Liz Michalski's Blog, page 7

For Boston With Love, Bad Language Included

My dad grew up in Southie. If you aren’t from Boston, aren’t from Massachusetts, that has different meaning for you. To me, it means afternoons spent at my grandmother’s house, listening to white boys wearing gold chains pass on the sidewalk outside, trying to understand what they said. It means going to the playground with your grandmother as a ten-year-old, looking at the five-year-olds playing there, and realizing that any one of them could take you.

It means being young and far away from home  and homesick. Not for any one person or place, exactly, but for a sense of the familiar. And then hearing that accent — that godawful, wonderful accent — spoken on the Tube by some punk, loud-mouthed Boston kid in jeans and a Celtics t-shirt — and smiling for the rest of the day.

It means having absolutely no interest in sports, not even in the Red Sox (okay, maybe the Red Sox) but hating New York on principle.

It means taking the train into Boston as a teen with your friends and realizing that all the stuff you read about in history books, the stuff that made your country, happened HERE, and that the founding fathers were pretty bad-assed after all.

It means that your husband — who can navigate anywhere in the world — will sometimes turn to you, the geographically impaired, after following a maze of one way streets to say in frustration “Where the hell ARE we?” and you can actually tell him.

It means driving through a blizzard at 65 mph with cars passing you on both sides. It means drinking Dunkin Donuts iced coffee instead of Starbucks in the summer. It means understanding that when Paul Revere did his midnight ride, he wasn’t shouting “The British are coming” so that people could hide. He was doing it so that they would stand up and  fight.

It means that you swear allegiance at an early age to a city that pretends not to give a damn about so many things, but really cares so much. A city whose heart is big enough, open enough to break for those who are grieving. And tough enough to move forward, to give the finger to whoever did this. Tough enough to say,  in that awful accent,  ’We ain’t done here. You haven’t beaten us, asshole. You never will.”

Boston, You’re My Home

Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandolf:  So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.

Boston. I love you. You wicked tough, wicked cool, wickedly awesome city. To the people running toward the explosion to help instead of away, to the first responders, the doctors, nurses, police, to the residents offering cell phones and clothing and food and shelter to strangers, you give me hope.  Because of you, when I talk to my children I can say “Look at the heroic deeds of so many!” instead of focussing on the evil actions of so few.

If we must live in such times, there’s no place else I’d rather be.

Writing Advice at the Bottom

I have been a slacker this winter. Oh, I have run on the treadmill, and hiked with the dog, but in terms of logging good, heart-pumping, want to keel over and die miles? Not so much.

This is bad for so many reasons, the main one being that my mind, it goes like a hamster on a wheel. Being too tired to stay awake at night and worry about everything from the state of publishing to how I can fend off the inevitable shark attack at our sleepy beach on Long Island Sound this summer to whether tomatoes with fish genes will ever be approved (I do not jest — look it up) is an excellent thing. And of course, there’s the reason of health. But most importantly ….

there’s the vanity. My husband bought me a very fancy dress for a very fancy event this summer, and not fitting into it, or fitting into it and looking like an overstuffed kardashian, is truly not part of the game plan. And so I cast around and looked for an emergency solution, one that would work well with wine and chocolate.

I found a local gym that was running a health challenge, in which you promise to attend a certain number of classes, eat a certain number of calories, and commit to a certain number of minutes spent in cardiovascular exercise, and the gym promises you will get in shape. At first I thought “Ha — suckers! I will ROCK this cardiovascular exercise part.” But unfortunately, life gets in the way, and spending X number of hours a day running hasn’t been possible. So instead of setting aside big chunks of time every day for exercise, I’ve been trying to sneak it in — I get to the gym 15 minutes before my class starts and walk around the block. At night, I drag my son and the Slobbering Beast with me for a nightly jaunt. I’m still running and hiking a few days a week, but on the days I have other obligations — and there are many of them — 15 minutes a handful of times throughout the day is what happens.

And you know what? It’s working. Numbers that I wanted to go down are dropping, slowly but steadily. Maybe not as quickly as they would if I committed to running five miles a day again, every day, but dropping all the same.

Writing is like this too. I’d thought that this year, with both my children in school, I’d have hours of luxurious time to devote to writing. Most days, I don’t. Some of that is because of outside obligations, obligations I can’t control, but sometimes, it’s because the idea of sitting down and looking at a blank page for two hours is terrifying, and I will fill those two hours with almost anything else. (Except ironing. Even I have limits.)

So I’ve been taking my laptop with me lately. Fifteen minutes in the waiting room before a doctor’s appointment. Ten minutes in the car before the kids get out of school. It’s not a lot of time, it’s true, but the words add up. Because sometimes the freedom of knowing you can’t get it ALL done in the short time you have allows you to get SOMETHING done, which eventually adds up to all.

How’s your writing coming these days?

Choose Your Adventure

I’ve been thinking a lot about the choose your adventure books that were popular when I was young. Remember those? You’d read a few pages, and then make a choice — turn to page 21 to search for the treasure in the mountain, skip to page 35 to search by the sea. Your choices determined whether the characters succeeded or failed.

The kids are growing up, and we’re facing choices these days. So much seems to hang in the balance. If we choose the ‘right’ school, pick the ‘right’ sport, steer them toward the  ’right’ peer group — will their story end the ‘right’ way, with a healthy and happy life? That’s the question that keeps me up at night.

The truth is, I never cared much for those adventure books. Being able to control the plot might have been exciting the first time, but the story never captured my imagination the way other books did. They were billed as stories to read again and again, but I only read them once and then gave them away. The books I turned to — The Hobbit, The Dark is Rising, The Chronicles of Narnia — might not have had huge plot points I could control, but each sentence was crafted with exquisite care. Strung together, page after page, they required patience from my 10-year-old self to decipher, but the whole added up to such a wonderful story I couldn’t help but read them again and again.

I tell myself it’s not the big plot points in my children’s lives that make them who they are. It’s not the choice of schools, of sports, of activities. It’s not who they hang out with (even though their friends are all lovely). It’s the smaller moments — the time we spend in the car together, the family movie nights, the trips to the beach. It’s reading on the couch together, the chore of feeding the Slobbering Beast, the times my husband and I choose to be their  parents instead of their friends, no matter how often I wish it could be the other way. It’s a million tiny moments, strung together with as much care as we can muster, done as often as we can. Those are the moments that make up their story. Those are the moments upon which their ending depends.

I Know, I Know …

It’s Tuesday, but I’ve got nothing for you today.  Well, that’s not completely true. I do have a FABULOUS interview coming up with one of my all-time favorite writers, Alice Hoffman, on the Writer Unboxed blog on March 29th. If you get a chance, stop by, okay? And until then, Happy Spring!

 

Snow Day Redux

I’m not writing much today. I’m sitting by the window, a cup of tea in hand, watching the snow fall. There’s noise from the bedrooms upstairs — footsteps from one room to another, quiet giggling. In a few moments they’ll be down demanding breakfast (yes) books (yes) television (no). It has been like winter in Narnia this year — never-ending. And yet I can’t help but be grateful for one more stolen day. I hope wherever you are, the day is good to you, too.

Sometimes What You Hate is What You Miss Most

On a good day, mornings at my house are controlled chaos. On a bad day, it’s just chaos. Like most parents, I’m fighting a losing battle against the clock — there’s breakfast to make, the dog to feed, backpacks to prepare, and one child who points out EVERY morning what a nicer place the world would be if I would just let him sleep, instead of resorting to stripping the covers off and dragging him feet first out of bed. And inevitably, the crazy hour before school starts ends the same way — me booming in a voice that cannot possibly belong to my 5’2 body: “GET. IN. THE. CAR. RIGHT. NOW!”

We’ve been doing this dance together for six years now — since the day my daughter started kindergarten. On good days, I can shake my head and laugh, point out the bluebird at the feeder or the bulbs popping up as I usher them to the car. On bad days, I’m backing out of the driveway and simultaneously delivering one of my dreaded lectures on Responsibility, Punctuality or my personal favorite How Will You Manage in College?

But somehow, every morning, we all wind up in the same place — in the car, listening to our latest book on tape, heading out to face the world together. Right now we’re a unit, my kids and me. We spend a lot of time in the car together, the three of us, and we’re tight, even if they laugh at my music choices and mock my dance moves. And the two of them are even tighter. I watch them sometimes, after I’ve dropped them off, and see how my daughter laughs when he takes off his hat if he thinks I’m out of sight, and how he looks up to her, face shining at making her smile, and sometimes it is hard to drive away.

Because it’s about to change. My oldest is graduating from her elementary school in just three short months, and no matter where she goes, it will never be the same. We’ll still be scrambling to get out the door, but it will be to different destinations: My daughter will be heading to junior high, and my son will be walking up that sidewalk alone, the way he will be for the rest of his academic career. Because of their age difference, it’s unlikely they’ll ever attend the same school at the same time again.

The path that started dividing them from me when they first went to school has branched once more, sending them in separate directions. I’m not sure they realize this yet, if they understand how few mornings we have left together. Next year there may be car pools or buses, a complicated calendar as we struggle to balance everyone’s schedule. My son may finally get to sleep in, my daughter may leave the house without me. But for these last few months, we have time, even if it’s passing too fast. Even if, when I’m yelling at them to get in the car, what I really mean is “Stay here, this size, just like this, forever.”

Keeping Your POV True

Point of view is on my mind this month. My friend Vaughn Roycroft wrote an excellent post on head-hopping that you should read. And  as I am deep in the midst of my own head-hopping with my current book, I thought I’d share my favorite tips here for any writers who might be going through the same process:

Give each character her own book. Go through your manuscript and cut and paste each character’s story into a single document. Yes, it’s a bit of a pain to do (easier in Scrivener than in a regular word processing program) but it will help your writing in several ways. I find I’m much more likely to see inconsistencies this way —  Trudy hates the color blue in chapter  five but wears her favorite blue sweater in chapter 17, for example — than I would if I were just reading through each chapter in the larger document. Plus, creating a separate ‘book’  really helps you nail the voice of each character. And mixing up your work this way will help you with the overall editing, too.

Now read each character’s story aloud. You can do it yourself or paste the copy into a words-to-text program. Are the intonations, the slang, the speech patterns different? They should be. Can you close your eyes, listen to the reader, and know immediately who is speaking?

I’m not saying to go crazy with odd word choices or verbal tics to distinguish your characters. But think of it this way — if an email from a good friend arrived in your in-box with the sender’s name stripped out, you’d probably be able to figure out who sent it based on the way they ‘talked’ in the email, correct? You should be able to do the same thing with your characters.

Diversity in your characters’ voices — it’s a good thing.

Digging In

For someone who hates being cold, I love winter hiking. There are no ticks or mosquitoes to contend with, no vicious horse flies, no gasping for air in the humid New England summer. Often, particularly if the weather is unpleasant, the Slobbering Beast and I can go for miles without seeing another human soul.

There’s a short hike I love to do in the winter.  In summer, the trail runs alongside a narrow, muddy stream.  Clouds of insects buzz about it, extracting bits of flesh in exchange for passage. In warm weather we go early and quick or we don’t go at all.

But in winter, the scene is completely different. There’s no rush, no hurry, so long as we’re out of the woods by dark. The downside, of course, is that this is New England, and the same weather that keeps the blood-sucking pests away has its own hazards. Ice and snow, sleet and cold, can make for treacherous footing. The most challenging section of the trail winds upward, through the pines and the birch, and runs along a small cliff. At the top, it weaves between two large boulders, skittering down among rocks and tree stumps until it meets level ground.

In summer, the path is a fun challenge, requiring just enough effort to make my heart race pleasantly. But in winter, the way is harder. What looks like secure ground is often no more than dried leaves covered with a dusting of snow.  Step too hard, put too much weight in the wrong spot, and you’ll find your feet flying out from underneath you. Going uphill, a fall may bruise your pride. Downhill, the stakes are a little higher.

There’s an alternative, of course. I could not hike at all, could traipse about my neighborhood, doing laps and logging miles. Or I could take a different path, a safer one, a path that has neither the highs nor the lows of this one. But the view from the top feeds my soul with joy, and the view from the bottom reminds me of my accomplishment, my tenacity and my strength. And so there is no other choice, not really, but to kick the toe of my 10-year-old hiking boots into the soft snow, scrape out a foothold, and hope that it holds.

For me, writing is like that these days. I’m not a ‘baby’ writer, not just starting out anymore. I know how high the hills are. My time might be better spent, more profitably spent, finding another type of writing. There are other calls on my time — family and friends, jobs and responsibilities, any one of which has more ‘real’ claim to how I spend my hours. There are book stores closing, publishers merging, a once staid landscape turning unstable. Step wrong, and who knows what will come plunging down next?

But just as nothing else gives me the same joy as tromping through the woods on a snowy afternoon, nothing else feeds my soul like writing. When it goes well, when the black lines on the page turn into words that turn into sentences that turn into a real, true story, there’s nothing else quite like it. And so, even though the path is no longer smooth, even though it’s turning cold, I’ll keep kicking into the snow for a toehold, no matter how small, I’ll keep climbing upwards, one step at a time.

it may not look like much, but in winter it’s my own personal Cliff of Insanity.

The only one more joyful about winter hiking than me is the Slobbering Beast.

Snow Day!

I’m sticking my tongue out at the snow too…