Writing as an Art Form
I’ve been giving a great deal of thought lately to what it is that makes a book great. So much of what I’ve learned as an aspiring writer has revolved around the use of the English language. Good grammar is the foundation of a good book (and something I’m still working on). It is also something which has spent years slowly fading and now much of the western world communicates in LOLspeak.
When I was at school the majority of the time in our English lessons was dedicated to interpretation of the writing of others. What did Wordsworth mean when he chose to use an ‘and’ instead of a ‘but’? In stark contrast, we were taught to use the comma as a visual cue for the reader to pause. Very little effort was put into explaining the actual purpose of the comma. In high school English, the focus was on the why instead of the how.
Since making the decision to try my hand at writing I have spent a great deal of time learning the how. It is very much a work in progress. Many things baffle me. For example, certain verbs are reviled among many groups of writers, most notably variations on ‘to say’. To a certain extent, I share an aversion to the repeated use of the alternatives “just to mix things up a little” but in the end writing is an art not a science. Something which stands out to me is the way published authors who use the alternatives are mocked as hacks, often in spite of their popularity.
This is a practice loftily referred to as ‘reading as a writer’ as if somehow this makes the critic’s opinion weightier than that of a person reading as a reader. It is also something which has left me, and no doubt others, so paralysed with the fear of finding a stray adverb in my work I can spend hours agonising over the same paragraph.
That’s not to say I don’t “read as a writer”. However, I do try to read as a reader first and a writer second. Do you know what I discovered in doing that? The book I most enjoyed was the one which broke the most rules. Adverbs were sprinkled across every page with nary a regard for their status as the lepers of the English language. A simple word was seldom used in place of its more complex equivalent just because it was simple. The author chose the perfect word instead of the safe word and created a beautiful book.
That is exactly the type of writer I aspire to be.
This is Why I’m the Queen
Well it’s day 1 in my new home and I’m still a gibbering wreck. The only difference I can make out is I’m a warm gibbering wreck. It’s a start.
I struggle a lot with self-confidence. Writing wasn’t my idea, you see, at least not to start off with. It actually started out as kind of a convenience thing. It sounds odd, I know. What could possibly be convenient about writing, especially for a neurotic such as myself?
Well, I can pick my own hours, and it’s a job I can still do if my crohn’s flares up.
But here’s the thing — I don’t actually like my own writing. I don’t find anything I write to be particularly clever, interesting or engaging. When I write, I feel like one of those first-round Idol competitors. You know, the ones whose loved ones should have taken aside and quietly but gently told, “uh, no, don’t do that. You’ll get shredded.”
Added to that is Sunday’s decision to start over. I still remember how hard it all was the first time and I’m starting over. You know what I want? I want to go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow morning to discover a fully written, fully edited, fully awesome novel has just fallen out of my ear while I slept.
Isn’t that how it’s meant to work?
Starting Over
After my short break from writing I’ve returned with a great deal more perspective. I’ve found it’s important to do that from time to time. Otherwise I just end up banging my head against the same brick wall over and over again. Every time I return it’s with a new sense of purpose and direction.
I’d reached a point in my editing where I realised none of my options were places I wanted to go. I didn’t know quite how or why it had happened so I couldn’t find a way out. (So really all of my distractions came at the perfect time.) If I was to push forward I needed to find a way around that little problem.
I have a problem, you see. I absolutely crave the approval of others and my craving requires instant gratification. I need people to see what I write and adore it. In order to achieve that I took the story I was writing, diluted it and ran it through a filter of what I hoped people would want to read. I tried to make sure it wasn’t offensive in any way. And what I ended up with was a joke. What I should have done was worry about my own opinion. I’m the one who has to go through and edit it and polish it and edit it some more. If it’s not the story I want to read, what’s going to motivate me to keep at it?
So here’s where I’m at. I’m throwing away (metaphorically) the first draft and starting over. I’m doing it my way. I’m not going to let anyone see what I’ve written because the second I do that I’ll return to my old habit. It’s going to be my little secret until I’m happy with what I have. Once I’m happy with it, then probably others will be too.
Nobody ever said being a writer would be easy. Now I know why.
The Times, They Are a’Changin’
It was panic stations here at Casa del Me when first I came across this article. I thought to myself, holy crap, he’s right. I hardly even read half of what he said what with the yawning and the skimming. Google has made me stupid. Damn you, Google! Damn you to hell! Once I sat down elsewhere and picked up my current read, cooler heads prevailed.
I do skim things I see on the internet, unless it’s written in an interesting voice or is particularly relevant. What that article doesn’t seem to take into account is the sheer amount of crap on the Internet. I’m not excluding myself in that, I’m as guilty of talking crap as the next blogger. What I try to do is make my crap interesting.
Also, isn’t it interesting, an article on how people don’t read large chunks of text any more has to be the longest internet article in the known universe? Just sayin’.
There’s another, related link which gives advice on how to combat the kind of word-fatigue people claim we’re suffering from. It’s not any more interesting than the first but it does make use of bulleted lists, claiming they are the best way to get your point across. Let’s do a little experiment, shall we?
Best served cold
Ella stepped through the doors and looked around, her fur-lined jacket tickling her chin. A shape lurched across her field of vision, its movements odd. She looked again.
“Is that…”
Her aunt glanced over. “Ah. Beryl. Yes, she passed last week.”
“She’s a zombie?”
Her aunt’s face creased from her smile. “Where else?”
Ella pondered. Better here than Arizona for the walking dead. “Why would anyone live here?”
Another smile. “They’re no worse than most other neighbours.”
For a moment, Ella watched Beryl. She grimaced and turned away. “Tell that to the woman whose intestines she’s eating.”
Compare that with:
• Girl visits her aunt in unspecified cold location
• Girl sees walking corpse
• Girl discovers this is common here
• Girl realises cold place is better for the walking dead than hot place
• Girl sympathises with zombie’s victim
Call me crazy but I prefer the first.
I do skim articles on the internet (so if I’m reading something of yours, make it interesting). I skim text on my computer as well (so if you email me, make sure it’s interesting). The problem isn’t my brain, it’s in the method of delivery. Anything on a screen gets skimmed. That’s why I do all of my editing using a copy I’ve printed out special. It’s why I have no interest in the new technologies like the Kindle. Its why, as long as I and people like me are alive, there will always be books. 56% of 18-24 year olds agree.
Neither Napster nor Kazaa nor the iTunes store have managed to close our music stores. That’s the cold, hard truth. People still buy CDs and they’ll keep buying books too. The world isn’t ending. The sky isn’t falling. And Google hasn’t made us stupid. Life goes on.
Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, congratulations. Go and have a quick nap. Rest your eyes. They’ve earned it.
Happy Birthday
Today would have been my father’s seventieth birthday. I would have called him and he would have answered the phone, as he always did, with “Are you there?” To which I would have replied, “I am here, are you there?” And he would have chuckled, even though it wasn’t funny the first time and it would have been far from the first time.
I would have wished him a happy birthday and he would have thanked me. We might have discussed what I was up to, what he was up to, how the weather was in our respective parts of the world, you know, the usual stuff people talk about. What we wouldn’t have talked about is what a great dad he really was. We should have talked about that more.
He was extremely protective of his youngest daughter. My mother likes to remind me, though I was too young to remember, of the time I tearfully reported to him that one of the chickens had “bitten me”. He asked which one and, when I was unable to identify the culprit, executed the whole lot of them. I’d imagine we ate chicken for quite some time. An incident I do remember was much later, when I was a teenager. I had an irrational fear of magpies from when we first moved to the farm where I eventually grew up. We had a magpie problem back then and to keep my little eight-year-old head safe, I was told stories of how they swoop on your from behind. It translated into a phobia which has survived until this day. One afternoon, after school, I was up in the front orchard, gorging, as I did, on whatever fruit was in season at the time when I heard the taunting cry of a magpie nearby. I spotted it perched in a nearby eucalyptus tree, watching me as if it was simply daring me to turn my back. I huddled under the plum tree until I heard the tell-tale crunch of gravel which signified dad’s return home from work. I flagged him down and explained the situation. Dutifully, he drove me up the driveway then retrieved his rifle from its cabinet. He strode down the driveway like the Hunter he always fancied himself, and no magpie ever bothered me while I was picking fruit again.
He was very tolerant of my youthful curiosity. There was never a man who blushed more easily than my dad and my tiny brain seemed all too aware of that. Whenever I had a question related to exactly what that boy-animal was doing to that girl-animal I always asked him, never mum who had no problem fielding questions like that. He always turned a fascinating shade of red and he always stammered through his answers, but he always answered.
He always went above and beyond. When I first went to school I wanted to take our rooster for show-and-tell. Well, the wretched creature escaped so he chased it through the neighbours’ yards with his fishing net. Eventually he did catch it. Later, he took a week off work when my school went camping so he could go with us, ostensibly as a parent-helper but mostly so he could make sure nothing happened to his little girl. Whenever he was needed, he was there.
He taught me as much as he could about nature. He had a passion for New Zealand native trees (so it was lucky we lived in New Zealand) and he did his best to instill the same in me. Between his time working in the forest park near where we eventually settled and his enthusiasm for planting them on the property, eventually a great deal of understanding sank in. I only wish I’d taken more time to learn.
Those are only the highlights but a lifetime of memories would take a lifetime to tell. Hopefully, he knew how much all of those things meant to me. I just wish I hadn’t gone through life just assuming he did.
Happy birthday, dad.