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| Normandie Fischer |
Writing for me.
What, for an
audience of one?
Les Edgerton (as
quoted in Chip MacGregor’s recent blog
post on finding your writer’s voice) suggests that we write for us. That we
don’t talk down or up or around as if to an ideal reader, but that we imagine
ourselves as the one picking up our book. As I read his words, I thought of the
talk I gave last week in Portland, Oregon, on “Writing the Crossover Book.”
My intended
reader has always been the me I used to be. (Although the me I am watches over
her shoulder.) That me questioned everything and had no clue God existed
outside of all that shouting from nature—you know, the sunsets and the
sunrises, the trees and the rocks, the sea . . . oh, yes, the sea. That me was
rather appalled by what I’d seen of church goers. Their behavior didn’t
resemble their message, not from my side of the room. My atheist mother was
kind and loving. Those other folk gossiped and judged and condemned. Some of
them were racist. Some cruel.
“You need God,”
the grandmother I barely knew said. Well, if I did, he’d better not look like
those pew-sitters or rote-spouters. A God who still parted Red Seas? Maybe. A
God who transcended man’s inadequacies, who had answers for this skeptic? He’d
have to be a whole lot more than what I’d seen by my twenty-seventh year.
He was. He showed
up and showed off. No, I didn’t turn into a perfect person, but I found a perfect
God, one who hears and cares and delivers from bondage all who cry out to him.
I am my audience. The me of my twenties and
thirties and forties and fifties. (Well, that gave it away, didn’t it?) The me
who once questioned, who failed and still fails, and who has been yanked out of
the mire again and again.
I don’t write for
the ones who have answers, but for the ones who crave answers—even if they don’t yet know the questions. I write
for the hurting and the broken—even if they don’t yet recognize their
brokenness.
I write about the
real, the pain, the guilt, even if some of my stories flit in frothy bits of
fun as they chase what-ifs. I want my stories to touch hearts like mine. My
voice is the me crying to be heard above the noises that would blot us out and
press us down.
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| About the Author |
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| Becalmed by Normandie Fischer |
I sail and I write. I also edit (as Acquisitions and Executive Editor of Wayside Press) and mess about at home in North Carolina with my husband and mother when we’re not heading off on board our lovely ketch, Sea Venture. Two of my women’s fiction books release this spring and summer, Becalmed and Sailing out of Darkness.
Becalmed, from Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas.
When a Southern woman with a broken heart falls for a widower with a broken boat, it's anything but smooth sailing.
Connect with Normandie Fischer
Blog - www.writingonboard.com
Website - www.normandiefischer.com
Becalmed, from Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas.
When a Southern woman with a broken heart falls for a widower with a broken boat, it's anything but smooth sailing.
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| Sailing out of Darkness by Normandie Fischer |
Sailing out of Darkness, from WhiteFire Publishing.
An unexplained apparition, wanderings through Italy, and mayhem back home push four lives toward their day of reckoning. Sailing out of Darkness is the haunting story of mistakes and loss and the grace that abounds through forgiveness.
Blog - www.writingonboard.com
Website - www.normandiefischer.com
