Archives for December 2015

A Writer’s Resolutions

December 19, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

What makes the Christmas holiday season so special for writers is that it’s the only holiday that juxtaposes recollections of the past, with assessments of the present, and contemplation of the future. The warm and fuzzy nature of the season prompts the recall of warm and fuzzy Christmases past. It brings people and shared memories together in celebration and closes out the week or so allotted to it with contemplation about the coming new year.

No other holiday offers writers so many options and alternatives for stories as Christmas. Its key element—happiness—is easily flipped over to expose a less positive underbelly rich in frustration, despair, and hopelessness for our heroes to struggle against and overcome as they search and reach for happiness. Its focus on giving provides a rich milieu of generosity contrasted against the less generous and sometimes downright meanness of the world’s realities.

The “holiday infected” heart is an easy target for emotionally rich stories. Readers love the tearjerker that has a happy ending. There are of course, those stories where it’s the tragedy that teaches the lesson of the season. For example, Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Match Girl.” It’s the epitome of a holiday, heart-breaking tragedy. It doesn’t tug at your heartstrings; it yanks them free of their moorings and drowns them in a sea of sadness that make a reader’s reality so much the sweeter by comparison. Likely that was one of Anderson’s goals.

It and stories like it rely on mining the primary emotions of kindness and giving and their contrasting opposites personified in characters and familiar situations. Well done, they go beyond the pitfalls of interjecting the maudlin and put a new twist on traditional styles and more conventional writing techniques. That should be your goal whenever you put pen to paper over the holidays.

It doesn’t take a lot to convert an age-old tale into something new. Take the story/song of “Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer.” You could turn him into a lush I suppose, the history of his drinking derived from some tragic event at Clement Moore’s house. (The tragic event is up to you.) Or perhaps the red nose is a symptom of a fatal illness and this might be Rudolf’s last Christmas Eve trip. Put that at the center of your white board and see how fast the tentacles of ideas spread. Simply write it at the center of your whiteboard and step back. Ideas will flood in.

I bring Anderson’s story to your attention not to interject maudlin emotions into your Christmas spirit, but to remind you how the richness of emotions that surround the holiday season can add an important element to your writing—heart (or its opposite: heartlessness). Of course, writers pull—or yank at times—at readers’ hearts through words. In that regard, I direct your attention the list of “Feeling Words/Emotion Words” at eqi.org/fw.htm. Most of the words listed there are verbs, which mean they can inexpensively add depth and breadth to a description, definition, expression, or exclamation. There are something like 4,000 emotion-laden nouns, adjectives, and verbs to choose from in the English language. What I found is that such lists generate their own story ideas. The word “glided” jumped out at me. I suddenly visualized Santa rehearsing the approach to rooftop landings with a bunch of reindeer trainees.

The referred to list is filled with what I call “bumble bee words”—capable of carrying many times their own weight in intensity and injecting zing into a sentence. Many are the action verbs that can turn an ordinary sentence into a movie in a reader’s mind. Others are adjectives that add visual spice to a story. To give you an idea, here are a few “b” words: brutal, brutish, bubbly, buffeted, bugged, bulldozed, bullied, bummed, buoyant, burdened, bursting, buzzed . . . It’s like looking at flashcards of exciting visuals.

These words are not meant to be kept in a bowl to be dipped into and thrown at the page. You have to be careful with them. Many have been subjected to overuse and misuse to the point of becoming hackneyed. One that might sound fresh to you might have holes in its soles to your readers. Those are the ones that need bed rest. Let them lie.

Each word, and especially each verb, you consider needs to be assessed and measured to make sure it properly fits into and feeds the intent of your sentence. Take a word like “ambivalent”—having mixed feelings or ideas about something or someone—a condition not that rare during the holiday season. But your writing is enhanced when you capture the essence of ambivalence via story rather than merely injecting it as a descriptive. In fact, if you say the word over a few times it has a sort of sterile sound to it. (“Ah,” said the doctor, looking up from his microscope and rubbing his chin, “its another damn case of ambivalence.” / “Oh dear, what can we do, doctor?” / “It’s tricky. Treated incorrectly and it can morph into hackneyed.” / “Oh no, doctor! Not hackneyed! Anything but hackneyed!” / The doctor looked over with a serious expression on his face. “Go prepare the surgical suite.”

Hackneyed is what happens when you rely on the tried and true and take the lazy route through the thinking process. We each carry a little bag of hackneyed words and phrases around and thus they are too easily accessible. Their use requires little thought, and they have the tendency to float to the surface where they are the first words grabbed and slapped onto the page. To add freshness to your writing in the New Year, try to sit back and contemplate how to say something differently in a meaningful way. But remember, saying something differently doesn’t necessarily remove hackneyedess (my word). You need to dig a little deeper into your vocabulary pouch and find the very best word.

What makes “The Little Match Girl” hackneyed is not the story itself, but that its theme has served as the foundation for so many stories—like a collection of cupcakes with frosting of different colors but they all taste the same. The challenge is how can you tell a well-used story in a fresh way that provides a truly new perspective to the vortex of poverty and public ambivalence.

What you do is tweak some fundamental ingredients. Stand the story on its head—poverty is replaced by great wealth, and the poor little starving girl by the thoughtless mogul who has become dedicated to expanding her wealth and empire. She might also be the night janitor who offers the creatively stressed artist (or writer) insights and suggestions and the ultimately great idea and suddenly disappears. She—your heroine—didn’t start out as a lonely wretch; the “condition” was foisted upon her. Now think of how many ways you could have that happen! You can take any story apart and redesign its pieces, contents, and characters and shuffle them around a bit to have something new or at least newish. Detroit does it every model year. And like Detroit, if nothing, your first story of the New (model) Year should at the very least be “newish.”

So make a resolution, and process that has a long history, dating from Babylonian times 4,000 years ago. The Romans offered their promises to change and improve to Janus, the god of beginnings and endings. Medieval knights would take les voeux du paon (the peacock vow) to reaffirm their commitment to chivalry. But the Christians focused on reflecting on past mistakes and resolving how they would improve themselves in the coming new year. And that is what writers need to do.

Back then, those who made resolutions were probably more motivated to keep them to assure they benefitted from their gods’ good graces. Perhaps because we now make our resolutions to ourselves rather than the gods, we’re more prone to break them or not seriously try to keep them the centerpiece of our New Year improvement efforts. Writers should not follow the common rabble here but set the example. We’re above that sort of behavior. Instead, writer’s resolution(s) should be carefully considered and include plans of commitment and execution to assure a higher level of success. It is, after all, your chosen craft.

According to one study, eighty-eight percent of those making New Year resolutions fail to keep them! The same study also found, however, that men benefited (by twenty-two percent) when they engaged in goal setting rather than just resolution making; and, women were ten percent more successful in staying true to their resolutions when they made them public.

The success or failure in keeping our resolutions might also have something to do with the approach we bring to them. Try spending less time reflecting on the past and more time on specific ways to implement ways to improve your efforts and achieve measureable self-improvement. Set benchmarks to target.

So in the spirit of making resolutions, here are some to consider:

1. Write from your heart, the impact or results of your efforts is the readers’ job.

2. Be truthful to yourself, your readers, your story, the goals of your efforts.

3. Avoiding taking yourself too seriously. It makes your writing ponderous rather than light and refreshing and thus enjoyable to create and read.

4. Play around with a different genre. If you are up to eyeballs in memoir, take a break and play with fiction. Take a real person you are writing about and fictionalize him or her in some totally different setting.

5. Keep working on the discipline thing. It demands constant attention. Don’t condemn yourself if you fail, praise yourself for continually trying. Write even when you don’t feel like it. I suppose you can write yourself into a funk, but if so, you can certainly write yourself out of one.

6. Research. If you don’t do your research, your story will lack credibility and readers will become critics who will spot weaknesses and go in for the kill. Also, a dose of truth adds spice to fiction and makes it more believable by fuzzing the border between fact and fiction. Keep your readers in what I call the it-could-be-true zone. People love to believe. Feed that desire. The most frightening horror story is the one that could happen . . . right next door!

7. Close mouth, open eyes and ears. Observe! Does this need explanation? Shouldn’t. Just remember that great ideas don’t hide, they’re out there walking around in public and you need to be ever vigilant at trying to spot them.

8. Read . . . a lot. This is the hardest thing for me to do. I find myself feeling guilty about not writing when I’m reading. But reading is the fuel for creative thinking. Feed the fire and keep it stoked. Set aside a specific time—a.m. to get the juices moving, and p.m. to prime the pump of the subconsciousness of nighttime thinking.

9. Read and research, but remember, too, your primary focus is on writing. Reading should be a source of knowledge that fuels your creativity and adds details to story, not some place to hide to avoid the work of writing. This is an area where we can too easily lie to ourselves . . . You may be doing important research, but don’t avoid important writing! Assess your habits with brutal honesty—you have to hate a bad habit to change it.

10. Keep at it. Some days will be better than others. Your goal is to attain prolificacy. (Now there’s a word worth the fifty cents I paid for it!)

11. Brainstorm on a white board. When filled, take a picture with your iPhone or iPad and print it out. There’s something about standing in front of a blank space that motivates to move—mentally and physically.

Give thanks for your talents and to your talents, and for having the insight and perseverance to want to improve them in the New Year. May 2016 be happy and productive.

Telling Your Own Christmas Carol

December 11, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

Memories come rushing home during the holidays. Inevitably, you’ll likely want to write some of your own for your personal diary or journal, or to include in a Christmas Letter or insert in cards to family members and special friends. It’s a great opportunity to practice writing a “slice of life” recollection about some special Christmas event, tradition, or chaos—something that will leave your readers with a sweet, holiday aftertaste.

As you get older, your recollections of holiday events tend to come in tidbits and pieces rather than longish narratives. Likely as not, your favorite Christmas might over time evolve from a collection of memories from several Christmases. The farther you “look” back, the more likely that will happen. It’s okay. You are writing a “truthish” narrative, not a biography. Your primary goal is to capture the emotions of the holiday. For example, one of the tidbits that come into my mind includes checking all the Christmas tree lights to make sure they worked. Those were the days when the bulbs were incandescent and got hot and were wired serially, which meant one bad bulb would make the whole string go dark. Inevitably, a few bulbs died during the annual storage ritual. Using a good bulb, you had to unscrew each bulb—starting at one end of the string—to find the offender. Easy, you say, just look for the bulb that looked burned. That didn’t work. The color coating usually obscured the deceased filament. Fortunately, the excitement of Christmas trumped the impatience of youth and you were willing to conduct a bulb-by-bulb analysis to make sure all the strings would light. It was for Santa Claus, remember.

Putting tinsel on the tree was no easy matter either. The modern bright plastic stuff had not developed, which meant tinsel was actually reasonably shiny strips of what I recalled appeared to be lead. You would have to very carefully remove it from the package then as carefully toss it so it would land with some semblance of frozen, dripping water. When you’re too short to reach and correct an errant strand, you need the right flip of the wrist to plant a strand in a “dripping” position as close to the end of a branch as possible. And you had to be careful because the string of lead coming into contact with the base of a light might cause a short and cazoooooot, you’re back to “finding-the-dead-bulb” game.

It wasn’t until the proliferation of LED tree lights that we saw the statistics of burned up Christmas houses take a precipitous drop. What a way to remember Christmas! “Grandma baked cookies, then we baked the house.”

Ornaments, too, presented special challenges. They were made of glass . . . rather delicate glass. Dropping them, even on carpet, didn’t assure they would survive. At a very young age I learned how to pick up shattered chards without cutting my fingers. Decorating the tree thus required the skills of a surgeon, but in the end the investment of time made for a truly delightful Christmas tree. Only once do I recall an excited collie named Coco bringing the whole carefully “coifed” affair crashing down. I think that might also have been when I first learned some nifty swear words from my dad.

So if you’re thinking about writing about a favorite Christmas you might find it easier to write about your favorite things about Christmas—going out and finding your own tree, or Grandma’s favorite—and perhaps spiked—punch, baking and decorating cookies, wrapping presents, or sneaking around the house in search of Mom’s hiding places for presents. I recall finding under my parents’ bed a really nifty gas station set. I was probably six or seven. I’d sneak under the bed and play with it in the days before Christmas Eve. You would have thought they would have wrapped it!

Like the song “It Was a Very Good Year,” recollections of Christmas come in segments, starting with your first recollections and thinning out to the very special ones as you got older. Then came those Christmases of making it special for your own children.

One of my favorites? During my university years. I joined my publisher and his wife on a visit to their friend’s place out in the country. She hailed from England where she trained as a concert pianist. Her husband had built her a proper English residence, complete with a fireplace you could walk into and a huge picture window that took up most of one wall and opened onto a large greenhouse, beyond which quarter-sized snowflakes gently fell while we enjoyed some real plum pudding and a crackling fire. But what really made the morning special were the two grand pianos nestled together in front of the picture window and John, who had taught himself how to play some twenty years previous, and Bonita playing duets as the snow fell and fire crackled.

So if you’re going to write about Christmas, hone in on a very special one and bring it back to life. Christmas is a topic that lets you play to all five of the senses—from the kitchen smells to crackling of the fireplace to the touch of a snowflake landing on your tongue.

The trap you might fall into is writing a chronological narrative. You want to focus on the emotions and senses, not merely the facts. Descriptions need to be tinged with the smells and tastes and sounds of the season. Because you want to capture the specialness of the time you might avoid beginning with sentences like, “Marley was dead to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.” For me? I might begin with . . .

“The words stealth and child don’t really belong in the same sentence. Childhood tends to be a noisy time of life. Intentions have nothing to do with it. Lacking grace and coordination, a child would have a hard time sneaking up on a freight train. But there I was, probably on my fourth excursion—that had to quickly executed as my mother fiddled with the laundry in the basement—into the wilderness of my family’s small bungalow in search of Christmas presents.”

Limit you holiday to five- or six-hundred words. That will force you watch your word count as you write and thus self-edit to achieve the necessary tightness in your prose. Touch on the five senses and likely your prose will touch on the emotions of your readers.

Poetry and the Right Word

December 4, 2015 By howtobeabetterwriter_dhystk

There once was a writer of prose
Who at poetry stuck up his nose.
A stick with a pen wiped off his grin,
Now the importance of poetry he knows.

Robert Frost might smile at this limerick, but more likely suggest a trip back to the drawing board, or that the writer—me—keep his day job or confine himself to something other than limericks. But writing poetry has a secret power if you’re a prose writer; it slows down the contemplative process and makes you think about individual words and finding just the right one. Finding the right word is a powerful tool for the writer to develop into a habit. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.” The search is worth the effort, always.

Poetry is the search for the right word—not the nearly right word, but the one that fits perfectly into the opening left for it. When writing poetry, you must also consider the nuances of rhyme, meaning, and usage of a word. As a result you become more intimate with each word you use. In prose, you tend to think in sentences and paragraphs. In poetry, you think in terms of individual words. First you have to search for the right one—it may be hidden in some dark corner of the dictionary or thesaurus—then you have to study its definition and usage to see if it fits into the space you’ve left open for it and whether it gets along well with its neighbors. You learn how sensitive a word can be to slight differences in definition and usage and location. One day “gay” refers to a happy person; the next to a homosexual one. You sometimes have to be careful in your word choice.

A word sometimes hints at another that might be a better choice, and that one might hint at still another. Just when you think you have lassoed the right word, a better one gallops up and lands, clinging desperately to the tip of your tongue just slightly out of mental reach, only to pop up a day later and with a teasing smile to say, “Am I what you’ve been looking for?”

Unless you’re into writing odes and other longer forms of rhyme, your poetry will likely be reasonably short and frequently drop into your lap while you’re working on some other piece of writing, or inexplicably pop up as a flash of inspiration. You don’t have to emulate Robert Frost—although reading him is well worth the effort—but do a sort of mental word calisthenics that writing poetry offers in its most basic form. A mental warm up in rhyme loosens up that part of your brain from which your prose flows.

An arduous search for the just right word frequently produces a wave of self-satisfaction, but just as likely, your mind will circle around and find another, better alternative. Don’t become frustrated. Each word is worth careful examination, not just in terms of its definition and usage, but how well it fits into a line and interacts with the rest of your verse or prose. You find yourself operating in the world of nuanced differences. A single word can add just the right amount of spice to your poetic recipe. Finding it can be like tasting cake batter!

My first exposure to poetry came at age ten or so when my cousins and I were exploring an informal landfill, i.e., dumping site, not far from my house down a side street that faded into a dirt access road that descended into some bottomland acreage near the river. I remember being amazed to discover that some farmer had planted peanuts in the flat, sandy, 10-acre patch at the bottom of the road that bifurcated a large pond that would fill up in response to an appropriately heavy rain and provide endless hours of Huck Finn adventures.

The sandy soil appeared to be ideal for peanuts and it was obvious that the dirt access lane received no traffic other than the farmer’s occasional visit and our neighborhood gang tromping about in search of an adventure. The circumstances made it a good place—out of sight—for someone disinclined to drive to the county landfill to dump the remnants of some recently deceased relative’s bounty or an overabundant attic or garage. When you’re ten, other people’s junk becomes your treasure. One of the treasures I discovered was an old battered suitcase, inside of which was an equally battered volume of Shakespeare. I wondered what the long-ago poet would have thought were he to see where his words had ended up.

Our gang’s hideout was the garage attic of one the members on the corner of our block, near the railroad tracks. It was where we kept our treasures, hid out from our parents, and relaxed on lazy summer days with some icy Kool-Aid. Shakespeare’s book was added to the other treasures there. At ten, one is barely ready for the old bard and had I checked the book out of the public library I likely would have been laughed, or drummed, out of the “club.” But, as a found treasure it had an enhanced pedigree and status under the Boy Code of Coolness and I spent time reading pieces of it.

I regret to say that somewhere along way it again became lost but left its impact. A volume in much better shape has since replaced it. But that original tome had an impact on me. When other boys groaned at the thought of reading poetry, I found Shakespeare’s sonnets intriguing, and by the time eighth grade rolled around I had become fond of poetry, although secretly so to guard against ejection from my gang of associates. This Shakespearean exposure also assured my subsequently developed preference to traditional poetic forms and rejection of “modern” formats.

No, I didn’t start spouting Shakespeare on the playground—that would have invited some taunting if not physical abuse—but the book left a substantive impact not just on poetry but thinking. It opened my mind to a world beyond the small one where I resided and the silly poems of Ogden Nash on mimeographed sheets. I had stuck my nose into poetry not up at it.

In my own classroom many years later, I discovered that students had a natural inclination to rhyme and that allowed me to open doors to poetry not just by reading it but by writing it and exploring in greater depth the efforts of others, and the power of individual words to create mental images.

I never studied poetry or the poetic form formally, but to enjoy it and to write it doesn’t require formal training. Once exposed to it, you might decide to explore it more formally. But for the writer, the effort extended to play with poetry is a sort of sensitivity training to how words work in prose that moves with grace. Writing poetry is a great warm up exercise not unlike a musician or singer running a few octaves in various keys. To dip your toes in the water, visit my poetry page at lowellforte.com. There you can read Molly Wrights’ “sawdust memories” and discover how each of us can connect to poetry through our personal experiences or interests.

One of the poetic forms a writer might find of value to play with is Haiku, a Sixteenth Century Japanese form with its own unique structure and rules. With its traditional three lines, the “cut,” and seasonal reference, it offers a great way to explore the power of the poetic form. Click on the tab connected to the book cover “Bittersweet Clusters” image on the left side of my homepage and read an explanation and examples of my own illustrated Haikus. Writing Haikus will flex your literary mind in the same way doing crosswords enhances your facility with vocabulary.

Rarely is time wasted exploring and expanding your writing experience through poetry. You might start with sampling a little Shakespeare.