Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, editing, heroic couplets, novel writing, sentence structure and rhythm, Writing, writing techniques, writing tips on 06 Feb 2014| Leave a Comment »
I do not care for the heroic couplet.
daDa-daDa-daDa-daDa-daDee,
daDa-daDa-daDa-daDa-daDee.
It’s fine for a short poem or sonnet, but when you stack one atop the other for stanza after stanza, it gets predictable, monotonous, and boring. It’s why A Midsummer Night’s Dream is my least favorite of Shakespeare’s plays, as a huge portion of it is written in heroic couplets.
What does this have to do with writing prose? Plenty.
Posted in Writing, tagged believable characters, building believable characters, Characters, creative writing, luck, lucky penny, Writing on 30 Jan 2014| 4 Comments »
I don’t really believe in luck.
At least, I don’t believe in luck as something we can affect. Things happen; sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not. People who we think have “good luck” are just folks who make better decisions than others. People who have repeated “bad luck” are usually not paying close enough attention to what’s going on around them. Beyond that, it’s just the randomness of life. Stuff happens.
So, why do I have a “lucky penny?”
Posted in Culture, tagged Arlo Guthrie, Berkeley, courtship, creative writing, humpback whales, Marin County, memoir, mixtape, Pete Seeger, remembering pete seeger, Sausalito, the weavers, Yodeling on 28 Jan 2014| 3 Comments »
Yodeling is not often connected with courtship. Nor humpback whales.
The fact that I employed both in pursuit of love may, in part, explain my somewhat spotty record at wooing women.
If you grew up around San Francisco Bay and remember rotary phones, you know who Pete Seeger was. Pete, who passed away yesterday, was a fixture of the SF and Berkeley folk music scene. Pete Seeger and the Weavers, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Buffy St. Marie, Peter Paul & Mary…these were the minstrels of my youth, and Pete was the revered elder, the crafter of anthems, the troubadour whose clear clarion voice would sing us out of troubled times.
His singing style–head up, chin out, a smile on his face–gave me hope, and made me happy, even when the words were sad. I sang his songs around campfires. I listened to his banjo and 12-string riffs with joy. His music was simple, uncomplicated, poetic, and was always there in the backdrop of my youth, like wind in the trees, like the gloaming song of crickets.
Still, not really the stuff of romance.
And yet… (more…)
Posted in Culture, Hi Tech, Low Tech, tagged creative writing, cursive handwriting, handwriting, handwritten letters, letters, letters vs email, love letters, pen and paper, pen pals, snail mail on 23 Jan 2014| 12 Comments »
If you were born before 1980, it’s likely you are writing in code.
That’s right. Cryptic code.
We have a young houseguest staying with us. She’s nineteen. I literally have t-shirts older than she. Needless to say, having her with us has been an education, on both sides.
The other day, she watched with fascination as I sat down with pen and paper and slowly, over the course of the day, wrote a letter, by hand.
The fact that my correspondent and I had never met didn’t seem to faze her–in this day of social media, it’s commonplace. Nor was the idea of sending a letter by snail mail particularly foreign; presumably she’s sent a bill payment or a birthday card in her lifetime. She was curious about the slowness of the process, that it took several sessions at the desk to complete a single letter, but that wasn’t the big issue.
No, what really puzzled her was something much more basic. (more…)
Posted in Writing, tagged creative writing, editing, odd words, Reading, Writing on 17 Jan 2014| 8 Comments »
It’s happened to us all. That moment when a word–a perfectly innocuous, everyday word–suddenly looks weird.
It happened to me the other day. The word was “dirt.” I wrote it down and suddenly it looked misspelled. I stared at it. I tried “durt,” but that was even worse. Dirt. Dirt.
Dirt.
Oddly, when I wrote “dirty,” that looked okay, but “dirt” still looked…wrong. Truncated. Too tall. Too narrow.
Last year, I had a similar episode with the word “schedule.” We haven’t gotten along, since.
Thankfully, these episodes are transitory. Eventually, usually within an hour, the word loses its alien quality and becomes once more a regular, banal word from my daily lexicon.
Except, that is, for the “odd ducks.” (more…)
Posted in Books, Writing, tagged books, Characters, creative writing, favorite authors, favorite books, gabriel garcia marquez, Marcel Proust, reading lists, Shakespeare, William Shakespeare, Writing, writing tips on 06 Jan 2014| 9 Comments »
Writers aren’t like normal people.
When writers read–be it a book, an article, or sometimes even a headline–we study, parse, and edit. We re-word what we read (“It would be better like this”), we laugh out loud at ugly phrases (“He threw up his hands”), and we will kick a book across the room before we’ll read another page filled with moronic characters and Swiss cheese plots.
This can take a lot of the enjoyment out of reading, but on the flip side, there are joys in reading only writers can experience. We have WIWI moments (“Wish I’d Written It!”) and can find ecstasy in a well-wrought sentence or a surprising image.
We also learn from reading. We learn a lot.
Posted in Culture, Writing, tagged amazon, blogging, creative writing, ebooks, Kindle, novel writing, self-publishing, Writing on 31 Dec 2013| Leave a Comment »
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 