The Writing Walls are Crumbling.

Tags

Biden, bipartisan, debate, discussion, left wing, moving forward, right wing, Trump, walls

I have had a very hard time blogging over the past four years. It wasn’t just Donny and his insane cabal but his many followers. I have unfriended many people during this reign, and I have blocked many of them. And I did try to listen. I tried to understand the divide, not just in America but in Canada and around the world . I have teased and ridiculed not only Donny but these followers. I knew converting the mindless was not possible, but they were never my target. I targeted the middle-of-the road centrists, the non-partisan voters who see truth above party politics. Unfortunately, these people tend to be more laissez-faire and vote less than the indoctrinated [on both sides]. Biden winning the vote feels like a victory but a tainted one. We are not in a good place.

Now that we have a change on the horizon, can I dump the farcical memes and get back to arguing with logic? I hope I can. I hope we all can. I would much rather see far-righters and far-lefties write out what they believe and openly discuss their arguments. I would hope we can all sit down quietly, read others’ stances on issues, and work to some consensus. It is this back and forth playing with ideas that moves us forward. It is how I move my writings forward. I don’t write knock-out stories in one go. It takes many tries of pushing that theme or pushing this character or pushing that conflict. All of my best writing has come from pushing into areas I never ended up in. The same is true, I believe, for moving forward in social and political discourse. Life is story, and those of us who write a lot of story can attest that what we think is best almost always is not.

I could not write much about life these past four years because so many have adopted views of life I do not agree with. And no, it is not just the righties. I am anti-government. When governments in my Canada want to implement new programs, I cringe, because I know my government’s debts will rise with no compensating benefit. Too many pay no service at all to our enormous debts.

What do I want to Write About?

The list is long, and I don’t claim to be qualified to write about much of it. But the following is a quick list.

• Socialism
  • what is it?
  • where should social policies fit in a capitalistic society?
  • what do Liberals really want?
  • what are Conservatives afraid of?
• Competition
  • I am for competition, when it makes sense
  • when does competition not make sense?
  • how do we manage non-competitive units so everyone is happy?
• Executive Accountability
  • this is currently a critical problem in not only America but in Canada and around the world
• Taxation
  • does the low-taxation-of-billionaires model make sense?
  • what is the logical management perspective on achieving good government?
  • of course, taxation of expatriates and management of tax fraud.
• Reading and Writing
  • I work at my writing every day. I have many ideas on making writing more interesting and relevant
  • reading is a forgotten skill. We have millions of experts who do not read anything more than Facebook posts or their favorite news headlines
  • how to correctly punctuate lists 😉
• Racial Injustice
  • unfortunately, the list is endless!
• My many other interests: books, fountain pens, inks, poetry, nutrition, diabetes, and more.

There is so much to write about and such little time to do it. I’ve been sitting on my hands for so long, I don’t really know if I can do this. Is Humpty Trumpty falling off the wall enough to get me back into this? But of course I have to write. The only way we’re going to move forward as a civilization is through discourse and debate. I remember when the Berlin Wall started to come down. It was the day my firstborn entered the world. I was so hopeful. The world really did seem to offer a brighter future. But of course we’ve erected replacement walls, and unfortunately we always will. I think the purpose of my writing and many other blogs has to be the dismantling of walls. These ideological walls need to crumble.

Learning New Words

I pay attention to words, but I haven’t always. While my literary friends were tossing around vocabulary in high school, I was tossing around baseballs, footballs, and hockey pucks. My time would have been better invested in reading and writing, but what do kids know?

We learn many words in our day to day lives. Media mostly but also interacting with people. Or we used to, back when people used larger vocabularies. I cannot remember the last time I learned a new word from a person, or from television, or radio. I now learn my words from reading and studying.

Yes, I study words. It is not easy learning something you know nothing about. Yeah, we’ll just plunge into this forest and find our way through. Nope. To study words, chance does play a part. Read Mordecai Richler or John Cheever, and I can almost guarantee you’ll learn a new word.  Cheever throws words that don’t seem to belong, at least he did in his first story, Goodbye, My Brother: That beach is a vast and preternaturally clean and simple landscape. I have seen preternaturally before, but I couldn’t define it. I was not sure what the sentence meant. So, as a lover of words, I looked it up.
Preternaturally

Definition of preternatural
1 : existing outside of nature
2 : exceeding what is natural or regular : extraordinary
wits trained to preternatural acuteness by the debates—G. L. Dickinson
3 : inexplicable by ordinary means; especially : psychic
preternatural phenomena

I take Cheever’s intention to be exceeding what is natural, as in no ordinary beach is as vast and clean, no driftwood, no people, no garbage, now beach paraphernalia. The trouble with harvesting words from other sources like reading and television is you will never build your vocabulary unless you read vast amounts. I am lucky if I learn a new word in a story, and those stupid Facebook tests all say I know some 40,000 words. Sounds like a lot, but is it? Estimates are as high as 300,000 distinct English words. Sources say that fiction readers know more words than non-fiction readers – yeah! – but it is still too slow.

My primary means of study in at Vocabulary.com.  Great, you might think. Just run through the tests and learn. That’s the theory. Inculcate yourself with various forms of questions, make your mind sort through meanings and possibilities, even force yourself to investigate further. I always have a dictionary handy, and I often search for new words in media. If I can read them in a real story, I have a much better chance of remembering them. At my age, my brain’s first order of business is forgetting, not remembering. Half the words I’ve learned — I have about 1.5 million points there — have drifted away.

Preternaturally won’t. I can almost guarantee that. There’s no better way to learn a word than to write about it. The same with inculcate. You can look that one up yourself, but recently learned it.I wrote a poem this morning called Learning New Words. I wanted to use this word, but I couldn’t remember what it was. I did write its meaning in my notebook, but I failed to write the word. Another sign of a slipping mind. But now that I’ve used it in a poem and a blog, I’ll not likely ever lose it. Enjoy!

Learning New Words

You cannot learn a new word by rote.
If all you had to do was inculcate,
an auto-play dictionary is all you’d need.
Your vocabulary would grow at incredible speed.

You need to live a word to understand it,
or you’ll end up a master of sublimate.
New words are fresh paint too easy to abrade.
You need to work them, feel them, tie them in a braid.

 

2017 Poem A Day (PAD)

Tags

Alden Nowlan, Alliteration, Down River, Haiku, Hamza al-Khateeb, metaphor, PAD, rhyming, Sonnet, Voice

This post is about my experiences at the Writer’s Digest blog Poetic Asides; where each April Robert Lee Brewer runs a poem a day (PAD) event. In 2016 I posted every day with my poem and thoughts. It was too much, and I didn’t want to invest that effort this time. It becomes pretty dull after only a few days of mediocre poetry. Sorry bloggers, but reading our unedited, off-the-cuff poetry is too often a painful exercise.

This season I want to write about what I have learned, with examples. I don’t know how many of the 54 poems I wrote this month I will post, but it will not be double digits.

April is National Poetry Month, and for me, it has become a month to focus on poetry. Not entirely. I met with an editor this month about my novel. In my mind it is finished and ready to go, but what does ready to go mean? I am not sending it off in queries, yet, as the forces are telling me to self-publish, and do it NOW! Including my wife who has finally read my work. More on that later.

I read one complete book of poetry this month and about 30 pages of another. I picked up a copy of Alden Nowlan’s Early Poems for $8. A steal as other shops are charging $30-$40 for this 1983, posthumous publication by UNB’s Fiddlehead Press.

Nowlan writes earthy poems of simple life-events and often adds a dramatic twist. His rhyming can be forced, and he willingly strays into the dirty areas of life. You will not find a light, airy, emotional Alden Nowlan poem. I sympathize with the style and it has influenced my poetry this month. Here is one example of his work.

Down River by Alden Nowlan

In cities the embittered ones are cunning;
anguish sharpens their wits, I’ve seen the eye
glint in whoresons and beggars, its approach
quick and malicious as a common fly.

But here persistent misery endures;
growing thick-headed like a cow, it chews
thistles in mute protest against the rain
of innocence it cannot lose or use.

This poem I wrote is about a man in a funeral procession carrying a casket, upset at others, his tailor who screwed up his pants is sitting in the back of the church and the guy in front of him wearing jeans, yet he cannot see the irony of himself wearing boots. Most definitely Nowlan-influenced.

Untitled

It is so disappointing when people don’t show respect,
forty dollar dress pants too long, and the haberdasher knew Tom;
he sits at the back of the church, head bowed, embarrassed
as I step on the cuffs with the heels of my boots
afraid I’ll fall while hauling this casket
the weight of Tom’s miserable life on my shoulder,
and the guy in front of me who pretended to cry
while buddy spoke of friendship and sadness and told lies
is only wearing jeans.

Nowlan uses simple rhyming but more complex and subtle alliteration: In, cities, embittered, wits, glint in, its, quick, malicious, persistent, misery, thick, it, thistles in mute, innocence, it, cannot. Fantastic when you look for it and read it a few times. And as I sit in this down-river city with the painting of Nowlan on a brick wall along Canterbury St., look at the persistent fog and drizzle outside my office window, and walk among the thick-headed denizens, oh, do I feel this Nowlan poem beating!

I attribute the following to Nowlan Influence, especially the simple rhyming scheme.

Platinum 3776 Century SF

The sound of this fine gold nib
an this smooth, heavy paper
is the sound of a clean sheet of ice
being etched by a smooth figure skater

It traces ornate twirls as it glides
through the jungle of imagined words
jumps and spins as it writes attacking
the loudest clashing of swords

The following is in many ways concrete and earthy but the conceit is abstract: sitting in a coffee shop wondering if you fit in.

The Sound of Youth

I try to sit in silence
sip my coffee
read my book
the pages won’t lay flat
but keep closing
my eyes wander the rows
tables full of chatter
incessant social banter
not looking at faces
straining to decipher
the deafening sound of youth

I also worked through In The Palm of your Hand by the late Steve Kowit out of San Diego. I read this with some trepidation as Steve called a friend of mine illiterate after she submitted poetry using Canadian spelling. American exceptionalism? Myopia? I can’t comment, but she was not pleased. Anyway, while this book has issues with generalization, examples you have to track down in back pages, and editing snafus, this is actually a stunning read. I highly recommend it.

I am also working through the book Studying Poetry by Matterson and Jones. This is another stunning book. It is advanced and assumes you understand the basics of poetry. These authors dig deeper and discuss how poetry actually works. This month, some of this text has led me into exploring alliteration and forms of metaphor deeper, such as in the following poems.

Haiku 17417

Clothes hang from the line
strung-out lives, histories dancing
in the cold, spring wind

And this poem combines Nowlan subject matter and twist with alliteration.

Untitled

Their 54 Plymouth, festooned
with Green Giant corn cans
and full Cracker Jack boxes
rambled down county road one
scaring the deer and raccoons.

I tried not to, but I also strayed into politics again. I have often made statements such as, “America will never be able to change its ways; it can’t even adopt the metric system.” And when Robert gave a prompt of ‘metric’, I knew what I had to write.

Untitled

When hicks talk in klicks
you can bet they’ll accuse
the country of Bolshevik
influence and interference
calling the president a lunatic
and march on Capital Hill
with night sticks and booze.

The following poem hurt to write. When you write a poem, the emotional impact is many times that when you read it. I spent half a day reading about Syria; because I didn’t understand it. I stumble across this article in Al Jazeera and decide I needed to write a poem about it. It put me in the darkest mood I have ever been in. Ever! After dinner my wife and son went out and I was home alone. I couldn’t take it, so I went to my favorite pub and played trivia a night early with friends. Oh the beer went down fast!

Hamza al-Khateeb

You loved it when the rains came
filled a simple irrigation ditch
a makeshift swimming hole; you weren’t to blame
for giving your family’s money to a boy without a stitch

The Arab spring promised freedom
a loner, you joined the protest
an easy target, young and without wisdom
al’aman, security; we all assume it protects

They whipped you with steel cable
shocked your knees, elbows, hands, and face
left your tortured body on a table
a bullet in your belly, they cut off your penis

Hamza al-Khateeb, what have you seen?
you were an innocent boy; you were only thirteen

Yeah, a tough one.

Of course I also had some fun this month. Some of my poetry was light and airy and even made me smile 😉

This aphoristic poem in response to ‘in <blank> of love’

Laws of Love

There are no laws of love
no rules or conditions.
There is no bad love
to avoid
and there is no good love
to prefer,
no rolling of the dice
no depending on tossed rice.
The only love that matters
is the love you live to make.

And another metric poem.

Untitled

I waited for you
until the parking meter
ate all of my coins

It was a very good month for me. I wrote 54 poems in 30 days, learned a lot, and I explored much. I took another baby step towards learning my poetic voice and becoming a confident poet, if there even is such an animal.

November 2016 Poetry – PAD

While November is my primary novel starting month (25,435 words written through the first 17 days), I am also participating in the Chapbook Challenge, a poem a day event run by Robert Lee Brewer over at Poetic Asides.

I will be honest: I am putting nearly all of my energy into getting this novel on a good road. 50,000 words of prose is not a finished novel, not the first draft, not even close. But in my experience, the tighter you can make the story now, the easier it will be to finish later. It’s one of these things called paradoxes: two extremes with no logical compromise. I do want to keep it tight and in track, but I also need to ignore my boundaries and explore when the urge arises.

They call this urge ‘characters telling you what they want to do’ in your story. Right up there with other myths like women are unequal to men in every discernable way except for having babies and doing housework (I am writing about women’s rights, and I am being facetious, unenduring as my words are). The truer version is our minds are not linear, organized machines. They respond to input. Our minds are much more reactive than active, sometimes. The reactive minds are creative: throw a word, an image, a sound, a smell, a situation… and the reactive mind finds a new door and opens it. And if they are willing to step through, there is always a whole new world behind that door. The reactive mind become an artist: painter, photographer, designer, musician, sculptor, dancer… a writer, a poet.

Poems are created by walking through new doors but are also unexplored doors themselves. There is an element of craft to poetry, an element of care. Those first responses are first steps through doors, down new pathways, and they need further exploring. But my mind this month is wandering down prosaic doors this month, secondary pathways, ideas of white privilege and feminist movements and high school immaturity and searches for personal freedom without entrapping yourself in media prisons. I am writing first drafts of poetry this month, then abandoning them for my novel.

And then there was the election. In my mind, there’s a name for a person who cannot open doors in their mind. It’s a Republican!

Here is a collection of my poems from this month so far that might actually resemble poems. I’ll give the prompt for each.

Nov. 18, 2016
Prompt: write a poem that uses the following six words:

• band
• logic
• pack
• web
• froth
• clean

before coffee

a pack of lies bandied freely
as if authored in biblical times
unseen film directors and misguided preachers
it is now a fact-free, logic-free world
we live in a dream projected through the web of
rhetoric and fallacy
the land without physical filters
and Bubba tightens his tie and grips his shifter
clean living his myth
unclean politics his gift

Nov. 17, 2016
Prompt: Paper

Background: some days you just want to have fun 😉

God made paper on day eight
An afterthought, a flick of fate
He made a mark with his feather pen
Invented glyphics over and again
The very first Ibis
Sat on the first papyrus
And Shat the first whiteout
On the very first script

Nov 16, 2016
Prompt: Play (blank)

Go! We’re through
No choice, no option
No money for a cab home
My dice fail to monopolize
Fives and tens, a lone fifty
No hope of consolidation or peace

B&O and Water Works
The corner store supplies my food
Chips and soda
I can run water
But not was my clothes
Life is no fun
With cards stacked against

A community bailout
My only chance
A gift from the man
A lucky seven
Skirts disaster, again
But all I get is a ban
And do not get to pass Go!

Nov 11, 2016

Prompt: write a description poem. Pick someone or something to describe

My Mug

My morning maw of motivation maintenance
A fire-hardened rock
A liquid lover that sips on life
A great handle, on the trends
It is essential, to my well-being
It is vital, to my happiness
I toast of tastefulness, I boast
Of wastefulness
A Saturday morning reading club, I host
My own internal parties
I get more out of it than I pour in
And it gets more out of me than I bleed out
Shakes me awake, yet grounds me
With its fragile weight

Nov 10, 2016
Prompt: Tragedy

Background: I wrote the last line and asked myself ‘now what?’ I immediately succumbed to Thesaurusitis and looked up plan. I then saw the need to link each line, so I linked them into a story. This is not so much a freely written poem as it is a construct of form. Still, it’s a fun read.

The Plan

Your policy of sympathy, combined
with intentional apathy, implemented
by methods of rationality, coordinated
through arrangements of fantasy, stopped
since procedures for bankruptcy, tempered
his program of apathy, complicated
a project of gadgetry, intimated
her suggestion of jalousie, encompassed
in their system of stagnancy, concluded
the treatment a travesty, became
a strategy of tragedy

 

Nov. 9, 2016
Prompt: Call Me (blank)

Background: this was more about my platonic relationships with women than the image of two old politicians bantering, but that’s what we might as well be. And I wanted to use the image I recently took in Charlottetown PEI of the two Fathers of Confederation named John Hamilton Gray.;)

Call me, when you’re free
We can chat, and pretend
We’re old friends
Catching up on, lost times
Times on the mend
No walks on the beach, for us
No bitters in the pub
Just a cup of coffee
And a warm muffin
We can be intimate
But we cannot be close
We can share our dreams
But not our secrets
We can agree, to disagree
On the pedigree of our lives
We will not jeopardize
This thing we call friendship
So call me when you’re, feeling down
For you know too
I will feel alone
As kindreds always do
Call me, I’ll be around

 

The John Hamilton Grays

 

 

Novels High School Teachers Teach: version #4 is in the books

Tags

John Updike, Rabbit Run

In The Books

I am writing novels. I wrote a novel just this November for NaNoWriMo. No, it is not a readable let alone publishable story. I think I know the differences. My November drafts are forays, experiments, and practice. I pick a rather random idea and write to it. I do some structural planning, but I do not put much thought into them. This might seem bad, but for me it is good. I have no limits when I write, no outline to guide my creative process. I follow enough scene-level form to keep me on the straight and narrow; I don’t need more.

I have five novels in the works, 2010 through 2014. I ran for a year with 2010 just because that was all I had in the hopper. It grew to 80,000 words and I am still fairly happy with its characters and ideas. But it takes place in Newfoundland, and it makes me uncomfortable. What right do I have to write about that province and their peoples’ events? If you have read February by Lisa Moore, you might catch my drift. By the way, she is coming here in February 2015 and we are so excited!

I also ran for a year with my 2011 novel. It is a long Canadian epic at 120,000 words, and it screams for twenty thousand more. My reading suggests publishers want short first novels, something less risky. And lets face it. Two years of fiction writing does not a writer make. I knew I needed to improve my knowledge and skills of this craft. Craft. Let’s all remember that writing is hard and it takes broad and in-depth knowledge and experience. I wasn’t there yet; I am not there now. There are also rumors of grant money for Canadian stories in 2017, the country’s 150th anniversary. I decided to let it sit.

My 2012 story excited me from its conception. I had nothing but an image in my head on October 15th. After two weeks of active brainstorming and diffuse thinking, the premise came to me. W5 plus how. I was excited that first day of writing, and the excitement stayed with me for the month. Yes, there have been ups and downs. I have asked myself a lot of hard questions. I have put my story and my skills up against firing squads. Like Colonel Aureliano Buendia, we have both survived. Unlike the good colonel, I hope to someday emerge from my solitude. I concluded edit pass number four this past week on December 15th, 2014.

So what to do next? Approach an agent? Pass it on to more beta readers? Let is soak? Stick my head into it again? I have two marked up version #3 manuscripts from beta readers I have not even looked at yet. I pouted for a few days, celebrated my daughter’s 25th birthday on Friday, and I printed out the first six scenes, 83 pages. I went to Starbucks, ordered a Venti coffee, and read the cut off MS. I marked it up as I read with a fountain pen I had lost for seven months (we moved) and an ink I haven’t used in a while.

I found myself marking up many words, phrases, and sentences. I clarified some things and unpacked others. Nothing particularly major but every page was becoming marked up with violet ink. Most changes were to make the sentences clearer. I changed “these” to “those” a few times. I removed much thinking, mostly “know” and “feel.” But I also added some literary flair:

He gave up on being a dad before he met Jill, and she had not changed his mind. “I don’t know how to be the father I never had; I can’t become him.”

I refuse to say if it is good writing, but some of my additions made my heart thump. The good part was I was happy with the story structure. My second and third scenes have always been bloated, and pass #4 was designed to remove bloating. Still, most of my changes this weekend were significant enough to warrant another serious pass. I concluded I need to continue with this edit before I let anybody else read it. I am focusing on the writing and not so much the structure; though I have already killed a significant paragraph. Today I updated 40 pages of changes and modified some of the mark-ups.

I am setting a short deadline of January 15th as my drop-dead date. It currently sits at close to 122,000 words, so this will be an intense few weeks. But it should be a fast edit. Hopefully most of the scene shuffling is over with. Hopefully I can focus on the writing and get it to where it needs to be, to where I want it.

Oh, I made a stunning discovery. I have been reading John Updike’s Rabbit Run and I learned it is one of the early, well regarded use of third person present tense which I use in my story. Like me, Updike drifts up and down in his perspectives. I probably drift more than he does, and I incorporate much reflective past tense as well. Unlike Updike who changes perspectives — sometimes it’s Rabbit and sometimes it’s Eccles — mine stays in one person’s head. In only a handful of places at most do I hint at drifting away. 

One of my beta readers made an interesting comment as we chatted briefly about it. “It reads like one of those novels your high school teacher asks you to read and you never forget.” My line of the year 🙂

Editors, A Mysterious Breed

Tags

Canada Writes, contest, K.M. Weiland

I am almost finished a short, short story of 1,440 words. I plan on submitting it to Canada Writes. As usual, I sought help from beta readers. For the first time, I solicited help from an editor.

Editors. Impressive species. They remind me of sandhill cranes — drab, erect, self-aggrandizing, and uber-pedantic. An editor would slash the previous sentence five ways from Sunday. Mine would anyway.

He is a copy editor for a  newspaper. He is not schooled in the discipline but is a natural. He is the same age as my oldest daughter. He was born without fear. He is clear-sighted, has a perfect ear for prose, and he is expert at riding the conflict fence. Not only does he tell me what he is really thinking, but he makes me feel good about it. He is also in one of my writing groups, we share social time together over coffee or scotch, I am in his book club, and I call him a  friend. Even more dangerous. Only a good editor could edit a friend’s fiction and remain friends. *I’d say the same about the writer, but I have my doubts about him.

What baffles me is how they do it. I mean, I have worked on this piece since early September, have let close to a dozen people read it and give me feedback — see a previous post — and I have scoured over it almost daily. I have taken a couple of short breaks. I have also read up on self-editing. Fred Stenson’s “Things Feigned Or Imagined” has a couple of great sections on self-editing, and I’ve read every article posted by Writer’s Digest or K.M. Weiland. Yet the stuff my editor sends back to me baffles me. Not the content; that’s exquisite. I mean how he was able to discern trouble.

I had the following two sentences.

He staggers to the kitchen, yanks open the fridge door, and grabs another beer. He punches the tab and the drinking hole stares back at him, the empty, steely eye of his beer can.

He thought these verbs were too strong for where they were in the story. He felt the rise in action broke the tension prematurely. I read it and the rest of the section. He was right. What baffles me is I knew he was right all along. I knew these verbs were wrong and subtracted from my later explosions. I had felt it many times, but I did not recognize my feelings. He found other places where I distracted the reader, spend too much energy on getting points across, used wasted, superfluous adjectives. He messaged an answer to one of my challenges that he had read the sentence five times. He said that he follows the rule if he has to read something more than once, there is a problem and it’s his job to root it out.

That’s what I fail at, stopping. I let my uneasiness be passed over. I don’t stop and smell the flowers, or stinkweed. Again, I know this. I think I have acknowledged this before on this blog. And I don’t know how to train myself to stop, or if it is even a good thing.

Seriously, is it good to be able to stop and smell the flowers? Is it good to be able to read your most subtle reaction, stop, analyze them, and investigate the source of their being? It is for an editor, but is it for the writer? Once I learn, can I ever lock the editor out of the room? Don’t I need him to take a vacation while I write?

I often stray when I write. I step sideways, and backward, and sideways the other side, and even forward. I explore character and plot when I write, all while trying to keep to an objective of story, character, and scene. If I let my editor question everything I write, I wonder if much of what I write would never find the surface of the page?

I worry too much. Yet I worry, and worry is good. I hope.

If you have techniques for making yourself aware of issues in your prose, please tell me. Suggestions like my editor’s — if you have to read it twice, there is a problem. That will now stick to me until I die, but there have to be more of these techniques. These little mental reminders. Filters I can turn on and off as needed.

Oh, and I am extremely happy with my story as it stands. I think it has chances. If not this contest then in a literary journal. I think the story is ready. I just hope the jury is up for being slammed upside the head.

Thank you my editor and editors everywhere.

Doing it the write way!

Last Monday or Tuesday, maybe Wednesday — sheesh — I began another edit of my novel. I have a couple of manuscripts out to readers, but the story called to me. This might go against all sound advice, but I completed a development edit on August 31, and the story was more or less fresh in my head. I debated giving it a long timeout, say three months, but I knew there were sections that needed surgery. At the end of my story, looking back, I knew of several scenes that needed either modification or removal. Reparative surgery or amputation. I debated waiting for feedback to confirm my suspicions.

I decided to re-read my first chapter.

I should backtrack a bit. I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’, Francine Prose’s ‘How to Read Like A Writer’, and Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’. I had literary words in my head. I had Gaiman’s efficiency, Prose’s extreme literary examples, and Bradbury’s almost hyperbolic style hitting me all at once. I had focus on words, sentences, and paragraphs. I was focused on the writing, not the story. I felt I was in a zone.

I have also been working on a short story extracted from my novel. One of my readers told me a short scene I shared read like a short story. But it was only 500 words. Hmmm. I found another dangling scene and glued them together. It was an improvement, but it didn’t quite work. (see my previous post) The story also primed my thinking on my novel, and reaffirmed my need to get back at it.

I created a new file and began. I assumed a position of a content and line editor. I asked two questions: does it read well and does it belong? Maybe these do not belong in the same edit, but that is what I asked. The very first answer of the very first sentence was no, so I re-wrote my opening lines. I smiled. I felt good. I kept going.

Scene number three was my first challenge. I felt many times it needed trimming but could never find it, could never slash any of it. As I read it, it became very clear that much of it was crap. It was crap content and it was crap writing. I cut, cut, and cut. I then jumped ahead to a scene I knew needed a beat-down. I had just pounded one scene, so let’s roll. Let’s rumble why we’re in the mood. I chopped, chopped, chopped.

I am now 27k words in and have removed almost three thousand words. Yes!

But I added my short story in. It is a chapter in my novel. And this brings two dilemmas:
– do I remove bits of reference material needed for the story but not for the scene; because they were introduced in the novel?
– what will this do to my publishing chances? How does the copyright thingy work? Is it good or bad to publish a chapter as a short story?

I am discouraged I write so poorly, but aren’t we all? Anne Lamott in ‘Bird By Bird’ claims all our first drafts are shitty and not to worry about it. Good writing takes much effort, may rounds of editing, many attempts at trying new words and phrases, of experimenting, of working at it. Determination results in more creativity any noetic miasma might. So I plod forward and don’t look back.

Last night, after a weekend away, I edited a key scene. I asked myself “did I really write this?” It was good. Seriously, it was very good. It gave me chills. I woke this morning at 4:30 and jumped back in the pool. I re-edited the same scene and felt just as good. I edited the next scene, and … I removed it. It was part of my short story. I welded the remnants to the next scene, and read through it twice. I made some sentence changes. I moved me almost to tears. I smiled. “Fuck I’m good,” I thought, and slapped myself.

No I am not. Not yet. Never will be good. Quality writing occurs with a quality process. Focus on the process John. Do it the write way!

If you are beta-reading my last draft, sorry about this, but I will not likely use much of your feedback. Well, maybe I will, or maybe I will have already.

Novel Progress [2012]

Tags

literary agent, nanowrimo, novel, publishing

I’ve been busy this summer, writing-wise. Otherwise it has been pretty slow and laid back. I am unemployed and off of EI, so we are living off my wife’s salary only. We have also moved into an apartment in the city, and our daughter, who began her first full-time job in May, and her boyfriend are renting our house from us. The housing market sucks around here, and we have some foundation work to complete before we are ready to sell. Call it an experiment. So far, all tests are positive.

I decided to use this downtime to focus on a novel. Every day that passes I feel more comfortable with my abilities as a writer, more confident in my abilities to write a readable novel. Hell, let’s cut to the chase. I think I can write a best selling novel, and I think I have two in my portfolio, maybe even four.

Okay, pop the balloon head.

Seriously, I do think I am approaching take-off, that point where one of my novels can be pitched to an agent. And I’ll get this off my plate right now: I have zero interest in self publishing. None! I believe a novel placed in front of readers needs a large amount of care. Novels not only need a great amount of effort by the author, but also a great deal of editing, story and copy. As an avid reader, I want a quality book in my hands. I do not read trash. At least not often. And when I do, I give the book the review it deserves. I think my worst rating this year is two stars, but blame that on my prejudice against werewolves.

So when my school term ended in late June — I’ve been teaching part time at our community college — I began to stick my head back into my 2012 NaNoWriMo effort. I cannot accurately describe all the work I have done on this story, but I know it is a lot. 50,000 plus words were originally written in November 2012, and in the time since, it has grown to 115,000 words, give or take, as of July 1, 2014. *If you are an agent and are turned off by seeing NaNoWriMo, please do not be. I treat Novembers seriously. It is a convenient time to write, and the group support very helpful. We — me and a few other keeners who hope to get, err, plan to get published — are actively planning our 2014 novels now. Brainstorming mostly. I have almost nothing concrete in my notebook, and frankly, I didn’t in 2014 either. But that’s not my point. The point is I write seriously, and NaNoWriMo for me is a serious project kick-off. How many times have I heard authors say “I wrote this story quickly, in a couple of months?” And the audience says “ooh.” It’s impressive to write 50,000 words in a month if you are a published author but not if you are a hack writer? *end of rant*

I began by writing about my story. It is a complex tale with many subplots and themes interacting. I created a page for each and cross-linked them all. Funky graphs. Various colors of fountain pen ink. Stabbing, paring, dodging, and reconciling. Two weeks later I was still happy with my story but with notes. Gaps and danglings. Dead ends and stupid wtfs. No darlings though. I’m that good 😉

I am now deep into editing. I just finished off 90,369 words of 120,000. Yes, I have added 5k since July 1. And I am learning a lot about my writing. I think too much and direct the stage too much — he feels, he watches, he thinks, he looks. He edits with a heavy pen and a light heart.

I have a big stickler of an issue though. I introduce a main character late in the story and another after her. It pains me to leave them so late, but it kills the story to bring them in earlier. I think. I did manage to bring him, the second character, in much earlier, and I am real happy with the scene and placement. But I cannot bring either in sooner. Let me describe it another way that might make sense. I have two stories. I have the internal transformation — let’s call it becoming a wasp from an egg — and I have an external story, an in your face, dramatic story — the wasp saves the nest. These two characters belong more in the second story, and if look at the second, external story on its own, they are introduced early. But if you look at the lead up, the egg-to-wasp story, they play more minor roles, so they come in late. They cannot show up until the threats to the nest appear, really. I think. Anyway, that’s where it stands, at 90.4k of 120k words and less than three weeks left to my self-imposed deadline.

Then it’s beta reader time. They are lining up to read it!

I only wish the agents and publishers were lining up.

*** If you are local, I think I am going to read a short scene at Bernie’s open mic night in September at the Arts Centre. It’s a head twister 😉 ***

The best writers give themselves the most permissions.

Tags

In Football Season, John Updike, The Music School

Sandford Lynne has written a very popular book on poetry titled “Writing Poetry From The Inside Out.” Thank you Robert Brewer and the fine participants over at Poetic Asides for the recommendation. I am not recommending this book though, at least not yet. It is a beginner’s book and I am a beginning, ignorant poet, yet the book bothers me. Me. I am looking for nuts and bolts and so far the author has only given his attempted inspiration. I am on page 67 and until now it has all been writing BS — “You can do it!” Pfft. I know that; I just don’t know how.” But on with my point I feel so self-secure about.

In the last paragraph of Chapter #4 the author leaves us with his legacy. When I read it I stopped, and not because it is the end of the chapter. I re-read it and re-read it. I have read it several times now, and I have Googled it. Many have written about his lines on this page number 31. I’ll present his full text since I always seem to skip the most important parts when I truncate.

When I think about it, the happiest, most successful, most fulfilled people I know are the ones who, over time, gave themselves the most permissions — in all areas of their lives. Guided by the compass of an inner truth, they did not wait for others to tell them what was okay to do, or wait for others to tell them which steps to take. Through trial and error, they learned how to experiment with their lives. And maybe this is worth underscoring: The best writers give themselves the most permissions. The happiest, most fulfilled people give themselves the most permissions. The two go hand in hand.

I am writing about this prescription to let it go because it has been a theme with me this past year. I run a prompt writing group, and this is really our one and only theme. Let it go! I have written poetry, essays, fiction, and pages full of landfill. I have turned a few of them into novel scenes and maybe one short story. Time flies. Every Wednesday night when it isn’t blizzarding I let myself go as much as I can.

I think I wrote not too long ago about my Douglas Glover workshop. On the way out he encouraged me with some direct advice. “Let it go!” I don’t know if those were his words; he probably said something more elegant. But that was the message. Let it go. Give yourself permission to go for it, and damn it all, go for it!

But an aphorism is useless without action. Words are just words, unless you are writing them. Or reading them. Yesterday I began my first John Updike read. I’ve been picking up his little novels for over a year now, but I have never managed to hold one open in front of me long enough to let anything sink in. I am notorious for that — reading a paragraph and brushing it off. I a a profligate first paragraph reader and a delinquent last paragraph finisher. I grabbed his short story collection “The Music School.” It was first published in 1962 and is almost as old as I am. Some of the stories, maybe all, are likely older. So let’s start from my beginning, I thought. How bad can this be?

The first sentence and the paragraph of the first story — “In Football Season” — hooked me.

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn?

Are you serious? Of course I do. I paused while my mind raced back to chasing my wife at university in the autumn of 1979 and remembering her fragrance. My mind continued back to junior high school in 1973 when my interest in girls had exploded open in that young teenage hormonal irruption. The fragrance of girls at the school dances and on the mile and a half walks to and from school each day.

As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seem to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold and lie heavy as the perfume of a flower shop on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

Updike knew his opening sentence would create many of these sensations on its own, but now he directs them towards us. He tells our histories to come alive and be remembered. And then once he has us, at least us knuckle dragging men, he then directs us to the football field. And now we’re all hooked on John Updike.

But was this giving permission in action? What does giving permission mean and how do you know if you’ve given yourself permission? These are questions I ask of my own writings. Am I giving enough?

First, how many grown men would write about the fragrance of young teenagers? How many would write past glancing references and delve into flirtations and implicit inviting crescents? In today’s pedophilia-phobic society? In 1960? Any way you cut it, John Updike explored emerging sexuality without inhibition — at least by 1960’s standards — and went so far as to publish his words. I think it is pretty clear he gave himself permission to explore and write about all facets of the human condition. And the more I read John Updike, the more I fall in love with his free pen. The more I read John Updike, the freer I feel with my own writing hand.

Write on!

The Periodic Poem

Tags

Letter From Birmingham, MLK, periodic, periodic sentence, poetic asides, sentence

I don’t know if this is a type of poem, but it is a type of sentence. As far as I know (which isn’t much) a sentence can be a poem, so there we have it, a Periodic Poem.

I have been reading Stanley Fish’s “How To Write A Sentence: And How To Read One.” On page 52 he discusses subordinate sentences with Martin Luther King’s famous sentence from “Letters From Birmingham Jail.”

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

If you cannot see this sentence as a poem, you might as well stop reading now.

This sentence employs hypotaxis — weak or imperfect coordination — and anaphora — a rhetorical device that consists of repeating a sequence of words at the beginnings of neighboring clauses, thereby lending them emphasis. Each of its preliminary clauses repeats form and by themselves do not complete the sentence. The sentence is fulfilled with a dramatically understated conclusion. It is a powerful sentence, a powerful technique.

I planned on writing one as a poem during PAD (April 2014), should the inspiration strike. But my friend Max — maxie409 — beat me to it. Read her poem at Poetic Asides. I won’t post it here, not directly. But isn’t it a great little poem? It uses the same format as MLK’s sentence and carries its own enormous impact in its own context. She does not use a single sentence, but she could have. I mentioned Cicero in her comments. He is considered the original master of this sentence form.

So this morning when I woke I was determined to write my own. I can’t remember my first draft, but it was very stodgy and telling using obtruse comparisons. It was a bludgeoning sentence. I kept the ideas but re-wrote every word and made them more glancing, less clear, more image-based. I like it, but I think it can be improved. Some of its antithesis is not coordinated. Pft. It flows at least. And it is only one sentence. The prompt was “Love.”

Love Springs Eternal

Spring around here is not a time of pure joy but a time of transition, of remembering the past as you watch it melt away revealing blankets of green, of listening to the early morning woodland songs of joy while death remains heavy in the snow, of emerging life while the roads that got us here decay spectacularly and despite this passage of time, the unceasing flux of creation, and the uncertainty of life, our love lives on, stronger than ever in this season of hope.