WRITING SPACES

                                       by  DVORA  WAYSMAN

How do ideas form?  How do you transform thoughts into words that become stories and poems?  I have often been asked these questions, and my real reply is: “magic and miracles”, but it’s not an answer that would satisfy anyone but another writer.  Yet composers are rarely asked: “Where does your music come from?” as listeners hear a haunting melodic refrain or the awe-inspiring crashing crescendo of a symphony or concerto.  They may query an artist if it’s a “real” place when they see a magical landscape forming in oils on his canvas, but usually the questions are reserved for writers.

I was a teacher of Creative Writing for 35 years.  I always quoted a two-line poem I heard as a child  from my older sister (author unknown),

            “Writing is dreaming, head in the skies.

             Reading is sharing another man’s eyes.”

I was 7 when my sister read it to me, and at that moment, my writer’s soul was born.  I felt I had all these secrets I wanted to share, and I wanted my readers to be able to see, hear, smell, touch and taste them … to “share my eyes.”

I have written and published more than 5,000 articles, poems and essays in my life, and fourteen books.  In one historical novel (“The Pomegranate Pendant” published by  Chaim Mazo  Publishing, both in English and Hebrew)  I wrote in the first person as a 14-year-old child bride from Yemen who came to live in Jerusalem in the Holy Land 130 years ago.  For the duration of writing that novel, I WAS  Mazal ben-Yechiya even though I had never visited or lived in Yemen, and my Jerusalem is of a different era.

In “Back of Beyond” (published by Pitspopany), I was a 12-year-old boy named Danny

visiting Ayers Rock in Australia’s north and having all kinds of adventures with an

aboriginal boy named Muri.  In my novel “Esther” (published by H.C.I. in Florida) I am a London journalist named Max involved with a three-decades- long love affair with Esther even though in truth I am a woman who was married for 65 years and have 1 8grandchildren and 30 great-grandchildren..    My “writing space” involves vivid imagination, nostalgia, reminisinces,, dreams both fulfilled and unfulfilled; songs I sang; jokes I laughed at; the pain of loss; the joy of sharing.

I don’t  write at an orderly desk overlooking mountains or lakes.  I do finish up working at my computer, but  the Muse is always with me  –  in my dreams at night; when I glimpse a stranger with a beautiful face, or even one lined with broken commandments; when  a great-grandchild offers me a tiny hand with love and trust;  when I see a star in a black velvet sky or the dewdrop  that nestles in the heart of a rose.    I write out of love or of pain, out of tenderness or passion.  If I am breathing, I am writing.

So where is my writing space?   I guess it is in my heart.

I am always happy to hear your comments, or to help you (free) with any writing problems. Contact me direct at dwaysman@gmail.com