How do I end this? Wrapping your story up when you don't have an ending

I'm not a pantser, but if you are, here's a tip from an extreme outliner to help you figure out how to end your story. (By the way, my favorite ending type is 3. 1 is too linear, and the kind of thing I wrote when I was 10. I can do way better than that. 2 is sad, and I hate sad endings. 3 is just right.)

Okay, here's your basic plot with your three basic options for ending a story: character wants something. Character encounters obstacles to achieving goal. Obstacles, obstacles, obstacles. Conflict comes to a peak. 

Now your ending options: 

1) Character overcomes obstacles and gets what they want. 

2) Obstacles prove to be too overwhelming. Character either gives up, accepting the status quo, or dies. 

3) Character gives up original goal after discovering something else matters more to them. Character gets new goal, and very often the original goal also comes to the character as a side effect of switching goals. 

Hope this helps.

Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--W is for Who, What, Where, When, Why (and How)

From an "ugly" stepsister's
perspective

I suspect the most widely known rule when it comes to writing an article is that you must answer the six W questions: Who, What, Where, When, Why (and How). 

Answer these six questions, and you’ll have a complete article. Don’t answer these six questions, and your readers will be left asking questions you should have answered.

Fictional stories answer these six questions, too, but there’s one very important difference: the answers for an article are supposed to be based on fact, but the answers for a work of fiction can be anything the author chooses. 

Cinderella, for example, has an evil stepmother and evil stepsisters in the original fairy tale, but in your version? You can do anything you want.

This Cinderalla is running away
from the prince

The truth is every existing story has an infinite number of story possibilities. All you have to do is change the answers to the six questions.

Who? In the original, it’s Cinderella, her evil stepmother and evil stepsisters, her fairy godmother, and the prince. But what if you make one of the stepsisters the main character? Or the fairy godmother? Or what if Cinderella isn’t so good? What if she’s kind of mean and she chooses to sleep in the cinders to embarrass her step family?

What? In the original, she gets magic clothes, goes to the ball, falls in love with the prince, loses a glass slipper, and is found to be the prince’s true love when the glass slipper fits her. But what if she doesn’t have a fairy godmother, or magic clothes, or any of that stuff? What if she doesn’t even like the prince? What if she doesn’t want to go to the ball?

All she wants is to get rid of the
curse of obedience

Where? The original takes place in a fairytale land. But what if it didn’t? What if it took place in the 21^st century? (Time is a part of the setting, not the “when.”) What if it took place on another planet? What if it took place in the Wild West?

When? The story begins with Cinderella being mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters. But what if it started before all of that happened? Or what if it started after? And how much after? What if starts with Cinderella trying to adjust to a royal life and being unable to accept how the servants at the castle are treated? What if it deals with political intrigue behind the scenes as noblemen and women try to get rid of Cinderella? Or what if it skips ahead a couple of decades as the daughter of Cinderella and the prince has doubts about marrying a prince?

Why? Cinderella gets her happy ending because she’s good and obedient and doesn’t complain despite all the hardships she endures. But what if she isn’t so good and obedient? Or what if she is obedient, but not by choice?

How? The “how” of a story is about how the story is told: in other words, its style or genre. Cinderella is fairytale, but it doesn’t have to be. What if you turned it into a mystery? I mean, how did Cinderella’s parents die (or at least disappear) anyway? What if you turned it into a screwball comedy? Or into a science fiction novel with robots?

Six questions, infinite answers, and infinite story possibilities.  

Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge‑‑S is for Stories (and where to find them)

As many writers will tell you, the first rule of being a good writer is to read, and read, and read some more.

But I like to think it goes beyond that. You can’t simply read like any other reader; you have to read like a writer. You have to take apart what you read and figure out what works and what doesn’t and why. You have to take what you’ve learned, and you have to apply it to your own writing.

I also think it goes beyond stories written in books. There are stories in every medium imaginable. There are stories in movies, TV shows, songs, and art. But it goes beyond that, too. The truth is there are stories pretty much everywhere you look.

In Toren the Teller’s Tale, young Toren learns that every person, every object, and even forces like the wind have their own unique stories. If she can read a thing’s complete story, that thing becomes a part of her. She can control it, but only if that thing wants to be controlled. And when she fully knows a thing’s story, she can retell it in a single word that brings that thing to life. This is her unique magic, the magic of the storyteller.

While Toren the Teller’s Tale is an epic fantasy, there’s a part of it that’s, well, not a fantasy at all. The truth is that every person and every object does have a story. You have to crack it open like an egg, take it apart and figure it out to discover the story hidden within.

Just pick up any object, the object closest to you. Who made that? Where did it come from? How did it get to you? Who were the people who affected or were affected by its journey? And isn’t it interesting to think that someone at the start of its journey in some small way affected you at this stage of its journey? You’re connected to each other through this object. You’re connected to every person along its path. And that’s just one object. Look around you. How many people affected or were affected by the objects just in your immediate vicinity? And role did they play in that object’s story?

But it’s even more than that. Because every person, every object, holds millions of possible stories. How could this object have arrived here? Where could it have gone instead? And what could happen to it in the future? How would that affect the people involved? The potential stories are infinite. And if you believe the Many Worlds theory of quantum physics, what’s even crazier is that they could all be true, somewhere out in our amazing universe.

In his autobiographical book, Rewrites: A Memoir, playwright Neil Simon says (I’m paraphrasing), “Writer’s block isn’t when a writer has no ideas; it’s when a writer has so many ideas and doesn’t trust himself to choose the right one.”

With so many stories around us all the time, that truly is a dilemma. How do you choose the right one?

I like improv’s answer. There is no right and no wrong choice. There’s just a choice, and you have to make it or let the audience make it for you. Whatever the choice is, you have to commit to it 100%. I guess you could say the only wrong choice is not choosing or not committing to what’s been chosen.

I see dozens of stories around me every day, and I throw almost all of them out.

It’s not because I haven’t committed to a choice. It’s because I am already 100% committed to choices I’ve already made, stories I have thought out in my mind or outlined on paper but haven’t had time to turn into fully formed manuscripts. Like the persona in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I “have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep.”   

But the stories are there, inside my head. Don’t ask me what I’m thinking. You probably don’t want to know.

I once sat with a guy near a bonfire and watched the ashes float in the hot air above the flames. He leaned in and said, “You’re a writer. I bet you’re thinking something about the poetic beauty of the fire.” I smiled and nodded, although what I was really thinking was “Wouldn’t it be funny if some prehistoric caveman who was obsessed with flight saw those ashes and thought he could fly if he could somehow sew or glue the ashes together? And after a few failed attempts, it might occur to him that it had something to do with the fire. He’d wonder if he could fly if he could just somehow throw himself on the fire at just the right angle. Maybe he could test that theory by tossing a friend over it. Hey, maybe that’s what gave J.M. Barrie the idea for pixie dust!”

See? There's a reason why I don't tell the stories I don't tell and focus instead on the ones I do.

Speaking of which, I should get back to those stories. The second book in the Legend of Gilbert the Fixer, here I come! 

Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--M is for Magic (Is it real?)

Picture a scene. Harry Potter is playing Quidditch with his friends as the sun begins to set. The young wizards zoom and loop through the sky, chasing the winged golden snitch that remains ever out of grasp.

As night falls, a figure appears in silhouette on the horizon, her long hair flowing in the wind. She’s holding a staff and wearing a long cloak. An extreme close-up reveals the cloak is made of colorful patches. The young woman, still in silhouette, runs her fingers through her hair and raises her hand. There’s a sound, like a woman talking, but the words spoken aren’t of this world.

The young woman glows, and we can see her for the first time. Her hair is dark, her skin pale, and her clothes are colorful.

The dramatic music rises as we once again see Harry trying to catch the snitch. The camera shifts to the snitch itself and follows it zooming straight toward something. The music rises and suddenly ends as the snitch flies into the young woman’s outstretched hand.

“The time for games is over,” she says.

The screen fades to black. Enchanting music starts. The words “This time the magic is real . . .” appear on the screen and then fade. The last screen shows the words “Toren the Teller’s Tale” as the music comes to an end.

Sometimes I think of parts of my books as scenes in a film. This is the trailer that I like to imagine for the film version of Toren the Teller’s Tale. Sure, it will probably never exist in real life. But anything can be real in my imagination.

Toren the Teller’s Tale is about real magic. It’s about the magic of stories: the magic that lets you see and hear and touch and taste and smell a story, the magic that transports you to different worlds that could only exist in your imagination, the magic that lets you experience what it’s like to be a boy wizard or a hobbit or a young girl who loves telling stories and is about to discover the magic they hold. Toren the Teller’s Tale is about a kind of magic you know is real. You’ve felt it every time you’ve found yourself swept away by a story.

Those who aren’t very familiar with fantasy and science fiction often think there’s a clear divide between the two genres. Fantasy involves wizards and magic spells and magical creatures, like dragons. Science fiction involves the future and space ships and alien planets and things that could scientifically exist one day.

But there’s more overlap than most people realize. Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern books, for example, have dragons, but they’re science fiction.  Most people would say that Star Wars is a science fiction series, but never say that to a science-fiction purist. Sure, it has aliens, androids and spaceships, but it also has a form of magic called “the force” as well as Jedis, who are basically wizards that live on other planets, have robot companions, and fly spaceships. Star Wars regularly breaks the rules of science, which is fine as long as you don’t call it science fiction.

There are some who have pointed out that the Many Worlds theory of quantum mechanics basically means that all fantasy is actually science fiction, which is true.

That’s a topic that comes up in a conversation between Gilbert Garfinkle and Dungeon Master Dave in Why My Love Life Sucks, the first book in the Gilbert the Fixer series. Gilbert, the young aspiring mad scientist, can’t accept that he’s been turned into a vampire. His life is supposed to be a science-fiction novel. How is it possible that it now contains an urban fantasy trope? In his mind, that’s not scientifically possible.  It makes no sense. Dungeon Master Dave points out that the Many Worlds theory says otherwise. Because if an infinite number of worlds exist, some of those worlds must have vampires, as well as Gilberts that don’t believe in their existence.

The first book in the series shows Gilbert mostly grappling with his strange, new, unscientific predicament. By the second book (Why It Still Mega Bites, which should be out later this year), he’s come to accept that “magic is just science we don’t yet understand.”

Of course, he wasn’t talking about Quidditch.

L is for Love Stories (And how to write one when you don’t read romance)

Sometimes I have ideas for books in genres I don’t read. For example, I read fantasy, science fiction, and all kinds of humor and comedy. I don’t read thrillers, but I have a great idea for a romantic thriller with a little twist of science fiction. Except for the science fiction part, I have no idea how to write it. I also don’t read serious romance. Bridget Jones is awesome, and so are the Georgia Nicolson books. But those are romantic comedies. Serious romance? I generally find it laughable, and not in a good way.

And yet I’ve written a mostly serious YA romance. I even won third place in a national contest with it. So how did that happen? 

The idea for Ride of Your Life came for me soon after I heard about the Great Adventure Haunted Castle fire that killed eight teenagers in an amusement park in New Jersey on May 11th 1984, almost exactly 32 years ago. It was my way of trying to give a pointless tragedy a happy ending. I knew from the start that it was going to be the story of a love greater than death. But I didn’t want it to be a typical romance. That was never a genre that appealed to me. And it seemed wrong to write a book in a genre I didn’t enjoy reading. So what was I to do?

For a long time, I did nothing. The story was one that stayed in my head and gave me comfort when I needed it. It was a story where death was the beginning, not the end. And sometimes that’s a story I need to hear.

Skip ahead about 25 years. I had trouble deciding what to submit to the Smartwriters’ Write It Now contest for the YA category. I told the members of my critique group, Fantasyweavers, that I had this idea for a story about two teenage ghosts meeting and falling in love in an amusement park. I wrote out the first page, and asked them what they thought. They liked it and encouraged me to write the first chapters I needed to submit. So I did—and the first three chapters of Ride of Your Life won third prize. 

I continued working on it, and a few months later, I submitted it for a critique at a conference. The agent I showed it to liked it, particularly how well I captured a male perspective in the scenes that were shown from Josh’s point of view.

I told that agent, “I have a hard time writing the romantic scenes.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Because romance in books always seems so clichéd. It’s not real. I mean, those kisses in romance novels, no one kisses that way.”

And he told me something that I think about to this day. He said, “If you don’t like writing something, don’t write it.”

At first I thought, “Well, how am I going to write a love story without any of that romantic stuff in it?” But then I realized that wasn’t what he was saying. What he was saying was just because people have been writing romantic scenes one way for decades that doesn’t mean I have to write it that way, too. If it feels wrong to me‑‑if I don’t like writing it that way‑‑I shouldn’t. Instead I should write what feels right to me.

That was so freeing. 

Instead of banging my head trying to write what I thought people expected a romance novel to be, I could just write the story I had in mind. It doesn’t matter if it fits someone else’s label. The only thing that matters is that I’m honest to the story I’m trying to tell.

So that’s why Ride of Your Life is probably different from any love story you’ve ever read. I gave up trying to write a romance novel and instead focused on telling the story of how two teenage ghosts named Tracy and Josh met and fell in love in an amusement park. I liked them. I liked their story. And I liked writing it.

I hope you like reading it, too.

Oh, and if you write romantic thrillers, contact me. Maybe we can write that great book together. I can help with the science fiction twist.

Writing Words for Nerds #AtoZChallenge--I is for Ideas

It only takes two words to inspire an infinite number of story ideas. 

“Where do stories come from?” It’s the question writers get asked most. “Where did you get the idea for your book? What inspired you?”

I think the idea for all fictional stories starts with two short but incredibly powerful words: “What if?” 

There are what-ifs everywhere you look. Every person you meet, every story you read or see or hear, and just about everything you experience or have experienced is full of what-ifs. This is why I completely agree with something that Neil Simon wrote in his autobiographical book Rewrites (I’m paraphrasing), “Writer’s block isn’t when a writer has no ideas. It’s when a writer has so many ideas and doesn’t trust himself to choose the right one.”

There are so many ideas—so many what-ifs—everywhere you look that it seems impossible to me that a writer could ever have no idea what to write about. Why, I write at least a dozen story ideas in my head every day. At least. And I throw them out, because I don’t even have enough time to write the stories I’m already working on, never mind a dozen new ones every day.

A little imagination and two words are all you need to create infinite story ideas.

Here’s an example. Recently I was sitting with my husband in a courtroom, because he had a couple of unfair traffic tickets we wanted to contest. (We reached a compromise with the court, because the police officer who issued the tickets wasn’t available and taking it all the way would have meant my husband taking another day off work, which wasn’t worth the $58 cost of the remaining ticket.) We had to spend about three hours in the courtroom waiting for our turn. My husband thought I might get in trouble for using my cellphone, but even the bailiff was using hers. The first cases brought before the judge were those where defendants had lawyers, as well as drug-related cases that involved already incarcerated defendants. Instead of being brought in, those defendants appeared in the courtroom via some sort of teleconferencing arrangement on a large flat-screen TV.

I leaned in toward my husband and whispered, “I can imagine a story about a woman who comes into court because of a traffic violation and is shocked to see her missing husband on that screen.” My husband loved the idea and continued it. What if the husband was in jail pretending to be someone else? What if he married her while pretending to be someone else? What if he had other wives who had no idea where he was or who he really was? What if after she screamed in court, “that’s my missing husband,” he pretended not to know her? What if he really didn’t know her? What if the husband but had lost his memory in the same accident that led to his incarceration, and while the system believed and had been telling him for a year that he was someone else, she was the only person who could reveal the truth and that he was innocent? What if after his experiences even he isn’t sure she’s telling the truth?

By asking one what-if, I came up with a story idea. And by continuing to ask one what-if after another, my husband was able to hone it into a very interesting story idea. I’m probably never going to use it, because, like I said, I think of and then abandon at least a dozen of these a day. But this little event gave my husband a glimpse into how my mind works when I write a story—and how much fun it is.

And asking what-ifs really is!

Yes, hearing or reading or seeing stories is fun, but it’s even more fun when you’re the one who’s telling yourself the story and you can make it go anywhere you want.

Infinite story ideas are everywhere. All you have to do is ask yourself, “What if?” and then let your imagination do the rest. 

A Passover Miracle

This is my favorite Passover story, one about a real miracle that happened in my mother's family when she was just a girl. I hope you like it, too. 

My mother, Tova Hacohen, was twelve years old in 1948, the year of Israel's War of Independence. 

Before the British even left, Arabic forces surrounded the city of Jerusalem on all sides and laid siege to it. Brave Jewish men lost their lives attempting to bring truckloads of food from the Tel Aviv area to Jerusalem's residents. What little there was had to be rationed, and it wasn't even safe to venture out for the rationed food. Jewish men had to walk with their backs pressed up against the walls of buildings so they would be harder for the snipers to spot, and sometimes fathers lost their lives while trying to bring home something for their hungry children to eat. 

Tova's family--all eight of them, not counting her eldest brother Shmuel who was married and lived near Tel Aviv--got only one loaf of bread a day, a little bit of beans or peas, and a small amount of flour. Because they had small children, they got powdered milk too.

“Drink, drink,” her Imma said.

“I don’t want it, if you can’t have, too,” young Tova replied.

But her Imma would not hear of it. She didn’t care if she didn’t have enough food. The only things that mattered were her children. They always came first.

That year before Passover, the Ashkenazi rabbis permitted Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem to eat Kitniyot, like peas or beans, during the holiday. The rabbis didn’t want anyone to starve because they were trying to keep the Ashkenazi tradition for Passover, which forbids eating legumes. Tova’s family expected to eat only peas, matzo, and a little wine or grape juice over the holiday. It wasn't much, but at least they could try to celebrate the holiday. 

Then they got a surprise. 

Tova’s eldest brother, Shmuel, sent the family a gift.

Shmuel was a member of the Hagannah, which would soon become the army of the new Jewish state. Shmuel found out who was going to attempt to bring food to Jerusalem, and he asked this brave man to help bring something special to his family. Miraculously, that truck made it through. Tova's family received handmade matzos, a few apples and nuts for making Charoset, and--wonders of wonders--a crate with over a hundred eggs!  

Eggs! It was something they hadn't had a chance to eat in a very, very long time. 

A few years before she died, my mother took her grandchildren to the house where she grew up, so they could see it and learn the stories of her childhood. The man she's talking to now lives in the neighborhood. They each know a part of the story, and they are filling each other in. 

Everyone looked forward to it. Family and guests crowded around the dining table on the night of the Seder. Tova's Abba, who was a rabbi, had invited a group of his students, and they were in high spirits. Shmuel’s brother-in-law, Ze’ev, who was also studying in Jerusalem, came too.

There was talking, and learning, and singing. They drank wine and grape juice. They ate matzos, Charoset, eggs, and peas. It wasn’t much, but for them at that time it was a feast. And despite how little they had, the family was more than happy to share it with their guests.  

When the meal was over, Abba’s students sang the rest of the Haggadah. They wanted to do as the rabbis of old did: they wanted to make the Seder last until the sun came up. 

But there was shooting outside.

“Imma!” Tova's sister Yehudit cried.  

“Yes, I heard that too,” Imma said. “We should go down to Savta’s room." Tova's Savta slept in a room on the ground floor. "It’s safer.” 

“No, no!” one of the students shouted. “It’s Passover. We should sing!”

And sing they did. And as their singing grew louder, so did the gunfire outside. And as the gunfire grew louder, so did their singing!

“Abba!” Tova shouted. “Please can we go downstairs?”

Then came a loud “BANG!”

Everyone froze. It sounded like a bullet had entered the room.  

“Enough singing!” Abba cried. “Imma, get the baby.”

Baby Rama had been sleeping soundly when Imma picked her up from her crib. Tova rushed after little sister Sarah to Savta Bat-Sheva’s room on the ground floor. Yehudit followed them. Tova's older brother Menachem went downstairs with the students. Imma carried baby Rama down with Savta Bat-Sheva at her side. Abba came last to make sure everyone was out of harm's way.

The precious crate of eggs was already there. After all, these eggs were a great treasure for them at this time, and Savta Bat-Sheva's room was the safest room in the house.

It wasn’t the first time Tova had heard shooting. But this time was different. It seemed to go on forever. And as time wore on, Tova grew tired. Soon she and her sisters were fast asleep. One at a time, the others joined them in slumber.

In the middle of the night, however, she awoke to a strange sound.

Crack. Plop. Crack. Plop.

Over and over it went.

Crack. Plop. Crack. Plop.

Tova sat up. 

The strange sound was coming from the corner where the crate of eggs sat. In the weak light, she saw her baby sister with a big pot. Little Rama’s hand came down with something in it on the edge of the pot. Crack. Then she put the thing in her hand in the pot. Plop. Rama laughed and clapped. Tova gasped when she realized what the sound was.

Oh, no.

“The eggs!” she cried. “Imma! Imma! The eggs!”

“What?” Imma said, still half asleep. “What about the eggs?”

“Rama broke them!”

Tova and Imma looked inside the pot. It was filled with eggs and eggshells. Imma checked the crate. 

Out of more than a hundred eggs, only eight whole eggs were left.

“What are we going to do?” Tova asked. “The eggs will spoil.”  

 Imma shrugged. “So we won’t have eggs for the whole week of Passover.”

“But we can’t cook them today,” Tova said. “It’s Shabbat.”

“So after Shabbat we’ll have eggs,” Imma said. “Lots and lots of eggs.”

After sunrise the family went back upstairs. Imma put Rama in her crib. There she found a surprise.  

“Look, look!” Imma cried. “It’s a miracle!”

Tova looked. 

There--very close to where Rama’s head always rested when she was asleep--was a bullet.

“It’s the bullet we heard last night during the Seder,” Tova's older brother Pinchas said.

“It’s a miracle she wasn’t hurt,” Abba said. “A Passover miracle.”  

The story of what happened quickly spread through the neighborhood. With it spread the invitation to join the family for a breakfast of scrambled eggs on Sunday morning.

There was nothing to light a stove with, so that Sunday morning they made a bonfire. Neighbors brought wooden boards. Some also brought their rationed oil. Everyone brought plates and forks to eat with. They stood in line and waited to get a delicious, warm breakfast of scrambled eggs. Abba took a picture for the newspaper he edited.

People thanked Tova's Imma, but she laughed and pointed at baby Rama. "Don't thank me. Thank the cook!" 

Here's wishing you and your family a safe, happy, and healthy Passover.

Have a character but no plot? Three easy steps you can use to make one

If you have an idea for a character but don't know what to do with it, here are three easy steps that will help you create a great story:

1. find out what your main character wants most and make him/her want it or need it more and more.

2. find something that prevents him/her from getting that thing and make the obstacle bigger and more urgent (it can be internal, another character, or the world your character is in). 

3. bring the conflict to a head until the character resolves it by getting what he/she wants, letting go of what he/she wants (and possibly getting something better in return), or coming to accept being without the thing he/she originally wanted. 

A plot can have several steps, so your main character can start out wanting one thing, get it, and then want something else.  For example, in The Cat in the Hat, the main characters ("me and Sally") want something to relieve their boredom until they get it; then they want to avoid getting in trouble. 

These three steps have infinite possibilities depending on the main character(s), other characters, setting, style, and want/need.

If you have an idea for a plot but not a main character, you can easily turn that plot into a main character, too: whatever the objective of the main character in a plot is supposed to be, create a character who is strongly motivated to achieve that objective. Create other characters who are strongly motivated to stop the main character from achieving that objective. For example, some of the people who are motivated to solve a crime are a detective, a reporter, the accused, the victim, and the likely next target. Notice that the more motivated the character is to achieve the objective, the more compelling the story becomes. 

Two Purim Stories

Purim is my favorite holiday.

I love the costumes, reading the story of how Esther and Mordechai saved the Jewish people, the joy and noise in the synagogue, the festive meal, and giving out baskets of goodies. It’s a chance for me to express my creativity, and it’s just plain fun!

It’s traditional for children to dress up in costumes on Purim, but this tradition takes an odd and humorous twist in the story of my grandparents’ courtship in Jerusalem in the mid-1920s.

My grandmother fell in love with my grandfather when she was just fifteen. They lived on opposite sides of the same apartment complex, and they sent each other love letters that they pinned to a clothesline that stretched from one side of the complex to the other. It was all very romantic and not at all proper for the son and daughter of two distinguished orthodox rabbis.

Of course, if you read my previous post, you already know that when Rivka Schorr wanted something, Rivka Schorr did not let anything get in her way. The fathers sat down, and the marriage was arranged.

The wedding was a few months away, and it was a Jewish Jerusalem tradition for a girl to give her fiancé gifts on each of the holidays that took place between the engagement and the wedding. Young Rivka looked forward to Purim. She was going to give her beloved the perfect Mishlo’ach Manot. She had even hand crocheted the cloth that covered the tray of homemade foods.

One of my homemade Purim baskets with a garden theme. The Megillah printed scroll came with a story I wrote about Queen Esther asking a bee and a butterfly in the king's garden for advice.

It’s traditional to have someone else deliver Mishlo’ach Manot for you, but on this particular Purim something very strange happened in Jerusalem: it snowed. This put young Rivka in a bind. No one would agree to deliver the gift to her fiancé for her. And she couldn’t do it herself, could she? It wouldn’t be proper to visit her fiancé’s house. Oh, no.

But this was Rivka Schorr. And when Rivka Schorr wanted something, Rivka Schorr did not let anything get in her way.

So Rivka decided to deliver the Mishlo’ach Manot herself . . . disguised as an Arabic man!

At first Rivka had thought that she had managed to pull it off, but it turned out that she had pulled it off a little too well.

The Mishlo’ach Manot included a bottle of wine, and kosher wine can only be served by a Jew. If it isn’t, it becomes unkosher. My grandfather’s father became so enraged at the thought that a non-Jew had handled it that he poured the wine out and called the wedding off!

Of course, Rivka wasn’t going to let that get in the way of her marrying her beloved. She spoke to her father, who spoke to my grandfather’s father, and everything was straightened out.

Now, this is a great story, and I hate to piggyback on it, but there is another great Purim story that I want to tell you.

My parents lived in an ultra-orthodox and mostly English-speaking neighborhood in Jerusalem. I didn’t like being there on Purim, because the neighbors would often get very drunk.

There is a Purim tradition of drinking until you don’t know the difference between blessing Mordechai and cursing Haman. The members of my family have never been big on drinking. My dad, for example, has been known to mix sweetener in semi dry wine. We just don’t like the stuff. But my parents’ neighbors on Purim, oh, boy, do they like to drink! Driving becomes scary because of people stumbling in front of your car. And people bang on your door, because they want to sing and dance for you, loudly and badly.

So this is the story that my mother used to love to tell. It would make her laugh so hard that it would bring tears to her eyes.

My parents’ apartment is on the first floor of a very tall building, and it has a huge balcony. Huge! The apartments above theirs have much smaller balconies.

Well, as I said, this is an English speaking neighborhood, so when people get dressed up for Purim, they’re more likely to choose the kinds of costumes you might see people wear in the United States for Halloween. Not revealing or scary costumes, but costumes that relate American culture.

So this one Purim, my family is about to sit down for the festive meal. All of a sudden my mom sees something dark and big zooming past the glass door that leads to the balcony, and everyone hears a loud bang. She rushes to the balcony to find out what it is and slides the door open.

There’s a man on the balcony. He jumps to his feet, and she sees he’s dressed as Batman! BATMAN! An ultra-orthodox Jewish Batman!

And he is drunk. So drunk he has no idea he just fell two stories and is lucky to be standing at all. He sees the open door, rushes past her with his black cape flying behind him, rushes past my dad who cannot believe what he’s seeing, leaves the apartment, and heads back upstairs.

And that is my mom’s funny story about how Batman literally crashed her Purim feast.

Every year I hand out creative Mishlo’ach Manot baskets. One year, I created a booklet about “Winnie the Pooh-rim.” Another year I made bento boxes with a flower and garden design. Yet another year I created an Alice in Wonderland picnic. This year, however, I’m not allowed to give more than one Mishlo’ach Manot, because my mother passed away in December, and my daughter will be handling the Mishlo’ach Manot instead. Still, I hope you have a wonderful Purim. It is my favorite holiday, and that’s something I can’t disguise.

Bathsheba’s Daughters: Our Story Begins With an Open Window and a Fall

There’s an odd similarity between the earliest story told about the great-grandmother I’m named after and the earliest story my parents used to tell about me: both involve an open window and a fall.

I’ve already told you about my mother’s earliest memory, how her grandmother held her hand and ran home with her from a pogrom in Jerusalem. I don’t know what my grandmother’s earliest memory or story was, although I do know several fascinating tales from her childhood and teen years that I plan to tell you in another post. The earliest story told about my great-grandmother, however, is so remarkable that it became a part of our family’s legacy.

My great-grandmother was named Bat-Sheva, a name that has been passed down in our family going all the way back to the biblical Queen Bat-Sheva, my royal ancestor and original namesake, the wife of King David and the mother of King Solomon.

My great-grandmother was born in Poland sometime in the 1870s. At the time of this story she was still a toddler, only two or three years old. Her father was a rabbi who also edited a newspaper, making him the first newspaper writer of five generations of newspaper writers in my family, ending with me (unless, somehow, my daughter carries on that legacy or marries a journalist).

I don’t know much about where they specifically lived, although I do know it was in a building that was at least three-stories high, so I have to guess it was a city. I know it was three-stories high, because that’s an important part of the story.

One day when my great-grandmother was just two or three years old, she climbed up to an open window on the third floor and fell out.

Her father saw her.

He saw his precious little daughter fall out of that third-story window, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Naturally, he was terrified.

She was just a baby, and it was such a great fall. How could she possibly survive? He had to get down to her as quickly as possible, and he couldn’t waste a second running to the window. Instead, he ran out of the room and raced down the stairs.

He could hear his feet pounding with each step he took. He could hear his heart beating hard and fast with fear in his chest. But he couldn’t hear his daughter. She wasn’t screaming, wasn’t crying.

He called out her name, “Shevaleh! Shevaleh!”

But there was no response.

His precious little girl had fallen out of a third-story window, and she hadn’t made a sound. Why hadn’t she cried out? Why wasn’t she crying now? Why didn’t she answer him?

His mind, of course, came to the only logical conclusion. She wasn’t crying because the fall had knocked her unconscious. Or worse. It had killed her. He prayed to God that he was wrong.

He raced as quickly as he could to the ground beneath the open window.

And he could not believe his eyes.

There was his precious little girl, standing up, not a hair out of place, looking as if nothing at all had happened to her.

He scooped her up in his shaking hands.

“Shevaleh,” he asked, “what happened?”

“Zayde carried me down the stairs,” she replied, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

But it was out of the ordinary.  In fact, it was impossible. Not only were there no stairs out of the window, but his daughter’s Zayde, her grandfather, had died two weeks earlier.

Her father was so astounded by this miracle, he had the story printed up in Yiddish, and he posted notices about it everywhere he could. I once saw a photo of that notice, and I would publish it here if I could find a copy of that photo.

You might wonder if I believe this story.

I can’t say that I do, but I do believe that my great-great-grandfather believed it with all his heart, so I don’t disbelieve it either. Like with most things that can’t be proven, I try to keep an open mind.

When I wrote Rideof Your Life—a novel about teenage ghosts falling in love in an amusement park—I treated it as a fantasy. However, as I do with all my novels, I still wanted it to make the most sense that it possibly could.  It seems to me that if ghosts do exist, they must be like the people they were when they were still alive. My great-grandmother’s Zayde was a good man who would have saved his granddaughter if he could. Perhaps he did. I don’t know. I suppose it’s comforting to think he did, and that comforting feeling is something I tried to convey in Ride of Your Life. The afterlife is unknown, but that doesn’t mean it’s scary.

As I said, the earliest story my mother used to tell about me also involves a fall and an open window. Unlike my great-grandmother Bat-Sheva’s tale, however, there’s nothing even remotely miraculous or other-worldly about it. In fact, it’s kind of funny, which I guess is fitting. It is, after all, about me.

A few weeks before I was born, my parents flew to Israel with my sister, Eliedaat. My mother lied to get on the plane, because it was against the rules for a woman to fly in the ninth month of pregnancy. They went to visit my extended family, particularly my mother’s parents and siblings.

At some time during the trip, my grandfather commented about my sister:  “You could draw a little circle around that baby, walk away, come back an hour later, and still find her in that circle.”

My parents agreed. My sister, who was eleven months old, was a natural born sitter. A natural born stay-in-placer. If you wanted to find a baby to pose for an oil painting, this was your girl! She could sit for hours and hours and not move.

Understandably, this led to a false sense of security.   

Enter me.

The oldest of my four younger brothers, me, and my sister. I have a dead tooth in this photo. If you guessed I got it from a fall, you'd be right. We were playing a "let's see how far we can jump" game (my sister's idea), and it turns out it wasn't quite as far as the top of the shelves  after my sister had moved them the second time. The dead tooth eventually fell out, but I still have the huge scar on my right arm from when my sister decided we should play milkman with glass milk bottles. (She says we were bowling, but I'm pretty sure we were playing milkman.) It was also her idea to play doctor with cold medicine that she spooned out to us. There is a slight possibility she wanted to be an only child. 

I was born days after my parents and sister returned from Israel, two weeks and two days before my sister’s first birthday. On the day I was brought home from the hospital, my father took me upstairs to the only bedroom in the house they were renting and laid me down on a bed. It was a hot summer day, and the window was open.

He thought, “This is safe. She’s a newborn baby, so she couldn’t possibly move.”

Yeah, right.

I was not my sister.

He left the room, I’m guessing to check on my mom and my sister. And when he came back, I was nowhere to be seen.

And the window was open.

Now, I know this doesn’t make any sense. I can’t even imagine a scenario where this might make sense. But for some reason the way my father tells this story is that he thought I had fallen out of the window.

I guess when you’re confronted with the realization that your assumption about your newborn being unable to move turns out to be false, you start to question the exact degree to which it is false. If your newborn can, in fact, move, who’s to say she can’t also climb windowsills? Or jump out of windowsills? Or fly? Or perhaps he knew the story about my namesake falling out of a window, and his mind played the most bizarre version of “connect the dots” anyone’s mind has ever played.

Of course, I hadn’t fallen out the window.

There was no miracle, ghost, or magic involved. I hadn’t disappeared. A short while later, my loud screams made it clear that I had merely fallen off the bed and had jammed between the bed and the wall.

To my father, though, this was almost as astounding as it would have been if I had disappeared.

Here was a newborn who could move a heck of a lot more than his almost one-year-old daughter. I couldn’t just move a little. I could move a couple feet right off of a bed. And I was only a few days old.

Over the coming months, my ability to move astounded both my parents over and over. You would think they’d have learned their lesson after that first time, but no. They didn’t.

One of the funniest stories my mother used to tell about me is how when I was a few months old, she put me in one of those baby carrier seats on a counter in a store. She left me alone for a second, just a second. Next thing she knew, I was crying, because I had flipped the seat over and was crawling around on the counter with the seat strapped to my back, like I was a turtle and the seat was a turtle shell I didn’t really like.

Through the years, I’ve tried to find similarities between myself and the great-grandmother I’m named after, and there are a few. I found out during my mother’s Shiva, for example, that my great-grandmother loved games. Someone told me she kept a chess set in a green plastic basket under her bed and would take it out to play chess with him when he was a little boy. But although I love games in general, I don’t like chess. I’ve also heard she loved to read and was usually found with a book in her hand. But she read mostly religious books, and I read mostly nonfiction, humor, fantasy, and science fiction. And several people have told me I’ve inherited her artistic and creative side. But I write and draw, and she expressed her artistic and creative side by sewing and crocheting, which are two things I can’t do at all.

But we do share a name and stories that start with an open window and a fall.

My Mother's Stories

My mother, Tova Hacohen Wachtfogel, at age 72 during a visit to the United States for my son's bar mitzvah

A few weeks before my mother died in Jerusalem, she told me in a telephone conversation that stretched all the way to the United States about sitting down with her sister Sarah and reminiscing about the past. That day they had talked about the time they spent in Tel Aviv in the late 1950s, two young and beautiful ladies in a young and beautiful country—all three with ancient histories and fascinating stories—sipping coffee in a café.

My mom worked back then as a journalist, a children’s page editor, and a publishing assistant for the newspaper owned and run by her father and brothers. Her work didn’t make the front page, but, there in that café and everywhere she went, she had a front seat to history.

“You need to write your stories down,” I told her over the phone. “I want to read them, and I know I’m not the only one.”

Several years earlier, I had interviewed my mother for a book I was writing, which was a fictionalized version of her life in Jerusalem before, during, and a few years following Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. My mother had been twelve years old at the time of the war—a bat mitzvah girl—and the book was a project I was working on for a publisher who specialized in gifts for Jewish girls. The publisher had loved the story . . . until she asked me to add historic facts. The historic facts didn’t agree with her less than Zionistic friends, and her demand that I rewrite history to suit them didn’t agree with my principles and journalistic integrity, so the project fell through.

But I still had all these stories I had gathered when I was researching the book, and they were wonderful stories.

Perhaps it was for the best that the project fell through. Even before I started working on it, I had wanted to write a book about four generations of women in my family that spanned from the very early 1900s until the present in the Holy Land.  I wanted to write that book, Bathsheba's Daughters, because these women had great stories, stories that deserved to be shared. And a few weeks before my mother died, when we still hoped she might be with us for at least a few more years, I wanted her to share more of her stories. It was the greatest inheritance she could possibly leave behind.

“I’m not a writer,” my mother replied, this from a woman who was a journalist for decades.

“But you’re a good storyteller,” I told her.

“I’m not that good a storyteller,” she replied. “You know who’s a good storyteller? Your Aunt Sarah.”

“You are,” I said, although I suppose modesty prevented her from admitting it. “And if you don’t want to write your stories down, you could hire someone to write them down for you.”

She told me a great aunt of mine was doing that, paying someone to listen to her life’s story and turn it into a book for her kids and grandkids. “You should do that, too.”

She said it was a good idea and implied that she would think about it.

I’m sure she did. I’m sure it gave her a reason to want to stay around just a little longer. My mother was the kind of mom who would do anything for her children. Anything.

But God had other plans.

So now it’s up to me, the daughter who writes, the collector of stories.

When we were sitting Shiva for my mom, a few people came to me with stories. Stories about my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother. And I grabbed those stories with both hands.

I knew, for example, that my grandmother had been a bit of a rebel when she was a teenager, but I didn’t know that she would lean forward when the seamstress was measuring her for dresses, because she wanted the hemline to be higher than her parents would permit. I knew that my great grandmother was funny, creative and smart, but I didn’t know that under her bed in her old age she kept a green plastic shopping basket that contained a chess set, and I didn’t know that she would pull out that basket and play chess when a young distant cousin came to visit. Even in her old age, she still had a playful side.  

I shared the stories I had collected, too, but there were so many of them. I couldn't possibly tell them all.  

I told them about the book I had worked on and the book I had planned to write.

“I want to read that,” they told me. “Publish it, and I'll buy a copy.”

I promised to post the stories on my blog, and that is what I hope to be doing from time to time over the following weeks. Maybe if I write enough of them and collect enough photos and other material from my family, I’ll put it all together as that book I was planning to write, the one about four generations of women in the Holy Land.

I hope you’ll forgive me for this little detour. I know I usually write about writing, designing books, comedy, and geek stuff. But these stories about the women in my family deserve to be told.