Guest blog post | Lisa William Kline, author of One Week of You + One Week of the Heart
CREATIVE BLOG
TOUR - ONE WEEK OF YOU & ONE WEEK OF THE HEART
Guest
Post with Lisa Williams Kline for Diary of a Book Girl
Thanks
so much for having me, Diary of a Book
Girl!
When
I was in second grade, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and wrote my first
series --- The Adventures of Little Horse
and Little Lamb – on the wide-ruled paper we used to have that left the
spaces for illustration at the top. When I was in about fourth grade, I started
writing a novel. It was about a brother and sister who go on a barefoot quest
through the snow-filled mountains to get penicillin for a younger brother who
was sick. Why did they have to trek through the snowy mountains barefoot, you ask?
Why, indeed? This was an ever so small kink in my plot that I still needed to
work out. Anyway, after this momentous literary achievement I became distracted
by boys and socializing and didn’t find my way back to my real dream – writing
– for many years.
Lizzy,
the main character of One Week of the
Heart and One Week of You, like
me, has a dream. Hers is to be a doctor. She and her best friend Kelly share
that dream. But while Kelly is laser-focused, Lizzy gets distracted. By
cheerleading and by boys. Again, sort of like me when I was that age. Lizzy
makes a lot of mistakes, but she is good-hearted, and she wants to do what’s
right. And I do have faith that she will find her way back to her dream. But
her distractions along the way are, I hope, entertaining!
The
roots for the story of One Week of You
were real events in our daughters’ lives during high school. They really did
have to carry flour babies for health class. And one year there really were
three bomb threats in one week at our daughter’s school. I had wanted to write
about both of those events, one sort of funny and one very serious, and so I
took on the challenge of combining them in One
Week of You. I also added a memory from my own adolescence – my first
crush. I tried to recapture that feeling of being absolutely swept away by the
new guy at school.
And
the germ for the story of my novella One
Week of the Heart somewhat comes from a time when I attended a summer
program in high school. My parents made me go, even though I wished I could stay
home and hang out with my friends at the pool. I ended up having a fantastic
experience at this summer program, though. It was a film program, with
incredibly inspiring teachers, and everyone had to make a movie as their final
project. I opted to try animation. I did an animated film of the Three Dog
Night song “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” with a nerdy cartoon character going to
a huge wild party and being overwhelmed. I drew probably a hundred cartoons for
this three-minute song, and my dad helped me tape the film camera to the
basement ceiling so we could take still single frames for the animation. I have
such a wonderful memory of working together with my dad on that film. My
parents kept it for a long time.
One Week of the Heart is totally fictionalized,
but the germ of the story comes from that surprising and influential summer
program many years ago.
I
hope some of you are inspired to read One
Week of You and One Week of the
Heart. At least for a short time, One
Week of the Heart is free!
Comments
Post a Comment