Behind the (Writing) Scenes with…
Ronni Miller, Sarasota Branch
Far From Home
From The Pen Woman, Fall 2020
Alone on the sofa, I stared out the window. Snow-covered Alps were in the distance. I was far from home — in Torino, Italy — and had just become a nonna.
Born premature, my son’s son fared well in his hospital bassinet a few miles away. His other nonna had just left to pick up her teenage granddaughter from school. I waited and thought about the man I had left behind in Florida.
He was young, tall, and muscular and spoke with a West Virginian accent. He had stirred my appetite with his drawl and flirtation I didn’t resist. He was an Adonis.
I picked up my pen and spiral notebook and wrote:
“He is too big, too much like an Adonis to fit into clothes. His form needs to be sculpted out of sleek marble left to admire, photograph. Instead, he walks and talks. Mostly talks. It’s not the voice this time. It’s the words. They shoot arrows directly past my thorns and fences to the heart. No, not love. Not love, of course, but something more to the core. I stand naked, but not undressed.”
Those were the words I wrote that day — and never changed to become the first paragraph of my third novel, “A Woman Of A Certain Age.” I have always started a story or a novel with some incident, sight, feeling, or momentary flash of insight. I’m hooked and want to find out more.
The more is the first draft of the story I tell myself. It’s the first birth and I don’t know how it will end. The story will tell me, as will the characters. Subsequent editing stages hone it, shape it, once I know where it has taken me.
I write autobiographical fiction, as my mentor Arturo Vivante did. He was an Italian-born American novelist (“Truelove Knot”) and short-story author who won the Katherine Anne Porter award for fiction for his opus. We were friends and he reminded me to use my life as a canvas.
In his book, “Writing Fiction,” he says that “one writes to know … if there isn’t this urge, then there is no art.”
This third novel helped me to know what was really important in a love relationship. I have learned from my own writing just what is in my heart, soul, body, and mind — and it has given me answers along with the pleasure of creating a story from passion or reaction.
Ronni Miller has won awards for her fiction and published seven books of fiction and nonfiction. She created Write It Out, a motivational writing program, in 1992 and teaches writing in the United States, Italy, and Bermuda. As a “book midwife” and developmental editor, she has helped numerous writers birth their books.