Lost In the Details
by Judy Justice

Every writer has heard the advice "write what you know" and most writers believe they can tell a good story based on events taken from their own lives. However, writing from personal experience is not easy. It's hard to separate significant details from those that aren't needed to tell the story.

Why are you writing this book? Who will read it? What do you want your readers to take with them after reading your story?

Usually, when asked these questions, new writers are not at all concerned about who will actually read the book. They just feel the need to write it. This is mistake number one.

Think about your reader before you plant yourself in the chair to start writing, unless you are writing for self-discovery, in which case, you should get a journal to record your thoughts.

Hemingway commented that what ends up on paper is just the tip of the iceberg and that 90% of the author's total knowledge is below the surface. Many beginners' initial attempts to write from personal experience fail, because they have not distilled the details down to that magical ten percent. This is mistake number two.

When writing from your own experience, don't bog your story down with insignificant details. It may have been important to you that the first girl you romanced rode to school with you on the school bus, lived at 39 Flower Lane, in a red house next to the dairy with cows in the barn. Will this matter to your reader? Are the cows significant? Is the school bus important to your story? Do we need to know about your first love? Do we need to know where she lived? Write only what is absolutely essential to your story.

Begin with a blank page and think back over just one incident, start freewriting and get down all the thoughts. It doesn't matter if your thoughts are connected or in logical order at this point. Just get those memories out of your head and down on paper. You may want to set a time limit, or you can write as long as your ideas keep coming.

When you've finished, read it over, then let it sit for a few hours. Now go back and read it again, this time looking for additional memories that may have been triggered. Add new details only if they pertain to the story you want to tell.

Next, try to 'see' the incident as if it was a program on TV. How can you write about this so that a reader can form pictures from your words? Take another piece of paper and record your feelings, tastes, sights, smells and any sounds you can remember of the experience.

Although you can bring a picture to mind as soon as you think of your experience, your reader will need significant details and narrative description to 'see' the incident. You need to find the right words to get the pictures out of your head and into theirs. Use the sensory information to bring the scenes to life.

Read books that are similar to the one you want to write, keep a notepad handy and jot down to list techniques the author used to describe a setting, note how the action was handled and notice how the author blended dialogue into the story.

Continue to freewrite other incidents. Is there a theme developing? Sometimes, we are so close to the story, we don't see a theme. Try to boil your story down to a sentence or two. Pretend it is the blurb on the dust jacket of your published book.

Make a sound bite for your story and write it on a card to keep in front of you as you write. This will help you keep focused on the significant 10% of your story. Each day read over your new work. Does it fit your sound bite? If not, it might be part of the 90% that doesn't need to be written.

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is a freelance writer and publisher of an online newsletter created to inspire and motivate new writers. Visit her website at: Reststop Writers Newsletter

How Does Your Garden Grow?
by Ronald Wayne Jones

Are you searching for writing inspiration? If not, you probably should be. If ideas don't sprout faster than crabgrass from the fertile soil of your mind, your writing career may wither and die before you reap your first harvest. Even veterans experience this bothersome malady which they often mistake for that bugaboo, writer's block. The problem with spotting these colorful exotic plants, called plot twists, is that their foliage tends to blend with the weeds and undergrowth as the panic of a deadline looms closer.

Remember, you're not just hunting a single idea. Quality novels require more twists than a sunflower has seeds. Even a flash fiction story usually contains more than one.

I find my inspiration in odd places. One plot twist that comes to mind is one that I found in an elephant pile. Yep, you read that right. Did you know that some historians believe the connections between mummification and an afterlife may have originated from early Egyptians' observations of dung beetles emerging from cases of pachyderm dung? The seeds for both sci-fi and fantasy plots twists can be uncovered in ancient tombs or in the radio pulses from distant supernovas.

If the lack of inspiration troubles you, consider adding a dose of history to your story. This trick can tie what was with what might have been. History, after all, shouldn't be sacred. It's only a popular opinion, or as one man put it, history is only the lie that a majority has agreed upon. Look at the banquet the creator of STARGATE harvested from Egyptian lore. He started with Egyptian gods of the dead and planted those into a story of space travel across light years and galaxies. Something similar could be reaped from other cultures, but you'll want to add your own spin.

Another good method is to choose random or obscure words from a dictionary and see what ideas they generate. The trick is to pick words with multiple meanings or emotional value. Then use those words and ideas in the opening paragraph of your story. This will usually prompt something interesting, unexpected and usually more exotic than a rare orchid.

Everyone urges writers to read everything. They tell us to borrow from the quality writers, while learning to recognize and avoid the mistakes of the less talented. Calm that skeptical voice in the back of your head, folks. This wasn't some publisher's sales-pitch aimed at the audience of another writers' conference. Robert E. Vardeman put it this way. Read everything, but don't limit yourself to fiction even if that is all you write. Check out those trade magazines, and science journals for the latest research or discovery. Remember, any idea that grabs you is likely to snag your reader, too.

Don't stop with the obvious tilt on that scientific development, either. Manipulate that idea and form it into something special. The trick is to project this discovery another two steps beyond the obvious conclusions. Another speaker at a Southwest Writers Workshop Conference reminded us that this process is like predicting drive-in movies, and car hops in miniskirts on roller skates from the invention of the automobile.

You must create a culture for your world, and discover its effects on mankind. Since emotion is what makes a story truly gripping, this is the secret of creating drama in any fiction, sci-fi included.

For the science fiction writer, I'd suggest making time to devour science shows like NOVA. Watch them for ideas that will tickle a story line you might be sprouting in your greenhouse. If you've heard Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch speak, you know you should always have at least one idea germinate in that fertile soul upstairs. A wealth of twists lay waiting to be discovered in the scientific details revealed on NOVA.

You may have also noticed a few movie titles that resulted from a double meaning. A great example of this was ENEMY MINE. Words with double meanings are another good place to uncover plot twists.

If you've read the Emporium Gazette for a while, you know there are other aspects of a story besides plot. Some writers find inspiration in the emotions and flaws of their characters. Develop a cast of characters who please you. Give each a range of strengths and weaknesses. If you've created your cast with enough color, voice and depth, they can take you for one roller-coaster ride. You will need plot elements, but it will surprise you how much power a cast of characters can give a story if you've taken the time to make friends with both the villain and the protagonist.

Inspiration is all around you: in that Reader's Digest entry in your mailbox, in that hail stone that thumped your noggin, in that book about World War I aircraft on your coffee table, even in that old high school history text. It will certainly take some care and pruning, but you'll discover strange new varieties of flowers ready to populate your alien planet if you take the time to examine all the bushes and shrubs in the big forest we call our world.

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George Washington and Me
by Lana Robertson Hayes

Thoughts of George Washington have occupied a large portion of my life. As a young student I spent an inordinate amount of time gazing at the unfinished Gilbert Stuart portrait that hung in every classroom of the elementary school I attended. My teachers' lessons and the voices of my fellow classmates swirled around the periphery of my consciousness as I studied the father of our country who appeared to rise from a fluffy cumulous cloud.

I abruptly returned to earth when my teacher would speak my name in a sharp tone that indicated she was losing patience with me. Sometimes I was sent to the cloakroom as punishment, which was like being thrown in the proverbial briar patch. Instead of having to pay attention to the lesson, I read my library book.

In fifth grade I graduated to a seat in the rear near the wall of windows. I quite truly enjoyed being tucked away back there. Nearby stood an altar -- a bookcase filled with junior biographies. I read all of them that year. I had junior biographies hidden behind my math book, my science book and my history book, which defies logic since biographies are history. I probably actually read my English text because I was in love with words.

Mrs. Moon, our teacher, had that Gilbert Stuart portrait hanging above the blackboard. He was an American god, his inscrutable expression concealing his false teeth carved of wood. His biography was on the bookshelf by my desk. I read of his wartime adventures, his domestic life at Mt. Vernon, and his retirement years spent as a gentleman farmer.

Mrs. Moon should have moved me. I was totally unprepared for the sixth grade. All my teachers frequently wrote 'Lana daydreams in class' on my report cards, and that remained a constant bone of contention between my parents and me. I may have missed vital parts of my education, but I don't know what they were. I spent huge amounts of time with my head in the clouds unless I was distracted by something shiny. I was my own dot-to-dot canvas because I enjoyed connecting the freckles on my arms with a pen.

How is a person to cease daydreaming? Is it an act of will, a conscious decision? How could a person withdraw into her own private world in the midst of such bustle and activity? I suspect, to me anyway, that real life never held the same allure as my misty realm of dreams. I peopled my world with interesting characters that I placed in sticky situations while I watched them wiggle and squirm. I was a puppeteer, manipulating my marionettes' moves. Their thoughts became my thoughts.

Am I a daydreamer? In the words of George Washington "I cannot tell a lie." Those formative years molded and shaped me into what I was to become.

I am a writer.

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javascript:showit(15); is the author of many humorous essays and articles, as well as the Sonoran Sampler column in Arizona Garden Magazine. In a world divided by those who see the glass half empty or half full, she alone is left wondering why she received the glass with the lipstick on the rim, and who left it there. She is at work on her first mystery novel.

FROM ANOTHER ANGLE
by Susan Long Turner

THE WRITER'S PAINT BOX

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,
but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.
~ Katherine Paterson, The Spying Heart, 1989

According to Ken Casper, Harlequin SuperROMANCE novelist, the sole purpose of writing fiction is to evoke emotion. How can the writer meet this challenge of touching the heart of the reader?

"I think of personal experiences as part of my writer/artist's paint box," Tess Gerritsen, best-selling author of such books as "Harvest," "Gravity," and others, replied to an E-Mail from the Gazette's Answer Lady. "The more experiences you've accumulated, the more shades of paint you have available to create your work of art. While a great deal of what I write is purely from my imagination, the most powerful stories, I believe, are those that come from a deeply emotional source. And my strongest emotions are inspired by things that have happened in my own life."

Tess talked about her inspiration for "Bloodstream," a book that will keep you riveted to every page. Some years ago, when her older son was fourteen, he and a few friends broke into a boatyard, found a flare gun, and shot a flare over the harbor. Someone spotted the flare and alerted the Coast Guard that there was a boat in distress, thus launching a nighttime search. "When we found out about this, we were stunned." Her son had never been in trouble. On the day they met the local police chief, she remembers thinking, "This is the worst day of my life."

It was the emotions--shock, sadness, disbelief--that brought "Bloodstream" to the bookstores, a story about a small town where all the local children became uncontrollable and violent. Although there's a huge leap of imagination from my son's relatively minor nighttime prank to a story where children are murdering their parents, the emotions behind it--a parent's bewilderment--sparked the story.

"A writer doesn't have to actually live a story in order to write about it. But a writer must FEEL the story, based on his or her lifetime of experiences." It is for this reason that Katherine Paterson's "The Spying Heart" rings so true. She turns autobiography into fiction to give it credibility. Tess Gerritsen proves with her writing that Ken Casper was also correct: "The sole purpose of fiction is to evoke emotion."

From "The Surgeon," although in the villain's viewpoint, could Tess have written the following sentence unless she had experienced the sensation? "I wander the city and breathe in air so thick I can almost see it. It warms my lungs like heated syrup."

Take your life experiences. Forget the facts. Give your feelings and emotional experiences to the characters and you'll soon be writing stories and novels that the reader will long remember.

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Susan Long Turner is co-author with Russ Turner of "Wings Born Out of Dust" which is available now from 23 House Publishing and is also available in trade paperbacks and hardback at other major online bookstores. Visit her Website

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Poetry World
by R. S. Nailor

One of the most classic ways of personal experience expression has been through poetry. If you think for just a few moments, you'll quickly realize the depth of that statement.

Poetry: words, usually placed in syncopated rhythm, are the emotions of the writer. This person is writing from life's experiences. It's true that anyone can write poetry without being familiar with the emotion, but it would reflect this. You've read books where you swiftly realize the author doesn't know the subject: be it location, language or some nuance that only experience would reflect.

To write of love, one must be in love, or have been in love. This also holds true for anger, loneliness, hate, admiration -- every feeling. A person who never has been in love will have a poem that seems hollow and lack that essence which places itself in the limelight.

Poetry is the emotion of personal experience revealed to the reader.

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R. S. Nailor is Poetry Editor and Production Manager for the Emporium Gazette. His manuscript, THREE STEPS: THE JOURNEYS OF AYROLD, is currently in the final stages of editing. He has short stories included in three ebook anthologies from 23House and numerous articles and poems elsewhere on the internet. You can visit him at Lore's Webs.

Bury Only The Dead
by Barbara Deming

I may no longer sound like it but I'm from Texas. A long line of Texans going back to the original settlers with Stephen F. Austin, are my kinfolks. Now, I must tell you that not all of them were real educated people back then. They were farmers and hunters and, when called upon, militia, but many of them could barely read and write. So, they became storytellers, and the family history was handed down word by word, mouth to mouth, instead of on paper. One of the stories they tell about a member of the family has stayed with me since I first heard it as a child.

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My kin, the Stones, were living near what is now known as Austin - but back then, old Stephen would have thought it presumptuous to have a town named after him, so it was called Cane Brake City . . . a place that doesn't exist today. Anyway, this family had a passel of strapping sons and one lovely daughter. You can imagine that this girl was probably pampered, at least as much as one could be in those days when everyone toiled long hours just to survive. At any rate, Hannah was loved by the whole family.

So it was a mournful day when she fell ill. There were no doctors in Cane Brake City so the women in the town could only apply the potions, elixirs and poultices. Mother Stone nursed her day and night - gathering herbs and boiling teas, holding her daughter in her arms to pour the treatments into her. But she became sicker and sicker. Early one morning, with Mother Stone taking a short respite, her head cradled on the bedside near her daughter, Hannah's spirit left her.

There was no comforting the mother. While she dressed the body, hot tears trickling down her face, her husband and sons went to the barn to build a coffin. In the late evening, Mother Stone stood at the window watching as they trudged up the hill with shovels and pick to dig a grave next to the grandparents. Before they finished, she took the only material she had, a soft blue calico, and the grieving mother lined the roughhewn box.

When the men returned, they wrestled the box into the house and placed the young girl, all dressed in her best white, into the calico coffin. Leading the procession, Bible in hand, Father Stone shuffled up the hill where the box was placed in the newly-broken ground. He read from the scriptures and ended the short service with a verse from the Book of Revelations: They shall see his face . . .And night shall be no more . . . for the Lord God will be their light.

No one wanted food that night. The embers in the large fireplace were banked early and the family went to bed. The story goes that it took a long time for the boys to go to sleep, but they didn't talk among themselves about their sister's death, perhaps only wanting to remember better days. Eventually, they drifted off into a restless slumber from which they were all awakened by a horrible scream. They immediately knew that something had happened to their mother and flew down the ladder from the loft and waited until their father pulled aside the curtain closing off the bed.

Mother Stone was whiter than the muslin she slept on. Her eyes were filled with a terror the boys had never seen, not even when she had realized Hannah was gone. When they asked her what was wrong, the first thing she did was put her head in her hands and wail, a shattering sound that sent chills through her sons.

"You must take her out! I heard Hannah! She's not dead!" Her eyes flashed with terror as she glanced at the stunned faces around her, almost shrieking, "Please! Dig her up!"

The men tried to calm her, but she continued to scream, to beg and plead until they relented. "We'll have to do it, boys," Father Stone decided. "She'll go crazy over this if we don't put her mind at peace."

Mother Stone stood beside the new grave as they removed the loose soil. It didn't take long for the shovels to touch the coffin. Father Stone and his sons worked ropes around the box and eased it up and out of the hole. Carefully, he took the edge of his shovel and pried open the coffin lid. Looking at Mother Stone who waited expectedly and then solemnly at each other, the men lifted the top.

Without a church in the town, Father Stone had often been called on to offer words of praise to the Heavenly Father, but on this morning he cursed God. Mother Stone grabbed the edge of the coffin as she sank to the ground and her grief was heavier than it had ever been. The sons stood, holding tight to their shovels, as if they would fall without something to cling to.

Hannah Stone lay in the calico coffin. Her lovely white dress was ripped from the neckline to the waist. Her fingernails were torn and bloody, her arms lacerated with scratches. And the calico lining had been shredded from the sides where the girl, awaking from the illness that would later become known as encephalitis, or sleeping sickness, had sought a way out.

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resides in San Marcos, CA, and uses images from the past in her writings. Barb's fiction can often be found at various web sites and in "Southern Nights Mystery & Suspense Anthology" available at Amazon.com. Her collection of short stories, "The Quiltmaker" is under consideration as she continues to work on a novel set in East Texas.