Rising with the Day

 

Bread is such an amazing food, isn’t it? Take a handful of ingredients—salt, sugar, flour, water, yeast—maybe some olive oil and rosemary—combine it, then watch as it does its magic.

I woke to snowfall on Thursday. We’ve been expecting this storm, here in Calimesa, hoping for snow because we rarely get real snow. When I opened the door to take the dogs out at 4:00a.m., big, fluffy flakes were falling. Did the dogs mind? Not a wit. They had to pee! Out into the yard they raced, returning to me on the patio ten minutes later, their coats dusted with flakes that were already melting.

It rained and snowed on and off all day—a good day to hunker down and produce some good work.

So after breakfast, I started some bread rising. The night before, in anticipation of the storm, I’d plucked some sprigs of rosemary from my back yard shrub, washed it, and minced the leaves. (The entire house smelled like fresh rosemary, and I remember catching a whiff of the scent as I went to bed.) I added salt, sugar, water, flour, yeast, and some olive oil, stirred, mixed, and kneaded until a dough was formed. (When people ask if I have a bread maker, I always answer in the affirmative as I hold up my two hands. I’ve been making bread this way for 50 years. No reason to change it up now.)

With the dough in the bowl, rising nicely, I opened my laptop. I know I don’t talk about it much—I consider it bad form to do so—but since I retired, I’ve been working on a series of children’s books. (Not a Young Adult novel, as I’ve done before, but a Middle-Grade series, for kids 10-12.) The idea came to me years ago, when I lived in Mt Baldy. I intended to write one fun book. Then I heard a fellow writer talk about the advantage of writing a series—in order to sell more books.

Huh, I thought. I could make it a trilogy. (Which is how it started, but well into the second book, I knew there had to be four, as it follows the seasons.)

But finding the time to write it was nearly impossible while I was still working. (Though I did write the first 30 pages and hand them off to one of my favorite brilliant ten-year-olds, Matthew Confer, who read it and gave me the best feedback I’ve ever gotten from a first reader. Matthew is 19 and in his second year of college now.)

One week before our rainy snowstorm, I finished the last chapter of the fourth book. All that was left to write was a short epilogue. But some things happened… some good, some bad… and I didn’t get back to it until Wednesday night. After I chopped up all that aromatic rosemary, I wrote the first half of the epilogue.

On Thursday, while the bread was rising, the house now filling with the scent of yeasty dough, I put some soft music on for the fur kids, then, as I mentioned, opened the laptop. And cried. And wrote the final words of the book. And cried some more.

It may seem like a tired trope of egocentric writers, so forgive me if that’s the case, but I absolutely love my characters. Writing fiction is damn hard—you have to create lives and back stories and scenarios out of thin air—truly like pulling a rabbit out of a hat where none existed previously. But a decade ago, when I had the idea, one snowy, wintry night in Baldy while I lay in bed in the loft with my tiny cat, Sugar Plum, curled beside me, I began to tell her a story. A story about a cat… and a dragon. And in the years that passed, the story took shape in my head. And I knew exactly how it would end. Ten years and four books later, that story ended exactly as I had envisioned it.

To celebrate, I took a long nap. When I got up, I shaped my lovely mound of dough into four smaller mounds, let them rise one more time, and then put them in the oven.

Imagine the joy in my house: The quiet snow falling… the scent of fresh baked bread… the satisfaction of seeing a vision come to fruition….

Storytelling is much like making bread. You only need a handful of ingredients—a few characters, a setting, a bit of conflict to get the story churning—and, with patience, you can produce something wonderful. Something magical.

Now the hardest part of all begins: Finding just the right publisher to get these books out into the world for kids just like me who love to read books with cats, dogs, dragons, and a wee bit of fantasy.

While we wait, here's a tiny sample from Book One, just to give you a taste: (FYI: I have this section printed and thumbtacked to my writing board.)

"Little one." The dragon stopped, turned, and spread her enormous wings to embrace the small girl who had halted in the middle of the path. Softly, she continued. "Here is my blessing of peace to your heart. It matters not whether this person at this time chooses or does not choose you. Let that be the furthest from your mind. It has been asked of you to sing. This is a sacred gift. You honor us all--your ancestry and yourself--when you do so. At the time given, let go of 'what if' and celebrate what is."

A Blueprint for Successful Storytelling

In the eight years I've been posting to this, my beloved blog space, I have never had a guest writer. There's a first time for everything, right? I am so excited about the brilliance of this newly released book on story, I've asked author M. L. Welker to say a few words about how the book came to be. Here is his response--and may his words, both here and within the pages of his book, be an inspiration to you:

I’ve always been fascinated with stories. When I was a little kid, I fell in love with the fictional worlds of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Jurassic Park. This led me to start writing my own stories and making my own homemade movies as a hobby. But despite how fun that was, destiny seemed to have other plans for me. At least at the time. I went off to college to pursue a “safe” degree and a “normal” job. But the entire time I never lost my obsession with stories. I kept writing on the side and learning more and more about the craft and the magic of storytelling.

That we humans find stories so transfixing is fascinating to me. When a movie starts, when we read the first few lines of a novel, or when somebody starts to tell us about “This one time . . .” it’s like our brains switch into story-receiving mode and we’re locked in. From there, we are transported into story worlds in a way that makes us feel almost like we are actually there, experiencing it all right alongside the characters in the story. Well, at least if it’s a good story.

Which was what intrigued me most of all. Why were some stories really good and able to hijack our brains, sucking us into their worlds, while other stories weren’t and were kind of just boring? And why were some stories so good that even repeat readings and viewings didn’t diminish their appeal? They are still engaging and fun even though we already know everything that happens. Why?

This began a lifelong obsession for me: What makes stories tick and why are the great ones so great? How do they do it?

It was really exciting when I found out there have been books written about this very thing. It turns out many other folks have had an interest like me and analyzed stories to find something of a secret formula. I pounced on these books. Some of them were paradigm-shifting for me (like Save the Cat!). But not all of them clicked. And some of them just made me wrinkle my nose. I felt like they just weren’t quite talking specifically enough about what I was interested in. Or at the very least they weren’t convincing me with their analyses. And all of them (even Save the Cat!) were woefully deficient when it came to helping me write my own stories.

It soon became clear that to get the answers I was looking for, I was going to have to go find them on my own.

Thus began the journey that culminated in the creation of my own book on the craft of storytelling: Blockbuster Blueprint.

I didn’t start out wanting to write a book. At first I was just frustrated with the existing material and decided to do my own investigation and write down my findings. I’d use these personal notes to help myself with my own stories and that would be that.

But as I poured over stories and analyzed them, my notes grew and grew. Eventually I had enough notes that folks started asking to see them and suggesting I turn them into a book.

And this struck a chord. This made perfect sense. These notes were, after all, my own personal answer to the missing material I was after. So if I wasn’t thrilled with the other books about story out there, it stood to reason there would probably be other writers who felt the same way. In the end, it seemed rather selfish to keep my findings and writings all to myself. So, I spent four years working on transforming those notes into a book.

And now the real fun begins. With Blockbuster Blueprint now published, I can start using the lessons it teaches to write even better stories than ever before. And the best part is, so can anybody else who reads it. Which is great because if it helps other writers make their stories better, all the readers, movie-watchers, and all-around story lovers out there benefit. Myself included. And the world could always use more good stories.