. . . . . . ~© The Writer's Den ©~ . . . . . .

2011-08-13T06:50:00.000-07:00

Beachcomber; One who scavenges along beaches or in wharf areas, a seaside vacationer.

I stand on the beach strewn with rocks and shells and crazy collages of human refuse; old bottles, faded shoes, sunglasses, a pair of worn Levi’s; a real sandy junk yard. Everything looks old, but it’s just the sun having beaten down on them for so long. I feel old too, but it’s just the quiet that does it to me; I am still relatively young, it’s just my mind that ages here.

Georgian Bay, on the southern shore of Lake Huron, is flat limestone plain and cedar marshes. The Anishinaabeg First Nations peoples to the North and Huron-Petun (Wyandot) to the south own this land, in spirit anyway. I feel I own it too, in some primordial way. When I walk this beach, one of the longest stretches of beach in North America by the way, 8.7 miles of it, I become lost in time. I walk with the ancients, and their ghosts. I could discover the meaning of life here, given enough time.

The meaning of life; I feel ill-equipped to tackle the often heavy subject, but the surf and sand and distant seagulls point my soul in that direction anyway. I’ve often left my friends there on the beach to wander down the road, so to speak, usually late in the day when the sun is low across the water and the skies are turning dusky blue and rusty pink. This beach has another perk; you can walk out almost a quarter mile into the water and stare north to the horizon where there is nothing but sky and water, infinity, and aloneness. It’s like staring into a beautiful abyss.

Walking; further down the beach there are crags and rocks, where most of the best stuff is found. I find beautiful pieces of ornate sea-wood, which I keep for whittling by the fire. There are stones and rocks older than Moses here, and storm glass; Mother Nature takes old broken wine and beer bottle shards and buffs and sands them for years in the tides. When they return from this process they are smooth and round and lovely; I collect them by the handful. Sometimes I find old bones, seagulls, and fish. That’s okay, this is their place, and they are entitled to die here. I can find no more peaceful memorial ground then this. But the sky is growing long, and purple clouds are sailing across the darkening blue and I don’t want to leave this. I turn to look down the beach and see that my friends are packing things up, getting ready to leave, so I guess I must go. I scan the ground for another souvenir, a stone to take with me as a memento. I see a lovely buffed pink one and I pick it up, but suddenly I feel guilty. I should leave it, because it belongs here, and I have no right to take it. I put it back, and head for the crowd. They are far off in the distance, growing misty in the dusk, so I have plenty of time for thought.

I think about Jesse.

Did I ever tell you about Jesse? He’s a Dutch dwarf bunny, 8 years old now, pretty good for a rabbit. We got him Christmas Eve at a pet store for my girlfriend Clair in 2001. She took to him immediately, whenever she stopped crying for joy of course. Jesse is a spirited little cuss, and he makes a funny honking noise when he’s riled up. I was surprised at how cat-like he was; he’d sit on your lap and let you pet him for hours, he’d use a litter-box. He’d grunt his displeasure at you too. His fur is a winter white color, and he has sparkling blue eyes; the better to stare into our souls with. He’s been a great pet and a great companion for the past eight years.

We just found out he may have cancer.

Thinking of this as I walk the beach, I wonder about the meaning of things, and why people exist, and then die. Certainly not a new question and I’m certainly not the first to wonder about it, but at times when I’m faced with unpleasant things, I begin to wonder. I wonder about all the people who have ever lived and died and who have looked upon the same sun, sky and moon, who have walked the same Earth, sand, and beach, and I wonder what it all means.

This essay will not answer these questions.

So, when we finish our trip, leave Georgian Bay and head back into reality, we have to make a decision about Jesse. It’s one I don’t wish to make.

Leave no business unfinished, leave no stone unturned, and leave no person unloved. The meaning of life could be that simple.

I’ve reached my friends, and the closer I get, the further my existential thoughts are drifting away. They are young; I am young too, perhaps too young to be wrestling with these questions.

But it’s the beach, and the beachcomber in me. I search for answers in life as I do on the beach. It’s just my questing nature I guess.

The meaning of life will have to wait for another day.

2011-03-09T20:26:00.000-08:00

"On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays"

1. A beginning ends what an end begins.

2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full.

3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself.

4. The best time is stolen time.

5. All work is the avoidance of harder work.

6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.

7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music.

8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear?

9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation.

10. Writer: how books read each other.

11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love.

12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything.

13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.

14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear.

15. There are silences harder to take back than words.

16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself.

18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.

19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.

20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do.

21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of.

22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday.

23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open).

24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?"
— James Richardson

"The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write:

too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming,

too many characters to raise up from the dirt like flowers whose petals I peeled down to the intricate frail organs within,

too many terrible genetic and fiduciary secrets to dig up and bury and dig up again,

too many divorces to grant,

heirs to disinherit,

trysts to arrange,

letters to misdirect into evil hands,

innocent children to slay with rheumatic fever,

women to leave unfulfilled and hopeless,

men to drive to adultery and theft,

fires to ignite at the hearts of ancient houses. "

— Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)

Happening Now: The Den report - What is a 'True' Writer, Anyway?

Grammar – A Printable Version

2010-08-03T17:58:00.000-07:00

"The English language is your most versatile scientific instrument. Learn to use it with precision."

1. Make sure each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
2. Just between you and I, the case of pronoun is important.
3. Watch out for irregular verbs which have crope into English.
4. Verbs has to agree in number with their subjects.
5. Don't use no double negatives.
6. Being bad grammar, a writer should not use dangling modifiers.
7. Join clauses good like a conjunction should.
8. A writer must be not shift your point of view.
9. About sentence fragments.
10. Don't use run-on sentences you got to punctuate them.
11. In letters essays and reports use commas to separate items in series.
12. Don't use commas, which are not necessary.
13. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
14. Its important to use apostrophes right in everybodys writing.
15. Don't abbrev.
16. Check to see if you any words out.
17. In the case of a report, check to see that jargonwise, it's A-OK.
18. As far as incomplete constructions, they are wrong.
19. About repetition, the repetition of a word might be real effective repetition - take, for instance the repetition of Abraham Lincoln.
20. In my opinion, I think that an author when he is writing should definitely not get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that he does not really need in order to put his message across.
21. Use parallel construction not only to be concise but also clarify.
22. It behooves us all to avoid archaic expressions.
23. Mixed metaphors are a pain in the neck and ought to be weeded out.
24. Consult the dictionery to avoid mispelings.
25. To ignorantly split an infinitive is a practice to religiously avoid.
26. Last but not least, lay off cliches.
by George L. Trigg, Physics Review Letters, (Volume 42, Issue 12, pp. 747-748, 19 March 1979).

Writing a Novel is Easy? Since When?

2010-07-21T21:44:00.000-07:00

Conversations with my Muse

I recently got into it with my muse, A shadowy figure not unlike Lady Godiva, who started asking me why my book wasn’t written yet. I had no haughty replies, I just stated the obvious; these things take time.

She scrunched up her brow like I had said something offensive.

“Writing is easy,” She said. “I could write a book in a month, tops.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Not interested.”

“Why do you think it’s easy?

She leaned forward, “C’mon. Twilight? I could write that in my sleep.”

“There are a lot of things to consider,” I say.

“Like what?”

“Story. You need a good story.”

“Okay. Easy enough.”

“Ah, but then you need an interesting protagonist.”

“Okay, I guess you mean the main character.”

“Yeah. Also, the protagonist, the main character, has to be interesting enough to carry the story.”

“Okay.”

“He also has to have an arc.”

“An arc? Like Noah’s Arc?” She says, laughing.

“No, a personal, emotional and cathartic story arc. He can’t be the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning.”

“Why not?”

“Cause what’s the point of following this guy through 300 pages if he just ends up the same?”

“Oh. Never thought of that. Well, that doesn’t sound so hard.”

“What about conflict? Drama? We need an antagonist in this story …”

“An antagonist? Like a shit disturber?”

“Right, someone who causes our hero distress.”

“I still don’t see …”

“Also, there’s thematic issues to deal with …”

“Thematic?”

“Yeah, the novel should have a theme, a motif, it’s gotta be about something other than the story …”

“I don’t understand ….”

“Then there’s Tone, Pace, Style …”

“You’re losing me.”

“Then of course, you have to curb character drift.”

“Character drift?”

“You gotta keep your characters from acting OUT of character …If the characters are not acting like themselves you’ll lose the reader.

“This is getting complicated …”

“What POV should you write your novel in?”

“POV?”

“Point of View. First person, third person …”

“Aren’t you making this more complicated than it should be?”

“No. Like I said, there’s things to consider. Language, for instance.”

“Language? What about English?” She says, laughing.

“There’s different types of English. Colloquial, and literary, regional dialects …”

“Colloquial? You mean slang.”

“I mean, how do people talk? Which brings us to dialogue.”

“Oh, dialogue. Well, I talk enough (laughs) so I should be able to write dialogue easily.”

“Not so easy. You can’t write book dialogue the way people actually talk, you couldn’t get a decent sentence down that way … human speech is fraught with broken sentences, half-thoughts, uh’s and um’s … and you need dialogue attribution or people won't know who's saying what ...”

“Yeah but …”

“And, do all the characters talk the same way? You need dialogue quirks, inflections unique to each character, so they don’t all sound like each other. Where are the characters from? Does that influence their speech patterns? Will one character from Place B curse a lot whereas character from place A will not? Or vice Versa? How about back story? These people need a history of some sort, or they won’t seem real.

“Slow down, Hemingway …”

“You also need to think about foreshadowing, onomatopoeia, incremental repetition, conflict heightening, resolution …”

“You’re losing me again.”

“And research. You can’t forget research.”

“What’s there to research? I have Google for that.” (Laughs again, but this time nervously)

“Setting, you have to set the story someplace. Some research is in order there. Also, if you’re writing a police story or a story involving high finance, say, you need to do your homework or you’ll look rather silly.”

“I never thought of that.”

“And your characters can’t be vague, or clichéd, and your prose can’t be dull. Same goes for your actual story; you can’t trot out a tired old plot and expect people not to fall asleep reading it. It’s a fine line to walk.”

“I never knew so much was involved.”

“Then there’s the second draft, maybe a third draft (which would be a polish …) editing, copy-editing, re-writes …”

“Whoa! You have to write the book again?”

“Sometimes three times.”

“That sucks.”

“Yup. But it’s necessary. Still think writing a book is easy?”

“I’m beginning to think not.”

“You also can’t be Polemic.”

“Polemic?” (rolls eyes)

“Yeah. You can’t beat people over the head with a message, or a theme, you can’t have an axe to grind.”

“You mean you can’t lecture your reader?”

“Right. They’ll throw your book off a cliff and tell you to go chase it.”

“I thought writing was supposed to be fun and easy. What’s with all the strict guidelines?”

“No guidelines, but you need to know your stuff. For instance, you need to outline a novel before you start to write it. A novel needs prep work, or you could be writing in circles.”

“Ugh. Hate outlines. My English teacher used to make me do those for my essays.”

“Right, and you also need chapter outlines. You need to know where your story is going. And here’s a spoiler, you have to know the end of your book before you know the beginning.”

“Kind of like Pulp Fiction?”

“Sorta, but in a not so Twisted way.”

(Shakes head) “Why would you want to be a writer? Sounds like a lot of work.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling you!”

“You must be crazy.”

“And, once the book is written, the real work begins. Agents, query letters, book titles, cover art, copyrights …”

(She sighs, takes a sip of her drink) Forget I mentioned it!

“See? Always know the end before you know the beginning.”

Thoughts Too Long for This World: Quotes on Writing and Other Things …

2010-06-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

I love posting quotes on Twitter and Facebook, but often they’re chopped up and edited to fit stringent character limits or are just too long to post because friends and followers alike prefer short sound bites, and if a phrase is longer than Gone with the Wind usually they’ll tune out after the first few sentences. It’s a shame because a lot of the longer quotes on writing are very interesting, and I feel a twinge of horror when I have to edit one of them down into small edible bits. Here are a few that you might enjoy. So, uh … enjoy!

❝...After all, all he did was string together a lot of old well-known quotations.❞ ༺༻ H.L. Mencken on Shakespeare

❝You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair; the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.❞ ༺༻ Stephen King ~ On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

❝Do not be grand. Try to get the ordinary into your writing — breakfast tables rather than the solar system; Middletown today, not Mankind through the ages.❞ ༺༻ Darcy O’Brien

❝A writer who does not speak out of a full experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as "humanitary," which have a paralysis in their tails.❞ ༺༻ Henry David Thoreau

❝The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn’t realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.❞ ༺༻ Lewis Thomas

❝All the fantasy writers I know have a way of dwelling on their own fears and phobias. A writer spends his life being his own psychiatrist.❞ ༺༻Charles Beaumont

Semicolons . . . signal, rather than shout, a relationship. . . . A semicolon is a compliment from the writer to the reader. It says: "I don’t have to draw you a picture; a hint will do.❞ ༺༻ George Will

❝Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching. ༺༻ Harlan Ellison

❝In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.❞ ༺༻ Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

❝The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.❞ ༺༻ William Styron

❝The basic rule given us was simple and heartbreaking. A story to be effective had to convey something from the writer to the reader, and the power of its offering was the measure of its excellence. Outside of that, there were no rules.❞ ༺༻ John Steinbeck

❝We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—”Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.❞ ༺༻ John Steinbeck

❝When I am attacked by gloomy thoughts, nothing helps me so much as running to my books. They quickly absorb me and banish the clouds from my mind.❞ ༺༻ Michel de Montaigne

❝Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.❞ ༺༻ Sir Francis Bacon

❝When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.❞ ༺༻ W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915

❝One nice thing about putting the thing away for a couple of months before looking at it is that you start appreciate your own wit. Of course, this can be carried too far. But it's kind of cool when you crack up a piece of writing, and then realize you wrote it. I recommend this feeling.❞ ༺༻ Steven Brust

❝The novel is an event in consciousness. Our aim isn't to copy actuality, but to modify and recreate our sense of it. The novelist is inviting the reader to watch a performance in his own brain.❞ ༺༻ George Buchanan

❝Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.❞ ༺༻ Monica Dickens

❝Writing wasn’t easy to start. After I finally did it, I realized it was the most direct contact possible with the part of myself I thought I had lost, and which I constantly find new things from. Writing also includes the possibility of living many lives as well as living in any time or world possible. I can satisfy my enthusiasm for research, but jump like a calf outside the strict boundaries of science. I can speak about things that are important to me and somebody listens. It’s wonderful!❞ ༺༻ Virpi Hämeen-Anttila

❝Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.❞ ༺༻ Barbara Kingsolver

❝Are we, who want to create, in some way specially talented people? Or has everybody else simply given up, either by preassures of modesty or laziness, and closed their ears from their inner need to create, until that need has died, forgotten and abandoned? When you look at children, you start to think the latter. I still haven't met a child who doesn't love - or who at least hasn't loved - drawing, writing or some other creative activity.❞ ༺༻ Natalia Laurila

❝Reading usually precedes writing and the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.❞ ༺༻ Susan Sontag

❝Like everyone else, I am going to die. But the words – the words live on for as long as there are readers to see them, audiences to hear them. It is immortality by proxy. It is not really a bad deal, all things considered.❞ ༺༻ J. Michael Straczynski

❝All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.❞ ༺༻ George Orwell

❝I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.❞ ༺༻ Brenda Ueland

I can’t help but to write, I have an inner need for it. If I’m not in the middle of some literary project, I’m utterly lost, unhappy and distressed. As soon as I get started, I calm down.❞ ༺༻ Kaari Utrio

❝Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to a writer - and if so, why?❞ ༺༻ Bennett Cerf

❝The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.❞ ༺༻ James Jones

❝It's tougher than Himalayan yak jerky on January. But, as any creative person will tell you, there are days when there's absolutely nothing sweeter than creating something from nothing.❞ ༺༻ Richard Krzemien

Got a long quote that won’t fit Twitter? Send it along and I’ll post it in future additions of “Thoughts Too Long …”

Thanks for stopping by the Den. Take care now, and keep scribbling …

JUST A COMMON SOLDIER (A Soldier Died Today)

2010-06-01T00:54:00.000-07:00

by A. Lawrence Vaincourt

He was getting old and paunchy and his hair was falling fast,
And he sat around the Legion, telling stories of the past.
Of a war that he had fought in and the deeds that he had done,
In his exploits with his buddies; they were heroes, every one.

And tho' sometimes, to his neighbors, his tales became a joke,
All his Legion buddies listened, for they knew whereof he spoke.
But we'll hear his tales no longer for old Bill has passed away,
And the world's a little poorer, for a soldier died today.

He will not be mourned by many, just his children and his wife,
For he lived an ordinary and quite uneventful life.
Held a job and raised a family, quietly going his own way,
And the world won't note his passing, though a soldier died today.

When politicians leave this earth, their bodies lie in state,
While thousands note their passing and proclaim that they were great.
Papers tell their whole life stories, from the time that they were young,
But the passing of a soldier goes unnoticed and unsung.

Is the greatest contribution to the welfare of our land
A guy who breaks his promises and cons his fellow man?
Or the ordinary fellow who, in times of war and strife,
Goes off to serve his Country and offers up his life?

A politician's stipend and the style in which he lives
Are sometimes disproportionate to the service that he gives.
While the ordinary soldier, who offered up his all,
Is paid off with a medal and perhaps, a pension small.

It's so easy to forget them for it was so long ago,
That the old Bills of our Country went to battle, but we know
It was not the politicians, with their compromise and ploys,
Who won for us the freedom that our Country now enjoys.

Should you find yourself in danger, with your enemies at hand,
Would you want a politician with his ever-shifting stand?
Or would you prefer a soldier, who has sworn to defend
His home, his kin and Country and would fight until the end?

He was just a common soldier and his ranks are growing thin,
But his presence should remind us we may need his like again.
For when countries are in conflict, then we find the soldier's part
Is to clean up all the troubles that the politicians start.

If we cannot do him honor while he's here to hear the praise,
Then at least let's give him homage at the ending of his days.
Perhaps just a simple headline in a paper that would say,
Our Country is in mourning, for a soldier died today.

© 1987 A. Lawrence Vaincourt

Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All!

2010-05-24T13:35:00.000-07:00

The great American writer left instructions not to publish his autobiography until 100 years after his death, which is now.

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language
left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

Read more here: The Independent

Related Article: The wait is almost over for Twain's autobiography.

Tuesday Links:

2010-05-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

Why Ray Bradbury's science fiction stories have seeped into the culture ~ The National Post:

by Nathaniel Rich, Slate.com

....Ray Bradbury is one of the most prolific writers of our time -- and our parents' time and our grandparents' time. As he approaches his 90th birthday, he continues to publish, his pace slowed only slightly by a stroke that requires him to write by dictation. (His daughter is his amanuensis; he calls her on the telephone and she faxes him back the typed pages.) Thanks to Fahrenheit 451, now required reading for every American middle-schooler, Bradbury is generally thought of as a writer of novels, but his talents--particularly his mastery of the diabolical premise and the brain-exploding revelation -- are best suited to the short form. Two of his better-known novels, The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine, are story collections in disguise, and even Fahrenheit 451 began as The Fireman, a short story.

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=3036244#ixzz0oJ7AHk5c

The Tuesday Link

2010-03-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

Top Ten Proofreading Tips -
How to Proofread Effectively

By Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide

Humerous Rules For Writing

2010-03-25T16:13:00.000-07:00

George L.Trigg. Grammar

It is said that back in the 1940's, the following message was prominently displayed at the front of the main chemistry lecture hall at a major university:

"The English language is your most versatile scientific instrument. Learn to use it with precision."

In the intervening years, the teaching of proper grammar in the public elementary and high schools fell into disfavor. The inevitable result is that manuscripts submitted to us are often full of grammatical errors, which their authors probably do not even recognize (and often would not care about If they did).

We regard this state of affairs as deplorable, and we want to do something about it. For many years we have tried to correct the grammar of papers that we publish. This is toilsome at best, and sometimes entails rather substantial rephrasing. It would obviously be preferable to have authors use correct grammar in the first place. The problem is how to get them to do it.

One fairly effective way is to provide examples of what not to do; it is particularly helpful if the examples are humorous. We have recently seen several lists of grammatical examples of this type. A few weeks ago we found taped to a colleague's office door the most complete one we have seen. (He tells us it was passed out in a class of Darthmouth - not in English - at the time a term paper was assigned). We reproduce it here in the hope that it will have some effect.

1. Make sure each pronoun agrees with their antecedent.
2. Just between you and I, the case of pronoun is important.
3. Watch out for irregular verbs which have crope into English.
4. Verbs has to agree in number with their subjects.
5. Don’t use no double negatives.
6. Being bad grammar, a writer should not use dangling modifiers.
7. Join clauses good like a conjunction should.
8. A writer must be not shift your point of view.
9. About sentence fragments.
10. Don’t use run-on sentences you got to punctuate them.
11. In letters essays and reports use commas to separate items in series.
12. Don’t use commas, which are not necessary.
13. Parenthetical words however should be enclosed in commas.
14. Its important to use apostrophes right in everybodys writing.
15. Don’t abbrev.
16. Check to see if you any words out.
17. In the case of a report, check to see that jargonwise, it's A-OK.
18. As far as incomplete constructions, they are wrong.
19. About repetition, the repetition of a word might be real effective repetition - take, for instance the repetition of Abraham Lincoln.
20. In my opinion, I think that an author when he is writing should definitely not get into the habit of making use of too many unnecessary words that he does not really need in order to put his message across.
21. Use parallel construction not only to be concise but also clarify.
22. It behooves us all to avoid archaic expressions.
23. Mixed metaphors are a pain in the neck and ought to be weeded out.
24. Consult the dictionery to avoid mispelings.
25. To ignorantly split an infinitive is a practice to religiously avoid.
26. Last but not least, lay off cliches.

---------------------------------------------------------------
George L. Trigg
Phys.Rev.Lett., 42, 12, 748 (1979).

The above was taken from a reprint at http://lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/orfograf.txt.

See more at Humorous Rules for Writing

How do I format my manuscript?

2010-03-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Every Writer's Resource

Here is a 10 part easy to follow checklist that we feel answers most questions people have when they are submitting a manuscript to a publisher. Keep in mind the rule of thumb here is to make your manuscripts easy to read, neat, and all that jazz. This isn't the only way to do it, and we are suggesting this for submissions to traditional print publishers not electronic publishers. Their guidelines may be different. It is always wise to take a look at the publisher's guidelines BEFORE you submit work to them. You don't want to waste your time.

1. What font should I use?

New writers always come inevitably to this question. The answer is Courier 12 or new Courier 12. If you are a new writer, you are scratching your head possibly thinking that we are crazy. You might not have seen a manuscript in Courier. The truth is Courier is what typewriters and typesetters have used for a very long time. Even though computers have come along and suggested new and arguable better fonts like Arial or Times New Roman, you are best to go with what editors know. Maybe they are longing for the good old days. Humor them. Don’t give them another stupid reason to reject you.
Many editors as of late have suggested they would take other fonts besides Courier, but many large and small publishers still insist on Courier.

2. Do I need to protect my manuscript from being stolen by a publisher?

Many new writers feel their work might be stolen if they do not place a copyright symbol on it when they send it to a publisher. Truth is, labeling your manuscript with a © only makes you look like an armature. By common law once you have put something to papers it belongs to you. It is already “copyrighted.”
Publishers are not going to steal your work. They have 1000s of manuscripts running across their desks each day. If this was a “real” problem a little symbol in the corner of your work wouldn’t help anyway. So don’t label yourself and avoid this faux pa. Also a publisher will file a copyright in your name if they decide to publish your work.

3. Should I bind or staple my manuscript?

Never use staples! Do not bind your manuscripts. Stapling your manuscripts will make you look like a newbie straight away. Editors might want to copy your manuscript so more than one person in the office can read it. Make it easy for them. Use a clip, paperclip, or rubber band.

4. Can I use 1.5 spacing to shorten my manuscript?

No! Double space your manuscript. Editors again like to have the freedom to make notes. They are used to reading double spaced copy. They have trained eyes, and they will know if you cheat.

5. What size margins should I use?

Make your margins 1 to 1/12 inch. Again this gives room to the editors.

6. Can I double-side my manuscript to save space?

No! Do not double side your copies. Each page should have print on 1 side.

7. Should I page number?

Yes! Number your headers or footers, and include your last name with an abbreviated title. Make sure editors can put your manuscript back together after dismantling it. Make it as easy as possible to reassemble.

8. How do I figure out my word count?

Do not use a word processors word count feature to figure out the number of words. This sounds silly, but it is necessary. The word count feature on most processors will not take into account blank spaces. Editors are more interested in knowing how long your manuscript will be if it is printed. Estimate your word count 250 X the number of pages.

9. Justification?

Left justify your manuscript always.

10. Do I need a title page?

Yes. Make sure you include your name and all contact information on your title page. Do not include your header, footer, or page numbers on your title page. Write your name and contact information in the upper left corner put your contact information. In the upper right corner write the estimated word count. Space down and center your title double space to the word by double space again to your name or pseudonym. Space 3 lines downs and being your first chapter. If you are a new writer without an agent your title page should look something like the title page below:

Courtesy of Every Writer's Resource

New Post at the Den Home Page: The Write Space

2010-03-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

How important is a writing space?

The Write Space, at the Writer's Den Home Page.

How to Copyright Your Work

2010-03-06T23:24:00.000-08:00

By eHow Contributing Writer

As soon as you write your story, print your photograph or record your music, you have a copyright. However, you may want to take additional measures to establish your copyright in case you ever have to prove ownership of your work. Any original creative work should be copyrighted as soon as it is recorded in some tangible way.

Step 1

Add a copyright notice to your work. Adding a copyright notice protects you against claims by infringers that they did not know the work was copyrighted. For visually perceptible works, such as short stories or written music, use the following format: the word copyright followed by the year of creation and the name of the creator. You may use the copyright symbol, the letter C inside a circle, in place of the word "copyright" if desired. If your work is unpublished, you may also add this notation to the beginning of the notice. For audio recordings, use the symbol for phonorecords, the letter P inside a circle, in place of the usual copyright symbol or word.

Step 2

Register your copyright. This establishes a public record of your copyright and is necessary before you can bring an infringement case to court. Send a completed application form appropriate to the work you are copyrighting, the registration fee and two copies of the work to the U. S. Copyright Office.

Step 3

Consult with a copyright attorney. It is not necessary to use an attorney to register a copyright, but it may be helpful if the work was created before 1978, if someone has infringed on your copyright or if someone is claiming you have infringed on their copyright.

Step 4

Publish your work. If your work has been published, the publisher should have applied for a copyright on your behalf as part of copyrighting the publication. This is normally done 3 months after publication. Check with your publisher to make sure you know which rights were granted to the publisher and which you still retain.

Step 5

Consider a Creative Commons license: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that allows copyright owners to grant some rights to the public while retaining others.

Copyrighting Your Work 101, by Nick Popio

United States Copyright Office

Writer's Guild of America, West

Writer's Guild of America, East

10 Big Myths about copyright explained

Ten Rules for Writing Fiction

2010-02-25T00:57:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of The guardian.co.uk

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing...

Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin

1 Never open a book with weather. If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday, but it's OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: "I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks."

3 Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.

4 Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said" . . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances "full of rape and adverbs".

5 Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6 Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose". This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use "suddenly" tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7 Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavour of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories Close Range.

8 Avoid detailed descriptions of characters, which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants", what do the "American and the girl with him" look like? "She had taken off her hat and put it on the table." That's the only reference to a physical description in the story.

9 Don't go into great detail describing places and things, unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language. You don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10 Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing is published next month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Diana Athill

1 Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK (prose rhythms are too complex and subtle to be thought out – they can be got right only by ear).

2 Cut (perhaps that should be CUT): only by having no inessential words can every essential word be made to count.

3 You don't always have to go so far as to murder your darlings – those turns of phrase or images of which you felt extra proud when they appeared on the page – but go back and look at them with a very beady eye. Almost always it turns out that they'd be better dead. (Not every little twinge of satisfaction is suspect – it's the ones which amount to a sort of smug glee you must watch out for.)

Margaret Atwood

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.

5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.

6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What fascinates A will bore the pants off B.

7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.

8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.

9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.

10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Roddy Doyle

1 Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

2 Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph –

3 Until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it's the job.

4 Do give the work a name as quickly as possible. Own it, and see it. Dickens knew Bleak House was going to be called Bleak House before he started writing it. The rest must have been easy.

5 Do restrict your browsing to a few websites a day. Don't go near the online bookies – unless it's research.

6 Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg "horse", "ran", "said".

7 Do, occasionally, give in to temptation. Wash the kitchen floor, hang out the washing. It's research.

8 Do change your mind. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones. I was working on a novel about a band called the Partitions. Then I decided to call them the Commitments.

9 Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.

10 Do spend a few minutes a day working on the cover biog – "He divides his time between Kabul and Tierra del Fuego." But then get back to work.

Helen Dunmore

1 Finish the day's writing when you still want to continue.

2 Listen to what you have written. A dud rhythm in a passage of dialogue may show that you don't yet understand the characters well enough to write in their voices.

3 Read Keats's letters.

4 Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away. It's a nice feeling, and you don't want to be cluttered with the corpses of poems and stories which have everything in them except the life they need.

5 Learn poems by heart.

6 Join professional organisations which advance the collective rights of authors.

7 A problem with a piece of writing often clarifies itself if you go for a long walk.

8 If you fear that taking care of your children and household will damage your writing, think of JG Ballard.

9 Don't worry about posterity – as Larkin (no sentimentalist) observed "What will survive of us is love".

Geoff Dyer

1 Never worry about the commercial possibilities of a project. That stuff is for agents and editors to fret over – or not. Conversation with my American publisher. Me: "I'm writing a book so boring, of such limited commercial appeal, that if you publish it, it will probably cost you your job." Publisher: "That's exactly what makes me want to stay in my job."

2 Don't write in public places. In the early 1990s I went to live in Paris. The usual writerly reasons: back then, if you were caught writing in a pub in England, you could get your head kicked in, whereas in Paris, dans les cafés . . . Since then I've developed an aversion to writing in public. I now think it should be done only in private, like any other lavatorial activity.

3 Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

4 If you use a computer, constantly refine and expand your autocorrect settings. The only reason I stay loyal to my piece-of-shit computer is that I have invested so much ingenuity into building one of the great autocorrect files in literary history. Perfectly formed and spelt words emerge from a few brief keystrokes: "Niet" becomes "Nietzsche", "phoy" becomes "photography" and so on. Genius!

5 Keep a diary. The biggest regret of my writing life is that I have never kept a journal or a diary.

6 Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.

7 Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

8 Beware of clichés. Not just the clichés that Martin Amis is at war with. There are clichés of response as well as expression. There are clichés of observation and of thought – even of conception. Many novels, even quite a few adequately written ones, are clichés of form which conform to clichés of expectation.

9 Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it.

10 Never ride a bike with the brakes on. If something is proving too difficult, give up and do something else. Try to live without resort to perseverance. But writing is all about perseverance. You've got to stick at it. In my 30s I used to go to the gym even though I hated it. The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

Anne Enright

1 The first 12 years are the worst.

2 The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

3 Only bad writers think that their work is really good.

4 Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

5 Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

6 Try to be accurate about stuff.

7 Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

8 You can also do all that with whiskey.

9 Have fun.

10 Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

Richard Ford

1 Marry somebody you love and who thinks you being a writer's a good idea.

2 Don't have children.

3 Don't read your reviews.

4 Don't write reviews. (Your judgment's always tainted.)

5 Don't have arguments with your wife in the morning, or late at night.

6 Don't drink and write at the same time.

7 Don't write letters to the editor. (No one cares.)

8 Don't wish ill on your colleagues.

9 Try to think of others' good luck as encouragement to yourself.

10 Don't take any shit if you can possibly help it.

Jonathan Franzen

1 The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

2 Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

3 Never use the word "then" as a conjunction – we have "and" for this purpose. Substituting "then" is the lazy or tone-deaf writer's non-solution to the problem of too many "ands" on the page.

4 Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

5 When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.

6 The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than "The Metamorphosis".

7 You see more sitting still than chasing after.

8 It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

9 Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.

10 You have to love before you can be relentless.

Esther Freud

1 Cut out the metaphors and similes. In my first book I promised myself I wouldn't use any and I slipped up during a sunset in chapter 11. I still blush when I come across it.

2 A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something.

3 Editing is everything. Cut until you can cut no more. What is left often springs into life.

4 Find your best time of the day for writing and write. Don't let anything else interfere. Afterwards it won't matter to you that the kitchen is a mess.

5 Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.

6 Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.

7 Never forget, even your own rules are there to be broken.

Neil Gaiman

1 Write.

2 Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.

3 Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.

4 Put it aside. Read it pretending you've never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.

5 Remember: when people tell you something's wrong or doesn't work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.

6 Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.

7 Laugh at your own jokes.

8 The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you're allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it's definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

David Hare

1 Write only when you have something to say.

2 Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

3 Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

4 If nobody will put your play on, put it on yourself.

5 Jokes are like hands and feet for a painter. They may not be what you want to end up doing but you have to master them in the meanwhile.

6 Theatre primarily belongs to the young.

7 No one has ever achieved consistency as a screenwriter.

8 Never go to a TV personality festival masquerading as a literary festival.

9 Never complain of being misunderstood. You can choose to be understood, or you can choose not to.

10 The two most depressing words in the English language are "literary fiction".

PD James

1 Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft. The greater your vocabulary the more effective your writing. We who write in English are fortunate to have the richest and most versatile language in the world. Respect it.

2 Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

3 Don't just plan to write – write. It is only by writing, not dreaming about it, that we develop our own style.

4 Write what you need to write, not what is currently popular or what you think will sell.

5 Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.

AL Kennedy

1 Have humility. Older/more experienced/more convincing writers may offer rules and varieties of advice. Consider what they say. However, don't automatically give them charge of your brain, or anything else – they might be bitter, twisted, burned-out, manipulative, or just not very like you.

2 Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.

3 Defend others. You can, of course, steal stories and attributes from family and friends, fill in filecards after lovemaking and so forth. It might be better to celebrate those you love – and love itself – by writing in such a way that everyone keeps their privacy and dignity intact.

4 Defend your work. Organisations, institutions and individuals will often think they know best about your work – especially if they are paying you. When you genuinely believe their decisions would damage your work – walk away. Run away. The money doesn't matter that much.

5 Defend yourself. Find out what keeps you happy, motivated and creative.

6 Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.

7 Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.

8 Be without fear. This is impossible, but let the small fears drive your rewriting and set aside the large ones until they behave – then use them, maybe even write them. Too much fear and all you'll get is silence.

9 Remember you love writing. It wouldn't be worth it if you didn't. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

10 Remember writing doesn't love you. It doesn't care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.

Read the second part of the article here

Hilary Mantel

1 Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.

2 Read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

3 Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

4 If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

5 Be aware that anything that appears before "Chapter One" may be skipped. Don't put your vital clue there.

6 First paragraphs can often be struck out. Are you performing a haka, or just shuffling your feet?

7 Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. People don't notice their everyday surroundings and daily routine, so when writers describe them it can sound as if they're trying too hard to instruct the reader.

8 Description must work for its place. It can't be simply ornamental. It usually works best if it has a human element; it is more effective if it comes from an implied viewpoint, rather than from the eye of God. If description is coloured by the viewpoint of the character who is doing the noticing, it becomes, in effect, part of character definition and part of the action.

9 If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.

10 Be ready for anything. Each new story has different demands and may throw up reasons to break these and all other rules. Except number one: you can't give your soul to literature if you're thinking about income tax.

Michael Moorcock

1 My first rule was given to me by TH White, author of The Sword in the Stone and other Arthurian fantasies and was: Read. Read everything you can lay hands on. I always advise people who want to write a fantasy or science fiction or romance to stop reading everything in those genres and start reading everything else from Bunyan to Byatt.

2 Find an author you admire (mine was Conrad) and copy their plots and characters in order to tell your own story, just as people learn to draw and paint by copying the masters.

3 Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.

4 If you are writing a plot-driven genre novel make sure all your major themes/plot elements are introduced in the first third, which you can call the introduction.

5 Develop your themes and characters in your second third, the development.

6 Resolve your themes, mysteries and so on in the final third, the resolution.

7 For a good melodrama study the famous "Lester Dent master plot formula" which you can find online. It was written to show how to write a short story for the pulps, but can be adapted successfully for most stories of any length or genre.

8 If possible have something going on while you have your characters delivering exposition or philosophising. This helps retain dramatic tension.

9 Carrot and stick – have protagonists pursued (by an obsession or a villain) and pursuing (idea, object, person, mystery).

10 Ignore all proferred rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say.

Michael Morpurgo

1 The prerequisite for me is to keep my well of ideas full. This means living as full and varied a life as possible, to have my antennae out all the time.

2 Ted Hughes gave me this advice and it works wonders: record moments, fleeting impressions, overheard dialogue, your own sadnesses and bewilderments and joys.

3 A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

4 It is the gestation time which counts.

5 Once the skeleton of the story is ready I begin talking about it, mostly to Clare, my wife, sounding her out.

6 By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

7 Once a chapter is scribbled down rough – I write very small so I don't have to turn the page and face the next empty one – Clare puts it on the word processor, prints it out, sometimes with her own comments added.

8 When I'm deep inside a story, living it as I write, I honestly don't know what will happen. I try not to dictate it, not to play God.

9 Once the book is finished in its first draft, I read it out loud to myself. How it sounds is hugely important.

10 With all editing, no matter how sensitive – and I've been very lucky here – I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.

Andrew Motion

1 Decide when in the day (or night) it best suits you to write, and organise your life accordingly.

2 Think with your senses as well as your brain.

3 Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary.

4 Lock different characters/elements in a room and tell them to get on.

5 Remember there is no such thing as nonsense.

6 Bear in mind Wilde's dictum that "only mediocrities develop" – and challenge it.

7 Let your work stand before deciding whether or not to serve.

8 Think big and stay particular.

9 Write for tomorrow, not for today.

10 Work hard.

Joyce Carol Oates

1 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – there may be one, but he/she is reading someone else.

2 Don't try to anticipate an "ideal reader" – except for yourself perhaps, sometime in the future.

3 Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

4 Unless you are writing something very avant-garde – all gnarled, snarled and "obscure" – be alert for possibilities of paragraphing.

5 Unless you are writing something very post-modernist – self-conscious, self-reflexive and "provocative" – be alert for possibilities of using plain familiar words in place of polysyllabic "big" words.

6 Keep in mind Oscar Wilde: "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal."

7 Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.

Annie Proulx

1 Proceed slowly and take care.

2 To ensure that you proceed slowly, write by hand.

3 Write slowly and by hand only about subjects that interest you.

4 Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

5 Rewrite and edit until you achieve the most felicitous phrase/sentence/paragraph/page/story/chapter.

Philip Pullman

My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.

Ian Rankin

1 Read lots.

2 Write lots.

3 Learn to be self-critical.

4 Learn what criticism to accept.

5 Be persistent.

6 Have a story worth telling.

7 Don't give up.

8 Know the market.

9 Get lucky.

10 Stay lucky.

Will Self

1 Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . .

2 The edit.

3 Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

4 Stop reading fiction – it's all lies anyway, and it doesn't have anything to tell you that you don't know already (assuming, that is, you've read a great deal of fiction in the past; if you haven't you have no business whatsoever being a writer of fiction).

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

6 Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

7 By the same token remember how much time people spend watching TV. If you're writing a novel with a contemporary setting there need to be long passages where nothing happens save for TV watching: "Later, George watched Grand Designs while eating HobNobs. Later still he watched the shopping channel for a while . . ."

8 The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.

9 Oh, and not forgetting the occasional beating administered by the sadistic guards of the imagination.

10 Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Helen Simpson

The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-it on the wall in front of my desk saying "Faire et se taire" (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as "Shut up and get on with it."

Zadie Smith

1 When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.

2 When an adult, try to read your own work as a stranger would read it, or even better, as an enemy would.

3 Don't romanticise your "vocation". You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no "writer's lifestyle". All that matters is what you leave on the page.

4 Avoid your weaknesses. But do this without telling yourself that the things you can't do aren't worth doing. Don't mask self-doubt with contempt.

5 Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

6 Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.

7 Work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.

8 Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

9 Don't confuse honours with achievement.

10 Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Colm Tóibín

1 Finish everything you start.

2 Get on with it.

3 Stay in your mental pyjamas all day.

4 Stop feeling sorry for yourself.

5 No alcohol, sex or drugs while you are working.

6 Work in the morning, a short break for lunch, work in the afternoon and then watch the six o'clock news and then go back to work until bed-time. Before bed, listen to Schubert, preferably some songs.

7 If you have to read, to cheer yourself up read biographies of writers who went insane.

8 On Saturdays, you can watch an old Bergman film, preferably Persona or Autumn Sonata.

9 No going to London.

10 No going anywhere else either.

Rose Tremain

1 Forget the boring old dictum "write about what you know". Instead, seek out an unknown yet knowable area of experience that's going to enhance your understanding of the world and write about that.

2 Nevertheless, remember that in the particularity of your own life lies the seedcorn that will feed your imaginative work. So don't throw it all away on autobiography. (There are quite enough writers' memoirs out there already.)

3 Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

4 Listen to the criticisms and preferences of your trusted "first readers".

5 When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait and obey". Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being.

6 In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.

7 Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

8 If you're writing historical fiction, don't have well-known real characters as your main protagonists. This will only create biographical unease in the readers and send them back to the history books. If you must write about real people, then do something post-modern and playful with them.

9 Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

10 Never begin the book when you feel you want to begin it, but hold off a while longer.

Sarah Waters

1 Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. Which leads me on to . . .

2 Cut like crazy. Less is more. I've often read manuscripts – including my own – where I've got to the beginning of, say, chapter two and have thought: "This is where the novel should actually start." A huge amount of information about character and backstory can be conveyed through small detail. The emotional attachment you feel to a scene or a chapter will fade as you move on to other stories. Be business-like about it. In fact . . .

3 Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I've got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

4 Writing fiction is not "self-expression" or "therapy". Novels are for readers, and writing them means the crafty, patient, selfless construction of effects. I think of my novels as being something like fairground rides: my job is to strap the reader into their car at the start of chapter one, then trundle and whizz them through scenes and surprises, on a carefully planned route, and at a finely engineered pace.

5 Respect your characters, even the minor ones. In art, as in life, everyone is the hero of their own particular story; it is worth thinking about what your minor characters' stories are, even though they may intersect only slightly with your protagonist's. At the same time . . .

6 Don't overcrowd the narrative. Characters should be individualised, but functional – like figures in a painting. Think of Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, in which a patiently suffering Jesus is closely surrounded by four threatening men. Each of the characters is unique, and yet each represents a type; and collectively they form a narrative that is all the more powerful for being so tightly and so economically constructed. On a similar theme . . .

7 Don't overwrite. Avoid the redundant phrases, the distracting adjectives, the unnecessary adverbs. Beginners, especially, seem to think that writing fiction needs a special kind of flowery prose, completely unlike any sort of language one might encounter in day-to-day life. This is a misapprehension about how the effects of fiction are produced, and can be dispelled by obeying Rule 1. To read some of the work of Colm Tóibín or Cormac McCarthy, for example, is to discover how a deliberately limited vocabulary can produce an astonishing emotional punch.

8 Pace is crucial. Fine writing isn't enough. Writing students can be great at producing a single page of well-crafted prose; what they sometimes lack is the ability to take the reader on a journey, with all the changes of terrain, speed and mood that a long journey involves. Again, I find that looking at films can help. Most novels will want to move close, linger, move back, move on, in pretty cinematic ways.

9 Don't panic. Midway through writing a novel, I have regularly experienced moments of bowel-curdling terror, as I contemplate the drivel on the screen before me and see beyond it, in quick succession, the derisive reviews, the friends' embarrassment, the failing career, the dwindling income, the repossessed house, the divorce . . . Working doggedly on through crises like these, however, has always got me there in the end. Leaving the desk for a while can help. Talking the problem through can help me recall what I was trying to achieve before I got stuck. Going for a long walk almost always gets me thinking about my manuscript in a slightly new way. And if all else fails, there's prayer. St Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers, has often helped me out in a crisis. If you want to spread your net more widely, you could try appealing to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, too.

10 Talent trumps all. If you're a really great writer, none of these rules need apply. If James Baldwin had felt the need to whip up the pace a bit, he could never have achieved the extended lyrical intensity of Giovanni's Room. Without "overwritten" prose, we would have none of the linguistic exuberance of a Dickens or an Angela Carter. If everyone was economical with their characters, there would be no Wolf Hall . . . For the rest of us, however, rules remain important. And, crucially, only by understanding what they're for and how they work can you begin to experiment with breaking them.

Jeanette Winterson

1 Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom.

2 Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.

3 Love what you do.

4 Be honest with yourself. If you are no good, accept it. If the work you are doing is no good, accept it.

5 Don't hold on to poor work. If it was bad when it went in the drawer it will be just as bad when it comes out.

6 Take no notice of anyone you don't respect.

7 Take no notice of anyone with a gender agenda. A lot of men still think that women lack imagination of the fiery kind.

8 Be ambitious for the work and not for the reward.

9 Trust your creativity.

10 Enjoy this work!

Note: Here's another great post:

Everything you ever wanted to
know about writing successfully-
in ten minutes, by Stephen King

Literary Links for a Tuesday...

2010-02-23T18:12:00.000-08:00

Here's some interesting articles on writing that I came across; a few lament the loss of newspapers and traditional journalism, a soft spot for me, and the rest are a random assortment of thoughts about the writing life. Hope you enjoy.

Writing Sense: Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer

A great early look at Ray Bradbury. We found this on the Internet Archive. It is listed in the public domain, but the look at the author is outstanding. It includes his short story: “Dial Double Zero.” The movie was made by David L. Wolper. I enjoyed and hope you will..(See Article..and Video.)

Robert Fulford: J.D. Salinger: A generation’s silent hero

Perhaps he left behind an explanation of his peculiar decision to cease submitting his work to The New Yorker or any other publication after 1965. Perhaps, as his many passionate admirers dare to hope, he left behind something much more valuable, a cache of work he had steadily accumulated in solitary self-confinement over all those decades, to be released after his death...(See Article..)

The Los Angeles Times: A writing career becomes harder to scale
Authors used to expect to struggle as they gained experience. But now it is sell -- or else.

Goodbye to Journalism 805: By MARK BONOKOSKI, Toronto Sun

My greatest act of optimism expired at year’s end, closing on the pessimistic note that the course I taught to fourth-year journalism students at Ryerson University is now in the throes of its death.

It is called Journalism 805.

By the end of this semester, after full-time faculty member April Lindgren gives it the last rites, it will no longer exist.

The times, as Dylan wrote, they are a’changing...(See Article..)

Who killed the newspaper? The Economist Magazine
The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic

Aug 24th 2006 | From The Economist print edition

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart (see article).

The most irritating phrases in the English language: Robert Fulford, National Post

Going forward, eradication is the only option...

There are those who wince and curse whenever a TV pundit or sports spieler speaks the familiar words, "at the end of the day." This usually announces that what follows will be empty of meaning. Even when the pundit has something of consequence to say, those six words anaesthetize the listener, encouraging them to miss the point..(See Article..)

The Pic as a Prompt

2010-01-24T06:30:00.000-08:00

This morning something dramatic happened.

I’d been in the throes of a writer’s block of some kind, although I generally refuse to acknowledge the term “writer’s block”, I can find no other way to describe it except that I’ve been unproductive.

Then the dawn arose.

I took a photo of an imminent sunrise.

This got me thinking about the possibilities of photo-prompts.

Can pictures yield good writing?

I’d never tried it before, or even thought about it. I’m sure someone , somewhere, has thought of this. I suppose it’s natural; a photo is visual, physical, aesthetically stimulating, and any other adjective you can think of. Sometimes we even READ for inspiration. So why not photos?

However, if you follow the Marshall McLuhan school of thought, a photo could be called “Hot Media”…

The hot media are those which have a large influence on humans and their sense perception. According to McLuhan, these media even possess a "destructive strength". The pioneer of the media ranks writing, the phonetic alphabet, the book, the photograph and also the radio among this kind of medium. These objects of communication place much data and detailed information at the users disposal, which mainly concentrate on one sense of the recipient.

It is affected by this, but remains rather passive in the behavior. The cold media have a small influential strength on humans. The reason for this is that they offer little details and information, and are not optically delightful for humans.

After watching television my brain turns to mush: too much thinking is done for me, and when it gets time to start creating in that highly cognitive endeavor called writing I find the functions are a tad off-center. This is an extreme example of course; and an obvious one; we all know that Television turns our brains to mush. But what about the photograph? Can a photograph have the same effect?

Doubtful.

When we write we are essentially putting into words the pictures in our heads anyway, aren’t we? But have you noticed that after a brisk walk when ideas start floating around in the old transom and creativity starts to peak that you race back home to put these things down and…

That blank page just stares back, doesn’t it?

Stephen King bought a radio station years ago because he loves music, and because he loves radio. He grew up on it, listening to music, and Radio Theater. He attempted to write a play to be performed on air a few years ago, but he found that what he’d written just sounded like people talking. He said that the art of Radio theater relied on creating certain visual cues in people’s heads as a means of communicating, an art form which has since been lost to the advent of Television. We have all become very visual, which does not bode well for writers in particular. We can still get by, for the most part, but have you ever noticed how great the pre-television authors were? The pictures they painted, the images they put in our heads?

But I digress.

Take a camera, go out and take photos. See where it leads you. I just started a photo site called Photo Genesis that I hope will prompt me to write new things, in new ways.

After all, I’ll try anything, if it’s creative!

David Hunter, over and out.

The Photo in Question: Photo Genesis

I’d like to thank Denise Robins AKA @dkrobbins on Twitter for starting the discussion about writing prompts ~ Visit her site, Denise Robbins Blog http://deniserobbins.blogspot.com/

Note: Anyone noticing errors in this post, feel free to let me know! Catch me on Twitter too, and don't hesitate to tell me your thoughts.

An Interview with David Hunter

2010-01-23T00:51:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of, and Thanks to, Natasha Hollerup at The Melting Pot

Hello and welcome to a new installment of “What’s Your Story?” The subject interviewed in this installment is David Hunter, who is a musician and a writer, as well as a blogger of news and writing advice. So, please give your attention, applause and goodwill to Mr. Hunter.

***

Can you tell everyone your name and location?

-I am David Hunter, and I dwell in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Okay, David, here is a set of simple questions to begin with:

When and where were you born?

-I was born in Toronto on October 19th, 1971. Wow, that date is starting to sound ancient! I was raised there as well.

What are your hobbies?

-Photography is a big passion of mine; and playing my guitar (A 1978 Les Paul Gold Top! Got it when I was 16 and I still have it…) And of course reading books, if that qualifies as a hobby. I’d say writing, but that’s not a hobby, it’s my obsession, my life!

How long have you had these hobbies?

-I think I was born with my hobbies! Although I started playing guitar rather late in life, at age 15, I excelled at it quickly.

What is your favorite part about this hobby?

-That I was good! Within a few weeks I joined a band at school. People look at you different when you can play a guitar! I enjoyed that look.

What kind (s) of music do you like (bands, singers, genres)?

-How much time you got? There are so many; Rock, jazz, folk, you name it. If it sounds good, it is good. I do hold a special place in my heart for the Beatles. As Jazz goes, Joe Henderson is my favorite. And Vince Guaraldi. And Dave Brubeck! (See? I need more time…)

Who is your favorite author? Why?

-No one could turn a phrase as well as Edward Abbey, even though the man himself was a bit of a wing-nut. I picked up a copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang when I was 12 and I never put it down. I still have that copy! His writing influenced me the most. He was a curmudgeon and a desert anarchist who burned billboards because they were an affront to the landscape, but boy could he write some beautiful stuff!

What was the most recent book you’ve read?

-Blood Work, by Michael Connelly.

What were your thoughts on it?

-It was good; a page turner. But the movie was better, I thought. It’s one of those books that I forget soon after I’ve read it. How terrible is that?

What are you currently reading for enjoyment?

-I’m currently re-reading an old YA (young adult) book that I’ve had since high school; the Pigman, by Paul Zindel. It’s one of my all-time favorites.

What place do you/have you want (ed) to visit or live in? Why?

-I think I’d like to bum around Europe. It seems very artsy and writerly; and it always impresses people when you say you’ve been places like Paris or Rome! Also, I could use some worldliness. I’m not very worldly.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

-Who wants to grow up?

Here are some more personal questions:

What three people are most important to you?

-Carl Sagan, Chuck Jones, and my mom. Not in that particular order, either.

Could you describe them and your relationship to them?

-My mom is the last parent I have, so that’s self explanatory. She really belongs in the mom Hall of Fame.

Can you describe your most recent mistake or failure?

-I should have taken writing in college instead of art; big mistake. Here I was with all this writing ability and I was still clinging to my artistic dreams. It was a hard lesson, learning that you’re not going to be successful at something you love, and I loved to draw, but it wasn’t my real destiny; writing was. Thank the gods for writing; it saved me.

Can you describe your most recent victory?

-I consider all my new friends on Twitter a victory for me. My dream was to be a part of a creative community and I accomplished that in the past year; they sustain me; they inspire me!

What do you do for a living?

-I work in a Food Container plant; in the mornings I do maintenance, in the afternoons I work in the Graphics department.

Tell me about how you got into your line of work.

-I had experience as a superintendent, so I applied for this job. It’s your standard 9 to 5 job, and it’s very similar to being a super. I needed money, and my only skills include writing and being creative, things we know are hard to make money at. The Graphics part came about because I asked them to train me. I wanted to move up in the company.

Do you like your job?

-It’s a job, that’s all; nothing special. I guess that means no!

If you could do anything now, what would you do? Why?

I would love to be writing for the local media, become a part of the writing culture here in Toronto. Nothing says success like having your friends read your stuff in the local paper.

What do you hope to accomplish in 2010?

-What does any self-respecting writer want to accomplish? A finished manuscript, a book deal, and to move to California. Me and California, we are meant for each other!

How do you think you’ll accomplish this/these goal (s)?

-By working my ass off. I know of no other way.

What genre of writing do you want to write in?

-I love crime fiction, but I also love Sci-fi, (although my lack of scientific knowledge may prevent this…) and comedy; but I’m mostly mainstream. I love many genres, so I hope I don’t get pigeon-holed into only one genre.

Why do you gravitate towards this particular type of writing?

-Under the Mainstream banner I can write anything, and I won’t get trapped in any one genre. I like to be free in what I write.

Do you have any works in progress?

-I have a story called Rockfish, set in the 1960’s.

Can you give a brief summary about it?

-It’s about a kid named Everett Winsom who is dealing with his messed up family…and the fact that he has a bad leg that makes him limp, makes him the butt of jokes at school. He has a mentally challenged brother and an alcoholic mother…

When do you plan to become published?

-As soon as humanly possible! But seriously, it’s a long process. These things take time. Like any optimistic writer, I plan to get published within the year, which is wishful thinking at best.

If you become a published author, would you quit the job you have now to primarily write?

-A resounding “hell yeah” would be the appropriate response.

What do you like the most about writing? What do you like the least?

-I like the creativity of it; creating my own characters, my own worlds, where I can explore things. Plus, let’s face it, writers like to write because they can be in charge of these little places in their minds; petty tyrants lording it over imaginary people. That’s the real reason people write, isn’t it? What I hate is the doubt; it can be debilitating.

What do you want to be doing in five years?

-Writing for a living; traveling the world; hopefully engaged with love and life.

List five adjectives that describe yourself.

-Stubborn, sensitive, creative, easy-going and hungry (Hungry being a metaphor for motivated)

How would you like to be remembered?

-Through my writing. I hope students will be reading and discussing my work a hundred years from now, and I hope they say, “He was pretty cool”.

Can you name three to five things you want to do before you die?

-Meet the perfect girl, fall in love, have children, become a published writer, and bowl a 300 game.

***

Thank you very much, David, for such wonderful insights and a wonderful interview. I hope that we see more of you here in The Melting Pot. If you wish to see some of David’s work now, please visit his site, The Writers’ Den. If you wish to be interviewed, please email me at Natasha.Hollerup@Rocketmail.com. Thank you.

The Magic Box

2010-01-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

There’s always a lot of talk about writer’s block when the creativity dries up. For me personally, it’s not about creativity, or even subject matter, its “what the hell do I work on?” which can be just as debilitating.

I gotta clarify this, of course; I have millions of ideas, and they all just want my attention. For instance, as of this writing I have about 6 blog post ideas that I’ve wanted to work on, and wouldn’t you know it, this Magic Box post wasn’t of them?

The Magic Box? Yeah, sounds kinda loopy. It’s a small cardboard file box that I found at work. I brought it home and started putting all my notes in it.

What a treasure trove it’s turned into!

At my job, my mind tries to work off the tedium by coming up with cool ideas and characters, scenes, short stories, novel titles, blog posts, and anything that happens to skip through my transom. I don’t carry a Blackberry or anything like that, so I take pieces of paper and fold them up so they fit in my pocket. I write all kinds of things on them, because I know I’ll forget them as soon as humanly possible.

Case in point: A lost novel Idea.

I had this fabulous character; a rich kid who is pulled out of Harvard because his father dies. He has to come home and deal with the family, the funeral, all that. This character is unimpressed by his family’s wealth and the way they put on airs; he’s humble, easy going, rather un-ambitious, except for his love of art and writing, and he’s likable. He’s obviously the black sheep of the family. He decides to take off in his father’s favorite car, to parts unknown, so he can sort things out. I immediately loved this character.

I forgot his name!

And it was integral to the story. His name was great; it instantly conjured up his demeanor and personality. Also, I had a great title for the book, which was part of an old poem I had read. I had quickly jotted it down, and have never seen that bit of paper since.

Soon after, I found this box. The Magic Box.

No, it didn’t have the kids name in it (To my chagrin).

But since then I have made it a habit of dropping all my notes in this box.
It’s a great writing prompt; I just search through the pieces of paper when I’m stuck and voila! If I had something in mind and forgot it, it’s always there in the box. And If I’m feeling “blocked” I just reach inside it and pull out some idea I had jotted down.

Not all ideas are usable, mind you. Some of these things are written at odd hours, or when I’m busy with something else. Some don’t even make sense, and some remain a mystery; I found an entire 800 word blog post on Perez Hilton stuffed at the bottom; I must have been pissed at him for something. Why I wrote it is baffling.
Searching through the Magic Box, I find notes on the Beatles, Generational Differences, Paper Airplanes, something called Edi-Writing, and a few pages of notes about my days as a high school reporter at the old Johnson Journal (which is now prompting me to finish it!)

My point is, Ideas are hard to come by, and when you get them, write them down, throw them in a box (You can name yours Pandora if you like...) unless you have a photographic memory. In the latter case, forget the whole thing! I bet if you wrote down some of the things you think about during the average day you’d never be stuck for ideas. That’s halfway to beating that Basterd Writer’s Block.

This may not work for you. Sometimes it doesn’t work for ME! But we need to keep trying; we need to keep positive.

And a Magic Box is never a bad thing, is it?

David Hunter, over and out.

Letters Home

2009-12-27T08:27:00.001-08:00

Huzzah, finally I have internet!

Been in Calgary for a few days now and have gotten online at last. Don’t know what it is with Calgarian Internet service but I wasn’t able to log on until late last night…after countless attempts…

I hate flying.

After eating Christmas dinner with family on Christmas day, my folks drove me to Pearson International for my 8:30 flight. It had started raining; not a good sign when you’re about to take to the skies, or if you’re a bad flier like me. I kept remembering “Nightmare at 20,000 feet”, that old Twilight Zone episode…

I hate flying, but I hate takeoffs even more. I always feel the plane and its tonnage struggling to get up there. But once we were sky-bound I was fine; it was a smooth flight. My travel buddy, Alex, had his laptop on, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, and offered to let me partake, but I begged off. I was busy studying every bump and change in the plane’s path. Through the nearest port hole I watched a bright star for a while; its fixed position rising and falling due to the plane’s movements. Half the time the Airbus’s turns would have gone unnoticed if not for that bright star’s vigil and unmoving essence…It made me feel a whole lot better for some reason. I fell asleep watching it.

When I woke up I was startled to see that the star was gone, but the flight attendant had goodies! Ginger Ale, Apple Juice (ugh to apple juice) and assorted free cookies and snacks. Normally my frugal nature (hah!) would demand I take as much free loot as possible, but this time I demurred; one pack of cookies and a Ginger Ale was enough for me.

Oh yeah, the girl.

She was a real Chatty Cathy (a reference so old, it voted for Lincoln) but extremely nice. Alex had chided me about her, telling me to go talk to her, so I did. We talked for hours, it seemed. She was on her way to Vancouver and parts unknown. Nothing like engaging in a conversation with a stranger on a Christmas Day flight…especially a cute one; she was utterly engaging and unfettered, and she had a great laugh; I imagine we entertained some people on board with our lively chatter. Ships in the night, though. We were heading in different paths.

Currently I’m looking out the window at a clear blue sky. Deceptive; I know it’s cold enough to freeze my socks off out there. The cat, Jinxie, a stray that my friend Clair brought in from the cold a few days ago, is quietly mewing, looking for food or something. She is so malnourished that I can feel her bones, but she’s convalescing nicely (Must buy her some food later) Anyway, I’m fine as wine here; the others are asleep, and I felt words calling me, so here I am.

Don’t know what we got planned, but we got a car, we got our friendship, and we got time. The mountains, I want to see the mountains! Them old Rocky Mountains that I’ve only ever seen from 40,000 feet on a flight to Frisco…the land…the sights…

Day’s just beginning.

(More later…)

Love, David

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

2009-12-25T11:14:00.001-08:00

MERRY CHRISTMAS, and thanks for following the Writer's Den...I wish you all a great 2010!

Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process

2009-12-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

by Betty S. Flowers

(Here's an interesting article on writing that I came across while leafing through the Harbrace College Handbook for Canadian Writers, and I thought I'd share it with you all - hope you like it.)

"What's the hardest part of writing?" I ask on the first day of class.

"Getting started," someone offers, groaning.

"No, it's not getting started," a voice in the back of the room corrects. "It's keeping on once you do get started. I can always write a sentence or two-but then I get stuck."

"Why?" I ask.

"I don't know. I am writing along, and all of a sudden I realize how awful it is, and I tear it up. Then I start over again, and after two sentences, the same thing happens."

"Let me suggest something which might help," I say. Turning to the board, I write four words: "madman," "architect," "carpenter," "judge."

Then I explain:

"What happens when you get stuck is that two competing energies are locked horn to horn, pushing against each other. One is the energy of what I'll call your 'madman.' He is full of ideas, writes crazily and perhaps rather sloppily, gets carried away by enthusiasm or anger, and if really let loose, could turn out ten pages an hour.

"The second is a kind of critical energy-what I'll call the 'judge.' He's been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says, 'That's trash!' with such
authority that the madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the judge is right-after all, he speaks with the voice of your most imperious English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can't create anything.

"So you're stuck. Every time your madman starts to write, your judge pounces on him.

"Of course this is to over-dramatize the writing process-but not entirely. Writing is so complex, involves so many skills of heart, mind and eye, that sitting down to a fresh sheet of paper can sometime seem
like 'the hardest work among those not impossible,' as Yeats put it.

Whatever joy there is in the writing process can come only when the energies are flowing freely-when you're not stuck.

"And the trick to not getting stuck involves separating the energies. If you let the judge with his intimidating carping come too close to the madman and his playful, creative energies, the ideas which
form the basis for your writing will never have a chance to surface. But you can't simply throw out the judge. The subjective personal outpourings of your madman must be balanced by the objective, impersonal vision of the educated critic within you. Writing is not just self-expression; it is communication as well.

"So start by promising your judge that you'll get around to asking his opinion, but not now. And then let the madman energy flow. Find what interests you in the topic, the question or emotion that it raises in you, and respond as you might to a friend-or an enemy. Talk on paper, page after page, and don't stop to judge or correct sentences. Then, after a set amount of time, perhaps, stop and gather the paper up and wait a day.

"The next morning, ask your 'architect' to enter. She will read the wild scribblings saved from the night before and pick out maybe a tenth of the jottings as relevant or interesting. (You can see immediately
that the architect is not sentimental about what the madman wrote; she is not going to save every crumb for posterity.) Her job is simply to select large chunks of material and to arrange them in a pattern that might form an argument. The thinking here is large, organizational, paragraph level thinking-the architect doesn't worry about sentence structure.

"No, the sentence structure is left for the 'carpenter' who enters after the essay has been hewn into large chunks of related ideas. The carpenter nails these ideas together in a logical sequence, making sure each sentence is clearly written, contributes to the argument of the paragraph, and leads logically and gracefully to the next sentence. When the carpenter finishes, the essay should be smooth and watertight.

"And then the judge comes around to inspect. Punctuation, spelling, grammar, tone-all the details which result in a polished essay become important only in this last stage. These details are not the concern of the madman who's come up with them, or the architect who's organized them, or the carpenter who's nailed the ideas together, sentence by sentence. Save details for the judge.

Ten Editing Tips, for Your Fiction Mss.

2009-12-09T16:08:00.000-08:00

As Posted by Margaret Atwood, at her wonderful site: The Year of the Flood

Speaking of writing, which we did a lot in Tofino: I put these together for a friend, but maybe someone out there could also use them…

TEN EDITING TIPS: FOR NOVELS, NON-“EXPERIMENTAL”

1.The beginning. This is the key signature of the book. Sets the tone, introduces the leitmotifs. Are the people in it main characters? If not, how much do the readers need to know about them?

2. Charles Dickens said, “Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” He put “wait” at the end because it was crucial. (In any series of three, the third is the most important.) In terms I’ve picked up by playing with the boys: Drop the hankie early, but make ‘em wait for the opening of the kimono. Are you telling too much too soon? (Suspense: a good thing, if not done too obviously. Who is this guy? What happens next? Don’t signal too much, too far ahead.)

3. Verbs shall agree with subjects (singular, plural). That is, unless it’s dialogue or third-person inside-the-character point of view, and the author wishes to indicate that the character has a weak grasp of this principle.

4. Verb tenses. This is tricky. But in general: if something is always true, use the present tense. If it was always true once, use the past, or “would” plus past tense to indicate continuous action in the past. (“Every day, he’d go to the laundromat.”) . If it’s something happening before the time we’re in, use the past perfect (“He’d gone.”) Only the author knows the time flow – an editor can query, but the author must decide. If tenses are disjunct, there should be a very good reason. (Maybe the character is having a breakdown.) See also the use of the historical present. (“So, he goes, “What’re you doing?” and I go, “Butt out,” and he … etc.) Elmore Leonard is an expert at this kind of thing, and at informal dialogue in general.

5. The gerund mistake. A common one. “Walking along the beach, a pair of boots was seen.” Means that the boots were doing the walking, not the observer. Correct: “Walking along the beach, he saw a pair of boots.”

6. Readers are readers. They are good at reading. They are also post-film, and are used to swift cuts. They will fill in quite a lot. At any point, are you telling/filling in too much? The author needs to walk through the moves in his/her head – like practicing a dance or a military exercise – so that no actual tactical mistakes are made – the character doesn’t go out the door before he’s put his pants on, unless intended — but then the planning steps, the connect-the-dots steps, are pruned out so that what the reader gets is a graceful, fluid execution. We hope.

7. Dialogue. How do people actually talk? Too much for prose fiction, as it turns out. Dialogue in a novel should: give the illusion of real speech; indicate character; not tell us stuff we can assume or don’t need to know, unless the point is that the character is boring; advance the plot; be funny if intended; not sound too wooden. Look at contractions: it’s, he’s, shouldn’t. Look at use of “that”—in speech, we rarely put it in. ‘The tree I saw,” not “The tree that I saw.”

8. Point of view. Whose eyes are we looking through? A character’s? The author’s? Is the author intruding too much on the character? Does it sound like Character Bob, or like Author Phil/Phyllis? We know characters in the following ways: What they say. What they think. What third-person narration says about them. What other characters say/think about them. What they do. What they say they do. What they see when they look in the mirror. The tone of the prose about/surrounding them.

9. The second person problem. Applies to letters and journals, for instance when one character is communicating to another or writing a diary or journal. If a letter, A shouldn’t tell B something we already know B knows. If a journal –who is it for? Is it to be found after the character’s death – “Look what a clever boy I was”? Or is it for her to enjoy in private in a gloating or meditative or My Secret Life sort of way? For a sampling of diaries/journals, see the excellent anthology, The Assassin’s Cloak.

10. The ending. Open or closed. Fitting in tone. Makes us say Wow, or I want more. Or it sums things up, or provides a coda. It is, in any case, the last word. For now. Ask: is this how you want to sign off?
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Changes: A Winter’s Monologue

2009-12-08T20:06:00.000-08:00

Up here in the Great White North it’s been anything but Great, or White. We’ve seen nary a breath of snow this season; a record for us Canucks who are used to being buried in the stuff by mid October. But as I sit here, the wind is blustering outside my 8th floor apartment, and I can see by the radar that I’ll be waking up to a very stormy dawn. I wait for it, because I am at heart, a storm watcher, be it literately or figuratively. And I suppose this storm can be looked at metaphorically, if you can dig it.

Time has been tight; work, sleep; these are things that have occupied my life lately. In this brief post, that I hope to finish off in the few moments that I have to myself before going off to sleep, I wanted to welcome you all to this new Writer’s Den page. It’s not fundamentally all that different from my original one, but I felt it was time for a change. Although, I do intend to really amp up the writing aspect of it; more writing tips, articles, information that’ll help in this crazy thing we call composition. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not posting this stuff to preach to anyone, I’m learning just like everyone else. These are things that I hope will help me, too. So consider this a “Writing Encounter Group” designed to inspire and help foster creativity.

So, welcome to the new Den. I hope it’s just as cozy as the old one, and I hope I can provide some insight and inspiration to all you writers out there with my nutty mind and even nuttier writer ways. And as the wind howls outside my windows, and as I await the first big storm of the season, I’ll leave you with this wonderful Robert Frost poem:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost (1923)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

~ ~ ~

Peace and Love, all.

~ David

The Importance of Being Bloggish

2009-12-08T00:51:00.001-08:00

There are 8 million blogs in the naked universe; this is one of them.

No doubt there are tons of voices out there, approximately 5 billion personal websites, or “blogs” if you will, and when put in this context your little domain may seem rather insignificant and small, but that’s not the point. You need that blog, it’s your voice. I came to that realization slowly, and painfully.

At first I was terrified about starting a blog; what do I say? How do I say it? What if I run OUT of stuff to say? What if nobody LIKES what I say? These are fair questions, but you can’t concern yourself with that. In the beginning you just have to write for the sake of writing; even if no one is reading. Even if you think you suck.

A blog is your personal voice, your vehicle, your wheelhouse; this is your domain; it’s a place for you to go and write what you feel. It’s a place for people to come and get to know you better. Without it, you’re a whispering wind instead of a full force gale. And also, it’s a great motivator. Nothing gets the juices flowing like an audience waiting to read your words.

In my pre-blog days I just didn’t write as much as I do now. You see, when there’s no place to hang my hat, or publish my writing as it were, there just doesn’t exist the urgency to write anything, at least that’s the way it was for me. Think of it as a soft deadline; you don’t really have to post anything; no one’s going to come after you and give you detention or anything, no one’s going to rap you on the knuckles with a ruler, but you know it’s there, that deadline, especially when you start gathering followers. Followers will motivate me every time. If I haven’t posted in a while I start feeling that twinge of guilt (yes, writer’s remorse!) and so I get off my ass and write something, like I’m doing now. It’s like getting a gentle kick in the rear. Without this blog of mine, the urge just doesn’t exist (Let me amend that by saying the urge to write ALWAYS exists, it's just not as strong). I write for one reason: I want people to read me. Without a blog, I am a tree falling in the forest with nobody around to hear me, and that’s no good. What the hell is the point of that?

Recently a Twitter-friend of mine named Joseph Lane started a blog called The National Affairs desk. Prior to this I knew virtually nothing about him; but his blog has since become a place to get to know him better; I can see his full-fledged personality and talents as a writer and journalist, and now I look forward to his every post. It’s like shining a light on yourself. If you ever hope to become a writer, this is vital; without a blog or an emotional connection, people will gloss over you. I’m happy to say though, that I’ve managed to convince a lot of talented people to be brave and start a blog. I know it’s tough; a blog is kind of like pulling your pants down in a crowded auditorium and giving a speech, but believe me, it gets easier, sort of.

Like I mentioned before, it can be a scary thing. When I first wrote a post for the Writers Den, I sat and stared at it for a good long hour; my finger hovered over the mouse, the publish button stared back at me. I said “Hell with it” and published. You know what? It wasn’t so bad. People were generally nice and supportive; I felt good about it. Now, I regularly post, un-post, edit, re-edit, delete entire posts; it’s my blog, my words, so why not? Just like people say, OWN your life, OWN your job.

OWN your blog. It’s yours; your voice, your words. Show us what you got.

David Hunter, Over and Out.

Writer's Block: The Basterd Returns

2009-12-07T18:27:00.000-08:00

Writer’s Block.

I want to deny its existence.

The sad fact is, an inordinate amount of people complain and curse about it, so there is grounds for its standing in reality. Writer’s Block, the Basterd, or whatever we want to call it, rears its ugly head at the worst of times, for me;

When I’m tired.

When I’ve had a great run of words and stories and blog posts.

When I’m sick of hearing (or reading) my own voice.

When I start feeling like nobody gives a shit.

When I start thinking I’m Ernest Fucking Hemingway.

I suppose my recent lack of writing activity could be attributed to this affliction. I suppose I want to blame SOMETHING, so why not WB? (Henceforth known as the Basterd.) Today I had enough of this and literally (yes LITERALLY!) hauled my brain out of neutral and grabbed a pen/paper and began scribbling things; notes, sentences, phrases, inarticulate doodles, letters! Anything.

Immediately I had ideas for twelve posts.

Beside me on my desk are piles of crumpled post-it notes and folded bits of bond paper that I used to jot down various thoughts and ideas during my workday. Occasionally, I would root through these and make more notes. I discovered that shuffling through that sheaf of paper made me excited again; ink, pen, and the goddess of creativity were upon me. Huzzah!

I find that I don’t actually lack for ideas. My problem is when I stop writing for any length of time; I get rusty. The old finger/brain symbiosis dries up. I get afraid to put words down. I start feeling like I never wrote before.

Is this the Basterd at work?

Stephen King, that insanely prolific and crazy author we all know and love, wondered at various times in his career whether he had anything left to say. And after his horrific car accident he, for obvious reasons, could not write for a long time, months actually. Upon returning to his desk and writing again he also felt like he'd never written before; he was terrified.

Stephen King? Afraid to write? It’s true.

My little lesson learned: I may allow myself a break to re-charge once in a while, but I will not allow it to continue. The Basterd must not win. And if we imbue Writer’s Block with human traits and refer to him as the Basterd, perhaps it’ll help us hate him, and fight him off. Anthropomorphize the sonnuva bitch so we can kill him where he stands. Scratch that: hangin’s too good for him. He deserves a good vaporizing.

The Basterd of course comes in many different forms; musicians get it, so do artists and actors; even world class athletes are prone, but they call it a “slump” and it is just as crippling. So what causes this? If I knew I’d be a millionaire. How do you cure it? If I knew THAT I’d be a billionaire. Many have tried to decode the Basterds DNA; Philosophers, scientists, even Tony Robbins tried to help a hockey team get out of its horrendous slump (L.A. Kings?) and failed. Most come up empty. I’m coming up empty right now.

I guess we’ll have to live with it. And fight on.

Last night I had a revelation though; I started reading Edward Abbey’s the Journey Home. Besides the excitement I had about getting my grubby hands on such a rare out-of-print book, I marveled at the fact that he wrote that manuscript on a low-tech typewriter while sitting atop a Fire Lookout (Numa Ridge) in Glacier Park Montana, completely isolated; no phone, no internet (1975, hadn’t been invented), no ANYTHING! (Except bears, which he called G-bears, or more affectionately, GRIZ.) His sole companion was a citizens band radio and his own thoughts.

Imagine that? With all the technology and information and communication we have at our disposal…

It made me think. I have NO excuses for not writing. NONE. I imagine myself up there where Ed sat for three months, 3000 feet above sea level, isolated and alone with only a typewriter and nothing but the sound of his own brain knocking away! My hands get sweaty just thinking about it! No computer! No Information! I think I’d go starkers, and not in a good naked kind of way. Stark raving MAD.

Back to the point.

Mostly I’m writing this because I need to get my head out of my ass and write. And I suppose the best way to fight the Basterd is to write about it; get the fingers moving, get the blood pumping, circulating, and boiling. Get the old mind-cylinders a-firing. It’s the only way. There IS no other way. You only beat the Basterd by writing. You only beat the Basterd by writing.

You only beat the Basterd by writing.

And If I repeat that to myself, I'll probably start believing it, too.

David Hunter, The Writers Den ~

Critical Mass

2009-12-04T22:45:00.001-08:00

Months ago I wrote a post called How To Lose Friends and Alienate People on Twitter, which was wildly popular, one of my most read pieces. It detailed the common annoyances Twitter followers had with each other. I thought I was being clever, and somewhere in the murky depths of my brain I knew I would piss someone off, even though I slapped disclaimers everywhere, and even the article itself is completely tongue-in-cheek in tone.

But I found out that some people not only DON’T have a sense of humor, but they’ll take direct aim at you and verbally spank you!

One such person did this, and un-followed me to boot.

This is the piece and the comment afterward:

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People On Twitter

There’s been a million blogs written about “Twitter Etiquette,” but I thought I would throw my three cents in on this topic as well. Disclaimer: This is all in fun, I may be completely wrong and you may be doing the opposite of everything in this list and STILL have twelve thousand followers; more power to you, friend. Here we go…

The Point Of Social Networking

The point of social networking is to be SOCIAL. If you’re going to tweet in a vacuum, Twitter is probably not the best place for you. Some people don’t really enjoy constant internal dialogue in their Tweet Stream; unless you’re Ashton Kutcher and can get away with tweeting what you had for breakfast, or have a very lively mind, you’d better start interacting with others.

The F-Bomb

Now I’m no prude by any stretch, but using the lovely F word in your tweets constantly might just offend someone. Not the word itself, but what it says about you. This is a very public place, and you reflect who you follow, and vice-versa. If I vouch for you and then you start dropping those F-Bombs in your tweets like a New York dock worker, then you need a bar of soap. (Mind you, I didn’t say NEVER curse, but the English language has billions of words to express yourself with, not just the word F__K! As fun and cathartic as that verbiage is.

Shameless Self-Promotion

I’m all for self-promoting and capitalism and all that jazz, but when you don’t even say hello and try to sell me something, you’re going down in a hail of un-follows! I even felt guilty when I started flogging my blog (Ah, see? Subversive and rude language, hidden in euphemistic terms…) The Writers Den by tweeting “Read my blog!” because it’s a rather crass method; and Auto DM’s? Ugh. You are treading on very dangerous follower toes by doing that. First, it’s impersonal, and second, it’s ANNOYING! Please stop this activity immediately. Also, if you have a book to sell, you’d do better to actually form RELATIONSHIPS with people, rather than constantly tweeting about your book, because not only is that NOT effective, it makes me want to go to the book store and walk right PAST your book without buying it, on purpose! Perhaps you should follow other self-promoters instead, and you can all sell things to each other and live happily ever after. Happy capitalism!

Erratic and Bizarre Behavior

I’m not saying I’m the sanest guy around, or that my head is screwed on any tighter then the next person, but again we are dealing with a public place here. When you emote and rant constantly, we may sympathize a little at first, but then our twitchy hand reaches for that block icon, reluctantly. I have problems too, so do the people who follow me. The only people who don’t have problems are dead people (although THAT may be construed as a problem too, in some circles.) This just isn’t the place for those kinds of discussions, unless you’re part of a Twitter Therapy group (insensitive of me I know, but a solution may be to use DM’s to express those feelings instead of tweeting stuff like “I’m losing followers! What did I say? I hate you all!!!) In the beginning I was guilty of this as well, but it can be cured!

Picking Fights and Being a Bully

I know from getting my ass kicked and being abused in grade school that bullies are very unpleasant. In the adult world it exists too, in the workplace and online. On Twitter it takes on a more subtle form; okay, you disagree with me once, twice, but all the time?? Come on! Or someone is making it clear that they don’t like something about my tweets, or my quotes, or my advice; why are you following me then?? F__K off! Some of these comments take on a very nasty tone, meant to embarrass people in public. If you want to embarrass me, do it in a DM, or else: BLOCK! I can take a tongue lashing, but not in public. You deserve a spanking for that.

If You Have 40 thousand Followers, but Confine Your Tweets to Three People

I don’t care who you talk to, or what you talk about, but you should acknowledge the existence of more than 3 people in your tweet stream. I have followers who still don’t know I exist. Why follow me then? Lord knows. But when it comes time to clean house, out they go…

Useless tweets

Recently some bonehead wrote that “40% of Tweets are useless” although I don’t know where he got those statistics. How can you qualify a useless tweet? If someone tweets about eating Bananas in their Corn Flakes, I may or may not find it interesting (or it may make me hungry) but I agree that there is such a thing as “Useless tweets”, I mean we all can’t orate like Norman Vincent Peale every second of the day, but something of value should be attached to the majority of your tweets. Entertain, enlighten, anger, incite; do any of these things. Don’t bore! (I’m one to talk; I’m surprised I’m not a mascot for Insomniacs Anonymous) One thing that will make me want to un-follow (not really, it’s just an annoyance): Too many one sided conversations; Like this:

@TheWritersDen ~ That’s great! I can’t believe it!

This will force me to go and hop back and forth to the other person to eavesdrop and get the rest of the story! (Although this is a weak argument) Once in a while it’s okay. Some do it constantly, (The theme of this post seems to be “do what you like, just don’t annoy me and do it too much…)

Indecipherable Tweeting

I consider myself well read and somewhat educated, but I don’t work for the NSA and I don’t do code-breaking. I’ve received tweets that are completely undecipherable, like this:

@The WritersDen ~ You Feel the Same? You me too HAHAAAA! U funny n can we talk? Prolly can Thx

Here’s a tip, try to be a little clearer in what you’re trying to say. I’m a very nice guy, and I’m quite tolerant, but tweets written in reverse Sanskrit or Zodiac code drive me batty. If I weren’t such a nice guy I would “UnFllow get it HAHA!”

Learn How to Spell

Okay, so I’m a grammatical stickler. Bt when you start usng lead speak 2 tweet, it gets annying! Come on! You can edit without omitting vowels! It’s easy, give it a try.

So that’s it for now. Remember, this is all in fun. Like I said, you may be doing the opposite of all the above and manage to have 3 billion followers, in which case I may eat my hat. Take care now.

Anonymous said...
Your post shows a fundamental misunderstanding of Twitter.

It isn't a "social networking" site. It's a communications tool, for people to communicate, or not, as they wish, in their absolute discretion.

Procedure:

1. You attach yourself like a limpet to the twitterers whose feed you want to receive.

2. You avoid - either by the BLOCK button or by Unfollowing - those twitterers whose feed you don't want to receive.

Simple.

Your post suggests there's a specific way other people should be twittering (the way you'd like, naturally) whereas the opposite is the case: everyone can do precisely as they like.

You don't like someone's twitters? Well have the brains to unfollow or block them, then. End of problem. Don't start ranting here about how other people choose to use the tool. No one is forcing their twitters upon you. Get it?
September 1, 2009 8:50 AM

Wow.

For a long time after this I was gun-shy, worried about putting words to page in fear of reprisal from some demanding reader, but then I realized that I did nothing wrong. Writers are apt to piss people off from time to time. But It got me thinking about the power of words, and the effect they may have on certain readers.

I mean, we shouldn’t walk on egg-shells when we write, or placate, or try to remain neutral, harmless, safe, bland! What good is that? I know it also flies in the face of the entire article above, where I wrote about the annoying things people on Twitter do. Aren’t Tweeters allowed to do pretty much as they want? It is a free country after all (Countries. I’m Canadian, you may be American) however, As I mentioned above, the entire article is laced with tongue - in- cheek references and self-deprecation. I KNEW that a lot of that stuff I listed was just plain funny, and not at all serious. I guess it didn’t come across that way to "Anonymous". Perhaps my wacky sense of humor and satire needed to be a little clearer.

So, take heart; when someone hammers you about a post you wrote, or verbally abuses you in the comment section of your blog, remember, it’s your role as a writer to provoke, anger, enlighten, educate, learn and just plain have fun while composing. And don’t wait for months before you get over a bad review like I did. Staring at that comment for the past while was like an itch just waiting to be scratched, and I guess I finally scratched it.

And boy it feels good!

Huzzah! ~ David Hunter

This Post Has Been Mentioned by Writery, at the blog From the Desk of a Writer : "Literature reviews, publishing links, writing rants, and soap box commentary." ~ Check it out!

The Writer’s Life: A Bohemian Manifesto

2009-10-22T20:24:00.000-07:00

You wouldn’t believe how I’ve been living lately; food has been a low priority. So has housekeeping; there are articles, magazines, newspaper clippings and related dementia strewn across my work area. Seems my books have been multiplying like rabbits too (although I have twelve thousand books, I still felt compelled to buy Stephen King’s Detective novel The Colorado Kid for two bucks at a yard sale) When I do eat I take impatient spoon-full’s of food, chew hastily and return to my computer; I’ve been subsisting on PB & J sandwiches and tea. The writing has taken over. I feel like a true bohemian lately.

It’s the book of course, isn’t it always? And the blogs, like this one. I think about them all day, then I come home and think about them some more, then whenever the synapses are firing correctly I dive in and try to get something down on the page before my famously wiggy short-term memory kicks in and wipes the slate clean. Sometimes I stew over an idea (usually at 5 AM or thereabouts) and get all excited and start wandering in circles, coffee in hand, searching for a pen or something to scribble a note on. Sometimes I get home and I have all these tiny slips of paper in my nap-sack, usually yellow post-it notes, filled with insane and inspired ideas. Some are good, some are shit. Most are shit. By the time I get home only the best notions are left in my head, but being on the move all day working, I fall victim to the usual human foibles; I need time for sleep, food, clothing (laundry) and to clean the apartment. Need to pay bills, run errands (Shopping! Haven’t done shopping all week!) and so the little amount of time I have, I dedicate to writing, but lately the time-balance has been skewed slightly; seems writing has taken up more and more of my time. I haven’t even watched TV since I got cable a month ago. And me, a movie buff, I have not once watched a film since I’ve moved in to this new place. This is definitely strange behavior for Senor Hunter, let me tell you.

A lot of the reason stems from this particular blog, The National Affairs Desk, and my two partners in literary crime, Joseph Lane and Matt Byron. Two more dedicated guys I could never have met. We’ve formed a kind of un-spoken (ironic?) and un-holy bond with each other. I’m trying to do my part, because I love to do it. And now I’ve gone and started another blog which will require more attention, and more maintenance, and yes, more writing.

It’s been fun, though. Every day I search through the papers and news reports for interesting angles, and I find I have a lot to say about nearly everything. But If I write down everything I think about the universe it’d dwarf a phone book, so instead you get snippets. I’m also in search of my voice; when you’re part of a repertory company like the NAD, you need to discover your own voice. Joseph Lane is the sane one (for the most part) Matt is the crazy Dean Moriarty of Kerouac’s fabled beat generation, and both are Hunter S. Thompson lovers. So where do I fit in? I don’t know. I love Edward Abbey, an elitist nature writer who had a foul mouth and a penchant for burning bill-boards along America’s highways because he thought they ruined the landscape and it’s aesthetic, plus he wanted to be buried in the desert (“...Disregard all state burial laws”, he states in his will). I love music, jazz in particular. I love writing. Simple when put in those easy terms, but I have complexities too. I couldn’t tell you about my voice; either I haven’t discovered it yet, or I have laryngitis.

So where was I? Oh yes; the writing. I am completely immersed in it. Although I am not a prolific author (I am too perfectionist for that) I have written more in the past three months then I ever have. I’ve beaten back that bastard known as Writer’s Block a few times now, and I’m getting the hang of writing every day, although sometimes the words come hard, and slow. The long and short of it is this; I’m a fucking writer, and I love it, and this is what I want to do with the rest of my life. Hang the 9 to 5 job; I deny that’s the only way to live. Not for me anyway. This new dedication is a little scary to me; and friends, co-workers, they don’t understand. The term “Writer” is an abstraction to them. They probably envision a guy in a straight-jacket sitting behind an Underwood type-writer, ranting and drooling, but mostly they see the reality; bare cupboards and bare pockets. To this end they may be correct on both counts.

But GOD I love it so.

David Hunter, Over and Out.

Sigh!

2009-10-10T08:28:00.000-07:00

So the gist is, if I use a new template I will lose all my stuff; widgets, photos, everything. Yikes?