Writing Yourself Up and Over That Wall

I am no expert on writing, but I have climbed a couple of rungs on the ladder which surprisingly puts me in a position to help others. I do this gladly. If you haven’t discovered by now, the writing community is like none other in its support for its members.

Aspiring authors often talk about the frustration they feel from their inability to complete a story. Many people begin writing only to abandon their ideas when they reach a dead end or don’t see where their story is leading. I’m often amazed that regardless of whether my books are good or not, people hold me in high esteem for the simple fact that I have finished and published four books. That is a goal many wish to realize.

This is my advice to you. Keep writing. Face the wall and if you can’t get over it, do what you would do in real life; turn and go in another direction. Just like a drawing on your Etch a Sketch, when you can’t go diagonally upwards, you learn to take steps to get you where you want to go. The same goes for writing. I’m not saying this is easy. Once I’m entrenched in my favorite characters that the storyline revolves around, I don’t want to go in another direction and write about someone new anymore then you want to read about them. But I do, and guess what? Once I’ve met them, and I get to know them as people, not just filler, I begin to see the potential for what they can bring to the story.

BUT, it takes more than getting around an obstacle or two in order to complete your book. AND that’s where my secret wisdom of writing has helped me through my most challenging times. Writing a novel is like cleaning my daughter’s room.

So my daughter is interesting, far too interesting to focus on the humdrum activity of cleaning. Periodically, I attempt to put something in a drawer and find that it is welded shut from the sheer volume of its contents. Worse yet, I attempt to find something that she has borrowed and I'm forced to look in her closet. I never want to do it. I resist with every fiber of my being, but ultimately I am drawn to her room, preferably when she spends the night at a friend’s house so I know I have uninterrupted time to work through all the areas that need attention. My goal is to bring order from the chaos of her room.

As I stand in the doorway, I am daunted by the sheer magnitude of work that lies before me. My eyes glance from her obscured dresser to her rocking chair that hides many sins, along the wall past her dresser where she pushes everything in an attempt to clear her floor. Behind her bed, well, let’s leave that alone. And then there is her closet. Her double closet which can no longer slide to the left or right because of all the clothes and toys pushing out against it trying to break free from the darkness. I would too.

But enough. Cleaning her room is not for the timid, and I am no novice at this game. I pick a place to start, something simple. Something that won’t overwhelm me. I choose the underwear drawer and quickly pry the drawer open and lift it to the ground. I am no longer surprised at its contents. I simply remove leotards, bathing suits, hair brushes, anything that was quickly deposited in an effort to clean. After that I take a large trash bag and begin collecting the pajamas and socks that my daughter has long outgrown. I take several cathartic moments to match socks and organize what remains before depositing the now lighter drawer back into the dresser. I sit back with a feeling of satisfaction and actually open and close the drawer several times to see my handy work.

This small amount of success gives the confidence to move on to the tougher drawers, and then to the surface of the dresser. The entire process takes me well over an hour. By the time I finish, my back is aching and my knees are stiff from sitting in the same position for too long. But then I look at what I’ve accomplished and I feel a sense of pride. I take out the bags of clothing that I’ve removed and steel myself for another area to tackle. It gets harder as I work through the room. I can’t finish one area until I work out problems somewhere else. And ultimately everything is at a standstill until I confront my greatest challenge; the closet. At my weakest moment I turn to look over my shoulder and see the center of her room is piled high with collections of clothes, toys, costumes, shoes, and I don’t think I’ll ever make sense of it all. How can this all work out? I don’t question it for long. I look back at the closet and focus on the work ahead. Slowly but surely, I sift through the contents and find homes for what is on the floor. Hours pass, the pain in my back increases. Aside from occasional bathroom breaks, I work non-stop. Long after my husband has cooked dinner for himself and my son, and the sun has gone down, I am able to take a step back towards the door and look into her room. My eyes glance from the dresser which is now organized and neat, to the floor which is free from clutter, to a bed that hides nothing behind it, and finally a closet that has a place for everything and extra room to spare.

This is no different from the writing process. We all have piles of ideas cluttering our brains. Some areas are easier to tackle and we face them first. Others we are too intimidated to confront. But have faith that by confronting each pile, one at a time, they eventually end up where they belong. Your head will clear all of the garbled mess into cohesive stories with interesting characters, and twisting plots. You have a lot of sorting to do, but that’s writing. Don’t walk away when it gets difficult. Peel away one thought at a time, one topic at a time, one dilemma at a time and your story will reveal itself just as my daughter’s room does.

Writing on Writing

I learned the essentials of writing at the age of twelve, sitting in an iron framed sling style chair, the same one that sits in my room today. I always read from a variety of authors, but when I held a Stephen King novel, something strange happened to me; I gained the ability to read in the dark. But I’ll get back to that point in a moment.

 I fell in love with Steinbeck as soon I read East of Eden. I floated from the pages and my mind took flight. His characters were so real to me that I couldn’t separate my life from theirs. In hindsight, I wish I had sat at my type writer, yes it was a Smith Corona back then filled with good old crackly onion skin, to capture some of my thoughts. But I didn’t see myself as a writer then, only a dreamer.

When Hemingway came into my life, I scoffed up everything he wrote. I was bitterly jealous of Gertrude Stein. I wanted to be the female welcome at his round table in the cafés in Paris. I wanted to have the circle of intellectually stimulating minds sitting around my flat smoking cigarettes and complaining about the lack of pay for their short stories in magazines, as they considered ideas for their next great novels. I wanted a lot of things, but I had not yet realized what I wanted most of all was to become a writer.

So back to Stephen King and my abilities to see in the dark. When I read one of his novels, time would pass, the phone would ring, people would enter my room to pick something up or drop something off. I was oblivious to it all. His hypnotic words created a protective shell in which I read. And just like in the movie Somewherein Time, as long as a penny from my world didn’t enter the story, I remained transfixed. At some point, I would be released from the grips of his tale and look around the room at the darkness that enveloped me. I would glance back at the page I had just been reading and would see nothing but the darkness.

If it were with any other author I would say there was a reasonable explanation; the moon was out and became obscured by clouds, anything, but not with King. After all, he is the writer who didn’t stop at scaring us with the idea of the Boogieman. King is the writer who made us believe in the Boogieman.

So how does he do it? Easy, he’s a magician with words. In the introduction to Night Shift he described how one word is enough to shake a person from his grasp. Just one word has the ability to separate the story from the reader and once that spell is broken, it can’t be fixed. Hence the need for great editors. Their job is to keep your illusion and prevent your audience from leaving before you pull a rabbit from your hat.

Stephen King didn’t stop helping authors with a book he published over thirty years ago. He also wrote a book for us struggling neophytes apply called, On Writing. If you haven’t read it, you should. When I set out to edit my first novel, Daniel’s Story, I was realistic enough to know I had no skills to prepare me for this task. I also had no bank account sufficient to hire someone. And like everything I’ve faced in life before, I gritted my teeth, researched, and taught myself what I hopefully needed to know to get the job done well. And that’s how I found the book On Writing.

When I believed my story had come to a successful end, I was curious. Was it long enough? Was it actually a novel? Something I created sitting at my kitchen table on my laptop and upstairs staying awake through the night typing in bed. Was this actually a novel, not just a rambling, yet interesting story of teens taking on their world? But how could I know? So I picked up a book from my son’s dresser and counted how many words were on a random page and it came to two hundred fifty six. It was a book from the Series of Unfortunate Events, if you are interested. I multiplied the number by the pages in the book and then ran back to my computer. I hit control A, then went to the toolbar and checked word count Daniel’s Story was over sixty thousand words. It was a novel by YA standards and I sat back amazed at myself for what I had accomplished. I was a writer. Never realizing before how important this had always been in my life, I sat frozen, appreciative, awed, and yes, reverent.

Some kids grew up mastering the piano. I struggled at it. Others found their place in sports. I played soccer and ran track, but was second string all the way. Some kids found their strength in the theater. I was better suited for painting sets once they were built. Everyone had a moment in the sun that highlighted their natural gifts. I had but brief moments of being seen the poet, the philosopher, the dreamer of my friends. This wasn’t glorious and it didn’t help me through school or college. It just caused me to flounder through life searching for meaning.

But then everything changed. I was sitting at my computer and I felt that moment in the sun. But now I had to take the novel, (yes a novel. I kept pinching myself through this process) and I had to turn it into something worthy of being published. As I sat reading Stephen King’s words, one message was striking a familiar cord from back in my childhood. He wrote about the moment a reader gets to a page when they can put the book down and take a bathroom break or get a glass of water, and that’s when the author fails. That page should not be there.

He was right of course. He’s mesmerized me throughout my life with his words and that was the secret behind his magic trick. He ripped words out of his stories and pages from his books that weren’t essential and I needed to do the same. I’m thinking the same thing about this blog as I write. There is a lot of deleting I will be doing when I am through and hopefully you aren’t peeing in the bathroom as I write, thinking I should have cut more.

Five thousand words were removed from my story. Five thousand beloved words that I slaved over, believed in and fretted over, I ripped out as easily as weeds from my garden. You probably need to do the same. Because although the words are beautiful and moving and telling, your story can exist without them and that is at the heart of a great writer. Let the story stand on its own. Don’t let words get in the way.

Pushing the Limit

I write where the story goes, and then have panic attacks that I've gone too far. During my lunch period, as I sat at my desk grading papers, a student came in. I looked up and smiled asking, "Do you have something to make--up?"

"No, I just wanted to stop by."

My room was affectionately named, Take Five. It's the place where students are welcome to come and unwind and get away from the drama of their lunchroom. I believe a lot of problems/fights have been avoided because students have a place to cool off. (For my readers, if you are wondering which came first, I had the room before I wrote Jordan's story, but created the name officially when I was writing. Reality and fiction co-inspired one another).

"What are you writing these days?"

"A story about a gay high school student."

"Ugh!"

"Sweetie, it's about a ninth grader coming to terms with his identity -"

Again, the girl made a sound of disgust.

Happily, I said, "You are the perfect person to read it!"

"I don't think so. I don't want to read a story about a gay kid."

"Listen, everybody has secrets they hide -"

"I don't have any secrets," she said over confidently.

"Sure you do. And that's why you need to read the story. You need to see that it's not someone's choice to be gay, and it's not right when they are faced with hatred. It makes kids grow up depressed and some even commit suicide."

"Well, I don't want that to happen."

"Of coure you don't That's why you have to read their side of the story to understand what they go through in school and at home."

"Maybe."

It's not this girl's fault that she grew up with prejudices. She needs to learn how accept  people of all backgrounds, religions, and yes, sexual orientations. I gladly accept the job.

I spoke to another student later that day who had just  finished the fourth book, Martin's Story. I tell her about the idea for the new story and ask, "Have I gone too far this time?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Do you think I'll lose my readers if I write a story about a gay teen?"

"No, Mrs. Crupi. I'll read it. Others will too."

This is not a new feeling for me. With my first book, Daniel's Story, I wrote about abuse and bullying and about a main character who runs for the board of education in order to get a principal fired. And then I went to my school district to get  approval for my students to read the books ;) Small wonder, I didn't get their blessing. Not one person in the chain of command said yes. Fortunately, students are industrious. They Googled me and found the books on Amazon. A will and a way...

After I published my fourth novel, Martin's Story, I was warning people not to read the book. 'It challenges views on religion and God. It deals with a teen who was killed when he was eight and describes his life in heaven. Later it deals with the relationship of the boy and a girl he is haunting. They are inexplicably drawn to each other...and that's before the issue of suicide.' It seemed like I was coming up with reasons for people not to read my work and a funny thing happened - they kept reading. What I've learned through all of this is that if you write with honesty and don't talk down to your readers, they will have faith in your words. I hope to let the stories follow their own destiny and be as true to them as I can. When I have my panic attacks that I've gone to far, I'll blast the radio and let someone else drive for a while.

I'll keep writing and pushing the envelope. I seems my readers are sticking around for the ride. Hope you come too!

Visit me on my website www.donnacrupi.com and thank you for reading!

Affectionately and gratefully,

Donna Crupi

A Letter to My Dad (Jack Ekelchik if your curious;)

Dad

You’ve given us many gifts over the years. By far the greatest has been your never ending love.

Recently, I was going through boxes in the basement and. I came across a collection of letters I’ve kept through the years. They were from you.

The earlier ones were written on Seaboard stationary and were addressed to Ralph S. Mason, my sleep away camp. Then the letters skipped a couple of years and were addressed to Syracuse University. I usually received those on a Friday, where you’d tell me to enjoy happy hour with Shari and throw in a ten or twenty for good measure. You didn’t have to worry about us at school. We always looked out for one another. In fact, I remember our friendship blossoming at Fagan’s happy hour, so maybe that was because of you after all.

Everything in my childhood and my adult life that you’ve been involved with has brought happiness and security. As a father, I hope you realize I only have happy memories of all that we’ve done. Few people are that lucky and for that I am truly blessed.

You were my first and have remained my greatest hero. Through everything life has gifted and taken from you, your commitment to making this world a better place has never faltered. 

In short, I am thankful for every car ride we took as a family, for teaching me how to ride a bike, for every worm you placed on a hook and every line you patiently untangled, for taking me to get my ears pierced, for coaching every soccer game I ever played in, for standing on the sidelines when I ran track, for bear hugs good night, and for all the ice skates you laced, for late Sunday night projects you helped me pull off, for all of the dog shows we did together, for our Saturday mornings at work and afternoons in the city, and the too many things that literally consumed my entire childhood.

You’ve been a wonderful father in law to Nick and loving grandfather to Michael and Marielle, Mostly, I am thankful for your optimism and love of life that has made me the person that I am. For everything you’ve done and still continue to do, I love you.

Happy Birthday Dad and Grandpa,

Love,

Donna, Nick, Michael and Marielle