How You Got That Story: Thoughts for the Writer Seeking It

 

The house stood in the middle of Jerusalem more than 2,000 years ago and was owned by a priestly family known as Katros. When Romans destroyed the city in 70 CE, the house burned to the ground, like many others. Archeologists who discovered it in the 1970s called it Burnt House, and I first heard of it on a trip to the city in my twenties.

The story itself was intriguing, but what attracted me most was the idea of using the archeological site surrounding the house as a setting for a new play. I thought about it the entire day after being there, and when I came home, I started writing dialogue.

My story went its own many-tentacled way beyond the facts, but Burnt House offered a rich background for the tale I wanted to tell — which was about a family in our own times. I know I wouldn’t have even thought of it without discovering the house. As a writer, I’ve learned to look for moments like these because they spark our creative storylines in unexpected, out-of-the-ordinary ways.

While travel is one of the best ways to encounter story lines, there are plenty of them waiting for us at home. I was visiting a friend’s church once at Eastertime when his daughter noticed a woman ahead of us in a black blazer. A white thread was spread across her back, curving at one end. The woman was completely oblivious to it.

My friend had the perfect answer to his daughter’s questions about the blazer and thread. “Maybe it’s something you can write a story about when we get home,” he said. “Think up reasons for how that thread got on there.”

That’s how you can tell if someone is a great writer, I thought. It isn’t just about being observant of what’s around you. It’s about having the ability to imagine what happened before and after you encounter any given moment where something new is presented — and preferably, that something is surprising and unusual.

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Is New York Still the Best Place for Authors, Playwrights, Actors and Artists?

 

She was thirty something, smallish, brunette. Her hair was chin-length, and her eyes were almost too dark to be real. When she came out of the kitchen, I had no idea how or when she materialized — all I knew was she was standing before us, waiting. The overall feeling I picked up from her was boredom, only it was boredom elevated to an art form.

"What do you want?” she asked. She had no pad or pen, just a little white apron that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else, but that she managed to wear while still looking cool. We were the only people in the diner, probably because it was a few days after Christmas and stormy outside.

My friend replied, “Watcha got?”

“Nothin’,” the waitress responded. It seemed like a preview of what you might find in the city itself; a profound indifference to politeness, small talk and nearly everything else.

I had met the two men sitting with me a few hours before, when they decided we should all go out to eat. Their names were Rafael and Henry, and my college teacher had recommended Rafael highly as a person who could “introduce me to New York” when I moved there.

I couldn’t tell them how nervous I was about moving to the city. Born in Brooklyn, I had grown up mostly in suburban New Jersey. I visited New York many times with my family to see relatives or plays/movies and eat at restaurants. But the idea of living there and trying to make a career of acting seemed like a whole other animal, one I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to ride.

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Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Seeking Reasonably Priced Scottish Castle

 

When my husband and I first started thinking about the possibility of buying a house, he insisted that we watch The Money Pit. The movie stars Shelly Long and Tom Hanks, who do a spectacular job of showing you the pitfalls of home ownership--admittedly on a larger scale than you would likely experience. The movie made my husband and I laugh hysterically, but it turned out his caution was not exaggerated.

We bought a house built in 1914 after falling in love with the architecture and structure. I have since learned that while old houses are beautiful, they are hell to maintain, and you do have to maintain them. We had to redo the entire basement and lift one side of the hosue before we could sell it years later.  

Luckily, we made more money than we ever thought possible, so we must have done something right. Our new house (bought in 2018) was built in 1957 and also had its share of problems. We don’t care because every house has problems, and this one has a public lake across the street. In other words, I know how lucky we are to be here. So.

Am I thinking about Scotland? (Shhh)

Why am I thinking about Scotland?

I don't know, exactly. Is it a good time to flee?

Read more at:

https://medium.com/the-narrative-arc/seeking-reasonably-priced-scottish-castle-efd2e375f9e1

Talk. Write. Show. Don't Preach! Writing for Young People

 

The first play I saw in a theater as a child had a princess in it. Much as I wanted to like it, I was soon bored. I had already been fascinated by movies like The Wizard of Oz, shown every year on Thanksgiving. Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West were far more fascinating.

Other movies, plays and stories drew me in with dinosaurs, ghosts, horses and adventures. I wasn’t a writer then, but I knew that certain stories were thrilling — and others, not so much.

Safe stories with plots that appeared to go wrong for a minute or two and then righted themselves, seemed fake in ways I couldn’t have explained at six or seven years old. I knew when something happened that seemed genuine — and that is always what I look for, since.

I've written a number of plays for children, and each theater has its own, fairly large audiences. Subjects ranged from historical to folk tale adaptations with hints of magic and fantasy to a young teen satire. I also wrote a three-book, middle-grade historical series about the Beat Generation in 1958.

I decided to set the Beat Street series in the 1950s because I thought Beats sparked what we later called the hippie era and a new way of looking at art. I didn’t always know I wanted to be an artist, but I had a feeling that artists were more like me than doctors, lawyers, or CEOs. And part of me knew that, as someone who loved making up stories, I was headed for a creative life.

Early on, I learned that telling a story to children is like telling any other story: we need to show, not tell; share, not preach, and most of all, create stories and plot lines to captivate readers and audiences, no matter how old or young they are. Yes, there are things we don't want to show to a three-year-old. At the same time, we don't want the three-year-old to be so bored she wanders off--or worse, falls asleep.

Read more here.

 

My Favorite Job Helped Me Connect With My Body

I had no reason to believe anything good would come out of my divorce — which happened when my son was three and a half years old. In fact, I was embarking on a major transformation that would change the way I lived in my body. It began with a new job, of all things — in a small eight-person office where the last thing I expected was positive change.

I first saw a posting about the job at a women’s center. The organization, called Melpomene Institute for Women’s Health Research, was a nonprofit. Its mission sounded fascinating: to bring cutting-edge health research to ordinary women and girls and to develop programs to engage them in leading healthy lives.

What that meant, from the organization’s point of view, was a profound commitment to helping women engage in physical activity — at a time when male sports/athletics were primary in every sense.

Melpomene was looking for a development assistant, and the pay seemed better than what I was seeing for other jobs. I had no clue what a development assistant was, but it said something about being a good writer and creating grant proposals, which I had done before. It was a part-time job, which I also liked because it would give me more time to be with my son.

At this point, I was a terrified human being, with nightmares of being homeless in waking and sleeping dreams. My son’s dad was paying child support and alimony, because I hadn’t worked outside home in many years, and was a stay-at-home parent and writer. I was grateful for the money, but it came with a time limit, and I didn’t want to be all that dependent on someone I wasn’t married to anymore.

Read more on Medium.

Photo: Property of Judy M. Lutter

Flying Dreams (poem)

 

They begin when I am eighteen, dreams
Refusing subtlety, rising from books that say
You can leave your body, it feels like flying.

I don’t believe it. Then it happens to me.

The first dreams take me up, not like wings,
But suddenly, without warning, slowly at first.
Then faster and higher than I’ve ever been or will be
Like a comet, flying high over the trees until

The clouds turn hazy and I swoop, like a bat, 
Past branches, moss, leaves, a sky bereft of animals
Speed is all I have to pull me forward, spiraling
Like rice paper, lifted by the wind.

See more in my post for Medium.

Photo by Look Up Look Down Photography on Unsplash

When You Fail/Die/Bomb Onstage, What Can You Do to Recover?

 

Have you ever had to perform a show without one of your cast or band members when no understudy was available? I have, and though I never want to do it again, I’ve never forgotten what happened.

I was in a punk-pop-rock band, working with a manager who found us college gigs. It was a Friday night, and I think we’d been advertised as more of a dance band than a concert. We’d have been better off with a seated audience, but a lot of colleges preferred dance bands at the time.

As it happened, our lead singer/songwriter/guitarist was really sick, and could hardly stand. He was willing to go with us anyway, but we couldn’t bear the thought of him falling over onstage and told him we could perform without him. I think we also wanted to show him we could function without him, if we had to — though in fact, it wasn’t true.

Once we arrived and started setting up the stage, I was feeling less and less confident. All we had was a bass player, a drummer, and a vocalist (me), whose signature songs consisted of harmonizing with the lead singer/founder. We tried playing the songs we were used to doing, but they sounded weird without either acoustic or electric guitar.

After a few songs, people in the audience began booing us and telling us we sucked.I hated to hear it, and at the same time, I couldn’t say I didn’t understand. In fact, I didn’t like how we sounded, either. After a few more tries, we ended up leaving and telling the staffer at the door that one of our members was sick and we should have canceled.  As you can probably guess, we didn’t get paid.

Of course, people bomb out for all kinds of reasons, but when it happens to you, it can feel like a monster squeezing his hands around your throat. Was there something we could have done? In hindsight, nearly everything.

Read more on Medium.