I have always believed in the symbolism of ‘The Light’ with my faith. In my research to validate my viewpoint, I’ve found in the Bible multiple references to ‘The Light’ or ‘The Light of the World.’ The first chapter and first verses of Geneses are the initial sources.
“In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was the morning of the first day.”
Biblical scholars have varied interpretations of these five verses. I understand that the usage here of ‘The Light’ and its opposition to ‘The Darkness’ is symbolic of good and evil. Since God created the light, perhaps it means the ‘Spirit of God.’
Psalms 27:1, “The Lord is my light and my salvation – whom shall I fear.
Isaiah 60:1 “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.”
In January 2019, I finished the draft of my first attempt at fiction. If you have followed me, you’ll remember that month I experienced my husband’s death. I put the writing on the shelf until the fall of 2021. With the assistance of my writing critique group, I began anew with the editing and rewriting process.
Eighteen months later, I am confident we are closer to the final version. In the hope of titillating and sparking some interest, I’m presenting a portion of a chapter from Bigoted Truths. As always, please give me your observations and suggestion in the comment area below.
Chapter Two
A friend of mine stopped smoking, drinking,
overeating and chasing women —
All at the same time.
It was a lovely funeral.
Unknown author
In high school, the coaches expected West Texas boys to play sports. Compared to Tommy Goodwin, my best friend, I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I played football and baseball. In my first two years of football, they had me playing left end of the bench. The coach put me in at least once a year, and he regretted it each time.
My senior year had me playing more, but with no more success. I played tight end, and after our second game, Tommy teased, “You’re supposed to block the defensive guys, not let them run over you. Hell, a tackling dummy would be better playing that position than you.”
“Shut up! I’m doing my best. If I didn’t have to, I wouldn’t be playing this stupid game.”
Scholastically, schoolwork came easy. I’d catch hell from Mom if I came home with something lower than an ‘A’ on my report card. “If you put as much effort into paying attention at school as you do playing around, you wouldn’t get them low grades.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” My interest lay in being popular and making my classmates laugh. I rarely dated girls in high school, but when we had an event like homecoming and the prom, I’d talk Tommy Goodwin into double dating. He felt sorry for me because of my shyness around girls.
Do we understand love and grief, and how might they be linked? Both emotions are all-consuming and seize us when we are least expecting. There are many types of love. but I’m talking about the shared love between two adults in a committed relationship. During my life, I have twice experienced love and grief.
There are hundreds of definitions of love, and not all apply to our individual phycological experience. I couldn’t find the source, but someone stated, “True love is a selfless act.” It’s when you continually put your significant other at the center of your existence.
The Songs of Solomon in the Old Testament of the Bible gave me another perception of what love is.
During the few years that I have studied the art of writing, one prominent piece of advice for novice writers is to “write what you know.” Following this guideline makes it easier to select a genre. You already have a foundation on which to build.
The first three books I wrote were memoirs, with each about a different period of my life. By being a familiar subject, the minimal research made it easier for me to focus on the skills of writing the narrative.
Currently, I’m working on my first attempt at fiction. When I started, I again took a life experience as my subject. In 1970, I attended mortuary school, and until 1981 worked as a licensed funeral director and embalmer. It seemed a natural and easy choice to use my mortuary profession as the primary subject of my plot. I followed famous writers such as Hemmingway, John Grissom, and Anne Rice, who utilized this technique.
I’m not the first person to recommend joining a writer’s critique group. A friend and a member of the group invited me and I’ve been attending for three years. I will tell you from experience as a novice writer, that it’s been a tremendous help. Often, it’s the incidental detail that I miss that can stand out and weaken my writing.
For example, I overuse adverbs. I’ll use duplicate words in a paragraph and not notice it. I’ll include excessive detail when it adds nothing of value to the chapter. I frequently use weak verbs and passive sentences. For me, the list goes on. Thank goodness I have the patience of my group members that point out these flays
One of the members of my critique group, and my guest, is Laura Boldin-Fournier. She’s an accomplished, and published writer of short stories and children’s books. Recently she has submitted one of her science-fiction short stories entitled, Poultry Mattersto Quantum Shorts’ flash fiction. This work is published on their website. Follow the above link for her latest entertaining piece.
I’ve allowed my blog website to go stale during the last three years. I found no desire or comfort by keeping it current. I quit following all those individual bloggers that inspired me, and I aspired to be one of them. I didn’t delete the links to my favorite writers, but their connections to me were lost in my absence.
Perhaps I should feel ashamed, but I’m not. Individuals who know me might say the absenteeism was justifiable. It doesn’t matter. I often wanted to return to what previously had been motivating and therapeutic. With any of my attempts, all I found was the blank screen. It’s an experience most writers have.
Although I abandoned my blog site, I continued writing. When I first joined the writing group, they assisted me in rewriting my first book, One Month, Twenty Days, and a Wake-Up. I released the second edition in July 2020. Currently, I’m working on my first attempt at writing fiction. Please watch for further discussion and announcements on its release.
I thought my desire for the world of blogging would return once my mourning ended. But my sadness hasn’t ended. What I’ve learned, there is no end to our grief. We don’t stop loving those we have lost, so why would we stop grieving for them. We don’t.
Christmas of 2018, I introduced a guest writer, Forest Riggs, with his Christmas short story.Forest isn’t a novice writer like myself, but a skilled writer who has written for several Texas magazines and newspapers in and around the Houston, Texas area. Recently, Forest released his new book Galveston – Memories & Related Stories. The book, published by Outskirts Press, is available on Amazon as a paperback or ebook. You also may purchase a copy through Barnes and Nobles, Ingram, Abe Books, eBay, and several local books stores in the Galveston and Houston area.
Here is a quote from the manuscript:
“The sand-covered oasis in the Gulf of Mexico represents an almost mythical and magical place, where man, nature, and Providence have come to the crossroads many times since its earliest beginnings.”
I’m a novice writer and I don’t claim to be an authority. This post, along with others, are my observations and reiterations of professional writers. I point out these pieces of information for other writers at my level to learn from my experiences and often errors.
I’m writing my first fiction manuscript. Creative writing has a diverse set of demands, just as non-fiction has. If we don’t meet these essential elements, our readers may quit after the first chapter. Many key areas in non-fiction, if included in fiction, turn off our audience.
For example, my first three books were memoirs. Providing my reader with basic information about myself is a requirement. They need to know my age, the topography and/or location where the events occur, and other details that support my story. This same information with fiction may not be relevant or may be too much (e.g., information dump).
For the last three years, I’ve worked on my first attempt at writing a fictional novel. In January 2019, I completed the first draft. Two friends volunteered to read it, and they both had similar opinions.
They liked the overall theme, but they stated it lacked character development and world-building. One said I didn’t give him a reason to follow the protagonist beyond the first chapter. Ouch! The other remarked that chapters got bogged down with detail, and it lost any identifying storyline. Double Ouch!
I put the manuscript on the virtual shelf and attempted to refocus my writing. About the same time, a critique writing group invited me to join. (If you never took part in a critique group, I highly recommend them.) Rather than tackle the fiction manuscript, I rewrote my first book, One Month, 20 Days, and a Wake Up. Once I finished that project, I came back to tackle the fiction manuscript.
After three chapters with the group, I was getting the same response as I had back in 2019. One individual referred to my chapters as nothing but an ‘information dump.’ Information dump! What is that?Then I read a blog post by K.M. Allan entitled “5 Ways to Avoid Information Dumping.” https://kmallan.com/2021/02/19/5-ways-to-avoid-info-dumping/Ah, huh, the light bulb came on.
Christopher Cervelloni, my editor with Blue Square Writer’s Group, didn’t call it ‘information dump.’ His classic example: “Sam drove home, got out of his car, walked to the front porch, unlocked the door, and entered the house.” He said, the reader can figure it out if you write, “Sam returned home.” I realize this is an overly simplified example. But it points out that as writers, we insult our readers when we overtly give them unsolicited detail (information dump).
Please use the link above to read the full post of Ms. Allan. In summary, she states the five most common mistakes and how to recognize the ‘info. dump.’:
Check the Starts
Manage the Monologuing
Drip It In and Stretch It Out
Fine-Tune the Dialogue
Make It Relevant
To show (hopefully) that I understand and have corrected my ‘info. Dump’ here is an example from my text; before and after.
Before:
“It was typical for funeral homes to have an apartment attached somewhere. Someone had to answer the phones twenty-four – seven. For our place, we lived in the apartment on the second floor. Our apartment was a two-bedrooms, one bath, a small living room/dining room combination. The kitchen was barely a kitchen, but Mom made use of what she had.
It was common for the funeral homes to resemble a southern colonial mansion. Ours was a white colonial with two-story pillars on either side of the entrance. The downstairs was larger than the upstairs. As you entered the main foyer…”
Previous Welch Funeral Home, Longview Texas
“The Chapel was located off to the right of the reception area and would seat one-hundred comfortably….”
“Off the foyer in the opposite direction of the chapel were two offices. One we used as our business office and Dad used the other as his office and where he brought families to make their arrangements….”
“Growing up, I had several classmates who had a morbid curiosity. To stop their stupid questions, I would tell them about the ghost or the dead bodies who walked around at night. Most the time that prevented them from bugging me…”
Even with the above, there was more detail that I spared you from reading. It is so obvious now, but when I wrote it, I thought most people knew nothing about the funeral homes and it was my job to educate them. Mm, something wrong with this picture.
After:
“I grew up living above the funeral home. I never thought it was odd living where I did. Several of my friends lived in the same building as their family-owned business. But there were those classmates who had a morbid curiosity. When they bothered me too much, I’d whisper in their ear, “The other night, I saw a ghost crawl out of the casket and walked out the front door.” Their eyes would get big, and their mouth hung open. It usually shut them up when they realized I was pulling their leg…”
I’m apprehensive to read the new chapters to my critique group. Hopefully, they will approve of the changes. Leave me a comment if you think I’ve got it. Don’t be shy telling me I still need to work on it.
My morning routine as I eat breakfast often includes watching Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe, on MSNBC. I’m not a fan of Joe, but his news program is revealing and informative. I find Joe long-winded, and he takes too long to make his point or allow his guest to respond. Frequently, Mika Brzezinski offsets him when he goes overboard. Their coverage of the national news is timely, and their interviews are efficient in understanding the topic.
This morning’s discussion became heated when the subject turned to Facebook and Twitter when Mika and Joe explained, “…they see Facebook and Twitter as ‘publishers,’ and such, they want the social media platforms to be held accountable by the same laws as news organization…”
They feel both social media platforms were negligent in monitoring and eliminating “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” Mika’s rant continued saying, “Perhaps there wouldn’t be people dead. Perhaps there wouldn’t be people following false scientific information about the coronavirus. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been some sort of insurrection at the Capitol that was promulgated all over your sites. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been so much hatred and disinformation. You have shown that it drops just by some random act that you decided to take at the last minute…”
