Bell Bridge Books

Writing About Friendship

by Melissa Ford

Writers are supposed to write about what they know, right?  And what do we know better than our friendships?  There were the friendships our parents set up for us; the children of their friends that we were expected to share our toys with simply because our parents wanted to hang out.  (Yes, I am guilty of passing along this fine tradition to my own children.)

There were the first friendships we formed on our own on the playground.  The friends that broke our heart or didn’t return our affection or were too clingy.  The ones that dumped us.  The ones we drifted away from.  The ones that saved our lives.  The ones that we whispered our secrets to in the dark during a sleepover.

There are the old friends that we’ve been together with for more years than we haven’t been friends, and the new friends that we’ve intensely connected with in the last year or two.

See?  As a subject, it’s pretty ripe for the write-what-you-know rule.

But being close to the subject is tricky.  No one wants to see themselves show up on the page, and it’s bad form to dissect your friendships in front of an audience.  Sometimes we can’t really explain why we’re friends with someone, or why we’re not.  We may not know what we did right or what went wrong.

Sometimes friendships defy words, though I never stop trying to write about the topic.

Life from Scratch is about a woman named Rachel finding herself after the dissolution of a marriage.  She finds her voice through the act of writing but also seeing what she wants reflected in her relationship with her best friend, Arianna.  Where do we first learn how we want to be loved? Our friendships.  And it’s where we constantly return to measure our relationships.

LIFE FROM SCRATCH is Amazon’s monthly deal for March for only $1.99.  Read it with a friend and discuss it over coffee.  Don’t forget to tell your friend how you could never get by without her.

BE CAREFUL WITH THE LITTLE DETAILS

by Melissa Ford

The first thing you need to know is that I don’t know a lot about television.  I watch whatever my husband puts on at night, and if he doesn’t turn on the television, then it wouldn’t occur to me to choose something myself.  One time my husband went to Berlin for ten days. When he returned and clicked on the television, it was still set to ESPN which he was watching before he left.  He looked at me and said, “you either missed me so much that you watched sports… or you didn’t turn on the television for a week and a half.”  Ding, ding, ding!  We have a winner.

The second thing you need to know is that when we were making Bermuda shorts in our Home Ec class in eighth grade, I didn’t align the front and the back properly so the fabric pattern went in two different directions.  I had hand-stitched my shorts together because I couldn’t get a hang of the sewing machine, and the fabric puckered strangely between the holes in the seam.

I know nothing about television and nothing about sewing.  So why did I make one character in Apart at the Seams a writer for a comedy news show, and the other a finisher for a clothing designer?

It was sort of by accident.  Noah and Arianna were supposed to be minor characters, meant to help hold up the plotline, but they were thrust into the spotlight when we decided to tell the same story over two books from two very different points of view.  If these two characters were a television writer and a finisher in Measure of Love, then they needed to have the same jobs when the story flipped over and was told from their point of view in Apart at the Seams.

The moral of this story is to be careful with even the little, throwaway details.

I was lucky in that a bunch of kind people in New York jumped in to teach me their craft so I could create a believable television writer and finisher.  Jill Katz at the Daily Show brought me to the set and taught me what goes into crafting a half hour comedy show from script to performance.  She didn’t even roll her eyes when I meekly asked her what the man working the camera was called.

And Brenda Mikel, the Atelier Director at Narciso Rodriguez, spent hours walking me through the process of designing clothing. It’s thanks to her that Arianna attaches sequins before the pattern is cut rather than after as she did in the first draft of the book.  There was no question too basic that Brenda didn’t take time out of her busy schedule to answer thoughtfully.

I’m grateful for all the people who stepped in to help bring veracity to the characters and storyline.  Though next time, I’m going to stick with what I know and make my character a women’s fiction writer, working out of her house.  Then again… it was pretty cool to see the Daily Show in action…

Make sure you grab Melissa Ford’s new release

– APART AT THE SEAMS-

out on June 14!!

Just click the link above!

And don’t forget to grab the first two books in this series – LIFE FROM SCRATCH and MEASURE OF LOVE!

Just click the links below!

Last year the Wall Street Journal short-listed Melissa Ford’s blog about fertility issues, “Stirrup Queens” as one of the country’s best motherhood-themed journals.

Now Melissa has put her insights on the blogging life into a smart, funny, poignant novel about the pain of divorce and the healing power of writing about it. LIFE FROM SCRATCH follows heartbroken New Yorker Rachel Goldman as she struggles with her first year of single life. She can’t even fry an egg correctly, and she wonders if her lack of homebody skills helped K.O. her marriage to a busy lawyer. She sets out to prove she can find the way to a man’s heart through his stomach, but along the way she starts blogging about her misadventures in the kitchen.

Soon her “Life From Scratch” blog segues into a diary about her marriage, her loneliness, her mistakes, and her clumsy efforts to develop a new love life with a sexy Spanish photographer. Soon her blog is a surprise hit, her romance is taking off, and her kitchen skills are becoming impressive. But Rachel still misses her ex-husband, and her blog fans don’t realize that she’s not done with her journey to recreate her life from scratch.

Mary Alice, co-star of Food Network’s ACE OF CAKES show, says LIFE FROM SCRATCH “made me laugh out loud and made me hungry.”

LIFE FROM SCRATCH. Now available at all online booksellers in paperback and ebook.