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Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

New Year, New Algorithms

Posted in Culture, Writing, tagged , , , on 04 Jan 2013| 2 Comments »

Obey the Kitty!

Obey the Kitty!

As of the first, my inbox and this blog have been inundated by new spam. Whereas before this blog used to get only 2-4 spam posts per day, now it gets 2-4 dozen spam posts per day.

And is it a requirement that a spam post must include misspellings and grammatical errors? I mean, if you’re going to go to the trouble of putting meaningful text in your spam, why not write it correctly. Have some pride, people!

However, as a result, if you’ve made a comment and it disappears, my sincere apologies; please send me a note and we’ll work to fix it. I want to see the comments from ALL of you–comments close the loop and let me know if what I’m posting is making sense.

Moving forward with my “The View from Here” posts, I’m not going to put these up daily. First, they take more thought to prepare than rants like this, and second, I want to give us time to discuss one topic thoroughly before moving on to the next.

So, for now, I’m going to be glad it’s Friday, I’m going to enjoy the absolutely dreary weather Seattle offers me today, I’m going to make some notes anent my recent trip to California, and I’m going to water my orchids.

And yes, I just used the word “anent” in a sentence. Try it. It’s fun!

k

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The View from Here: Show and Tell

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on 03 Jan 2013| 11 Comments »

Stack of BooksI hear you already. “Not that old chestnut!” Sorry. Sad, but true: “Show, Don’t Tell” is one of the most common of errors I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks prowling the new-writer-blogosphere, and sometimes the errors are simply egregious.

First off, let me say that I believe it is damned near impossible to “show” everything in a story. I mean, come on; you have to take a short-cut through a description now and again. I also think it’s unnecessary to “show” everything. And, to round out the argument against, there really aren’t any “rules” in fiction…or at least there aren’t any rules you can’t break now and again. As always, know when you break a rule, and do it for a reason.

As promised, I’m going to pick examples of these errors from my own stories, posted here on this site. Some of these stories are my very first efforts, so finding errors in them usually isn’t hard, but “Show, Don’t Tell” is a mantra that was drilled into me early on in workshops and from editors, so I had to root about a bit to find these offenders. Every story has spots where I need to move things along and not gum up the momentum with a fully descriptive flashback. A memory here, a wondering thought there, these might be difficult to “show” thoroughly. So, even if you find this sort of thing in your own work, the errors may not be big enough to warrant a rewrite; fixing them might alter the flow of the tale.

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01Jan13

Posted in Writing, tagged , , on 01 Jan 2013| Leave a Comment »

Your voice is dim

Your words break up

As if your call

Is from years past

And not across

Mere miles

k

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Up Your Aspirations

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , on 30 Dec 2012| Leave a Comment »

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiOne day my mother came home with a slogan from her workplace. “Lower Your Expectations,” it read. Not really the gung-ho mentality of today but hey, it was the ’70s. Anyway, my father saw it, found it somewhat ludicrous, and came back with the flip side: “Up Your Aspirations!” He even had it printed up on a t-shirt.

This probably tells you more about my father than it does my mother.

The point of this (and I have one) is that, as writers, we must manage both our expectations and our aspirations. This came home to because my wife has recently begun to ply her hand at writing, and tonight we had a discussion about what aspirations she might have, as a writer. Sensibly (I thought) she said that, at this point, she doesn’t have aspirations of writing for a living or even for profit. Right now she just wants to play with it and to learn how to be a better writer. I know I’ve harped on this before, but I believe it’s important; writing is a lonely business, and publishing is a cutthroat business. Writing for profit ain’t for the faint.

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The View from Here

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , on 14 Dec 2012| 6 Comments »

Stack of BooksI’ve been trolling the blogs, the last few days, reading fiction from new/unpublished writers. I see the same thing, over and over, the same mistakes, repeated.

I don’t know why writers continue to make these mistakes. Read any article or book on modern writing and you’ll see these problems called out. Perhaps it’s that some new writers don’t read books about writing, don’t analyze their own work. I don’t know.

What I do know, is that there are some new writers who read this blog (we’re up to 80+ followers, now, with slow but steady growth), so I thought I’d go over these basic problem areas in a series of posts. I hope it starts a conversation with some of the apprentice writers out there. (more…)

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To Be, Or Not To Be

Posted in Books, Culture, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on 13 Dec 2012| 5 Comments »

Stack of BooksI have been a “Stratfordian” all my life…so far, anyway.

A Stratfordian—for those of you not “up” on the nerdier side of All Things Literary—is someone who believes that the plays and poems of William Shakespeare were written by, well, by William Shakespeare. Of Stratford, that is. As in “Stratford-on-Avon”. Hence: Stratfordian.

I have been a Stratfordian all my life.

So far, anyway.

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I’ve Got Style

Posted in Books, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 05 Dec 2012| Leave a Comment »

I’ve been reading about Gustave Flaubert and his writing method.  “What a bitch of a thing prose is!” he wrote to his friend and lover, Louise Colet. “It’s never finished; there’s always something to redo.” And redo he did.

Flaubert was a definite “basher,” taking up to a week to produce a single page. He once remarked that for the first 125 pages of Madame Bovary, he actually wrote 500 pages. But this constant revision was required to achieve the style for which he aimed.

“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.”

In reading an analysis of the style he adopted for Madame Bovary, I realized that I, too, have a style. (more…)

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