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Searching for Dreams

May 13, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Antique letter

Forgive me, I haven’t posted in a while. You know how it is when time just flies away. That’s all the time for those of you still raising families, so I’m not complaining: your schedules put mine to shame. On top of it all, I’ve been writing two mysteries at once, one set in contemporary Brooklyn, the other in Paris in 1874. The first drafts should be ready for editing on August 15, at least that’s my goal.

Remember searching for your dreams when you were twenty? I do. And the search still haunts me, the time when we were young and so was life. The world was our oyster, if we only knew how to break it open. It was a time of new adventure, for travel to exotic lands, a time when angst and turmoil were to die for, a time for a lot of navel gazing, a time to forget books and degrees and jobs, a time to get lost in the salt tunnels of Sicily or in the labyrinths of Moroccan villages or on the horns of a dilemma, a time to flirt with life, a time to find oneself.

Well, Fina Fitzgibbons—that’s her name right now, she might change it—but Fina never had those exotic opportunities and a big part of her is searching. Her father disappeared a few years after 9/11 when Fina was a senior at Packer Collegiate in Brooklyn. At the time, her brother was in med school; her sisters still in grade school, and Fina, the middle child with extraordinary business skills as well as a mind for sleuthing had to help support her family. Shortly after her mother was accused of embezzling funds at the Nameless As Yet Foundation where she worked, her body was found steps away from her front stoop and Fina was on her own, the burden of her mother’s death like a fresh wound.

The book begins when Fina falls into her first case. Literally. She’s a newly licensed PI, barely making ends meet. Goaded by her best friend, Cookie, she investigates the death of a woman whose body Fina finds on the same spot where her mother’s body was discovered seven years previously. (And before I forget to tell you, Serafina Florio is one of Fina’s great-great-grandmothers. Fina shares her surname for a reason—she was named in her honor.)

Meanwhile, back in the nineteenth century. Serafina’s on the move and I’ve been writing her fourth mystery. This one takes place in France in April 1874—coincidentally during the First Impressionist exhibit on the boulevard des Capucines—when she’s commissioned to investigate the tawdry death of a Sicilian countess whose body was found on a back street in Paris. The plot gets complicated because the dead countess is the estranged wife of Serafina’s lover, Loffredo, whom she, Serafina, hasn’t seen in several weeks and their romance becomes deeply compromised—on the rocks, you might say—at least in the beginning of the book.

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Inside the Mind of an Author

March 9, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Inside the mind_HungryForester_600

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an author, read Celestial Navigation by Anne Tyler. She gets into the socks of an artist and wiggles her toes.

The book is about Jeremy Pauling, who at thirty-eight has never left home. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but as I recall, Jeremy lives on the top floor of his mother’s home, a Baltimore brownstone, and is misjudged by many, including his sisters, as a person unable to cope. He spends hours in his room, deep into his imagination which is boundless, and then creates collages from found objects, mostly bright scraps of paper he collects.

The book begins at a point of no return for Jeremy and is about how Jeremy changes—he finds the courage to fall in love. But it is also about being creative, the peace or the angst of the artist at work inside his mind—or not—about the necessity of freedom and privacy, and about the fragility of a Jeremy who can become easily torn, like the collages he creates.

Beyond daily word and marketing goals, an author inhabits a special world known only to herself. We are reluctant to share it, although most of the time being inside our brain is the best place to be.  It is a world filled with dreams, a place where we are most productive, a carnival we take care to cultivate. If we don’t visit it often, we begin to dry up.

Sadly, the reverse is also true. There are days when it’s sheer hell, when we must take off our artist-at-play hat and go to work or change a diaper or write copy. Or a day when, despite the care we’ve taken to inhabit our mind, we are restless, cannot do what we want, find the best word, create the best scene or the roundest character or fit the pieces of a novel together.

Most authors have a system for exercising both sides of the brain, but here are twelve ways for mining the rich lode of the subconscious:

  1. Create a space of your own and sit in it, surrounded by your favorite stuff.
  2. Do a morning or afternoon of dolce far niente.
  3. Start a collection of found objects.  Found objects abound in fringe neighborhoods where there are artists’ studios or abandoned factories.
  4. Write a short story in a genre you seldom read. How would it begin?
  5. List the objects in the purse or pocket or closet of your main character.
  6. Rhyme words or string them together creating word salad.
  7. Look at street signs and make up names with them.
  8. Describe the shapes of clouds or mountains. Find giants in them.
  9. Write without conscious thought, pushing the pen across paper.
  10. Read poetry or go to a gallery. Savor how the words or colors surprise.
  11. Eat your favorite food slowly, concentrating on the different flavors and name them. Name the scents in a meadow or a library or a sewer or a morgue or a haunted house or describe how newly cut grass smells.
  12. Never listen to “Why don’t you write a book about …”

Now it’s time for me to put butt in chair and write.

Photo: Inside the mind. Credit: HungryForester (Flickr), Creative Commons

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Characters We Remember

January 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Sunset in Sicily_by Villa Ghimette (Flickr), Creative Commons

Fleshy Breathers

I call them fleshy breathers—characters we remember long after we’ve read the book. They are flesh-and-blood real, larger than life, perhaps ahead of their time. We meet them at a point of no return in their lives and we watch, fascinated, as they pivot or sit there, all broody. We may have forgotten their names, but they and the events that entice them to change are a big reason why we keep reading books.

Fleshy breathers are born in imagination, strut their stuff in books, pop out every once in a while in our memory. We can see them waiting for the bus or walking down the block a few steps ahead of us, or remember them in the agony of their central conflict. I swear I’ve seen the white rabbit shooting down a manhole. They are amazing creations and have spellbinding stories to tell, and they go on and on.

We love them or love to hate them, but we’re not indifferent to them. They hold us in thrall. Full of longing, they carp, mope, dream, love or lament, have quirky habits, sleep too much or not at all. They change or sort of change or vow to change next week. They slip and fall. They make us fearful or frightfully angry, and sometimes they even disgust us. But because of the unique way they stumble about the page, they surprise, they shock, they stick to us like glue.

These are some of my favorites—at least for today—but mind you, as soon as I post this, I’ll think of others: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment (mostly I want to ring his neck), Humboldt, Molly Bloom, Hamlet, Hercule Poirot, Andy Dalziel (the only character I know who breaks wind on a regular basis), Anne Eliot, Emma, Ahab, Jude Fawley, the Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall, and I mustn’t forget his wife, Liz, who, although she has a small part, is powerful; Sarah Berg in Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs, Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, Jack Burden in All The King’s Men.

Who are some of your favorite characters?

Photo: Sunset in Sicily by Villa Ghimette (Flickr), Creative Commons.

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Where Does a Story Begin

August 27, 2012 By 2 Comments

writing in rome3_gnuckxThe heart of story

In another life and far away, I studied at the Art Students League in New York and attended the annual lectures of John Howard Sanden—he’s the artist who recently completed the portraits of Laura and George W. Bush. Invariably, his lecture started with a demonstration, usually an alla prima painting of the sitter’s head in three-quarter view. Afterward, he took questions.

One time, someone asked him, how do you begin a portrait? He smiled and said it depended. Sometimes he started in the conventional way by measuring, mapping, massing out a pose and working to ever smaller shapes as did his mentor and much-loved John Singer Sargent. But sometimes he began by painting an eye in just the right spot on a white canvas, then painting his way to the other eye, the nose, the mouth, chin, forehead, you get it. I’m sure before the first sitting, he’d spent hours studying his subject, going round and round the edges, getting all the lines and color into his fingers, making numerous drawings of the person’s facial expression, mixing gobs of paint to capture the subject’s flesh tones, rehearsing various poses and angles until he discovered just the right gesture for the portrait.

So it is with writers and our stories. Sometimes we begin by plotting, other times by fixing on a character, getting the words and color into our fingers. But where does the story begin? The answer varies by genre and by story and by author, I would imagine.

There’s the old saw that a story begins at the point of no return and that’s delicious to chew on, but I’m not really talking about beginning-middle-end. I mean, in the deep down, what moves us to write a particular story or series or body of work? Where’s the eye? Is it contained in the opening scene? Probably not.

My stories begin and end with a few images I carry around in my head. Some of them I’m not even aware of. Sometimes they’re written into a scene, but they’re deeper than that. Like William Faulkner’s image of Caddy in a tree that begins his story of the Snopes family, they begin and end and infuse a body of work. For me, I have two images: one, of a young girl, a tatterdemalion named Tessa, walking the streets of the Lower East Side in the 1900s; a second, of Serafina, a midwife, walking home after managing a birth in nineteenth-century Sicily. She’s waving to the baker and her earrings jingle, catching the sun. What brings them to that point in their lives? Where are they going? What are they doing? Who does what to them?

Where does your story begin?

Photo: Writing in Rome. Credit: gnuckz (Flickr), Creative Commons.

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Why Do You Write?

June 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Lower East Side

Long before they were books, the Serafina Florio mystery series began as two paintings. In 1997 I was commissioned by the American Jewish Committee to paint a diptych of the Lower East Side. The client told me I had free rein as long as my work reflected all ethnic groups that settled in the area from 1882 to 1925.

So how do you stuff the richness of that neighborhood onto a canvas? Before I picked up a brush, I spent three months walking the streets of lower Manhattan, sketching in a notebook, reading as much as I could about the great migration of the early twentieth century, interviewing long-time residents, frequenting the delis, the pickle stands, the Tenement Museum. I stood on the site of the pig market at Hester and Ludlow, the historic focal point of New York’s garment center; I walked Orchard, Mott, Eldridge, Grand, and—my favorite—Elizabeth Street where Sicilians settled.

Maybe it was the onion soup at Ratner’s, but one day as I sat on a park bench, I imagined a young girl. Smudged from play and wearing a patched smock, she looked at me a moment, pointed to the mass of haggling peddlers, shoppers, prostitutes, and children playing under push carts. Placing a finger to the side of her nose, she whispered something indistinct, disappeared. What did she say? Where was she born—in a back street in Sicily? A village in Russia? A brothel on Allen Street? What were her dreams?

Tessa, I called her, a name taken from the roll of those who perished in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in March 1911. Probably she lived in one of ten thousand overcrowded tenement buildings south of Fourteenth Street. For sure she breathed fetid air, carried water from the well up five flights of stairs. She froze in winter, roasted in summer, was ashamed of her accent and dress.

So I sketched my roughs and painted my paintings.

Time passed and I switched from oils to words, but Tessa lives on in my mind. Like the lower Manhattan neighborhood I love, she has cast her spell. That’s how DEATH OF A SERPENT started. It’s the first book in a very long series.

What inspired you to write?

Photo: Clam Seller, Mulberry Street, Lower East Side, New York, ca 1900. Credit: Detroit Photographic Co.

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