Read to Write

"Every story seeks, in Emerson’s words, the “invisible and imponderable.” Faith, loss, emotional contact. But to get there, oddly enough, the storyteller must use the visible, the physical, the eminently tangible: the reader, first and foremost, must be convinced. And details – the right details in the right places – are what do the convincing.” Anthony Doerr,  Four Seasons in Rome

It’s a common thought that in order to be a good writer, you need to read. A lot. You read to write…or to write well at least. Through the words of someone else you find your own voice, start to recognize patterns, determine what you like and don’t, and are influenced by each character, storyline and sentence structure. Good and bad.

I just finished Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr and it has made me itch to start working on my next draft. It was given to me by a good writing friend who noted similarities with my own attempted story structure and it reminded me how much I love reading books of this type.  Stories that provide a window into another, real live person’s life, and take me around the world.  Biting into warm and buttery croissants in Paris, feeling the rain and oppressive humidity of a summer in Rome, meeting a sage-seeming Elephant in Bali: all from the comfort of a park bench in Toronto.

Passion Pays in Purpose

I constantly bemoan that I haven’t yet found a passion that I can translate into a living wage. But I do have at least one passion and I didn’t really get it until now: writing. You know you have a passion when you run home because you can’t wait to get a thought down on paper. Even though you know no one’s lining up to read it, you feel it’s intensely important to get it down just the same. You spend hours of your precious free time sitting in front of a computer when all day long you can’t wait to get away from the screen. It’s how my mind works, how my brain processes the world. My headspace is in a constant state of story-writing, making connections between disparate events, a notebook always at the ready for a constant stream of consciousness.

Draft Three, Let's Go!

So here goes draft three of the book. As it’s a creative non-fiction I’m writing, I really can’t bear to continue living in this particular moment in my past, no matter how wonderful it was and how much I learned. I need to move on.

For this draft, I am going to try to use a software called Scrivener, to try to get through this mountainous task. It allows you to break the book up into chapters and parts, attach research, reorganize sections effortlessly, create bulletin boards of characters and the list goes on.

If I were to write it all again, there is so much I would do differently but this is my first go and with it comes some growing pains. Here’s hoping draft 3 grabs some momentum in my busy life and I can move this killer yardstick forward a tad. Again, for something at least the grandkids can read!  ;)

Should probably take this advice!