Renee is Writing

Night is a blue velvet drape outside my bedroom window. Between the clicks of the baseboard heater the muse comes tapping. Long golden tresses flow over her shoulders. She is dressed in pale blue and green chiffon. Her slender hands pull me from dreams and needed sleep, luring me with poetic lines and dramatic scenes with irresistible characters. I toss and turn, knowing it's hopeless to try and go back to sleep. Now the muse begins to hum, melodious tones spill from her mouth filling the room with the siren's song that calls me to my desk. In that vaporous alley between midnight and dawn poems rise like mist over the ocean. My pen glides across the page as the muse whispers in my ear. Her hand braces my elbow nudging me to keep writing. All thoughts of sleep vanish in the verses and I keep writing until sunlight glints in the window behind me, chasing away the dark night shadows that spawn poetry and stories. As the shadows fade the muse disappears leaving me to continue t...

On a clear and crisp November weekend three members of my writers' group Tapestrie s venture out to the south fork of Long Island for our twice a year retreat. Staying at Sea Crest Resort in Amagansett we find the time to write and the support of other writers. As the sun rises in the east I brew a pot of coffee, have breakfast, then go for a walk along the beach. The sand is soft beneath my sneakers. The waves roll softly into the shoreline and the seagulls' cries greet me. As I walk, characters appear in my mind, new plot lines unroll like the waves, and as questions are answered others arise. These will be raised to my fellow writers later today when we have our brainstorming session. Back in our suite, I shower and get dressed, then settle at the kitchen table, notebook open, purple pen in hand poised above the blank page and begin to write. The time and silence in which to write is a rare gift for a writer, especially the three of us who all have full time jobs and fam...

In four days I will be driving out to Amagansett to attend a weekend retreat with two women from my writers' group. It will be a welcome getaway after a late season hurricane and an early snowstorm. Thankfully the resort we stay at, Sea Crest, has power, heat and minimal storm damage so they are open for business. Open to welcome us into a little suite with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen, 2 bathrooms and a living room and dining area. We will take our pens, notebooks, and laptops and write away. In between meals and snacks we will create characters, weave plot lines, amp up suspense and tension, and hopefully make significant progress with our novels. We will also spend time brainstorming so we can give each other ideas for plot lines and character development. Writing is a solitary sport but sometimes three heads create more of a story! So you may wonder why I called this post writing confusion. It's an old tale for me. I've been beating my head against the plot wall of my nove...

I enter poetry and find my self. The images and metaphors beat with my heart, the rhythms float on my breath, and the lessons in the verses are my life blood. I found poetry as a child hearing and reading nursery rhymes and soon began to write my own poems. As a more independent reader I discovered the humor of Ogden Nash and the world of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verses." In poetry I found my own private Camelot, a place of perfection. Inside the silence and solitude of writing poetry I record my world and learn about my own heart. I discovered Mary Oliver's astute descriptions of nature and Billy Collins' persepective on the everyday world. I ventured into the mystical realm of Rumi and Hafiz. I travel away and into prose--fiction and essay, novels and memoirs, but always return to the land of poetry. I read it, write it, study it and read about writing it. It is my heart and soul and herein I will always abide.

After a four day weekend away at a wedding with no time to write I received a gift. It's an odd gift with a real demon side. Hurricane Sandy is pounding up the eastern coastline and preparing to slam into the New Jersey and New York shorelines. Due to Sandy we have two days off from work. Of course it would be better if there wasn't a natural disaster at the helm of this unplanned vacation but here it is in my lap. So far I have completed revisions on my flash fiction chapbook in preparations for submitting it to a contest next month. I'm also working on queries for my short story collection so I can send them to publishers. I'm going to target some small publishers and see how it goes. Next it's back to my novel. I would love to finish a first draft before my retreat in three weeks so I can begin revisions, or put it away and turn to poetry and flash fiction again. I need the quick results of short forms. But at odd times the characters and plot lines of my nov...

Saturday was spent out at the wineries with friends and we had a grand time. Sunday bloomed crisp and sunny and free. A good spread of hours in which to write. But as much as writers love to write, we also seem adept at finding other ways to occupy our free time. Here are ten things to do instead of writing. Some fun and some not so much fun, but they supply the coward's way out of attacking that plot twist, that end rhyme, that perfect tie up to an essay. clean out your closet take photos of your shoes to glue on the boxes so you know what's inside bake a batch of brownies read a good novel make lists of ideas for new novels and stories walk in the woods do laundry take a nap chat on facebook enter writing contests (well okay at least this one is related to writing) After all that is done it's time to tackle that new chapter and figure out exactly why Meghan's twin sister committed suicide on her sixteenth birthday. Or was it really suicide?

I just read an article in last month's "The Writer Magazine" that presented writing advice from the inimitable Edgar Allan Poe who died at the ripe age of 40. He lived an addictive and tortured life but managed to create some of the best crafted prose and poetry of his century. Indeed, he treaded the first steps in the genres of mystery and horror. A writer to be reckoned with for sure. Poe scribed essays about writing for a variety of magazines in between penning his poems and short stories. In one of those essays he talks about the value of writing short. His claim was that a reader needed to be able to consume a poem or story in one sitting so as not to disrupt the mood and tone of the piece. In this way the reader was able to keep the "whole" of the story in his head. He claimed that when reading a novel, where the reader is forced to put down the book in between reading sessions, he loses the thread of the plot and the mood of the fictive world created by...