Pen to Paper: One Writer’s Life

I have read a few things – a very few things – by Vaclav Havel. I don’t remember what they were, though. I read them because he wrote them, and I knew who he was, and when you respect someone you are inclined to read at least a little of what he has written.

Havel was one of those rare, shining creatures – a writer whose words made an enormous difference in his own lifetime – that the rest of us scribes admire and, in our weaker moments, envy. He was a playwright who became a dissident and helped to lead his people from life under the Soviet yoke to one of self-determination, and who led then as president of his country. That’s a heck of a story arc, but few of us would care to emulate his years in prisons and a labor camp, no matter how many books we might sell afterward.

He is gone now, but his words and his example remain for us always.

Pen to Paper: Revisions

A confession (and, simultaneously, an undignified boast): I was always that kid in school who did a perfect or near-perfect first and only draft of a writing assignment. After years of voracious reading, I knew how sentences should be constructed because I had seen so many of them, and I was a good speller. From handwritten work through my typewriter years, I did one neat, well-crafted version and handed it in.

I despised the occasional assignment which required a messy, marked-up first draft and then the revised, neat, finished paper. I would always write what I needed to and then reverse engineer a rough draft to satisfy my teacher’s pedanticism. Such, then, was the state of my abilities (and my ego).

After getting a word processor, though, and discovering the endless joys of painlessly changing a word to improve a sentence, and of moving entire paragraphs around, I have become an inveterate revisionist reviser editor of my own work.

And that is how the best work is produced. The writer must go back through his story and make certain that every word, every concept is as it should be. Sometimes this will be a simple process; other times, it will mean rewriting the story essentially from scratch.

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Pen to Paper: Setting

Setting can be a crucial part of your story. It doesn’t have to be; some stories get by on a bare minimum of “this is where and when we are.” For example, Accept Our Condolences does not tell the reader when or even where it takes place; other than the mention of an end table, leading one to understand the story takes place in a home, there is no setting. In Popgun, though, the setting is paramount to telling the tale. And in The Library Patron, I put more effort into describing the personnel and places than I generally do, simply because I felt it was valuable information. As with most things, give the reader whatever he needs to make sense of and enjoy the story, and withhold that which is merely window dressing.

So what goes into setting? You’ve got time, place, and the standard five senses, of course, plus the reactions of your characters to what they sense. The more you can deliver through the eyes of your characters, generally the better off you are. For example, you can baldly tell your readers, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Or you can have an exchange of dialogue between two characters:

“Oh! the lightning is so bright!” Gladys shrieked.

“Yes,” Rupert agreed, “and the thunder is about to shake that vase right off the mantelpiece.”

Okay, that doesn’t necessarily improve on Bulwer-Lytton’s original, but you get the idea.

In working with your setting, accuracy has to be a target, and you want to hit one of the inner rings. Except under carefully controlled conditions, a story about the Civil War will not include a scene in which President Lincoln radios instructions to General Lee. Or let’s say you set a story in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area in which you describe the scenic view of the Missouri River from Shawnee Mission Parkway. You would perhaps achieve a perfectly acceptable verisimilitude for most of your readers, but the locals would howl either in outrage or derision or both. It pays to look up little details like that, and it has never been easier to do so than it is today.

Pen to Paper: Now, What Shall I Call This?

Titles: either they come to you in a flash or you struggle with them for perhaps longer than it took to write the story.

The title is the first point of contact with a potential reader, which makes it pretty important. It’s got to catch your attention sufficiently that you read the first paragraph. After that, the story has to sell itself.

B.W. Clough and David Steffen offer some helpful hints on giving your story just the right title with examples of things that work and things that don’t.

Even the best writers have title trouble. Some of Shakespeare’s titles wouldn’t leap off the shelf at me: Two Gentlemen of Verona, As You Like It, All’s Well that Ends Well (why bother, then?), Much Ado About Nothing (ditto). He did much better with The Tempest and The Taming of the Shrew.

Other top writers have also had difficulty creating titles to match their works. Here’s a list, compiled by Emily Temple, of famous books that began life with different names than we know them by. One she missed for Gone With the Wind was Mules in Horses’ Harnesses.

Pen to Paper: Senryu

There is a tradition that haiku is divided into two parts: real haiku, which are about nature, and senryu, which are about people. These basic divisions get redivided by whoever is doing the analysis. Elizabeth St. Jacques has three categories of haiku (the third one is an overlap of the first two), and in her article she has plenty of examples of how to tell one from another.

Michael Dylan Welch sees four categories, which he describes. He notes that the division between haiku and senryu is sharp and serious in Japan, but believes English-language poets and lovers of poetry can afford to do without the distinction.

Jane Reichhold gives us the sordid history of senryu and why the gulf between the two forms is so wide in Japan. She also tells us how one of the great early importers of haiku-form poetry was very selective in the ones he gave the English-speaking world. She goes further than Welch and makes a cogent argument for English poets to drop the very idea of senryu in favor of, simply, haiku. Her reasoning makes good sense to me, and I intend to follow it.

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In other haiku news, I learned yesterday that one of my haiku will be used at tinywords, the haiku site run by poet D. F. Tweney. So if you aren’t already, start reading tinywords daily for all the wonderful haiku found there and to, eventually, see this Catsignal classic.

Pen to Paper: Theme

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.

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Pen to Paper: Do You Swear?

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:

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Pen to Paper: Copyright and the Public Domain

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.