Tag: resilience

Posted in adventure, Adventure Fiction, Coming-of-Agency Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

DEMYSTIFYING THE CREATION OF A NOVEL

Posted on by Rhonda Wiley-Jones

IDEA CREATION

Idea creation is often mysterious and vague. But I can recount the two specific events that led to the creation of my protagonist, Fiona Weston, Song of Herself.

The first. I took a walk in Spirit Lake, Iowa, after conducting a workshop in the early 1990s. I meandered down a lane of houses built on the lake. One house had a large letter, F, encircled on the side of the garage—like you see on ranches in Texas.

My imagination leapt to the attic of that garage with an old trunk and a woman named, Fiona, who was going through the trunk with a young girl at her side. They were reliving Fiona’s life.

The second. Several weeks later, I woke up from a dream in which my fantasy Iowa woman, Fiona, stood dressed in an outfit that looked like it was from India. I didn’t know what it was until weeks later when I described it to a Pakistani friend, who said it was a salwar kameez.

The morning I awoke from that dream, it continued to unfold in my mind during the next several waking hours. The skeleton of a story. It clung to me as a baby monkey clings to its mother.

A NOVEL IN THE MAKING

In the coming weeks, I wrote a three-page story for my writing group. They informed me that it was definitely a novel. There was too much there for a short story.

I balked and brought them an expanded ten pages and later twenty-five pages to show them I could tell the tale in short form. They insisted it was a novel and Fiona was begging me to tell her story.

In coming years, I took a novel writing class at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival in Wayne Johnson’s class. During my one-on-one with him, he informed me I didn’t have a 300-word novel, but a saga, one that could yield 600 pages. I won’t print my reply.

THE CURRENT BOOK, SONG OF HERSELF

In the end, the book turned into a 480-page book. If you have the book and are reading it, you may be interested to know the story took new twists and turns in the writing process. New characters and events beyond the skeleton grew out of the writing process.

My dream life set Fiona on a journey of a lifetime.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM NOVELS?

Journeys of this importance create chances to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts. They show us what we can become.

We can build confidence (self-assurance and the ability to make decisions for ourselves), resilience (adaptability and flexibility, the ability to the bend and sway as life throws obstacles), and agency (the ability to organize our lives around what is best for us, choose who and what we take with us, and take action to make these things happen).

These are things all individual need to learn for themselves as they mature. But it is especially critical for women (in our culture, which makes them second guess themselves too often) to take the reins of their lives to give the world the best they have to offer.

Fiona’s journey opened her eyes to different ways to live, seized her mind to realize she could think with an open mind, and captured her heart to know she could be who she is and to live openly and unafraid.

HERE’S HOW TO ORDER, SONG OF HERSELF

The novel’s protagonist, Fiona Weston, an Iowa horsewoman in work boots and trousers, sails to India in 1906 from San Francisco to discover her journey is not the quest for which she had yearned, nor the escape from those at home who ridiculed her unconventional ways. Fiona’s journey is fraught with obstacles that create a sturdy sense of self.

Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1639885501

Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BDK7Q54J/

If you read the book, please leave a short review of two or three sentences on Amazon, what you liked, what you found intriguing, or what you discovered about yourself in reading the book. Thanks, so much!!!

Posted in Growing Up, Spirituality, Travel

A Mother’s Guidance Affords Agency to a Young Daughter 

Posted on by Rhonda Wiley-Jones

 

My mom is the mother; and I am the young daughter (many years ago).

I’m going to be self-indulgent in this post and selfishly promote my book. I may have been the protagonist in my story, but mother was the main character in my life, as well as the other main character in the coming-of-age memoir I published three years ago, At Home in the World: Travel Stories of Growing Up and Growing Away (paperback version) or Kindle version.

As I have explored the concept of agency in human development here on my blog for several weeks and go further with an example from my own At Home in the World: Travel Stories of Growing Up and Growing Awaylife. I know Mother provided the “curriculum” for me to grow assertive, self-reliant and unafraid—in other words, to develop a sense of agency, in order to be the CEO of my own life. Travel trips, living in other cultures, and being on my own all generated agency that has served me well into adulthood.

HER STORY

Mom propelled me into the world, where she had rarely gone herself. She married two weeks out of high school and had me 21 months later. By age twenty-three she had two baby boys in addition to me. She and Dad situated our family in Piggott, Arkansas (northeast Arkansas) on a plot of land and in a house they built and moved into the month before I was born. At age thirty-seven she became the administrator of the nursing home that she and dad built with another couple and opened in 1966. She became the second largest employer in town.

Mother’s domain extended to the First Baptist Church one mile from our house. She taught Sunday school forever. She held every position possible in the women’s missionary union (WMU). She was leader to different children’s programs. She sang in the choir. She served on many committees and chaired most at some time over the years. And she always showed at potlucks with tasty treats.

Our family did not travel much, took very vacations. Mom and Dad were busy working, raising us kids, and active in the life of our church.

MY STORY

In first grade, my teacher placed a seashell to my ear and I traveled to the ocean to hear the surf for the first time. My third grade teacher read the adventures of the Box Car Children that I relived each night before dropping off to sleep. I toured the world in fourth grade geography, where I learned Switzerland was a country without its own language and Japan, a country with a language of pictograms I could not read.

But moreover, I built a curiosity about the world at church, through mission studies and missionaries who visited our church. Sometimes religion can narrow our views of the world, but in my case the church expanded my outlook on the world, and in turn developed my worldview.

OUR STORY

Poignantly, my mother launched me into the world, discerning that travel is fundamental to exploring the world, though she had never done so herself. Mom, progressive and enabling by standards then and now, proved to be an instrument of me growing up strong, independent, and resilient. She trusted me, but more than that, she trusted the process of becoming an adult. And she entrusted me into the hands of Jesus Christ in her prayers.

Mother knew what Mark Twain expressed in the “Conclusion” of The Innocents Abroad, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of Men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Before I was twenty-one I took many imaginary trips, along with ones in real time. Travel became my herald, mentor, and shadow. I prized the strength and wisdom that travel offers. And now I relish life’s lessons, learned—those treasured, even those squandered.

I dedicated the book to my mother, Gaye Wiley, wise beyond her experience, who provided me the means to learn about how to make my own decisions; how to act and behave in ways that were caring, compassionate, and smart; as well as, providing a safety net until I had developed sufficient resilience to get up on my own and try again.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, MOM!!!

To purchase the paperback version of my book go to: https://www.createspace.com/4766298

To purchase the Kindle version go to:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JU4WITI