My First Story or the Great American Novel, by Lyn Searfoss

In May of 1960 at age 17, I left my hometown in rural Pennsylvania, population 1603 people, six churches and seven bars, and escaped to the big city, Philadelphia. I was to begin college in the fall and my revolt against everything was in full swing. You see, I had ambitions, and, armed with my treasured, personally autographed photo of Tallulah Bankhead and a tract from the Socialist Party I got through the mail when I was 12, I was going somewhere, anywhere. Besides, I needed money for college.

My cousin, who lived in Philadelphia, and I cooked up a scheme where I would go to Ocean City, at the New Jersey shore, find a job and live for the summer. To get the approval of my parents, we told them Ocean City would be a safe place for me to work because no liquor could be sold and no bars were allowed within the city limits. It was a dry town.

I boarded a bus in Philadelphia, took a window seat and headed for Ocean City. In my overnight bag, I had packed a BIC pen and a small blue notebook, the kind with metal, spiral binding. I was determined to spend lots of my time during the summer writing the great American novel. Not just a novel, but a great novel of someone who left home and became rich and famous.

We left the bus terminal and I watched the City of Philadelphia disappear and crossed the Delaware River through Camden, past the Campbell soup factory and on the road to Ocean City. I opened my notebook, recorded my name, the day and date on the first page and watched for an hour or so as a dozen small towns went by the window. Another hour went by as the mysterious Pine Barrens, the source of all kinds of mystery stories and poems, appeared on both sides of the road. Next, the first inlets and marshes and swatches of sand leading to the ocean zoomed by. Before I could write a word of my novel, we arrived in Ocean City.

I was so full of dreams that day. Could life be any better for a 17 year old hick from the mountains? No, I don’t think my life has ever been so full of promise as it was on that day in May. Did I finish writing the great American novel during my first summer of freedom? No, there was too much life to experience and not enough time left to write about it.

But, today, some 50 years later, I still dream of writing a novel, maybe not the great American novel, though. I keep writing and waiting for the day when my book gets published and I’m asked to hit the talk show circuit. I can hear the applause as Oprah introduces me, “Here he is, let’s give him a warm welcome, that famous writer, . . . .”

I found a yellow watermelon – inner flesh is yellow, not a hint of pink anywhere. I bought a 20-pounder and it has fed me all week and is incredibly sweet and a truly magnificent fruit….

The blogging point is: this melon triggered a memory for me. It may have to be my newest book, Watermelon Dreams or something: ….driving home from a trip across the Sonoran Desert in JULY with a broken car air-conditioner…across the dry plains of Texas in the middle of nowhere….it was all about the heat….we came across a farmer and his farm truck full of yellow watermelons, parked by the side of the road….I had never even seen a yellow-flesh watermelon, let alone tasted one…..that melon saved the day.

WRITING PROMPT: Let a piece of fruit be an important part of your next story.

Yellow Watermelon. Go get one.

My first locking diary was when my first inside words hit the paper, at 11. I am now on my 63rd year of the same diary, no locks now.
Secrets kept seem to sap my creative because my mind, during my young years, thought and tried to protect those secrets. Writing is the place to tell the secrets and release the story. My first story, at 12, was written in the 6th grade. Written in longhand with a blue ball point pen, Dr. Kram and Dr. Alaclam was a story about finding the “secret” of Atlantis. I was a boy in the story who loved dressing up like a girl. The book was written with a copyright page, a title and half title page, a table of contents, illustration list and the opening chapters. It was fully illustrated with multiple colored ball point pens and all the strange fantasies of my youth. It was full of adventure and I died at the end.

Once a psychic told me in Santa Fe, “You were a twin in the womb. One boy and one girl. The boy’s body died and the boy’s spirit entered the remaining female body and the girl was displaced over my left shoulder where she sits to advise me.” This certainly was profound and explained my androgenous psyche. Even my first husband told me I looked like a “football player” in a dress.

Amusement keeps me going. I want to see how the story ends. I have always loved human beings, and all animals. Human beings fascinate me. They are the characters of the big world story intriguing me, beguiling and hurting me sometimes. The hurting ones always become a bit of comedy for me and I watch myself rage and carry on at their betrayals and disloyalty, but I let them go onto the pages of my diary and enjoy how they come and go in different forms. I have no regrets.

Music and rhythm fill my well. I find myself totally renewed when I can find others to play music with, make bands, perform and get involved in the energy exchanges of the audience and performer. The older I get, the more amused I become and I welcome the good, bad and the ugly found in my own obsessions, addictions, dreams and failures. It is how fast I recover without hitting the pity pool that I really call success.

I had a gift of a dream once when I was in some despair over my unfinished business with my father at his death. The scene was in a very tall and dense grove of trees. I was riding in an old 1960 Plymouth, sitting in the backseat with a woman and a man I didn’t know. The driver and passenger in the front were also strangers. We were bogged down in the most beautifully decayed, deep salmon colored wood trunks that had fallen across the shady grove’s path. The tires were nearly buried in the rich wood. I scooted out, after the others and at the edge of the grove, a desert of white sand reached the horizon. In the distance was a small raked stage. A middle aged, tall preacher-man stood in a burial type black suit holding an open and limp Bible. In the foreground, about 20 feet from the stage was a 3 foot by 3 foot cemetery fence with no gate. The woman from the backseat, fellow passenger, climbed over the fence to stand on the sand in the small square space. I followed. As soon as my feet hit the white sand inside the fence I was filled with the agonizing magnetic affects of deepest cosmic grief. I didn’t have the strength to pull myself back out. All of a sudden, the preacher-man was activated like a robot when plugged in for the first time. His arm went in the air, pointing to the cosmic blue sky, referring to the Bible as he looked down spoke he in his loud bellowing preacher voice, “You know where it is, but you don’t have to go there!”

It changed my life. I never went there again.

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artyprojects@cybermesa.com

I flew to a piece of paper and wrote a story from start to finish. To my astonishment, I liked the story. I liked it a lot. Maybe, just maybe, I could write a little and if I took lessons maybe, just perhaps, I could write a little better.

That first story flowed like no other story has since. Talk about being in the zone. My creativity, stifled for decades, had a ball. The party lasted a half an hour and that slice of time that goes down as one of the happiest in my life. The pleasure continues, though not as intensely as in those first writing moments.

The joy I get out of writing is similar to how I felt reading as a child. What magic to crack the spine and enter a new world. My first book was a piece no publisher would ever consider today. It was photographs of different cats sitting with balls of yarn in the foreground and tapestries in the background. The colors on each page were dark greens, browns and muddy yellows. There was nothing childlike about the book except for the simple sentences imagining what each cat was like. I poured over that book dozens, if not hundreds, of times, running my fingers over the weavings, trying to imagine how they would feel and thinking about how each cat might live- like the gray one with the heavy brow and whiskers who was said to live on a four-masted sailing ship. Being the youngest of a big family, I never saw the book in full form, the cover had long since been ripped off by the time I got it, but I treasured it nonetheless. Today, books come and go in my household, but this one stays with me forever as my MOST IMPORTANT BOOK.

Memories of what it was like to read as a child inspire me to write. If I can give even half the pleasure I received from writers before me, I will be delighted. It isn’t about what I can do to keep the writing going, it’s the writing that brings a quiet joy, a tranquility, an equilibrium that are life within my life. Writing keeps me going. When I am feeling out of sorts, grumpy, “off”, it is often as not because I have not been writing. As soon as I am back in the chair, life is sweet again.

Nadine Donovan
who, when not writing children’s fiction, rides the stock market roller coaster and provides stock tips at www.gostocksgo.com

1. When did you start writing? Do you remember your first story?

2. What keeps you going? How do you “fill the well”?

Would you like to be a Guest Blogger? Send me an e-mail to:

bj mayfield at cybermesa dot com

Modesta is the person to whom I dedicated The Magical Mrs. Iptweet and Me. She was young when she died. She was a lively person married to happy-go-lucky David, my granddad of Welsh descent. He grew gorgeous flowers in their patch of garden in the city, and worked at the Navy Yard. He was playful, funny and a great social dancer. He hung a wooden-seat swing in their basement for us, right next to the coal bin.

Modesta was a little bit intimidating to me – I remember her as tall and outspoken, and she had her own slipcover-making business in their basement. Her sewing tables were set up next to the swing and the coal bin.  I felt very connected to her; she was a big love in my young life. I think I’m the only one of her 10 grandchildren who was born and old enough to remember her clearly.

Thanks for being born, Modesta. You are remembered.

This quote today from Judith Fein’s new book LIFE IS A TRIP.

Thank you, Judith, I needed that.

http://www.yourlifeisatrip.com/

I don’t know why my blog is not letting me add a direct link…..

Here’s a prompt for you: “Opposite” – have your character react/respond to a situation opposite to what you have already written. Go.

Mingo™ in deep thought preparing for the show

there.