Early influences are important, especially when they encourage a deep love of writing. Virginia Nygard has been on both sides: the eager student inspired by the skilled teacher and the passionate teacher passing on her love of words to her students. Virginia also enjoys watching her characters grow. She was struck with an opening scene and the rest of the story flew from her fingertips, creating her book Missing. It won First Place for Published Novella in the 2018 Royal Palm Literary Awards. Virginia talks people-watching, writing routines, and editing in this week’s RPLA showcase.
Virginia’s Writing Journey
My mother read to me every night at bedtime. Those tales and poems sparked my imagination and curiosity. I was well-prepared whenever my first-and-second grade teacher encouraged the rest of us to write and illustrate stories while she worked with one reading group. At the end of the year, she gave each of us our stories bound in bright colored paper covers secured with shiny brass fasteners. I was a published author! I wrote for school newspapers and yearbooks and wrote short stories and poetry. During my teaching career, my creative energies were channeled into helping the children express theirs. I read about creative writing, took some classes, found FWA, and the rest is history.
The Winning Entry, Missing 
Logline: Detective Carmella Callenda is puzzled by a possible double kidnapping, a rash of crimes in her small Florida town, and unexplained lights and activity in Gopher Slough.
I am a people watcher, body language observer, and loud-cell-phone-conversation accidental eavesdropper. I wonder what motivates people to do and say what they do. Love? Anger? Fear? Hate? A torn psyche? Why do some people come out of the worst circumstances to be successful at whatever they choose to do and become a blessing to others? Why do some fill our headlines and newscasts with self-interest, vulgarity, bitterness, and heinous crimes? Is it Nature or Nurture? Both? The opening scene of MISSING came to me first, and the story wrote itself. What made MISSING special for me was listening to my characters tell their tales and watching them grow through their experiences.
Read an excerpt of Missing here.
Two Truths and a Lie, Writer’s Edition
Don’t stop to edit your writing as you go.
Write something every day.
Rise and shine and start to write.
The lie? Rise and shine and start to write. Or something similar. It’s hard for me to get down to serious stuff between daytime interruptions. I’m one of those writers who prefers to be cloistered alone in a mountain cabin to let my thoughts wander in the world I am creating and write to my heart’s content. Maybe that’s why I do my best work from about 8 p.m. or so into the wee hours of the morning. But you should write something every day. I count even beginning the day with a witty rebuttal to some uninformed, unreasonable, downright biased POV in the newspaper as cathartic and creative, even if it never goes to print. It’s priming the pump.
Another important truth is don’t stop to edit your writing as you go. Let the creativity flow. For a teacher who has corrected thousands of class papers, I find this the hardest advice to follow. I know someone, post publication, will pick out the one error missed throughout countless editings by numerous people, and make a point of it. It has happened. And the Ghosts of Editings Past still haunt me. OCD maybe?
Other Works by Virginia
I’ve also written two romantic suspense novels, Déjà Vu Dream, and Beyond Déjà Vu, as well as several novellas including Fish Tale, Ice Man in Paradise, and the current Missing. And poetry, poetry, poetry! My work has been in a few anthologies and in an online journal where I was one of the editors and a contributor.
Coming Next from this Author
Among other things, I am working on a collection of poems centered around one unique character who tells of her life experiences and observations.
Connect with Virginia
Stop by my blog Dialog on Dialogue, and dialogue with me! You’ll find me at: http://dialogondialogue.wordpress.com
More about RPLA
The Royal Palm Literary Awards competition is a service of the Florida Writers Association established to recognize excellence in members’ published and unpublished works while providing objective and constructive written assessments for all entrants. Judges include literary agents, publishers, film producers, current or retired professors, teachers, librarians, editors, bestselling and award-winning authors, and journalists from across the nation. Entries are scored against the criteria set by RPLA using rubrics tailored to each genre. Winners are announced at the annual FWA conference during the RPLA awards banquet. To learn more about RPLA, click here for the guidelines.
