Generative WHAT?

HALLIE EPHRON: Often it's only with 20/20 hindsight that we recognize (or misconstrue) the massive changes right under our noses.

Looking back, I was absolutely oblivious to the scope of the changes that were underway as computers took over, rendering typewriters and library card catalogues extinct.

I still remember my sister Nora swearing that she could not properly edit a manuscript with a computer. Pushing the words, line by line, page by page through the typewriter were essential to a proper rewrite.

Is there ANYONE out there today who actually starts over when they rewrite, "typing" the whole thing over?

My parents wrote a movie (The Desk Set, 1957) which features a gigantic (think: semi truck) mainframe computer matching wits with Katharine Hepburn (and losing). The first PC was 20 years away and today, a computer that powerful can fit into a well ventilated coat closet.

I was sure I'd never swap out my typewriter for a personal computer, my PC for a MAC. Or succumb to the siren song of a cell phone. Or ditch my land line. Or do my banking on line. 

Now we're going kicking and screaming into an age of generative artificial intelligence. Griping about "customer service" bots that run us around in circles. Yearning for the voice of another actual human being when we dial HELP.

Meanwhile some folks are singing its praises.

I've been keeping my distance, happily ignorant when it comes to AI tools. Unsure even of what vocabulary to use to describe them. Wondering, like everyone else, if AI will render writers obsolete. Swearing at phone bots and unhelpful "help" bots that seem to make it impossible to tell truth (whatever that is) from a bot's fever dream.

But my pessimism got dented recently.

I had a medical test and waited and waited for the results. After a few weeks of silence, PING, an email came that directed me to click and log into the medical "portal" (of hell?) and see what the tests think.

So, after waiting another week and getting up my courage, I clicked. Searched down the right password (every g-d doctor/practice seems to have their own "portal"). And read results that felt like instructions to a chemist.

There were numbers and percentages and... mixed in, a lot of words. I didn't know whether to be worried. Or relieved. Confused: absolutely. Baffled, for sure. 

Then, like a lifeline, the portal offered to run my test results through generative AI.

What's to lose? I clicked the link.

The bulleted list that came up was subtitled "Interpretation." The words were plain and simple, easy to parse. Brief and to the point. One word leapt out at me: Negative. Let's just say that in this case that result was a positive for me.

Maybe I can get used to this new world after all.

I will not be using AI to write or rewrite, and a cautionary tale in last week's New York Times illustrates how a chatbot can feed delusional thinking. 

No more than I'll be be hauling out my typewriter and running manuscript edits through it or trying to get Verizon to re-install my land line. But I am a bit less pessimistic about what the future holds and how I'll be adapting to it. 

Because, clear as can be, this is the way of the future.

Have you had any positive or negative experiences with generative AI? Or are you sitting there scratching your head and saying, "Generative what??"

Hallie on writing setting from her mind's eye

HALLIE EPHRON: One of the pitfalls of being me is that people assume that I know something about writing screenplays. Let me assure you (as I do them), I do not. 

My parents were screenwriters. My sisters, too. But my favorite things to write are setting and internal dialogue (narrator's thoughts)... none of which show up in a screenplay. In a screenplay it's mostly dialogue and (brief) suggestions on the staging and character affect.  

I love to write setting in combination with internal dialogue, neither of which show up much in a screenplay.

Moving the reader through the setting with the characters usually requires research. The writers has go GO somewhere and take notes, record sounds, take pictures, talking to locals. Research, if it's an historical setting. A ton of world building if it's fantasy.

But there's a special pleasure (and ease) writing a story that is set in in A PLACE FROM YOUR OWN PAST.  Possibly a place that no longer exists the way it was then.

I did this In "Night Night, Sleep Tight" which takes place Beverly Hills in the early 60's when I was growing up there. The THERE/there no longer exists except in my memory, so that's where I went to find the details I needed.

In one of the opening chapters, Deirdre reluctantly driving back to her childhood home to deal with her wayward father. Along the way she's flooded with memories, just as I was writing this since I'd taken that drive (decades ago) a gajillion times: Sunset Boulevard, from the San Diego Freeway to Beverly Hills. 

I remember every curve. Every stoplight...
**

Deirdre crossed into the left lane and accelerated. Power surged and her Mercedes SL automatically downshifted and shot forward, hugging the road as she pushed it around a bend. She braked into the curves and accelerated coming out, weaving between cars on the winding four-lane road. 

Forty, forty-five, fifty. The end of her crutch slid across the passenger seat, the cuff banging against the door.

The car drifted into the right lane coming around a tight curve and she had to slam on the brakes behind a red bus that straddled both lanes and poked along at twenty miles an hour, idling just outside walled estates. STARLINE TOURS was painted in slanting white script across the back.

Deirdre tapped the horn and crept along behind the bus, past pink stucco walls that surrounded the estate where Jayne Mansfield had supposedly once lived. 

It had been a big deal when the actress died, had to have been at least twenty years ago. And still tourists lined up to gawp at her wall. Breasts the size of watermelons and death in a grisly car accident (early news reports spawned the myth that she’d been decapitated)—those were achievements that merited lasting celebrity in Hollywood. 

That, or kill someone. 

It was the same old, same old, real talent ripening into stardom and then festering into notoriety. Deirdre sympathized with Jayne Mansfield’s children, though, who must have gone through their lives enduring the ghoulish curiosity of strangers.

Buses like the one belching exhaust in front of her now used to pull up in front of her own parents’ house, passengers glued to the windows. Most writers, unless they married Jayne Mansfield, did not merit stars on celebrity road maps. And in the flats between Sunset and Santa Monica where her father lived, notables were TV (not movie) actors, writers (not producers), and agents, all tucked in like plump raisins among the nouveau riche noncelebrity types who’d moved to Beverly Hills, so they’d say, because of the public schools. 

You had to live north of Sunset to score neighbors like Katharine Hepburn or Gregory Peck. Move up even farther, into the canyons to an ultramodern, super-expensive home to find neighbors like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.

Arthur Unger had earned his spot on the celebrity bus tour through an act of bravery that had lasted all of thirty seconds. It had been at a poolside party to celebrate the end of filming of Dark Waters, an action-packed saga with a plot recycled from an early Errol Flynn movie. 

Fox Pearson, the up-and-coming actor featured in the film, either jumped, fell, or was pushed into the pool. Sadly for him, no one noticed as the cast on the broken leg he’d suffered a week earlier doing his own stunts in the movie’s finale dragged him to the bottom of the deep end. Might as well have gone in with his foot stuck in a bucket of concrete.

A paparazzo had been on hand to immortalize Arthur shucking his shoes and jacket and diving in. Fox Pearson’s final stunt, along with its fortuitous synchronicity with the movie’s title, earned more headlines for the dead actor than any of his roles. Suddenly he was the second coming (and going) of James Dean, a talent that blazed bright and then . . . cue slow drum roll against a setting sun . . . sank below a watery horizon.

(Yes, I really did used to sit in our front window and wave at the tour busses.)

I have no idea how you'd write this as a screenplay. There's not a single line of dialogue, precious little action, and a ton of setting and internal dialogue. 

Flashbacks? Voice over?? Beats me.

Are there mental journeys that you can take with details of places that are long gone but still vivid in your mind's eye? To the corner store? To the drive-in movie, local dive bar, swimming hole, lover's lane, fabulous view???

Playing fair: The mystery writer's high-wire act

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Today I'm posing a wonky writing question.

Mystery writers write genre fiction. Genre. Which means there are a ton of expectations we need to meet or address. And two of them have always seemed to me to be in conflict with one another.

#1: Play fair with the reader.

This translates to: whatever the narrator knows, the reader should also know. If the narrator sees something, the reader should "see" it, too.

In other words, it's not kosher for the narrator to say, "I couldn't believe what I saw!" or "There, in the corner, I saw something that made me realize what was going on." And then not, right then and there, when the narrator has the realization, reveal it to the reader.

The reasoning here is that readers want a fair crack at solving the mystery along with the sleuth. They don’t want to feel cheated because the sleuth hid key clues.

#2: Create suspense by posing unanswered questions and delaying the answer.

This can involve saying something like, "I couldn't believe what I saw!" and then waiting three more chapters before revealing what that seen thing was.

The reasoning here is that suspense will keep reading. Turning those pages. Looking for the answers to those unanswered questions.

So I feel that push/pull when I'm structuring my tale: how to create suspense by posing unanswered questions and delaying the answer, on the one hand, and playing fair with the reader on the other?

So todays queston: How have you reconciled those competing goals to create a page turner? Or do you you just ignore both "rules" and let the chips fall?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What a tough question, Hallie! I think I'm cheating a little bit because I write in third person with multiple viewpoints, so sometimes the reader may know things that my detectives don't.

But I absolutely play fair–my detectives never make a big discovery that the reader doesn't learn, too. I think scene and chapter breaks as the characters are ABOUT to learn something go a long way towards creating tension, but no cheating by keeping that information a secret allowed.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: When I teach my seminar on suspense, one of the works I reference is, believe it or not, Cinderella.

Everyone knows the story, and it points out the underlying basics of suspense: the reader needs to CARE about the character and the character’s goal needs to be desperately important to them. (I could go into a whole ‘nother seminar on why caring is different from liking, but I’ll save it for another day.)

I don’t think the suspense is in “I can’t believe what I saw,” because the answer to “what did the sleuth see?” should immediately lead to another question, or another obstacle blocking the sleuth from racing their goal.

An amazing example of this is K.J. Erickson’s THE LAST WITNESS, where the detective knows the victim’s husband murdered her. But he doesn’t know how and he can’t find the body. It’s a great example of the suspense coming from the character’s goal, not the solution to the murder.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I think suspense is the way authors can use time. We have control over whether time passes quickly or slowly, and can play with that to tease out suspense.

In my classes, I teach suspense with—-Baseball! It’s the bottom of the ninth, tie game, two outs, bases loaded, and the guy comes to the bat.

The ballpark is full. But! Half the people are rooting passionately for the batter to score–and the other half is rooting just as passionately for him to fail. Two groups rooting passionately for the OPPOSITE outcome! ANd it’s good guys and bad guys, depending on where you sit. It’s the highest moment of the highest stakes in baseball. We all hold our breath. WHAT will happen? In seconds we will be cheering or devastated. And the batter will be running! Or slinking back to the dugout.

But it’s the moment BETWEEN that’s the jewel of suspense. The moment before the pitch and the swing. In real life, it’s an instant. But in a book, in that intense moment of the book’s real life, the author can pause. Put the action on hold. And, depending on POV, tease that moment out while the reader is holding a hope in their minds. And then boom, come back to it.

And yes ,as a result, it’s all about motivation. What does someone want, and how far will they go to get it? Will they get it? What will happen if they fail? That’s suspense.

JENN McKINLAY: I’m a let the chips fall sort of writer. I always leave a trail back to the killer but I throw in a lot of misdirection.

I write in first or third but only one point of view so the reader is the sleuth and learns everything the sleuth does. There are no “I can’t believe what I just saw” moments as I feel that’s unfair!

RHYS BOWEN: it’s all a question of who do we trust, isn’t it? Who is good and who is bad.

I do like to play fair with the reader. Writing mysteries mainly in the first person we learn clues at the same time as the sleuth. But this is also useful for suspense if the reader puts two and two together quicker than the sleuth. She goes into a house of a person we don’t think we can trust.

HALLIE: So, as a reader, does it drive you nuts when the writer plays fast and loose with the "play fair" rule. Do contrived "cliffhangers" drive you bananas? Or do you just let yourself go with the flow if everything else is working?

Birds! We're surrounded...

HALLIE EPHRON: As I was posting yesterday's blog about birding, I picked up my head and looked around. Yes, there are birds outside. But INDOORS I'm surrounded by them, too.

It all started with (wait for it) a yard sale. And of course it was my husband who spotted a pair of framed bird prints someone was asking $5 for. We bought them.

Turns out they're hand-colored lithographs by John and Elizabeth Gould, published in the 1830s and part of their "Birds of Europe" series. One (on the right) is a "Doubtful Sparrow" and the other a "Lesser Grey Shrike." (Aren't bird names wonderful?!)

Leap ahead to, what else, another yard sale, and he picked up a pair of framed Audubon bird prints. Not, of course, from the original folio, but big and beautiful and framed.

Then, upgrading years later, Jerry picked up a later Gould print at an antiquarian book fair. We framed it and have it hanging on the stairs.

Much funkier, there's a pair of bird prints (1950s?) that I picked up at a yard sale and have hanging in our guest room. I love them but I think I'm alone in that sentiment.

Then there's a sassy smokin' pelican that I bought for Jerry at a print shop in Baltimore. It's advertising art. French. A VERY large bird with long eyelashes. And I knew Jerry would love it.

On our mantle there's a fleet of birds. Picked up on our travels. My favorite is the cast rooster which must have been used in a fireplace. I bought it at a flea market in Spain and schlepped it all over Europe and finally home.

Then there are the bird mugs. Lots of them. Including an utterly goofy pair that our daughter brought back for us from Europe.

And finally my favorite is a collage by artist Barbara Baum. A bird (robin?) is lifting a silverly strand of words from a rain battered urban landscaping. I got it for one of my bigger birthdays. How it looks changes with the light, and what it shows is a perfect metaphor for writing.

Are you a collector? Did your collection creep up on you or was it deliberate? 

Birds are having their moment...

HALLIE EPHRON: I remember years ago when I was just working on my first mystery novel, I heard a fellow writer talking about the birding mystery series she'd pitched to a New York editor. The editor wasn't interested -- said she'd recently acquired a birding mystery. What she was looking for was a bowling mystery.

I wonder if that birding mystery would have met the same shrug today, given that birds are definitely having their moment. Amy Tan's memoir and nature book The Backyard Bird Chronicles has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 33 weeks. The memoir Better Living Through Birding by Christian Cooper, about birding in Central Park, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 27 weeks.

And recently it feels like newsfeeds have been full of birds. There was the widely reported story about a pileated woodpecker that was terrorizing drivers in Rockport, Massachusetts, pecking out car mirrors.

A pileated woodpecker is formidable -- it's as big as a turkey vulture, looks like Woody Woodpecker, and sounds like a jackhammer when it goes after a tree trunk.

Reading about it, I was reminded of a male cardinal that spent a week attacking our car mirror -- apparently mistaking his reflection for a rival -- and leaving the side of our white Honda Civic bloodstreaked. I wonder what forensics would make of bird blood.

Then there was the lone wild turkey (a female) who went in search of a mate in midtown Manhattan. We've got herds of them here in the Boston. Named by locals as "Astoria," apparently she's is friendly (unlike a male turkey), walks on sidewalks without bothering pedestrians, and forages peacefully for food.

As for me, my yard is full of noisy poultry looking for mates and nesting. Cardinals, bluejays, song sparrows, house finches, mourning doves, circling red tail hawks... I'm thrilled when a Carolina wren or a yellow warbler shows up in my birdbath.

Maybe it's time for me to work on a birding mystery... Or maybe it's already too late. I'm sure I'm not alone enjoying THE RESIDENCE (streaming on Netflix). Set in the White House, it features rabid birdwatcher slash brilliant detective Cordelia Cupp (played by Uzo Aduba).

Do you notice birds or are they like the weather, just the background to whatever else that's going on?

Hallie's going on about what makes us stop reading

HALLIE EPHRON: Last weekend I had the great pleasure of giving a talk at CrimeCONN 2025, a day-long mystery lovers' conference at the wonderful Ferguson Library in Stratford, CT, and sponsored by the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

My talk: "DEADLY DOZEN: How not to shoot yourself in the foot writing a mystery novel."

Here's me, revving up the crowd with the still sturdy Detection Club Oath, coined in 1930 by Golden Age British mystery writers who included G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

In the process of preparing for my talk, I unearthed an article ("What makes me stop reading a mystery") that I wrote in 2009 for (the sadly now defunct) THE WRITER magazine. As part of my research for that piece, I'd interviewed our wonderful Boston area mystery bookseller Kate Mattes, mystery reader/reviewer and librarian Lesa Holstine, St. Martin's Minotaur editor Kelley Ragland, and literary agent Janet Reid.

So pause for a moment and think of the mystery novels you've started, read a chapter or maybe two, and then set the book aside. What made you abandon it: Reasons?

Here's some of the reasons the experts I interviewed said they stop reading:
1. Taking too long to get going. "That doesn't mean there has to be a murder right away but I have to be interested enough to get to the murder." (Kate Mattes)
2. A main character who doesn't actively solve the mystery. "I have to care what happens to the main character." (Lesa Holstine)
3. Too much introductory material, background information, or one-by-one introductions to the main characters complete with description. "A savvy writer jumps right into things and feathers in the necessary information as she moves forward." (Kelly Ragland)
4. A dull narrator's voice. "Voice and character can keep me reading even if nothing is happening." (Janet Reid)

What would you add to (or strike from) the list?

Nailing It

 

HALLIE EPHRON: This Christmas I got gifts from my grandchildren.

From my granddaughter, I got a package of press-on nails.

As you might imagine, this gift says more about her than it does about me. She is obsessed with her nails. There are shops stores near her in Brooklyn that sell nails. That’s it. Full stop. Press-on nails in an amazing range of colors and designs.

This is from my grandgirl who’s a gymnast and a competitive swimmer and who opted for a STEM-focused junior high. She saves up her pennies to buy nails, nails, and more nails.

Go figure.

So far I have not attempted to put on the nails she gave me. I’m waiting until she visits here or I’m in Brooklyn and she can guide me in the fine art. Bonding experiences are not to be passed up.

My grandson aso gave me a Christmas gift. This amazing fantastic and wonderful picture, which tells you as much about HIM as my granddaughter’s gift tells about her. I’m quite sure he’ll be wanting a motorcycle when he gets to be his sister’s age. And OMG hasn't he got talent!?! (He's 9.)

This got me thinking back to when I was my granddaughter's age. I was seriously into makeup. “Flesh” colored lipstick. Fake eyelashes and eyeliner. We rouged our cheeks and teased (and sprayed) our hair so it stood out like an astronaut’s helmet.

And somehow I survived.

Do you have youngsters in your extended family who are spreading their wings and proclaiming their identities through their arts?

A peek inside the sausage factory - What we're writing

 

HALLIE EPHRON: Welcome to What We’re Writing week!

Recently I put together materials for a class I gave for the Writers Digest Mystery and Thriller Writers Conference. (I get to do it via Zoom from the comfort of my new desk chair!) I was talking about one of my favorite topics: character-driven plotting.

I usually start off quoting what I once heard Walter Mosley say. It went something like this:

STORY is what happened. PLOT is the order in which it’s revealed to the reader

I’m still chewing on his words. I think this is what he means…

STORY in a mystery novel is the crime: what led up to the crime  (sometimes years or generations earlier), what the villain and suspects did and why. The pieces get revealed in dribs and drabs as the sleuth discovers them. It’s kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that has no edges, the reader putting the pieces in place along with the sleuth.

PLOT is more about the sleuth’s journey. How they get involved in the investigation, why they care about the outcome, what they discover, what they discover about themselves, and how the investigation challenges and changes them. It's told sequentially.

That's one of the reasons why mystery novels are so hard to write: there are TWO stories. The investigation (the sleuth and their associates figure out what happened), told sequentially. The crime itself (what led up to it, what happened, who did it, and why), revealed as the sleuth puts the pieces together.

So… it’s complicated! And hopefully when you read one of our novels, you will be blissfully unaware of the two stories we’re trying to tell while keeping you bamboozled and finally gobsmacked when all is revealed.

Are you a fan of puzzling mysteries or do you prefer the adrenaline rush of a thriller, where you know who the villain is early on, and goal becomes beating the clock and keep the bad thing from happening again.

Writing from Experience by Pat Kennedy

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm particularly excited about today's guest--you'll see why. Pat is one of my good buddies in the Friends of the Key West Library, and she is an old friend of Hallie's. When I heard she had taken Hallie's writing class at the Studios of Key West, I asked (begged) her to blog about it. Welcome Pat!

PATRICIA (PAT) KENNEDY:  Hello to all you fascinating Reds!  It has been quite awhile since I’ve chimed in here – July of 2022 to be precise when I complained about the never-ending presence of “piles” at my home -– papers, shoes, electronic devices, grocery bags, stuff.  Since the piles never seem to diminish, I just gave up and moved to Key West for the winter.  

I spend my time in sunny Florida participating in and supporting the arts. Recently, I participated in a “Writing from Experience” workshop at The Studios of Key West, led by Jungle Red’s Hallie Ephron. I had never taken a writing workshop being somewhat shy about sharing my work with strangers – and Hallie too. I’m an amateur and she’s definitely a pro. 

I had an interesting childhood as both my parents were profoundly deaf so we four siblings (none deaf) grew up in a signing household.  Recently my sisters and I were interviewed by StoryWorth on their national podcast about the challenges of growing up in a different family life. It was an emotional experience for us. More so when we heard the final 18-minute podcast.  I can’t listen to it without getting weepy.  

This experience rekindled my desire to write more about my parents – especially our mom.  Our dad was tall, handsome, gregarious – a real star shine kind of guy.  Our mother was shy and very angry.  And she had good reasons to be that way. We learned by dribs and drabs how challenging her life had been at a school for the deaf run by the Sisters of St. Joseph in St. Louis, Missouri. And the challenges of being a deaf mother with un-sympathetic in-laws who lacked confidence in her ability to be a suitable “mother.” She fought back.

As Hallie said to me, “you have a deep well of experience to write about.” My reluctance has been how to write about HER experience but write in a way that reflected her lack of traditional English composition skills. She was an American Sign Language user so her English was rudimentary. 

As you probably know already, Hallie is a superb teacher.  And a kind one too.  Fourteen of us produced short essays for each of the three classes – some were absolute stunners which left me intimidated. I passed on reading aloud during the first and second sessions but knew I had to come up with something for the third. Hallie’s teaching and comments about my classmates’ work were precise and spot on. She emphasized the importance of “voice” and how it drives the whole trajectory – and authority – of a piece of writing.  “It must be authentic. Obviously if one is writing about one’s experience, then one must use the first-person voice.”

I had been trying to write about a life-changing experience my mother had as a four-year-old child, but I was using third person omniscient. I could see that the piece was stilted and false, but I didn’t know how to fix it.  Suddenly, with Halie’s simple “change the voice” instruction, I saw another way to write the story but as I experienced it.  An hour later I was doing final edits and ready to read to the class. My sisters and I are now moving forward on collaborative pieces to add to this first piece. 

If you want to hear the StoryWorth podcast that so influenced me to get going on writing, here is the link.

Are any of you writing teachers?  Any pearls you want to share with us?  And it would be fascinating to hear from you, dear readers, how a teacher has changed or improved your writing.  

Patricia Kennedy is a retired marketing consultant for healthcare organizations. She lives in Plymouth, MA and Key West during the winter.  

Hallie on What We're Writing (it's personal)

 HALLIE EPHRON: Here we are again, come full circle to WHAT WE’RE WRITING WEEK. And leading off, let me tell you about the class I’m putting together on “Writing from Experience.” It’s for people who reach a point in their life when they want to get their thoughts and memories down on the page and, in the process, figure out what the heck they think about all that stuff that went on.

I use examples from my own writing, examples that follow the memoir-writing advice of Philip Lopate ("To Show and To Tell") to make oneself into a character. And at the same time to take my own advice about storytelling: give the main character (me) a problem.

Here’s one of the examples:

It was September and I was starting eighth grade, the same year my sister Delia left for college. I’d moved out of the room I shared with my baby sister Amy and into Delia’s room, a sliver of space carved from the side of the house. The room was papered in fat yellow cabbage roses floating on a field of pale gray.

The room was so small that if I stood up from the bed and took giant step, I’d run into the door. But it was mine, all mine, even if the walk-through closet was still half-full of Delia’s clothes. Even if when Delia was on school breaks I had go back to sharing a bedroom with Amy.

My very own phone hung on the side of the desk beside the bed. I could talk to my best friend, any time of day or night with nobody watching me and asking, "Who are you talking to?" or "Do you have to breathe like a hippopotamus?" 

Problem was, at that moment, I was fresh out of best friends.

Just for fun, here's a photograph of me with my sister Delia on the left and Amy on the right, in about the year I'm writing about.

As I’ve been putting together the material for my class, I made a very short list of books to recommend… my own personal favorites.

Bossy Pants - Tina Fey
The Liars’ Club - Mary Karr
On Writing - Stephen King
The Color of Water - James McBride
Eat Pray Love - Elizabeth Gilbert
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
Left on Tenth by Delia Ephron

So two questions:
- Do you read memoirs, and if you do what memoir(s) would you recommend?
- And... If YOU were writing about your childhood bedroom, what detail would make it distinctly YOURS? (It's that thing that writing teachers go on and on about: the telling detail.)

What We're Writing: Hallie remembers a Thanksgiving...

HALLIE EPHRON: This Thanksgiving, surrounded by the glorious chaos of my children and grandchildren, I found myself remembering the Thanksgivings that I grew up with and my mother who detested domesticity but loved Thanksgiving.

Here's part of an essay I wrote about her final Thanksgiving.

**

Thanksgiving was my mother’s favorite holiday. I remember her last one. The four of us (my sisters and me) and our spouses and my dad are there with her in the living room of my parents’ New York apartment.

My mother is presiding from a sofa that was moved there from their house in Beverly Hills to this apartment on the upper East Side of Manhattan. Once upholstered in a shiny red-and-green floral print that felt cool against my face, it’s there that my mother read the Oz books to me after dinner when I was growing up. Now in their bright, modern condominium, the sofa had been re-covered in white linen.

I can still see my mother sitting there, nearly lost in a billowing gold brocade caftan. Her hair is, as always, short and brushed briskly away from her face. She smells, as always, of Eve Arden face cream, cigarettes, and Scotch whiskey.

Her cheeks are flushed and full, and she seems at first to be in the pink of health. But closer up, her face is puffy, the skin reddened with broken blood vessels. Her hair is thin. Her grey eyes rheumy. She seems at once paunchy and emaciated. A cigarette trembles between her fingers. She’s too weak to even stand and will retire to her bed before we sit down to eat.

A writer, first and foremost, her hands have always been her pride, the fingers short, stubby, and efficient, the nails cut short so as not to interfere with her typing. Thanksgiving was one of her annual days of domesticity, even if it was hired help who set the table, cooked and served the meal, and cleaned up after.

Even at that last Thanksgiving there was an elaborate centerpiece for the table – a riot of pineapple, eggplant, persimmon, nuts, and grapes. Two turkeys, three pies, three kinds of stuffing.

Not only did she have to be a successful lady writer but she had to run a perfect home and raise perfect children. And Thanksgiving, even her last one, was the time for that perfection to shine.

**

Do you have memories of a lost loved one, no longer with us, but whose memory pops up during the holidays?

Book KEEPING and what it say about us

 HALLIE EPHRON: This picture (it ran in my local paper) caught my eye... Someone’s idea of home decorating with books? 

As a decorating idea, I give it two thumbs down. But, to be fair, this is a house which is rented – the people who flipped the books didn’t acquire them. Books are so personal, So I suppose this is a way to live with someone else’s collection of books.

Still, It reminds me of a restaurant meal I had somewhere in Ohio – scallops (4 of them) served with a mound of naked spaghetti. And it needed salt. And pepper.

I do think how you display (or don’t) your books is a bit of a Rorschach.  So today’s question: How do you shelve (or not) your books, and what does it say about you?

- On shelves or in stacks on the floor?

- Spine out or spine in?

- Sorted by category? In my house there are shelves of books about New York City, and shelves about birds, and shelves of illustrated chidren’s books, and shelves about cartoons and illustration, and of course shelves of crime fiction and other shelves of how-to-write books.

- Randomly organized or alphabetized? How anal are you? My fiction is all shelved by author. And I have several bookcases devoted only to crime fiction. I save the books I've loved.

- Any under glass? I keep the ones have resale value under glass. Especially illustrated children's books or signed firsts.

- Stacks in the garage waiting to go to Goodwill or your library's resale shop?

What does the way you keep your books say about you?

What IS Hallie Writing...

 

HALLIE EPHRON: It's WHAT WE'RE WRITING week... and my usual question: Am I writing? And if I am, then where is it?? 

The answer: ideas are swirling in my head. Which is a step forward.

I’m still disinterring and collecting the personal writing I’ve done over the decades and sorting. Since Jerry and I were married for more than 50 years, a lot of the writing is about him. I've been printing it all out, three-hole-punching, and putting the pages into a spiffy red 3-ring binder.

So it feels as if something is happening.

On a parallel track I’ve scanned the hundreds of cartoons he drew and saved, much of it from the cards he drew for me and capturing our family history. Every birthday, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving, Ground Hog Day, and once on Bastille Day I’d find a hand-drawn card in the bathroom in the morning when I groped my way to the toilet.

It started out with just us and two cats. Then us and a baby. Then us and another baby. The last cards include my daughter's handsome husband and their two delicious grandchildren. It was a sort of rite of passage when you assumed cartoon-character form in one of his drawings.

He was a lunatic who raised “silly” to a fine art. Who turned cartoon drawings into love letters.

Friends have urged me to use his drawings to tell a story.

I met Jerry in 1968. He was a graduate student in physics, living near Columbia, and I was a junior at Barnard. We were fixed up by one of his roommates. I’d just been dumped by Charlie; then, months later Charlie whistled and I dumped Jerry.

Jerry was persistent. He wooed me with cartoons. Here’s a postcard he sent me.

He’s Don Quixote and I’m one of the evil grimacing faces on the windmill along with Charlie. The text is from a poem by Frederico García Lorca. Jerry loved poetry and spoke pretty good Spanish.

When Charlie dumped me (again), it’s telling that I’d kept Jerry’s card. I must have known in my heart of hearts, that he was the one. And lucky for me, he thought I was, too. We got back together, and stayed that way happily (almost) ever after.

Here’s a picture of Jerry as he was when I first met him and again in 1990. Was he handsome or what?? I must have been out of my mind to dump him.

And here’s how he portrayed the change he’d undergone in those three decades. Cue: laughter.

Is your family history in photographs? Letters?? A recipe box?? A binder?? A book???

Beating the heat with orzo and fetah cheese salad

HALLIE EPHRON: It’s been miserably hot everywhere, and the last thing I want to do is cook. So now is when I forage for a nice cold dinner that I can quickly assemble.

One of my go-to dinners is a cold orzo salad with tomatoes and fetah cheese.

It’s easy peasy, and you can adjust the recipe a million ways.

The basic involves:
Boil the orzo following package directions. Drain. Toss with some olive oil so it doesn’t clump. Add fixings (see below). Toss and serve.

Assemble fixings to go into the orzo, any of these in any combination…

• Chopped tomatoes (gotta have tomatoes)
• Crumbled fetah cheese
• Fresh dill, parsley, or basil (or all of them)
• Chopped green veggies (blanched sugar snap peas or green beans or cucumbers or green pepper or artichoke hearts or all of the above)
•  Chopped olives if you have some good ones in the fridge
  

Toss with a dressing: Two parts olive oil to one part vinegar (white, cider, or balsamic, your choice); salt and pepper liberally; optionally mix in a tablespoon of Dijon mustard

When it's too hot to cook, what’s your summer salad?

Memories... holding onto them

First off - Yesterday's winner of a copy of Diane Kelly's FOUR ALARM HOMICIDE is Julie Bush! Congratulations, Julie! Contact Diane via her website contact link: https://www.dianekelly.com/contact/ 

HALLIE EPHRON: Dual factor identification is a scourge. You type in your user name and password and instead of opening sesame, back comes a message that you’re about to receive a text with a security code.

Now this security code is often 6 characters long, sometimes more, and it appears on your screen (heaven help you if it’s a cell phone screen because you have to know how to switch around among your apps) for about 4 seconds. Barely long enough to scratch an itch. Definitely not long enough for me to memorize a 6-8 digit code.

But, I’ve discovered that if I say the number (out loud) when it flashes, it seeds itself in my brain long enough that I can type it into the waiting prompt.

I was pleased to see similar advice in a New York Times review (“A Neurologist’s Tips to Protect Your Memory” ) of a book (“The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind,”) by neurologist Dr. Richard Restak.

Memory decline, according to Dr. Restake, is not inevitable.

The review praises the book’s abundance of tips to protect your memory. These include VISUALIZE. For instance, when you meet someone new and want to remember their name, visualize it.

I once met a doctor named Gabriel something. I can’t remember his last name but his first name pops right into my head because when I was introduced to him, I visualized him as an angel wearing a doctor’s head mirror.

I've used a similar strategy to remember a shopping list. Suppose I need to buy hamburger, toilet paper, milk, a cucumber, and raspberry soda. I imagine them in band of colors: two reds, two whites, and a green. Easier to hold that picture in my brain rather than the list itself.

Another piece of advice: Turn off your GPS. I can testify to the way relying on it to get me everywhere has clouded the maps in brain.

My favorite of his advice (I'm not making this up): read novels!

Dr. Restak claims that when people begin to have memory difficulties, they switch to reading nonfiction. Reading a novel keeps your brain agile -- you have to keep track of the characters, plot lines, and most especially with MYSTERY novels, there are the clues red herrings that often start dropping in Chapter 1 and don’t get resolved until the end.

So I hope I've given you more incentive to buy more mystery novels. What are your strategies for keeping your memory sharp and remembering those 8-digit codes?

What she wrote: Still loving getting older?

 HALLIE EPHRON: Welcome once again to WHAT WE'RE WRITING week! I wrote a magazine piece years back, about getting older, written from the perspective of middle age. It's one of the many efforts I've exhumed from my computer's depths and am revising. Here's the opening: 

I'm sitting at my computer trying to read the title of this piece, the letters swimming on the screen – "I Love Getting Odder"? Make that "Older." I try to remember where I left my glasses. In the bedroom? I go upstairs, pause on the landing. Why did I come up here? When I scratch my head, that’s where I find them.

Yes, middle age can be a series of bad jokes. Failing eyesight, forgetfulness, not to mention a drooping eyelid that reminds me of Columbo (who’s that actor – Peter something with an F?) whenever I look at myself in the magnifying mirror.

On the upside: not having to wear panty hose, shave my armpits, or blow-dry my hair.

Would I trade aging for youth? Not a chance. I was a pathologically self-conscious teenager for whom life was a constant source of humiliation. I slouched through high school with my shoulders hunched, school books hugged to my front like a plate of armor.

Every new place had its unwritten rules that everyone knew but me. When I walked down the street I was sure everyone was staring at me because I had on the wrong clothes, the wrong shoes, the wrong haircut, and walked like a duck. When I got lost I was too embarrassed to ask directions.

When I was 15 I begged my parents for modeling lessons which of course they refused, saying it was a ridiculous waste of money. For weeks I practiced walking with a book balanced on my head. I posed the way I thought models posed – one arm bent, my hand floating in front of me, the fingers delicately arranged. Holding that position, I pushed my hips forward, trying to imitate the way those sylph-like creatures slide down the runway, pause, pivot, and then retrace their steps, eyes trained on some invisible vanishing point at the horizon.

When I sprained my pinky finger for the third time ramming it into a door jamb as I tried to pass through, my mother gently suggested that I give it a rest.

At least now I don’t worry about how I walk and I know strangers aren’t looking at me – in fact, I’m not even on their radar. As an older woman with graying hair and a blurring middle, I am wonderfully invisible. Best of all, I’ve discovered that I can pretty much do whatever I please because there are no rules. There never were any. Other people are just as clueless as I am. ...  

So today's question: So how's it going for you? Are you embracing the years or fighting like hell to turn back the clock?

The Tooth Fairy gets pricey

HALLIE EPHRON: It’s been ages since I was the tooth fairy, but a poll from Delta Dental caught my eye, reporting that the average tooth fairy payout has increased 349% since 1998.

Yikes! Talk about inflation... Nowadays, on average, a lost tooth nets nearly... SIX DOLLARS?? And “on average” means that half of the tooth fairies out there are shoveling out more than that. For a tooth!!

I don't remember what my tooth fairy delivered, but I do remember my father threatening to tie a string to that damned tooth and tie the other end of the string to the knob of an open bathroom door, and slam that door to yank out the tooth that I was very disgustingly playing with while it hung from a thread. ICK.

Losing teeth was a big deal for my kids. My daughter Molly was bereft when she literally lost her first tooth in a neighbor’s snow bank and had to put a note explaining it under her pillow instead of the actual tooth.

The trauma of it had us reading the wonderful ONE MORNING IN MAINE children's book to her, all about a little girl who loses her tooth while digging for clams. So traumatic. 

After that Molly always left a note for the tooth fairy, hoping that flattery would make the tooth fairy more generous. I don't think it worked.

When I asked Molly today about her memories of the tooth fairy, she said, “My tooth fairy was very cheap.”

Which is exactly, to the word, what her sister Naomi said. “Cheap!” And by way of piling on, Naomi added. “One time we were in Switzerland and the tooth fairy thought I’d be excited to get foreign coins but it amounted to about 12 cents. I couldn’t even buy chocolates.”

I asked her what her kids (my grands) get for a tooth and her answer was, “They get a dollar and they’re happy with that.” I did not say what I was thinking, but it rhymes with bleep.

Did you survive the trauma of losing your first tooth? Do you have memories of the tooth fairy? Did you leave a note under your pillow? And what did the tooth fairy usually leave you?

Hallie's sticky collected books...

HALLIE EPHRON: Yesterday we talked about professional organizer Kathy Vines's advice for getting organized in the new year. When I was consulting her for advice about my professional organizer's work in CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, she introduced me to the term "sticky."

Sticky described the objects in your life that are hardest for you to throw away. Usually because of some personal meaning that's attached to it.

When I was downsizing our collection of books last year, that term kept rising to the top of the heaps of books that I just wasn't willing to part with. Three categories stood out. First, all the bird books. Jerry bought one for every locale we traveled. And we made good use of them.

In each of them is a list of the birds he added to his life list on our trip there.

Then there were the books by cartoon illustrators, especially Walt Kelly's POGO books, Searle's cats, and Larson's FAR SIDE top the list. Jerry was of course a cartoonist so I've kept all the books by illustrators he admired.

Then there's a shelves of quirky early illustrated children's books -- each one a classic or wonderfully goofy, all collected at yard sales or library book sales.

What are the "sticky" things in your house that, given a choice, you'd rather NOT part with. Guessing that for more than a few of us, books top the list.

Hallie's Wintery SOMETHING FROM NOTHING SOUP

 

HALLIE EPHRON: When my husband was in graduate school, he used to make something he called STAPLE STEW which involved throwing together whatever he could find kicking around in the kitchen.

Canned tomatoes might get mixed with frozen corn, elbow macaroni, and tuna. It wasn't gourmet but it fed the beast, cost almost nothing, and you didn't have to put on your snowboots to get the ingredients.

When the last thing I feel like is getting in my car and driving to the supermarket (it's 30 degrees out now and getting colder and the world is icing up...) Jerry's Staple Stew springs to mind.

When I'm reluctant to leave the house, I open the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets and find the makings for SOMETHING FROM NOTHING SOUP: a wintery brew of onions, carrots, potatoes, and whatever other vegetable that's at the moment expiring in the fridge or freezer, simmered in soup broth (chicken or beef or vegetable) until the veggies are soft and then zuzhed with an immersion blender... creatively seasoned and topped with something creamy and sprinkled with something herbal.

Serve with bread (thawed from the fridge) and voila, DINNER! With leftovers!

Here's last night's SOMETHING FROM NOTHING SOUP. I'm having leftovers for lunch.

1. Start w basics – Sautee in olive oil in a roomy saucepan: chopped carrot, celery, and onion (and garlic if you like).

2. Add chopped potatoes

3. Cover with soup stock to cover (I use "Better than Boullion" but use canned broth or bouillion cubes, whatever, just pay attention to the amount of salt is in the broth) and simmer til nearly tender.

4. Add: Pick a vegetable (frozen? canned? Perhaps nearing extinction in the fridge)… chopped up broccoli, cauliflower, orange squash, corn, mushrooms…

I added very old but not dead yet frozen corn and some similarly on-their-last-legs frozen peas.

5. Cook til tender and then beat til smooth with an immersion blender.

6. TASTE and add salt and pepper if needed and some other seasoning(s) that suit your fancy. (Hoisin, soy, vinegar, lemon, siracha, chili crisp ...) I added SMOKED PAPRIKA, salt, pepper. 

7. Top servings with something creamy. A swirl of heavy cream? A dollop of sour cream or yogurt? Crumbled feta cheese? Blue cheese? Shredded cheddar?

8. For an extra touch, TOP with something green and herb-y. Chopped parsley, scallions, cilantro, chives, basil... whatever you happen to have if you think it will work. Last night I had none of the above

Do you have a favorite dish that you can whip up from what's in the kitchen?