Author Archives: ona

From Names to Scenes: Another Step into Reality

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Last week I wrote about choosing names for my characters. What happened in naming
the characters surprised and delighted me. As I named them, they became real, like writing in invisible ink and then holding the paper over a candle. Giving names, I entered the characters’ lives in a way I hadn’t when I was simply outlining a plot and calling them “son of landlord” or “daughter of lace maker.”

Having chosen the characters’ names for meaning and cultural import, they took on flesh: I could see their eyes, the shape of their heads, their hands and hair. Their names blossomed with history, and each character began to fit his/her name in a natural way. With names, they became part of an extended family, of a group of friends, and they began to move in the society I created in the first two books of the series.

The naming done, I’m now working on actual scenes for the book. Sometime ago, I
wrote a film script by writing each scene on a 5 X 7 cards. I decided to try the same process for this new mystery.

This approach doesn’t work as smoothly as it does with a film, because a book grows a
different way. Still, I persist with the 5 X 7 card idea because I am discovering that this process breaks open the plot in a way the outline can’t. Writing scenes illuminates strengths and weaknesses in the storyline, and it ignites new ideas, new twists to the plot, relationships that I hadn’t considered.

Writing scenes, the new characters and the characters from the first two books in the
series move among each other, and this forces me to ask questions. How do these people know each other? Are they friends? Acquaintances? Antipathetic toward one another? Co-workers? How long have they known each other?

Writing scenes also compels me to ask questions about plot: Can Arrammundu be in the piazza bar talking with a friend at this time? Or must he be on the trails that run through the forest below town? How did Leah know that Diego was at home that afternoon? Angelica is talking to her son, can she, in this intensely emotional scene, avoid the truth of what happened, and still answer his questions?

As I try to answer these questions for myself, some of my scene cards become unwieldy. This is a signal to me that I need to expand, that I’m actually writing a whole chapter or two, or more…, not just a single scene. Or, if I find problems with the storyline, perhaps I need to go back to earlier cards to check, or think forward to what’s coming.

Scenes make me see people interacting: talking together, exchanging information,
gossiping….. Writing scenes I can observe these characters, get to know their inner thoughts and emotions; I can see how they behave.

Writing scenes, I am also led to another step in writing the novel: strong sense of place,
weather, time of day. Now that the characters are interacting, I need to give the reader the piazza itself, the bar, the forest trails, the heavy rains of spring, the granary, the smell of cattle, the morning light over a field of winter wheat, the musty smell of Etruscan tombs … I need to give them rural Tuscany.

What’s in a Name?

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“If I’m gonna tell a real story, I’m gonna start with my name” Kendrick Lamar

Today I picked up my work where I left off last week: on my outline for the third book in the Tuscan series. (The first in the series will be out in early September.)

My outline for the third book is almost finished, so I know the plot, but until today I
hadn’t given the new characters names. The “landlord,” the “widow,” the “farmhand” have been stuck on the page as empty titles without character.

“A name is the blueprint of the thing we call character. What’s in a name? Just about
everything we do,” said Morris Mandel.

After my work today, I understand what he meant.

I needed to do some research to discover the characters’ names. The book is set in Italy,
and in Italy, surnames can vary according to region and sometimes according to what sort of work a person does. What if the person is an immigrant? What about her name?

In order to name characters with authenticity, I needed to ask questions: What was the
basic backstory of each character? Did she come from the area about which I’m writing? Did he move into the area from elsewhere in Italy? Or in Europe? He lives in Tuscany, but was he born in Venice? Is she Sardinian? Is he an immigrant from Senegal? Did they both come from the Marche? Were the parents or grandparents tailors? Locksmiths? barons? barbers? I needed to find out.

The day turned out to be a day of meeting new people, people with names that began to yield their characters to me; it was like having a first introduction to strangers. Exchanging names we were beginning to know each other all the better. Today, my characters and I were living in the excitement of these new relationships, relationships that will be long, sometimes difficult, sometimes grief-stricken, often joyous.

These newly named people have stepped into my world, but more importantly, I’ve
stepped into theirs, and today, real people, we set off together to see what will happen.

How Far to Wilderness?

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Given the recent snows and thinking of friends and family living in currently sub-zero weather, I’m posting a short essay from my book, Stories to Gather All Those Lost . Published by Utah State University, the essays were originally radio commentary aired on KUSU-FM, Logan, Utah,  and KUER-FM, Salt Lake City, Utah. The book is available on Amazon.

It is 8 P.M., and I have decided to go for a walk.  I will find out tomorrow that the winds tonight are 65 mph and, with the wind chill factor, the temperature is -80 degrees.  But I do not know this yet, and I think only of the walk.  I dig my jacket with the coyote fur hood out of the closet.  It is an old military jacket I was given when I was a visiting poet in a prison in the Midwest.  It embarrasses me to have it; every time I wear it I think of all the jackets like it and all the coyotes that were killed in order to make them:  thousands of coyotes, all slaughtered for the Air Force.  Still, I keep it.  It reminds me of the young prisoners, and me, immured in the sloping stubble fields of central Iowa, all huddling in our khaki green jackets crossing the barren prison grounds to the classroom building.      

     When I step off the back porch, away from the protection of the garage, someone punches me in the chest.  I suck air.  It is the wind.  I pull the hood as far forward as it will go, creating a six-inch, fur-circled tunnel around my face.  It could be perfect.  I am warm from the waist up and around my head, but I have forgotten to wear long underwear, and my jeans are too thin:  only a minute out and my thighs hurt. 

     But I will not go back.  I am alone with the wind, the way I want to be. 

     I turn left, skirt the golf course on the north, and head toward Lundstrom Park, where, on a night last summer, I lay in the grass next to the canal and watched the Perseid meteor showers.  Now the park is cold and barren, the wind slapping against the ball diamond backstops. The road and walks are clogged with drifts.

     Tonight the wind is in a wild dance with the snow, and the wind is the stronger partner. It howls across the surface of the streets and yards, ripping away the fine top layer of the drifts, incited to a cold stinging fog that swarms over the drifts and scuffles along a frozen gutter.  Bearing the snow, the wind shifts and dodges along the ground, stops suddenly, then leaps up again, lashing my feet and legs.  Across from Lundstrom, I turn west, toward the dirt hills.   The wind is behind me now, plummeting down from the Wasatch Front.  This wind wants me to do something wild.

     I cut off the street into the dirt hills.  The street is too safe, I’ve decided.  How far do I need to go for wilderness? 

     Fifty yards in, the drifts are suddenly waist high and hard.  It is as if I stood still and they crept in around me.  I start over them, slipping, regaining balance just before I fall and then slip again.  I can’t get a grip on the sanded snow. The drifts undulate in front of me.  Sucking air, I make my way.  One strong gust and I am blown down, rolling as I fall to the bottom of the drift. 

     Things are getting serious.  This isn’t suburbia, this isn’t Maple Drive winding gently through one of the older developments of Logan. 

     A friend, Kim, once told me to “Know your place.”  I think of him.  My place is a brick house behind a row of maple trees.  Secure in that warm house, I make stew and watch the snow drift against the juniper bushes. 

     But tonight, only blocks away, I find another of my places. I have walked here dozens of times before, and I know now I never knew this place;  I am only beginning to understand.  This wind torn barren field, scarred by backhoes, disfigured by the encroachment of ranch houses, is keeping itself.  The wind slaps me in the face, and I pay attention.

     I push myself up to my knees, dig in the steel toes of my boots, and heave myself up, leaning hard into the wind.  My hands ache, my thighs sting. 

     I begin to run;  I am only on the edge of being frightened. Mostly, I am cold.  I run in a jerky, uneven motion.  My boots grip one step and slip the next, one step slides and the next sinks, waist deep.  I stumble, fall, groping my way toward the road, head into a wind too painful to breath.

     My friend’s mother died in a drift at the end of her street.  She wanted to die there. She planned it that way, and she went there on purpose to freeze to death. She was only yards from a house.

     This story I’m telling is small. It is just one of many of a season when I learned to let the snow take me. To let the snow gather me in with all those lost.     

New Year’s

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Happy New Year  in the hope that this will be a healthy year under the guidance of smart and brave leaders and citizens.

שנא טובה (שנייה) בתקייה שזו תהיה שנה בריאה בהדרכת מנהיגים ואזרחים חכמין ואמיצים

I migliori auguri per un felice e sano anno nuovo e per leader e cittadini saggi e coraggiosi

For Italophile Mystery Lovers

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Since I’ve signed on with Level Best Books I’ve been in contact with other LBB authors who set their books in Italy. For those of you who like mysteries and are Italophiles, here are some sites you might like to visit: 

Jen Collins Moore

https://www.jennifercollinsmoore.com

Gabriel Valjan

www.gabrielvaljan.com

http://gabrielswharf.wordpress.com

and a forthcoming work by Nina Wachsman

https://www.venicebeauties.com

The Stuff of Dreams

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Just before I woke this morning I had a dream. I was standing at a doorway. The door opened and I had just raised my foot to step through, when I realized that with the next step I would be leaving this world and entering another world.

I thought about the dream over coffee.

Before I stepped into that black and white other world, I had turned my head to see what was behind me in the place I was leaving: people I know were doing dishes; others were going up and down the stairs; there were letters on the desk; and the smell of winter minestrone simmering on the stove permeated the air. I could feel the chill of the cold doorknob on my fingers; could hear the chatter of kids playing in the corner. The walls were covered with photos of family and friends; there were books on the shelf; and through one of the windows I caught sight of trees in full leaf, and beyond, the neighbor in her backyard. I heard echoes of arguments, a whiff of the metallic air of anger; saw the eyes of a friend shedding tears, heard the ring of a phone, noticed dirty dishes in the sink…

These were fleeting moments, small things. There were shadows, smells, the taste of fresh bread in my mouth, the sound of my sons’ laughter, the feel of dirt on my hands from working in the garden.

Sipping my coffee, I understood the dream as a moment mori in 2-second dream form.

With that glance back, I had stepped into the same river of thought as the ancient Greek philosophers Democritis and Socrates, who said that the proper practice of philosophy is about death and dying. My dream wasn’t a didactic dream, not a religious admonition to “ be good or else when you die you’ll go to hell.”

And it wasn’t a thing, graspable like other momento mori: not a 19th century mourning brooch made of human hair, not a skull ring like my friend wears, not an elegy like Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, or a dance like that of the Grim Reaper, or a portrait like that of the Puritan Thomas Smith with his skull in hand. It wasn’t a calavera, a skull made of sugar for the Day of the Dead, nor a literary calaveras, a satirical poem given to the living, but written as if the recipient were dead.

The dream was not significant enough to walk along with the works of Camus or Sartre, or profound enough to be an experience of Bhuddist maranasati, or serious enough to echo The Way of the Samurai or a Sufi’s profound understanding.

It was just a little dream.  I decided the significant part of it was the details: 

 Each element of my life filled the room, although the room was not full or crowded; there was no threat, just details of life.  My little 2-second dream, my early morning momento mori, was simply a reminder that the big part of my life, as a woman and as a writer, is contained in a mass of the smallest of details. As I gather these details I find out who I am, and in the details of my books, I find out who my character are. This is what a moment-mori is good for. If I can remember that death is just one step away, the details around me will burst into the lush color, motion, and forms of life.  

Films with a Sense of Community in a Troubled Time

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As COVID 19 drives us further into isolation, I rely more and more on books, movies, and walks along the deserted trail that follows the canal. The walks clear my head and the books and movies transport me out of the house in a different way, so I can see how other storytellers are searching for meaning.  

Lately, I’ve seen two movie-series and a movie that you might like: Midnight Diner, a  Japanese anthology TV series directed by Joji Matsuoka, based on the graphic novels of Yaro Abe; The Queen’s Gambit, a U.S. miniseries based on a novel by “Walt” Stone Tevis and directed by Scott Frank; and The Life Ahead, from a novel written by Romain Gary and made into an Italian film directed by Edoardo Ponti, son of Sophia Loren, who still powerful at 86 shares the lead with Ibrahima Gueye, a very talented young actor.  

I think of these films specifically because all of them have themes of love manifested in camaraderie, community in its truest sense, and resilience in the face of hardships, and I’ve been hankering for a good shot of these things lately.  The Queen’s Gambit and The Life Ahead are hard in parts to watch, but working toward love is never easy, and all of these films pay back.

Beginning a New Book

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To animate work on a book, I gather ideas from three sources:  scholarly / public records; interviews; and notes from my own experience. Combining these three elements jumpstarts my imagination, and I know if I keep sifting through these elements, the story I discover, one of hundreds of possibilities, will make itself known. Personal memories of food, landscape, gestures, and the sounds of a language infuse scholarly information with vibrancy, and the scholarly writings provide details and facts that may have become fuzzy in friends’ telling of personal stories.

So when I was recently asked at a reading if my stories are autobiographical, or if the stories I am putting to paper are the stories of someone else, or if I just create the narratives whole cloth out of imagination, I say that none of these is the case, and yet, all of them are the case.

Everywhere I go, in everything I read, hear, and see, I find pieces of life — good, evil, and inbetween — and am compelled to make a story. The pieces appear everywhere: in a fact in a book, in a neighbor’s tears elicited by a memory, in the vison of a landscape, in the unique sound of a dialect, in the way the rain fell outside the window on a certain day, in the moment I understood the profound anger of a woman who remembers running through the forest, SS and dogs not far behind.  From these pieces, an incipient story nudges at me.

I begin a narrative. Perhaps the woman was crying when she remembers how it was raining the night she slipped from her house and fled into the forests of Tuscany, the SS not far behind.  It could be that the trail that  night was muddy, like the trails I explored years later in the same forest, the mud sucking at my feet. Perhaps the Italian peasant man I interviewed still makes the same sausage his grandfather made, and can give me the recipe, which in my story becomes a murder weapon.

These chunks of life add up to a story, which, good or bad, is a reflection of my vision, risen from the urge to create a narrative. My ultimate goal is to look into my own and others’ hearts, including the darker sides, to grasp some understanding of human nature.

The Writing Life

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A friend just suggested that I and some other friends think about our “writing life,” so I’ve been thinking about what my life as a writer has been.

Every writer creates, or tumbles into, a certain “writing life” tailored to him/herself, and the habits of that life are blended, smoothly or roughly, with the daily life of meal preparation, outside jobs, marriage or other love relationships, childcare, social get- togethers, bills, housecleaning, exercise, illness – all the activities/vicissitudes of any life’s needs.

For some years, I persisted in the dream that, eventually, I would be one of those writers who could dovetail my writing with the other aspects of my life –  with fluid skill and perfect organization: up at 4 every morning to put in 3 hours of solid work before my children woke, then a nutritious breakfast for the family, off to my part time job, come home, have a snack for the kids, clean house, help with homework, fix supper….  

But those visions of myself scurrying around like a well-organized little mouse were figments of imagination. If such a writer’s life does exist somewhere, for some writers, it was not to be mine.

My writing life, like the rest of my life, has been chaotic, erratic, and productive in spurts. Some nights I woke at midnight to work, caught an hour or two before 7, then dragged through the day. Some days I sneaked away to the river with a notebook; many days I ignored chores. I didn’t balance my checkbook; I left dishes in the sink; dust gathered on the shelves; the kitchen floor went un-scrubbed. There were long spans of time when my writing was reduced to notes on scraps of paper stuck in a file, or rough first drafts of poems were literally jotted down on napkins at the breakfast table. I finished first drafts of whole novels, written in the burst of an idea, that still, years later, sit on my shelf waiting for a rewrite. There have been fits of submissions when I sent out individual stories / poems / novels, followed by doldrums of inactivity when, for months, I submitted nothing.

In short, I’ve conducted my writing life in a calamitous way. It’s been hard most of all on the people around me, but can I be brazen enough to at least offer it as a vision of persistence?  

Each of us writers has something to say, and walking either upright with steady steps toward our goals or stumbling and lurching through our work, we write. Writing is what makes us writers. Under any circumstance, through any hardship. A person’s writing life is a manifestation of character and is bound to be as varied as the people who live it.

When I think of my own writing life I know I could have…. I should have…. 

But I didn’t.

I was lost in the glorious chaos of life with other people, other needs, and with my own failings. The poems and the stories twirled in an endless, dizzying polka through my head. I was a failure at an orderly life, but blessed with a loving family, friends, and editors that danced along with me, or when I needed, let me dance by myself. My writing life was that I just kept going.