Character Development

Developing my own character as a writer.

I have been trying to write regularly about any and everything to get in the habit of daily writing. Some of it is for this blog, some for me and some for that novel I always had running in my head. To keep me on track I have been checking out different writing and author sites and this one caught my attention, The Write Practice. They have a writers prompt that you get when you subscribe to their blog and they had an interesting article about using of the Proust Questionnaire to help you develop more deeply the characters in your story to help you get to know them better.

Some of you may know this questionnaire from the back page of Vanity Fair magazine or a version of it from Inside the Actors Studio where host James Lipton asks a version of the questionnaire that was used by a French show host named Bernard Pivot.

So I thought I would complete the questionnaire as the writer I want to be so that you can get to know me a little better. And if you are game; I would love for you to complete it too so that I can get to know you better.

What is your greatest fear? Losing my mind
What is your current state of mind? Stressed out
What is your favorite occupation? Writer
What historical figure do you most identify with? Katherine Hepburn, I am a bit of a ball buster too.
Which living person do you most admire? Anyone you sacrifices to help others in need.
Who is your favorite fictional hero? Wonder Woman
Who are you real-life heroes? The police who sacrifice and take crap everyday
What is your most treasured possession? My family
When and where were you happiest? Alone writing with a nice cup of coffee
What is your most obvious characteristic? Tall and talk a lot
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Smartass
What is the trait you most deplore in others? Cruelty to humans or animals
What is your greatest extravagance? None – I am a state employee that wants to write – I can’t afford extravagance.
What is your favorite journey? Any road trip
What do you most dislike about your appearance? Big nose and 20 extra pounds
What do you consider the most over-rated virtue? Hard worker
On what occasion do you lie? When it will hurt another’s feelings
Which words or phrases do you most over-use? “Living the Dream” and “SSDD”
If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? I wish I could sing!
What do you consider your greatest achievement? Being married to the same man for 24 years when everyone said it would never last.
Where would you like to live? Near the water
What is the quality you most admire in a man? Humor and intelligence
What is the quality you most admire in a woman? Honesty and humor
What is it you most dislike? Mans inhumanity to man.
What do you value most in you friends? That they continue to put up with me
How would you like to die? quickly
If you were to die and come back as a person or an animal, what do you think it would be? Rock star would be the wish, but likely a man with a bad attitude.
If you could choose an object to come back as, what would you choose? Big piece of busy machinery.
What is your motto, the words you live by or that mean a lot to you? I try to remember to “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things!
Who has been the greatest influence on you? My family

What do you think, will you take the questionnaire?

Do You Meditate? Why Not – Everyone Else Is!

Do you meditate?

I don’t really, but I have been sorta of trying. It seems like every article or blog I read lately has something about meditating and how much it benefits your life.

Gwyneth Paltrow, the actress and lifestyle guru always has something “new age” on her site GOOP. This is from her New Years Resolution to start meditating post and this excerpt is from Mark Epstein, MD the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy.

“Meditation, as taught by the Buddha, was a means of taming the mind by bringing the entire range of thoughts, feelings and physical sensations into awareness, making the unconscious conscious. There were already various forms of meditation widely practiced in the Buddha’s day but they were all techniques of concentration. Buddha mastered each of them but still felt uneasy. It was fine to rest the mind on a single object: a sound (or mantra), a sensation (the breath), an image (a candle flame), a feeling (love or compassion), or an idea. This gave strength to the mind, a feeling of stability, of peace and tranquility, a sense of what Freud came to call the ‘oceanic feeling’. While this could be relaxing, it did not do enough to change the mind’s complexion. Buddha was after something more.”

Another blog I enjoy, Zenhabits, also had an article recently on “The Most Important Two Minutes of Your Life”

“I’ll save you the suspense: it’s two-minute meditation. And it’s extremely simple: take two minutes out of your extremely busy day (cat videos) to sit still and focus on your breath. Just keep the gentle fingertip of your attention on your breath as it comes into your body, and then goes out. When your mind wanders, take note of that, but then gently come back to the breath.“

Almost all of the articles tout the ease as well as the difficulty of meditation, but how much better, uncluttered, relaxed, zen, etc, etc you will feel. And, if you practice often enough it will become a tool you can invoke at anytime.

Another article by Dan Hurley in the New York Times Magazine that had a section that took me a bit by surprise, it includes the work of psychologist Amishi Jha’s with the U.S. military, helping solders learn to meditate to better their performance in combat situations. An excerpt from the article;

“We found that getting as little as 12 minutes of meditation practice a day helped the Marines to keep their attention and working memory — that is, the added ability to pay attention over time — stable,” said Jha, director of the University of Miami’s Contemplative Neuroscience, Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. “If they practiced less than 12 minutes or not at all, they degraded in their functioning.”

So much for new age, hippy dippy make yourself and the world more relaxed. The article also talks about some of the down sides of too much mindfulness; that it can inhibit your creativity and stifle your ability to let your mind wander to the benefit of your life. But the final paragraph from the article sums up the “sacrilege” versus using new tools to be better at what ever you do in life.

“After meditating upon such sacrilegious findings, no doubt the Buddha, who taught a middle way between worldly and spiritual concerns, would have agreed that there is a time for using mindfulness to discover inner truths, a time for using it to survive a battle or an exam and a time to let go of mindfulness so that the mind may wander the universe.”

I am generally a skeptic, but I have been so stressed out by almost every aspect of my life lately that a hint of desperation is setting in, I am going to give this a try in earnest. Beginning today, I am going to meditate everyday for at least 2 minutes. I will follow-up on my experience and progress or in my case probable ineptitude in some upcoming posts. namaste.

Do you meditate or practice mindfulness? How does it improve your life or maybe the lives of those around you?

Top Ten

Nothing inflames the passions like a top ten list!

I heard an interesting NPR piece on All Things Considered about the American Scholars; 10 Best Sentences. They admit that the choices are subjective, but they usually have come from a “hey listen to this” conversation. I picked three of my favorites out of the ten below.

“In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.” Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

However, what I enjoyed the most about both the NPR story and the ten best are the comments by readers on each story. People are picky, passionate, mean, loving, encouraging, snarky, funny and above all enthusiastic about their picks and their comments on the choices of others. Check them out, if you don’t enjoy them almost as much as the story I don’t want to know you.

Some of my favorite sentences in no particular order and without strict limit to one sentence only;

“She had walked close to him today, his am had brushed against hers and his roughness had caressed her softness. There had been a sensation akin to death and birth.” Amulya Malladi, Song of the Cuckoo Bird

And a passage I loved from one of my favorite books.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.” Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Someone posted this quote in the comments section on NPR, I have never read Joseph Conrad, but this made me want to seek him out.

“Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets.” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”

Words, sentences, quotes and songs all sound different to me depending of the variables of my life: my mood, the openness of my heart, the delivery, whether I’m hungry or full, whether I’m there in the moment or wasting this moment thinking of one off in the future. They all impact me in different ways too; soothing me when I’m angry or upset, welling the tears when I am sad, filling me with love and warmth when I am open and willing to be vulnerable or fueling my anger, building a hate and slamming a door when I am closed and not truly listening.

I want to listen, be open and live in the moment. No more wasted energy, life or love.

Do you have a favorite sentence, story, poem or song? Does it or do they make you feel something?

Retirement

That elusive day way off in the distance when I can give my suits to Goodwill, ride off into the sunset and do what I want. But what?

My husband, as I mentioned in a previous post, is a lot older than I am and can technically retire whenever he feels like it. A pension and social security are ready and waiting for the day he decides he doesn’t want to or can not work any longer. But he doesn’t want to retire just yet. He says “I’m not ready”, “What would I do with myself all day?” and “I don’t want to just sit in the house and stare out the window until you come home from work.” But what could he do with his time if he wasn’t working? He says he has no idea.

A recent New York Times article by Tara Siegel Bernard about Coping When Not Entering Retirement Together talks about the need to communicate, the feelings of guilt on the retirees part about spending money when the other spouse is still working and working out your schedules. An excerpt;

“With more and more baby boomers retiring each year, either by choice or because they lost their jobs in the economic downturn, many couples must coexist, if only temporarily, in different phases of life. Living two different realities can lead to a variety of challenges, both financial and emotional, from brewing resentments about how a partner is spending free time, to how to reconcile the spending mind-set of a retiree and of someone still collecting a paycheck.“

I would probably be a little jealous of his free time, but I also know he has more than earned the right to retire when he’s ready.

But I don’t want to get to 67 and not have that next thing to engage my life. In fact I want more things than work to engage in now; which is part of the reason I began this blog so that I can begin to enjoy one of my passions. Retirement is 20 years away, I don’t want to keep planning on living the way I want to in 20 years, I want to do it now. But how?

Also, there is “the bucket list”. I found several sites recently that are focused on helping and documenting people checking things off their bucket list. The Bucket List Society and The Bucket List Blog are a couple I found interesting. My list is long and mostly filled with places that I want to travel to; Scotland, Japan, Thailand, India, Vietnam, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Alaska, Kenya and on and on. I have two friends that are travel addicts and am quite envious before and after every trip they take.

I have been stuck for awhile, but I am slowly figuring out my next steps, what brings me fulfillment and happiness and I am evaluating what and who I want in my life and I am going to make those things happen.

Do you have a plan for life after retirement or to live the life you want now?

Happy

Happy puppy, happy life!

Time Flies

Four Generations. I am the cute chubby one in the middle.

Now that I’m getting so close to the Big 5-0 articles on aging, growing older, retirement and social security are attracting my attention more often.

Yesterday I was caught by surprise by a New York Times article about Gloria Steinem turning 80. Yes, 80, that is not a typo. I always think of her as my mothers contemporary, but she is 15 years older. In the article, NYT Op-Ed Columnist, Gail Collins wrote “This is What 80 Looks Like” about Ms. Steinem’s decades in the spotlight. Asking Ms. Steinem what she had planned for her 80th birthday.

“She’s planning to celebrate in Botswana. “I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’ First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.””

Getting out-of-town and riding elephants sounds like a perfect birthday celebration, I’m just not sure I want to wait until I’m 80 to do it.

Another comment from Ms. Steinem struck me:

“Fifty was a shock, because it was the end of the center period of life. But once I got over that, 60 was great. Seventy was great. And I loved, I seriously loved aging. I found myself thinking things like: ‘I don’t want anything I don’t have.’ How great is that?” But, she added, “80 is about mortality, not aging. Or not just aging.”

Fifty does feel like it’s looming to me, like a cliff that I am heading towards and at times I am trying to swim like hell away from and other times I just lazily float down the river enjoying the ride.

A wonderful poem on the blog Ephemeral Memories “The Midlife Moment of Truth“. contained a line;

“Each innocuous day adds up to months, years into decades“

You know the saying “time flies”? I know my grandparents and my parents have said it over the years and you never quite understand that statement until you get there, but time really does fly. And a lot of that time is innocuous. I want less innocuous time and more memorable time filled with fun, people I care about, things I am passionate about doing and more laughter.

As I wrote earlier this month about my husband getting older and his comments about his “F’ing Golden Years” not being very golden, it’s giving me a preview of the trials of aging, but also some of the triumphs of aging. The no longer wasting time on things that are of little importance, the ease of saying “No”, the wisdom to know that a bad day or unhappy event will pass and pleasure and happiness will return.

Anne Karpf of The Guardian wrote an article earlier this year “Ageing is a mixture of gains and losses” that had several parts that resonated with me;

“The denigration of age is built upon the idealisation of youth, and both do violence to reality. Being young is rarely as unconflicted, nor old as wretched, as the stereotypes would have us believe.”

The stereotypes of every age do have truth to them, but they are definitely not the whole story.

And a great quote on the passions that can come with age.

“One of the most delicious accounts of how growing older can mean growing more engaged was written by Florida Scott-Maxwell, the American-born playwright, suffragette and analyst. In 1968, when she was 85, she wrote: “Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My 70s were interesting and fairly serene, but my 80s are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise, I burst out with hot conviction … I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.””

Though only in my late 40’s I do find myself less willing to sit back and take things as they are or as they are presented; if something is not to my liking I find myself more often than not voicing my dissent, walking away from it or just ignoring it.

How are you aging?

Geeking

Car geeks unite!

My husband is a Volkswagen car nut. I think we are on our 9th Volkswagen in nearly 30 years together. He has his favorite car dealer, Pignataro Volkswagen in Everett, Washington. That dealer is nearly a 2 hour drive from our current home, but used to be just a couple miles away from us. And he has remained loyal to them through the years, buying only one car from another dealer and swearing he would never buy from anyone but Pignataro again based on that experience.

This picture above is of my husband and a guy, who lived a few blocks down the street from us, who had just come home with a new VW. My husband had to stop the car, get out and check it out. He stood there talking about that car for 30 minutes with a man he never met before, both of them geeking out about that Volkswagen. The man moved away a few months later, I wonder if there is a correlation to his moving and my husbands stalking?

His face lights up, at even the thought of a new VW, a bit like mine does when I see a new tech gadget. The gadget story is for another time. He even drives to Everett for service on our Volkswagens. He is driving up there this morning and I haven’t seem him that happy in weeks, thrilled to be heading to his “mecca” and talk horsepower, mpg, navigation systems and sunroofs with his people.

Let the geeking begin!

Do you geek out about anything?

Joy

Joy and Happiness.

This is an old picture of my little brother and me on his third birthday. I laugh and feel happy every time I see it. His joyful, excited expression and my terrible haircut and snaggletooth grin. Just getting ready to light the candles, to sing and to eat cake!

Random & Rhyme

Tag Archives: happiness