Where do you get your ideas?
That’s a popular question to ask writers. Some, weary of answering, claim to have hired a service to send ten or fifteen a week. Harlan Ellison famously answered: “Schenectady.”
I can track down the inspiration for some of my stories; others surprise me as much as, if not more than, they do the reader. Some quick examples for ones I know about:
Some people swore that the house was haunted. Others scoffed during broad daylight but refused nevertheless to walk within a block of the house after twilight.
“It’s the wind making those noises,” some asserted. “Stray animals.” “Vagrants.” “Maybe some rotten kids foolin’ around to try to scare folks.” “You know, the police really should go in there and see what’s going on.”
Police Chief Vasquez, for his part, declined on the basis that it wasn’t illegal for an old building to make odd noises. He directed people to the zoning commission.
It is impossible to discourage the real writers — they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.
– Sinclair Lewis
heavy snow —
dogs call truce
to share the porch
Adam “Ape Lad” Koford’s Laugh-Out-Loud Cats say it all for me.
Kitteh’s statement to Pip refers to the old canard that the Inuit language has a hundred or thousand or ten thousand words for snow, depending on who’s talking. Said canard gave birth to the linguistic fact of the snowclone. The Wikipedia article is a nice, tight piece about the history of the snowclone and some of the more common ones; you’ll undoubtedly recognize many of them.
The snowclone is both a useful shorthand and a cliché. Like all clichés, it has to be handled with great care lest it fall flat on your readers’ ears. If you use a snowclone formula in a new way, however, it can sparkle.
The Snowclone Database is your source for all things snowclone. (In fact, that phrase might count as a snowclone: “your source for all things X.”)
When you get your fill of other snow activities (I’m done!), you can play around with some snowclones in the warmth of the Great Indoors.
IN UNRELATED NEWS: A month after they were announced, here is the Write to Done list of Top 10 Blogs for Writers for 2011. I’ll let the writers speak for themselves.
Mel had been dithering for an hour, which annoyed him. He had been so decisive when he was younger.
“God, how my kids will complain,” he told Rufus. “And it probably won’t be long before some helpful neighbor comes over or sends a grumbling kid to do it for me.”
He thought a moment longer. Then he snapped his fingers.
“But I’m going to do this whether anyone approves or not.”
Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
back porch —
large icicles
bar the way
Two weeks ago, we examined whether personification and other literary devices common to Western poetry were acceptable in haiku.
Now I have discovered (a mere eleven years after publication) an article that takes us far beyond that initial discussion of what might be permissible in haiku. The piece is by Haruo Shirane, Shincho professor of Japanese literature and culture at Columbia University in New York City. It was published in Modern Haiku magazine in 2000. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, this was the year of the Matsuyama Declaration, which politely insisted that writers of haiku in languages other than Japanese explore the form without being tied down by Japanese conventions.
Continue reading “Pen to Paper: Breaking the Rules of Haiku”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Owen Ludlow began, “if you’ve seen this morning’s news, you know the grave problem we face.”
Around the table, heads nodded wearily. A few people looked grimly at the poster for Carpenter Shop Studios’ forthcoming motion picture release, The Tempter’s Snare. It featured a likeness of Jillee, the hottest young star the Christian movie studio had; she was 22 but looked like she was going on seventeen. On one shoulder was a smaller likeness of her as an angel, and on the other shoulder a small image of her as a devil. The art department hadn’t gone out of its way to do anything other than get as many pictures of Jillee as it could on one poster.
But then, that was all that was needed to sell one of her movies.