Category: Pen to Paper

Pen to Paper: The Creative Joy

Posted on by bryon

It can be so easy to lose oneself in the endless books and articles telling us how to write better. The genre is so seductive: just read this one more article and you’ll have the key you’ve always sought; the last piece of the puzzle will fall into place and you will become an Author.

In these weekly essays, I’m hoping to both discover and offer keys and puzzle pieces that lead to better writing. Goodness knows I’m in favor of it. And like any good hoarder, I enjoy unearthing some new little treasure that will help me write more clearly, more evocatively, more, more, more.

But let’s stop briefly to remember why we got into writing in the first place.

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Pen to Paper: I Write Like

Posted on by bryon

My friend Susan told me about the I Write Like site. I’ve had entirely too much fun playing with it. I tested 30 of my fiction posts with the IWL analysis. Here is the short version of the results:

Once each: Margaret Atwood, Jack London, J.D. Salinger, Ian Fleming (on a story involving multiple ways to kill someone), David Foster Wallace, Margaret Mitchell, P.G. Wodehouse (!), Raymond Chandler, Harry Harrison, and Bram Stoker (on a vampire story).

Twice each: Kurt Vonnegut, James Joyce, and JK Rowling.

Three times: Chuck Palahniuk.

Four times: Dan Brown:.

Seven times: Stephen King.

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Pen to Paper: Method vs. Madness

Posted on by bryon

I like the idea of being organized, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It seems as though it would be soothing and helpful and almost guarantee productivity.

The practice of being organized, however, is to me not merely a closed book, but a closed book trodden on a few times by drunken plow horses (still pulling their plows), dipped in cream of mushroom soup, left for the chickens to peck at, and the remains messily scattered by a tropical storm.

I collect potential character names and phrases that might work into story titles and interesting words that might be springboards to stories. I keep them in two or three squat spiral notebooks as well as in two or three or more files in my computer’s memory. I am not one to place all the eggs in a single basket; if I lose one notebook or computer file, I still have the others and perhaps my literary future will not founder upon the rocks and shoals of happenstance. Then, too, there are the numerous notes to myself on sticky pads and pieces of small, loose note paper.

And just so you know, the great mystery writer Agatha Christie are in agreement on this. Her notebooks make it appear, in comparison, that I have a pristine and rigorous method of tracking my thoughts and notions. So we learn from Christine Kenneally’s delightful article in Slate of a few months ago (published a mere eight days before BP committed a disorganization in the Gulf of Mexico that the vengeful, disaster-wielding God of the Old Testament would have looked upon with some envy. But I digress.)

Christie’s slapdash ways of working should give some comfort to the rest of us who don’t always know what we’re doing either.

Pen to Paper: Naming Your Characters

Posted on by bryon

When I write my stories, I need to know the characters I’m dealing with. I can permit their personalities to develop during the course of writing, but I must know their names. I can start by writing, “Then X crossed to the window and spotted Y doing something unnatural with a tennis racquet.” But before I can go much further, I will have to stop and name both X and Y. The names help to shape the story. If X is Ralph and Y is Aloysius, we will have a very different story than if X were to be Rajit and Y were to be Miyuki.

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Pen to Paper: Freedom of Speech

Posted on by bryon

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down an extremely important ruling this past Thursday. In an 8-1 vote, the court ruled that public disclosure of the names and addresses of persons signing petitions is not a violation of the First Amendment.

The case, Doe v. Reed, comes from Washington State. The legislature had granted same-sex couples all the benefits of marriage except the word itself. People who do not believe same-sex couples should have those benefits organized. They got like-minded people to sign a petition to force a referendum on the new law. As required, the petition signers wrote their names and addresses on the petition. The petition drive got the required number of names and a referendum was placed on the ballot.

Some people who supported the law on same-sex benefits planned to publish on the Internet the names on the petition. At least some of the signers of the petition felt that would not be in their best interest and asked a court to forbid it. Their bizarre argument was that having their names made public would hinder their First Amendment right to free speech.

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Pen to Paper: Stories on Napkins

Posted on by bryon

So, once you’ve read your way through Catsignal — all the fiction, all the haiku, all the odds and ends that have crept into this site — you could click over to this page at Esquire’s website and read stories that were written on napkins.

It’s an intriguing idea. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s a reminder for me that web fiction is by both necessity and definition short. Attention spans are measured in pixels and picoseconds, not pages and “perhaps just one more chapter.” I’ve been writing longer stories lately, which I have actually felt just the tiniest bit guilty about, feeling as though I don’t at present possess the discipline required to write something of 500 words or less. (And what would Freud make of writers trying to write shorter and narrower stories rather than longer and broader ones?)

There’s something charming about the idea of writing a whole, entire story on a napkin. It has a reductionist appeal, declaring that something worthwhile and beautiful can be done so simply and with such humble materials. And it forces one to write tightly, unless the last words one comes to are: “Continued on next napkin.”

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Speaking of reductionism, this is the last Friday Pen to Paper. Catsignal will be a Monday through Thursday blog, starting with Pen to Paper, then a haiku, a quote, and finishing up on Thursdays with some fiction. Sorry, but I need that time back for other projects.

Pen to Paper: Vocabulary Words

Posted on by bryon

On the one hand, a broad vocabulary is a delight in that you can get nearer the shade of meaning you want. On the other hand, too many people with a broad vocabulary use it to obfuscate their meaning from their interlocutors (Q.E.D.).

My master’s work in communication taught me about the varying levels of communication and the dangers of getting stuck at one. Fifteen years in journalism taught me that the point of mass communication is to communicate to the masses, and that means using common words in common ways. I still have quite a good vocabulary, but I’ve learned not to use it in most settings. I don’t feel in the least that I’ve dumbed down my conversation or my writing; rather, I’ve improved my clarity of reception.

Some folks at The New York Times put together a (PDF) list of the top 50 words their readers don’t seem to have a solid grasp of. The methodology is well explained in the article. Some I actually could define; others … not so much but I’d be likely to read over most of those words without going to a dictionary and let the context enlighten me. See how you fare.

A note to those who teach: pay particular attention to word number 13. That this is unknown by a large segment of some of the nation’s better-educated newspaper readers is a grave problem. Do your part with your students to fix it.

Pen to Paper: Novels are Educational

Posted on by bryon

Good fiction can do a lot of things: it can entertain, horrify, instruct, illuminate, and bring forth empathy in the reader. Really good fiction can do some or all of this simultaneously.

In November 2008, The University of Manchester issued a news report about how novels are useful in helping us to understand aspects of poverty and international development. The novel’s ability to delve deeply into both the basic facts of an issue and also show us how that affects people makes it as valuable (and often far more readable) than academic or government studies.

This is additional confirmation of what we have known for years. Think of novels that have changed policies and history: Two Years Before the Mast, The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Grapes of Wrath … add to this brief list in the comments.

Fiction can explain to people what they did not understand before and move them to act to change the status quo. Someday the plutocrats and oligarchs will figure this out, and then it’ll be not Orwell’s 1984 but Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Pen to Paper: Writing vs. Paying the Bills

Posted on by bryon

The readily available evidence indicates that writing fiction for a living is becoming less of an option for those of us with expensive tastes such as food and shelter. The raw numbers can be seen here: Book Advances, Royalty Checks, and Making a Living as a Writer, by Adriann Ranta. It looks easier to win a lottery jackpot with an expired ticket. Some few will always be able to make it happen, of course, but they will increasingly be the exceptions to the rule.

Where does this lead us? Directly to Working the Double Shift, by Emily St. John Mandel. She writes about treating writing as a second job, which makes sense to me. It’s not as glamorous, but it’s practical in terms of money and perhaps in terms of finding things and people to write about, or in letting our subconscious work on a story while we earn the house payment.

Finally, Lapham’s Quarterly assures us that even great writers have held day jobs, so we need not feel badly about the necessity ourselves. (From the world of science, a reminder that Albert Einstein was working in a Swiss patent office when he wrote his groundbreaking papers on light quanta, Brownian motion, and special relativity. Perhaps a mind-numbing job for part of the day can lead to a burst of creativity at other times.)

Pen to Paper: The Advantages of Posting Your Work Online

Posted on by bryon

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
– Samuel Johnson

Dr. Johnson might scoff at this blog and the innumerable other blogs where writers write for the sheer joy of doing so. Not getting paid for writing is one reason people have told me not to do this blog. “Send those stories to magazines and make money off of them.” Reasonable advice, of course, but harkening back to Monday’s Pen to Paper, the traditional publishing options are fading away in the face of the digital revolution.

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