My Book in Progress

Beyond the Silent Scream,

finding your writers voice ten minutes at a time.

Writing From the Inside Out.

Genuine writing comes from beneath the surface where the words live; in your heart, in your memories and in your mind. The secret is to capture them on paper.  

From the inside out is the only direction to take if you want to tell a true story…the story itself doesn’t have to be true, but it must feel genuine, the way it feels when you let yourself really remember.  

Take for example the proverbial grade school September essay topic: “What I did on my summer vacation”. What if, instead of, “We went to Happy Hotel on Beautiful Beach and had a lovely time”, the student was given the freedom to say “Mum and dad argued every night and I couldn’t sleep”, or “I hated having to wait an hour after eating lunch before I went swimming”, or “on the last night of the holiday I kissed a boy for the very first time”.

Threshold Moments are those times of irreversible change, first or last times that will never come again. The exercise I suggest for writers is to make a list of all the firsts and lasts they can remember from their own lives. Choose one from the list, set a timer for 10 minutes and write.

Here is my example:
The first time I rode in a limousine, adults were crying. My grandfather who used to live in our house rode in the hearse in front of us, on the way to his own funeral. 

I was sixteen. An age when old people were just old people. It felt bad that I’d lost interest in him and now he was gone. 

A vague fog of dark clothed relatives, drifted around the chapel. Aunts with fur stoles  draped across their shoulders clasped by tiny paws with protruding claws;uncles in gray overcoats and real men’s hats.It was so formal, so unfamiliar, and adults were crying. 

Words fell like rain but my ears refused to listen.

I raged, silently, at being told where to stand, when to pray and what to say…I’ll mourn when I’m ready. I’ll cry when I need to and I’ll come back here when the rest of you are gone. 

If only I could go to go back to the early Sunday mornings on Ash Street. The rest of the family slept in while I went down to Zadie’s room and tiptoed across the cold linoleum floor. There was no carpet, just a shaggy rug the size of a bath mat.  

He was awake, waiting for me, propped up on huge pillows against his brown, iron framed bed. It was higher than mine and covered with a pile of thick, scratchy woolen blankets he brought out from Regina. I can still smell the camphor, from the cedar chest he stored them in over the summer. 

A pair of old man slippers, the kind hairy legs wear, rested just under the bed. I clowned around the room in them and he clapped after each performance. 

He boosted me up beside him and let me comb his thin white hairs across the pink of his scalp and endured the pin curl clips I decorated him with. I read to him when I could barely put the words together and he never laughed, even when I pronounced sugar as cigar.  

The top drawer of his dresser was a treasure box of haberdashery: metal arm clips for holding up shirtsleeves, elastic sock garters and a fancy lady’s mirror__silver handled with an engraved monogram on the back. 

While I grew up, he grew beyond family life and needed to be cared for by strangers, who were willing to do it. His slippers went with him to the nursing home. Nothing else.  

I did go to see him there but only a few times. The bed pillow was small and he was covered with a limp synthetic blanket . The woman in the next room ran a continuous chorus of guttural, gagging sounds. A sign on the door across the hall said “Mrs. Becker, this is your room. The whole place smelled yellow. 

It was worse than visiting him at his graveside. At least here, it was peaceful with memories of a better time.

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