A Novel Creation www.WatersWords.com

Nora My husband and I spent Saturday evening with our two-year-old granddaughter. We enjoyed playing with her and reading her books. She is fun and at age two has a wonderful imagination and a great sense of humor. I don’t always understand every word Nora says, but she is a good communicator. She has a way of making known what she needs or wants. Nora has a decent vocabulary for someone that young. There are times, however, when she wants to tell us something but can’t find the words. She turns to gibberish, her first language. Sometimes I feel that way when I am writing. I feel as though I have used all my words for the day and can’t even begin to think of how to string together a meaningful sentence. I will search for a word in my brain, describe what I am looking for to my husband, check my thesaurus for possibilities and wind up putting in /???NW/ in my text to remind me to come back at a later date with the appropriate word. The question marks tell me I w...

Scribbles I have enjoyed writing ever since second grade when my teacher liked one of my stories so much she had it published in the school newspaper. I have stacks of notebooks and scraps of paper with stories or ideas for stories scribbled on them. I have lists of names of people and places I like or have found intriguing with the intent to use the names one day in my writing. For example, we have a veterinarian in Cincinnati named Steele Mattingly. What a great name. Or how about the road in Columbus named Needmore Road? I can just imagine some farmer standing there saying, “We need more road.” I have stories I wrote for my classroom, teen novels I drafted to entertain my three daughters, and short stories based on the oral history my grandmother shared with me as a child. I have written numerous professional papers (including a master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation). I published educational articles and submitted proposals...

  I learned in elementary school about how to tell if a book was written in first person, second person or third person. It was a simple matter of pronouns. “I,” “me," and “my,” or a "we/us" approach  indicate a first person point of view. “You,” “yours,” or where I come from “ya’ll,” is indicative of a story written in the second person while “he,” “she,” “they” tells the reader the story is written in the third person. Most works of fiction (most, not all) are written from a third person point of view. I have used this technique to weave my story, but now I am learning there are different layers of that third-person narrative. For example, I can tell the story as if I am on the outside looking in. I can tell the story from several characters point of view. The best way to successfully do this is to use one perspective per scene.  Another sort of third-person point of view may be described as “limited.” That simply means that I need to const...

I have been thinking a lot about first impressions lately. How does the saying go?  My Own Experience I haven’t always made a “good” impression, I’m sure. But at least I have made some memorable ones. I am thinking of my first year in graduate school. Actually, the first class when I drove myself to the University of Cincinnati for an evening course. I got lost on the campus, parked in unfamiliar territory, and wound up climbing a hill to find the classroom. I looked at my watch. I would be late but I pressed on. I found the assigned room only to discover the class had moved to a different building.             “Come on in,” the bearded professor beckoned, when I arrived at the door ten minutes late.             Of course the only available seat was near the front on the other side of the room. Somewhat embarrassed by my tardiness, but relieved t...