Readers and Writers Retreat

07/03/2022

Another shout to all our upstate and semi-local members. You may well be planning to head downtown tomorrow and watch the fireworks, and if so, good for you. Not my cup of tea, but have at it.

However, if you're free during the day, do not sleep on Hillbilly Day in Seneca, Mountain Rest. Starts at 9am, and in true hillbilly fashion, bring your own chair. They do this every 4th of July. Arts and crafts, bluegrass music, quilt raffle. They'll have BBQ and peanuts. Dude... clogging. You can always drive the forty minutes back to town in time to watch Greenville light up the sky.

P.O. Box 24 Mountain Rest, S.C. Located on Verner Mill Rd. near the Junction of Hwys 28 and 107

07/02/2022

FYI for all my local peeps - Independence Day weekend brings events around the state. Today, July 2nd:

Boat parade then evening fireworks launched from Spence Island and Dreher Island State Park to choreographed music airing on local radio
Columbia
Lake Murray

Fort Jackson Independence Day Fireworks Celebration
Fireworks, live music, kids zone with carnival rides and crafts tents, food/beverages, food trucks, beer and wine - general public welcome
Columbia
Fort Jackson

SolFest RollFest
Live music, bike-powered stage, kids bike rodeo, artisans, bounce house, food and drink vendors - guests asked to bring their own containers for drinks
Columbia

America's 5K and 1 Mile Fun Run
Medals and refreshments at the finish line, costumes encouraged, strollers welcome - benefits Operation Active Kids
Anderson

07/01/2022

(Continued from yesterday)

As I strongly suspected, the paragraphs introducing the art book (also the working title of this WIP - "The Art Book") failed to write themselves. I almost failed to write them myself - I let the day get away from me and didn't get to write until last night, and I wasn't very productive. When I was younger I mostly wrote at night, but as I've aged I've found I do my best, and most, work in the morning. That good old coffee and keyboard combo.

Except that isn't accurate this go-round. I'm actually going old school and writing the first draft longhand, something I haven't done since the first word processing machines came out in the 90s. I know writers who swear by longhand for all first drafts, but it's usually because of some crunchy mumbo-jumbo like, "The art flows from hand to paper," or, "The connection is more visceral from hand writing than typing," or some other moonstone nonsense that makes me doubt their basic life choices. But handwriting does hit different than keyboarding for some good, tangible, observable reasons.

It forces, me at least, to slow down. When I screw up and line through something, or a lot of somethings, I can still see what I wrote before, unless I've struck it out with great fury and determination, which is a possibility: "The world must never know I wrote that!"

With a computer when you delete something it just vanishes. You can't refer back to it. Plus, longhand, I can correct using copyediting marks, which I find comfortingly old school. In reality my computer probably has a way of doing that too, but I'll never know.

I can draw arrows and inserts and make notes in the margins like, "Callback to this later," or, "Tonal shift too much?" I can end a scene and skip ahead to the next scene if I'm rolling strong without doing the segue stuff that might make me lose momentum.

Next up I'll talk keyboard.

(Continued July 5th. Other posts may appear but not in this thread.)

Pictured below - terrifying.

06/30/2022

(Continued from yesterday)

So what I decided to do is begin with a blanket statement about infidelity and work that into the "natural" beginning of the story by way of a good old fashioned Rashomon (sort of) approach by the three main characters - MMC, MFC, and antagonist. In this novel two people act as the protagonist, like, the Byrde parents in Ozark.

This is not the sort of thing I normally write.

I'm a big believer in letting the action and dialogue drive the plot and to minimize description and overt character development. I think character development should come through what they do, as opposed to what they think, or remember, or feel, or any of that squishy stuff. Lets say you want to make the point that your assassin character misses her dad. You can write a few paragraphs about all the fun they had eating ice cream at the zoo, or shooting cans with crossbows, all of which I will skim (or skip), or you can have Ms. Assassin keep a picture of her dad clipped to her visor. She taps it for luck before she gets out of the car and taps it again when the hunt is over. Easy, done, two sentences.

The next thing I have to write for the novel is a paragraph or two about the Macguffin, in this case an art book. Not something I'm looking forward to because it's outside my comfort zone as a writer. Alas, must be done. Then either dropped in or worked into the narrative, so more fun ahead.

I've been avoiding it by working on a listicle. They don't pay particularly well and I've never sold one - that sort of writing doesn't appeal to me, but it doesn't repel me either - butI think I can do it. I can absolutely ape the style of this particular site (Listverse). Tonally it's similar to what I do here, but with an emphasis on humor and education. Humorous essays are my first love.

But my Macguffin - sometimes "McGuffin" - ain't just going to write itself (Life Pro Tip - nothing is just going to write itself), so I will do that after lunch.

(Continued tomorrow)

06/29/2022

I've been writing a novel. I've written long form before and the process I've always used is to start at the beginning (the story's natural beginning), then proceed scene by scene to the end. I have a number of plot points that I know will occur, and if I feel like the narrative is wandering, I proceed to the next plot point - Fred shoots Joe, or whatever - as quickly as is reasonable. I don't outline, or write character biographies. Some people do and that's great - you do you. There's no wrong way to write a novel except not to do it. No one is reading, or buying, what you've "written in your head." Besides, what's written in your head never comes out as good as your head assures you it will.

But my normal method of writing long form has abandoned me. I tried, but all narratives are different, and the always faithful method of starting at the story's natural beginning (In this case, an offer between the two main characters at a corner table in a dark coffee shop) won't work. Unless the readers knows the backstories of the MMC and MFC it will come off as extremely unlikely. Stupid, even.

I may have told you this before, but a reader will accept a LOT as a premise. Anything goes on the first page of a novel. Aliens, werewolves, lottery win, sinkhole swallows Manhattan - maybe an alien werewolf winning the lottery as he falls into a sinkhole in Manhattan - it doesn't matter as long as you introduce it right away. So, you may (reasonably) ask, why not begin with your outlandish deal struck between our two coffee drinkers, then fill in the backstory from there? Happens all the time.

Yes, smarty-pants, it does. And the only defense I have in this case is that I've tried and it Just. Doesn't. Work. There's too much of it. Dropping chunks in later destroys the narrative flow (Mostly. It's complicated. There's a natural opening for a flashback in one place, but it's just one spot, and I need much more). I'm well into the process, though. About 70 pages. Update tomorrow.

04/19/2022

It's National Poetry Month, and as we've been over, I am neither a poet nor great consumer of poetry. I do have a soft spot for form poetry - I like the discipline of it - and my two favorite forms are the blues sonnet and the terzanelle. My favorite poetic foot is anapest. So you might ask - rightfully so - how a non-poet happens to have two favorite poetic forms and a favorite foot (that isn't iamb), and you would be right to do so. Even among word nerds these aren't things that come up in casual conversation. We don't recommend them to each other like restaurants ("I've really enjoyed the roundelay, but lately we've been going to kouta. We love Japanese.").

The answer is "The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics," which someone, lost now in the haze of time, put into my hands back in college. It. Is. Fascinating. It's by Lewis Turco who also wrote, and includes within, my favorite Terzanelle: Terzanelle in Thunderweather. I cannot recommend this all-ages book highly enough, and here's a link. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/801561.The_New_Book_of_Forms

My favorite poem, and a quick read to brighten up this dreary day, is Song of the Queen Bee by E.B. White, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1945. It perfectly captures love and lust and bees and the sensibilities of the era, and it's funny. Here it is not behind the New Yorkers dreaded paywall.

https://sonjahakala.com/2018/06/21/song-of-the-queen-bee/

04/13/2022

It's entirely possible that someone out there has never heard of Wordle. It's also possible for solid matter to pass through other solid matter via the laws of quantum mechanics, but I'm lacking faith in that one also. Before we played Wordle we played Words With Friends and before that we had the good old pencil and paper games - crosswords (I max out at NYT Tuesday), acrostics, and those good old Find-A-Word puzzles they used to hand out in grade school. For road trips, my parents would pick up one of the multi-game books - you remember - cheap binding and pages ready to fall apart - filled with hours of distraction for that budding young English major. If you had two book nerds in the back seat, they could play hangman. And what is Wordle if not updated hangman?

Word lovers love word games, from filling in boxes and blanks to puns, banter, and flirting. We enjoy being clever. We find lists of esoteric words fascinating and we celebrate our vocabularies.

Today is National Scrabble Day.

Did you start with the fold out board or were you lucky enough to have the one that turned on ball bearings in a circle? Have you ever opened with a seven letter word and basked in the horror of your enemies? Did you own an official Scrabble Dictionary? Have you ever - oh, the indignity - lost a challenge?

Have you ever been in a romance, back when you were really too young for such a thing - so your parents said - and played Scrabble on the floor, on a big oval rug, lazily turning the board back and forth, holding hands until your palms sweated so much that the tiles were slick in your fingers? And when you were finished, did the two of you, both being word lovers, even then, look at the filled in board and make up a story between you, using the words you'd placed and interlocked together?

I'm not saying I have, but I will say Robin, wherever you are, I wish you well and I hope you never stopped playing.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

03/31/2022

You may have noticed, depending on how many of these things you read and how often, that the language in our posts is geared for wide acceptance - we're aware we have young people in our audience as well as different adults with different sensibilities. Literature and literacy casts a wide net and there are plenty of opportunities for vulgarity and coarseness the moment your front door closes behind you. We keep things civil - no need for expletives or descriptions of body parts we wash with particular care.

This isn't censorship - a wildly overused accusation - but rather a style choice. We frequently talk about race, or LGBTQ issues, and that may be offensive to some, but not our audience, and we know that. We don't post trigger warnings - maybe we should - because we are a bit on the creaky, stuffy side, just a bit behind the times. That's necessary for reflection. Hot takes are available elsewhere. You don't go to a vegan restaurant for lamb chops.

This is all a roundabout way of noting that today is the birthday of the Hayes Code, the precursor, in case you're really just that young, to the MPAA movie rating system that we use today. One may draw a straight line from the movie rating system to parental advisory stickers and other attempts to shield the eyes and ears of youngsters, both legitimate and not.

Many of us, and certainly myself, plowed through the age appropriate section in our school library in no time and were already reading whatever we could find at home. A good librarian would guide you through books geared for older kids - a bad librarian would just say no. Mine didn't care. Check whatever out kid - no one's watching. I loved it. Did I encounter themes, scenes and phrases I didn't understand? Absolutely. Probably led to some uncomfortable questions for the adults in my orbit. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Photo by Raúl Nájera on Unsplash

03/30/2022

Are you a pencil person or a pen person? As adults, most of us have shifted to pens - nice, heavy ones if possible - but we all started with pencils. Packs of hexagonal (no rolling off the desk) yellow number twos full of blunt ends and promise. If you close your eyes you can probably still smell them.

When you were in school, did you use the communal sharpener on the wall, or did you carry the little bladed box in your purse or pocket? Are you old enough to have kept an electric sharpener on your desk that was too easy to use just for fun? Mechanical pencils, where the graphite looked naked and vulnerable when it emerged from the tip, never did it for me despite the practicality. And today, of course, you can order novelty pencils with whatever sayings you'd like printed on them. But when you hear the word "pencil," is that what you think of? A thick, round stick with a business name or pithy saying across it? Reader, you do not. You think of a yellow hexagonal number two, with a thin metal crimp on one end supporting a pink eraser.

Erasing is vital.

In life, as a metaphor, and on paper, to clean up mistakes, from the typo to the misbegotten sentence, whether it's an overreach, too weak, bland, or unnecessary. White Out is still around, but the mistake is still there, just hidden now. Lurking. There's something apologetic about White Out, but erasing is having none of that. It scrubs out that mistake and takes some of the paper with it. It's satisfyingly final.

Today is the birthday of the eraser-attached pencil, made in, and still primarily used in, America. The internet tells me a single pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long or write about 45,000 English words. The editor in me knows that's way too many. Some of it always has to go.

Photo by Eduardo Casajús Gorostiaga on Unsplash

03/25/2022

I love these people (as you know, I repost them so much), and here they are with why English is such a bear to learn as ESL, and why it's so darned hard to spell. Our native tongue is basically a linguistic car crash.

The English spelling system is a MESS... arguably more than any other language. How did it get this way?Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied that digs d...

03/25/2022

A companion piece to the post about novel structure featuring Jennifer Egan from two days ago. Done right, it's a perfectly fine approach. Not my cup of tea, but who didn't love Pulp Fiction?

The following first appeared in Lit Hub’s The Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here. * In the spring of 2019, I found myself tangled up in a writing riddle that on the surface seemed easy to sol…

03/23/2022

One of my current reads is "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan - I'm about a third of the way through it. So far each chapter has focused on a different character and has jumped around in time. This isn't a super-uncommon approach, and when it works (as it definitely does here), it's fulfilling to the reader. When it doesn't work it reminds me of a phrase I heard from some adult many years ago, while we were watching a group of kids trying to change a tire by lifting a car onto a log, instead of using a jack:

"Well, I guess that's one way to do it."

Story structure is important.

One of my pet peeves is the literary device of opening a novel with an action sequence or a person in peril, with an antagonist we have not yet met and therefore have no investment in, with villains whose motivation we do not know. This is followed by something along the lines of "Three Days Earlier..." and the reader is then yanked back to the beginning of the story proper. Can it be done well? Sure. But nine times out of ten it smacks of middling editorial advice from middling editors to middling writers.

Yes, you absolutely have to grab the readers attention right away, so I get it. It seems much more interesting if we meet Dirk Bandersnatch trying to escape an alien's esophagus than if we meet him getting up and around three days earlier (never start a story with your protagonist waking up and looking in the mirror, by the way). There are plenty of character-driven ways to open up with Dirk pre-mortal, throatly danger that will let us get to care about the man, so we can actually be worried that he might become an alien's breakfast. Start him out at work - work is a goldmine of character development.

Luckily, "A Visit from the Goon Squad" doesn't have any of these problems. It's solid so far.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive...