Unlock the Secret of the Rose: Transform Your Writing with Powerful Detail as Narrative
All a reader learns about my father in those first words I wrote was his height, where he grew up, what he studied and did for a living. They expressed very little about who he was at his core, what my story about him might be and any sense of his relationship to me.
Compare this to when people learn that my mother grew up in a hotel. Their eyebrows go up. “Really?” they ask. They often bring up the children’s storybook character Eloise, though my mother didn’t live at the Plaza but at a hotel in Pittsburgh. She did, however, live with her mother and father in three rooms with no kitchen. She would take the elevator down to the hotel dining room, order a bowl of cereal for breakfast — which she ate alone — and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. Growing up in a hotel not only left her with zero kitchen skills, but they influenced her decorative leanings to something I lovingly call institutionally immaculate. Clean. Spare. Formal. There was a lot about her that was formed by growing up in that environment.
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