Episode Title: It’s not too late!

Welcome to Writing from Behind the Curve. This blog is written to encourage, persuade, cajole, or reason you into the world of the written word—your written word! My premise is a simple one: Within many of you awaits a story to be told—whether as a fiction short story or as a novel. It’s something you’ve thought about for years, even decades. But as with so many things, life has gotten in the way. Perhaps you’ve had a full and demanding career, or you’ve been the chief orchestrator of your family’s growth—maybe both! With time having passed, maybe you’ve decided that it’s too late for you to tell your story, that no one will want to read what you have to say. Or you may think that first-time writers are mostly young and educated to be writers. But that’s where Writing from Behind the Curve comes in. You see, this blog, while hopefully informative for people at any age, is written specifically for you who accomplished other things in the first half of your life, but still retain that latent flicker to tell a story that has been bouncing around in that noggin of yours for the past ten, twenty, or even forty years. If you think this blog’s premise is but a fantasy at this late date, please read on.

Photo by Austin Chan

Today’s forms of advanced communications, as we know, are no more than a smartphone text or computer email away. It is this digital world that brings with it a stunning development for anyone who wishes to write—the “digital cloud.” This means that anything you write can be stored for reading, not just in your lifetime but for the next hundred, five-hundred, or thousand years! Whatever you write today becomes part of your personal legacy. Do you want your short story or novel to be read by family and friends, perhaps others, long into the future? With today’s technology, this is actually possible.

It is with this background in mind that this blog is determined to accomplish one thing: to rekindle your desire—no matter how dormant—to write. Let me also say that I write this blog from the viewpoint of the lay writer; I am not pretending to be a professionally trained writer. Accordingly, this blog is not written for the well-trained, well-educated journalist or author. What I am able to share with you, one lay person to another, however, is my personal journey from non-writer to writer, and to share the experiences gained and knowledge learned during that journey.

Photo by Danica-Tanjutco

About now, you may be thinking that I am someone who is about to take you through a technical class on writing. No, that’s not it; that couldn’t be further from the goal here. Let me give you an example of where I am going with this. When I was regularly visiting in-residence patients at a healthcare center in Durango, Colorado, I met Hildy, a wheelchair bound woman in her late seventies. I immediately recognized her love for reading; her small half room was stacked with books in every nook and cranny. She had a wonderful vocabulary, no doubt the extension of her voracious appetite for the written word. I had just completed the rewriting of a novel and, at her request, I agreed to share it with her. A couple of weeks later, we sat together to talk through the novel’s storyline: its protagonist, its other characters, its main plot and subplots, on so on. It was then that I asked this bright woman if she had ever written anything. No, but she had often thought that she would like to. So with a small amount of encouragement from me, she began, for the first time in her life, to write a few short stories.

During my visits to Hildy over the next couple of months, she would read me her stories; they were charming, touching, clever, and well written. One morning while I was shaving, the phone rang; it was Hildy. “I’m sorry to call so early, Dick, but I just had to tell my mentor. I have just been informed that I’ve won two first place ribbons and one honorable mention for the three stories I submitted to the county fair.”

The point in telling you of this special lady, gone now, is to argue for a renaissance in the way we think about writing. Statistically, some eighty percent of adults, when polled, have indicated that they wanted to write a book at some point in their lifetimes, but that only two percent actually do. I believe there are good, corrective answers to the disparity in these numbers, and that there is a way to finally write that long lost story. It just takes a different frame of reference, as I will discuss in the next blog.

Photo by StockSnap

I was in my mid forties, after a lengthy career in business, before I put word one to paper, so please don’t think that your age, if advanced, is in any way a hindrance. I believe Hildy proved that. This blog is written to encourage all of us, especially those with decades of life behind them, who may have long ago given up on putting pen to paper, or should I say fingers to keyboard.

Join me in this endeavor, this attempt to create something that will finally fulfill your latent desire to write that short story or novel. Writing anything has always been an intellectual challenge for most people, but what a wonderful and worthy challenge it can be. Dementia related disorders are the concern of many today, so what a fabulous way to stimulate the mind with something important and far above the trivial. Always remember, if you have something to say—only you can say it. The end product will be your end product and no one else’s—-something to be proud of.

This is the first episode in a semi-monthly blog. Above all, I hope it to be interactive, with much correspondence not only between you and me, but an exchange of information and experiences among all of our participants. Tell me what you think about joining in. I sincerely hope that you do. It’s not too late; it never was. Please retweet this blog! Thanks.

All the best,

Dick Franklin

richardsfranklin100@gmail.com

                         

Note: Dick is author of novels Joshua Rye, Serpent at the Well, and MOLTO GRANDE. Go to: amazon.com/author/dickfranklin

Episode Title: A live example of the writing process!

Up until now, I have taken you through a number of the key considerations that apply to writing your first story. And, hopefully, I have persuaded you that what you have to say is worth saying, just as it always has been. I also realize, as with any good novel, that it is better to “show” than to “tell.” With that axiom in mind, during the months ahead I would like to share with you the issues that I will personally encounter in the writing of a new story. Depending on how the story evolves, I expect that in the end it will be a short story, perhaps something under 50,000 words. As with everything about its writing, however, I do not commit myself to the story’s length, any more than I commit myself to its full storyline or subplots, or to its major and minor characters, or any other of its fundamental aspects. I start only with an idea, and then let the story write itself during the act of writing. This is my personal preference for proceeding, but it does not in any way diminish the other approaches that one may choose to follow, as discussed earlier in this blog series.

Image by Wikiimages from Pixabay

As of this writing, I am also in the process of creating a three-book series from MOLTO GRANDE, my novel about two Italian brothers on remarkably different paths in 1693 Europe. At 258,000 words, MOLTO GRANDE is roughly the size of three full-length novels; it is a huge standalone read. Rather, I think it will be better to have a series that doesn’t overweight the reader. In this way, I can provide the first book in the series at no cost or at a very low price, allowing readers to experience the novel before deciding to pursue the entire story. The point in telling you this is to suggest that the writing of the new story will be intermixed with this important development for MOLTO GRANDE. Thus, future blogs will not continue to be published every two weeks, but as I have something worthwhile to share about my new writing project.

Image by Mona Eendra from Unsplash

In between those times when I will write additional blogs, I’ll assume that you are busy writing your story, using many of the tenets discussed in the earlier blogs. Of course, I also continue to encourage you to write to me and our writing community about matters that you are encountering and wish to discuss. This will strengthen your writing process and our writing community at large. Remember, above all, it’s not too late to write your story; it never was!

All the best,

Dick Franklin

richardsfranklin100@gmail.com

Dick is author of novels Joshua Rye, Serpent at the Well, and MOLTO GRANDE. Go to my author’s website at: amazon.com/author/dickfranklin