Gotham Writers’ Workshop asked Robert McKee, a noted screenwriter, of:

I didn’t write in my blog for about a month or maybe even a few days more than a month. It happens. I get involved with one thing or another and the priority and importance of things shift. So instead of concentrating on one subject, I’ll write snippets for today.

Yesterday, in Dr. Oz’s show, he featured 50 Shades of Grey, the book that made most women curious, and those who read it feel sexy. Well, I haven’t read it but from what Dr. Oz and his guests discussed, I figured, right or wrong, it had stuff in it that demeaned women. Today, hubby and I went to Barnes & Noble’s to have tea at Starbucks inside the store and to see what new stuff is on the tables. First, we sat to have our tea. Three women, two of them as old as me—no, I’m not kidding, were reading 50 Shades of Grey. One of them was at the table next to ours. I couldn’t help but think, Is hubby in danger of getting attacked? Oh, the power of television and which thing the flavor-of-the-times show-host comes up with!

Now that I’m into e-books, thanks to the readability of Kindle (for my easily tiring eyes), I can’t help picking on the mistakes such as typos and stuff like that in them since most of them do not have an editor. Even those with editors sometimes goof. This is for sure present company excluded: that is, Writing.com authors excluded since they have the cleanest texts, really..

From an actual text, in which the usage of worried…repeats itself in two other places: “B. worried the end of her tongue with her teeth during walk back to the office building.” Not to mention the rest of the sentence construction, how can one worry the end of her tongue?

This is from an intro to a book:
“The flaw in her plan, however, is that Chuck is a ticking time bomb with a temper that is truly unpredictable, which has dior consequences for all family members involved.”
I'll take a Dior consequence anytime. I know it’s a typo, but it made me laugh.

Today’s real rant is about companies that try to make better already very good products, and in the process, cause them to become worse. I used to love Dove body wash. The latest one I have, however, is so thick and creamy that it is like schlopping myself with a glob of cheap cream. I didn’t feel clean after using it. Actually it felt icky and greasy. Can't they leave the well-enough alone!

Second product: To kill germs on my hands I sometimes use a hand-sanitizer. Dial came up with a new hand sanitizer. I bought the thing because its bottle looked fancy. Wrong move! the liquid inside is clear, but when I push the pump on the cap, a foam comes out and glues itself to my skin. Afterwards, my hands feel sticky as if I kneaded a sugary, oily dough. Ugh! Moral:Better stick to the cheap, ordinary kinds of things and don't swoon over sexy-looking bottles...

I just hope no one messes with Dickinson’s Witch Hazel now. I need the good old-fashioned things for my witching practices.

 

As part of being human, we want safety. We are afraid to step out of the commonplace where we are used to live, where we feel comfortable.

Safety, however, is a paradox. How can we feel safe if we don’t dare to venture outside of what is customary?

The best ideas are scary. Once we experience the scary, we find that all is safe.

I am uttering all this gobbledygook, not because I am not thinking about the Amazonian jungle or the African Savanna, but I am talking about writing, and I am talking about psyching myself about it.

Before I came to WdC, my writing had been straight-laced nonfiction, mostly research work, with the exception of a novel attempt in 1985 in a novel-writing course and very few poetry and short fiction pieces here and there. Truth is, I have always loved fiction and read non-stop. When I finally got around to writing "the fun stuff" though, most of my work turned into general fiction, with little or none of that occult/horror/sci-fi material.

For example, all three of my NaNo novels mimic real life, and they all feel like they lack something. Except the last one, in which I sprayed a bit of ghost/occult thing. Of the three rush jobs, it is my favorite. For sure, it needs re-thinking and rewriting, to which I am not easily going to succumb.

The good thing is, if it is a good thing , I have been reconsidering. I may try the genres in longer works maybe little by little at first. It may be late but what the heck. I write for the fun of it in the first place. Why not try something far out? Who knows, I may enjoy it.




 

Yesterday, at noontime where I am (East Coast), I watched drunks on the other side of the world stumble over each other as they tried to walk on the sidewalks of a busy street with several bars. It was after midnight where they were, and though there were several police cars around, they were tolerated.

As a side note, I suspect the word “loitering” or “vagrancy” is a US invention, while the entire world seems to engage in walking the streets, at all times, aimlessly.

Live webcams have turned me into an addict. Placed in any one part of the world, they are the true reality shows and a boon for people watchers. Some webcams are controllable; others, you just sit back and enjoy.

Although I can understand logically what happens as the earth turns, it is a small shock or rather a sense of awe to view the various times of the day or night in the world, when the sun is up where I am or viceversa. Europe is usually 5-7 hours ahead of our time in the East Coast, the same as we are three hours ahead of the West Coast.

Even in the most unlikely places, there are webcams now. Even “Putin” has “put in” (pun intended) live webcams all over Russia as of yesterday. The cameras went online before the opening of polling stations for Russian elections, suddenly making it possible to catch a glimpse of life in the schools, village clubs and other municipal buildings that host the polls. I think this may be the only good thing Putin may have done in his life, giving the people of the world as well as the Russians themselves to get to know each other in a more intimate way.

I love watching the cities of the world or rather tiny pieces of them, like the Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Times Square in NY City, or the harbor of Amsterdam, due to the fact that. I used to travel a lot, but now I don’t because I don’t like the restrictions of the air travel, and also I became too old for the wear and tear of adjusting to jetlag and other taxing conditions. For such reasons, the live webcams are my consolation prizes, and I value greatly the voyeuristic experiences they provide.

There are all kinds of webcams, too, on the web: those that show the action at bars, karaoke joints, places for various kinds of sports, and undersea divers, plus personal webcams like that of a trucker, a bartender etc.

Late last night as I watched the daybreak in a city seven hours ahead of where I am, the idea occurred to me that some great stories can be concocted from the webcams. Next time, a writer has a dry spell, he/she can start with www.earthcam.com. Why not? They are all live prompts, like ripe fruit waiting to be plucked.



 

Out of the blue, it occurred to me to hoard titles: Not other book, movie, or song titles but what I would hear, read, or see that could make a good title for a story or a novel.

Whoosh! My brain was flooded in a short time. After writing down several pages of possible titles for two days, I realized that those titles I picked could also double up as prompts. Anyhow, anything becomes a prompt when I put my mind to it. The problem is in finding that mind, which plays hide-and-seek.

Here are a few of my titles and the stories behind them:

Man on the Roof:
While we were in the car, I saw a neighbor fixing his roof.

Wide Sweep:
The same neighbor's wife was sweeping their driveway while the husband was on the roof. (No, he didn't fall on her!)

Pouring Coffee:
You got it! Me helping myself to a cup. The phrase has caffeine in it, don't you think? In the least, it implies vigor, a Starbucks story maybe, or even something more.

To Make a Day of It:
A snippet from hubby's offer for some leisure activity.

Self-Storage:
The sign of a Storage Business. When the words are taken separately, their meanings might imply something psychological, or psycho, if you like.

Keys in Hand:
That was hubby walking with keys in his hand, but in a story, keys could mean so many things.

The Knock-off Version:
From Jimmy Cramer's Mad Money talk. Somehow this rings a bell, but which bell I can't say. Can it be the closing bell for the markets? Ahha! Here is another one: The Closing Bell

And I better stop now, before I find myself in a padded cell.


 

Well, curiosity killed the kitten. SM put a funny cartoon on FB about grammar mistakes. Via that cartoon, I made my way to its original website, Grammarly.com, which advertises itself as the “World's Most Accurate Grammar Checker.”

Well, I had to check the checker, as I said curiosity kills me each time. In order not to be biased toward the negative side, I didn’t put any of my pieces in the box where one writes or pastes the work.

In that box, however, I wrote in a paragraph by Faulkner. The site's program graded the paragraph 65 over 100, disliked the one use of passive voice, which IMHO was necessary, suggested better vocabulary use in one place, and said an in-sentence punctuation was wrong. Lol!

There is more. They have a plagiarism detector. It didn’t detect I was copying Faulkner verbatim with punctuation included.

Truth is, grammarly.com is like a flimsy cane to lean on, and nothing can replace learning plus good judgment. I suspect they could be better than MS Word, which doesn’t use semicolons properly, plus a few other things.

Grammarly.com may be used as an unreliable checker, but a checker nevertheless, and what they say should not be taken as the final word of the Grammar gods.

 

In one of the recent Dr. Oz’s shows -I don’t know which since I follow them from the DVR tapings-, a psychiatrist asked this question to overweight ladies. I thought the question was excellent for most anyone to ask himself or herself. Not only that though, for us writers, it is a good question to ask to every character we create.

Let me repeat the question: Who in your life told you, you were worthless?
In the same vein, the same question can be asked as: Who in your life made you feel you were (are) worthless?

To reach the proper answer, some introspection and painful recall are necessary.

In the show, most of the answers involved people’s parents. It doesn’t always have to be the parents, though. I think it can be anybody if the character believed their words or actions and took them to heart, or it can even be something like a malicious gossip that got out of hand. Sometimes, even a derision or an nasty implication can be enough because the mind has a way of filling in the gaps.

The idea is the same as the curse, by witches or whoever else, in fiction and visual media. The feeling of worthlessness is a psychological curse for it affects a person’s life and personality. If the person believes in his or her mind that he or she is worthless, the mind will filter out most anything that will make him or her believe otherwise. Resistance and disregard to one’s own worthlessness or, better yet, self-appreciation is the true armor a person can have.

Most of the time, however, being the vulnerable human beings that we are, we build false armors against such hurtful words and actions. In Dr. Oz’s show, the women overate and glorified in their obesity. There can be other false armors that show themselves in various ways such as cruelty, misbehaving, disloyalty, depression, overreaction, and criminal behavior.

Affirmations and positive suggestions can provide some cure for such hurts if the belief of worthlessness hasn’t become a chronic problem. It can still be dealt with when it’s chronic, but it needs a lot of work.

So, let’s not forget to ask the characters we create the telling question: Who, in your life, told you, you were worthless?



 

Writing.com has an official contest "Dear Me: Official Contest" , which asks about our new year’s resolutions. This is a wonderful encouragement to writers because just to mull over the idea would help any one of us.

Chuck Palahniuk, too, asks “Okay writers, it's a new year. What are your 'writing resolutions?” in:
http://litreactor.com/news/new-years-writing-resolutions-these-are-ours-now-show...

The idea in the contest and Palahniuk’s question got me going. If I were to come up with a few resolutions, what would they be? Mind you, resolutions can turn into scary monsters to steal away from one’s life and family. That would be the last thing I would go for. So in my half-hearted way, while not entering the contest, I’d probably answer the question as:

I could resolve to finish at least the first draft of anything. My writing is full of half-cooked ideas. My computer weeps incessantly because of those. So are the flash drives those ideas and half-done work are stored into, not to mention the shoe-boxes filled with notes that never see the light of day. If I can only do this, I won’t need other resolutions.

I would also like to try slightly different ways or genres than what I usually do.

I don’t submit much anymore, well, not at all, except for posting stuff here in WdC. Only because I don’t think anything I have is really “finished.” It would be nice to finish a thing or two, then act on it.

Having said all that, I’m afraid of making resolutions. What I have up here is only wishful thinking, not resolutions. If they were resolutions, I’d beat me on the head at the end of the year or while trying to accomplish what I set me out for. I’m big on keeping my promises, even those I make to myself.

There is also this other thing: I like reading more than writing, which takes a lot of time.

One resolution I made several years ago and have kept up to now is to write every day. I guess it is an ongoing one and, sort of, makes up for all my writing ills. On the days when I can’t be near a writing apparatus, I compose something inside my head. This comes in handy in waiting rooms and similar places, even though it might make other people in the place to wonder about the faraway look on my face or the frown that comes from not liking an idea. If people wonder about me, so what? I am not the only one who talks to herself, and who says I have to be in the loop for anything!

 

Finally it happened. I dreamt of my muse…compliments of Jane Eyre.

Since most everything written nowadays is occult, gore, cheap sex, mayhem, and murder, for my bedtime reading, I decided to go back to my teenage favorite, Jane Eyre.

Last night, the second night I was reading, I dreamt of my muse, a tall thin wiry guy whose energy far surpasses anyone I know. He wanted to tell me something, but I shooed him off. That is, I caught him in a net and physically threw him out the door. Who needs a buttinsky, right?

Well, this buttinsky managed to come in through the window, all tied up in rope--my earlier doing--and claimed his territory by bugging me.

“Leave Rochester alone! He’s no woman’s hero,” he proclaimed as I went at him, beating him with my slipper.

“Don’t put a Rochester in your books. He ain’t real.”

I stopped then. Rochester, not real?

“Rochester fooled Jane. He hid a mad wife in the darkest section of his castle. He’s the most selfish, most twisted character. And you think him a lover? Phooey!”

Well, I woke up…factually speaking.

Yes, the muse had a point, but we, the lovers of the world, love our faulty love objects, don’t we! Wasn’t it the same with The Beauty and The Beast? At least, Beast was a rung higher than Rochester; he didn’t have a hidden mad wife.

For argument’s sake, I thought what if the tides were turned and I hid a mad spouse in my castle? Of course, in my case, the castle would be a split level and I’d have to hide my mad spouse in the wood shed, but knowing me, I most certainly wouldn’t be able to get away with it.

Even Rochester wasn’t all that successful, but the end proved his means, and Jane took him back…willingly! Of course he had to suffer for it by becoming blind and having a face with burn marks.

Yet, can you imagine Jane’s life after marriage? I can just hear her screaming. “Rochester, don’t walk up the stairs alone!” “Rochester, that is the closet not the bathroom.” “Rochester, let me cut your meat. You’re making a mess.” etc. etc…

Poor Jane! Poor lovers of the world!

My muse was right.

Tonight, I’ll go back to reading occult, gore, sappiness, cheap sex, mayhem, and murder...willingly.




 

Finally it happened. I dreamt of my muse…compliments of Jane Eyre.

Since most everything written nowadays is occult, gore, cheap sex, mayhem, and murder, for my bedtime reading, I decided to go back to my teenage favorite, Jane Eyre.

Last night, the second night I was reading, I dreamt of my muse, a tall thin wiry guy whose energy far surpasses anyone else's that I know of. The muse wanted to tell me something, but I shooed him off. That is, I caught him in a net and physically threw him out the door. Who needs a buttinsky, right?

Well, this buttinsky managed to bust through the window, all tied up in rope--my earlier doing--and breaking the glass and some part of the window frame. He, then, claimed his territory by bugging me.

“Leave Rochester alone! He’s no woman’s hero,” he proclaimed as I went at him, beating him with my slipper.

“Don’t put a Rochester in your books. He ain’t real.”

I stopped suddenly. Rochester, not real?

“Rochester fooled Jane. He hid a mad wife in the darkest section of his castle. He’s the most selfish, most twisted character. And you think him a lover? Phooey!”

Well, I woke up…factually speaking.

Yes, the muse had a point, but we, the lovers of the world, love our faulty love objects, don’t we! Masochists us! Wasn’t it the same with The Beauty and The Beast? At least, Beast was a rung higher than Rochester; he didn’t have a hidden mad wife.

For argument’s sake, I thought, what if the tides were turned and I hid a mad spouse in my castle? Of course, in my case, the castle would be a split level and I’d have to hide my mad spouse in the wood shed, but knowing me, I most certainly wouldn’t be able to get away with it.

Even Rochester wasn’t all that successful, but the end proved his means, and Jane took him back…willingly! Of course, Rochester had to suffer for what he did by becoming blind and having a face with burn marks.

Yet, can you imagine Jane’s life after marriage? I can just hear her screaming. “Rochester, don’t walk up the stairs alone!” “Rochester, that is the closet not the bathroom.” “Rochester, let me cut your meat. You’re making a mess.” etc. etc…

Who was the author punishing?

Poor Jane! Poor lovers of the world!

My muse was right.

Tonight, I’ll go back to reading occult, gore, sappiness, cheap sex, mayhem, and murder...willingly.




 

About five or six days ago, I cooked a dish of pinto beans. After the dish was cooked, I found a single bean that had fallen on the kitchen floor. On an impulse, not wanting to throw it in the garbage, I stuck it in a pot of soil on the sill in front of the kitchen window where I keep African Violets. I had placed that pot of soil on the sill to use it later for a section of an African Violet which had become too big for its container.

It never occurred to me that this single bean which was designed for eating would take root. But it did, and in two days. Four days ago, I came to the kitchen early in the morning and found that the bean had sprouted.

I am not alien to raising vegetables. About thirty years ago when we lived in Long Island, NY, I had a vegetable garden where I raised Italian beans from seeds in small packets. I know beans are fast guys, but this bean that wasn't meant to be sown had taken root all on its own. In two more days, it became a five-inch stalk. Amazing!

Far be it from me to think of it as a simple bean stalk. The way it's going, it will need the fairytale's Jack to climb it. In the meantime, I put a straw near it for support, although it doesn't seem to need it.

Watching it, the term life force comes to mind. What a strong energy that is!

The Chinese call it qi or chi. Star Wars called it The Force. Some of us call it élan vital, vitalism, energy, spirit, or even soul. Whatever we may call it, what type of an esoteric spirituality we may attach to it, it is what it is, and it is awesome.

a being in green
sprouted from dirt
through shadows, like love

its dream beyond my grasp

to think it will go away
responding to a call
radiating drama

and dreams beyond my grasp


 

What I miss in the English language I learn from CNBC. Just a few minutes ago, the speaker, one of the young regulars on the CNBC’s roster, said--more or less--that the subject at hand is uber local and there is more life to US than on this side (meaning the eastern side) of the Mississippi. That makes it uber local, I guess. Uber local, meaning national, more than local, or something like that.

I know English has kinship with German, but where did this uber come from in the later years? This practice makes me ask, “Warum?”

Uber local, huh…

Well, live and learn.

 

I can’t believe I finished my NaNo novel. It happened, thanks to the "October NaNoWriMo Prep Challenge"  here in WdC. In the beginning of the month, I fell back because I got busy with other things. Then I panicked, thinking I’d never see the end of this book. So I went at it. There was a day when I wrote 4000 words, unheard of where I am concerned. Then the rest of it came like raveling a knitted item. I even wrote a chapter on Thanksgiving, late in the evening. Another first for me.

The book needs some TLC, but I enjoyed writing it and it gives the message I wanted it to give...I think.
"Rocky Road " 

As to TLC, in other words revision, I’m really bad at that. So waiting is the game, at this point, as it has been with my other novels. Of all types of writing, I enjoy novels the best, sans the revision. Novels work in (and under) so many different levels.

Writing the NaNo novel meant not writing anything else, minus the reviews. That is why this blog got the utmost neglect.

Anyway, it was a good two months: the first, with the prep; the second, writing the novel itself. I enjoyed this year's NaNo better than the last two when I flailed at the end not knowing how to do the ending. This year I did. Thus the actual writing was much easier.

Well, best of luck to all the NaNoers who are still writing. May all your novels shine!

 

I am so proud of WdC writer-friends whose books I read because they have the best self-published books without any glaring flaws. It was, however, not so where other books were concerned.

Ever since I started reading self-published books on my Kindle, I began to appreciate more, a lot more, the value of good editors. Unless a writer has the eyes of an eagle, sees all awkward passages and errors, and can proofread for herself or himself, his or her work will lack credibility without a knowledgeable editor.

Example: The last novel I finished is written by a writer with a BA in English, an MA in Lit, and another degree in a related field. She also teaches writing privately. (Her bio is at the end of the book.)
Her novel was a long one of the literary genre, the genre I like reading the most. The first half of the book was flawless. But somewhere during the middle, typos, misspellings, slight grammatical errors began to sprout. At one point in one scene, I thought she wrote it while half-asleep and forgot to look it over.
Here is an exact quote with the characters’ names changed. It is a mother and daughter scene:
Clare said, “May I drive you home?”
Clare answered, “I don’t think so.”
She insisted. ‘It’s late. Please let me.’
Clare wasn’t talking to herself either. There are a couple more things like this in the second half of the same book. Never mind the fact that she has written the same scene in two different places and that she likes beating around the bush a lot.

I don’t mean to look down on any one author, but this one is a well-educated person on the very subject she is involved in. Imagine if she needed an editor, how would the rest of self-published writers fare?

Forget the grammar, typos, or an attention slip or two, an editor’s best medicine to an ailing manuscript is to point out the construction flaws, incorrect information, and organization of thought and sequence. A writer may have the best idea, great premise, well-developed characters, but if the scene sequences put readers to sleep and the novel is not presented as impressively as it can be, the writing loses from its positive impact.

Having said that, I checked the editorial services of a popular company for a 50K novel, since NANO is right around the corner and most editorial services charge by word count. Just to give an overall idea the price was $360.00 for only manuscript critique, $843.76 is for line-by-line editing, and $721.99 for proofreading. And, they won’t do the proofreading before the writer goes through the previous two. This company advertises itself as: Fast, Affordable, Professional Editing and Proofreading --Trusted with more than xxx million words

Now who can afford that! Even if we could, should we blindly accept what they say? I don’t think so. After all, the blame or the praise goes to the author.

What to do, what to do, if we can’t afford an editor and couldn’t get the attention of a serious publisher? What a catch-22 situation!

I think we should arm ourselves with information, and check, and recheck several times over with or without any editorial services before deciding to publish.

Even if we did all that, can we be sure our manuscript is at its best? Not really, but at some point, we have to go jump in the lake or rather into self-publishing. Otherwise, we’ll miss the flow of things. I don’t know what the remedy is in the long run, but I think we should be careful, very careful, with our manuscripts.

 

"The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires." William A. Ward

While I believe most teachers do inspire already, may all of them strive to do so.

Now that a school year has just started or is about to start, depending on where you live, all the burden of sharing and caring outside the home, or sometimes in spite of the home, will fall on the shoulders of teachers.

I am not going on and on with tributes to teachers. Since there is no way to measure how teachers impact lives and because the lure of trying to teach surpasses all logic, no amount of tributes will suffice. So, for all you out there giving so much from yourselves under trying conditions and little compensation, I wish I could put all the world’s apples on your desks.

There is one thing teachers of today can be happy about; that they are not teaching in the year 1872.

1872 Instructions to Teachers
Mason Street School
San Diego Co. Historical Days Association

1. Teachers will fill lamps, clean chimneys and trim wicks each day.
2. Each teacher will bring a scuttle of coal and a bucket of water for the day's use.
3. Make your pens carefully. You may whittle nibs for the individual tastes of children.
4. Men teachers may take one evening a week for courting purposes or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.
5. After ten hours in the school the teacher should spend the remaining time reading the Bible and other good books.
6. Women teachers who marry or engage in other unseemly conduct will be dismissed.
7. Every teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls, or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reasons to suspect his worth, intentions, integrity and honesty.
8. The teacher who performs his labors faithfully without fault for five years will be give an increase of 25 cents a week in his pay - providing the Board of Education approves.


Have a happy and successful school year, everyone.

 

No, I don’t think so. I think it is more alive than ever. Only it has taken different forms and different media and devices.

I just finished reading The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin. In the beginning of the book, the author tries to motivate his son to read. The son rejects reading and when asked why, he says it is because literature is dead. The author wonders about that throughout the book.

While I found the book and the author’s ideas very interesting and some of them very close to my way of thinking, I think people do read today and a lot; maybe they do it differently, and not in the way the author reads or some people read or I read or Pat Conroy reads, as there are many references to Conroy’s My Reading Life.

On the other hand, one passage described exactly why I read and what literature does to people. ”This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers: a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase. There is something thrilling about it, this unburdening, the idea of getting at a truth so profound that, for a moment anyway, we become transcendent in the fullest sense.” The way the author expressed what I always felt was just beautiful.

The book also touches many different areas and different situations in our time from classics like Joyce to politics to daily living to electronic media. He is ambivalent about the electronic media, unlike me. I applaud the new media, e-books and everything in it. It opened doors for me I didn’t know existed.

This book also made me realize a few things about myself. One of them was Hermann Goering’s statement at Nuremberg. I have so hated the Nazis that I refused to read anything or listen to anything about them. Their victims and how they stood under cruelty, I would read, but not about the Nazis themselves. Maybe I should.

After stating that no matter what the regime is the people are under, Goering says the common people don’t want war. The way to incite them to war (in Goering’s exact words) is: “All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”

OMG! History surely has repeated itself. I suppose inspecting the dark things and how and why they operate the way they do has some merit to it.

Leaving the nasty people’s comments, though applicable they may be to situations after their time, I’m going to jump to the author’s another profound comment on reading. “Reader becomes the book.”

How many times, after finishing a book we like, do we walk around carrying the book inside our heads and feel we are one with the characters and the situations in it!

While reading The Lost Art of Reading, I sometimes agreed with the author, sometimes not, but I thoroughly appreciated his opinions and the quotations—mostly literary—that he offered. The book is short only 149 pages, yet it deserves stopping here and there for reflection.

Rarely I read a worthwhile book that discusses the one thing I love doing the most: reading. This one was a very pleasant experience.

 

Each time I start a new writing project, I feel like a first-time writer, no matter how many years I have lived and how many years I have written. So, since you asked for it, take what I am going to say with a grain of salt.

Here's a very rough list:

1. Learn to write clearly. If you think what you have written sounds vague to you, go back and write it in the basic subject+predicate+object formation. Then go on from there.

2. If you are not sure of your English or if it is your second, third, fourth or nth language, make sure you have learned it well. Read grammar books. As a matter of fact, read everything.

3. For prose pieces, essays, articles, etc., write down the list of ideas. Then write the piece using each idea or cluster of ideas as paragraphs. Make sure the passage from one paragraph to another is smooth.

4. Enjoy poetry whether you write it or not. It will add a specific dimension to your writing. I’m not going to tell you how to write poetry since I think it is so personal. For the same reason, formal poetry is out of my league, although I enjoy a well-written piece.

5. If you are a fiction writer, write the original idea in one sentence. This is called the premise, from which you’ll squeeze out the planning of protagonist, antagonist, story action, and setting. A great tip is before you write the first sentence and once you have a rough idea what the story will be, go ahead and write what the final revelation will be which will end the story. Believe me, this will make your story writing much, much easier.

6. Read a lot of the genre or of the style in which you wish to write. Read the contemporary writers as well as the real oldies.

7. Learn to take critiques for what they are worth. That is, who is telling you what. Did they understand the gist of what you wrote? Is their critique fueled by something other than to help you with your work, something like flattery, hate, or jealousy? If you think a certain critique is not going to help you, just disregard it as if it didn’t happen.

8. Don’t be afraid of rewriting, editing, and so to speak, fixing up your piece, something most of us--starting with me--just hate to do.

I think I’ll end this with a quote from a letter written by Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925.
“I think you should learn about writing from everybody who has ever written that has anything to teach you.”
Hope this helps.

 

No kidding! I should know. I’ve been here ten years, and I haven’t graduated yet. I hope I never will.

Anyhow, what brought all this on was a chance encounter at Barnes and Noble’s.

Yesterday, I was looking through the books near the dictionaries where the writing stuff is. Two young women, who surmised I knew something or other, probably just looking at my gray hair (yup, dappled gray hair has its virtues) asked me a question about choosing a book on character. We started talking and immediately I forgot about my husband waiting for me in the middle of the store at Starbucks. (Another virtue of gray hair!)

It turned out one of them attended a few writing courses, and the other went to but did not finish a creative writing degree program. They complained of teaching, in both places. They complained that what one teacher said clashed with what the other said, as did the books they read. And both women ended up being confused and feeling much less capable than when they started. I said that’s the beauty of writing. People have to stick to their guns and go after what fits them and their writing the best, while they try new things as they write. Then I told them about Writing.com.

They didn’t quite believe it--I think--since the site is online and the internet is a jungle. But they made me realize, one more time, how lucky we are to be writing here.

I didn’t get their names (another virtue of gray hair), but they seemed so nice and eager. I hope they check us out.

So the moral is: Creative Writing schools do not carry the weight they promise they do.

Anyone who is talented enough will do just as successfully here.

I know because I read people’s work here, as well as the books from highly noted, award-winning authors elsewhere. (IMHO) Sometimes, the difference doesn’t exist.

Oh, as to my husband:
Being inured to my evaporating into thin air, he was happily enjoying a cream puff, but my Earl Grey had gotten cold.



 

For the email-charter, The Subversive Copy Editor (CSE) says: it's "noncommercial, nonfat and gluten-free."

I agree. After all, I have her book and follow her blog because what she says helps me greatly. And I do love E-Mail compared to what I used to struggle with--that is: snail mail--between the time I learned to write and the invention of the e-mail. But e-mail has a tendency to overflow and waste precious time, thanks to our commercialism and our lack of concise expression.

Can we do something about the hundreds of e-mails we each get every single day and try to answer or eliminate them? Maybe. At least two people came up with some rules as The E-Mail Charter.

I read about the charter in SCE's latest blog entry, titled An E-Mail Diet: EOM NNTR
http://www.subversivecopyeditor.com/blog/2011/07/an-e-mail-diet-eom-nntr.html

And the email charter can be reached at:
http://emailcharter.org/index.html

According to SCE, the eighth rule is the best, and I can see why, since it is the most doable.

The eighth rules offers two short-cut alternatives in the form of acronyms:

EOM: Short for end of message to be put on the subject line if the message can be expressed on the subject line alone. For example, for us WdC members: Thank you for the gps. EOM.

NNTR: Short for No Need to Respond. This can be used inside, at the end of the message or on the subject line.

Can we stick to the Charter's Rules, or being human, are we going to mess this one up, too? Just look at what we did with our government in two and a half centuries. On the other hand, acronyms may lean more toward success than amendments.

In either case, it helps to be an optimist. If you're an optimist, you won't be able to avoid the bumpy roller-coaster ride, and at the end, you'll still throw up, but you'll think, At least, I went on the ride.

 

I learned a lot from John Truby’s teaching. This morning, I came across one of his articles online, I thought would benefit us all, whether we want to sell to Hollywood or not.

The article’s title is 10 Story Techniques You Must Use to Sell Your Script.

His ten techniques are:
1. Know the 10 most popular genres (Action, Comedy, Crime, Detective, Horror, Fantasy, Love, Myth, Science Fiction and Thriller.)
2. Combine 2or 3 genres
3. Find the right genre for the story idea
4. Use Myth as one of your genres
5. Combine Myth with one or two other genres
6. Make one genre Primary
7. If you ‘re writing a screenplay for an indie film, write Horror, Thriller, or Love
8. Hit all the genre Beats
9. Be original, transcend the genre
10. Be honest with yourself, and specialize in the forms that are right for you.

If you want to read the details in the article, here’s the link:
http://www.writersstore.com/10-story-techniques-you-must-use-to-sell-your-script...

He also has quite a few videos on Youtube, which might be useful to a writer.

Here is a video of John Truby explaining to an interviewer a thing or two about his book.