In 2005, I posted an article with excerpts from Riding in Cars with Boys by Beverly Donofrio’s and A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones along with exercises based on their writing.

I am reposting the following short excerpts along with the ideas I had aimed at helping you launch new writing of your own. I believe using these excerpts as models and the writing ideas I propose for new writing, will help you breathe new life into your writing. That might be in revising scenes or in opening new work with scenes you hadn’t yet to write.

From Riding in Cars with Boys, by Beverly Donofrio, Penguin, 1992

Good grades, done homework, any effort abruptly ended in the tenth grade, when my mother laid the bad news on me that I would not be going to college. It was a Thursday night. I was doing the dishes, my father was sitting at the table doing a paint-by-num­bers, and we were humming “Theme from Exo­dus” together. My mother was wiping the stove before she left for work at Bradlees, and for some reason she was stinked — maybe she had her period, or maybe it was because my father and I always hummed while I did the dishes and she was jealous. Neither of us acknowledged that we were basically harmonizing. It was more like it was just an accident that we were humming the same song. Our favorites were “Bye Bye Blackbird,” “Sentimental Journey,” “‘Tonight,”‘ and “Exodus.” After “Exodus,” I said, “Hey, Ma. I was thinking I want to go to U Conn instead of Southern or Central. It’s harder to get into, but it’s a better school.”

“And who’s going to pay for it?”

It’s odd I never thought about the money, especially since my parents were borderline paupers and being poor was my mother’s favorite topic. I just figured, naively, that anybody who was smart enough could go to college.

“I don’t know: Aren’t there loans or something?”

“Your father and I have enough bills. You better stop dreaming. Take typing. Get a good job when you graduate.”

“I’m not going to be a secretary.”

She lifted a burner and swiped under it. “We’ll see,” she said.

“I’m moving to New York.”

“Keep dreaming.” She dropped the burner back down.

So I gritted my teeth and figured I’d have to skip college and go straight to Broadway, but it pissed me off.

That weekend my friends and I went around throwing eggs at passing cars. We drove through Choate, the ritzy prep school in the middle of town, and I had an inspiration.

“Stop the car,” I said. “Excuse me,” I called to a little sports-jacketed Choatie crossing Christian Street. “Do you know where Christian Street is?”‘

“I’m not sure,” he said, “but I think it’s that street over there,” He pointed to the next road over.

“You’re standing on it, asshole!” I yelled, flinging an egg at the nametag on his jacket. I got a glimpse of his face as he watched the yolk drool down his chest; and I’11 remember the look of disbelief as it changed to sadness until the day I die. We peeled out, my friends hooting and hollering and slapping me on the back.

Writing Idea:

Think of moments when you or a character you are writing about introduced a want or need to parents, children, a boss, other authority figure, a relative or a friend and the response received was surprising–negatively or positively. Where were you or the character when the idea came up? What were you or the character and others there doing, wearing, playing? Was everyone indoors or outdoors? What was the light like? The ambient sound? What objects or pets or others were there, too? What actions and perceptions can you include that show the way you or the character’s mood has suddenly changed because of the surprise reaction (Beverly Donofrio’s speaker goes from humming in harmony to gritting her teeth)?

Write the scene in which you or the character brought up the idea and then describe what followed: it may be conversation or physical gestures or people changing the subject or leaving the room. After you have fully evoked the moment when the idea came up along with the surprising response, skip to another scene at a later time that shows how you reacted to the surprise, whether it was a good or a bad surprise. Did you or the character tear something up? Hide something? Make a phone call to someone, go out and get drunk? Run away? Describe the behavior and the setting and then find something haunting or long-remembered about it that is telling about character and her yearning to change.

For example, I might choose the scene in which my boyfriend and I arrive home from college and are having dinner with his parents in their beautiful suburban home and he reveals that he wants to become a doctor. Disappointed by his decision not to join the family business as an engineer and to transfer out of his Ivy League school to attend my Midwestern state university and take pre-med classes, my boyfriend’s parents quietly and severely tell him and me that he doesn’t have what it takes to be a doctor, get up from the dinner table, turn off all the lights downstairs where my boyfriend and I still sit, and climb the stairs to bed.

After writing the scene with him telling his folks his news, I would write the scene in which we decide to get married and I know I will help him prove his parents wrong.

Excerpt from A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, by by Kaylie Jones, Akashic Books, September 2003:

He had spent his first three years with a French couple who had only fostered him, not adopted him, and when the foster mother had killed herself by taking sleeping pills, the father, unable to cope, had put the little boy in a children’s home. The couple had been acquaintances of my parents. One day the man called my father and said, ” Bill, remember that little boy your wife thought was so adorable? As I remember, she said there was nothing in the world she wanted more than a boy like that — well, I can’t keep him, Bill. He’s in a children’s home right now and I can’t stand it.”

But it was illegal for Americans to adopt French children, and my parents had bribed and pleaded and paid thousands and thousands of dollars to some official to have my brother’s birth papers disappear. My mother had even had a private audience with Madame de Gaulle (my father’s position as a celebrated American writer living in Paris opened up all sorts of influential doors) and she, the wife of the President of France, had pushed the whole thing through by writing a letter of recommendation. Even with Madame de Gaulle’s recommendation, the deal was tenuous — I did not know this either until many years later: Once a month for the next several years a person from the social service agency came to check on us. One bad word from that person could have sent the little brother back to the children’s home. My parents lived in terror from the moment the little brother walked in the door.

“No two people ever fought harder to have a kid in the world,” my father had told me over and over again, during the year it took them to get through the bureaucracy.

“Didn’t you fight hard to have me?”

“Yes, we sure did. But it was a different kind of fight. Your mommy was sick. She can’t have any more babies and you always say you’re so lonely. Now you’ll have someone to play with all the time.

Writing Idea:

In this excerpt, although we are reading the narrator’s thoughts and recountings, we can imagine that the narrator’s parents have more story to tell. Imagine a difficult undertaking that you or one of your characters have been involved in. Describe the situation and the difficulties from your point of view or the character’s. Now describe the situation from another person’s point of view — a child’s, a parent’s, an official’s, or a neighbor’s — as long as that person knows a lot about the situation.

Begin the story again from the second person’s point of view. Now think of another person involved and tell the story again. When you have three stories, decide which one is the most compelling.

Whether you are writing from a true-life story or a fictional one, when you know which person’s story is the most interesting and compelling, you will have more meat for your writing. If you are writing fiction, perhaps your character needs to have a conversation with the person who knows more or perhaps you as author have to find a way to have your character suffer for lack of knowledge or seek the knowledge that another has.

If you are writing memoir or personal essay and discover that someone else’s story is more compelling if they tell it, you may want to put dialog in your nonfiction in which that person speaks. For example, I might write a personal essay based on the events of this past year when my mother experienced health difficulties. At the same time, a little house came up for rent across the street from me and my husband and our home offices. Our house and the little rental are two and a half hours from where my mother had been living for twenty years. My sister wanted my mother to keep the status quo in her current location because my mother was only a twenty-minute freeway ride from my sister, though my sister was not available to visit her daily. My sister didn’t want to let go of her image of our mother as doing okay.

I believe if I write from what I know of my sister’s struggle, I will have material for evoking not only my ideas for helping an aging parent but for exploring the ways we are all sandwiched between our expectations of our parents and their need for safety and support. And yet, what if I told it from my sister’s point of view? What would I learn that I may be overlooking, that might shed more light on how we make the decisions we do?

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Writing well calls for scenes in which conflict throws parties into new life situations, new worries and new behavior. We must imagine we are there in the scene, hearing information that a narrator recounts because it is formative, catching those moments as Beverly Donofrio and Kaylie Jones have done helps guarantee our writing will keeping us and our readers engaged.