Life Slices
My life changed in 2011. My husband of almost fifty-three years died after a three year battle to come back from a major stroke. So this is a new year, a new chapter of my life. The new chapter up to now has been filled with change, legal and familial. Since these things divert the mind from constant dwelling on loss, it was a good thing at times, other times not.
Almost a year has gone by and life is still somewhat chaotic, but I have reached some bit of equilibrium. Time to get back to writing, if I'm ever going to do so. So if the editor is willing I'm starting this new year off with a weekly newspaper column.
Hours of poring over name possibilities, searching a dictionary and a thesaurus produced only names that sounded too cute, plain stupid or pretentious. None conveyed my mental vision for the column, which is some nostalgia, looking back at how 'things used to be.' Some of how I look at the current way of the world. Some rants. Some raves. Maybe even an anecdote or two about family. So finally - Life Slices emerged.
It is my hope that a word of mine may entertain, inform or at least fill an empty moment or two for readers.
The editor was willing and below is the first of my Life Slices columns.
First column - Kingsport Daily News, January 7, 2012
Among my computer files are dozens of stories and several books begun and abandoned for one reason or another. Sometimes because my muse abandoned me in midstream. That's my usual story. In fact, sometimes the subject matter of the piece I abandoned was not one I was ready to write.
For my writing to flow it must engage me emotionally. And sometimes I'm not ready to lay that emotion, even veiled with words, on the page. Ahh, and there's the rub. For a piece of writing to grab Dear Reader it must engage his or her emotions. So with fear and trembling, I must display my own love, hate, fear or lack thereof for Dear Reader to reciprocate as he will. I can take comfort from the fact that if Dear Reader does not care for the story or book he probably will not throw vegetables at me as audiences sometimes did in Charles Dickens' time.
In his Pickwick Papers, Dickens laid out the difference between a story constructed to formula and one from emotion. "The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child. In creative art the essence of a book exists before the book or before even the details or main features of the book; the author enjoys it and lives in it with a kind of prophetic rapture." - Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers.
©2012 Sylvia Nickels