Michael Cogdill's Blog - Posts Tagged "she-rain"
She-Rain Puts the Love Back in Love Triangle, Takes On Inevitability of Sex Scandal
Adultery makes news the way war once did. I have no need here to call names. The above headline alone will send famous faces – and the images of their attendant heartbreak -- soaring to mind.
Celebrity love triangles seem as common as our very longing to be loved. I’ve worked in television news for twenty-five years and have never seen so widespread a herd of big-name libidos running wild. Perhaps it’s just more chic now to cover the naked truth of people we wish never to see naked. It is, certainly, magnetic. Viewers and readers pile in.
Yet for all its info-tainment, this wide-screen cheat-fest, even with its weeping contrition, has a way of attaching despair to us. It gives off the feel that we’re nearly doomed by our deeply human nature. Stepping out in the Biblical sense may begin to feel inevitable. I wonder how many people in devoted relationships secretly fear themselves left out. Even the most sympathetic witnesses to the heartbreak of a scandalized relationship may honestly feel they’re missing the fun that caused it. A real and lasting love can feel as likely as the NBC Nightly News with Conan O’Brien.
For She-Rain, I leaned into a simple definition of romantic love: Young hearts longing for one another as they long for the very best for each other. This seems a clarifying and pure way to think of it. For the people who form the love triangle of She-Rain, the very best of living with it does not come naturally, or easily. Their lust is as common as hunger, strong as sunlight. Some good science shows run-amok romantic love grows from brain chemistry awfully akin to obsessive compulsive disorder. Pedro Calderon de la Barca believed love that is not madness is not love. Frank, Mary Lizbeth and Sophia – as they made way through my imagination – feel this madness as an irresistible agony.
But what if amid that madness, a love triangle formed a constellation of hope rather than a design of malice? Human longing -- lived well – just might improve the nature of our hearts. The Faulknerian heart in conflict with itself can brace us to stand gracefully on our feet of clay.
As with our minds, we allow the majority of our hearts to lie fallow, seldom explored or used for their greatest good. Readers of She-Rain discover three people, survivors of crunching hard times, who venture out toward the edges of what the heart can hold. There to find that we human creatures -- so prone to the self-destruction of lust, envy and revenge – hold a stunning capacity for beauty.
I have chosen to tell a scandalous Southern tale -- a love story like no other. In it, all are flawed, love at times seems the most malignant insanity, and people practically sun themselves in tragedies of the early 20th Century -- many of which still make news today. Yet in She-Rain, three people clear themselves a way to let the love between them reign. They show us that malice and disgrace, in the face of temptation, are not inevitable. Living imperfect lives of defiance, two women in love with the same man create a wonder of the least expected. In this fiction, I believe we see a truth about ourselves. We catch sight of what’s possible. Those powerful women show the way.
That defiance in She-Rain draws from my boyhood reality. Growing up in the home of an alcoholic who kept the air charged with threat of violence, I saw love as an act of miserable sacrifice. Sociologists might have presumed such a boy would devolve into a man on the same path – sentencing the women I encountered along the way to the same abuses, and myself to destruction. Yet the opposite occurred. I managed to flout expectation. By the great virtue of strong women who raised me, and the model of a World War I veteran who put on display the stunning strength found in living as a gentle man, I cut a path far apart from addiction, abuse of women, and religious fundamentalism, which too often sentences women and children to death in the name of family. I abandoned a father hell-bent on destroying himself, and that act generated an accountability that saw him hit bottom and bounce into a beautifully forgiven man. One whose memory my mother and I love and honor deeply to this day. She-Rain is dedicated, in parts, to both of them.
I dedicate it, also, to my wife Jill, my muse who inspired both women in the love triangle. She remains the idealistic young soul I fell nearly instantly in love with in 1985. I tried to marry her so fast I nearly spooked her father into moving her away. Yet a few years into the writing of She-Rain, I found an utterly new woman emerging in her. Out of her strength, a stronger woman came. Rather than aging, she’s become a constant re-creation of herself, one of stunning beauty and grace I wish to deserve. In She-Rain, she inspired me to let fly the wisdom of measuring ourselves not by who we are, but by the legacy of what we can become. She deserves the plural title loves of my life.
Which brings me to the title of She-Rain; it derives from an Appalachian folklore term for a scrap of fog that breaks from a cloud to drift on the mountain treetops. It takes on the delicate look of lace, surrendered to wind, and that surrender reminds us of a higher order to which we can yield. Hard times, most certainly in relationships, are inevitable. Yet we are not doomed to a hard fall. Through the clash of body and soul, above the warring of our inner good and evil, we can soar.
In the novel, I chose to put this first on display in a simple act of love between two desperately poor children. Out of their terrible times, they respect and serve one another -- creating a form of love that defies words. As it evolves into young adulthood, that love grows more familiar to what we know as the longings behind every sex scandal ever known. Yet this young man -- soon to find himself in love with two women at once -- respects himself enough to harbor a sacrosanct kind of respect for them. He becomes man enough to allow both women to improve him. This love triangle helps yank him from the swamp of ignorance and violence into which he was born and set him on a path to greatness no one sees coming.
This young man, Frank Locke, your narrator in She-Rain, lives a lifetime in one of the ironic truths of sacrificial young love: It refuses to grow old and weary as we do. The feel of it sweetens with age, improves us, even as we stumble and fall and crave forgiveness, often failing to live up to its high ideal. I won’t spoil the story by letting you know which woman he shares the majority of his life with, or the full impact both women have on who he becomes. Though I leave you with a few of his words, written from his teenage memory of one of those women he adores. In this passage of She-Rain lives the yearning that can scandalize a man, alongside the devotion that can fortify him. In it a young man coming of age in a terrible time celebrates his early joy of a great woman’s love – feeling the brush of her own against his heart.
"Seeing her braced me to the bone, yet moved a sweet pain through to the marrow – as if we had been apart years instead of days. The dark curls in a tide around her face, skin colored in shades of creek sand, deep with summer and the force of a seventeen-¬year-¬old heart. Her eyes shone wet and bright as a long mountain view after rain – at once delicate and strong, refusing to grant sorrow or malice a bed of its own. Even in that cemetery, in the hardness of the time, every line that formed her, everything she was, begged for a fingertip. She was, to me, perfect satisfaction. A near-¬holy place of rest."
Michael Cogdill, a 24-time Emmy winner in television, dedicates his Southern novel She-Rain to the empowerment of women, encouraging all in a toxic relationships to walk out before they have to run.
She-Rain
Celebrity love triangles seem as common as our very longing to be loved. I’ve worked in television news for twenty-five years and have never seen so widespread a herd of big-name libidos running wild. Perhaps it’s just more chic now to cover the naked truth of people we wish never to see naked. It is, certainly, magnetic. Viewers and readers pile in.
Yet for all its info-tainment, this wide-screen cheat-fest, even with its weeping contrition, has a way of attaching despair to us. It gives off the feel that we’re nearly doomed by our deeply human nature. Stepping out in the Biblical sense may begin to feel inevitable. I wonder how many people in devoted relationships secretly fear themselves left out. Even the most sympathetic witnesses to the heartbreak of a scandalized relationship may honestly feel they’re missing the fun that caused it. A real and lasting love can feel as likely as the NBC Nightly News with Conan O’Brien.
For She-Rain, I leaned into a simple definition of romantic love: Young hearts longing for one another as they long for the very best for each other. This seems a clarifying and pure way to think of it. For the people who form the love triangle of She-Rain, the very best of living with it does not come naturally, or easily. Their lust is as common as hunger, strong as sunlight. Some good science shows run-amok romantic love grows from brain chemistry awfully akin to obsessive compulsive disorder. Pedro Calderon de la Barca believed love that is not madness is not love. Frank, Mary Lizbeth and Sophia – as they made way through my imagination – feel this madness as an irresistible agony.
But what if amid that madness, a love triangle formed a constellation of hope rather than a design of malice? Human longing -- lived well – just might improve the nature of our hearts. The Faulknerian heart in conflict with itself can brace us to stand gracefully on our feet of clay.
As with our minds, we allow the majority of our hearts to lie fallow, seldom explored or used for their greatest good. Readers of She-Rain discover three people, survivors of crunching hard times, who venture out toward the edges of what the heart can hold. There to find that we human creatures -- so prone to the self-destruction of lust, envy and revenge – hold a stunning capacity for beauty.
I have chosen to tell a scandalous Southern tale -- a love story like no other. In it, all are flawed, love at times seems the most malignant insanity, and people practically sun themselves in tragedies of the early 20th Century -- many of which still make news today. Yet in She-Rain, three people clear themselves a way to let the love between them reign. They show us that malice and disgrace, in the face of temptation, are not inevitable. Living imperfect lives of defiance, two women in love with the same man create a wonder of the least expected. In this fiction, I believe we see a truth about ourselves. We catch sight of what’s possible. Those powerful women show the way.
That defiance in She-Rain draws from my boyhood reality. Growing up in the home of an alcoholic who kept the air charged with threat of violence, I saw love as an act of miserable sacrifice. Sociologists might have presumed such a boy would devolve into a man on the same path – sentencing the women I encountered along the way to the same abuses, and myself to destruction. Yet the opposite occurred. I managed to flout expectation. By the great virtue of strong women who raised me, and the model of a World War I veteran who put on display the stunning strength found in living as a gentle man, I cut a path far apart from addiction, abuse of women, and religious fundamentalism, which too often sentences women and children to death in the name of family. I abandoned a father hell-bent on destroying himself, and that act generated an accountability that saw him hit bottom and bounce into a beautifully forgiven man. One whose memory my mother and I love and honor deeply to this day. She-Rain is dedicated, in parts, to both of them.
I dedicate it, also, to my wife Jill, my muse who inspired both women in the love triangle. She remains the idealistic young soul I fell nearly instantly in love with in 1985. I tried to marry her so fast I nearly spooked her father into moving her away. Yet a few years into the writing of She-Rain, I found an utterly new woman emerging in her. Out of her strength, a stronger woman came. Rather than aging, she’s become a constant re-creation of herself, one of stunning beauty and grace I wish to deserve. In She-Rain, she inspired me to let fly the wisdom of measuring ourselves not by who we are, but by the legacy of what we can become. She deserves the plural title loves of my life.
Which brings me to the title of She-Rain; it derives from an Appalachian folklore term for a scrap of fog that breaks from a cloud to drift on the mountain treetops. It takes on the delicate look of lace, surrendered to wind, and that surrender reminds us of a higher order to which we can yield. Hard times, most certainly in relationships, are inevitable. Yet we are not doomed to a hard fall. Through the clash of body and soul, above the warring of our inner good and evil, we can soar.
In the novel, I chose to put this first on display in a simple act of love between two desperately poor children. Out of their terrible times, they respect and serve one another -- creating a form of love that defies words. As it evolves into young adulthood, that love grows more familiar to what we know as the longings behind every sex scandal ever known. Yet this young man -- soon to find himself in love with two women at once -- respects himself enough to harbor a sacrosanct kind of respect for them. He becomes man enough to allow both women to improve him. This love triangle helps yank him from the swamp of ignorance and violence into which he was born and set him on a path to greatness no one sees coming.
This young man, Frank Locke, your narrator in She-Rain, lives a lifetime in one of the ironic truths of sacrificial young love: It refuses to grow old and weary as we do. The feel of it sweetens with age, improves us, even as we stumble and fall and crave forgiveness, often failing to live up to its high ideal. I won’t spoil the story by letting you know which woman he shares the majority of his life with, or the full impact both women have on who he becomes. Though I leave you with a few of his words, written from his teenage memory of one of those women he adores. In this passage of She-Rain lives the yearning that can scandalize a man, alongside the devotion that can fortify him. In it a young man coming of age in a terrible time celebrates his early joy of a great woman’s love – feeling the brush of her own against his heart.
"Seeing her braced me to the bone, yet moved a sweet pain through to the marrow – as if we had been apart years instead of days. The dark curls in a tide around her face, skin colored in shades of creek sand, deep with summer and the force of a seventeen-¬year-¬old heart. Her eyes shone wet and bright as a long mountain view after rain – at once delicate and strong, refusing to grant sorrow or malice a bed of its own. Even in that cemetery, in the hardness of the time, every line that formed her, everything she was, begged for a fingertip. She was, to me, perfect satisfaction. A near-¬holy place of rest."
Michael Cogdill, a 24-time Emmy winner in television, dedicates his Southern novel She-Rain to the empowerment of women, encouraging all in a toxic relationships to walk out before they have to run.
She-Rain
More Praise of She-Rain, As I Praise the Beautiful Blonde Who Inspired This Writer
Yet another review just emerged, this one also speaking of She-Rain in terms every writer longs to hear. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude. Here's a portion:
Reviewer Comments:
I am really struggling to write this review, because everything I've tried putting down so far, seems so lame. There is no real way I can describe how beautifully written this book is. She-Rain was written with the most beautiful prose and has that rich Southern feel that makes this book amazing and one of the best, if not THE best story I've ever read.
Beautifully written, "She-Rain" captured my soul from the beginning. The story is about an abused boy, Frank Jr., who grew up in a mill town in the 1920's with an alcoholic and drug addicted father and a strong and hard working mother. The emotions are raw and real and cover all from anger, hatred, and rage, to love, hope and forgiveness. The characters are so very real, so real that I swear I've known some of them from my own childhood.
Although I finished this book a few days ago, I still am breathless by this most unforgettable novel. This is a book that I will be keeping in my permanent collection and will be read again and again. I honestly won't be surprised, if in years to come, it becomes a classic. It is truly a treasure that should not be missed. This is a must to add to this year's reading list.
http://tweezlereads.blogspot.com/2010...
This praise about the prose reminds me some of the richest lyricism grows from silence. My wife, Jill, and I celebrate the fact She-Rain rose in part from a member of our family who never spoke a word. Yet she articulated love far beyond words. Below here you'll find a tribute to her, coming soon to blogs around the world. I'm deeply honored to share it here.
A Dog’s Inspiration to a Writer and the World
How the Life and Death of a Golden Retriever Might Save Us From Ourselves
On the morning of May 29, 2008, I lifted Savannah from her bed, carried her to the car, and made the longest seven-mile drive of my life. At the office of a veterinarian, welcomed by that profession’s unique form of love, I soon lay on a cushioned floor beside a golden retriever who showed virtually none of her age, watching both my hands stroke the face that had welcomed me home for thirteen years.
The answer to a yearning awaited us that morning. It was part of the quiet covenant I made with Savannah the day my wife, Jill, and I adopted her. When a sweet dog’s bloodline comes in confluence with our own, we human animals take on a sacred devotion. As sickness comes on hard and takes down the joy of living, caring dog owners are committed to shouldering our beloved family member to a merciful death. On the floor that morning, I answered Savannah’s courageous outreach for that death, allowing her to carry me. The peace that arrived in her final breath lifted the tide of my heartbreak. As I nearly drowned in sadness, Savannah showed me to the shore of a graceful goodbye.
Later that day, a prominent friend in Hollywood, fresh from the same grief in his own family, shared with us some comfort, but also a spiritual yearning of his own: Why would God measure the lifetime of dogs, and other animals we love, by a virtual hourglass when we live by a calendar? Why so little time on earth for those so good and loyal? It seems a cruelty.
After these months of healing, and the reporting of countless human tragedies on television, I’ve arrived at a conclusion: Savannah’s too-short life, like that of all sweet dogs, calls us to a fine urgency. Dogs get after big living. They seem illiterate of worry, yet able to read joys that elude us. They quietly shout to us: Wag your backside to music instead of your tongue to malice. Wallow less in pity and more on the bed of the one you adore. Give yourself, extravagantly, away.
I still fail her, of course. I live too much in my worries and sorrows and too little on the joy path she wore for me. Yet in these times of media-saturated human disaster ,a thought of Savannah improves me as a man, recalls me to life as a writer. Her memory sets off some musing about the hope found in the life and death of a good dog. See if these truths make the news of your times easier to bear:
Savannah feared nothing about death. She went to it with eyes full of gratitude for the way her life had been. Her eyes seemed to draw from some deep well of love, way beyond the crust of words. Even in her final hour, sick as she was, she lived as a divining rod to this love. No matter how I tried to comfort her, she served me – right to her last moment. The kidney failure that was stalling her life was no match for the servant’s heart within her.
The high pitch of biased media, politics, and the vitriol of social debate held no allure for Savannah. She made grace her way of life. She ran from loud voices and bounded to gentility wherever she found it. We could trust her to be tender, even with the smallest child. Savannah taught me there’s nothing so powerful in this life as a truly gentle woman or man.
There is no vanity in such dogs. They split mud holes, then track adoration across the floors of the humans who forgive them. They surely wonder why we care so much for things and so little for helping one another have simple wellness and fun. Savannah never cared for the size of my car. She simply loved the ride. She measured none of my money in how she valued me. In times of my sorrow, she made certain to place her head under my hand, letting me read a sense of all-will-be-more-than-well in its Braille.
With the too-often forgotten elderly in a nursing home, Savannah visited with no consciousness of herself. The sights and smells that repulse too many humans never seem to repel a good dog. Something innate about Savannah longed to care for everyone. She never appraised anyone by their politics, religion, or race. No human bloodline or job pedigree held any sway. Savannah treated the ignorant as kings and the malicious as queens. Even avowed dog haters valued what they found in her, and she loved them without pause.
Such a dog will forgive to the point of endangering itself. Some may argue enough hatefulness will turn any dog, even the most generous and kind. Perhaps this forms a caveat to us as well. Maybe good dogs teach us we will eventually draw back what we put into the world. Or is it that forgiveness becomes a form of capital we spend to the great shock of our enemies, an investment from which we draw the interest of turning enemies into friends? After every trip to the vet, on the heels of cavity exams every sane creature loathes, Savannah forgave Jill and me. We never had to ask.
In the afterglow of thinking of her, I adore considering how living so might change humankind. What might the news look like if everyone were so devotedly kind to everyone else? My job -- as a writer of news and fiction -- would so beautifully change.
Within an hour after putting her into that permanent sleep, I sat weeping at our kitchen table and wrote an open letter to Savannah. It let my grief out to run, with the memory of her a comfort at my knee. I leave you with a passage of it here, and a wish that the news of our future days will improve, changed in some small way by the legacy of Savannah.
“You tracked to the child who lives in me always. In this man you found a boy who loves you, sweet girl. Even in death, somehow you will always lead the boy in me home. I will follow your trail. And together, in the grand wet and muddy fun places of memory, we will be glad.”
###
Michael Cogdill is an Emmy-winning television journalist whose novel, She-Rain, contains two narrative threads dedicated to the memory of Savannah. She-Rain debuts nationally in March, 2010.
Reviewer Comments:
I am really struggling to write this review, because everything I've tried putting down so far, seems so lame. There is no real way I can describe how beautifully written this book is. She-Rain was written with the most beautiful prose and has that rich Southern feel that makes this book amazing and one of the best, if not THE best story I've ever read.
Beautifully written, "She-Rain" captured my soul from the beginning. The story is about an abused boy, Frank Jr., who grew up in a mill town in the 1920's with an alcoholic and drug addicted father and a strong and hard working mother. The emotions are raw and real and cover all from anger, hatred, and rage, to love, hope and forgiveness. The characters are so very real, so real that I swear I've known some of them from my own childhood.
Although I finished this book a few days ago, I still am breathless by this most unforgettable novel. This is a book that I will be keeping in my permanent collection and will be read again and again. I honestly won't be surprised, if in years to come, it becomes a classic. It is truly a treasure that should not be missed. This is a must to add to this year's reading list.
http://tweezlereads.blogspot.com/2010...
This praise about the prose reminds me some of the richest lyricism grows from silence. My wife, Jill, and I celebrate the fact She-Rain rose in part from a member of our family who never spoke a word. Yet she articulated love far beyond words. Below here you'll find a tribute to her, coming soon to blogs around the world. I'm deeply honored to share it here.
A Dog’s Inspiration to a Writer and the World
How the Life and Death of a Golden Retriever Might Save Us From Ourselves
On the morning of May 29, 2008, I lifted Savannah from her bed, carried her to the car, and made the longest seven-mile drive of my life. At the office of a veterinarian, welcomed by that profession’s unique form of love, I soon lay on a cushioned floor beside a golden retriever who showed virtually none of her age, watching both my hands stroke the face that had welcomed me home for thirteen years.
The answer to a yearning awaited us that morning. It was part of the quiet covenant I made with Savannah the day my wife, Jill, and I adopted her. When a sweet dog’s bloodline comes in confluence with our own, we human animals take on a sacred devotion. As sickness comes on hard and takes down the joy of living, caring dog owners are committed to shouldering our beloved family member to a merciful death. On the floor that morning, I answered Savannah’s courageous outreach for that death, allowing her to carry me. The peace that arrived in her final breath lifted the tide of my heartbreak. As I nearly drowned in sadness, Savannah showed me to the shore of a graceful goodbye.
Later that day, a prominent friend in Hollywood, fresh from the same grief in his own family, shared with us some comfort, but also a spiritual yearning of his own: Why would God measure the lifetime of dogs, and other animals we love, by a virtual hourglass when we live by a calendar? Why so little time on earth for those so good and loyal? It seems a cruelty.
After these months of healing, and the reporting of countless human tragedies on television, I’ve arrived at a conclusion: Savannah’s too-short life, like that of all sweet dogs, calls us to a fine urgency. Dogs get after big living. They seem illiterate of worry, yet able to read joys that elude us. They quietly shout to us: Wag your backside to music instead of your tongue to malice. Wallow less in pity and more on the bed of the one you adore. Give yourself, extravagantly, away.
I still fail her, of course. I live too much in my worries and sorrows and too little on the joy path she wore for me. Yet in these times of media-saturated human disaster ,a thought of Savannah improves me as a man, recalls me to life as a writer. Her memory sets off some musing about the hope found in the life and death of a good dog. See if these truths make the news of your times easier to bear:
Savannah feared nothing about death. She went to it with eyes full of gratitude for the way her life had been. Her eyes seemed to draw from some deep well of love, way beyond the crust of words. Even in her final hour, sick as she was, she lived as a divining rod to this love. No matter how I tried to comfort her, she served me – right to her last moment. The kidney failure that was stalling her life was no match for the servant’s heart within her.
The high pitch of biased media, politics, and the vitriol of social debate held no allure for Savannah. She made grace her way of life. She ran from loud voices and bounded to gentility wherever she found it. We could trust her to be tender, even with the smallest child. Savannah taught me there’s nothing so powerful in this life as a truly gentle woman or man.
There is no vanity in such dogs. They split mud holes, then track adoration across the floors of the humans who forgive them. They surely wonder why we care so much for things and so little for helping one another have simple wellness and fun. Savannah never cared for the size of my car. She simply loved the ride. She measured none of my money in how she valued me. In times of my sorrow, she made certain to place her head under my hand, letting me read a sense of all-will-be-more-than-well in its Braille.
With the too-often forgotten elderly in a nursing home, Savannah visited with no consciousness of herself. The sights and smells that repulse too many humans never seem to repel a good dog. Something innate about Savannah longed to care for everyone. She never appraised anyone by their politics, religion, or race. No human bloodline or job pedigree held any sway. Savannah treated the ignorant as kings and the malicious as queens. Even avowed dog haters valued what they found in her, and she loved them without pause.
Such a dog will forgive to the point of endangering itself. Some may argue enough hatefulness will turn any dog, even the most generous and kind. Perhaps this forms a caveat to us as well. Maybe good dogs teach us we will eventually draw back what we put into the world. Or is it that forgiveness becomes a form of capital we spend to the great shock of our enemies, an investment from which we draw the interest of turning enemies into friends? After every trip to the vet, on the heels of cavity exams every sane creature loathes, Savannah forgave Jill and me. We never had to ask.
In the afterglow of thinking of her, I adore considering how living so might change humankind. What might the news look like if everyone were so devotedly kind to everyone else? My job -- as a writer of news and fiction -- would so beautifully change.
Within an hour after putting her into that permanent sleep, I sat weeping at our kitchen table and wrote an open letter to Savannah. It let my grief out to run, with the memory of her a comfort at my knee. I leave you with a passage of it here, and a wish that the news of our future days will improve, changed in some small way by the legacy of Savannah.
“You tracked to the child who lives in me always. In this man you found a boy who loves you, sweet girl. Even in death, somehow you will always lead the boy in me home. I will follow your trail. And together, in the grand wet and muddy fun places of memory, we will be glad.”
###
Michael Cogdill is an Emmy-winning television journalist whose novel, She-Rain, contains two narrative threads dedicated to the memory of Savannah. She-Rain debuts nationally in March, 2010.
Throwing A Bash For The Written Word...
...and here's the pool in which we'll all have this party:
http://michaelcogdill.wordpress.com/
Friends on Goodreads, I welcome your comments there on books that have deeply moved you, those that have failed, and how you feel about the seismic change going on in publishing now. Whether it's Jonathan Franzen, Pat Conroy or Charlotte Bronte you want to talk about, your comments are waved in on all writers and every literary front.
My thanks to so many who have embraced She-Rain with passion, grace, and stunning reviews. I hope I live up to all of you with the new novel, For The Love of Honeysuckle Road. Stay tuned. Excerpts coming there on the blog.
On that blog I'm also soon to run a 55 Fiction expo. To all who've practiced this addictive art of writing a story in 55 words or fewer, welcome to the fun. To all who haven't, give a try. There are few excercises more apt to make each of us a better writer, compelling every word to fight for its life.
Warmest peace to all!
m
http://michaelcogdill.wordpress.com/
Friends on Goodreads, I welcome your comments there on books that have deeply moved you, those that have failed, and how you feel about the seismic change going on in publishing now. Whether it's Jonathan Franzen, Pat Conroy or Charlotte Bronte you want to talk about, your comments are waved in on all writers and every literary front.
My thanks to so many who have embraced She-Rain with passion, grace, and stunning reviews. I hope I live up to all of you with the new novel, For The Love of Honeysuckle Road. Stay tuned. Excerpts coming there on the blog.
On that blog I'm also soon to run a 55 Fiction expo. To all who've practiced this addictive art of writing a story in 55 words or fewer, welcome to the fun. To all who haven't, give a try. There are few excercises more apt to make each of us a better writer, compelling every word to fight for its life.
Warmest peace to all!
m
Gettin' Some Action Between The Covers Of A Novel
F. Scott Fitzgerald, scribbling in the working notes for his novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, said, “Action is character.”
I’ve long cleaved to this wisdom, as if Fitzgerald’s statement formed a guiding set of reins, setting my course as a writer trying to entertain on two levels: The action of the tale has to keep a reader longing for the next word, of course, but the words themselves ought to glimmer with a life all their own. They should form a sound that moves the reader’s soul. The words alone should have breath and a voice. It’s not an easy reach.
This little passage of She-Rain is a quick look at what I’m talking about, at least in my opinion. Let me hear yours.
"The day came on so cold the air felt breakable. The coldest day even the grayest heads could recall, talking of it for weeks. A pack of us had piled onto Pap’s mule wagon, the children smothered in quilts and shivers and a show of good faith. We were party to the goodbye.
Everything outside shone silvery white, all the trees wrapped and crackling in the shimmer of frozen January rain atop a snow. Cloth wrapped about the faces kept the ride quiet under the low winter noise. It seemed every branch, twig and roadside weed crunched against the lightest wind. A feel of frailty came off it, yet I loved the blank white. The way it made that trip to town feel as new as Christmas morning the day we hauled Frank to the Marshal Depot. Pap was paying his way."
Reading should be transformative. Writers ought to take you somewhere, causing the dust of a dirt road or the cold of a place and time to settle onto you. When we succeed at this, you, as a quiet reader, live out loud the truth of the people in the tale. You have a chance to touch, to hear, and to know them. By the transport of words, readers discover deeper parts of themselves. They find a new and familiar world at once. To read well is to travel well. But more than travel, readers – in the hands of a caring writer – arrive in a story from which they don’t want to turn away.
Some writers decry description. They uphold only the leanest truth telling, figuring the reader’s imagination will do the rest. It’s not a terrible idea, though one that often underachieves what a writer is called to do. Fitzgerald’s genius still holds true – action is character. And in a world of well-chosen words, action -- and readers -- find a fine place to dwell.
I’ve long cleaved to this wisdom, as if Fitzgerald’s statement formed a guiding set of reins, setting my course as a writer trying to entertain on two levels: The action of the tale has to keep a reader longing for the next word, of course, but the words themselves ought to glimmer with a life all their own. They should form a sound that moves the reader’s soul. The words alone should have breath and a voice. It’s not an easy reach.
This little passage of She-Rain is a quick look at what I’m talking about, at least in my opinion. Let me hear yours.
"The day came on so cold the air felt breakable. The coldest day even the grayest heads could recall, talking of it for weeks. A pack of us had piled onto Pap’s mule wagon, the children smothered in quilts and shivers and a show of good faith. We were party to the goodbye.
Everything outside shone silvery white, all the trees wrapped and crackling in the shimmer of frozen January rain atop a snow. Cloth wrapped about the faces kept the ride quiet under the low winter noise. It seemed every branch, twig and roadside weed crunched against the lightest wind. A feel of frailty came off it, yet I loved the blank white. The way it made that trip to town feel as new as Christmas morning the day we hauled Frank to the Marshal Depot. Pap was paying his way."
Reading should be transformative. Writers ought to take you somewhere, causing the dust of a dirt road or the cold of a place and time to settle onto you. When we succeed at this, you, as a quiet reader, live out loud the truth of the people in the tale. You have a chance to touch, to hear, and to know them. By the transport of words, readers discover deeper parts of themselves. They find a new and familiar world at once. To read well is to travel well. But more than travel, readers – in the hands of a caring writer – arrive in a story from which they don’t want to turn away.
Some writers decry description. They uphold only the leanest truth telling, figuring the reader’s imagination will do the rest. It’s not a terrible idea, though one that often underachieves what a writer is called to do. Fitzgerald’s genius still holds true – action is character. And in a world of well-chosen words, action -- and readers -- find a fine place to dwell.
