It's that part of your story. You know, the part where you know what needs to happen. You know what leads up to that part, and what comes after that part, but for whatever reason the scene, or paragraph, or even sentence, when it's down on paper, has all the tension and allure of a teenager's smelly sock.
What do you do? Well, if you're me you stare at it incessantly, moan, bury your head in a pillow, and announce to the world that you'll never - never, you hear me - make it as a writer. Then your blow your nose and maybe dig into that stash of clearance Easter candy you swore would last till summer break (at least). But more than anything, you get on with things.
So, the most important piece of advice about getting unstuck that I've learned as a fledgling writer? Does it come from a literary genius? From some secret cabal of writers? Did I pull a genie out of a bottle to give me the ultimate answer?
http://disneyoftheweek.tumblr.com
Well, yeah, the last one, sort of. The most important advice I've found to get past that part of a story comes from Disney's Alladin. It's a shame I couldn't find a clip on Youtube, so you'll just have to pretend along with me. Remember when Alladin is snookered by Jafar into going into the Cave of Wonders and gets stranded there? It looks pretty bad for him and poor Abu. He's about as stuck as you can get. But then the genie comes, and after the song and dance number and some witty dialogue, he plops Alladin on the magic carpet and gives this fabulous advice:
"In case of emergency, the exits are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here anywhere! Keep your hand and arms inside the carpet! We're outta here!"
How does this relate to writing? Well...
Here: There's not just one way a story has to be. Your exit to get past that part may be to write the scene the way it wants to come out instead of how you think it should. Some things might need to be tweaked later, but the whole of it might be better in the end.
Here: Talk it over. A spouse, a trusted friend, a writer's group. I was sorta hurt when a few people (including my hubby) said they didn't buy a scene of my WIP. But, after a good stint of pouting, I rewrote it and it's better than it ever could have been on my own.
Here: Sleep on it. Or daydream on it. Give your subconscious leeway to stew, simmer or deep fry your problem. Sooner or later the solution will boil over into your consciousness.
Here: Rearrange the furniture. Okay, don't tell my kids I said that - I'm forever moving stuff around and it bugs them to death. Sometimes great writing is in the wrong place. Cut and paste is your friend - no pain, no long term damage. How would that scene, paragraph or sentence work out somewhere else?
Here: Take out the trash. Maybe that part really isn't supposed to be in your story at all. Be open to the possibility of dumping it altogether, no matter how much you love it.
Here: Write poetry to that part. (see here and here). Yes, I'm serious. A limerick, haiku, a ballad. Get those creative juices flowing in a different direction and see if the phrases you use can't also inspire the work itself.
Here: Move on. Like a boyfriend who won't commit, sometimes you just have to let go. As the days pass, you might find a new and better guy, er, scene. Or, you might also reconnect with that old flame and see it in a brand new light (maybe it's ready to change a little, too).
Are you putting the finishing touches on your dystopian YA novel about kids who are chosen by lottery to fight to the death on national television? If so, this post is for you.
MaryAnn’s enlightening post on emotional resonance has had me pondering what else poetry can teach us about story. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a poetry workshop with Richard Jones and subsequently falling in love with his collected poems in The Blessing. He talked about where he got his ideas, and how everyday things can inspire poems like The Altar, about the joys of sharpening a pencil. But he also said that some themes come up again and again, such as the tragic death of his young nephew. His analysis of whether this was a problem, which I'm paraphrasing from patchy memory, was something along the lines of: So what? Mary Oliver's been writing the same poem for thirty years.
If you’ve read much Mary Oliver you’ll know why everyone laughed. You’ll also know she’s one of the most universally loved poets of the last few decades.
To say that reading one Mary Oliver poem is like reading them all would be like saying that every time you hug your child is exactly the same as every other. Of course it isn’t. He grows and changes and sometimes he hugs hard and sometimes he hugs soft, and sometimes he asks in a whisper if reindeers get Christmas presents and sometimes he tells you I love you the best of all, Mommy, except also I love Daddy the same because I don’t want to hurt his feelings.
You wouldn’t ever not want another hug, just because you’d had hugs before.
Storytellers seem to diverge from poets here. No one wants to reinvent the wheel, or more pessimistically, beat a dead horse. (Even worse: a flesh-eating horse that won't die.)
When I'd finally caught my breath again after imagining the horrors of being a slush reader for Strange Horizons, I noticed that star-crossed lovers, man vs. nature, kidnap & rescue, and any others of the 1, 3, 7, 20, 36 or 42* basic plots were not on these lists. Maybe that’s because it’s a speculative fiction magazine, but my money is on the fact that classic plots don't hinge on clever world-building or twist endings. They are frameworks for universal experience and emotion.
Some authors do amplify their stories with fascinating new ideas, which is exciting. It’s also rare. And relying on originality to sell a story is risky; someone else may have had the light bulb go off just before you did.
When I think about what makes poetry work, I realize that a unique premise is overrated. I think this is true even in that skeleton of the literary closet called genre fiction.
My current, never-ending work-in-progress has vampire characters. Sometimes I wish I had a 12-step meetings for vampire writers where I could publicly admit I write them and everyone would nod and welcome me and we’d all drink weak coffee in styrofoam cups.
I guess I’ll just admit it online and make my own coffee.
This novel was never supposed to be about vampires. Supernatural undead aren’t the point of the story. Fear, love, courage, family, finding your way out of a rock and a hard place… those are the point of the story. I could change the vampires to some other ambiguous evil, or even take out the supernatural altogether, and I may someday. Paranormal stuff is fun to write, but the premise is not the story.
Most of the items on the Strange Horizons lists are ideas where the premise is the story. For instance, #12 on the Horror List:
Initiate into religion discovers that the religion is actually killing/destroying its initiates.
Before we continue, I must review the warning from the fiction list:
One more thing: We know it's tempting to look at this list as a challenge. Please don't. In particular, please don't send us stories that intentionally incorporate one or more of these items.
In other words, don't try this exercise at home. And if you do, don’t send it to Strange Horizons.
Back to business: I don’t know that this plot isn’t salvageable. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I do know that if the whole story is just building up to this horrifying revelation, you will never meet the challenge that you were already advised not to take but we’re hypothetically taking anyway.
Let’s say you already started this story, and now you stumble across this list and bang your head on your desk. You declare you’re done with fiction forever because you’re a writer, and prone to histrionics.
There’s a good chance you initially approached your story with the time-honored question: What if? Perhaps: What if a religion’s sole purpose in recruiting new initiates was to kill them? You were very proud of your idea until you read that website, or this post.
I say the game isn’t over! Maybe, just maybe, the premise isn’t your problem. Maybe it’s the question.
What if? is a great question. I support what-iffing. But if you think your story has already been written, you might need to ask, What would it feel like?
What emotional state makes a person vulnerable to a predatory cult in the first place? How does it feel to find acceptance? What does it feel like to have your sense of meaning—of purpose, of life and death, of God—crumble under the weight of betrayal? How do you find the will to fight?
When a timid voice of intuition tells you something is wrong, what does the air feel like on your skin? What do you smell? What seeps through the filter of your senses?
These aren’t light questions. These are heavy questions. Some of them are questions that poetry asks all the time. Poems grapple with love, friendship, grief, loss, meaning, death… They tackle these over and over and over again, and yet poetry has never been exhausted.
Neither have stories.
Whether you’ve written The Hunger Games, Twilight, or murderous cult story #12, don’t despair. Figure out what your story is really about—not the cool what if idea, but the story underneath. The what would that feel like? story. That's the story that only you can write, and when you find it, the rest is fixable. I think.
And if you lose your way, read some Mary Oliver. That same poem she’s been writing over and over? It never gets old.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own…
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Sarah’s brilliant post on poetry got me thinking, especially her number one reason for blogging about poetry: “All writing seeks to elicit emotions in the reader. Poetry just does it efficiently.”
I agree with her. I think there is a lot that prosers can learn from poetry.
I must confess, I haven’t read a lot of poetry, hardly any since high school, and I’ve never really studied it. Most of the poetry I’ve read didn’t really speak to me. I appreciated the rhythm and figurative language, but for the most part, they did not elicit an emotional response.
But the few that did reach me on an emotional level, I really loved; I mean deeply and passionately, read-over-and-over-again-obsessively loved.
I think poetry more than prose either resonates with you or not. If you study the poem, you can appreciate it on a deeper level, but that won’t necessarily evoke an emotional response to it. We all have unique experiences, and sometimes a poem manages to tap into those experiences and put into words the perfect expression of those thoughts and feelings connected to it. When that happens, it is truly amazing. It shows you the real power of words.
My Experience
When I was young, our local zoo had a cat house. Where all the cats big and small were kept concrete cages with iron bars. Every time I went to the cat house, at least one of those big cats, the panther, tigers, or lions was pacing. And even as a child, I was entranced by power and grace of their strides, but there was something sad in it, that these sleek, formidable creatures had all this pent up primal energy, and their pacing seemed to be the only way to relieve centuries of predatory instinct. It was so sad, so powerful, so stunningly beautiful.
The Poem
Then in high school I was forced to read the poem The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke, about a panther pacing in cage in a Paris zoo. I was blown away. Rilke described exactly how I had always felt when I watched those big cats at the zoo. He expressed my experience, my emotion in a way that I couldn’t. He gave me the words to describe how I felt. And that was amazing, powerful.
Emotion in Story-telling
Story-telling is all about emotions. A horror story is trying to evoke horror; romance, love; suspense, umm suspense; fantasy, a sense of wonder (sometimes, not always). All try to form an emotional connection between the reader and the main character (although some stories to a lesser extent than others).
If, as a writer, you achieve that emotional response, the reader will not care about whether the story is realistic or if it has any plot holes. They are willing to suspend belief and let the story take them on an emotional ride. If you fail to establish the emotional connection, the story will be torn to shreds by the reader because no story is ever perfect.
The thing is that like poetry, not every story is going to work for every reader. That is why any book no matter how brilliant or well-written can be trashed by a reader who did not buy into it, even the classics. I can tear down a few classics myself because they did not work for me(although no one else may agree with me).
So, yeah, there is a subjective factor in creating emotional resonance with a reader, but that is not all there is to it. There are tricks that can be used to achieve it, and we can find those tricks in poetry.
Creating Emotional Resonance
Before I get into this, I want to say that I think that a lot of this is done intuitively. We don’t have to examine the poem or prose to feel the emotion in it. So most of the time, I think we can naturally add the right emotion to the story, but there are some times when it isn’t quite there, and these are the times to consider these tricks.
So in order to look at how to achieve emotional resonance, let’s examine the poem The Panther.
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.
Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Stephen Mitchell
1. Sentence Structure and Rhythm- When this poem is read aloud, you can feel the rhythm in the sentences. It matches that of a pacing panther; slow, smooth, and steady. In the last stanza the rhythm and pacing changes just a little, this adds emphasis and emotion to the last stanza.
Varying sentence structure and rhythm can add emotion to prose as well. Long sentences are more reflective; short sentences are more exciting. Using short sentences in action scenes or long sentences in romantic scenes can help establish the correct emotion.
A sudden change in sentence structure or rhythm can be used for emphasis. If a short sentence is used after a paragraph of longer sentence, that sentence will stand out and will have more power. Make it an emotionally charged sentence, and it will resonate with your reader.
2. Emotionally Charged Words- Look at the word choices in this poem (I know it is a translation. How I’d love to be able to understand the original).
Words that evoke the feelings of being trapped: “cramped,” “bars,” “paralyzed.”
Words that evoke the image of power and beauty: “Powerful soft strides,” “dance,” “tensed, arrested muscles.”
Words that show repetitive motion: “constantly,” “over and over,” “ritual dance.”
Words that imply hope: “curtains of the pupils lift,” “rushes,” “plunges into the heart.” Of course the last three words kills that hope.
The use of emotionally charged words is key to eliciting the right emotions. I know that is kind of obvious. But this is where finding the right word makes all the difference.
When I was struggling with writing romantic scenes I stumbled on a writing advice on Stacia Kane’s blog called “Be a Sex Writing Strumpet.” The whole thing is on her blog, but you can also buy it.
Yes, this book is about writing sex scenes, and no, I’ve never written a sex scene, and I’m not sure I ever will. But the advice Kane gives can be applied to any romantic scene, and really any emotionally charged scene (Warning, her examples are very sexually explicit).
One thing she said was to make a list of words that you find sensual. Now I think this advice can be applied to any emotion.
There are lots of words and phrases that are emotionally charged: ones that evoke fear, horror, happiness, sadness, disgrace, loyalty, jealousy, rage, etc. Brainstorm trying to express these emotions and find the words and phrases that connect you to them. Don’t worry about anyone else. Find the words that work for you. Then use these words and phrases to add those emotions to your scenes.
3. Subtext- There is so much in the poem that isn’t said. Never does it say that the panther feels trapped or disheartened, but it is there. Never are we told that the panther has a glimpse of hope, but it is there. All in the subtext. What is not said is powerful.
The emotions that are shown are more powerful than the emotions that are told. And what isn’t said but is there will be felt more deeply than what is on the page. I know it is tricky, but if you can manage some subtext, it will make your writing more emotional and more compelling.
So there you have it. The tips of writing emotion that I got from one of my all time favorite poems. I’d love to hear any tips you have for creating emotional resonance, so please feel free to share.
"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!" Illustration by Peter Newell
We don’t usually think of cacophony as a good thing. It’s the word people use to describe an orchestra warming up—a hundred insruments playing, none in sync, none in harmony. It sounds… bad.
Poetry often evokes thoughts of something smooth and fluid, pleasing to the ear. This is euphony. Sounds good, right?
But in truth, poetry is image in rhythm and sound. And it takes all kinds of rhythms, and all kinds of sounds.
Why is a Proser writing about poetry, you ask? Three reasons:
All writing seeks to elicit emotions in the reader. Poetry just does it efficiently.
Almost all poetic techniques can be applied directly or adapted to the novel.
I dig it.
According to Encyclopædia Brittanica's entry on euphony and cacophony, “Inadvertent cacophony is a mark of a defective style.” There's a simple answer to this: Don't do anything by accident.
Sometimes an unpleasant image or emotion requires sound effects to match. Something scary can be made scarier by clashing, dissonant words. Or it can be made scarier still by unexpected euphony, like opening a horror movie with a lullaby.
Perhaps the most famous example of cacophony is Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"
Contrast the fluid melodies of Edna St.Vincent Millay, as in Sonnet XLIII:
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.
And because I can, I'll self-blog-publish an exercise I did with writing teacher/genius Jack Grapes, which he calls "teeth and mouth." The point of the exercise is to write something that will exercise your mouth and use plenty of teeth when you read it out loud, which is similar to cacophony. That constraint forced my mind to come up with some unexpected images. (Do try this at home; you won't believe how fun it is.)
Newspaper-Sourced Instruction to California Nature Enthusiasts
Should you come across a cougar, hiking through sagebrush, rattlesnake country caressed by the central star's direct heat foiling spf fifty— Should you come across a cougar, resist urges prompting statuesque stillness, the benedict trick temptation to cower from the stalker's muscular dance of strength that shames your thumb-gifted awkward carriage.
Should you come across a cougar, first clutch straggling children close. Scream, stretch, enlarge, throw backpacks, keys, recyclable bottles, rocks, twigs, shoes, flap your unzipped puffy quilted vest to mimic the hawk's expanse, ornithological person-beast cultivating cowardice in the black-belt kung fu sharp-toothed rabid mouth ultimate fighting champion of rippled silk furred physique.
Do not approach to waste opportunity on stupidity's cruel punishment. You have without coincidence happened upon a puma who arranged the tête-à -tête in the shadows of your casual hiker's gait. Fight back if attacked.
Emerge from this match a braggart back in your choking concrete habitat, but forget not gratitude for fortune's pickled choice for each sacred creature for a park ranger lecture on cat-specific technique, and for the fact that it wasn't a bear.
Note 1:This blog post originally consisted of only the above poem without an accompanying discussion. Apologies to my intrepid initial commenters, who may have been, ah, confused.
Note 2: MaryAnn recommended another poem: The Panther, by Rainer Maria Rilke. The words flow in a quiet melody that beautifully enhances its meaning. Rilke was known for his musicality, and if you listen to the German version, below, you will get a sense of that music even if you don't speak a word of German. Translators have a lot to think about, don't they?
I do not keep a journal. I do not record the details of my life or of my emotional state with any regularity. I do not have a daily writing ritual or a treasured notebook in which everything is meticulously recorded.
I have nothing against journaling, except in the specific case of my own emotional health. We depressive types are often lovely people—really!—but many of us share a certain thought pattern: rumination. Because I am most likely to seek the company of pen and paper when I'm least suited to being with actual people, my attempts at journaling used to end up like this:
I'm the worst housekeeper ever. The kitchen's so gross it will take me an hour, and then I’ll be even more tired and I won’t get any writing done. What is the point? WHAT IS THE POINT? There is no point. It’s all utterly pointless. Do the dishes, then more dishes get dirty, then do more dishes, again and again forever as I hurtle towards a meaningless death. Everything sucks.
See what I mean? The journal is not a healthy outlet for rumination. Expressed mathematically:
But still... I need to write like I need food and air and very occasional interaction with human beings. So what's a writer to do? Here are my tips for avoiding the tornado:
Low-to-Zero Expectations:
If I buy a notebook, I do it with full acceptance of the following:
It may get used off and on for years or be filled in a month.
I’ll have at least two other notebooks in rotation at the same time because I write in
whatever I have handy.
It will be an unsorted mish-mash of fiction, stream-of-consciousness drivel, grocery lists, and important dates and phone numbers. I will never remember to transfer those important dates to a calendar.
Eventually, I will let
the kids doodle all over it at a restaurant.
At some point, I will spill water or coffee, rendering most of the pages unreadable.
99.9% of any notebook is too boring to re-read.
Take out the trash
Sometimes I need a brain dump before I can settle in to my "real" writing. I set a time limit
or a page limit, and I just let go. I don’t dwell on one idea or try to give myself a pep talk. I write about what I need to do, what I don't want to do, what I dreamed about, why I hate my novel, etc. I don't go too deep and I don't try to analyze. When I reach my limit, I stop and move on to the work of the day. The key difference between this and ruminating is that I don't see the negative stuff as anything but taking out the trash.
That mindset is critical; you can't believe everything you
write.
Wax Poetic
While simply writing down bad feelings isn't very helpful, transforming them into poetry can be. Include line breaks, choose each image and each word carefully, and you might find yourself more involved in crafting a poem than in whatever emotional crisis started your journey into free verse. There's a creative objectivity that goes along with art, and it often gives me the distance I need to get though a bad time.
Her worth was the dusty trail’s
desire.
She puts lotion in her hands,
always dry now,
and in the geometry of her skin
sees the cracked desert clay
no water for her thirst.
Get Kinky
There's freedom in writing stream-of-consciousness, letting yourself get as random and weird as your mind will allow without regard for logic or meaning. The following is utter nonsense, but writing it rescued me from a pint of Häagen-Dazs.
Diet Coke + Mentos = Awesome
Devil peals out of my car's subconscious keychain and I'm laughing out loud the nocturne, gentle and slow. Why is that cat clawing at nothing, air, a vacuum, a blue blinding hell-born light? My mind is bottled up and fizzy and minty-fresh, vaguely European. I'm a Mentos, a science experiment, imploding in the sand. My toes call me and plead to feel the sun.
Try it, really. Your brain will thank you.
Moment by Moment
(Not my actual husband)
Feelings are like leeches—slimy and sticky at the same time. You can't pin them down, but the act of trying tends to make them hold on tighter. So don't write feelings. Write moments. Was there a penny on the floor? Heads or tails? Were you twirling a stolen hotel pen in your fingers? Was there sunlight or lamplight or the flickering of a fluorescent bulb? A moment during a conversation with my husband, between lines of dialogue:
I held the last glass from the dishwasher; it dripped water from its concave base onto my hand. John stood against the counter, slurping the last drops of Kellogg-sweetened milk from a blue ceramic bowl. His sandy hair stuck out in eighty different directions, and his left arm had a bright pink pattern of sleep creases. The children whispered about their cereal being poop, which meant they were eating poop and that made them poopyheads. I pretended I couldn’t hear them over Elmo’s World.
Letting Go
When you're working on a story, sometimes it flows and sometimes it's really work. That's just the writing life. Don't let a journal become an obstacle. If it isn't working for you, put it away. Go make some memories. Let life happen, and if the best times never make an appearance in your stack of notebooks, that's okay. There's more to the writing life than writing.
Half my living room is consumed by a grand piano, which my parents bought when I was 13. The house is too small for this behemoth instrument and I know I should sell it, but I can’t bring myself to. I hardly ever play, but every year, on December 1st, I pull out a book of carols.
Every song is special for its own reasons. I remember my first book of carols, with water-color illustrations on each facing page. "Good King Wenceslas" was the easiest to sight-read, and so I played it over and over. To this day I have no idea what that song is about.
I remember playing through "Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming" and falling in love with the simple melody. My father came into the room, singing the bass line of the four-part harmony.
My sister and I used to sit at the piano and sing "Angels we Have Heard on High" over and over and over again, trying to harmonize, trying to make our Glo-o-o-o-o-o-rias operatic. She has a voice that can be shared in public and I don’t, but I like to think that together we were lovely.
I remember Christmas Eve, joining my father in a living room lit only by the multi-colored lights on the tree, listening to The Messiah.
I remember singing "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" as we marched down the stairs—in ascending order of age—on Christmas morning. Our family was kooky, but a sweet kind of kooky. (After years teasing me mercilessly about this tradition, my husband was the one to start singing at the top of the stairs the first time we spent Christmas morning in our own house.)
I remember opening presents and listening to the Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King’s College in England. "Once in Royal David’s City" always begins with a boy’s solo. My father told me that the boys never knew which one would sing until the last second; that way the chosen singer wouldn’t crumple from nerves.
I remember when my children were babies, and I realized how many Christmas carols are just lullabies in disguise. I remember the first Christmas that I was the grown-up in my own darkened living room, lit with a rainbow of lights from my own tree, and how I sat holding a tow-headed infant and nursed and rocked and sang carol after carol.
Last year my younger one demanded "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" every night at bedtime. I thought it would stop after the holiday, but we’re going on 380-ish days and counting.
I play through all these songs and more on my living-room-sized piano. I flip through and focus on the easy ones, since I'm out of practice. I don’t usually play a second verse, except for one song that I have to play five times through. I can’t help it. I can’t stop at one verse. This song has to be sung to the end, even if the singing is in my head because my voice doesn't have much range.
On Christmas Day in 1864, in the midst of a brutal war, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was not feeling the holiday spirit. He’d lost his wife in a fire three years earlier, in which he was also badly burned. Then the Civil War broke out. His son joined the Union against his wishes. At the end of November, 1864, Charles Longfellow was severely wounded at the Battle of Mine Run in Virginia.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Hearing the bells on December 25, certain his son was going to die*, Longfellow did what any writer would do: He channeled his despair into a poem, titled "Christmas Bells." The poem is longer and much more specific to the Civil War than what we sing today. Here is a link to the text.
I like knowing this history, knowing that Longfellow found hope in the face of overwhelming grief. That's part of the gift of writing. Often I find that something good starts to emerge as I get all the bad stuff down on paper; a poem taking shape can transform sadness into beauty almost on its own.
The holidays are supposed to be joyful, but they also bring depression for a lot of people. My holiday blues usually take the form of wishing I could hold a baby in my arms again, or missing the magic of childhood and feeling overwhelmed with grown-up things to do. Longfellow’s words comfort me every year, reminding me that there is always hope to be found in your own heart, no matter how deeply buried it may seem.
Here's a link to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing my favorite carol. The opening melody is by John Baptiste Calkin. That's the one I play, and it's the one I love best:
I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."
Till, ringing singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!
Have a wonderful holiday!
~Sarah
*Charles Longfellow did recover from his injuries and went on to travel the world.
