We're delighted to again welcome Karen
Albright Lin to Chiseled in
Rock!
Karen consults and edits for published and
yet-to-be published writers of fiction, nonfiction, and book proposals. She
writes in a number of genres and conducts writing workshops in various venues,
including on cruise ships.
If you missed her five previous blogs
regarding Teaching through the Islands, you might enjoy reading them before
this installment, as she first shared her preparations in anticipation of teaching
classes while on board her latest cruise, discussed some of the downsides to teaching on a cruise,
introduced us to new tablemates and the private beach on
Moorea, how she was bit in Bora Bora, and then she
described her first class while teaching en route to Fiji.
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Each time I
return from teaching at sea I have new stories to tell. My cruise through the islands was no
exception. From Tahiti, Moorea, Bora
Bora and on toward Fiji
I collected dubious rumors, true tales and character sketches. These on-board experiences mirrored my second
lecture, Have a Great Story to Tell?
In most
genres, readers seek, above all, to follow characters.
And we
populate our books with complicated people like those we meet in real
life. While waiting for my husband to
finish up with the mahjong group, I learned one new friend was painfully
OCD. She admitted her fitted sheets
don’t look fitted after folding and that her morning ritual takes hours--most
of it unpacking and packing her makeup bag just so. To further complicate her world, she had to
cope with the aftermath of being a jury member in a case that included over one
hundred counts of child molestation. She
held back the tears at our lunch as she felt driven to wash her hands.
She would
make a great protagonist. I empathized
with her. She was noble, flawed, and had
goals. It would be painful yet
enlightening to be in her skin for the length of a book.
There were
many faceless antagonists on board. A
cough was going around. We met several
people battling the pain of cancer and the burden of pulling along oxygen
tanks. The weather wasn’t
cooperating. Yet it was the human
antagonists who made stories relatable: the woman who stole and wore another
woman’s dress, the DJ who refused to play anything newer than 1970s because he
wanted to clear the place of people who might stay past 11:00 pm so he could
call it a night, and the man who made fun of an entertainer who wore an outfit
that was super-snug over her large body rather than commenting about her lovely
voice.
Great
storytelling creates danger, tension, reversals, and key plot points.
Because the
ship was rockin’and rollin’ in a big way, nauseating some, entertaining others,
a rumor went around that one of the stabilizers had gone out. One of our entertainers fell off her
acrobatic prop and onto the hard stage, ending the show early. Another entertainer’s jokes flopped. All of it short story material, right?
The wide variety of characters on the ship
broke most stereotypes about Aussies.
They weren’t all alligator wrestlers or Nicole Kidman beautiful. Nor did they survive on Fosters Beer or live
on vegemite and barbeque. They didn’t
have to dodge kangaroos in the cities.
They each had a unique voice that made me care about his or her
adventures. Singers sold their CDs
outside the big theater. One performer
was a shrinking type, seemed pitiful, embarrassed about his career coming down
to this, calling himself “washed up.”
Another, head-held-high, promoted himself as a singer, horse whisperer,
and ukulele expert. Hey, why not?
We writers,
even as late as AFTER we’ve written our entire stories, discover our
theme.
My theme for
this trip could well have been that travel is a nuisance: showering in a cubby
hole, frowning over stormy weather, scrambling to find restrooms when ashore,
driving on a different side of the street, and learning how many ways people
try to part me from my money.
But I prefer
my theme be: travel brings out my passionate side, the
part of me that loves to dance in a Jacuzzi, eat blood sausage, schmooze with
cruise staff, and meet writers who are in the midst of living and writing
stories I’m eager to read or see on the big screen.
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Thank you, Karen,
for sharing your travels and for teaching us what it's really like to teach
on-board a cruise ship! Join us on August 13th for the next in the series: Fiji but the Wrong Port! (I won’t
mention it, but I will.)
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