Finding Your Voice(s)

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Back, everyone, to secrets and lies. A storyteller's podcast. I'm Carolyn. [00:00:05] Speaker B: And I'm Vicky. [00:00:07] Speaker A: Hey, Vic, how you going? How's it going? [00:00:10] Speaker B: It's going good. It's going good. It's a little cold today here. [00:00:14] Speaker A: I haven't actually been outside yet, except to let the puppy out. But yeah, it was like 20 something. [00:00:24] Speaker B: When I woke up. [00:00:25] Speaker A: Oh, that qualifies. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Have a fireplace? We have no fireplace. [00:00:31] Speaker A: Yeah. You were looking for somebody to take a look at it. [00:00:34] Speaker B: Yeah. So the guy came and he looked at it and then he put a big tag on it and said, don't use this. [00:00:42] Speaker A: That's not good. On the list of things like the signs, that's not good. Like a big no to the fireplace. I would heed that warning. [00:00:54] Speaker B: Yes. So I'm not, evidently it's a gas fireplace and pilot light or the flame would go out. And I like David, did you turn off the fireplace? No, did you? I'm like, uh oh, I think we have a problem if there's gas still coming out. And that ended up being the problem. The default wasn't kicking in and stopping it. So could have been a thing anyway. [00:01:18] Speaker A: Could have been a thing. [00:01:21] Speaker B: Could have been a thing. We went to Thompson gas locally and found a nice empire fireplace that we're going to get next. [00:01:33] Speaker A: You're pulling out the insert or just the logs and the stuff or what? [00:01:37] Speaker B: Insert and replacing those. Cool. Yeah. It's not cheap, but it's good to have a new set up. So I'm excited about that. So what's new with you? [00:01:53] Speaker A: First spring has started. I wrote a blog post yesterday. I haven't written a blog post in forever, but I wrote a blog post yesterday about it because last year I went a little nutty and bought, I don't know, like a hundred bulbs online from Holland or something. And you buy them. I don't know when I got them, August or something. And then you have to wait until the fall. They will send them to you when it is time for them to go in the ground. And so I waited and waited and then they showed up. And I don't remember if this was October or November, but somewhere around about there. And I went crazy putting these bulbs in the ground all over everywhere. And then of course, nothing happens for months and months and months. Well, now they're peaking, so they're starting to pop up here and there. But I haven't done any leaf raking or anything this whole time. So I have a lot of yard work to do. So that's what I did yesterday. And, yeah, I'm about ready to call somebody and say, hey, I need some help. Come and help me get this stuff out of here. But I think that we're going to have some nice color and some nice plants eventually. Right now, you can't. I'm, like, the only one who can see them. I'm like, look at them all, and no one else. Unless you go and look at the ground, no one else can see them but me. So, anyway, I'm sorry, what? [00:03:25] Speaker B: Daffodils popping up in your yard? [00:03:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I put daffodils in and tulips. And I put them in, like, I have a row of daffodils, and then I put the tulips behind them because they come up one and then the other, and I wanted it to look intentional. We'll see what happens. Who knows? [00:03:46] Speaker B: I was digging up daffodils from my yard, the wild ones that I didn't really want in the middle of my backyard, and pulled up all these bulbs and replanted them down by the street in a row, and they're popping up. So I'm happy I didn't kill them. [00:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, a few of mine are even starting to be, like, yellow at the top, like they're about to do something. But most of them are this tall. [00:04:17] Speaker B: So we went out on the local scene last night to Trailside Brewery. And one right, Acosta trail. It's in Lennox station. There's about four buildings there that used to be. They're very old buildings. One even used to be a lowe's. The first. [00:04:38] Speaker A: I remember you mentioned it here before, but I haven't been by there. [00:04:43] Speaker B: So we went there last night, and the space right next to it, I could tell they were working on it. So I peeked my head in there, and I saw a sign for appalachian coffee. And I got. And I know they used to be on Fifth Avenue, and they closed. And another coffee company moved in, which we've been there, too. But I really miss appalachian coffee. So I got super excited seeing that sign and realized that the owners of. If I'm getting this right, the owners of Trailside Brewery also own appalachian coffee, and they are moving in to the space next door. [00:05:24] Speaker A: Well, that makes a lot of sense. [00:05:26] Speaker B: Cocktails as well. So it'll be very interesting. [00:05:30] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds like something I'd like to check out. We've been exploring since we're talking about local spots. We've been trying, actually, since we moved here, trying to find really good pizza places. Dave is from Long island. So his pizza standard is very specific. I don't want to say his pizza standard is super high. I'm saying it's very specific about what he's looking. You know, I love PI squared, but that's Detroit style pizza. So he's almost like, this is delicious, but this is not pizza. That's his view. So we have been looking for good pizza around town with not great success. I mean, it's not bad pizza. Is there such a thing as bad pizza? I'm not sure, but a couple of places that we've been to is just kind of. Okay. I've not yet gotten into west first because they never have an available table, and we never make reservations because we're so. I've not tried that. I want to. It's on my list. But we have tried Mike's now, which is down by the publix and the planet fitness, and that's probably the closest to the big, cheesy thin pizza that we're looking for. So I'm kind of excited about trying some more things there because that was pretty good. And then I was with my mom up in Asheville last week, and we stopped in a place called Standard Pizza Company. It was empty. We were the only ones there. It was lunchtime, but you could get pizza by the slice. So I did. And it's super thin and crispy. So much so, I took a picture of it. I will post it on the page so that you can see what that looks like. But here's the best part. They have ping pong. You can go and get some pizza and get some drinks and hang out and play some ping pong. And I'm like, yes, please. That's my big outing since I was a kid. I know, right? It makes me want to get a ping pong table, but I don't have any room for that. There's no space here for a ping pong table. But, yeah, my grandfather had one in the basement when we were growing up, and I think my one uncle still has one in the basement. [00:08:15] Speaker B: We had one growing up, and you could fold it up real kind of skinny and slide it in somewhere. But we also had a train set that I remembered. My dad moved it from the attic down to the back patio and put it on. What do you call those wheels that you literally pull it up and it would lift up to the ceiling so it wouldn't be in our way. And when you wanted to use it, you pull it back down again? It was very bizarre. I don't think we used it much after he did that, but it was interesting. I remember that. So ping pong is a lot of fun. I would love to do that, but I haven't seen any place in Hendersonville place ping pong. So I might have to find my way up to this place. [00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it's right on Hendersonville Road when you get up into Asheville, but it's Asheville highway when you're down here in Hendersonville. So. [00:09:09] Speaker B: Yes. [00:09:10] Speaker A: Figure that. Yeah, yeah, it was cute. Cute place. [00:09:13] Speaker B: I did this cool thing in. I'm a member of the National association of Memoir Writers. Namw. David calls it Namwa, which probably is not accurate. There's a Facebook group. So she has this coaching thing every month. And she had sue Williams Silverman on, and she did a webinar on voice, which was pretty cool. I had a couple of takeaways from that when I studied voice in our MFA program. I found James McBride, and in his book, he had this awesome way of using the two different voices that you need in memoir. She calls one of them the unaware voice and the other one the aware voice, which would be like the narrator today, looking back on. And what. What James McBride does in his book is the example I used was he was in this scene with his mom when he was a little boy, and the man at the store had sold him a quart of milk that was sour. And his mom was pissed because she knew that he was doing that on purpose because she was a white woman in this neighborhood and nobody liked the idea of it anyway. So she takes her son back and gets in a big fight with this guy. She grabs that carton of milk, sour milk, and tosses it, throws it right at him. And it's going. So James McGride has written the scene in the scene as a little boy. And that would be what Sue William Silverman is called, the unaware voice. Unaware. And then he turns around after the scene's done, and he says, now, as a grown man and looking black, and I'm paraphrasing now, now I see what was happening kind of thing. And that's his aware voice. So these two voices are necessary in memoir, and some people don't use both of them or they don't know how to go from one to the other. So it was a pretty good talk that she did. She even gave an example in her own work of how to do that in the same paragraph, which was pretty cool, which I don't have. But it was neat to hear her do it and to know that it could be done. So not something you have to do in fiction necessarily. [00:11:49] Speaker A: Actually, I was thinking that this is probably pretty common in mystery fiction for characters to not understand the relevance of their recollections or what they mean in the context of the overall picture, and that the entire point of good amateur detective fiction or good mystery fiction is to be able to sort out what matters and what doesn't matter. In fact, I think I wrote my entrance essay for my master's program at Rollins. We had to select a novel that was of personal significance to us and why. Explain why in the entrance essay. And I picked Agatha Christie's. And then there were none. And it was all about finding your way so that you sort out the things that are important and the things that are just red herrings. They are distractions. And so that sounds a little bit like you don't see the big picture when it's happening. Often. Sometimes you do, but later that things seem sort of fit together. [00:13:01] Speaker B: Mystery always seemed harder to me. That's why I don't write it, because it seems like you need to do that unaware voice, but yet you need to present everything well enough. You do, reader. [00:13:13] Speaker A: It is a puzzle going on, and. [00:13:15] Speaker B: I think that's always cool. Anyway, so sue Williams Silverman's book, she's got a new book out, a craft book, came out 2024, called Acetylene Torch Songs. I think I'm pronouncing that right. Acetylene or acetylene. Writing true stories to ignite the soul. So in her book, she examines how the creative soul enhances craft elements like voice and metaphor and structure and sensory details. So I'm ordering that book, and I'll be reading that. There's also a write up she did an interview with. I forgot the name of it. [00:13:58] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:14:00] Speaker B: Blog. I just looked at it a little bit ago. [00:14:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm familiar. We'll drop a link on the page. [00:14:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it was a good interview anyway. Yeah, I mean, that's. Voices is tricky, but this was a cool. [00:14:16] Speaker A: So, a couple of things. One, I can remember before I moved down to North Carolina, and I was commuting on my last job. I was commuting from Baltimore to Columbia every day, and I was way into audiobooks for that. It's a miserable drive, and 45 minutes to an hour. It's awful. So I listened to a lot of books in the car, which was wonderful. And I went through the recent Stephen King. There are a lot of books that I went through. Know you clear an author's catalog, you're working your way through the whole thing. Anyway. And I was in this catch up phase of going through some of Stephen King's recent books, and he is so very good at telling a story from multiple perspectives that I decided to give it a try. And I worked on it a little bit and worked on it and ended up publishing a story that is told from three different points of view. So three different voices, which I had not done before. This leads me to just this last week or so I started noodling around with an idea. It's on my crazy idea board and I'm not going to tell you what it's about. I will share a small image of a portion of my crazy idea board on the website for our viewers if you're interested. But I do have an idea, and this idea has been germinating and I have been trying to map out my what if scenarios and start to figure out who those voices are going to be on the board. I had to actually order, I don't want to say props. I had to order some things from Amazon so that I can test them out in the real world and see how I can make this work in my story. And I decided that this would be a good opportunity for me to use this. This is a deck of cards called fabula, which I bought years ago. Never used them for anything, but they are. See, my cards are still in the plastic. They are to help you map out your framework for fiction writers. They are to help you map out your story. And it says it's based on the three act structure and on the archetypes of myths and tales. And it helps you build and analyze your stories in a simple and effective way. I will let you know how this goes. I don't have any idea how it works, but I'm going to bust into the deck of cards for this story and see if I can figure it out. I have a couple of characters that I haven't developed yet that I know that need. Which leads us to Carolyn's big writing dilemma, which I have with every story. And that is I don't know what to name anyone. I am the worst at coming up with character names. [00:17:46] Speaker B: Well, as long as you don't do this is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl. [00:17:53] Speaker A: We did that with fish in the fish tank a while back. But no, I have a weird tendency to unconsciously name my main characters with m names. I don't know why this is, but yeah, I don't have names for anybody, which is a real problem for me. So normally, I'll ask people at work who wants to have a character named after them, and people will weirdly volunteer for that. And I'm like, might be a murderer, might be a victim. They're like, yeah, we're on board. Okay. Otherwise, I'm going to name all my characters after last names in my fantasy football team last season. I got nothing. [00:18:36] Speaker B: I like that idea. [00:18:37] Speaker A: I'm open for suggestions. So if people have ideas, character, voice, ideas, I need all the help I can get. [00:18:46] Speaker B: All right, maybe we'll put a post out on facebook, and we'll get some responses on that, see what people come up with. That sounds fun. I am ready for truth or fiction. Okay, I got one. About 1961 is when this happens. There's, like, a six month period where guys start dying in this town, and they're coming up dead in strange ways. One guy is drowned in his bathtub, and his head is laying on the side, and he's got a rose clenched in his teeth, and there's water that kind of leads out the front door, which was wide open. And this is how they found him. So another one is, a guy was dead in his bed, and when they rolled him over, he had, like, a gallon of water pour out of his mouth, and they were like, holy cow. I don't even know how this works. So after about, like, nine bodies have shown up in this time, they start getting a little weird, and they find one guy has actually. They found something under his fingernails, some flesh. So they decide to bring in the dogs, and the dogs sniff the flesh, and they go running, and they lead the detectives to the doorway of wiki washing springs. Now, if you don't know Floridians, Floridians know what it is. Definitely. That is where the mermaids are. And you can go there and watch the mermaids swim and do little tricks and stuff. And I probably have been there as a kid, but I don't honestly remember it, but, yeah. So they're concerned why this leads to the wiki watching, so they start asking questions. And one of them is like, there's one girl that we don't know about very much. She doesn't hang out with the rest of us, and then the guy doesn't even remember hiring this girl anyway. She's the one that's the suspect. And they didn't really ever figure it out, as far as I know. Some say you can still see her if you look back in the shadows behind the glass of. [00:21:22] Speaker A: Right. I'm saying fiction all day on this, although I love the wikiwatchi aspect and it brings back my childhood obsession with the creature from the black lagoon, which I just thought was great movie, but I've actually. Fun fact. Never seen the watchy mermaids. Like, I've never went to see that show. I'm just aware of it because I grew up in what's. Tell us the deal. [00:21:53] Speaker B: All right. So it is part of John Henry Fleming's book, fearsome Creatures of Florida by John Henry Fleming. And this one story is called the Mermaid Vampire of a. [00:22:13] Speaker A: That is a b list movie title if ever I heard one. [00:22:18] Speaker B: It is. It totally need to make that a movie out of that one. But yeah, John Henry Fleming, he's the guru of Florida stories, man. [00:22:29] Speaker A: I'm telling you. I think if you had left out the part with the rose and the teeth, I don't know, I'd have been on the fence about maybe they were drowned and then brought back and dumped at their house. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. [00:22:48] Speaker B: But the truth is stranger than fiction. [00:22:51] Speaker A: You really, you know, anything that starts with Florida creatures, Florida stories is. [00:22:59] Speaker B: Yeah, Florida story. [00:23:00] Speaker A: No, that was a good. So we'll put a link to that book, too, so we can check it out. [00:23:07] Speaker B: What are you working on right now? [00:23:09] Speaker A: I am trying to figure out this story. I have the main component of my story worked out, and now I am aligning the adjacent storylines so that everything kind of fits together. And as I mentioned before, this one is going to require a little bit of experimentation on my part. I'm going to run some real life trials on some things and see what information I can collect and then use that in my story. So there may be some unwitting guinea pigs in the house who don't know what's about to happen. Yeah, I'm excited about it. It's been a little while since I've had something where I'm going to. This has some legs. I'm going to work this through. But how about you? [00:24:11] Speaker B: Cool. So David went down to Florida for a week, and while he was gone, I took that as a mini retreat here in the house and worked only on my memoir. And I decided to try some crazy thing like sharing my. [00:24:29] Speaker A: I saw that everybody. [00:24:34] Speaker B: As an editor, I like to have people I always ask, are you using a writing journal? And a lot of the people I help are writing memoirs. So beyond it being for therapy, writing journal for me is like, if I don't know how I want something to turn out or I don't know where it's going, I can practice in the writing journal, or I can just write through it, and sometimes it gives me an answer. I don't know. Sometimes I just bitch a lot in my writing journal. [00:25:03] Speaker A: I think that's the only thing you're saying. Like, I like to work things through in my writing. General, I'm like, I don't think I do that. I think I contain my complaints about the nature of the universe. I think that's kind of what they're for. [00:25:19] Speaker B: But part of it, though, is when I was working on the first few chapters, even in our MFA program, it was like they had us keep a writing journal, and I found out that I had a better voice in my writing journal than what I was showing up in the chapters. I don't know if it's just personality or what, because I was writing to myself in a journal. [00:25:43] Speaker A: That's interesting. Yeah, that's an interesting thought. I'm going to ponder that a little bit. When you're writing not for others, your voice is more authentic, and then when you are writing for some other purpose, it doesn't sound like you. Is that. [00:26:07] Speaker B: Yeah. When you're writing for an audience, you tend to hold back or just put the facts down or whatever. Instead of your insight, your thoughts, they come out in your journal. Whereas when you're writing for an audience, sometimes people forget to put those. [00:26:24] Speaker A: I don't think I've ever really journaled that way. I have kept journals, and especially I went off from high school to art school, and they were combination journals, sketchbooks, and that. There was a lot of scribbling in there. And much of that scribbling was very personal scribbling. But I don't know that any of that is worth anything or useful in any way or anything that I feel like is a good representation of me. But what does happen, and this is weird and I can't explain it, is that I will write a lot of communications and some other things for work and then forget about them. And then two or three or four weeks later, some mask email will go out, and I'll be reading it like everybody else, and I'll be thinking, damn, this is some good writing. Oh, I wrote this, but I don't remember it until I see it again. And then I'll be like, yeah, that's exactly how I would say, oh, yeah, that was me. [00:27:27] Speaker B: I know when I put the book away for a while and come back, I read stuff, and I know the crap stuff, and I don't worry about the crap stuff. But when I see something that came out really good, right? I'm the only one that could not. Then I'm like, did I really do. [00:27:45] Speaker A: Time for a cookie? [00:27:46] Speaker B: Is it really me? Was I drinking that day? [00:27:49] Speaker A: Yeah. That is a nice surprise when you reread something and you're like, damn, girl. [00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah, I'm doing this journal, and for the sake of maybe giving people an idea what a journal could look like or how it can help, I've been sharing it and secret box. [00:28:10] Speaker A: Cool. [00:28:11] Speaker B: And it's called, what the hell did I just write? [00:28:14] Speaker A: Appropriate. I'll take a look. Like I said, I don't tend to keep a journal about my writing or to prepare for my writing. Almost like if I'm sitting down and I'm going to be writing, I'm going to be writing the thing. But, yeah, I find that interesting. So I'll take a. [00:28:50] Speaker B: Week. My tip of the week comes out of sue Williams Silverman's talk that she mentioned something, and I remember being told, find your voice, find your voice. Find your voice. And for the longest time, I always thought that meant that me, as a writer has one voice. I have one voice, and I need to figure out how to get that on the paper. But it's actually not the truth, because each piece that you write has a voice. You can write one essay and it sound like one thing and have this tone or whatever, and you can write a different essay, and it'd be completely different. So that was a little liberating for me. I don't know why I ever thought that find your voice meant I had to have one voice, so lots of voice. [00:29:41] Speaker A: It's funny when I put something together and I send it off to my friend Chris, who everyone met a few weeks ago. She'll tell me sometimes when there's, like, a section that sounds like me. So I tend to think there are portions of all of the stories that I write, and most definitely the essays I write that sound like me. It just organized a little better because instead of me stammering and trying to figure out the words, I've written it down and then polished it. But it definitely sounds like me. And I think as a new writer, I probably had maybe the most trouble not making all of my characters sound like me. Like, learning how to write as the other was a problem. And I can remember in college, I had to read a section of my work in progress to other students in my program. And it was supposed to be this drunken scene where this person kind of crashes a memorial that's in a gallery in the evening and this person is drunk and swearing and whatever. And I can remember being super self conscious and apologizing to everyone, like, I'm going to say some bad words. The whole thing felt so incredibly uncomfortable and awkward and whatever. And now I'll f bomb everybody. I don't even care. I'm like, I'm down with. I'm very comfortable now. This person has killed like six people in my story or whatever. They don't have any problem treading on your mean. I really had to learn to do that. And I can remember even reading, we talked about Stephen King earlier. Even reading some Stephen King and listening to the inner monologues of some of his characters and how uncomfortable their inner monologue made me. I'd be like, cringey, cringey, cringey. But finding the courage and to let that stuff go and write the bad people and the bigoted people and the short sighted people and the mean, unnecessarily mean people is definitely outside of a comfort zone. [00:32:34] Speaker B: When I was in undergrad, it was a film class and we watched the Clint Eastwood movie. I'm recalling absolutely nothing today. [00:32:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:32:47] Speaker B: Which one? [00:32:47] Speaker A: That was Gran Torino. Gran Torino. [00:32:52] Speaker B: Gran Torino. And I had seen the movie and his character was such an ugly person in the beginning, but I have seen that person. I have known people just like that. And I thought, this is going to be fascinating to see how the 20 somethings in the room are going to see this. So it was an interesting one, but, yeah, those characters, hard to write, but they exist. They have to be written. So it's cool to see that happen, to see that it can still happen. Yeah. Was that your tip of the week? [00:33:34] Speaker A: No, I think if I have a tip of the week, I am borrowing from my project management life, and that is embracing my love of postit notes as a tool for organizing your story thoughts, because you can unstick them and move them around. So it's about collecting your thoughts first, and then you can rearrange order very easily, much more easily than you can in print when you're typing it out or writing it out. So I use these a lot and we'll shift things. And sometimes when I'm stuck, I will pick the story up from some completely different place and then refer to the things that happened before in some way and see if that gets me started again. Anyway. So sticky notes would be my tip of the day. Cool. All right, well, it was good talking with you. Good luck on your couple of weeks of writing. And I will see if I can make some progress with my story and I will test out. I'm going to have to read the directions. I will test out these writing card things and let you know next time how this worked for me. All right, well, you have a good afternoon. [00:34:57] Speaker B: All right? So I want to hear about it back. [00:35:01] Speaker A: Thanks, everyone. Everybody, we will talk to you again soon. [00:35:05] Speaker B: Have a good day. Yes. Bye.