Friday, Cooking and New Writers Books

It's 1h30 pm, and while I wait for my parmentier au canard to finish cooking, I've been leafing through the book I have waited for about two months for, The Modern Library Writer's Workshop by Stephen Koch (see Books for Writers for a link to amazon.com). The very first chapter is full of quotes of writing, its perils and angsts from noted authors such as Toni Morrison, Isabelle Allende, Tom Wolfe, EL Doctorow, and Faulkner.

Get up and get writing it says. Start at the end of the paragraph. What you don't know is it tells you this in the very first paragraph of the book. As a novice, it consoled me to know it doesn't work the way it seems to in movies or did for Stendhal and Kerouac where a budding author, with no real experience sits down and writes a novel or a screenplay in a matter of days (or in Jack's case, 16 hours). Writing is hard and apparently it is supposed to be, so I suffer less for not knowing exactly how everything is supposed to go.

It sure ain't easy.

While I have been rewriting for the past couple of weeks, I have been reading a great deal of odd little books. At the moment I'm going through Jerzy Kozinski's Steps, a biography on Misia (a muse to Latrec ET Renoir), and Celestine (the Diary of a Chambermaid).

I'm now one-of-those-writers, one of the ones who believe that reading in your down time is a great practice. I highly encourage it. I also encourage listening to a lot of Chopin.

I gave my last rewrite for a fragment from my novel to a dear friend last night who is a brilliant writer, perhaps the one I encourage most to write because he has a gift and I think something soft and important to scream out into the world. I'll let you know what he thinks.

I'm also on a self-imposed deadline to write something worthy of reading at group tomorrow.

So I'm indoors with a clean house (yay), yummy lunch to eat, and I'm going to make Southern Fried Chicken for dinner with mashed potatoes and green beans and have fruit for dessert. Today I am channeling that beautiful voice writers from the southern states of the United States seem to have.

For a glorious moment perhaps I'll have an epiphany of Twain, Faulkner, Williams, Harper Lee, or Langston Hughes.

Wouldn't that be just-oh-so-heavenly, I say in my best imitation of Scarlett O'Hara.

My, wouldn't it be just lovely? I ask in my best Blanche Dubois.

Which means apparently I'm going to channel a British actress who twice played southern belles, Vivian Leigh.

If only I could be as gorgeous. Guess we can't have everythin' now, can's we?