Category Archives: Nandy Ekle

The King

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

 

The King

By Nandy Ekle

 

One of the rules of our critique group is if you haven’t written something new to bring for critique, then you should bring something educational. This is a great rule because it works like a deadline to keep the writing going. But in those days when the words just will not come, we can learn something new and helpful.

So, since I have written nothing new in a while, other than the business letters I write for my day job, I decided it was time to do something educational. So I decided to bring a guest to our meeting tonight.

If you remember my blog from last week, I started reading a new book and the first chapter, which is a prologue, completely, totally blew me away. Talk about words that grab you and don’t let go. This book definitely has kept me hypnotized.

So for our meeting this week I decided to take my book and read the prologue out loud, as a learning tool. So that’s exactly what I did. I took Rose Madder by #Stephen King# and read the prologue to my fellow critiquers. And guess what happened. Exactly the same thing that happened to me. They were entranced.

Thank you, Mr. King, for instructing our group tonight.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

The Magic Words

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

 

The Magic Words

By Nandy Ekle

 

I was born a word person. I don’t remember the age I started reading, but I don’t know that I was a prodigy. But no matter what age I started reading, I’ve always loved stories.

The first stories I loved were bible stories, then the early readers from school. My parents were avid fans of the library and I grew up thinking the library was an enchanted place.

I always had lots of words to say, and said them as often as they came into my head, much to my dad’s dismay. I guess the thing I heard him say more than anything else was, “Don’t your jaws ever get tired of talking?” And of course, the words did slow down, except when I am able to let go and write. And in those moments, I really truly do visit the land of enchantment.

But as much as I love to talk and write my own words, I love reading others’ words just as much. I’ve only ever started about four books I simply could not finish. All the other book I’ve read are the most wonderful dessert in the world.

I said there were only about four books I simply could not finish. The opposite of that is there are about four writers who are the most powerful wizards on the earth.

All this introduction to say I am reading a book now by one of these very talented authors. I know I should not have been so surprised because nearly everything this writer does is pure genius. But I read the first paragraph of the prologue and immediately felt the air shimmer and electrify. The world around me disappeared and I felt like I was being sucked through a vortex to another world. All from the first paragraph.

That is talent.

Your assignment: get your favorite book by your favorite author and analyze it. When do you find yourself grabbed and pulled in to the world? How did they do it? Does the story you’re writing do that? Can you fix it?

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

Who Said That?

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

 

Who Said That?

By Nandy Ekle

 

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes

  1. Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

— Rudyard Kipling

  1. We live and breathe words.

–Cassandra Clare

  1. Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is       more real than the person standing beside us?

–Cornelia Funke

  1. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

–Italo Calvino

  1. What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with            flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance             at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for        thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and             silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human            inventions, binding people together who never knew each other, citizens of distant        epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are            capable of working magic.

–Carl Sagan

  1. I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write             one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine.

–Emily Dickenson

  1. Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

–Orson Scott Card

  1.          Literature is my Utopia.

–Helen Keller

  1. There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes             from an ancient book.

–Arthur Conan Doyle

10.  We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live    forever, unforgettable.

–Neil Gaiman

 

 

Deliberate Randomness

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

Deliberate Randomness

By Nandy Ekle

The clouds lazily crawl across the sky. They look like big old cotton balls and you feel comfortable watching them while the white globs of fluff change and begin to take on shapes. The longer you stare, the more recognizable the shapes are. The shapes morph and become other shapes.

Later you’re sitting in the office waiting for your appointment. Looking down at the tile floor, you notice the flecks of color in the squares. They seem to be random, but after a minute or two, they begin to look like objects or people. You think you see a strange story in the floor.

Then you gaze across the room at the bookcase and notice the grain of wood. The swirls and peaks catch your attention and pretty soon you have another vision of something vaguely familiar.

Randomness is a hard concept to follow. There are patterns all over the place, especially where we least expect them.

Keep your eyes open to the most random spots in your world and see if a picture doesn’t arrange itself for you.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

nandyekle.com

Left and Right

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

Left and Right

By Nandy Ekle

The brain is a whole entire organ. Or is it?

The medical books tells us our brains are actually made up of two hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum. The left hemisphere controls our logic and analytical skills. The right hemisphere, according to experts, is the home of our creativity and imaginations. The corpus callosum enables communication between the two sides.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to give an anatomy lesson.

In the past couple of decades, this has been a hot topic for doctors, nurses, psychologists, educators, even artists. And writing, my friends, is art.

So, the point of all this. When we’re working, as in a day job that pays our bills, we mostly want our “left brains” to be the active side. We might need complete silence in order to keep the right side sleeping, or we might need music playing to distract the right so the left can work. (I actually have a funny story about how my right kept my left from doing what it does . . .)

When we sit at the desk in front of the computer, that’s the time to open the door and let          Mr./Ms. Right out to play. The hard part is getting Dr. Left to go behind that door.

So, my dear readers, your assignment. Write in the comments below the ways you deal with the two sides of your brain to accomplish whatever task you have.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

A Second

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

A Second

By Nandy Ekle

First writing assignment in the new prompt book I bought asks, “What can happen in a second?”

Capturing a second takes a camera. Snap the picture and you’ve caught that moment forever.

So what is in your photograph? You might have a brand new baby in the middle of a sweet little yawn. You might have a dog jumping high in the air as he catches a flying frisbee. You might have a picture of a mountain, but the top of the mountain is covered by a layer of clouds and the bottom is hidden behind a different cloud layer. You could even have a simple bowl of fruit, nothing more, until you look closer and find that one of the apples has the shape of a small mouth bitten into it.

The point of the exercise is to find that one picture that opens up a world of words in your head. The baby yawning could be the story of conquering love. The dog catching the frisbee might be a story of victory. Maybe the partial mountain is a character who appears average on the surface, but becomes something truly majestic when the curtains roll back. And the bowl of fruit? Is there a mystery taking place there?

So, leave me a comment and tell me what you see in a second.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

Writing Prompts

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

Writing Prompts

By Nandy Ekle

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how big our imaginations are. It doesn’t matter how much rest we get or how much time we have to spend. Sometimes we can sit in front of the TV listening to our most mysterious songs with hundreds of interesting photographs spread out in front of us while channeling Shakespeare, and still no ideas come to us. Sometimes we write the same paragraph a hundred times a delete it a hundred and one times and still . . . nothing.

When this happens, we might need a writing prompt or story generator. And there are many out there.

If you google “writing prompt,” the first few pages that come up are for elementary student and teachers. These can work for you, but if you want something more grown up, keep going.

There are different formats for these prompters/generators. I’ve seen some that just blatantly say, “WRITE THIS.” And sometimes we might need that level of command.

I’ve also seen some that are like slot machines. They have several wheels with different story elements. You give them a spin and they put together all kinds of story elements in random order. It’s your job to make something sensible out of it. These can be fun for their silly factor alone.

Then there are what I call the “What if” generators. These are the ones that say things like “What if your life was a mystery novel?” Then it sets a few ground rules such as, “You’re not a detective, but clues about the murderer keep falling at your feet.” These types of generators can be lots of fun because of the possibilities.

There’s another type of prompter I really like and it’s what I call the pressurizer. You’re given some random words to use, or a subject or scene. Then they give either give you a time limit, as in minutes, or an impossible word limit. The reason I like this type of generator is that some of my best stories have come from this kind of writing.

So don’t be afraid to google writing prompts. I’ve heard it said that you give five writers the same assignment, same subject, same scenario, even the same characters, and you get a hundred different stories.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

Where

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

Where

By Nandy Ekle

Where do you get your ideas?

Everywhere. Literally. There is no shortage of stories in this world, or any other world for that matter. You just have to tune in to them.

Go to the mall and watch the people walking and shopping. Try to imagine what their lives are like. There are some people who strut around like peacocks, displaying what they think is great looks and fashion sense. There are “mallers” who are there for fun, walking with friends, laughing, playing, dancing around. Then there are the “trudgers.” These are the people who are there because they have to be—mothers pulling or pushing kids, men who are dragged by an invisible leash from the wife or girl friend in front of them. All these different types of people make me wonder why they are there.

But that’s not the only way to find a story. Read. Every. Thing. Every book, every paper, every billboard, article, instruction, even the ingredients on the back of the Lysol can. Reading every word in the world helps to enhance your vocabulary as well as show you an example of what works well and what doesn’t work at all. We don’t want to copy someone else’s story, but we can definitely get a few ideas.

And don’t forget all the senses: touch, taste, hear, see, and smell. These are great story radars.

If you follow these rules, you’ll never lose a story idea.

What this all boils down to is, there is a story on every piece of dust in the universe.

In the movie “The Magic of Belle Island,” Morgan Freeman plays an old broken down writer who lives next door to a young girl. She wants to be a writer as well and asks the old writer to teach her to make up stories. He takes her outside and asks her what she sees. Her answer to him is the same old stuff, cars on the street, trees covered with leaves, absolutely nothing any different from any other day. Then the old writer says, “Now tell me what you don’t see.”

This is where ideas come from.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.

Why

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

Why

By Nandy Ekle

WHY DO YOU WRITE?

I was born a long time ago with an enlarged imagination.

Pretend you have a box that jiggles and thumps and makes all kinds of noises constantly. Something inside that box whispers, knocks, and calls begging you you to open the lid. It tells you how much fun you would have if you let it out. Then it tells you what a great friend it would be. It tells you how it’s suffocating locked in that box. It begins to sound weak and sickly, sometimes hardly able to speak at all.

So you open the lid.

A dark shadowy shape jumps out sucking in a deep breaths of oxygen. Suddenly all the characters begin talking at once and a hundred scenes act out simultaneously as the shadow unfolds itself. You sit back and enjoy the show for a while, picking up bits and pieces of stories. And the shadow grows bigger and the voices grow louder. It’s now the middle of the night and you know you’ll never get to sleep like this.

You grab the dark thing by the hand and tell it play time is over; it’s time to get back in the box. It giggles and jerks away. So you chase it a while, trying not to get too caught up in its game. You finally catch hold of it again and try to refold it so it will fit back in the box, but it’s like trying to refold a map–just not gonna happen.

You get an idea. Grabbing a pen and paper you write down some of the stories the characters acted out. The more you write, the smaller the shadow gets and the quieter the voices get. Finally you can grab the dark thing by the ear, drop it in the box and close the lid. Now you can sleep.

This is why I write.

The Submit Button

Posted on by
Reply

POST CARDS FROM THE MUSE

The Submit Button

By Nandy Ekle

I have one huge phobia, and that’s spiders. Yeah, that’s right. I openly admit this phobia. I always say that I am not ashamed and am actually very comfortable with my pet phobia.

There is one other thing that frightens me a little, and that is the submit button. This one little thing can paralyze me as completely as a single spider can. I can not count the times my hand has hovered over the button while my brain tries to talk me out of pushing it. “Don’t do it,” it says. “They’ll laugh.” It continues. Then the organ inside my head turns ugly. “You know the story still isn’t right. There’s gaping plot holes and unbelievable dialogue. And your grammar and punctuation are no better than a third grader.”

If my finger still aims at that little button, my gray matter turns mean and hateful. “Who are you kidding? You can’t write a story. Just listen to your so-called style. This is just a silly waste of time and paper. Are you sure you want to bear your soul to strangers so they can laugh at you and point at you? You’re nothing but a useless blob behind a computer keyboard with delusions of grandeur.”

Sometimes I believe the whole spiel. I let all that bullying talk freeze my hand and stop my breathing. Just like seeing a giant spider, my fingers curl back into my hand and I close the computer lid and do something else.

But sometimes I turn on some music and remember the promise I made to my characters to find them a home. Then I close my eyes and . . . push submit. Air rushes into my lungs and my arms feel as though they could lift a house. That’s when I know my success is not whether or not my work is accepted. My success is in squashing the monster.

Congratulations. You have just received a post card from the muse.