The Beach Writer 2:50 pm on November 1, 2016
Tags: fiction ( 4 ), nanowrimo, novel, writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

Nanowrimo? Yes please.

Just after midnight last night I typed (ok keyboarded) my first five sentences onto a previously blank white page to start Nanowrimo (nanowrimo.org).

Nanowrimo is a month-long international writing event celebrating National Novel Writing Month. The event encourages writers to write a book in just 30 days. While you’re writing, Nanowrimo provides constant encouragement and support. Their website offers advice and a large online community of writers from all over the world who interact in a long list of forums. Using those forums you can meet other Nanowrimo writers including people in your area. You can even gather offline (you know, in person) for camaraderie to commiserate. Writers are asked to start with a blank page on November 1st and complete a 50,000 word manuscript before midnight of November 30th. If you do that, you win, because you’re really only competing with yourself.

There are a few rules to Nanowrimo besides start date, end date, and writing something new–notes, and previous thinking are allowed–but it’s ok to rebel. In fact, there’s a forum for that!

Five years ago today I participated in my first Nanowrimo. I didn’t win because my word count by the end of the month was a couple thousand shy of the cutoff. But I had the majority of my book completed and I finished the rough draft soon after. That wasn’t the first manuscript I’d ever completed. I wrote my first full length novel in 1995-1996 and several more fiction and nonfiction books since then. So why do I participate in Nanowrimo?

Because it’s fun. And because for those 30 days my writing takes priority over pretty much everything else.

You might be wondering…doesn’t her writing take priority over everything else already since writing is her career?

Yeah…no. It doesn’t. Is your dentist a dentist 24/7? Of course not. Your plumber? Nope. Even your doctor has a life. Writers, like every other human, have to survive, take care of their loved ones, and give the dog a bath occasionally. Besides that, most of the writing I’ve done during my professional writing career has been for other people. My own projects have always been squeezed into my free time. And that is why I’m attracted to Nanowrimo.

I don’t participate every year because life. Sometimes work has prevented me from putting in the time to hit 50,000 words at the end of 30 days. Sometimes personal life was more demanding. But often, for me, it was a matter of overall timing…I wasn’t in the right place on other writing projects to devote a month to something brand new.

It’s not often that I don’t have at least a dozen pages already written on whatever idea bubbles up in my brain. Like most writers I also have many, many writing projects in various levels of disrepair (or despair). For any nonwriters reading this think of that home improvement project started with enthusiasm in 2005. Yeah, we’ll finish someday.

To be honest, I probably shouldn’t be prioritizing a new novel over my ongoing project right now. I’m currently working on the final, final, final, final(!) revision of that book that I started during Nanowrimo 2011. It’s a nonfiction book (yes I’m a nanowrimo rebel) about getting rid of nearly everything we owned, moving halfway across the country in two crap cars with 4 adults and 2 pets, and starting over with pretty much nothing.

Hope that interests you because it’ll be ready to publish soon!

Don’t let that word publish intimate you. Nanowrimo isn’t about publishing. It’s about writing. You never have to show your book to any other living soul and it doesn’t matter if you finish by November 30th. Just start writing and keep writing for a month. If you do, you’re likely to finish what you started by New Year’s, or Spring, or in time for the next Nanowrimo. When you finish doesn’t matter. What matters is that you start and get enough of the story down that you want to keep writing until it’s done.

This year, I’m writing fiction. The last novel I wrote was more than a decade ago, when I was publishing a newspaper. Since then I’ve been writing nonfiction and I’m looking forward to having a more relaxed relationship with reality or the next 50,000 words.

But enough about me. I’m writing this blog post for you. I’m inviting you to join me at Nanowrimo.

Have you written a book before? Great! Write another one!

Have you never written anything longer than a letter/marathon email before? Great! Write your first full length manuscript! That probably sounds crazy impossible hard to those of you who haven’t written a book before. But don’t let that stop you from starting.

Writing a book in one month is not easy. But it is simple. Start.

And don’t stop until your story is told.

The Beach Writer 1:52 pm on June 9, 2015
Tags: Beach ( 30 ), Creativity ( 22 ), Hanna Beach ( 10 ), Sabbatical, Stories ( 4 ), story ( 5 ), Storytelling ( 4 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

On Sea Changes and Sabbaticals

For the first time since moving to the coast, I missed seeing flocks of black skimmers gather on Jax area beaches over the winter. They were there on schedule, but I was stuck at home with a scorching case of Achilles tendinitis. Walking in the sand would have felt great. Walking to and from the sand was not possible.

More than a month passed between beach walks at the start of the year. Since then, beach visits are far shorter and less frequent than usual. I miss those daily 3 mile treks through the sand and I’ll have to wait another year to watch black skimmers.

My beach walking companions, Hanna Beach, Jax, Spring 2015

During my grounding from the coast I wondered if it would be the same when I returned. Sure, I knew there would be sand and surf — the most basic beach ingredients. But the details, and even general topography of a beach can change in a day. High tide during a full super moon with an offshore storm can bury the steps and railing of a long-standing wooden walkover under sand and redraw the edge of a dune. Rough seas and wind can sculpt new sand ridges and valleys, and cover yesterday’s tracks with layers of plants and trash from both land and sea.

After a month, would I have to get to know my favorite beach all over again? Would everything be like it was before? Would I feel at home?

Questions like these stem from having too much time to think about stupid stuff thanks to illness (It’s A Parkinson’s Thing) and injury. And from forgetting that their answers (no, no, and yes) were already known to me–following a longer absence last fall from something less tangible than a coastline.

Hanna Beach, Jax (Jacksonville, FL) looking out at the Atlantic, Spring 2015

While writing the series of blogs about stories–how they change the world, themselves, and their writers–my story changed. An illness I’ve managed for years progressed. I can’t say that was unexpected. And I can’t say I didn’t know that the balance of writing, working, and living I had in place could be undone by some future storm.

Late last summer one of those storms knocked me far enough off course that I stopped writing.

You read that right.

I’ve been writing since I learned how to hold a pencil and telling stories longer than that. There have been times that I’ve taken breaks from writing, but not a complete, full stop with no plan to restart. What about all those writing rules we read and hear, that writers write every day forever and ever at the same time whether they want to or not, or else? And could I still list writer as my occupation on forms? And would I still be me?

What did I learn from my unscheduled sabbatical? First I discovered that…

Nothing. Bad. Happened.

Instead, it may be the best thing I’ve ever done for my writing.

Hanna Beach, Jax, Spring 2015

Not writing reminded me that I can create without words. I resumed photography and began telling exclusively visual stories–something I hadn’t done since childhood. I no longer consider writing as the bulk of my creative process, but as the last stage of communicating what I create to others–not so much a thing in and of itself anymore, but more of an end to a means.

Several months after I stopped writing, without thinking about it, I opened a document file on my computer and started again. It was that simple–no plan, no stress, no problem. Words surfaced and I wrote them down. It took less effort, and caused less pain, than walking to the truck and driving to the beach with an angry Achilles this spring.

Walking on my favorite beach after an absence I found that while some surface details have changed, I still know the general lay of the sand–where the tidal pools form and which streams dumping that stranded water back to the sea are too deep to cross wearing long shorts if your goal is staying dry. It was the same as returning to writing—the structure of my writing world remained unaltered.

The foundation of your creativity is what’s most important. That’s what needs to be cultivated, nurtured, and reinforced each day. If you do you can take vacations and sabbaticals of any length, or even call it quits, and nothing bad will happen. Not only will you remember how to write, or paint, or sculpt, or take photos, or compose music just as well as you did before, but the surface changes may do you good.

You might even find that not practicing for a while leads to improvement or a breakthrough with a troublesome project. But even if it doesn’t, you’ll still be a writer, or sculptor, or painter, or dancer, or whatever else you were before.

Go forth and create. Or not. You’re still you.

The Beach Writer 3:29 pm on February 22, 2015
Tags: Beach ( 30 ), Change, Creativity ( 22 ), Hanna Beach ( 10 ), kathryn abbey hanna park ( 3 ), Stories ( 4 ), story ( 5 ), Storytelling ( 4 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

Stories Change

The tide was low and I was wading in the still warm fall surf with beach poet and our yellow dog when I noticed a gathering of dark objects near the dunes. From that distance they looked like a loose pile of skull-sized rocks but I knew they weren’t. Hanna Beach can be rocky at times but it doesn’t have rocks that size.

I thought they were horseshoe crab shells. But I told myself they must be something else as I headed that way to investigate.

Horseshoe crabs on these beaches aren’t unusual. Discarded shells of various sizes, some with their creatures intact, often stay behind in the sand as the sea recedes twice a day. But I hadn’t seen more than a handful together before that walk.

Horseshoe crabs scattered on Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

What I found near the dune was a group of more than two dozen shells, many of them among the largest I’ve seen during three years of walking area beaches. Most of the collection was together, some touching or tumbled off of another, with a few outliers several feet in both directions. A few had crabs or crab parts. Most were full shells or full shells minus a few tears or cracks. Some were resting on top of the sand. Some were buried or nearly buried. There was no pattern to their alignment. It was if a giant hand tossed them up on to the shore and left them where they landed. All of them without a doubt horseshoe crabs.

Horseshoe crabs are easy to recognize, so why would I doubt what I saw from the shore?

Horseshoe crabs scattered on Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

Because it was different.

Changed.

We humans are obsessed with change. Whether we embrace or fear it, work to initiate it or strive to barricade or legislate against it, change is the most reliable aspect of our lives. How we react to it varies but our reactions are emotional. Change makes us FEEL something, just like a good story does.

There’s been a lot said, and written, and studied about what makes a good story, what humans look for or want in stories, and how stories change minds, open hearts, and transform societies. In recent years, marketing has made story their darling, rediscovering that telling a story is the best way to get and keep someone’s attention. Stories and storytelling are everywhere we look, listen, read, and worship.

“Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”
–Robert McKee

All of this chatter about what makes a good story and why we like stories and how we use stories to sell apples, promote war, or foster understanding and empathy, has led to a world of writing and storytelling advice ranging from contradictory to awful. There are some gems among the muck, however, and one of those can be found in Lisa Cron’s definition of story.

“A story is how what happens (the plot) affects someone (the protagonist) in pursuit of a difficult goal (the story questions) and how he or she changes
as a result (which is what the story is actually about.” –Lisa Cron,
The biggest Mistake Writers Make and How to Avoid it

Stories are like snapshots, but snapshots capture a moment, whereas stories capture movement.

The Poles at Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

Stories are not just a revelation of what happened. Stories are about how someone changes as a result of what happened. Stories are about change — not external or situational change, but the individual change brought about by those external shifts of circumstance.

Personal growth.

“If you keep telling the same sad small story, you will keep living the same sad small life.” — Jean Houston

Good stories–the ones we biologically crave, the ones that stay with us and shape us, the ones that change hearts, minds, and societies–are stories about how people are affected by what happens to them, how we are changed by change. We’re looking for examples of how to react and rebound, or sometimes how not to handle life’s shifts and turns. Regardless of the style or setting, the fairy tales, scifi epics, and literary tomes that captivate us are the ones that change the main characters, the readers or audience, and those of us telling the tale.

Looking south toward Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach, and Jax Beach from The Poles at Hanna Beach, Fall 2014

Stories change you, change me, explain change, embody change, ARE change. Wherever there is a change, there is a story.

Believe it.

Tell it.

Change.

This is the third and final blog of our three-part series on story.

The Beach Writer 12:59 pm on September 5, 2014
Tags: Beach ( 30 ), Creativity ( 22 ), Hanna Beach ( 10 ), kathryn abbey hanna park ( 3 ), Stories ( 4 ), story ( 5 ), Storytelling ( 4 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

What’s Your Story?

Imagine if when we met someone new we asked “What’s your story?” instead of “What do you do?” Their answer would not only be more interesting, but it would provide the information we’re actually seeking. Most of us don’t care what someone’s job title is. What we want to know is what they are about. What’s important to them? Are they someone we want to get to know better?

Part of the story of the Hanna Beach crossover at The Poles is that it's the northernmost entrance to more than 5 miles of continuous public beaches spanning more than 3 coastal communities.

Part of the story of the Hanna Beach crossover at The Poles is that it’s the northernmost entrance to several miles of continuous public beaches spanning more than 3 coastal communities.

As established in part 1 of this series, Tell Me A Story, telling stories is how we get to know each other and make sense of the world we share. All of us, just by being human, have stories.

“To be a person is to have a story to tell.” — Isak Dineson

One of my first writing students was an older woman who spent her days visiting her husband at an assisted living facility and maintaining the home they once shared. Their children and grandchildren visited regularly, and she participated and volunteered in a few organizations, but she spent much of her time alone. She enjoyed her family, gardening, and painting. Her life was full and happy (aside from the sadness associated with her husband’s health of course). I learned these things about her slowly over the nine-week course. But she told me her story the first night, when I asked each student why they had signed up for Beginning Creative Nonfiction.

She took my class because she wanted to learn how to write about her desperate escape from North Korea as a young girl, her terrifying journey to safety in South Korea, and then her immigration to the U.S. She wanted to document that experience for future generations of her family, people she would not be able to tell in person. And she wanted to leave that legacy for her children’s children’s children bad enough to take a community arts class to learn how to write it.

That was her story as she navigated the last stretch of her life. But it wasn’t her only story. As we got to know each other during the class and after, she also told me stories about life in North Korea before she had to leave, immigrating, adapting to a new culture and becoming an American, and raising a family. She had many stories to tell, but only one she felt compelled to write.

Beach dog’s story is happiness–finding it where ever you are, soaking it in, and sharing it with others.

We sometimes think only writers and other creative people have stories inside them demanding to be shared, but with all humans being born storytellers, there are more than a few people we meet who have stories they want to tell but aren’t sure how or who to share them with.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” — Maya Angelou

But if we are born to tell and crave stories, if we are living our lives in a sea of stories as we learned in What Is A Story, why does anyone have trouble writing them, or sharing them? Why is it ever hard to find one to tell?

Some of that difficulty stems from the language we use and our culture of story. We describe stories as elusive creatures that must be hunted, discovered, and captured. We tell each other and ourselves that stories are like shark teeth that few people can find, uncover, or receive as whispers from a coy muse.

Stories are not rare trinkets coughed up on the coastline. But they do need to be recognized, picked up, cleaned up, and told. Failure to recognize the stories of our lives and our imaginations causes a large part of writer’s block and creative angst.

We don’t encourage that recognition by constantly asking people what they do, which we all know translates to what’s your job title and what does society pay you for? Those of us who earn a living in creative fields may appear to have similar answers to what do you do and what’s your story. But even for artists, job titles reflect only what others see in us, not who we are or what we see in ourselves and the world around us.

When my student from North Korea was asked what she did she answered “Oh, I’m retired now.” It’s the same answer my grandmother gave toward the end of her life when her story was that she was the keeper of generations of family memories and lore. Earlier in my grandmother’s life she’d been a rebellious teen who risked not graduating high school by getting married before her senior year was over, obsessively frugal from surviving the Great Depression, and a young mother who traveled across the country alone with a toddler while pregnant so that she could see her sailor before he shipped out during WWII. She also bought the house she grew up in and raised her own children in it, thereby keeping it in the family for more than 100 years. She had volumes of stories about her experiences and the lives of several generations before her, and she told them to anyone who would listen, or who sat near her at holidays, reunions, weddings, and funerals. But she wouldn’t say, or even think, any of that when asked what do you do.

I lost touch with the woman from North Korea many years ago and I don’t know if she finished writing her escape story. When my grandmother died, she took all of her stories with her. Nobody ever thought of writing, recording, filming, or otherwise preserving everything she knew, and now we’re left with a handful of black and white photos of people who lived more than a century ago, that we know nothing about. I didn’t realize while my grandmother was still with us, or when I was helping my student, just how vital story is to our lives. Stories not only make sense of our lives and teach us about each other and the world. They also teach us about ourselves. Our stories, real or imagined, shared or closely guarded, make us who we are.

Understanding the power of story has changed how I live. I notice details. I interact with not just people, but also places, and things. And I’ve finally started sharing the stories I tell and write–through the news articles and columns I published in the past, writing classes I’ve taken and taught, this blog, and soon the handful of both fiction and nonfiction manuscripts I have in various stages of polishing, finishing, and dusting off. All of them are pieces of my overall story, but can stand alone, to entertain, inform, caution, or guide whoever reads them.

“Trust your story.” — Neil Gaimen

My answer to what’s your story would have been different through the years depending on where and who I was at the time, but today my story is stories–living them, recognizing them, telling them, writing them, and helping other people write theirs.

What’s your story?

The same Hanna Beach – Poles walkover as pictured above but viewed from the surf. Now its story is an invitation to venture inland, across the dunes and through the trees of the maritime hammock to see what adventure awaits inland.

This is the second of a three-part series on story. Part three will be Stories Change.

The Beach Writer 6:07 pm on July 9, 2014
Tags: Stories ( 4 ), story ( 5 ), Storytelling ( 4 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

Tell Me A Story

“Tell me a story, ” was one of my daughter’s earliest sentences.

We humans are born with a love of stories. Made up. True. Entertaining. Educational. Cautionary. We want them all.

“Next to hunger and thirst, our most basic human need is for storytelling.” —Khalil Gibran

Difficult to reach and see from the public garden it adorns, this iron fan greets those who make a wet approach, marking the start of stories waiting to unfold.

But what is a story? And why do we want them, demand them, love them, and hand them down like keepsakes through generations?

What is a story?

A basic definition of story is an account or narrative of an incident, event, or experience, or a series or combination of these.

What happened can be true but doesn’t have to be. Who it happened to can be a real person, place, or thing, or conjured. The story can be told from any perspective, and by one or many points of view. The same story told by several can range from deja vu to no apparent relation. But each and all is a story.

” In the end we all become stories.” —Margaret Atwood

So pervasive is story in our lives that we continue to create and use phrases and synonyms that, rather than narrow the meaning of the word, infuse it with increasing range and allow for opposing and contradictory meaning.

A story can be news, gossip, true, or a lie. It can be a legend, folklore, fable, or myth, parable, spiel or yarn, anecdote, report, article, or history, fairy tale, novel, biography, or memoir, broadcast, performance, drama, or saga. It can be the excuse you give for getting home late or the plot of a literary masterpiece or award-winning movie. We tell stories with words (spoken, written, or sung), music and dance, and visually with paint, film, pixels, clay, metal, and a mess of other mediums. The story is more important than how it’s told, unless you’re the first to break the news because then it’s a scoop. And if several of us are explaining the same suspicious event and want to ensure that our versions match we have to get our stories straight.

When we look for the story behind the story we’re gathering background information, which leads into the alternate meaning we’ve given the word–the levels or layers of buildings we construct to reach skyward. What better way is there to continuously remind ourselves that levels and layers exist beneath what’s communicated? It’s rare when there isn’t more to the story than what we first hear, read, or observe.

Why are stories critical to us?

The story goes that we can hear the ocean by putting a shell to our ear. Does hermit crab hear the stories of its adopted home’s past inhabitants?

Stories are the way we communicate and relate to each other and our world. They help us navigate our lives. Through stories we prepare and anticipate, explore options, and process what we’ve experienced.

“Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.” —Jean-Luc Godard

We crave examples of what if and what about and if only. We want to imagine ourselves in someone else’s situation and decide if we would handle it the same way. We want reassurance that we are not alone. Stories provide endless opportunities for all of these.

Sharing stories is how people get to know each other. When we make a friend we don’t give them a list our features and characteristics, we tell stories about our past experiences. We tell stories to explain ourselves, life, and the world. We share stories with others to help them learn from our mistakes and victories, to draw us closer and to set ourselves apart.

We listen to, read, watch, and tell stories not to escape our world but to help us make sense of it, tame it, and find our place in it. Stories shape our world and everyone in it. They are a critical, inescapable component of humanity.

“Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution–more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to…Story is what makes us human, not just metaphorically but literally.” —Lisa Cron

Stories enable growth, innovation, and evolution, not just for each of us individually, but for our societies and species as a whole.

How do stories affect us?

We learn early in life that telling a good story is an excellent way to get someone’s attention and communicate anything important. Our parents and families tell us stories to amuse us, teach us, and put us to sleep. We learn from stories it’s a bad idea to cry wolf, grasp only at low hanging fruit, walk alone to grandma’s house, or accept hospitality from scary old ladies that live in the woods. Stories comfort us with promises that heroes rescue good people and reminders that everyone says goodnight to the same moon.

Young yellow dog’s story: the world is scary but I think I’m brave enough to watch it from the safety of mom’s feet.

“Stories have power. They delight, enchant, touch, teach, recall, inspire, motivate, challenge. They help us understand. They imprint a picture on our minds. Consequently, stories often pack more punch than sermons. Want to make a point or raise an issue? Tell a story.”—Janet Litherland

Stories don’t just envelope us at home or at play. They’re also the foundation of our work and business lives. Marketing is storytelling–from branding to sales to customer retention campaigns. Companies start by telling us their story, then the story of how their products or services made our neighbors happier, smarter, and richer, and finally the story of how good we feel about being part of their story again and again through brand loyalty and repeated purchases.

Do you buy something because of a list of facts and features? Probably not. Usually we buy a particular product because we feel certain it will make our lives better.

“Facts don’t persuade, feelings do. And stories are the
best way to get at those feelings.” —Tom Asacker

How many have walked this path to Hanna Beach? Did their stories disappear with their footprints?

The stories we tell ourselves and each other shape our thoughts and beliefs individually, and as members of the various groups we belong to. Families, neighborhoods, schools, organizations and clubs, companies, cities, states, political parties, religions, countries, continents, and the entire world tell and retell the stories that bind us together, differentiate us from nonmembers, and guide our decisions and beliefs about ourselves, those who agree with us, and those who don’t. The power of stories to change the lives of individuals or nations, to start and end wars, to determine how the world perceives our universe and the existence of and passage of time, gave rise to and perpetually defend the cliché that the pen is mightier than the sword.

“The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and
won than by the stories it loves and believes in.” — Harold Goddard

Do you want to get my attention? Teach me? Entertain me? Persuade me? Inspire me? Convince me? Change my mind?

Tell me a story.

This is the first of a three blog series about story. Part two will be What’s Your Story?

The Beach Writer 2:47 pm on December 12, 2013
Tags: Beach ( 30 ), Creativity ( 22 ), Hanna Beach ( 10 ), know your audience ( 3 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

Your beach is not the one they are looking for

I haven’t lived up to my name much lately. I haven’t written many words in the last few weeks and I’ve set foot in the sand just a couple of times.

The latter is likely a significant cause of the former. I do my best work creatively when I regularly seek out and soak in the inspiration of the natural world around me. Sleep is important too. But none of those were abundant for me in November.

Why? Quincy.

Quincy playing with sticks at Hanna Beach.
Photo by Jeff Janda

Quincy is a yellow Labrador puppy we added to our family November 9th.

Bringing Quincy into our lives destroyed our pre-puppy schedule. Our days were immediately different and sleep was scarce for the first week. That’s all to be expected, of course, when a baby joins a family.

We’re all adjusting to new routines now, and slowly adding back in those activities pushed aside by the urgency of housebreaking and socializing a puppy. Quincy is adjusting to living with a writer, taking naps under my desk while he’s still small enough to fit there.

Quincy resisting wading into a tidal pool on Hanna Beach.
Photo by Jeff Janda

When we did manage to grab some beach time amidst the recent craziness, we introduced Quincy to the sun, sand, and water that will be a big part of his life now that he’s a part of ours. It didn’t take long for him to discover the joy of running through the sand and splashing with us in the surf. He was a bit suspicious about tidal pools but finally followed our daughter into one.

During our most recent beach walk, Quincy was trotting up ahead of us, looking back and bouncing around in circles urging us to hurry up. Every shell he came across went first into his mouth and then into our hands, and back to the sand. Every stick was scooped up by Quincy and displayed proudly until he reached the next one, always dropping the old in favor of the new.

It was all new to Quincy. And that made it all new again for us.

I’ve written before about how viewing (or reviewing) something from a different perspective helps with the editing process. And seeing things differently than most of our peers is the essence of creativity. It’s also an important part of knowing your audience.

You have to be able to look at what you’re writing from the perspective of your reader to inform, persuade, or entertain.

Quincy watching gulls at Hanna Beach.

When I take people to my favorite beach, I point out where we watch dolphins play, where and how we find shells, sea glass, and shark teeth, and how the sun setting behind us reflects back on the ocean and eastern horizon. When I take Quincy to my beach, I show him where he can find sticks, watch (and hope to chase) sea gulls, and run for long stretches in the sand and sunshine. Different visitors want to experience the same beach in their own way.

Knowing your audience can be as simple as focusing on their interests and guiding them toward their goals. You don’t have to share those goals, or agree with their perspectives, but you do have to understand their views if you want to create something with impact. Find out what they’re looking for, what they want to know, what they didn’t realize they were lacking, and give it to them.

Imagine looking at your beach through their eyes, and then show them what they want to see.

Sun-sparkled sand and surf at Hanna Beach.

Photos attributed to Jeff Janda are used here with his permission. See more of Jeff’s beach photography by following beachpoet on Instagram.

The Beach Writer 11:50 am on September 19, 2013
Tags: artistic ( 2 ), Beach ( 30 ), Creativity ( 22 ), Hanna Beach ( 10 ), Indiana Dunes, Jax Beach ( 21 ), Jax Beach Pier, kathryn abbey hanna park ( 3 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

Luck has nothing to do with it

Hanna Beach at Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park

It happened again last week. Someone said I was lucky to live near the beach. It’s a maddeningly common phrase. You’re so lucky to…have thick, curly hair…be tall…be athletic…be talented/artistic/creative…win the lottery.

Some of those do involve luck. Games of chance. Genetics. But most of what we achieve or have in life owes nothing to happenstance.

We worked for it. We sacrificed. We failed. We tried, tried again. We (wo)manned up. We planned. Practiced. Persevered.

We didn’t leave anything to chance.

Our language is filled with platitudes and clichés about luck vs. achievement through struggle, courage, and will because it is a central question of being human. But don’t worry, I have no plans to answer it here. Probably couldn’t even if I wanted to. I’ll stick to something I know, which is that luck wasn’t involved with my proximity to sand and surf.

I live near the beach by choice, courage, determination, and sacrifice.

I wasn’t born here. I wasn’t offered a dream job with paid relocation. I didn’t win the lottery.

Jax Beach

I set a goal.

What I did to achieve that goal is too long of a tale to tell here. It’s book-length, actually, and the subject of my current WIP (for my readers who aren’t writers, WIP = work-in-progress). Eventually it will be finished and published but I didn’t want to wait that long to deliver one of the morals of the story…

Don’t wait for your beach to find you.

Recently I visited a close friend who found her beach in the middle of the country, along Lake Michigan. We have proclaimed ourselves sand sisters and our personal Facebook pages often feature dueling photos of sand, sunsets, and seagulls. Another thing we have in common is that luck didn’t have anything to do with her relocation either.

Indiana Dunes Beach at Indiana Dunes State Park

And it doesn’t have anything to do with creativity.

Writers, poets, sculptors, painters, photographers, dancers, singers, musicians, designers, architects, engineers, and anyone else who uses inspiration and imagination to make something from the same raw ingredients that others pass by aren’t creative because they are lucky. They work. They practice. They fail. They try again.

They choose to create.

You can too. All it takes is realizing that luck has nothing to do with it.

North Jax Beach, Neptune Beach, and Atlantic Beach, from the Jax Beach Fishing Pier

The Beach Writer 4:34 pm on July 19, 2013
Tags: Beach ( 30 ), Creativity ( 22 ), Hanna Beach ( 10 ), Jax Beach ( 21 ), Shovelhead Shark, writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

All in a day’s walk, or, that time I saved a shark

At first I thought it was dead. Maybe it was something discarded by a fisherman. Maybe it was half eaten by gulls with just the good side tuned my way. I couldn’t tell. I was still too far away to see detail beyond a vague fish shape carried in by a larger wave and deposited on the sand as the water receded.

A few steps closer and it was clearly a full fish. Then it was clearly a little more than a foot long, smooth, and gray, with eyes on the outer edges of a flat, curved head. I was staring down at a baby shovelhead shark.

As soon as I saw what it was, I did what I always do when I see something new (or newly dead) on the beach. I took a photo. I don’t know if it was the shutter sound or my presence but something caused the shark to move. No longer a limp carcass on the sand, the shark lifted his head and twisted toward me, just as I took a second pic.

What happened next was a series of hilariously uncharacteristic actions on my part that slurred together into a surrealistic event that I would sum up in five short words when my husband walked up to me several minutes later.

“I just saved a shark!”

“What?”

First, I should explain that it’s not unusual for members of our family to rescue creatures of all sizes and habitats that find themselves lost, in need, or otherwise distressed. Our first family pet was a malnourished shelter rescue kitten. There was that summer when my husband and son managed to keep our front yard mowed while simultaneously protecting a nest of baby rabbits. And our daughter has repatriated many a stray praying mantis, butterfly, lady bug or beetle that found its way into houses or pools over the years. Since we relocated to the Sunshine state, frogs, toads, and lizards have been added to the list of hoppers and crawlers that we’ve scooped up and released back into the wild. At the beach we’ve returned more than a few stranded starfish to the sea, and this spring my daughter plucked a crab from a boxed in corner and helped him find the sand again.

This is what we do. Usually, however, it’s my husband, daughter, or son that does the actual scooping, plucking, grabbing, and releasing, not because I am squeamish but because I am slow. I’m either late to the party altogether, or wasting time assessing the situation while someone else swoops in and takes action.

But when the baby shark lifted its head, alerting me to the fact that it was alive, I was the only one around. Hanna Beach was empty for at least half a mile south–the direction I’d just walked from–and a glance north revealed my husband was still well out of shouting range. I was on my own.

Balancing my iPhone in one hand with a sand dollar I’d liberated from the shore earlier in my walk, I reached down, gently rolled the shark onto its belly, and grabbed him right behind the first dorsal fin. As I picked him up he swung his head side to side, trying to wiggle free of my grasp. Apparently he didn’t think being up in the air was an improvement on writhing in the sand. By this point, however, I was determined to put him back where he belonged, so I tightened my grip and followed that with the most logical next step. I spoke full sentences out loud to a baby shovelhead shark.

“Hold still! I’m taking you back to your home.”

It worked. Or he’d been out of the ocean way too long. Or both. Whatever the truth of it was he remained still for the rest of our journey. I waded knee-deep so that he wouldn’t immediately be washed back ashore, placed him in the sea, and let go.

At first nothing happened. Then he listed to his left side and I thought I was too late. But suddenly his tail flipped sideways, he righted himself, and he swam back and forth in front of me a couple of times. Instinctively, I stuck my hand back in the water behind his tail and made that shooing motion all Moms make to encourage slow children, dogs, cats, goats, toads, or anything else that needs to pick up their pace.

“Go!”

Baby shovelhead shark took off, his fin breaking the surface briefly past the next wave before he disappeared into the Atlantic. After wading back out of the surf I watched the coastline until my husband caught up to me and we both felt sure the shark was safely out to sea.

The remarkable thing about that experience was how unremarkable it was. Sure, that was the first and only time I’ve carried a shark (of any kind or size) back out to sea, but it wasn’t the only interesting thing about that day’s walk, or any of the other hundreds of walks I’ve taken on these northeastern Florida beaches.

Also on that walk, I found the sand dollar I mentioned earlier, and had a delightful conversation with a young woman and her preschool daughter about the creature that lived in a whelk shell that they’d found and her mother had to eventually bury back in the sand so her daughter would leave it alone. Routinely we watch dolphins play out past the sand bars and osprey and pelicans hunting along the shore. We hear gulls squabble, at each other and sometimes at us. We’ve seen manta rays almost close enough to touch. We’ve had interesting and sometimes outright bizarre conversations with fishermen, walkers, and shark tooth hunters from all over the country and just down the road, including a man who’d cycled to Jax Beach from LA.

It’s not unusual for something unusual to happen on our walks. It’s weird if a walk is routine.

I don’t know if interesting and offbeat encounters happen to our family because we are creative people, or if we, as writers, poets, dancers, and artists, bring our altered perspective to otherwise mundane situations and make them more than they might be on their own. But I like to think that these experiences are there for all to have, if they make time to fully interact with the world around us.

What I’m sure of, though, is that these experiences are critical for creative people to have if they want to continue building worlds from words, paint, motion, pixels, or clay. Before you can write what you know, you have to know. And more often than not, knowing comes from doing. Living. Experiencing.

Make it an everyday thing.

Edited to add link to First Friday Link Party for Writers.

The Beach Writer 7:04 pm on June 11, 2013
Tags: Beach ( 30 ), Beach O'Clock, Creativity ( 22 ), writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

It’s beach o’clock somewhere

I’m not one of those people who believes there is a best or proper time to go to the beach. I love the quiet early mornings, the noisy, blinding bright afternoons, and when sea and sand are blanketed with that blue tint from a cloudless sky reflecting the last of the sun’s daylight. Mornings or afternoons, midday or sunset, sunrise or late night under the moonlight, any time can become beach o’clock for me.

Sunset, Jax Beach

As with each time of day, every season, offers its own flavor, a unique blend of sights, smells, sounds, and cast of characters. Orange beaked black skimmers warm up the bland winter sand cluttered with shells and sea glass, seaweed carpets roll spring into summer, and sun worshippers share sand space with castle-makers, kite-flyers, and hungry gulls through the long lazy summer and fall.

Just as the beach varies what it offers, my reason for going to the beach fluctuates. Sometimes I’m simply looking for a workout with vacation scenery. Sometimes I’m seeking sights, smells, and sounds capable of drowning out whatever is clogging my thoughts that day. And almost always…no, definitely always…I am seeking creative inspiration from the comfortably relentless give and take of the sand and sea.

My creativity ebbs and flows like the coastline. There’s no right time of day, no perfect season, no proper schedule that works for me, and, I suspect that’s true for many writers and artists. One painter may swear by the natural afternoon light and refuse to paint at any other time or on cloudy days. Another writer might be convinced that the only appropriate time is early morning, before the sun or anyone in the family is up. While that singer doesn’t believe in approaching the mic until late at night.

We all have our best times, and, for some of us, there’s more than one. Like walking the beach at different times or in other seasons, for me writing in the morning, afternoon, evening, or night offers a variety of appeal. When it’s all about business, I usually prefer to write in the afternoon and evening. But when it comes to telling stories, true or imagined, nothing beats the dark until the story takes hold and then I tend to disregard circadian rhythm or clock.

I encourage you to do the same. Create when and where inspiration smiles at you and don’t worry about when that is. Or, if you can’t let go of the belief that there is a right time for everything, remember that the creative community is global. It’s beach o’clock somewhere.

The Beach Writer 2:02 pm on May 6, 2013
Tags: art ( 2 ), Creativity ( 22 ), Mayport FL, St. Johns River Ferry, writer ( 29 ), Writing ( 54 )

Ferry Art

I don’t read much when I’m nearing the end of a long writing project, preferring instead to focus all of my energy on reaching the end. The first thing I do when I finish, however, is cram words into my brain as fast as I can, probably in a subconscious effort to replace the ones I’ve recently pulled out. The first book I read after completing my latest work in progress was The Icarus Deception by Seth Godin.

We all remember that Icarus was warned not to fly too high, but we often forget that flying too low is also dangerous. In his book, Godin talks about the perils of following a course that is deceptively safe, and that behavior that used to be considered unsafe may actually be the best path to take after all.

Godin is talking about choosing nonconformity, creativity, and making art even, and especially, in seemingly mundane situations. He writes about art being an attitude, and claims that if we break new ground, perform our work tasks creatively, and make human connections, we are artists regardless of what our job titles might be.

I know someone who is a perfect example of Godin’s premise. Ok, I don’t know him personally. I don’t know his name, or where he lives, or anything about his family or friends, but I blew him a kiss the last time I saw him.

He works on the ferry between Mayport Village and Ft. George Island, directing vehicles onto and off of the deck, pointing each to its proper position to fit as many cars, trucks, and motorcycles as possible onto the boat for each crossing of the St. Johns River. I don’t know how long he has worked there. I’ve only taken the ferry a few times, whenever we drive up to Amelia Island. But each time I see him, he transcends competence and efficiency. He performs.

His hair is gray but his eyes are young and mischievous. His smile is river wide and contagious.

Like his colleagues, he makes eye contact with the occupants of each vehicle as he indicates the left, right, or center, easing them bumper to bumper in four parallel rows, every 30 minutes. Just shy of a mile later he directs everyone back onto land and begins the process all over again. This could be a dry, matter-of-fact experience for all involved, but it isn’t when he’s working.

He communicates not just with each driver, but also passengers who return his gaze. With exaggerated gestures he waves each to their space, and, minutes later, on their way. He smiles, and sings, and shouts. He shuffles and dances in and then out of the rows. He salutes and shrugs and spins.

He definitely makes an impression. He absolutely makes a connection.

When I blew him that kiss he caught it first on his cheek, and then on his heart, acting as if I’d made his day.

I hope I did, because he made mine by transforming an ordinary situation into a creative, endearing, memorable few moments that I can’t talk or write about without smiling myself. I don’t know what his job title is, but Godin is right.

He’s an artist.