Category Archives: Books I write

Is there more than one story looming in a favorite book?

Books I read, Books I write, Writing exercises

Have you ever thought whether a book or a story you fell in love with while reading could have been told differently? Or have different characters?

I haven’t ever wondered about this until my writing teacher and friend Menna van Praag shared her one-minute writing class with an idea to develop a story, which starts with the first paragraph of her best-selling book “The House at the End of Hope Street”. You can find the posted on Facebook video here.

I’ve learned a lot at Menna’s international seminars, both from her edits of excerpts from my books, as well as her feedback to the works of others. My first book “The Truth About Family” profited considerably from Menna’s advice and feedback.

Each of Menna’s one minute courses provide a self-standing, inspiring and complete in itself piece of advice, which I never before believed possible to embrace in one minute.

So the idea I mentioned above was given by Menna in her one minute course titled “One Minute Writing Class – Play & Taking the Pressure Off”. Menna has been giving one of her students a sentence a day from her favorite books and her student wrote a page inspired by this sentence or paragraph. This exercise took pressure off Menna’s student because she didn’t have to come up with the first sentence herself and she didn’t have to face an empty page. The start was made by the sentence provided by Menna.

In this particular one-minute course, Menna read the first paragraph from her book “The House at the End of the Hope Street”. I read this book and loved it from the start, its every scene. Images generated by its text come up again and again as bright glimpses in various situations of my life. They make me smile. This is truly one of my favorite books.

As soon as I watched this video with Menna I grew immensely curious what story would appear in my head after reading this beautiful paragraph:

“The house has stood at the end of Hope Street for nearly two hundred years. It’s larger than all the others, with turrets and chimneys rising high into the sky. He front garden grows wild, the long grasses scattered with cowslips, reaching toward the long-hanging leaves of the willow trees. At night the house looks like a Victorian orphanage housing a hundred despairing souls, but when the clouds part and it is lit by moonlight, the house appears enchanted. As if Rapunzel lives in the tower and a hundred Sleeping Beauties lie in the beds.”
Menna van Praag “The House at the End of Hope Street”

And this is what came out. Menna’s paragraph is quoted here again, since it is a part of this new and still unknown to me story. I hope you’ll like the result below.

***

The house has stood at the end of Hope Street for nearly two hundred years. It’s larger than all the others, with turrets and chimneys rising high into the sky. He front garden grows wild, the long grasses scattered with cowslips, reaching toward the long-hanging leaves of the willow trees. At night the house looks like a Victorian orphanage housing a hundred despairing souls, but when the clouds part and it is lit by moonlight, the house appears enchanted. As if Rapunzel lives in the tower and a hundred Sleeping Beauties lie in the beds.

Elizabeth’s hands dropped to her sides and her mouth slightly opened.

Is this really the house she searched for? The house she came to, to find the answers. It looks nothing like the tall Gothic clog of the house with rain stains below its spiky turrets rising up in a war declaration.

Nothing like the house she remembers from her childhood. The childhood she’d tried to forget, but didn’t manage. Except one single gap. Something so immense that it erased itself from Elizabeth’s memory.

Something that made her the person she was today. Sad, pale, with lips pressed into a flat circle of a cold copper coin.

She came in the middle of the night, because she couldn’t face the house in the daylight after so many years. And now she was glad she did so. If it glowed now, in the moonlight, how would it look like during the day?

Elizabeth drew a deep breath and kept the aroma, coming from the wild roses that framed the door, inside her for as long as she could.

As she let the air out a sudden fear wrapped her into its icy arms. She came to find answers. At least she planned to do so tomorrow during the day. But this house, this fairy tale house surely couldn’t reveal anything. Someone new and good lived here. They were probably unaware of the torture and agony whirling inside this house when her family lived in it.

Elizabeth pointed her intent look at the door both hoping and fearing someone to come out.

And then she suddenly relaxed. Whether it was another gulp of rosy air, or the peacefulness of the street around her, or both, it made Elizabeth lower herself onto the fence base and lean on the metal vine branches behind her. She looked at the house.

Something must have happened here. Was this during this gap she was so keen to close? Maybe whoever lived here knew what happened.

It must have been something big and terrible. Like a hurricane.

Only a hurricane had the ability to remove everything and leave an empty space for something new to grow.

Was she and her father part of this hurricane?

***

What do you think of this first page?

Let me know in comments below whether you are curious of a continuation. If there is interest, we can start a new category dedicated to this story. And if you like this story to go further, let me know how you would like to name it. You are also welcome to offer the next episode or scene. Let’s discover what will happen next.

What story did appear in your mind after you’ve read the paragraph quoted above?

If you are interested to learn more about Menna, and her books, check out her home-page. And if you would like to see what kind of writing courses she offers, take a look here.  Check out this link if you would like to participate in the sentence game.

Picture: A window I discovered in Cambridge last year. I imagine the House in the story above have at least one such window.

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True or false: an encounter with a singing legend

Books I write, Memories

I think I once promised to share with you, which of the scenes in my first book “The Truth About Family” are true and which are not. Actually most of them are based on true events, but they were modified in respect to place, point in time and some aspects of how the events took place. The story is good when it has a flow, so the true events took sometimes a different shape or simply were taken from another time and another person.

For example the scene where my father has an encounter with the Moldovan singing legend Nicolae Sulac, of whom my father was a huge fan and who inspired him to have his birth place changed from the one given him at the orphanage to Sadyk (Sadîc), the birthplace of Nicolae Sulac:

***

“So the thing is that he was walking to the back door of the Palace of the Republic and I recognized him. There were other people entering the building as well. My friends and I were trying to guess who they were. But he looked nothing like what we’d seen from the pictures and from the small TV. He usually sang in a traditional white costume, with stitching at the shirt collar and cuffs. On that day, when I saw him in person, he was dressed in black trousers and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was deep in thought or in a tune, because his fingers on both hands were moving as if playing an instrument. He walked pretty close to where I was standing. So I greeted him.”

“Did he answer, or did he ignore you?”

I shook my head. “At first he was startled. I guess he didn’t expect anyone to recognize him, so he thought for a second. Probably to figure out who I might have been. Then he smiled, returned my greeting and carried on. …”

***

This scene is both true and false. It did happen.

But it didn’t happen to my father. It happened to me.

It was in the mid-nineties and I saw Nicolae Sulac coming out of the gates of the main market place in Kishinev. Nobody seemed to recognize him, but there was a slight space around him, which probably was what let me notice him. He was deep in thought and, I guess, he was sure that no one would know him in the middle of the day, in the market place where you would not expect to see someone famous, and the way he was dressed.

And he was dressed exactly as described in the excerpt above.

Later I saw him at a wedding I was invited to. He wore exactly the same cloths, or at least the very same type of them: black trousers and black shirt with sleeves rolled up above his elbows.

He didn’t recognize me at the wedding and I never played music with him (I never played mandolin either, whereas my father did), but I never forgot that encounter.

And after that encounter I became even bigger fan of him.

There are many famous stars, who remain with their feet on the ground and do not become arrogant for their achievements. But what I most liked about Nicolae Sulac is that he was never much interested in himself. In the interviews I saw with him, he always seemed to be surprised about the interest to him, and his private affairs. All he was interested in were the Moldovan songs and his fellow countrymen and -women, for whom he sang and composed those songs. Many of these songs needed a lot of courage to bring out, like the song “Oamenii de Omenie” (title of which can be translated as “Humans with Humanity”) written and presented during the anti-alcoholic campaign during Perestroika years. The song said for example, that whatever you do, a Moldovan couldn’t have a wedding celebration with tea. And that we Moldovans don’t drink wine, we take it for honour. I would interpret this saying as taking it to honour life.

And this is what both Nicolae Sulac and my father did, with their lives and the ways they lived: they honoured life.

Picture: This is me at the celebration of my PhD defence in 1999, dressed in a Moldovan national costume, expressing my gratitude to my German and Moldovan professors and my colleagues at the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany, for their support during completion of my PhD course.

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Mid-month news: July 2015

Books I read, Books I write, Newsletters

The first newsletter

Many authors write newsletters. And many people read them. I do, too. Many authors write their newsletters once a month. Some of them do it weekly and have different names for these updates. Or they have different types of newsletters. Elizabeth Gilbert, for example, has a weekly “housekeeping”, as she calls them, news introducing into “rules” of her Facebook/blog practices and then there is a “pure” Newsletter distributed to the subscribers per e-mail.

Many authors send newsletters at the end of the month. I did share news in sporadic mails and blog posts. But I fretted to call them newsletters. Was it because it is so human to be afraid of making a commitment? Possible. I happen time to time to be scared of promising something and then not holding a promise.

It helps when the promise or commitment is integrated as something natural, neither big nor small, just a part of the flow of life. This happened with my blog posts. In more than two years I have written weekly posts and now when a Monday comes there is a natural need, just like hunger, to write and share. One could say, I am hungry to write every day and I am hungry to share something new at least once a week.

Thus, to help myself to incorporate these “oh-so-scary” newsletters into the flow of my life, and in order not to spam you, the reader, with too many mails/messages from me, I will be posting the newsletters once a month as a blog-post in a separate category for Newsletters.

Additionally, I love the cosy and warm “middles” or centres, to be inside of a process or a place. The edges do sound scary too. So, at least this first newsletter is coming in the middle of a month.

Any big news?

Yes. At least for my life as a writer.

I finished recently the very first draft of my second book. It is a wonderful feeling to know to be able to write more than one book.

The first four chapters of this second book are already published together with my first book “The Truth about Family”.

This second book, a novella, “A Spy’s Daughter”, the title of which I sometimes confuse in my notes and write “A Daughter’s Spy” — an idea for another book, right? —, will be the first in the series named “A Life Upside Down”. In this series, in which five books, most probably all to be novellas, are planned so far, the life of the protagonist Hannah will be turned upside down and entangled into fast-paced adventures.

This first book in the series will come out this year. Somewhere in November or latest in December. I will keep you posted.

In the meanwhile you can find a short description of it on the “Upcoming” page, as well as the links to various retailers of the first book containing the first four chapters.

What is happening now?

Now is summer vacation. For my son, for my family, and for the “Spy’s Daughter”. This novella is taking a break for a two-three weeks until I will read it and give it a thorough revision.

Right now I enjoy a family visit from Germany together with my husband and our two children.

And I practice translation. You probably noticed my interest in it when I interpret quotes and jokes I learned in languages other than English.

I plan to translate my books into German and maybe also into Romanian and/or Russian. Maybe some day also into Danish. Who knows, more languages might come too. Love to language learning is another passion of mine, and translation is a magical possibility to combine the passion of writing and my love to various languages.

Connected to this exciting side of writing, the translation or rather interpretation, I read currently a book in German with a title “Swetlana Geier — Leben ist Übersetzen: Gespräche mit Lerke von Saalfeld”, which can be intepreted as “Swetlana Geier — Life is Translation: In dialogue with Lerke von Saalfeld”. I recommend to read it to all, who can read German. A very inspiring book about life, literature and human nature, which is revealed in languages and great novels. This book inspired and strengthened me in my wish to translate books I like reading and writing. To think and to savor words and thoughts in different languages, mirroring different mentalities and colors each and every nation brings through its interactive and exciting history. And to realize that just like writing, translation is very personal and that I can express myself in it, because I reveal and open what touched me in the book I read or wrote. Just like with writing, through translation I share a part of me.

Any new writing projects?

Yes. Besides the four consequent novellas in the “A life upside down” series, there are two self-standing books planned. And an idea for the third one is floating somewhere in the air. After finishing my second book this year, I thought to bring out one of these stand-alone ones. It will be a story about learning languages, fear of life, hope, and love. And it will be my first attempt in romance writing. Various genres draw my attention both in reading and writing and somehow the stories draw me into their flow revealing their nature in the process of the story development. This third book of mine to see the light of self-publishing might become the first, where I will write using two voices: from the point of view of the two main characters in the story.

And what is my first one doing?

My first book “The Truth about Family” is coming into the next stage of its life. By writing more books I contribute to its adventure. I am curious about my life as a writer and self-publisher and to see where this adventure will take me. For you, the reader, this new stage for my very first book means a new price for the e-book. I am reducing it to $ 2.99. The paperback price remains for the time being as it was.

If the book touched you in any way, then I would be really glad to read your honest review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. Your feedback will help me grow as a writer. And by following my writing career you might recognize the contribution you make by giving me your feedback. I am sure that first-readers, editors and reviewers find a piece of them in the work of the writers they like and follow.

Thank you, dear readers and friends, for being with me on this journey.

Picture: The four notebooks containing the hand-written text and notes for my second book, the first in the “A Life Upside Down” series, “A Spy’s daughter”. Two of these notebooks I bought myself, the other two were given to me by two of my dear friends, including the one with a motive dedicated to “Emma” by Jane Austen. I started filling in this notebook shortly after my daughter’s Emma birth and it had been a very special experience. Much of the text inside it was written while giving my little Emma her milk bottles.

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A stormy brain learns to trust her first drafts

Books I write, Contemplations

I am a big fan of brainstorming. I even used to talk about brainstorming with myself. And I do brainstorm with myself a lot. Generating plenty of ideas before being able to develop them further. “I could do this, and I could do that. And that would be great. Or maybe that!” Does this sound familiar?

Last week I read an article that made me stop and contemplate. The article was about how and why the “Brainstorming Does Not Work”.

The idea in this article is that when you brainstorm in a group, you have a pressure of a group with no space to contemplate and develop this particular idea. Some studies and experiences revealed that the quality of the ideas, or rather ideas with solutions are better when developed by a solitary person having time to ponder on the idea and solution.

At the same time of this discovery and a light-bulb-experience, I observed something interesting about my way to write my second book. I did have the same experience during the first book, but I became very aware of it now and saw how it changed when I started trusting my initial creation. That is to trust my very first draft.

I write my books by hand. This was true for at least half of my first book and true for the second book in its full, or at least what I have written so far (about 3/4 are written). Then after some time, I type what I have written by hand. For example, I am writing Chapter 29 by hand now and typing Chapter 23 (having some of the later thirty-something chapters hand-written already as well).

What I noticed is that while typing, my brain generates new text prompted by sentences I type. I start modifying my first draft on-the-fly. Typing further I often discover that I had this same idea already, but in different and often better shape. Or that there is some other piece of text, which makes much more sense than this new idea.

Now, having discovered this article about brainstorming not being always that good, I start to understand what could be happening. My inner critic suggests subtly that my first draft is bad and that something new has to be generated. But this new text doesn’t have enough time to ripe as the initial, very first and hand-written draft, which flowed in one piece at the time of writing.

All these simultaneous revelations made me become curious about my first drafts and not to correct them too much. I still do slip into the correcting mode time to time, like today, having this brilliant idea to refer to old Italian movies with Sophia Loren, only to discover that I did this already in the first draft, but a bit later in the scene. The solution to this was getting the referee in my brain, who found the third option bringing peace between the inner critic and the initial originator of the first draft.

But in spite of this slipping, or maybe because I am aware of it now, I start being more detached and less personal about what I have written in the first place. Less proprietary and less worried, more curious about what was written and what kind of story emerges out of the first scribblings.

I must say, I enjoy the writing process more and more after discovering this. I now trust my first drafts to contain some gems, however hidden.

Picture: Talking of hidden gems. My sweet Emma loves falling asleep with her favourite cuddly toys close by.

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An interview with a reluctant character

Books I write

In my current work in progress I have a few talkative characters, including my protagonist Hannah. I am talkative myself, so it is a lot of fun to shape all these lovers to talk. It is not as easy as it may seem, since I have to make each of them sound different from me. I am learning a lot by doing so. But one of the bigger challenges for me, I found recently, is to shape a less talkative character.

While Hannah started talking to me all by herself, I had to challenge Liam to talk. Our dialogue turned into an interesting experience. See some of my conclusions after the dialogue below.

I, Vica (V): So Liam, let’s get to know you.

Liam (L): OK.

V: Tell me about yourself.

L: Why don’t you do it?

V: Aha, I found your first quirk.

L: If you say so.

V: I don’t say it. I know now! You are short-tongued and closed except when you are with Hannah. You aren’t as talkative to Hans or other people you know.

L: Maybe.

V: Oh, you don’t want to confirm. But I’ll find out anyway. Latest when Hannah will observe you interact with other characters.

L: You probably will. (Curious smile)

V: Do you always smile curiously or do you have also other types of genuine smile?

L: An interesting question. (Grin widening, still curious)

V: You mean quite strange. After I’ve written it, I see this now myself.

No answer from Liam.

V: Aha! Another observation: You’re polite and kind but you are not flattering. If somebody says something you consider stupid, naïve or obvious, you don’t say anything.

More silence in return.

V: Aha… But I feel that you are somehow different with Hannah than with others. I just can’t figure out how exactly.

L: Three.

V: Pardon?

L: You said three times “Aha”.

V: Aha, another interesting trait! You like changing the subject.

L: You might be mistaken.

V: How so?

L: I’m a researcher. It’s in my nature to make an observation.

V: Hmm, maybe.

L: Four, by the way.

V (suspicious and waving away his last comment): No, you’re tricking me somehow.

L: Tricking?

V (reluctant to answer, pondering instead; then a light-bulb experience): I’ve got it! You turn my attention back to myself, to my thinking process.

L: If you say so.

V: I do say so. But look, I really need your help here. How are you different with Hannah?

L (pensive, but still with curious and amused smile): Well, I really like her, and she is indeed special. Surprising and quirky. You did well, on that one.

V (pleased, but at the same time realizing another trick): Thank you, but I asked how, not why. (Excited) Ah, I know! You are truly engaged into the moment when you are with her. You’re detached, disengaged and distanced when you are with most others. As with me now. And… And you are protective of her. (I didn’t expect that.)

Liam says nothing, instead smiles gently and in a melancholic way.

V: Your silence is very expressive.

Liam’s brows raise.

V (ignoring his mimic): Thanks for being honest. But you seem to be sad somehow. Is there a reason?

L: There always is.

V: Not when you fall in love for the first time.

L: If you say so.

V: Is Hannah your first love?

No answer from Liam.

V: Is she your love at all?

A frown joins the raised brows on Liam’s face.

V: All right, all right. Let’s stop for now and finish this interview.

L: OK.

V: Thanks.

L: Don’t mention it.

This is what I learned about Liam from this dialogue. His answers are brief and he doesn’t put many questions himself. Probably in order not to get drawn into a lengthy discussion. His silence is more expressive than his words. He likes saying: “If you say so”. With the brief answers he is giving, he tries to escape the question without really answering. He tries not to be caught. Even if there is no risk or a trap in the questions being asked. He is definitely someone who hides something. Or many things. I am quite curious what I will find out about him. I might know more than you, the reader, but I definitely don’t know everything yet. What I did find out through this exercise, in addition to learning Liam an ounce better, is that the relationship between Hannah and Liam is much more complicated than I have anticipated. I’ll keep you posted.

Picture: I was glad to discover these flowers. They seem to hide their beauty and softness below the rough dry branches. I wonder whether Liam is like that. In respect to softness. He is good looking – I could no avoid that – but he hides his inner truth from others. I am curious to practice expressing this.

P.S. A discovery about myself. I love the word “curious”. 🙂

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