All lights burning bright?

By Pat Remick

Award-winning Canadian folksinger-songwriter David Francey recently graced a stage in my town and prior to performing each song, he shared the backstory with the audience.

Like many writers, I think I appreciated these tales as much as the songs they generated. I was especially intrigued by the background for “All Lights Burning Bright.” Francey told us it was inspired by his discovery that the same final entry was recorded in the Watch Log Book at the end of each shift on the huge vessels traveling the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway straddling the U.S.-Canadian border:

"All navigation lights burning brightly."

Francey read the logs while sailing on one of the mammoth commercial ships after his wife wangled an invitation for him to spend a week onboard. When he asked a seaman why it was so important to note the status of the navigation lights, he was told it was because of their significance to safe voyages. No matter what else a ship might encounter during the journey– if its navigation lights are burning brightly, other ships can see the vessel and those onboard can see other nearby marine traffic, as well. This is especially critical in bad weather.

The phrase “all navigation lights burning brightly” also can be a metaphor for life, says Francey. I couldn’t agree more. We can choose to go through life with our “lights” on low, moderate, "all burning brightly" or somewhere in between.

What about you – are "All Lights Burning Bright" in your writing? Are you seeing beyond the darkness to what might be on the horizon if you invest more BIC (Butt in Chair) time?

How about outside your writing? Are your lights burning bright enough that others know who you are, what you stand for and what you strive for? What about in your relationships at home, at work and in your community? Do you use your talents, whether it be for writing or something else, to the maximum? Do you sail on, all lights blazing, despite rough seas?

And when your journey finally concludes, will people be able to say that you had “all lights burning bright” to the end? I hope so. I think that would be a wonderful thing.

(If you’d like to read the words to Francey's song, click here and scroll down to the end of the page to find “All Lights Burning Bright.”

Editing Backstory - On the Chopping Block

by Martha Reed

If I had to pick one image to describe how I create my stories, I would picture a professional gas range with all kinds of pots and saucepans steaming, simmering, and bubbling away. Occasionally, I lift a lid to check on things, and maybe give an idea a stir or turn down the heat until I’m ready to serve it up. I usually have two or three stories cooking away at the same time, and I’m as surprised as anyone to discover the finished dish: sometimes it’s chicken, sometimes it’s fish, sometimes it’s cold fruit loops in a bowl.

Something happened to me on my latest story that has never happened before. There I was, merrily writing away, when I came to a fork in the road. My writerly side insisted that I follow the storyline down the path I had mapped out – and write it out in full – while my editorial side spoke up to mention that this bit was actually backstory and that it would have to get trimmed out of the final – so why didn’t I save myself the time and trouble of writing it down and simply skip past it now? It was the strangest feeling. I felt like I was straddling the divide between my creative and editorial sides and getting pulled in two directions, like a referee.

In the end, I compromised, (if you can compromise with yourself) and wrote out the backstory. I wrote it thinly, not spending a lot of time on it, just following the narrative line and eliminating any descriptive detailing that usually costs me time. The storyline turned out pretty much the way I had envisioned it, and when it was done I put my editorial hat on and took a good hard look at it. The bit didn’t reveal anything new about my characters; it didn’t provide any new motivations for their actions that we didn’t already know about, and it certainly didn’t add any new details that I hadn’t already planned on revealing later in the story. So, ruthlessly, bravely, I deleted it while it lay there breathing on the slab.

What was the point of this exercise?

When I originally conceived the idea, I had decided to create something around 5,000 words. While I was working on the story, I think the editorial part of my brain was performing an unconscious word count for me, and my brain was warning me at the split that I was nearing my word limit if I wanted to keep the story tight. If this is true, I’ve added a new trimming tool to my repertoire, and more importantly, I’ve learned to use this tool at the beginning of the process instead of at the end.

Any other word chefs out there? What tricks or tools have you discovered?