How to Write Anything Braless

When I’m asked on an application about my profession I always fill in writer/author/illustrator and Dazzle Queen of the Universe. No one ever comments. I’m not sure anyone reads anything these days, especially applications.  Even so, I still keep writing, because like it says on those applications I am a writer, and real writers write, regardless of what the universe is or is not reading. 

If I’m ever invited to discuss my creative process I know exactly the kind of advice I’m going to share with other budding wordsmiths.     

Ditch the Bra: Writing is a sedentary process, preformed while sitting in a chair or, in my case, while sitting in bed. Either way you’ll spend your day almost bent in half and will probably, at some point, slip into a much worse if not retched posture. And when the story really gets cooking you may wind up hunched over the keyboard like a deflated balloon. Save yourself time, pain, and distraction and take your bra off before it cuts you in half.    

 Weed the Garden: Typing is stressful and repetitive. Fingers get tired, stiff, and lumpy. Pulling weeds is a low cost exercise that strengthens typing fingers. It does not require special gym equipment or a personal trainer. Fresh, outside air will blow out all the pointless adverbs and metaphors and the weeding will build finger muscles. The corn will thank you. It’s a win-win. 

 Know Your Writing History: As far as I can tell the best place to write a book is in prison: there’s plenty of personal time, distractions are low, and the atmosphere is full of dramatic tension. Get arrested. Absolutely tons of books have been written in prison. If you behave, you may be allowed to work in the prison garden, pulling weeds. See above.     

Exercise Your Butt: While in prison do a lot of squats and dolphin kicks, otherwise your butt is going to spread and start to resemble the front seat of a minivan from all that sitting and writing. And it’s going to feel like you have two cement blocks taped to your tailbone. Trust me on this.

 Shop Quick: If you aren’t lucky enough to be in prison and have to write on a laptop in your bed make sure that you register on your favorite on-line shopping site so that you don’t have to waste time filling out a lot of applications, and you can buy stuff with one click. You’re going to shop; let’s be honest. Just shop quick, that’s all I’m saying.

This is a preliminary outline I’ve been working on for when I’m asked to speak at retirement homes and special school assemblies all over Osceola county, because I’m able to fill in the “What’s your profession” blank with FAMOUS writer/author/illustrator and Dazzle Queen of the Universe.

Linda (Dazzle Queen) Zern     

How Not to Write Anything

It has cost me tens of thousands of dollars to learn how NOT to write.     

As a student of creative writing I study the fine and gentle art of word mongering. I love mongering the words. It’s important to know that part of learning how to write means learning how NOT to write. There are more rules than you might think when you become a wordmongerer.

To show off  . . . er . . . I mean, for instructive purposes I’ve composed the following improper, shoddy, and incorrect versions of word assembly. Mistakes are typed in red, symbolic of blood and death—also bad writing.

EXCESSIVE USE OF SPICES (ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS)

My happy, humming laptop slid rapidly and quickly off the comfy, cushy bed.  I did not really drop, actually throw, quickly roll, mightily toss, or completely skip the smallish computer off the very tall bed. It really, really just slid.

It really, really slid from a softly puffing pillow top mattress onto an average grade slightly tired and walked on Walmart carpet and actually seized completely up. The thickly thick power cord bent extensively and a lot.

FILTERING (ACCORDING TO JOHN GARDNER FILTERING IS THE NEEDLESS LOOKING THROUGH SOME OBSERVING

CONSCIOUSNESS IN WRITING.) YIKES! SOUNDS SERIOUS!

For Example: Turning, I saw my laptop slide off the bed.

Compare: I turned. The laptop slid off the bed. The screen went black, and I was a dead woman. This was the fifth laptop I’d killed with my bare hands.

TOO MANY HE SAID, SHE SAIDS.

“How could you drop your computer again?” he said, asked, or squalled at me like a wounded cat.

“I didn’t drop it. It slid,” I said.

“I did not drop it. It slid off, by itself,” I said again.

“Linda, laptops do not grow on trees,” he said like a big numb nut.

“Really!” I said, my voice sounding really, really mean. “Since when?”

“Now, you’re just being sarcastic,” he said.

Turning, I gave him my best and most evil eye stare. (Actually, that could be an example of filtering.)

There’s more stuff that I’ve learned, but I’m all tired out. Writing is hard. I need a nap.

Linda (Write Stuff) Zern

COLLEGE DAZE: Quizzical

“And the on-line quiz is going to work every single time, right?” I said with heavy irony, a touch of despair, and hoping that I would not be praying for death when it was over.

 Ms. Koopmann, my composition II teacher replied, “Yes, yes, of course the on-line quiz will work every time.”

She smiled with a confidence that I did not trust or understand.

Ms. Koopmann was my college teacher. She taught creative writing and composition II (a class that I had already taken but in another state and with another course name and another magic class identification number, therefore the computer in Florida did not recognize my perfectly fine efforts, and I was having to take it over. It’s take the class over . . . or, hire a private detective to locate my former composition II professor in North Carolina, obtain a letter stating that I did in fact take composition II, and that I stayed conscious for the class and did not argue unduly with the professor.)

Since I took classes in North Carolina, the world has gone green and all written submissions, quizzes, and tests can now be submitted on-line—as in by computer, through the ether, over the Internet (invented by Al Gore or the government or some guy in a garage.)

“And the on-line quiz malarkey is going to work every single time, right?” My question was intended to receive verbal reassurance from my teacher that the whole techno-mess would, in fact, work as promised.

 It didn’t.

 Half way through my first timed computer quiz, my chubby husband of thirty plus years rolled over in bed onto my computer mouse. His flopping about caused a strange, unrelated “window” to pop up on my computer screen, over the top of my quiz. It was a window offering mandarin Chinese lessons.

 Okay, I was taking my first computer quiz in pajamas, in bed, with snacks.

  I clicked on the window; it disappeared.

  The computer quiz gods decided that I was A) dead B) cheating or C) descending the stairs like a goddess (that’s a quote from the reading I was being quizzed on, and that’s why that’s funny.) The quiz god “locked down” my quiz taking. I choked on a pork rind.

“Sherwood, you just blew my first quiz.” I clicked on boxes, windows, and pictures of a blinking padlock.

“AND I KNEW ALL THE ANSWERS.”

 “Urrrrrrghabloooooolig,” he said, squashing my bag of Bar-B-Q pork rinds.

“Wake up, man. I have eleven minutes to figure this out.” I clicked and cursed. The clock ticked down. “Ugh, I have ten minutes.”

 “Whaaaaaaat?”

“I HAVE EIGHT MINUTES.” I clicked madly. “You rolled over my test, and oddly enough when I asked the Help Desk what to do when a chubby husband rolls over on top of a computer mouse causing the, “Do you want this document translated into Mandarin?” option to pop up, THERE WAS NO ANSWER.”

He fumbled for his glasses. The clock ticked on and on. I balled up my fist, shook it at the sky, and cursed the computer quiz gods.

 “Sherwood, I’m doomed and damned.”

The clock ticked down and a cartoon bomb exploded when my twenty minutes had expired. A cold hard lump formed in my throat, nostrils, and sphincter.

I emailed my teacher to explain my quiz taking failure. Her email “came back” with the computer explanation “no such human being exists on this earth.”

 I have begun to pray for a computer related on-line death for a version of myself that resembles a cartoon. More about avatars at a later date.

Linda (Computers are the devil’s workshop!) Zern

Duck Drama

Henry Poole

“There’s a new duck in the chicken coop. Check it out.”

Our hoard of grandchildren thundered past me to “see” the new duck.

“How did that happen?” My husband asked.

“The grandchildren?  Or the duck?”

He sighed. “The duck.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure. Seems Doris’ daughter, Margo who sells Harleys, met a lady at a biker rally whose daughter was raising a duck in her back yard but now she and her college roommates are moving to a new apartment where ducks are not allowed and Margo remembered that we wanted ducks, not knowing that we had already gotten ducks from the Tractor Supply Company and raised them in a metal bucket.”

“Hmmmmm.”

“Exactly. The two college roommates brought Henry Poole, the duck, in a leopard print cat carrier—drunk. The roommates not the duck.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, so they were driving around Saint Cloud drunk with a duck.”

“How does this stuff happen to you?”

“Rumors and scuttlebutt.” I sighed. “The best part is when the college roommates—Tiffany or Brittany, or Jenny, or some such—informed me that Henry Poole was used to eating people food. I let them know that he’d be eating sad old duck food from now on.”

Our "state of the art" duck pen.

“How did that go over?”

“Fine. It was when Charles Dickens, our duck, tried to murder Henry Poole that they seemed a bit shocked by the rules of the chicken coop and farm life in general.”

He shook his head and looked resigned. “Did Charles Dickens kill Henry Poole yet?”

“Not yet, but the jury is still out. I’m keeping everybody separated until they sober up—the ducks, not the roommates. The good news is that Miss Havisham, Charles Dickens’ wife, has started laying eggs.”

“Nice. Let’s celebrate. I’ll make omelets.”

“You’re on,” I said.

And that’s where omelets come from children, not the grocery store and not giant refrigerated trucks. Omelets come from eggs. Eggs laid by Miss Havisham. Eggs that Charles Dickens the Drake will defend to the death, even if he has to drown Henry Poole in the cast iron bathtub in the duck pen. It’s a jungle out there in the chicken coop of life. Stay frosty. Stay focused.

Charles Dickens and Miss Havisham

Linda (Lucky Ducky) Zern

   

Quickies: Postings that are short and sweet!

Ella (age 7) to Conner (6) and Zoe (8) after collecting caterpillars in our back pasture for the butterfly jar, "What a wonderful way to spend the afternoon."

 

                                                              

I estimate that there are approximately 2,173 caterpillars in the butterfly jar this go 'round. I worry that I'll be cocooned to death.

 

RISE OF THE MACHINES

Eye contact was the first casualty. I haven’t made eye contact with another human being for two years. It’s hard to know where to focus my clever, witty retorts when all I see is the top of people’s heads as

they . . .

The cheery sound of tinny elevator music can be heard. Several fat minutes pass.

What was I typing? Oh right.

. . . hunch, as they hunch, over the glowing screen of their machines. They’re probably checking out my clever, witty retorts on Facebook or beating up on birds.

I blame the machines—also the birds.

The second casualty has been my self-esteem. My two-year old granddaughter, who does not speak any form of English that I recognize yet and still poops in her pants, brought one of the machines to me and showed me how to sling birds from a slingshot. I couldn’t do it. She laughed, took the machine and . . .

A clever ringtone of “Afternoon Delight” wafts through the sizzling airwaves. You wait impatiently for me to turn down the offer of free money from a bankrupt federal government.

. . . and with her tiny fingers flung birds about like artillery from the battle of the Bulge. I felt like a big, fat fingered old person.

The third casualty has been freedom: personal, private, individual, collective, group, and institutional. Gone.

Once we traveled long distances, through darkened streets, on rainy evenings without the benefit of the “emergency cell phone.” Those were primitive times. We existed by the seat of our pants, vulnerable to engine failure, flat tires, bad directions, fender benders, and weirdoes in farm houses with telephones. But we were free. Free to use two hands on the steering wheel. Free to use our blinkers. Free to get the news about the cupcakes for the party when you arrived at Sally’s house and not when you’re trying to merge onto I-4 at the Maitland Exchange.

Like I said those were . . .

I ignore you and answer the phone call about the cupcakes. And you wait and wait and wait and wait . . . and good news, Sally was able to get the Spider Man cupcakes on sale!

. . . primitive, primitive times.

I would finish this but there’s this new APP that’s all the rage where you try to blow up balloons with moose toots. It’s a scream. So let me just finish up this level, and I’ll be right with you . . . no, no, no, no, oh no . . . come on get in there, you moose toot, you . . .

Linda (Answer That!) Zern

  

Teaching vs. Telling

“Show don’t tell” is the first commandment you will hear when taking any writing class. It’s good advice.

It’s just that telling is easy and fast and showing requires an endless and judicious use of measures, weights, and scales: too much color, not enough noise, pointless detail, overly obvious contrasts, silly use of clichés.

When it comes to teaching the art of writing, I’m beginning to suspect the same dilemma exists—that showing is harder than telling.

We plow through short stories discussing theme and plot and character and decide that we do or do not “like” the story, but we rarely seize on the why and the how of a story. Why did it work or not. How did the author make it work? Is there evidence in the text itself to explain why a story is magic? How do they do it?

I wish that more writing teachers were able to show me why a writer is great rather than tell me that a writer is great.   

Little. Old. Lady.

I am not a nubile forty-year old anymore. It’s official. I am a little old lady. Here’s how I know.

Books Make Me Tip Over: I knew it was the beginning of the end when my twelve-year-old book bag, fully loaded and contents subject to shifting while in transit, made me tip over. College is not for the weak or shrinking.

“Hey, lady, are you okay?” asked the young man, approximately the age of bee larva, as he watched me sling my backpack over my shoulder. I staggered under its weight and tilted towards the center of the earth. The book bag weighed more than half of me. I staggered to the left and then lurched to the right. I was not dancing. The young man did not offer to help.

My husband finally bought me a rolling briefcase. It makes me look like I’m impersonating a professor, but it’s big enough for my books and my assorted eyebrow stencils.

The Eyebrow Stencils: I have to color my eyebrows on with a crayon. It’s time-consuming and fraught with the potential for goof-ups. Too much crayon and I’m Ronald MacDonald’s mother, too little and I’m Whoopie Goldberg. And the lingering tendency for my knucklebones to freeze up like a bad hinge made in China makes eyebrow placement a bit iffy.

A Burning in My Finger Bones:  Sherwood showed me his index finger. He said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me? My knuckle feels like it’s on fire.”

I held up my knobby hands, my aching elbows, and possibly one throbbing knee. “Yeah, that’s arthritis. I have fingers that are starting to look like they’re trying to run away from my hands. What’s your point?”

I still get hit on by men, but they resemble Captain Ahab from Moby Dick or gypsy wizards: I don’t want to talk about it.

I get extremely nervous when young children stare at me, especially my grandson Conner, who finds my advanced age and decrepitude a subject of extreme and ongoing puzzlement:  “YaYa, why are you so spotty and so bumpy and so old?”

“Conner, look over there; that person might be older than me.”

Then I hobble away as fast as my plantar fasciitis will allow.

No matter how you say it, spin it, or twirl it, it’s official; I am a little old lady.

Linda (Golden Girl) Zern