THE JEWISH NEW YEAR ---

 ---Begins with Honey

Unless there are health reasons not to, go right ahead and dip.

Honey, Sweetie, think good thoughts for having made it to this day

Blessing for the year to come

CONTEMPLATIONS ON THE MEDIA

 

All last week, in our parched California, the news media (online, in print, and on the air) blared from every possible corner: RAIN IS COMING! (Triple exclamation, but I’ll stick with one.)

 

It’s a big deal, after two years of miserably low precipitation.

 

The day before many times a day the news stations wouldn’t stop talking about it. Even Queen Elizabeth’s funeral preparations made for small breaks in what really mattered—

RAIN IS COMING, and it’s going to be BIG RAIN.

Get your umbrellas out of the closet. Be careful on the roads. You’ll be awakened by possible thunderstorms. Stay inside and bake cookies on Sunday and be careful going to work on Monday.

 

I awoke early Sunday and looked outside. Not a drop. I checked in the back yard where I have a rain collector. Not a drop. It hadn’t so much as sprinkled overnight.

 

I went to the curb to put the garbage and recycling bins out for Monday’s collection. On the other side of the street, I saw a young man walking, holding an open umbrella over himself and wearing a raincoat. It was as dry as could be.

I wondered if it was just me or the world had lost its senses.

 

Many hours later, it did rain. It rained a little. Then the sun came out. Later, it rained once more. Also, just a little.

 

Monday came, and the sun was shining. The hourly news kept telling us not to be fooled. The sunshine could and would turn to showers at a moment’s notice.

It never did.

 

I was happy for the bit of rain. As I said, we needed it. It also meant I can skip a single yard watering, and every bit counts. But it made me think of how media lives to augment and distort reality. Not because they got a weather prediction wrong (this happens), but because even as reality outside said otherwise, the news kept insisting in real time that it was Noah’s flood.

 

I thought about the  raincoat-wearing man with the open umbrella who preferred to believe the news rather than his own eyes.

Many analogies, on the left and the right, popped into my mind. This is what occurred to me: it is immoral to live off intentional propelling of hysteria.

 

I made a note to self to always pay attention to what I am experiencing, and less to the hyperbolic tendencies of the media.

 

And when the next rain comes, I will say, “Welcome. Glad you’re here.” That, and no more.

DOES ANALYZING OTHERS’ WORK MAKE A YOU A BETTER WRITER?

 

One of the many gifts of being a beta reader is learning how a story hits the spot (or doesn’t) on the reader’s end. I have gained as much from being a Beta as from being the one who received feedback from another.

 

There is another form of reading, one cultivated in academia, that imposes analysis on renowned books. The philosophies behind different forms of analysis are super-imposed on the text. I’ve done my share in school, and have never found it to help my writing. For that matter, I haven’t found those who excelled in literary analysis to be strong writers of original fiction. I have personal friends I will never name who fit into this category: strong academic background, and their original fiction suffered from the indoctrination.

 

One may argue, reading this article, that any analysis of others’ work is beneficial when forging with your own story. I will not deny this can and does happen. But as a rule, effective original fiction is intuitive, and the analyzing mind needs to go into lower gear, like a barely audible background hum, in order to tell a story well.

 

Another pithy way of saying this, paraphrasing Dr. Seuss: try to forget what you learned in Rule-going School. Let the intuitive life force flow. Get on the boat, and let it sail down the river, only occasionally resorting to use the oars.

©Geraldine Aikman

MEMOIRES

 

Memoirists have a special challenge: tell a good story, driven by themes which must not overwhelm the plot.

My late father was urged to write a memoire/autobiography, because his life’s story encompassed the momentous events of Jewish history of the 20^th century. He survived the Holocaust (ghetto and concentration camp) to go to what was then Palestine, and fight to establish the Jewish state of Israel. He was critically wounded in the battle for Jerusalem. He was part of a group that established a kibbutz. He went on the represent Israel in cultural aspects in France and Argentina.

 

Even one of these chapters would have made a poignant book. He was an academic historian, and wrote beautifully, having had poems published. He was the one to tell his story, right?

 

But he refused to write his memoires. He told me that people who write their life story inevitably lie, embellish, or seek justification.

“Fiction allows the writer to tell much deeper truths,” my father told me.

 

When I first wrote the story that would evolve into a published novel for middle grades, it was half biographical. By the time it took its final form, the details were more fiction than fact, and I submitted it as such. I was told by one editor who wanted to take it to acquisitions that it would be more likely to be acquired as a memoire. I, like my father, turned that down. The story had left the honest facts of my life’s story long before, in order (as my father would have put it) to tell the deeper truth and tell it as a better, tighter story.

One blurb I got referred to The Voice of Thunder as “fictionalized biography.” Fair enough.

 

Memoirists have the advantage that when submitting their story, they present it as true, and it is easier to sell it that way. But keeping it true while making it tight and compelling is a hard hill to climb.

See this post about the special challenges of seeking to traditionally  publish memoires.