The following post appeared on Abbott Press blog on June 27.

http://blog.abbottpress.com/sell-your-heart-when-real-life-becomes-fiction/

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Sell Your Heart: When Real Life Becomes Fiction

Posted by Rebecca Elswick on Jun 27, 2013 in Guest Blogs | 

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell. 
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I was writing my first novel, Mama’s Shoes, I took great comfort from the legendary F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words. Writing a novel is a daunting task. It didn’t matter that I was an English teacher and knew how to use correct grammar, punctuation and syntax, or that I knew how to create setting and plot and put my characters in the throes of conflict. That didn’t make me a writer — at least not one anyone would necessarily care to read; what made me a writer is that in addition to having all the proper elements in a story, I added the one thing you won’t find in a style manual. Emotion.

My Mama in 1942 at age 17. She is wearing her beautician’s uniform. She was the inspiration for Sylvia Richardson in Mama’ s Shoes.

As Fitzgerald said, you only have your emotions to sell.  I knew if I was going to write a novel that anyone wanted to read, I was going to have to sell my emotions. In Mama’s Shoes, I dug deep down inside myself to find the little girl who had grown up in a little coal mining town going to the beauty shops where her beautiful mama worked. I had to close my eyes and smell the cigarette smoke and beauty shop chemicals. I had to listen again to the women talk about having babies, husbands who got drunk and beat them, planting gardens and canning vegetables, and trying to raise their families amid the poverty and coal dust. And I had to put those sights and sounds on the page. I had to tell their stories by showing their emotions and mine.
Those women taught me more about life than I ever learned anywhere else. It was their stories that I drew from to find the happiness and love, sadness and grief, and never-ending hope that created the world where my characters lived in Mama’s Shoes. The story is indeed fiction, but the emotion in Mama’s Shoes is real — drawn from the life of a 12-year-old girl struggling to grow up and find her way in a world.
There are rules you have to follow to master writing. All those grammar and syntax rules I mentioned are indeed important, but don’t forget the most important of all — emotion. Sometimes you have to cry and laugh or even bleed on the page. Whatever you do, you have to make your reader hear your voice, feel your characters’ pain, and rejoice in their happiness. When you do that, you’re on your way to being a writer.

Rebecca D. Elswick is the award-winning author of Mama’s Shoes. Visit her website at http://www.rebeccaelswick.com/.

Takeaway Tweets

“You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly.” Tweet This

Sometimes you have to cry and laugh or even bleed on the page. Tweet This

Make your reader hear your voice, feel your characters’ pain, and rejoice in their happiness. Tweet This

Teachers Love Summer Vacation TOO

I am a teacher/writer, and I spent my first week of summer vacation facilitating a workshop for teachers called Strategies for Teaching Writing. As a teacher consultant for the Appalachian Writing Project(AWP), (http://people.uvawise.edu/awp/) I am dedicated to coaching teachers on how to use more writing in their classes regardless of the subject area.

AWP is part of the National Writing Project, an organization networked across the country and anchored in colleges and universities. It's mission: "The National Writing Project focuses the knowledge, expertise, and leadership of our nation's educators on sustained efforts to improve writing and learning for all learners." (http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/doc/about.csp).

Fourteen teachers from six different school districts gathered for a week of learning about and exchanging best practices for teaching writing. These ladies had just walked out of their classrooms and into mine. Their jobs ranged from teaching grades kindergarten to high school with subjects ranging from English to Art. They were tired and worn-out from all the duties and responsibilities of ending a school year, but they were ready to soak up new strategies to take back to their classrooms - classrooms they had just left.

Dedication. These ladies are perfect examples of dedicated teachers. They soaked up the new activities, research, and presentations like they were fresh, rested and ready to charge back into the classroom the next day.They shared one of their best teaching strategies and demonstrated how it was used in their classrooms.

We discussed ways to engage our students, and we shared ways to help our students learn how to communicate through writing.

AWP Teacher consultants came to the workshop to do demonstrations they had prepared. We discussed: 

Motivating the Reluctant Writer

Hook, Line, and Reel Them In:  Writing Great Opening Lines

Book Arts (How to make books and journals with our students

Oral History and Writing in the Primary Classroom

Appalachian Literature and Local Authors

Evaluating and Publishing Your Students’ Work 

Making Writing Meaningful  

Boys Will Be Writers—How to Narrow the Performance Gap Between Boys and Girls

 

We discussed how to use journals as a tool to teach writing and shared topics for student writing.
We even went on a scavenger hunt in the library to "find" poems!




On the last day of the workshop, we used Skype technology to talk to Dr. Amy Clark, professor at UVA Wise and co-author of the book Talking Appalachian. Amy told the group about the research that went into this book, and how we, as teachers, can use it to help our students in Appalachia understand their English is not "wrong". We can teach our students that the language of their region is a "living testament to its rich heritage."

The book contains essays and excerpts from works by authors such as George Ella Lyon and Silas House.

The group left Amy's discussion talking about how to teach our students how to "code-switch" from their "home-voice" to more standard English. By teaching them where their language/dialect comes from, we are empowering them in the classroom and beyond.

Do teachers like summer vacation? Of course we do! But this group of dedicated ladies gave up a week of  their summer vacation to gather a toolbox of ideas and activities for their upcoming classes. They know that the summer will speed by and soon they will be standing in front of a group of fresh faces, ready to learn!