On Writing - Michelle Richmond

Five Things I Love (& 5 I Can Do Without)

Cafe Kitsune Paris, with book from Librarie Galignani

When I go through a dry spell in my writing, I find it helps to think in fives. Instead of beginning the day with a scene from my novel-in-progress, I begin with a quick exercise: write about five of something. Five books I love, five cities I’ve lived in, five dates, five meals…anything.

In her excellent and esoteric blog Writer’s Notebook, NorCal native and Paris expat Summer Brennan explains the origins of the Five Things post.

“There seems to be something about the number five that helps to give a satisfying structure, at least to the writer, if not to the reader,” Brennan writes.

With that inspiration, I’m sharing my own five things: Five Things I Love and Five I Can Do Without. (I considered calling this post “5 Things I Love and Five I Loathe.” That would have been a catchier title, but a dishonest one. There’s nothing in this list of fives I actually hate. I began with the idea of very strong preferences. Here goes: Five Things I Love, and their less lovable counterparts.

Coffee not Tea

I have a secret bias. If someone reveals that they drink tea instead of coffee, I automatically mistrust them. I don’t think they’re morally corrupt, necessarily, but I question their common sense. Fair or no, I associate tea with china cups and doilies. Ruffled lampshades. Dusty sofas in floral patterns. I secretly suspect that the majority of tea-drinkers can name the lesser royals and perhaps even recall their more questionable moments in haberdashery. (I do have dear friends who drink tea and exhibit none of these characteristics, and I fully admit my bias is not based in fact). By contrast, in my mind, a coffee drinker’s lamps give good light. Their linens are unfussy. They like to get stuff done.

Give me coffee (I wrote a whole book about it)—the stronger the better. Black, not doctored. Give me energy and focus, the noise of the coffee grinder, the oil of the beans, the straight-to-the-brain olfactory joy when you pour the ground beans into the filter basket. Give me the heat, the first bitter taste, the burn in the throat, the electric charge. Give me a really good drip machine.

technivorm moccamaster — Best coffeemaker ever: Technivorm Moccamaster

Coffee in Paris, Les Deux Magots — Best coffeemaker ever: Technivorm Moccamaster

I should mention my husband drinks neither tea nor coffee. He is strictly a hot chocolate man. Once, when he edited one of my novels, he replaced every mention of the male protagonist drinking coffee with the male protagonist drinking hot chocolate. Despite reservations, I let it stand. Several layperson reviewers objected. “No grown man drinks that much hot chocolate,”they said. For some readers, the prevalence of hot chocolate in the novel created a problem of verisimilitude, a corruption of the fictional dream.

I will quote one of the reviewers, who calls herself muppetbaby99 and who writes a great blog called Doubleplusgood where she does wildly entertaining “live readings” of novels. She posted about The Marriage Pact for several days in July of 2017, right after the book came out. On the matter of hot chocolate, she had this to say:

I think Michelle Richmond must own stock in a bunch of different ‘hot chocolate beverage flavouring chemical’ companies due to sheer number of times she mentions/describes HOT CHOCOLATE in this story. She must be getting a kick-back from Nestle

If I were the type of writer to correct readers on matters of the possible, I would have responded, “But there are men who drink that much hot chocolate. I am married to one of them!” Of course I am not that type of writer. Readers are, after all, entitled to their opinions. May they all be so lucky as fall in love with a man who is man enough to drink hot chocolate instead of coffee or tea.

P.S. I don’t own stock in Nestle BUT we do have an entire cabinet full of Benco, the French equivalent of Nesquik, which my husband buys by the case whenever he goes back to Paris.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5

Walking in Paris – Park Monceau to Batignolles, a Beautiful Goodbye

During our final week in Paris at the end of October 2020, I ventured out for one last walk to Batignolles. Although traffic had returned to the boulevards, the city still felt deserted. Travel from the United States to the EU was still restricted, so the only Americans in town were expats like us. We had lived the first eight months of the pandemic in the City of Light. I had stirrings of affection for Paris I’d never felt before the pandemic. We’d all been in this together for such a long time. Now, when I saw the clerk at the Franprix or the machine-gun toting gendarmes along Avenue Gabriel, our “bonjours” held more warmth, our nods more familiarity.

On that quiet autumn Tuesday I set out from our home in the 8th arrondissement under a gray sky, walking the block and a half along Rue Rembrandt to Parc Monceau. The park had been my oasis in the center of the urban storm, green and vibrant in a city of browns and grays. On countless days, I had escaped our apartment and the book I didn’t feel like writing to walk through the park and order a crepe from the snack stand beside the carousel.

Crepes in parc monceau — Parc Monceau crepe stand

That Tuesday I skipped the crepe, as I had one thing on my mind: coffee. I exited the park, veered right on Ave. Georges Berger, and crossed Malsherbes, where Berger becomes Rue Legendre. The light caught me at the corner of Legendre and Toqueville, in front of the old brick house on the corner (19 Rue Legendre), so out of place among the whitewashed buildings.

I crossed the busy Rue de Rome, where ugly modern apartment buildings tower over the train tracks. The first time we walked this route, the day after our arrival in Paris, we were searching for our nephew Jack’s favorite restaurant, Crepe Couer. We didn’t yet know that everything closes in Paris in August, and the few things that don’t close for the entire month do close on Sunday.

By the time we reached Batignolles in the 107 degree heat, our son was hangry, and I was regretting the move from Northern California, where beaches are always a few minutes away and the fog keeps a lid on the heat. Crepe Couer was closed. The only open restaurant we could find, Brutus, had a line out the door. Once seated, we sweated and waited and sweated some more, thirsty and out of sorts. Eventually the crepes came, and so did the cider (though not the water, as we didn’t yet know you must request un carafe d’eu if you want water with your meal). It was delicious, and forever after Brutus was our favorite crepe place in Paris.

…

Time and the Novel

Sarah Stone, author of the novel The True Sources of the Nile as well as two books on the craft of writing, has a terrific new post up on RedRoom, “Navigating Time in Fiction”.

“What does it mean for a work to traverse different kinds of time? What in each writer’s life, biology, or brain structure leads us to our particular time fingerprint?” Read the essay in its entirety here.

Check out Sarah’s highly informative book, Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers.

The Joys of Not Finishing

I’d been struggling for two years with a novel I was writing on contract, unable to find my way, when I finally confessed to my editor that the book just wasn’t working. “Do you think you could write something else?” she asked. Strangely, that simple solution had never occurred to me. After all, I had invested 300 pages and hundreds of hours in the book, and the thought of abandoning it seemed obscene. Days later, officially released from the unwieldy mass of my failed manuscript, I started from scratch. Blank page, new premise; new characters, voice, and setting.

The freedom proved exhilarating, and the result was No One You Know, a novel about the stories we tell ourselves and those that others tell for us. It’s also about math, and the dangers of literary ambition. Writing it was a joy and a relief.

Our impulse as writers is to attempt to salvage the words, to make good on the promise we made to ourselves when we penned the very first line. While there is beauty in perseverance, sometimes the best thing you can do for a story is let it go, and give yourself the freedom to begin again.

This originally appeared in the Glimmer Train newsletter.