Speaking of Accents

While my North Dakota accent still needs some work, a friend sent me this great video of comedian Tim Wilson doing a number of Southern accents that help me realize I have a long way to go in perfecting my “Southern” accent.

Getting Out of the Way of the Story

For my monthly book club, a collection of well-educated mother’s of 8-year-olds known only to ourselves as the Readers and Breeders, we’re reading Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam book, The Things They Carried. I would have never guessed our little group would choose or read a book about Vietnam because we all admit that since we had children we can no longer watch the news, horror movies, or anything that remotely involves harming children or animals. But here we are reading a story that encompasses all three in gentle yet precise detail.

According to the Amazon review, the book was a finalist for both the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and “is neither memoir nor novel nor collection of short stories but rather an artful combination of all three.” I’m only half way through, and I have to admit that I’m not just reading it for pleasure or escape as I often do with book club fare, but this one I’m studying, dissecting, to observe what makes a Pulitzer finalist.

This morning I came along this little gem about storytelling buried deep in the heart of the book:

“Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit…because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do…is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.”

A friend and I recently agreed that most books published today are much too long. I hate wading through a self-help book with rambling prose when I’m really just there for help.

The existing draft of my own memoir is still too long, full of self-analysis and the occasional soap box, so it’s good to be reminded that I don’t need to be afraid to cut away all that isn’t truly relevant, no matter how much I enjoyed writing it or how clever it makes me feel.

Staying out of the way of the story can also be applied to improvisational acting. The heart of a truly memorable improv scene can usually be summed up in a sentence or two, and yet on stage, we can struggle to find the “primal truth” that’s often completely obvious to the audience even after four minutes of dialogue.

So in my writing, and my improv, I’m going to take Mr. O’Brien’s sage advice and try to get the heck out of my own way, let the story show itself, in all its naked glory, unencumbered by fuss and convention. Wish me luck, and to you all I wish the same.

Easy to Love…Transitions?

My blog post today over at Easy to Love But Hard to Raise is about a new resource I found that will hopefully help ease our transition next year into a different program at the boy’s school. Check it out and wish us luck!

Improv and Writing: A Parallel Training

I’ve been talking in the voice of a sophisticated Southern belle for about 24 hours. It rendered my husband speechless for hours and annoyed my children to the point of embarrassment within only a few minutes. Last night, I tried it out on stage in my improv class at the stellar Upfront Theatre.

I’ve been reading the book Acting on Impulse by Carol Hazenfield. The latter part of her book emphasizes the deepening of characters and story. I realized that each exercise Hazenfield proposes in her chapter “Playing with Fire: Creating Richer Characters” would also help me create deeper characters in my writing. By inhabiting the character, becoming them, physically, emotionally, and vocally, their thoughts, dialogue, and vocabulary come forward organically. I don’t have to “think” about it, she’s just there. After “becoming” the Southern belle, Sallie Mae, for only a few minutes, my posture, sentence structure, temperament, the speed and harmony of my voice, and even my vocabulary changed instantly. I’ve heard many of my teachers say, “we can act at the top of our intelligence.” I only yesterday realized that my intelligence also included the superficial wisdom of a proud Southern woman who likes to flirt and be pampered. I only needed to let her out.

Perhaps as revenge, my husband has issued me a challenge: to next inhabit a character from Fargo, ND. I’m not sure if his challenge was simply to escape Sallie Mae’s relentless drawl, or to see if she is just a fluke of my imagination, but I’m going to give it a try. Although I’m having a difficult time getting Sallie Mae to leave, I’m looking forward to finding my new friend from North Dakota, and perhaps someday, developing her as a character in a book that I have yet to conceive.

I encourage every writer to “become” their characters for more than a few hours to fully understand their inner workings, their approach to the world, and their motivations within a story’s setting.

Which character are you ready to become?

“Easy to Love…” is Finally Here!

I’m so proud to announce the official release of the anthology that my essay, Finding My Way, appears in, Easy to Love But Hard to Raise: Real Parents, Challenging Kids, True Stories, edited by Kay Marner and Adrienne Ehlert Bashista of DRT Press, and now available in paperback and Kindle. I’m proud to be part of a collection of essays by so many dedicated and wonderful parents who go the extra mile for their children, as well as a few world renowned parenting experts.

I hope to do a reading at Village Books in April and will post that info here first. As always, I also continue to post at the blog, Easy to Love, that accompanies the book, which is meant to support parents of children who need more. Thank you to all my friends, family, and supporters!

IVF Murder Mystery!

I just ran across the book, A Perilous Conception, by Pacific Northwest author Larry Karp. This murder mystery set in 1976 about an obstetrician’s quest to be the first to master in vitro fertilization is fiction. But the author’s 25 years of real life experience in perinatal medicine and medical genetics promises to inform this story with the true urgency of the time. Dr. Karp served as Medical Director of the Reproductive Genetics Lab at Seattle’s Swedish Medical Center and delivered the first baby in the Pacific Northwest conceived through in vitro fertilization.

The saying is, “write what you know,” and so I’m expecting this book to be full of real nitty-gritty of the fertility field at the time.

Dr. Karp will appear at the wonderful Village Books in Bellingham on January 28.

Film “Starbuck” Earning Raves

A recent French Canadian film, Starbuck, has been garnering awards, including the People’s Choice Award at the Calgary International Film Festival and the Palm Springs International Film Festival’s audience award for the festival’s best narrative feature. Click on the photo below or here for a subtitled trailer.

The comedy begins with 42-year-old David Wosniak, a grossly in-debt man child, as his girlfriend announces that she is unexpectedly pregnant and he is being sued in a class action lawsuit by 142 of the 533 children born from the sperm he donated 20 years earlier. The children in the suit want to know the identity of their biological father, known only by the pseudonym Starbuck.

David decides to find and spy on some of his children, now in their early 20′s, as they stumble through their hilariously odd lives, getting hopelessly sucked in along the way.

The film takes the premise to the extreme for the sake of comedy, but are the film makers also calling for tighter regulation and ethics considerations with their humor? Although there are currently no international regulations on the number of offspring that can be sired by any one donor, many sperm banks follow a self-imposed (and policed) limit on the number of samples sold to the public. To date, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who gathers and reports U.S. fertility statistics, does not track the number of offspring born from donor sperm. Sperm banks in the U.S. may or may not collect this information, but they are not required to report it to any agency.

The sperm bank we used in California offers a sibling registry to connect families that have used the same donor, but participation in the registry and reporting of offspring produced is voluntary. When we chose our donor from their list, we did not know how many offspring had been produced from that donor, but only whether or not other children had been conceived. At the time, we thought of the existence of half-siblings as a positive because that meant the sperm we were buying was viable and might give us good results, but it never occurred to us to be nervous about exactly how many half-siblings were out there.

I especially enjoyed this article, by Chris Knight of Canada’s The National Post, which compares the film’s main character to his nick-namesake, the famous bull, Starbuck, who sired more than 200,000 female Holsteins in a 19-year period, and was later cloned to continue the legacy.

Only time will tell whether this film will make it to my hometown for viewing, and whether the issue it raises will spur national and/or international regulation, but earning these awards, and thus expanding the film’s distribution and audience, will certainly up the odds. Let’s hope that talks of an English-language version of the film pan out.

What’s This Blackout All About?

Have you noticed the black boxes on google today? I heard about this “blackout” via word of mouth but actually had to go looking for an explanation.

Today, many major media outlets are practicing a symbolic blackout to raise awareness of two pieces of legislation are working their way through Congress: Protect IP Act (PIPA) is in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is in the House. Each would censor the Web and impose tough regulations on American business and penalties on individuals and companies involved in the piracy of music, film, and written materials.

This one seems tough to decipher. As a writer and aspiring comedienne, I would tend to oppose any threat to free speech. But I also don’t think people should be able to get away with mass pirating without penalty. In this economy, if I had a book for sale, I would be livid if someone was selling my book without permission and taking home the profit.

These videos from The Colbert Report attempts to make fun of and then clarify the issues:

I do my best to avoid piracy, but its pretty easy to do it in ignorance. Many teens and young people may not realize they are committing a crime.

Does this conversation sound familiar?

Me: “I love that song. I need to get the CD.”

My friend: “No one buys CD‘s anymore. Just go to www dot ________ and burn your own. It’s easy and free.”

I’ve had the same conversation with friends about watching a current movie on-line to save the $12 I’d spend in a theater. Some of my friends know it’s piracy and don’t feel they’re hurting anyone, while others figure it can’t be illegal if they can access it so easily.

So, on this one, I’ll say I’m for some regulation of the internet to prevent and stop piracy, but like many recent legislative attempts, I fear SOPA and PIPA won’t be clear and specific enough to be implemented without misuse or manipulation.

What’s your take on internet censorship?

Malia Jacobson: A Writer’s Role Model

Blogging can feel selfish at times because I get to choose what I write about every day, and no matter the subject, the perspective is all me, me, me. But one of the topics I most enjoy is highlighting the work of others who inspire me as a writer and a human being.

Pacific Northwest writer, Malia Jacobson and I took Christina Katz’ writing class, Writing and Publishing the Short Stuff, at the same time a couple of years ago. Since then Malia has been knocking it out of the park. I have been following her regularly on Facebook and her Website. Her flourishing writing career continually pushes me to keep at it.

Of course, she was a successful writer before she took Christina’s class, but what she has accomplished since is impressive. She now has more than 150 credits in over 60 publications (these numbers may be higher because she has 14 articles in January ’12 publications alone), with many in national magazines like Costco Connection and Women’s Health Magazine.

Malia is successful for many reasons (talent, dedication, and hard work to name a few), but I think she would agree that specializing and becoming an expert in a couple specific areas has been a boon to her career. I’m most familiar with her experience as a sleep journalist. She studies and writes about how to get your kids to sleep better and how sleep (or the lack of it) affects the whole family, including us tired parents.

I recommend Malia’s e-book, Ready, Set, Sleep: 50 Ways to Help Your Child Sleep, So You Can Sleep Too, to all my friends in this struggle. Its full of helpful tips for diet, exercise, and other approaches that will get everyone in the family the rest they need dearly.

In December Malia appeared on Seattle’s King 5 News segment, Parent to Parent, to talk about one of her articles focused on how to raise moral kids, which is no small feat in today’s crazy world.

What I admire most about Malia is how she’s able to balance work and life. She is an accomplished writer with diverse publication credits and strong professional relationships while fulfilling her roles as dedicated wife and mom to her young children. She still finds time to bake cookies, clean house, and maintain her blog, Family in Progress. She’s someone we can relate to and aspire to emulate.

Way to go Malia, and thanks for being an inspiration to us all.

Improv at Work

To follow up on yesterday’s post, Improvisation in Life, incorporating improv principles can also help your career. Thanks to my friend Clare for this article  by Bryce Christiansen over at the Savvy Intern about Tina Fey’s business acumen as described in her humor memoir Bossy Pants. The focus is how she uses improv in her relationships at work.

I love Bossy Pants and would like my natural voice to come forth as freely in my writing as hers does.

Classes with the theme of “improv for business” are available across the country, including at my favorite Upfront Theatre, so if you’re serious about your work and haven’t yet taken one, get out there. It will change the way you look at your job, and probably make it a lot more fun!

(photo courtesy of the Savvy Intern)