Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Writing for Me by Normandie Fischer


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.

About the Author
Becalmed
by Normandie Fischer
About 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.​

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.​

Connect with Normandie Fischer
Blog - www.writingonboard.com
Website - www.normandiefischer.com