Thoughts for Breakfast

So, apparently I eat weird things for breakfast. At least, according to my friends who happen to be around mid-morning when I begin to forage in the cupboards pulling out strange things like, left over curry, carrots, fruit, granola bars, figs, egg plant, stir fry or the odd piece of pie.

Hey, who ever said pie wasn't a healthy thing to eat, it has fruit (generally) and grain , albeit loaded with sugar, lard and other calories. My favourite's raisin, or cherry, or apple, or... okay, I guess I don't really have a favourite, it's all good. In my mind food is food and when I'm hungry... probably not a good time for me to go shopping, unless you want me to bring back half the grocery store because everything looks so good I can't make up my mind what I want most.

Speaking of breakfast got me thinking about Jasper Fforde. Ruth McCullough first introduced me to his work during one of Jerome Stueart's creative writing classes. That was a neat class. Half of us students were writing great literary novels (or at least, we hope they will be) and the other half were working on fantasy that was generally pretty out of this world and great to read! The assignment had been to either write 5 blog posts on a book or bring a book in your genre that would appeal to the other half of the class and explain why. Ruth brought in Jasper Fforde's series about Thurday Next.

Thursday Next is a literary detective who's a member of this special group of people that police works of fiction. In about the fourth book, The Well of Lost Plots, when Thursday's pregnant with the child of her dead husband, she goes into hiding in an unpublished book. Her biggest complaint is that people in books never seem to have breakfast. There are tons of teas, dinner parties, lunches and socials, but apparently breakfast is too boring to write about. So, she gets these stock characters, blank characters with little or no personality often used as filler's in crowd scenes, and teaches them how to make breakfast for her. After all, they might as well be useful. This of course is in the residence she is housesitting while the "real" book character she's filling in for is on vacation and when she isn't playing the part the reader reads in the book... like being off set.

In breaking the breakfast rule, this is one book guaranteed to have many breakfast scenes and variety of food to eat. And in my mind, variety is the key to enjoying breakfast. I mean who made up "breakfast" food anyway. Why is it that only eggs, bacon, ham, toast, cereal (cold or hot), bagels, yoghourt, cottage cheese, muffins, biscuits, pancakes or waffles, and fruit salad, are "breakfast" food and everything else is snack or dinner food? That's a lot of grain, dairy, meat and fruit, without being much of a selection of anything. There's what... 4 kinds of bread, 2 of cereal, two kind of meat, and there are only so many ways to do eggs. Then we wonder why it is our arteries are plugged when we eat eggs, ham, and bacon with toast all the time, no thank-you.

Don't get me wrong. Those of you traditional breakfast lovers can have your bacon, eggs, cereal or whatever it is you want. But for me, having to only eat specific things for breakfast would be like only being allowed to write (or read) certain kinds of things one or two ways... where's the interest in that? For me, writing is an adventure to be savoured as I learn about my subject, the characters, or the world I'm creating, no two alike... kind of like breakfast. I wonder what it'll be tomorrow... maybe biscuits with olives, onions, a bit of olive oil, basil, majoram, tarragon (for sweetness) and a dash of pepper... not to forget a pinch of white wine vinegar... mmmm. Last time I made those my kids thought I was crazy. "Are you trying to kill us Mom... olives? In biscuits?" they said. But that was before they tasted them!

Journey's

My friend once told me the best writing was the stuff one felt uncomfortable reading or showing to others. And it was those pieces which often contained more real experience and the genuine emotions; the very things which would resonate with the reader also made the reading feel more risky. Hence the adage, “write what you know.” These pieces are more than "just stories,” they’re a relaying of experience which the writer feels connected to, they matter, they’re real. And I have come to realize that these pieces are the ones where I've left part of myself and the pieces for which I bear the thinest skin for criticism. And yet, it’s precisely these connections, this genuineness of emotion, which allows the reader to relate to the story.

This in mind, the balance between what to put into a story and what to leave out is always tricky. I recently wrote a story draft in which I fictionalized and wove together two different experiences. The heart of the story was something I really experienced and I had the dilemma of deciding "how much to tell." In the first draft I stuck to what I felt safe with, but it wasn't enough. After reading it, my friend said "I feel like the author knows the key in the relationship difficulties between the characters and is keeping it from me." She said, she found this frustrating as a reader because I wasn't trusting her with the information she needed to fully connect with the character and truly feel what was at stake and sympathize with her journey. This left her feeling gipped. This was important for me to know because I want the reader to understand and fully experience the story and to do this they must be able to fully connect with the main character, whom they will travel the story with. At the same time I realized this also caused me to leave out another key in the story, a part of the "Hero's Journey,’ a moment where the heroine loses something.

I'd have to say the turning point in my storytelling was when I read “The Writer’s Journey,” a book written by Christopher Vogler, from which I learned the importance of the "hero's Journey" model. This knowledge came during my rewrite of "The Closet Guardian," a story of a boy who comes to terms with his fears around his father’s leaving, and irrevocably changed the way I look at story structure.

"The Writer's Journey" talks about "Mythic Structure for Writer's and the focus of the book encompasses the "Hero's Journey.” The Hero’s Journey, is an essentially different and totally organic, way of seeing, using and dissecting a story plot and what each stage accomplishes for the reader. Vogler is very good at relating the concepts with examples from well known stories, myths and films.

I didn't read this book... I absorbed it like a sponge over the course of a month before sitting down to redraft my story.

When I began the draft I didn't eat for 8 hours. My face was sucked into the screen as I typed and edited, scrutinizing each line for feel and flow while I transcribed from two separate and very different versions and added in the third layer of the boys father. When I was finished my brain kept going all night analyzing and cross analyzing each of the story threads. And when I realized I had the first story I'd ever written which it could be picked apart and studied, (as one studies things during English class) for structure and integrity, and hold up no matter which way it was looked at, my soul was flying.

The Hero's Journey is a circle and the most important part is the death. Something has to die and the reader has to get that heart clenching fearful experience of perceiving something they care about has or is about to die. This has to happen in order for them to feel the relief and elation born of returning from that place with a better view, a true shift, the knowledge that they've been through the life changing valley of death along with the character and survived. This moment came in my story "The Closet Guardian" when the boys mouse, symbolic of the memories of his father and his hope of someday seeing him again, is crushed and we think he's dead. And when the boy picks the limp body up in his hands and cries we see the mouse twitch and are suddenly relieved, elated, that he's going to be okay.

It is those moments that the reader wants. They want to laugh, cry, fear and mourning, with the character. And as a writer I need to measure up to that expectation. And so, in my new story I now have to take a bit of courage, step back into the heart of the story, battle my fear, and put in the missing parts, before I can achieve the reward - a story I know will be damn good when I'm done. Knowing that part of me too will be in someways sacrificed; no longer just mine, it will live forever in vulnerability of the page, away from the protection of my heart as I emerge from the story, make my cover letter, and send it out to the world.