Category: Pen to Paper

Pen to Paper: Omit Needless Words

Posted on by bryon

I recently entered Round Five of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest. The opening and closing lines were given; all I had to do was fill the space between them without exceeding 600 words. I wrote my story and the word count read 772. So I began to edit. (Unfortunately, the contest rules don’t permit me to post the story, so I can’t show you specific examples. I’ll do that with another story in a bit.)

To tighten a story, start with the low-hanging fruit. As King Arthur did Excalibur, so I wielded Rule 17 from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style: “Omit needless words.” Find three words doing the work of one and replace them: “about that time” becomes “then.” Find words that aren’t serving much purpose: “in the bottom drawer” is better than “in the bottom desk drawer” if you’ve already referred to the desk. Look for unnecessary adjectives: “He put on his blue coat and went out.” Do we need to know the color? If not, toss it out. This is a quick and painless way to reduce wordiness.

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Pen to Paper: Banned Books and Unfunded Studies

Posted on by bryon

This week, we’ll look at a couple of important stories from the news.

This is Banned Books Week. It started Saturday and continues through this coming Saturday.

There’s never a season when someone somewhere doesn’t think, “I know better than everyone else. I certainly haven’t read this book, and I don’t think anyone should read it either.” There are all sorts of mindsets that can lead to this disease: “God (by whatever name) hates this book”; “I hate this book”; “We have to protect the public’s morals”; “Think of the children.”

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Pen to Paper: Pen Names

Posted on by bryon

Thanks to the Internet, “nom” is now a verb, and “nom de plume” is straight English for what a lolcat does to a big feather. Q.E.D.

In literary circles, however, a nom de plume is still a pen name. Authors have long used pseudonyms and we know many writers primarily or only by the fictitious names they adopted.

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Pen to Paper: Writers and Cats

Posted on by bryon

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Greg Bryant’s creative writing class at Highland Community College. I don’t recall why, but I mentioned that writers and cats seem to be a common pairing.

Monica Wood, in her The Pocket Muse: Ideas & Inspirations for Writing, has this list of writers who loved cats: T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Christina Rossetti, John Keats, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Christopher Smart, Marianne Moore, Ernest Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, Doris Lessing, Rita Mae Brown, Carolyn Chute, and Nuala O’Faolain.

Then she asks: “Isn’t it time you got a cat?”

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Pen to Paper: Shiki

Posted on by bryon

Finally, in our brief look at the great haiku masters of Japan, we come to Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Shiki gave us haiku as we know it today. He was the one who counseled writing from life, just as we see it. He did not disdain imaginary images for haiku, but he told us to prefer what was real because it made for better haiku.

Other pearls of Shiki’s advice, from Henderson:

Be natural.

Write to please yourself. If your writings do not please yourself, how can you expect them to please anybody else?

Remember perspective. Large things are large, but small things are also large if seen close up.

Know all kinds of haiku, but have your own style.

In his short life, Shiki revitalized the very art of haiku, which had fallen into disrepute after Issa’s death. He gave haiku its name (formerly hokku), its modern values, founded a school of haiku and published a haiku magazine. His last years were spent in bed, in tremendous pain from tuberculosis which spread from his lungs into his spine. He continued to write to the very end.

tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

Pen to Paper: Issa

Posted on by bryon

Today we move on to Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827). Of the four great Japanese haijin, much as I respect Basho and Buson and admire Shiki, I enjoy Issa. He is the most easily understood of the four, and the most human.

As you will see in the biographical sketch, Issa had his share of misery and more. His mother died when he was a baby and Henderson tells us his stepmother was “of the fairy-tale variety.” When his father died, his stepmother and half brother kept him from his inheritance for thirteen years. Later, his wife of ten years and all five of their children died. He remarried and divorced. He suffered a stroke and lost his ability to speak for a time. He remarried again, and his only surviving child was born after his death.

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Pen to Paper: Buson

Posted on by bryon

This week we move on to Yosa (or Taniguchi) Buson (1716-1783). The link again takes you to a biography and you can click to read some of Buson’s poems.

To fill in some of the blanks, we turn again to Harold G. Henderson’s masterful book An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki. Henderson says the Japanese regard Buson as second in the haiku firmament only to Basho. Buson was multifaceted, like a diamond, and thus we cannot point to any one haiku and say it is typical of Buson.

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Pen to Paper: Basho

Posted on by bryon

I think it would be valuable to spend some time looking at the four greatest names in haiku: Basho, Buson, Issa, and Shiki. These haijin shaped haiku and set many of the standards we live by today. We’ll look at them chronologically.

First is Matsuo Basho (1644-1694). The link goes to a short biography and you can click through to some of his haiku at the top of the page.

In his indispensable book An Introduction to Haiku: An Anthology of Poems and Poets from Basho to Shiki, Harold G. Henderson tells us Basho created a new style of the poetry form renga. His first poem in this style set the stage for modern haiku:

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Pen to Paper: Mark Twain’s Writing Advice

Posted on by bryon

Mark Twain is back in the news, not that he ever really left it. His unexpurgated autobiography is being published shortly, and I expect more than a few graveyards will hum with all the spinning some of the residents will be doing. (N.B.: I wrote the phrase “unexpurgated autobiography” before hunting up the NYT article that also uses it. Great minds, and all that.)

Twain had something to say about most everything, and he certainly did not spare his own field. He left us a great many thoughts on what makes a good story. Here is one collection of those thoughts. Finally, we have his masterful blast against novelist James Fenimore Cooper. Early on, Twain gives us twelve solid notions of what a writer should and should not do, and he makes note of how Cooper violated these points of literary order.

Enjoy, and make good use of what the old master taught us.

Pen to Paper: A Mini-Seminar on Writing Short Stories

Posted on by bryon

Dennis G. Jerz teaches new media journalism as an associate professor of English at Seton Hill University. So he says on his About page.

This essay, which he wrote with Kathy Kennedy, is easily one of the most compact and most complete guides a writer could need to make sure he’s thinking about the elements that make for a good story. And I have to give credit where it’s due: I used the examples in tip number 2 as the starting point for this week’s short story. Check it out Thursday.

Last week, I wrote about recapturing the creative joy that brought us to writing in the first place. I stand by that because this is supposed to be fun. Kennedy and Jerz give us a basketful of goodies to help ensure that our fun is catching for the reader, too.

Enough of me. On to Short Stories: 10 Tips for Creative Writers.