could be found, usually along with friends and neighbors who also liked to end their days with a swim. Last week, my friend Karin Rector (we’ve been friends for almost 70 years!) was renting a camp on Crawford Lake, so the two of us took inner tubes (the real kind that went inside vehicle tires) and paddled out into the lake, where we bobbed in the waves and talked for at least an hour. The water was perfect. The sky was blue with whipped cream mounds of clouds, and while we floated and reminisced, a family of loons swam past.

Maggie Robinson: Years ago, a friend and I took our kids blackberry picking down a long dirt road in the woods. In those days, I made jam and jelly and syrup, canned, froze, and generally tried to be as back-to-the-land-ish as a suburban New York girl could be who found herself in Lee, Maine with four little kids.

I mentioned that the bushes were pretty beaten down and broken, and Suzanne replied, “Oh, that’s just from the bears.” Needless to say, I speed-picked and have not really been back in those woods since.

Now I don’t have to–I have blackberries in my backyard, along with three blueberry bushes. I still have to speed-pick to get ahead of the chipmunks and birds, but there’s nothing like fresh Maine berries in fresh muffins. Here’s the much-spattered basic muffin recipe from my ancient Fannie Farmer Cookbook. You can add whatever berry you like!

John Clark: Berries, berries, berries. Summer is rife with them, given adequate rain Exploring logging roads can offer wild strawberries, raspberries and later on, blueberries. Occasional handfuls of boxberries and even wild cranberries add to the ‘eat-as-you-go joy of finding new territory. My other guilty pleasure is finding images in puffy summer clouds. Beth and I saw a fire breathing serpent on our way back from picking blueberries this morning.

Featherhead dragon

Looking up at Heaven perhaps?

Susan Vaughan: When I was a teen in West Virginia, my favorite summer activity was swimming with my friends at the nearby lake. Many years later, I married a guy who grew up sailing. So when we moved to Maine, his priority was buying a sailboat. So for several years, we sailed our 19-foot sloop named Iris on Penobscot Bay. He taught me the basics of crewing for him. I’m still no sailor, but loved being out there, especially watching the Schooner Races.

In 2001 we did a canoe and camping trip with a guide on the West Branch of the Penobscot River. If you read my 8/11/22 blog post, you’ve read more about that. I enjoyed the canoeing and seeing the wilderness around us, including a moose. I did not enjoy sleeping in a tent.

More years later, we own a camp on Crawford Pond. I love to see the loons that populate the lake, especially when they have chicks. This summer, there are two chicks. We have no sailboat, but tool around the lake in a motorboat named Scribbler (a nickname for a writer). Early in the mornings, we paddle to various spots in a canoe my husband built.  Our dock is crowded with various other watercraft enjoyed by our friends and us. Like Kate, I love floating around on my inner tube, especially in this summer’s baking heat. Needless to say, I still enjoy summertime on and near the water.

Matt Cost: Summer in Maine for me is about golf, outdoor music, beaches, and driving with the top of my Jeep. The availability of so much music is amazing to me. I recently did a book signing in Damariscotta. Afterward, I had a beer with my father and listened to music at Schooner Landing, drove back toward my home and stopped at the Bath Waterfront Park for some Bluegrass music, and contemplated going on down to LL Bean for their outdoor concert series.

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The LL Bean summer concert series (only four miles from my house) brings in some world class bands for free. You are allowed to drop chairs starting at 6:00 AM, so if desired, you can get front row seating for these concerts. On the fourth of July I did just that and enjoyed Pink Martini with China Forbes, an orchestra that travels the world playing a mix of jazz and pop. It was followed by a light show that replaced the old fireworks and was just amazing.

Another favorite summer venue is on the Brunswick Mall. Wednesday nights they bring in amazing local talent such as the Delta Knights, Pat Colwell and the Soul Sensations, and Bonnie Edwards and the Practical Cats.

This is just a smattering of the offerings. Art walks, craft fairs, summer festivals, and so many more places are offering up, usually free, often fantastic, music all summer long.

The Writing is Off the Wall

I have discovered the “closed caption” command now that I am losing my hearing and probably my mind. This is especially necessary for the British mystery shows I love to watch on my computer but cannot understand. You know, the whole two nations separated by a common language thing. However, I suspect most of the translating from sound to text is done by other computers, because some of what I’m reading on the screen is hilariously wrong.

Recently I watched Ten Percent, not a mystery but a fast-paced, glossy show about entertainment agents in London. It features lots of great guest stars and twisty plots, but on one episode there was discussion of going to Hampstead Heath, a famous park on the outskirts of the city. Unfortunately, the closed caption read “Hamster Teeth.” Sure, why not?

It got me thinking about misheard words or phrases or lyrics that make sense, but are oh so wrong. There’s even a word for this, mondegreen, coined by Sylvia Wright, who as a little girl misunderstood this poem.

Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

There was no Lady Mondegreen, dead or alive. The actual words are “and laid him on the green.”

Song lyrics are habitually imagined to be something other than they are. Two fun examples:

Hold me closer, Tony Danza (tiny dancer)

Give me the Beach Boys and free my soul (Give me the beat, boys, and free my soul)

A close relative of the mondegreen is the Malaprop (from the play The Rivals) or Dogberry (from Much Ado About Nothing). Named for the verbally discombobulated characters in these plays, they are incorrect words substituted for words that sound similar. Dance a flamingo for dance a flamenco, ravaged for ravished, lathed for laved (the latter two a common mistake in some romances I’ve read, which have to be seriously uncomfortable and bloody).

When I was a little girl, I heard the term guerilla warfare and pictured a bunch of gorillas in the Cuban jungle that had somehow been trained to fight by Fidel Castro. I was confused but impressed.  A sign in the deli around the corner from my house said “No beer sold to minors,” and I wondered where the mines (Gold? Silver? Coal?) were on suburban Long Island and why the poor thirsty miners were being discriminated against. Both my auditory comprehension and spelling were faulty at that tender age.

I find I have to read directions—I cannot listen to or watch someone and understand what I’m supposed to do. But if I have that written list of steps in front of me, there’s a chance I can complete the task without too many screws left over. It’s rather late in life to discover my learning style, but better late than never. And that is why closed captions are my new best friends, even if they make me laugh on occasion.

Do you have a favorite word mix-up? Please share!

For more about Maggie and her many words, please visit www.maggierobinson.net