Category: Pen to Paper

Pen to Paper: Potpourri

Posted on by bryon

I know this looks awfully lazy, but there have been a number of interesting things I’ve found in the past couple of weeks that I want to share with you. Thus, a links post. Enjoy.

* The five most stolen books.

* Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary turns 100.

* The New York Times’s Bill Keller says, “Let’s Ban Books, Or at Least Stop Writing Them.”

* Kurt Vonnegut explains drama. I’m guessing he was qualified to do so.

* Everything you need to know about undressing a Victorian woman.

* Interview with Ira Glass. He talks about his career, creativity, and being wrong.

* Steve Pavlina tells us how to make brown rice. It has nothing to do with writing, but it’s foolproof (so sworn because it works for me). As for what he does once the rice is cooked, I have no comment.

Pen to Paper: Fan Fiction

Posted on by bryon

The first story I wrote was Star Trek fan fiction. It ran about two-thirds of a page long and was about the Enterprise blasting the heck out of a Klingon ship. I proudly handed it to my third-grade teacher for review. She neither mentioned it nor returned it. I apologize to my biographers for not being more diligent on their behalf when I was 8 years old.

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Pen to Paper: Long Live the Serial Comma

Posted on by bryon

Let me come straight out with it: I like the serial comma. It has an elegance and often a usefulness that I appreciate. Still, I don’t go into a meltdown when a writer doesn’t use one (unless it would have improved the sentence); there are bigger dragons to battle.

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Pen to Paper: The Declaration of Independence

Posted on by bryon

“It is the glorious 4th of July!”
– John Adams

And so it is. Today we celebrate the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson. John Adams had noted Jefferson’s “happy talent for composition” and “remarkable felicity of expression” and assigned the paperwork to him. Unlike young men today, Jefferson protested that he was the junior member of the committee; surely an older, wiser, more experienced man such as Benjamin Franklin or Adams himself should write the crucial paper. Adams responded that anything he wrote would be savaged merely because it came from him. Besides, he told Jefferson, “You write ten times better than I do,” which is something you wouldn’t hear from a lot of older, wiser, more experienced men.

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Pen to Paper: The Isolating Storm

Posted on by bryon

You’ve seen this exchange in movies and TV shows and plays and you’ve read it in books and short stories:

“Oh! Cuthbert!” Margareta exclaimed. “We need help! Quickly! Telephone the authorities!”

“Please, my dear; despite the dreadful circumstances, you must try to calm yourself. Calling the police is exactly what I was about to do.” Cuthbert picked up the handset and listened for the dial tone, but only silence greeted his eagerly waiting ear. He flicked the hook several times in rapid succession but failed utterly to establish a connection. He slowly, deliberately replaced the handset on its cradle. “The storm has knocked out the lines,” he reported grimly. “We’re completely cut off from the outside world.”

The lightning flashed and the thunder crashed as if to underscore Cuthbert’s announcement.

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Pen to Paper: The Haiku Habit

Posted on by bryon

I don’t get out much. Living where I do, there’s nowhere to go, and my big jaunt is usually from the little farmstead I inhabit to one of the nearby tiny towns, a distance of 10 or 15 miles depending on which way I go.

This is why so many of my haiku are about the dogs, or coyotes, or the weather. There’s not much going on around here. Someone more keenly attuned to the natural world than I am would find enough haiku moments to fill a calendar. As it is, I have to look pretty sharp and then hope a coyote howls at a different kind of moon than I wrote about last time. Needless to say, I’m missing a lot.

But seeking the constellations of life is a valuable thing in itself; writing a good haiku after making the discovery is the cherry on top. As one looks more, it becomes a habit. With diligent practice, the constellations become more numerous, more sharply defined, more richly patterned.

Jeanne Emrich has written about getting into the haiku habit. This is in many ways a primer, but it also reminds those of us who have written haiku for years what it is we’re looking for and what to do with it once we see it. Jeanne has illustrated her essay with some excellent haiku.

Pen to Paper: Haiku Silence

Posted on by bryon

It’s been a while since I did a piece about haiku. Cletis was kind enough to ask for a handful of my poems to share at his blog, and that has me thinking about haiku again.

I intend to say very little, however, in keeping with the subject which Angelee Deodhar has so exactingly written about: how haiku conveys silence. The very idea of using words to describe silence seems paradoxical, and yet a well-written haiku can accomplish this deftly.

More, I need not say; on to Angelee’s essay.

Pen to Paper: He Said, She Averred

Posted on by bryon

“Hello,” he lied.
– Don Carpenter, quoting a Hollywood agent

Danielle’s comment on my most recent story prompts this foray into the world of dialog(ue) tags.

When I was a young copy editor, I learned to chop “ue” endings off of words. I also learned that in newspapers, everything is “said” or “asked”; one doesn’t wax poetic in news stories.

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Pen to Paper: Hide the Soapbox

Posted on by bryon

Jurgen Wolff reminds screenwriters they shouldn’t hit the audience over the head with the moral of the story, or with some Important Life Message.

This, naturally, is good advice for those of us who are writing for a smaller screen, or for the page.

There are a few stories I want to write that are about Big Issues and through which I want to offer Important Life Messages. They remain unwritten because I haven’t yet figured out how to shape them so that they entertain rather than merely preach or scold. Good fiction often preaches or scolds, but it must first and foremost entertain. I haven’t found the right approach to make what I write fiction rather than a letter to the editor.

Wolff’s screenwriters have forgotten the adage “show, don’t tell” and they’re about as subtle as a Baptist evangelist at a tent revival. The characters have to play out the story and fail where they fail and learn where they learn (or fail to learn and learn to fail). The Important Life Messages about the Big Issue have to be planted organically in the flow of the story; they have to be presented almost Socratically. The reader can then find the ILM rather than having it spoonfed – or forcefed – to him.