I wrote this piece as a Christmas present for my nephew in 2004.

This is your first Christmas, Sean, and since you’re only eight months old, I know this story might not impress you much, but it seems like the right time to tell it.

Your father was not quite three months old on his first Christmas, and I was ten years old. I knew enough about babies to know they don’t really do much at first, but eventually they grow into real people. That was the exciting puzzle. What was this new baby brother going to be like? We didn’t have many clues, but we watched for them all the time. Who was Louis Peter Burke?

Your Grandmother Burke died well before you were born, so you don’t know much about her. Here is her Christmas tree decorating theory: More is better. In architectural terms, it was rococo baroque.

During Christmas Eve day, we decorated the tree. First the lights went on — big lights, small lights, steady lights, twinkle lights, colored lights, white lights, all the lights we had, and there were plenty. Second, we hung every single ornament we had on the tree, and, again, there were plenty. If one was ugly or beat up, it went way on the inside where it could add color or sparkle without really being visible. The only rule was smaller stuff on top, bigger stuff on the bottom. Finally, we added tinsel and garlands of various types and colors to be sure there was maximum sparkle.

Then we waited for nightfall, since only a darkened house could do justice to the masterpiece that we had created.

Meanwhile, we dressed your father in a red-and-white-striped elf-costume pajama set that an aunt had given him, complete with a pointy cap. He didn’t care for the cap but we made him wear it anyway, at least long enough for a photo, which may still be around somewhere. He looked more silly than elfish. He certainly had no idea about what was going on. He was too little to understand much of anything.

The moment to light the tree arrived. We turned out all the lamps and closed the front curtains to block the streetlight. With a flip of a switch, and the tree flashed on, providing enough sparkling light to read by.

Your father’s eyes got big and he couldn’t take them off the tree. He liked it! He liked it a lot! Even when we turned the regular room lights back on, he continued to stare at the tree, fascinated.

It was a clue, the first clue I remember, about your father’s personality. He liked colorful, beautiful things — at least, we thought the tree was beautiful, and in a rococo way, it certainly was. We lit the tree for him throughout the holidays for the sheer fun of watching him enjoy it.

I don’t remember much else about that Christmas, like what I got as presents, what anyone else got, whether there was snow, or what we had for Christmas dinner. All I remember is the intense look of surprise and delight on your father’s little face, and how merry a Christmas he made it for all of us because we could make him happy, and because we had learned a little bit about him.

Finding out who someone is takes a long time. I’m still learning things about my brother Louis. Fatherhood, for example, has revealed new aspects of his personality and interests. In the same delighted way that I first saw so many years ago, he could not be more curious and excited to learn about you. Who is Sean Patrick Burke?

This is your father’s first Christmas with you. I hope it is merry.

Copyright © 2004 by Sue Burke, all rights assigned to Sean Patrick Burke.

The Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Paper airplanes appeared in history several years later.

And yet, any child can make a paper airplane. The Chinese invented paper 2000 years ago and had kites. Birds have been flying since dinosaur times, and humanity has dreamed of flying since the stone age. Paper models of sailing ships, hot air balloons, and dirigibles were available before 1903. Japanese origami had already reached wonderful sophistication. Nothing was stopping anyone from making a paper airplane.

Except one thing: no one knew what an airplane looked like or how it would work. No one could imagine one. Orville and Wilbur had to develop an accurate understanding of how wing shape affected air pressure and created lift in order to make a real airplane, and by 1899 they had built intricate gliders and harnessed wind power. Their discoveries would soon be transferred to a simplified three-dimensional paper model. The rest is history.

This leaves me sitting here staring at a sheet of paper, wondering what unprecedented things it could do, things that would delight any child, if I could only imagine them.

 

Are you a plotter or pantser? An architect or gardener? Do you plan and outline your writing projects, or do you just start writing and see what grows?

Or do you combine both methods? I talk about how in this article for the Red Sofa Literary agency blog.

Source: NaNoWriMo Day #2 – Minimalist plotting

Do writing prompts work? Yes, at least sometimes. They can help you warm up before writing, the way a baseball player will swing two bats or use a baseball doughnut. Or they can help you create an entire work, the way that a prompt about a special kind of wall led to my novel Semiosis.

But what kind of prompt is effective? All kinds. You can develop a story from many directions. Both simple and complex prompts work. And sometimes prompts fail, which doesn’t mean that you as a writer have failed. It just wasn’t a good match. If you plant that most noble of cacti, a saguero, in a lush rainforest, it won’t grow.

Here are some prompts emphasizing different story elements. Feel free to use them any way you wish, to change anything about them to make them more useful to you, and if they result in a story, even better!

Character: the “who” of a story

• This is the kind of man who feels naked walking down the street because everyone else is wearing the rules of their lives for all to see.

• This woman habitually lies, even in her diary entries – possibly for a good reason.

Plot: “what happens?”

• A little girl’s invisible friends go away, and she decides to find them.

• Advanced social media algorithms allow ranking of character – helpful, trollish, petty, responsible, etc. – and someone is consumed with achieving the highest ranking possible.

Style: “how” to tell the story

• A listicle story: This is the perfect escape plan, and it has twelve steps.

• A one-act stage play that breaks the fourth wall: A squadron of soldiers prepares for a suicide mission.

Setting: “when and where”

• A bride at the altar is hoping that someone will object.

• The ghosts of the victims of a terrible tragedy have agreed to meet at the site one year later … and a year has passed.

Genre: the “why” that sets up reader expectations. But as Samuel R. Delaney says in Shorter Views, “superb fiction must fulfill some of those expectations, and at the same time violate others.”

• In this fairy tale, a handsome prince is sent on a grueling quest by his evil fairy godmother, and little by little he comes to believe she did the right thing, so is she evil?

• This is a romance about a pair of actors hired to pretend to fall in love during a long pleasure cruise to entertain the passengers.

The air could not have been more still that autumn morning, yet a tree near my back door was losing its leaves. One by one, they fell of their own weight as the tree let go. On that becalmed morning, leaves were dropping to the ground.

Usually we think the wind sweeps the autumn leaves from trees, and maybe it provides an extra tug. But trees decide to shed their leaves at the moment they deem best. Though they seem almost inert, buffeted by wind, soaked by rain, and baked by sunshine, they control their fates as much as any of us. We, too, can be uprooted by disasters, attacked by illness, cut down by predators, and suffer thirst. Being mobile does not make us less vulnerable. Or less willful.

So on that chilly morning, I watched a tree prove that it was the master of its destiny. One by one, it clipped its bonds to its leaves, and they dropped off. The tree was taking action, and no one and nothing could stop it.