Write from Your Life

I found this in the car (see below). It made me chuckle. Did it happen? I don't know. I'm thinking it's probably an amalgamation of experience and imagination. The red and yellow black-eyed Susans are in Tennessee. We gave them to my father's wife for her birthday. They are indeed supposed to be deer-proof, fuzzy leaves being a bit unappetizing.

As I experiment with fiction, I realize that my daughter's approach is one way to go. Write from your life. But feel free to make things happen that you haven't done yourself. Because, if you're unwilling to travel untrod ground, you risk holding your story captive. In that case, you'd just as well stick to non-fiction, if you can't stand the anxiety of following your characters around, letting them do what they want to do.

Anyhow, the paragraph I found in the car this morning, compliments of Sonia...

A moth flew around her head, then started to descend. She kicked at it, forgetting she had only slipped her sandal on. The sandal flew and landed upside down in her mother's new deer-proof (but apparently not shoe-proof) red and yellow black-eyed Susans.


Yellow Black-Eyed Susans photo, by L.L. Barkat. Fiction by Sonia, age 11.