How was your creative week?
I've been reading Olive Kiteridge the last few days for my book group. It's a theology book group, so I need to find a theological angle to the novel. It takes place in Crosby, Maine, and the thirteen chapters center on Olive Kiteridge, a wife, mother, and seventh-grade math teacher. I've read in several reviews that she is a "flawed character," and so, what I'd like to do is challenge the group to compare her to the flawed characters they know about in the Bible and how God uses them. How does God work through flawed, abrasive Olive in her interactions with others? This is a truth I find over and over and over again...God's love does not work through perfect people. God's love works through you and me in our very humanity.....
I did a write-in this afternoon at a local coffee shop with another writer. I worked on the fifth chapter of my novel. It is very challenging. It is hard work. In theory, writing sounds easy. It's easy to say you're a writer. It's hard to write. When you try to paint scenes with words, you realize just what craft and mastery is involved. If I can not stare at the chasm between where I want to be in my writing and where I am now, and instead focus on the joy of the journey of mastering something that I feel intrinsically motivated to pursue...Why would I write if it wasn't for an intrinsic pull to create, to explain the world around me, to focus on the details of living, and not let life slip by without observing it and writing it down...Writing helps me to know what I think and what I want to teach myself more of or find out more about. When I stumble over the words, or the content in the novel, and go, well, how would you really describe a course catalog and a radio program from 1907...it leads to new worlds for me...new things I didn't know the moment before...
The fifth chapter is about Marjorie at school. Her teacher, a poet, is introducing the students in this relatively poor rural farming community in 1907 to the University of Wisconsin catalog. They are twelfth graders who haven't thought much about higher education. A boy asks why the girls in the class are getting the catalogs. My hope in this chapter is to bring up the theme of women's higher education, and really highlight what a recent development in US history, and what a turning point that period was for women's rights. And ask the essential question---why educate women? As the boy says in this chapter, "They were just going to get married and have babies. Why do they need to know about political systems? or differential equations? or ..."They have no place in the public sphere..."
And I want to research the debates that were going on in that period...to add some meat to this chapter... Why, when women had been historically relegated to motherhood and the domestic sphere prior to this period...why was there a turn of tides in 1907 through the advent of the 19th amendment? What was going on in US society that lay the groundwork for this? x
Anyways, these are the themes I'm exploring in this chapter...it's still a work in progress...I'm fascinated by this topic...just trying to translate it from exposition to creative fiction is an absolute challenge.
One word at a time...
I love how you have explored the reasons you write, Chrissy. You articulate beautifully that sometimes elusive pull we all feel toward creating with the written word. You make me want to write more.
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