Insecure Writers Want to Know: Have you ever included personal traditions/customs in your stories?

            What an interesting question. I guess the problem with answering this question is; I don’t consider any of my personal family’s traditions or customs unique.  

            I start many a story or blog post with a family experience or two. From my personal experiences of Camping with FiveKids, to the national parks and forests we’ve visited, many of my YA short stories come from our adventures. But traditions and customs? I don’t think they are any different from anyone else’s.

            Let’s consider:

            Each summer, we camp with seven people in a tiny tent trailer that needs to be set up at each campsite. What’s different about that? We travel coast to coast and up into Canada for a month with those seven people—all sharing the duties of food preparation and clean-up for meals, accomplishing the laundry, hiking together for hours in the heat and the rain. Is that a tradition? Or is it just plain insanity?  

            In my memoir about attending college as a mother of five, I share how I made accomplishing a college degree and child rearing work. In this memoir, I share my belief that family comes first, that I am a mother first and a college student second. As a parent, I demonstrate to my children how to accomplish difficult goals, how to persevere through trial, and how to seek out assistance when necessary. But most of all, I believe I show my children how to stand up for themselves when they feel they are right. Is that sharing a custom or tradition out of the norm? Or is it a crazy person just trying to survive in a world, that in the beginning of the memoir, she felt she did not belong?  

You be the judge, cherished followers of Adventures in Writing. I’ll be interested to see how you’ve tackled this month’s question. It’s great having a topic to share our thoughts on each month. I am extremely thankful for all of you for being my sounding board and advisors in this writing and publishing game.

Thanks so much for visiting! Please follow Adventures in Writing if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in your comment so I can be sure to do the same for you.

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.  

Insecure Writers Want to Know: Has a single photo or work of art ever inspired a story? What was it and did you finish it?

            My family camping photographs of national and state parks, in caves or mighty forests or on mountains or rivers and lakes have inspired many an adventure short story. You can see some of these photographs at my Camping with Five Kids blog.   

Most recently, hiking in the Adirondack Mountains in New York inspired one of my current works in progress that I spoke about last month. 

I think I’ve got the pacing, when the protagonist finally realizes that because his father believed in him, he needs to believe in himself. I’ve got to make sure the emotion is there. That’s the difficult part for me. I’ve got so much going on in the short story—only 1800 words, remember—that many times I forget to leave word space to show emotions. How do you tuck in telling emotions in story?

The boulder scramble to the
top of Mt. Marcy Adirondack
Mountains in New York.

Thank you all so much for sharing your experiences with allergic reactions and helping me understand why and how to use the EpiPen last month. I’ve learned so much and hope to get back to that story shortly. First I need to be brave enough to let go and send out my Adirondack story. One story at a time, Vic, one story at a time.

I find photographs, especially of personal experiences, extremely helpful in story creation. Not only can they give you a visual reminder of a place, but if you study the photograph or a painting of a particular place, you can wrap your mind around questions to ask through story. What if questions. Deeply penetrating questions. Why is the protagonist here? What is he doing? What is he running away from or trying to hide from? What is he trying to make sense of in his life?

Try it yourself. Pick up any photograph or gaze deeply into a piece of artwork. Study the faces of the people in them. What could they be thinking about? What problems are they trying to solve? Describe them. Better yet, create them!

I’ll be interested to see how you’ve tackled this month’s question. It’s great having a topic to share our thoughts on each month. I am extremely thankful for all of you for being my sounding board and advisors in this writing and publishing game.

Thanks so much for visiting! Please follow Adventures in Writing if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in your comment so I can be sure to do the same for you.

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.  

Insecure Writers Want to Know: What started you on your writing journey? Was it a particular story or person? Did you just "know" suddenly you wanted to write?

First, I’d like to wish you all health and success in 2020. Happy New Year, Everyone! I am honored to co-host this month’s question. My gracious co-hosts are T. Powell Coltrin @Journaling Woman, ReneeScattergood, J.H. Moncrieff, and Stephen Tremp. 

Insecure Writers Support Group offers an excellent opportunity to pitch your stories, if you are ready. You can find details about the #IWSGPit, which is January 15^th, here. Good luck, everyone! 

You can also find details about IWSG’s new anthology Voyagers: The Third Ghost here. Congratulations to all the writers included in the anthology! Writers helping other writers. That’s what Insecure Writers Support Group is all about.

Now about our January question, I have always been a storyteller, like my father before me. I love adventure and romance, and I always envisioned myself in the story I read or watched. I was the protagonist, the main character who saves the day and wins her man. And I always did it with style. But getting it all on the page and hoping others would like the story? Well let’s just say this is why I’m part of Insecure Writers Support Group.  

             When I was growing up, my father would tell wild tales of adventure in our patio to me and my siblings and any neighborhood kid who hung around. We’d wait until dusk. He’d light a candle on the picnic table and begin his fanciful tale. The characters were whoever came to listen to the story. It didn’t need to make sense. His baritone voice kept us rapt on his every word wondering what would happen next.

            Because of my father, I took to telling my own children stories, but my stories would be based on anecdotes. It started when we went camping as a family. You can find many of our adventures on Camping with Five Kids. 

In the evening, sitting around the campfire, I’d tell the children stories. And they would ask for the same stories based on the same anecdotes. Then I started the “what if” stories. These were not actual happenings. These were pure fiction. My children liked those as well, and I started to think maybe I should try my hand at actually publishing these stories.  

            As you know, many of my short stories are based on adventures my family and I have had camping around this beautiful country of ours. But to make them worthwhile for others—and to keep within word count—I had to ditch the parents and any extraneous character and cut the time frame.

Right now I’m working on an adventure in the Adirondack Mountains where a teen and his younger sister are taking their first hike without their father who died in a car accident. It’s a familiar hike, but they’re both grieving. *Internal struggle* One external struggle is the younger sister keeps comparing her older brother [protagonist] with their father. Then I include a flash thunderstorm at the peak of the mountain, a flooded trail that takes them off course. Now there’s a swift river they need to cross on huge narrow boulders. And their mother is waiting for them at the foot of the trail. No cell service in the forest. I’m trying to get the pacing right, so feel free to offer comments or ask any questions on this. Thanks!   

I’m at the beginning of another short story that deals with an allergic reaction and the use of an EpiPen.

Does anyone have information as to what truly happens in an allergic reaction to a bee sting? 

Does anyone have any experience with using EpiPens?

Do you know of a reputable site to reference to help me learn about allergic reactions or EpiPens?

I’ll be interested to see how you’ve tackled this month’s question. It’s great having a topic to share our thoughts on each month. I am extremely thankful for all of you for being my sounding board and advisors in this writing and publishing game.

Thanks so much for visiting! Please follow Adventures in Writing if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in your comment so I can be sure to do the same for you.

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.  

Insecure Writers Want to Know: Of all the genres you read and write, which is your favorite to write in and why?

I love to read both memoir and fiction. I enjoy discovering the insight provided by the memoirist when she makes her point in the slice of life story she is telling. In fiction, I enjoy the more plot and action-based stories of adventure, cozy mysteries, and romance. 

But to write, I think writing fiction is far easier than writing memoir. Because in fiction, the writer can make up whatever she needs in order to make the story work, to make it intriguing. Is it easy? No. Not for me. But I can do things in fiction that I can’t do in memoir. Let’s say the protagonist in a fiction story needs some deep-seated reason to be fearful of relationships or to be afraid of bears. The writer creates the circumstances. Let’s say the writer needs an informant. Created. An antagonist? No problem. The characters need to be three-dimensional to appear real? Backstory can be made to order in fiction.

In memoir, the story the writer tells is true. There are demonstrative facts showing it to be so. The writer can’t, or shouldn’t, make up a memoir story. The writer can’t change when things happen or where they happen. She can’t create fictitious characters or change the beliefs of a real person whom she includes in her personal memoir story to make the story more exciting. She can’t add scenes that never happen to increase tension.

In memoir, the writer needs to find the story in the slice of life she wishes to share with the reader. She needs to find her point to be sure she knows what it is so she can relay it to the reader. Then the memoirist proves her point by shaping the true story in an interesting way, by creating scenes with true details and populating them with real people who matter to the protagonist in her journey. Then the memoirist interprets these scenes and happenings for the reader, to show the reader the insight gleaned from what really happened, to demonstrate the shift in mindset of the protagonist.   

That being my understanding between the two genres, I like to write adventure story. I’ve had the most success creating young adult adventure story, “man or woman versus nature” adventure. As some of you know, I have camped with five children for years. You can discover our adventures camping across the United States and up into Canada at Camping with Five Kids. 

Most of my YA adventure stories begin in a location we have visited while camping with kids. But as many of you know, any children’s writing needs to have a child protagonist who saves the day—not an adult stepping in to “fix” things. This is where the fiction comes into play. In fact, the first story I sold to Cricket Magazine had my teen protagonist with her younger brother lost in a cave. I needed to give the protagonist the backstory to be able to get them out of the cave without help from an adult. After I’ve sold several stories to Cricket, my editor did ask me in a confidential e-mail if I’ve ever let my children go explore a cave by themselves or hike in a national park by themselves and meet a mountain lion. The answer, of course, is no. That’s where the “fiction” comes in. But my editor does check out my Camping with Five Kids blog to see where we’ve been and the photos of national parks or the difference between the sugar cone pine cone and the redwood and sequoia pine cones.

My family and camping adventures are my inspiration—especially for my YA adventure stories. Where do you find inspiration to write in your particular genre? Thanks so much for visiting! Please follow Adventures in Writing if you haven’t already and connect with me online. Leave your blog link in your comment so I can be sure to do the same for you.

This post was written for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.  To join us, or learn more about the group, click HERE.