In honor of those of you who head “home” for the holidays, I’ve been doing some thinking about the intersection of geography, memory, and (of course!) writing.

I spent most of my childhood in a very small town, where the landscape became deeply familiar and where very little changed over the years. I knew the houses around every corner, the best hills for sledding, and the secret, wooded places to hide out in my neighborhood. I navigated by using my friends’ houses or our schools as markers; I navigated by beaches and by parks, by the distance a new location was from one I already knew.

Going home after years spent away is a little like that old French saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” The landscape has definitely changed: trees cut down, portions of the shoreline beaches eroded or changing shape, new developments popping up in what used to be cornfields or wooded space.

The high school has a new edition, although the smaller brick box maze I attended is still in place. The bookstore where I fell in love with reading just celebrated its 25th anniversary. The ice cream shop I visited in childhood has been replaced with another, and my favorite tea house has changed locations three times. There are food trucks that park near the town green now, and next to the green, the elementary school my childhood friends attended, the one whose doors I walked through for our graduation processional, sits empty. But behind that building is the field I played softball on for eight years, and the swings I used to swing on at 10 o’clock at night, after getting ice cream from a shop that no longer exists (because, small town. We got creative with our fun.).

I sat on those swings with a dark haired girl I no longer talk to, who has her Ph.D. now and a family I don’t know, on the night before I left for college. I swung on those swings with a girl who was the soul equivalent of a firecracker, swinging higher and higher, laughing and yelling and crying, the night of our friend’s wake. I stood by those swings for a half a dozen Fourth of July celebrations when the whole town turns out for the Concert on the Green. I stood by those swings when I glimpsed my crush, returned from Europe and looking like all the sharp edges the world has to offer. I stumbled to those swings after I chickened out on my first kiss, pulling away from the soft brush of lips and mumbling something about having to find…my sister? My friend? Somewhere (anywhere) else to be at that moment?

My husband teases me because as we drive through my town now, I tell the same stories over and over: that’s the temple where my sister played Esther for Purim, this is the waterfall we would pass on our way home from church every Sunday, be careful at this intersection because the oncoming traffic doesn’t stop and once my brother was in a really bad accident here, this is the gazebo where I spent an entire summer of humid nights, hanging out with my best friends.

My map of home is memory, even if no one else in the world could plot the same course. In ‘A Moveable Feast’, Ernest Hemingway wrote, “There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter who we were or how it was changed…”

Geography and memory inspire our creative processes. We visit our old favorite places, drive on familiar roads, and it reminds us of people, feelings and experiences we don’t always think about, those that have been eroded or erased from the maps of our lives now. Whether we use these details of place to build something new or simply to try to share our memory maps with others, we’re inspired to create a written landscape.

Happy holidays, and happy writing.

Today’s Prompt: Create a map, in words, from memory. Start at your parents’ home, or your home, or any favorite or least favorite place, and take your reader for a walk.

Your map could be plotted with all the places/things that are no longer there (friends moved away, trees cut down), or by specific memories (the room you first tasted ice cream, the yard where you drank out of the garden house, the driveway where your brother almost got hit by a car).

Welcome, writers! Kristen and I are excited to share that the South County Writers group is growing, and with new people interested, we thought it worthwhile to share additional information about the group.

First, any level of experience is welcome. Right now, we mostly have folks who love to write but don’t always have the time to do it. We have some people who write for a living, and others who are doing something else entirely in their day to day lives. We have have teachers, moms, technicians, students…part of the fun in the group is hearing how people from different backgrounds and levels of experience all respond to the same prompt. (You might be surprised to see how themes develop, even without planning: at our last meeting, three of us wrote about snow even though the prompt had nothing to do with winter and it was almost sixty degrees outside.)

Second, we welcome all kinds of responses to the prompts: fiction, nonfiction, memoir, stream of consciousness, poetry…if you manage to write song lyrics in response to a prompt, we’d be truly impressed. Whatever the prompt inspires in you, we’re interested. It doesn’t have to be neat, and it doesn’t have to be long. Sometimes, even one perfect line or phrase is enough to get you writing again.

The goal, of course, is to beat “writer’s block” in all of its forms. Writer’s block is formally defined as, “the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing.” (Less formally, some writers will say writer’s block is when their characters stop talking to them.)

What we found at our last meeting is that mostly, we all love to write-even if it’s been years since we last wrote anything creative. But we don’t always have the time, energy, or mental clarity to sit down, start writing, and simply get words on the page.

You may have noticed that our prompts may be short: a few words, or the start of a sentence or idea. The brevity is intentional, in part. If you can train yourself to write without too much direction, almost everything in your life becomes prompt-worthy. (Prompt: dog. Does the word make you think about your first dog? Your child’s first dog? Does it make you think about the dog sleeping at your feet right now, and the way you can hear his nose whistling while he sleeps? Does ‘dog’ make you think of loyalty? Fear? Allergies? Does it make you think about the English language, and how ‘d’ and ‘g’ are kind of weird sounds? You’re getting the idea…)

Happy writing, and we hope we’ll see you at the group.

Final Details:

Can’t make a meeting? Post a prompt response in the comments section, if you’d like your response to be attributed to you. Want to post anonymously? Email us your response at: southcountywriters@gmail.com

We’re currently borrowing our “suggestions of order” from other writing groups like ours: 

1. Newest person to the group chooses a prompt.
2. Timer is set for 20 minutes, and everybody writes. When time is up…
3. …the person who chose the prompt picks the first reader.
4. The first reader can read or pass, and picks the direction we read around the circle.
5. Those who want to read, read. Those who don’t, pass. After each reading, listeners may choose to share their thoughts: what worked? Was there a particular image or phrase that was powerful or memorable?
6. After everyone has read or passed, the second newest person picks the next prompt and we set the timer again.

Today, I’m stealing the title of this post from the wonderfully talented Neil Gaiman. He’s another favorite of mine, and let’s be honest-most writers are more thieves than magicians. We steal lines from conversations we’ve overheard, ideas from half remembered stories, and character inspiration from the habits of people we observe every day. But (and this is the important part, the amateur magic), good writers transform their thievery into inspiration. We ask ourselves, “What if…?”

What if, when he kicked his girlfriend out of the car in the middle of the night, she was barefoot? (Who is he? Who is she? What were they doing in the car before he kicked her out? Where are they? The story takes on a different tone if they’re in Miami, or in Vermont in the dead of winter.) What if the gate at the top of the stairs was unlatched? What if she came home early? What if the guy you share a cubicle wall with, the one with 18 different striped no wrinkle shirts is…go on, please, and finish that sentence. (…getting a divorce, a closet knitter, a dog enthusiast, joining the Peace Corps, in love with the girl one cubicle over. All of the above?)

As writers, we find a way to create something new, and in doing so, we hope to create something deeply recognizable. The truth, and not the truth, all at once.

Neil Gaiman writes, “Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes a magic casement; it can show you anything you imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.

(The smoke blurs the edges of things.)

Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.”

If you’ve been watching the news this weekend, there’s been plenty of darkness to go around and no need to imagine it: the world working, the world not working. On a day like today, is it possible for a distraction from the darkness, or a way to prepare for the day to come? Tell us. Pick your angle, truth or mirage, and get to writing.

Today’s Prompt: Two Truths and a Lie.

Further Inspiration: “But where there’s a monster there’s a miracle.”   -Ogden Nash, Dragons Are Too Seldom

John D. MacDonald was an American author who wrote many excellent novels and short stories. If you don’t know who he is, consider looking him up. Stephen King (who I truly hope you know) considers MacDonald a master of the writing craft. MacDonald is perhaps best known for his crime and suspense novels, and his honest knight-errant character, private investigator Travis McGee.

Asked to write an introduction to Stephen King’s collection of short stories, ‘Night Shift’, MacDonald wrote one of the most concise and enlightening essays I’ve ever read about the practice of writing.

MacDonald wrote, “I am often given the big smiling handshake at parties (which I avoid attending whenever possible) by someone who then, with an air of gleeful conspiracy, will say,

“You know, I’ve always wanted to write.”

I used to try to be polite.

These days I reply with the same jubilant excitement: “You know, I’ve always wanted to be a brain surgeon.”

They look puzzled. It doesn’t matter. There are a lot of puzzled people wandering around lately.

If you want to write, you write.

The only way to learn to write is by writing. And that would not be a useful approach to brain surgery.”

On the subject of writing, MacDonald continued, “Because that is the way it is done. Because there is no other way to do it. Not one other way.

Compulsive diligence is almost enough. But not quite. You have to have a taste for words. Gluttony. You have to want to roll in them. You have to read millions of them written by other people.

You read everything with grinding envy or a weary contempt.

You save the most contempt for the people who conceal ineptitude with long words, Germanic sentence structure, obtrusive symbols, and no sense of story, pace, or character.

Then you have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet.

Okay, then. Stupendous diligence, plus word-love, plus empathy, and out of that can come, painfully, some objectivity.

Never total objectivity.”

Both the essay by MacDonald, and the collection of short stories by Stephen King are well worth a read. But what I want to revisit is what MacDonald covers in the first few lines of his essay.

If you’re here, if you’ve found us, you want to write. Many people want to write. A few take the time to scribble down their thoughts in a notebook, or open a file on their computer for scraps of ideas. Some save articles from the internet-something that peaked their attention, something that made them think, “This. This would make a great start for a story.”

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. You get the spark. But then….nothing. Or, then…a few lines. A few chapters. A sense that the writing on the page somehow doesn’t measure up to the idea you had in mind.

What MacDonald says is absolutely true. If you want to write, you write. But he also speaks to the importance of practice, of “compulsive diligence” and “stupendous diligence”. Diligence, defined as: careful and persistent work or effort.

The practice of writing takes time, work and effort. Perhaps the “easiest” part (like squeezing blood from a stone, yes?) is getting started. So, pick a prompt. Write. Submit. Or burn it. But write, and keep writing, until you find what you’re looking for.

Today’s Prompt: The girl in 329.

Further Inspiration: Stephen King wrote ‘Carrie’ on a makeshift desk between a washer and a dryer. If you want to write, you write. Anywhere.

There are thousands of books, blogs and articles devoted to this idea: why do we write? Why is it important to tell stories, to create?

Joan Didion, American author and literary journalist, once wrote:

“All I knew then was what I couldn’t do. All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

(For the full essay: http://genius.com/Joan-didion-why-i-write-annotated)

Today’s Writing Prompt: Perfect strangers.

Further Inspiration? It doesn’t matter if you’re published or not. It doesn’t matter if you share your writing with one person or many. If your “most absorbed and passionate hours” are spent writing, then you’re a writer.

Welcome! We’re glad you found us.

Our Inspiration: Wordsmiths put pen to paper as they write from prompts and share their work aloud in a no-pressure atmosphere.

At a distance from us here in Narragansett, RI? Can’t make a meeting? That’s okay. We’ll post our prompts weekly, and would welcome your responses.

Wondering how to complete a prompt? Find a place to write. It doesn’t have to be quiet. You don’t have to be alone. It can be quiet, and you might write alone. But don’t worry, those aren’t requirements. The only requirements are these: Take a moment to clear your mind. Read the prompt. Set a timer for 20 minutes, and write. Write without editing much or at all. Write without listening to the voice in your head that says that what you’re writing isn’t any good. The goal is simply to get words on the page. As writers, we sometimes make a lot of excuses. We edit ourselves out of good ideas, or we feel that conditions must be ideal before we can write. Maybe your prompt response is mostly useless, but you can salvage one perfect sentence. Maybe you create a character that you find yourself wondering about later. Maybe you don’t write more than a few words. It doesn’t matter. The idea is to get writing, and to get in the practice of writing. And maybe, someday very soon, the timer will begin and you will be able to write something that you really, really like.

What is a writing prompt? According to Google, “A writing prompt is simply a topic around which you start jotting down ideas. The prompt could be a single word, a short phrase, a complete paragraph or even a picture, with the idea being to give you something to focus upon as you write.”

The best writing prompts can be anything. A line of poetry. A phrase you hear in a song. An insult. A photograph. An odd juxtaposition of words. A dream. A memory. Dialogue from a conversation you’re blatantly eavesdropping on. (We know. Generally speaking, you’re not supposed to end on a preposition. But you can definitely end with a proposition…that sounds promising.)

From http://www.dailywritingtips.com:

Here are four good reasons for writing to prompts :

1. Sometimes it’s hard to start writing when faced with a blank page. Focusing on an unrelated prompt for a while helps get the creative juices flowing. If you write for just ten minutes on a prompt, you should then find it easier to return to the piece you intended to write. You may also find that if you stop trying to think so hard about what you wanted to write and switch you attention to the prompt instead, the words and ideas for your original piece start to come to you after all.
2. The things you write in response to a prompt may also end up as worthwhile material in their own right. The prompt may give you ideas from which a complete story grows or you may get fresh ideas for another piece you are already working on. It’s often surprising how much material you come up with once you start.
3. Writing to a prompt regularly helps to get you into the habit of writing. This can act as a sort of exercise regime, helping to build up your “muscles” so that you start to find it easier and easier to write for longer and longer.
4. Prompts can be a great way to get involved in a writing community. Sometimes writing groups offer a prompt for everyone to write about, with the intention being for everyone to come up with something they can then share. This can be a source of great encouragement, although knowing that others will read what you have written can also inhibit your creativity.

Today’s Writing Prompt: When the cows come home.

Further Inspiration? Andy Weir. Now 43, the author originally published ‘The Martian’ as a free serial on his website. Upon readers’  request, Mr. Weir self-published his material on Amazon, where it became a best-seller and was purchased by a publishing company. Matt Damon is rumored to be an Oscar contender in the movie, in theaters now.