When I write a story, there’s about a 40-percent chance that I’ve given any thought to the theme of what I’m working on. I don’t believe every story has to comment on the human condition. A story can simply be an enjoyable read about what this person or these people did under these circumstances. Just because the stories that were read to us as children ended with a moral doesn’t mean that our adult stories have to have them.
I’m not going to get into all the ins and outs of swearing – how it works in the brain, the reasons for using it, the social implications. All very interesting stuff, but it’s not our purpose here.
I’m going to quickly remind all and sundry that if you’re a writer of children’s books or religious matter, this stuff is radioactive and isn’t for you. Other fiction writers should merely be certain that a cuss word is the mot juste, just like you do with every other word you use.
Ursula K. LeGuin takes a dim view of writers who overuse the good old Anglo-Saxon imperatives, and she’s got a pretty solid point. These are people who take their cue from B.D. in Doonesbury: A fellow soldier B.D. was heading with to the first Gulf War said he had been a civilian so long he no longer knew how to use the f-word; B.D. said, “Easy. You just use it like a comma.” These words can be dynamite if used sparingly and trite if used like commas.
And that reminds me of this oversaturated paragraph from a college textbook:
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged cuss words, obscenity, Pen to Paper, profanity, swearing, Ursula K. LeGuin, vulgarity
Copyright is pretty important to writers. Like most aspects of the law, there are ins and outs that it doesn’t hurt to have a law degree to understand. But Brian Klems over at Writers Digest has collected some of the popular copyright Q&As for easy access and comprehension. You can read the official word on copyright matters at the U.S. Copyright Office’s FAQs.
How long copyright lasts depends on when something was published and how it was published. The length of copyright now far outlasts the creator’s lifetime thanks to Mickey Mouse and Sonny Bono. (Come to think of it … did we ever see them together?) Increasingly, some corporations are using the copyright laws to enrich themselves at the expense of the public good (like they use or break or bribe their way around all the other laws). This is turning copyright law into a minefield for creators and is shrinking the public domain. For a guided tour of what’s good and what’s bad about the present state of copyright law, read this excellent graphic presentation (okay, it’s a comic book) written by three lawyers; the PDF is freely available at the Public Domain website. It focuses on documentary filmmaking, but don’t let that deter you from reading it.
I’m a great believer in copyright while I’m living and could (theoretically) earn some part of my living from what I write. And this is a good time to remind everyone that my stories and haiku (indeed, all my words here at Catsignal) are copyrighted and made available through a Creative Commons license. Scroll down the About page to see both.
But there will come a time after my inevitable death when there will be absolutely no good reason why my work shouldn’t be freely available to all. Why wouldn’t a creator want his stories to join those of Aesop and Shakespeare and Dickens in the public domain? Without that escape hatch, a creative work faces the possibility of being orphaned and lost forever.
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged copyright, creative commons, law, Mickey Mouse, orphaned, Pen to Paper, public domain, Sonny Bono
Foreshadowing is a skill a writer must master as he works toward making art. It requires a delicate touch: if it’s too subtle, the reader will miss it; if it’s too heavy-handed, the rest of the story is unnecessary.
You can build in foreshadowing details as you go, leading the reader even as you write. Or when you get to the end of the story and realize that you need to add this element, you can go back and put it where it needs to go. The reader won’t know you stuck it in later. Sometimes, a sentence you write just as part of the narrative ends up as foreshadowing; you successfully lead yourself through your own story.
Author Cathy Clamp tells how she uses foreshadowing to alert her readers to elements of the story she wants to emphasize. The Foreshadowing page at UDL Editions gives some excellent examples of foreshadowing.
Most of us read Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery” when we were in school. Schoolbytes shows us how Jackson used foreshadowing to hint at what was to come. And BookRags summarizes the ways William Shakespeare foreshadowed the action in Macbeth.
Do you have a favorite example of foreshadowing to share?
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged Cathy Clamp, foreshadowing, Macbeth, Pen to Paper, Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
There are more ways to write a story than there are writers. There are perhaps endless techniques and tools and philosophies. Start at the beginning and work forward. Start in the middle and give the reader a little of the beginning as necessary. Let character drive the plot. Let theme drive the plot. Don’t bother with a plot.
Here’s one more tool for your writerly toolbox, courtesy of Ray Rhamey at Writer Unboxed. I haven’t tried it yet, though I may do so soon. It looks (perhaps deceptively) simple and straightforward, and I can see this might be a useful tool for breaking through writer’s block.
After this, there is a brief discussion of one reason why stories are important. It’s something I hadn’t seen put into words before, but it makes sense to me.
To commemorate Banned Books Week 2011, the present board of the Charlton (MA) Public Library voted to override an earlier board and shelve a particular version of Eve’s Diary by Mark Twain. The seductive line drawings were apparently too much for one library board member to cope with back in 1906. As usual, Twain gets the last laugh.
But the censors are still out in force: since 1982, some 11,000 books have been challenged.
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged Banned Books Week, censorship, library, MarkTwain, Pen to Paper
As previously noted, it’s getting harder to find and hold onto a decent job. And awfully few of the alleged job creators – the ones the Republicans say we can’t tax because they need that money to create jobs – are creating jobs.
I had held out hope that those of us who put one word after another to create meaning might be spared the ax. Oh, sure, newspapers have been shedding jobs for almost a decade; I’ve known that since I lost my newspaper job in 2003. Under the right circumstances, though, those jobs could come back.
Or not. Not when advances like this are being made in the field of artificial intelligence. Read it first, then continue here.
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged artificial intelligence, computers, journalism, Pen to Paper, Pulitzer Prize, unemployment
With school well underway across the land, here’s something for Catsignal’s younger readers and writers.
John Scalzi tweeted yesterday: “Just found a bunch of short stories I wrote when I was a teenager. Oh my. They are NOT good.”
This comment is virtually a follow-up to an essay he wrote in 2006 giving advice to teenage writers. While much writing advice is good for novice writers of any age, this piece is directed straight at the 13- to 19-year-old crowd. Keep reading past Number 1, no matter badly it annoys you. Scalzi hits various nails squarely atop their heads, and this is advice you can bank on.
Follow that up with wisdom from John Steinbeck and a variety of useful things from Ralph Fletcher. That’s enough for now; I don’t want to keep you from your homework.
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged advice, John Scalzi, John Steinbeck, Pen to Paper, Ralph Fletcher, teenagers
Dylan Tweney is (among other fascinating things) a popular modern haiku poet. You can read a few of his haiku at his Tinywords site.
Below is his slideshow, “Practical Haiku: How Reading and Writing an Ancient Form of Poetry Can Change Your Life.” This is a nice introduction or re-introduction to haiku, showing us in haiku-like brevity the value of this form of poetry. Enjoy.
Let me be clear at the outset that I have no hatchet to grind, let alone to smash a tavern with. I am a teetotaler but strictly from medical necessity (it’s a migraine trigger) rather than preference (how do you think I learned it’s a migraine trigger?).
No, this entry comes about because I have collected some interesting quotations about writers and drinking. I think they would look a bit peculiar in the Wednesday Quotation spot bereft of larger context, so I decided to provide the context, and the quotations, here.
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