“Shut up!”
My daughter was walking down the narrow aisle of the plane, dragging her suitcase behind her in search of our seats, when a passenger said this into her cell phone. The funny part must have been my daughter’s facial expression, since all of the passengers facing her started cracking up. I know I have written before about swear words being part of our language, so I thought today I might write about when not to use them. - Don’t type the ‘f’ word when you are editing someone’s work on an airplane and your daughter is inches away from you reading over your shoulder. (Unless you want to engage in a difficult conversation in a very public place.) - Don’t have a hero who is shy or gentle use the ‘f’word to describe making love. - Don’t teach your child the meaning of the ‘b’word unless you want him/her to use it frequently in sentences when describing dogs. - Don't use the same damn swear word over and over and over in your damn writing. It is damn annoying. - Don’t use any of them when stuck in traffic or while being cut off by someone unless you are totally alone (actually, just break the habit since inevitably it will come out of your mouth when your car is filled with your child and her three best friends.) And finally, don’t, please, say any swear word into your cell phone thinking that you are somehow alone in hearing it. For those of you who don’t yet realize this, we can all still hear you. And in fact, some of us even plan our blogs around overhearing you.
0 Comments
“What makes your character cry?”
Here’s how I know that anyone could write a story, I challenge you to find one mom who didn’t immediately imagine what it would have been like if it were her eight year old caught in yesterday’s explosion. I bet they could tell you fifty ways they visualized it; could probably describe it down to the clothes their child might have been wearing. Imagination is a wonderful and awful thing. It allows us to come up with fantastic ideas, machines that fly, foods that pop, tights that are see-through (okay, maybe not always great ideas). It also, though, gives us the fodder to speculate, what if. What if I don’t get that job? What if the tree fell the other way? What if our school was next? Like stories of psychics wanting to shut out other people’s thoughts, I am sure I am not alone in sometimes wanting to shut down my imagination. I see this fine balance most clearly in my own daughter who has an amazing imagination but also struggles with anxiety. Her body always connects the what if to a fight or flight response… even when the what if is potentially positive. What if I get the part? The excitement turns to adrenalin, which tells her body there is danger, which turns her positive thought into a negative one. The only way I have learned to shut off the voice of my imagination is to focus only on where I am and what I am doing at the moment. I ground myself by washing dishes thoughtfully; feeling the soap and the water on my hands, and hearing the splash of it against the edge of the sink. Or I garden. I listen to the birds calling and the mower rumbling next door. I feel the dirt crumble beneath my fingers and I watch a worm make its way slowly back down, into the moist earth. Today I pray and today I focus on the moment. Because today my imagination is not my friend. |
Subscribe to my blog:
About Me...Deanne WilstedLink here to Betting Jessica on Amazon.com Archives
June 2020
Categories
All
|