Our pastor began his meditation by mentioning that the word Maundy comes from the Latin mandate. Though you pronounce it like it’s Spanish—mon-DAH-tay—when you see it written you realize right away what it means: mandate, law, command.

The command to which this word refers is from Jesus’ words to the disciples at the Last Supper:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. (John 13:34)

Jesus’ love was wide and long and deep. His love took Him to the cross and the grave and the pit of hell.

His love was costly.

And it came to me, as clearly as if the words had been spoken aloud, that the “one another” whom I am supposed to love in this costly way are my children. I knew, too, that the cost for me would be my fledgling writing career.

The next day we found out about the twins, and I realized my Maundy Thursday revelations were meant to prepare me.

A few days later, my writer friend Lynne emailed me and her words confirmed what I already knew: she said she knew having two more babies was going to be hard for me because it would mean I could not write as much as I would like to.

I emailed back: “Letting go of my dream of writing another book, of finding an agent for my novel, of being a multi-published author is my little cross to bear, my act of self-sacrificing love. I know you will understand and not think me melodramatic for calling not being able to write a cross to bear. It’s a small cross, I know, but it’s hard for me.”

She responded, “Writing is who you are, Kimberlee. I think not writing very much will be more than a little cross to bear. I think it will be a pretty big cross.”

Her words were like water, easing the guilt I felt for not wanting to let go of these words, these dreams I carry. I drank them down.

Over the weeks of Easter I have struggled to let go of what I want—to find an agent for my novel, to write another novel, to have a career as a writer. Now.

Never mind that I daily run out of energy long before the day runs out of hours, that my brain is a sieve, that I am sometimes so tired I can’t string six words together to form a coherent sentence—I still struggle to hold my dreams lightly, let alone surrender them for a time.

On Sunday at church, our children’s minister, Dianne, found me. “Oh, Kimberlee,” she said, “I was reading something this week, and I thought of you. The author was talking about vocation and how sometimes people have two vocations that seem to conflict with each other, like they’re working at cross-purposes. But he said that eventually those two vocations would flow together, and both vocations would be stronger because of the other one.

“And I thought of you, and I know it’s hard that you’re not writing much right now, but I just knew—I know—that your mothering will make you a better writer better, and your writing will make you a better mom. So hang in there. They’re going to come together.”

I carried those words in my heart all day. They gave me hope.

And I realized: that’s one of the main reasons I write—to give myself and others hope. That is the gift of good words.

The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to provide a forum for accountability and encouragement for would-be novelists to actually crank out their brain child.

The goal of NaNoWriMo is for each registered writer to write 50,000 words in 30 days. That’s 1,667 words a day. Every day. A standard page in Word, say, is about 300 words, which translates to 5 1/2 pages a day, 170 pages in a month. Clearly, this is a huge undertaking.

And for the first time I will be undertaking it.

Or mostly undertaking it. Even though I’m officially registered and all, I don’t think I’ll make the word count. I have other writing assignments – paying ones (wahoo!) – that I have to work on, and those will take priority. So, my personal goal is closer to 30,000 words, which is still 1000 words a day and still seems daunting.

The nice thing is that no one will ever read these words. They can be pure and total garbage. And I’m pretty sure they will be. But that’s okay. I’m the kind of writer who can take garbage, find the gems in it, and write a shiny new story that’s heaps better than the junk that birthed it. It’s getting the garbage out of my brain and onto the page that’s hard.

Which is where NaNoWriMo comes in. It gets me to put words on the page.

Of course, NaNoWriMo isn’t really about writing a novel (unless you’re some kind of genius). It’s about writing something that can be revised (and revised and revised) into a novel. I’m going to use my friend Helen’s term and call what I write next month my “zero draft.”

And, yes, it will probably be quite that bad.

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Since I’ll be busy cranking out those 1000 words a day for the rest of the month, you are going to get to enjoy six awesome guest bloggers, all of whom are writers of one kind or another. In honor of Thanksgiving and in celebration of books, they’ll each answer this question:

What book (excepting the Bible) are you most grateful for and why?

I can’t wait to hear their responses. I hope you enjoy them, too!

Nasals—n, m, ng—are sounded in the nose. Say inning, and you’ll see what I mean. You can feel the n and ng sounds at the top of the back of your throat, almost in your nose.

Sibilants—s, z, j (soft), th, sh, zh, ch, f, v, x—make a sort of hissing sound, and you can aspirate (i.e., protract) them as long as you have breath. Say hiss and hold that final s sound. And again, notice how our words for this kind of sound—hiss, sibilant—have the very sounds they’re describing embedded in the word.

Finally, liquids—l, r, w, m, n—create a fluidity or fluency of sound, like water running over rocks. (You already noticed, right? All those l’s and r’s that I used to describe this sound…)

All right, you say, that’s totally cool (because you’re a word nerd, so you would think so), but who cares? Why does it matter?

Let’s say you’re writing a bedtime story. Do you want to use a lot of stops? No, of course not. That would be jarring. You want to lull that child to sleep. So you use liquids and sibilants, sounds that can be drawn out. You use low energy vowels.

But if you’re writing a suspenseful scene in a story, do you want to use lots of sleepy liquids? Maybe, depending on the mood you want to evoke. If you want to create a sense of calm before the storm, liquids might be totally appropriate. But if you’re in the midst of the storm and there’s a lot going on, you can reinforce that with high-energy vowels and stop-and-start mutes.

You could use lots of sibilants to create a scene with hissing machinery, or to create the voice of a dragon.

Nasals would work well to reinforce the whiny little sister voice.

And so on.

Of course, there aren’t hard and fast rules about how to do this. But knowing about sounds can help you choose a better word in a given sentence or scene, a word that by its very sound reinforces the mood you’re trying to create.

Next time we’ll look at a passage from Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Shining Company that uses sound to great effect.

Most consonants cannot actually be said without an accompanying vowel sound. (Try saying the sound for “d” and see what I mean: you can’t really say it unless you add a schwa or some other vowel sound after it.) So the energy of a sentence is going to come from its vowels.

That said, consonants do play a role in how a word or sentence feels in the mouth. They can be divided into rough categories, based on how you hold your mouth and how the air moves through your mouth when you say the sounds.

Today, I want to focus on stops or mutes. These are the consonant sounds that, when at the end of a word, force you to stop: b; c (hard), k, and q; d; g (hard); p; and t.

The word stop, for instance, ends in a stop—that final p. And the word mute ends in a mute—that final t. How interesting that our words for these kinds of sounds actually exemplify the sound they’re describing. Coincindence? Probably not. We feel sound in our mouths and ears, and it only makes sense that the sounds of the words we create correlate to their meaning.

To understand the role of a stop, consider this sentence: The cats jumped onto the table. The s on the end of cats allows you to connect this word with the word that follows. But if you take the s off—The cat jumped onto the table—you now have a felt pause between cat and jumped. The t in cat cannot elide (i.e., blend) with the j in jump.

This felt pause can be used to great effect, as in Tennyson’s “The Eagle”:

He watches from his mountain walls/ And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The t on the end of thunderbolt creates a pause—and thus a bit of suspense—before the final two words of the line. Tennyson did this without line breaks or punctuation, simply by using a stop. How cool is that?

Next up: nasals, sibilants, and liquids (oh my!).

We all know that words are made up of letters. But I think we sometimes forget that they’re also made up of sounds. Let’s look at those sounds and why they matter. (Special thanks to Darcy Pattison, who first introduced me to the way sounds help create meaning.)

Today, we start with vowels. In English there are five vowels, right? A, e, i, o, and u.

Well, yes and no. There are five vowel letters. But in most English dialects there are 15 distinct vowel sounds. (The following list is entirely Kimberlee-centric; I included only those vowel sounds that I could distinguish as separate sounds, which is why only 13 are listed—I hear no difference in the sounds of “the” and “but” or of “cause” and “cop.” If you do, by all means, stick them back in!)

High Energy Vowels

• long e (as in tree)
• short i (as in sit)
• long a (as in say)

These are high sounds, spoken in the top of the mouth, with the face pulled taut. Try it. Say those sounds. Feel where they are in your mouth, what your face does as you say them. Feel their energy.

Midrange Vowels

• long i (as in glide)
• short e (pen)
• short a (cat)
• oi (toy)
• ow (cow)

These sounds are spoken in the middle of the mouth, with the face more relaxed. Go ahead. Say them. Feel where they are in your mouth, how your face relaxes as you go down that list.

Low Energy Vowels

• short o (cop)
• short u (but)
• long o (bone)
• short oo (book)
• long oo (tooth)

These are low sounds, spoken in the bottom of the mouth with the face relaxed. One more time. Say them. Feel them in your mouth, your face.

Okay, so this is all very interesting (okay, so it’s only interesting if you’re a total word nerd like me, but I’ll assume if you’re reading this that you, in fact, are), but who cares? How does it affect one’s writing?

Let’s look at how knowing about vowel sounds and their effects on our physiology (and thus our psychology) can make our writing stronger. Here’s the original version of the first sentence of chapter four of my novel:

The autumn I was seventeen, the nightmares were particularly frequent.

This sentence starts off an intense chapter, in which the narrator is nearly scared out of her mind—but though the sentence tells us a few things (the narrator’s age, the time of year, and that she’s suffering from bad dreams), it’s not, ahem, particularly compelling.

So, I decided to use these vowel sounds to revise it. I wanted to use as many high energy vowels as I could. Right away that got rid of every word but seventeen and frequent.

Now, the most important word in the sentence is nightmare, but it doesn’t have any high-energy vowel sounds. The only synonym I could think of was dream—and while the long e sound contributes high energy, dream doesn’t have the same connotations as nightmare. To use dream, I needed a strong verb that would make clear what kind of dreams these are. I came up with plagued (long a!).

Then I toyed with the rest of the sentence, trying to give it a few more high-energy sounds (there are a total of seven; eight if you pronounce the autumn as thee autumn). The revised version reads:

In the autumn of my eighteenth year, the dreams plagued me.

How’s that for a whole lot stronger? And all I did was tinker with the vowel sounds! Woot!

It was true. By my own novice writer’s standard, I had arrived: something I wrote was going to be published with my name on the cover! It was a lifelong dream come true. I was ecstatic.

And then, in October last year, my book was published. It’s a beautiful book (I kiss the feet of the designers) and I’m proud of it. But here’s the thing: if Doug is right that publication is the writer’s version of the NBA, then publishing one book with one small press is the equivalent of bench warming. And the problem with bench warming is that no one sees you play. The big name big shots are out there making the baskets and winning the game, and you’re sitting on the sidelines, hoping your coach will put you in. And of course, he doesn’t. Because you’re a benchwarmer. And that’s what benchwarmers do: they warm the bench.

I am not sure what I was expecting to happen upon publication. It’s not like I consciously thought I would be a different person—a published writer person—or that my life would look dramatically different. But I must have been expecting something, because whatever it was, it hasn’t happened.

In fact, nothing in my life has changed except that I can now find myself on Amazon. Big whoop. (Okay, it is a big whoop, but you can only do that so many times before it gets seriously stale.)

I still have frizzy hair, nasal congestion, seemingly endless laundry, children who are sometimes disrespectful (don’t they know who I am? I’m a published writer!), and the responsibility of getting dinner on the table every night. I mean, did I really expect that those things would change simply because I now had a book to my name?

I can’t have been that naive, surely. But I do think I expected that being a published writer would lend a sense of glamour to my days, make me feel more significant and important and worthwhile than I did in my pre-publication days. But it hasn’t. Even if you have a book with your name on the cover sitting on your desk, frizzy hair is still not glamorous, and nasal congestion is less so.

No wonder I felt deflated.

So now I’m back to the grindstone, revising my novel, writing a proposal for another non-fiction book, trying to sell articles to magazine editors who don’t want to buy them. Sometimes, post-publication, I wonder why I insist on doing this. I’m not making any money, my hair is still frizzy, and thus far only 1800 people in the whole of the U.S., the U.K., and Canada have bought my book. Clearly, this is not a glamorous profession.

But I can’t help it. The words come, the characters cry out to be made real, and I have to heed their voices, write them down.

I may be a bench-warmer to the end of my days. Most writers are. (And who am I to think I’ll somehow be different?) But even if I have to sit on the bench for the rest of my life and watch other writers get all the attention and the accolades, I’ll still try. I’ll still practice, writing that sentence, that paragraph, that scene over and over again until I get it right. And one day, please God, it will be my turn to play to a crowd.

In the meantime, I’m going to see what I can do about my hair.

The first thing I noticed about this book is that it provides an excellent example of bridging conflict. I’d read about bridging conflict in a couple of the writing books I’ve read, but I didn’t really understand what it was (probably because I’d never read any of the novels used as examples in the aforementioned writing books)–until now.

The Black Cauldron opens with POV character Taran trying to wash the oracular pig, Hen Wen. Up rides a tattered young knight who arrogantly orders Taran to do his bidding. Taran flings a few well-chosen insults at the rude rider, who then flings Taran into the mud.

This squabble between Taran and Ellidyr is not the central conflict of the book, but it captures our interest long enough to keep us reading till we get to the main conflict: the quest for the black cauldron. That is bridging conflict. When you can’t start with the main conflict, you create a secondary conflict to grab the reader and get her into the story as quickly as possible and you keep that conflict (or another) going until you can get to the main conflict. (Alexander sets up the cauldron quest, which is the book’s central conflict, by the end of the first chapter.)

Here’s the thing, though: the bridging conflict that Alexander sets up between Taran and Ellidyr persists throughout the book–it even causes several of the large events in the story–and is not resolved until the end. It is not merely a plot device to hook the reader. It is an integral part of the novel. (Writers, take note!)

And that’s why this book was so good: nothing was wasted.

That, and it had a satisfying ending.

That richly satisfying ending transfigured the whole rest of the book, which I’d found a bit of a slog while I was reading.

As I ruminated why I’d felt this way, I realized that only the narrator hinged all the various subplots together, which made the book feel really disconnected and scattered. (This may have been the author’s intent, but as a reader I found it off-putting and distracting.)

But in spite of the slog and the randomness of the story, I’m actually glad I was stuck with no other reading material, because it meant I got to read that beautiful ending. I just wish the first 200 pages of the book had been as compelling and powerful.

Moral: All subplots must relate to the main plot and to each other in multiple places. Otherwise the story feels disjointed, the subplots seem tacked on, and the book feels thin. The connections among plot and subplots can be symbolic or visual (recurring images, for instance), but they must be clear, and they need to appear early on and keep building throughout the novel, so it feels like a tightly woven whole.

I read and canoed and read and hiked and read and played games and read. With my kids I read Mr. Popper’s Penguins and James and the Giant Peach. On my own I read half a dozen books, most of which shall remain nameless because they were disappointing and I don’t want to offend the authors.

I’ll write more about my summer reading later, but for now let’s just get my biggest disappointment out of the way, the book I thought was going to be the literary equivalent of a chick flick but wasn’t—because the hero and heroine didn’t get together!!!

As a reader, I was angry. I read 350 pages, road this whole roller coaster of a novel, and they don’t get together? Are you kidding?

No, the author was not kidding. I read the ending twice just to make sure I’d understood (and then I wrote a much more satisfactory one, a practice I highly recommend when you love a book but hate its ending).

Still, I can’t say I’m sorry I read it, because as a writer, I learned a very important lesson: the whole book matters. I was totally engaged in this book, devoured every word, couldn’t put it down, laughed, cried—and then the last few pages ruined it all, casting their shadow backward over everything that came before.

As a writer, I learned that I can’t afford to lose my readers, not even on page 347 of 350 pages. Good to know.

But as I worked, I was held in the hand of God, my work inspired by the Spirit of God breathing life into the words that sometimes poured generously across the page and sometimes had to be wrenched and wrestled there.

Let me be specific. My book is an introduction to the church year. Each chapter corresponds to one of the eight major seasons or days of the Christian calendar. The two chapters I was most dreading were Epiphany and Pentecost because these are not seasons but rather single days, and I wondered how I would ever find enough to say about them to fill a chapter.

The Epiphany chapter, particularly, gave me fits. I wrote and found nothing usable, so I wrote again with the same result. It took me 12 of my 16 hours to even find a gem I could use to provide direction for the chapter. But once I did, the writing flowed, and in just a few days I was able to finish the whole chapter, piecing in material I’d written—and written off—in those frustrating days of what seemed like wasted writing time.

Months later, when I got my editor’s comments back, guess which chapter he wanted me to significantly revise? Yep, Epiphany. He particularly wanted me to change the opening story and suggested moving one of two anecdotes from within the chapter to its beginning. Again this chapter gave me fits. I went through eight drafts, using various iterations of my editor’s suggestions before one line—one line!—from the chapter morphed into a story, and that story fit the themes of the chapter far better than I could have ever dreamed.

As I look back, I see dozens of instances like this one, where I felt like I was getting nowhere, banging my head against a wall of words, none of which were yielding to let me through to the road I knew was on the other side. But all that head-banging was not wasted, however painful it was at the time.

I think often of Jesus’ words to his disciples after they feed the 5000: “Gather up the fragments, that nothing may be lost” (John 6:12). Indeed, nothing was. Nothing is. Amazing, that.