I am messing around, getting lost in the minutiae. My story is charted out, but I realize it is more like a basic skeleton than a story now. It’s good that I know this, but OUCH! So, the journey is this now that I have the whole thing ‘written’: I know where it’s going and most of the steps along the way. However, how do I proceed from there?
I’ve decided to make a journal. This is something that I have longed to do ever since I found someone’s that intrigued me in Paris. A wonderful trip that was bittersweet. My family had made plans to go to France and England with my parents. It was the last years of their lives, and we decided to make this elaborate trip for them. Unfortunately, my mother died right before, and we decided to go in her memory.
I found the journal in a bookstore while walking back to the hotel from the D’Orsay Museum. This museum is a place where artists are outside the Louvre Art Museum realm. I am not very well-versed, but it seems the Louvre Museum has strict rules on what is ‘admissible,’ and it is, at least somewhat of a battle with the D’Orsay. Each museum holds world-famous art, and most of us know much of the inventory, but they turn their noses up at each other. The Louvre has masterpieces, like the Mona Lisa and the Venus di Milo, spanning 9,000 years, and the D’Orsay has Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces by artists like Monet and Van Gogh.
The journal I found was from someone, I believe a woman, who went to Africa and wrote her adventures, with pictures, of that time. It was in French, and I didn’t buy it mostly because I am not versed in French, more in Spanish. At least with Spanish I would have stood a chance, anyway. This was a copy, of course, and they had a good pile of them, but I was really attracted to this lovely little book—a missed purchase I have regretted.
So, I am going to take one of the blank journals I have (thanks to my daughter, who collected a lot of them) and try my hand at this. First, I will write at the very beginning everything that I have arrived at as to what is needed in general, for my book to be readable, you know-GOOD.
Next, I will begin Chapter 1. First, I want to identify what is missing, then my ideas to fix it. Also, I want to draw one picture (at least) to illustrate what is going on. I don’t have much experience, but there is art in my family, at least with my mother and sisters. I inherited colored pencils, brushes, acrylics, and who knows what from my mother. Her father had done quite a few paintings, but while she had some education in this area, when she met my father, she worked for a department store, drawing pictures of women in their clothing for newspaper ads. The drawings were wonderful.
I don’t think she had very much confidence, though. One time she told me that she was afraid she would fail if she tried to paint in one of the rooms vacated by her three grown daughters. She had it all set up and never started. I always thought that was sad.
What is it when intelligent people think you have to achieve immediately or you are a failure? We’d never have SpaceX. Elon had to push it, with many blowups of the rockets he and his company had designed and deliberately taken to the edge. Without that courage, you wouldn’t know the limits of safety during testing, but you might learn them when people were in them. Mr. Musk was down to his last dime, his money and those funds he borrowed, when the breakthroughs started. However, his success rate in building tested rockets is much higher than with the previous rockets before Mr. Musk’s time.
My father, on the other hand, lamented that he had no talent in art. He told me he made buses when asked to draw in school—a rectangle with wheels. My father was an engineer, and that world he understood. He told me he had no trouble learning machine language (computer) because he thought that way. I plan to draw on both sides of my family for this project. I think it should help.
Yes, I’m going to make a colorful journal. Play around, let it come. Take the whole story into account and make it flow together. I want it to be realistic and fun.\
The plan is to start that journal is this week. In addition, I am starting to read a book on drawing, a book on Eloquence, and probably something else to bolster what I am trying to do.
Unfortunately, I already know one problem with my writing. I am averse to hurting my characters. I tend to make them all good, wonderful people who only have wonderful things happen to them. A bit tough when the characters aren’t well fleshed out, which makes the story feel a bit flat in general, regardless of whether or not the story is too innocent.
I ended up with a lot of characters, which was a shock. I had thought of a story sitting in a restaurant that I went to every day I worked out, a kind of reward for being a good girl, ha ha! I asked if I could mention the restaurant and use the server’s names. At first, the management said yes; then the whole group was sold to another corporation, and that new corporation said no to using the restaurant’s name. Yes, the journey has been long. I was allowed to use the server’s names as long as they said yes. I got ten names, with a few hints as to who they were. The servers don’t give out their names much, but over the years I’ve been told a few.
Turns out, all ten of them were the servers I have known the best. I already had about eighty other characters, and maybe the core of the main characters was about six. The main six were fine; the seventy-four were characters not used often, mostly for one scene. I believed I needed to make this real for me, and I think that is still true, but heavens, I really struggled with the ten, another challenge for me as a novice writer. However, those ten people were excited and happy to be participating. They enjoyed it and looked forward to each chapter. It made me feel responsible for getting them written, and in the end it helped me finish (well, you know, the first draft). I honestly don’t know if I would have got to that finish line by myself, and I am deeply grateful for that. This was a good request for a novice writer, and it may have been the boost I needed.
The plan is to start that journal this week. In addition, I am starting to read a book on drawing, a book on Eloquence, and probably something else to bolster what I am trying to do.
Wish me luck.
©J M Strasser August 2026 All Rights Reserved
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