Monthly Archives: April 2016

On Reading, Island Poems 2

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It’s May! We’re nearing the halfway point of the year and in the month of May, Canada celebrates reading in a big way. From April 30 to May 8, Reading Town PEI has a whole week of activities focused on increasing literacy through reading. Activities are slated island-wide, at which authors will interact with audiences and a great deal of reading will be done in public places in groups large and small. I think one of the nicest ideas spurred by this Canada-wide incentive is the Tiny Lending Libraries project. Tiny Libraries are small boxes, anywhere from the size of a large mailbox to old refrigerators where readers can take books and return books for free. Everyone is encouraged to share books they’ve read and would like others to enjoy by putting them in these little libraries. They’re open 24 hours and can be found in various places throughout the city.

Reading is a skill that is often overlooked and underrated. Nearly everything we do involves reading and understanding what is written–whether it is in words, symbols, signs, or ciphers–the basic skill is the same. We need to recognize symbols (letters are, after all, symbols) and decipher their meanings. Deciphering meaning occurs on several levels, the most elementary of which is to recognize the symbols. When we recognize letters, we eventually learn to read words, then sentences. Reading does not end with understanding the words in the sentences. Put together, the sentences have meanings beyond the words. Words can also mean more than one thing, and again, when put together in different ways, can mean different things. Because of the complexity of language, reading comprehension is classified into 4 or 5 levels, depending on your resource. Most people think that if they can read the words and identify basic information presented in a text, they can get by. In fact, while the meaning of “literacy” is the ability to read and write, as a statistical measure, it merely meant the ability to read and write one’s name, which was all that was required on any legal form. We know, however, that literacy has to progress beyond the mere ability to read and write on a Literal level–recognizing information stated outright. Schooling helps students achieve literacy on an Inferential level, which means they are able to make predictions and understand sequence and settings. At the very least, these two levels are necessary for anyone to function in the most basic way. Higher academic achievement, however, cannot be attained without at least Evaluative comprehension–the ability to judge texts based on fact or opinion, as well as determine cause and effect, validity, appropriateness, or comparisons. The appreciation of literature in all its splendor requires Applied comprehension, which allows readers to understand a text according to the author’s language, imagery, style, purpose, and values. Only when readers are able to understand and appreciate literature at the deepest level of comprehension can they truly appreciate the writer’s skill. Suffice it to say the writer must be adept at all levels of comprehension to write works that require the deepest thought. Thus is pulp fiction  separated from classical literature.

On another note, one of the projects for Reading Town PEI is ISLAND POEMS 2, a joint effort of the PEI Writers’ Guild, this town is small, and Peake Street Studio: the Writers’ Guild supplies original poetry from island writers, which are passed on to artists who interpret the poetry through their art. The resulting poems and artwork will be exhibited through the month May at the Farmer’s Market Art Gallery from April 30. I have a painting included in the exhibit and hope you find time to visit!

How to Become a Better Writer: Live to Write

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How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.
~ Henry David Thoreau

 

Inexperience is ambitious and time and again, we need to remind inexperienced writers to write about things they know. No matter what genre you write in, the essence of everything you write is based on life. Whether it is an observation of human behavior or a moving description of a place or an event, you cannot write about it from mere observation as well as you can from living the experience. That’s not to say you can’t live or experience things vicariously. A skillful writer might be able to convince readers that they know what they are writing about intimately. It’s similar to a thespian or film actor assuming a character they are not. We know the best actors often immerse themselves in real life situations, studying real people, trying out their characters’ lives when possible, doing what their characters did to replicate the experience, attitude, behavior, feelings, and reactions as realistically as possible. It’s the difference between the beginning of film when everything was filmed inside a studio and you could tell actors were faking the experience and movies today, when you have an actor like Leonardo diCaprio spending days in sub-zero Canadian weather and actually jumping into freezing Canadian waters (despite not being Polar Bear dipping time) to achieve his award-winning portrayal of a revenant in the 2015 film of that title. It’s why a writer who hasn’t experienced any gut-wrenching events will have a harder time convincing readers of the truth of pain, suffering, love, ecstasy, betrayal, and other powerful emotions they’ve never felt. It’s why writers need to experience life in all its diversity and uncertainty, because it’s the only way they can create characters readers will identify with. Settings can easily be recreated, even if you haven’t been to the place, and the ubiquitousness of videos online showing places, people, and events in every imaginable location around the world helps provide writers with fuel for the imagination and for their descriptions. It’s what runs inside people’s heads and hearts that is harder to describe. In fact, even if you have experienced something first-hand, you might not be able to find the words to describe the feelings that rush through you. That is where the writer’s skill and talent comes. Writers are able to find the words to describe the complex emotions that the average person finds indescribable. More skilled wordsmiths find dozens of ways to describe those emotions, besides having a hefty vocabulary, without sounding dogmatic or condescending. The ability to manipulate language to express myriad emotions and experiences, then draw readers into their little worlds and want to be with their characters, is what makes some writers rise above others. That mastery of language and writing comes with much practice—something most young or inexperienced writers will not have. Not that I’m advocating trying out every single thing just so you can write about, even if we know how some writers were brilliant because of mind-enhancing substances. All you need is to keep an open mind, be a keen and avid observer of details, and write, write, write. The sooner you begin, the longer your writing career.

Celebrating Shakespeare

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As far as I’m concerned, April is the Bard’s month. He was born in April and died 400 years ago on the 23rd, and still, his life and writing have been the subject of historians and researchers worldwide since then. He is probably the most studied writer and, as an avid reader, writer, and literature major, I have appreciated his canon and proudly call him my favorite writer of all time when I am made to choose. Shakespeare’s plays have explored the whole range of human emotions and behavior in an wide variety of settings, from the fantastic to the historical. He has left no topic sacred and has delved into the passions and motivations of no less than emperors and kings, but has not ignored the wealthy and educated as well. His works are enquiries into human nature, especially of those who wield power and are leaders of society. In that, he is quite the opposite of Dickens, who explores the lives of the impoverished and downtrodden. While his plays and sonnets have been read and analyzed to no end and students are able to count on set notes and study guides to dissect them according to literary paradigms, you will always be able to find something new with each reading–indeed, this is true for works with incredible depth. Best of all, is how, because of the universal truths we find in his works, we are able to relate to them, no matter what the age or era. There have been several interpretations of many of his works, updating them so that we can relate better to the stories. The fact that his plays lend themselves so easily to adaptations in different eras is proof of their timelessness, one of the characteristics of classical art. While Shakespeare’s works are just over 400 years and certainly, nowhere near the age of Greek and Roman classics, his works have withstood that test of time and, finding relevance even in the present day, will, undoubtedly continue to entertain readers and playgoers, scholars and critics alike, for more centuries to come.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists 410 feature-length films made for both big screen and television all over the world. While a great number are British, with several produced by BBC, there are a good number of American productions. More surprising might be Indian productions–but if you look at it in the light of the British colonization of India and, hence, exposure to Shakespeare, that is not really surprising at all; in fact, you would think there should be more. Among the most critically-acclaimed adaptations were  Japanese filmmaker Akiro Kurosawa’s Ran, an adaptation of King Lear; Throne of Blood (Macbeth), and The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet). Among the more recent Shakespearean films I particularly enjoy are Kenneth Branagh’s productions, although he hasn’t done any in the last 10 years.

 

How to Visualize Your Ideas

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How do I know what I think until I see what I say?
~ E.M. Forster

Let’s face it. We’re visual. We respond to visual stimuli probably more than anything else. We see things and like them or hate them. We are affected by the sight of many things. Our minds churn alive and work double time when we see things. It’s no different with words. When we see words, our minds connect them with myriad sensations and ideas. The sight of words is imprinted in our brain and connected to feelings, both good and bad. Words bring up images our brains have already connected them to. Love. Hatred. Sorrow. Cat. Pet. Home. Food. We will each have a similar image in our minds, but the players and details will vary depending on personal experiences. In the same way, writers can think up millions of ideas but until those ideas are written and can be read back juxtaposed among other words and other ideas, we really have no way of knowing how those ideas will make us react and what other ideas they will stimulate. The written words are our markers for whatever it is we think of. They remind us that there is so much our minds contain that is immeasurable until we record it. Then we realize that our minds contain so much more than we can even imagine and, even better, our minds can generate a great deal more when provided with visual stimulus. That’s why visual aids are so popular. Even when planning whatever it is you want to write, it helps to see your ideas in some for or another. You can work with outlines, charts, plots, graphs, timelines, story frames, and just about anything else you can imagine to make your ideas more concrete. The easiest and simplest might just be jotting down your ideas as bullet points. If you jot each bullet point on a sticky note, you can move them around and arrange them in any number of different ways. If you’re comfortable with research, you can use outlines, beginning with brainstorming words, creating a theme sentence, develop lists into word outlines and expand those to sentence outlines. If you’re even more visual, you can draw charts, graphs, or timelines to depict things from your plot to character traits. Story frames are nifty tools as well, if you’re into sketching, or even just to fill with your bullet points. There’s no limit to your imagination and there’s no hard and fast rule regarding what you can use to create your own visual tools. If you can imagine it, you can put it on paper; if it works for you and keeps you writing, it’s effective. That’s all you really need.

How to Revise Your Writing

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You can fix anything but a blank page.
~ Nora Roberts

As a writing teacher, I enjoy nothing more than seeing students produce writing, yet many are reluctant to even start because they worry about how to write their sentences, what to put in, what their style should be, how to handle mechanics. Worse yet, is the student who worries about writing because they say they can’t spell or don’t know how to use quotation marks or when to use commas, semi-colons, and colons. I always tell my students that they should just write without worrying about the technicalities. As long as you are able to put your ideas into words, you’re on your way. All you need to worry about as a writer is to get the writing out, to get the ideas down on the page, because once you’ve written your story down, there’s no limit to how much you can change, correct, and improve your writing until it is ready for your reading public.

Everything anyone writes can be fixed, whether writers do the editing and revision with full knowledge of the technicalities of writing, or leave the majority of the work to their editors. Whether it’s a few punctuation marks or rewriting sentences, paragraphs, and chapters, all writing can be improved. Sometimes it takes just a few changes; other times, the finished work looks nothing like the original writing. It’s still all part of the process of editing and revising. I know a few famous writers who are terrible at spelling, who don’t know how to use punctuation correctly, or who have awful grammar. It’s writers like this who give editors more work. Unfortunately, editors sometimes end up doing a great deal of writing, especially for writers who are prolific and have great story ideas but can’t seem to pick up the mechanics. In such cases, I often think the editor might as well be a co-author, or at least get paid incredibly well. As an English teacher, I try to make writing lessons as educational as possible, but don’t teach mechanics or grammar to high school or adult students because I expect that knowledge to be part of their arsenal. Writers who are insecure about their knowledge of grammar and mechanics of writing should take the initiative to brush up on this basic writing skill. Less experienced writers who truly want to improve their skill will look at everything their editors do to their work because that helps them understand what needs to be changed; editors can also provide them with notes, comments, and explanations for certain changes. Active revision involves writers understanding the reasons for changes, corrections, and suggestions. Even without brush-up lessons, novices can learn much from the process of revision. In fact, even before sending your work to an editor, you should do your own revisions, make corrections, clean up your writing as best you can. Do this and you will find yourself more conscious of your writing, familiar with the mistakes you make, and able to write better later on.

Your work as a writer isn’t over after you’ve written your story. In fact, if you’re particularly fast or inspired, it might take you a lot less time to write than it will to revise your story. You should always keep in mind, though, that there will be nothing to revise, publish, or read if you don’t write in the first place.

Once you’ve written your story, the best thing to do is to set it aside. Let it sleep for at least a week, ideally two weeks to one month. That helps you clear your mind and become somewhat detached from what you’ve written. The longer you stay away from it, the more detached you will be. That way, you can approach your story as if it isn’t yours and be as ruthless as you have to be in the revision process.

Different writers and editors have different approaches to editing and revision. Many times, you’ll hear the recommendation to review content first. Sometimes, I beg to differ. Sometimes, the writing is filled with technical errors that make it extremely difficult to read, let alone make sense out of what there is. The first step I recommend is to clean up whatever you can, as best you can. That means, check your writing for spelling errors, grammar, and mechanical errors. Names should be spelled correctly and consistently throughout. The preferred spelling is American English (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The preferred style book is the MLA Manual of Style or Chicago Manual of Style. If you don’t have access to either (they can both be accessed online) or you want a personal copy, you can get Elements of Style by Strunk & White or Kate L. Turabian’s Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, which is an easier-to-access source based on the Chicago Manual of Style. Penguin Books has a series of writers’ reference books, including the Penguin Writers Manual, the Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar, and the Penguin Guide to Punctuation. There are other resources available, including standard textbooks, that can answer most of your questions on grammar and mechanics.  Once that’s done, you can look at your clean copy with less distractions.

When revising for content, you want to make sure your story has a story arc: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Your events should logically follow the plot or the story arc. Anything that digresses from your story arc can go. Even if you’ve written a novel, your subplots will still be connected to your main plot, either through actions, setting, or characters. You should also check your content for consistency in your timeline, settings, characterization, points of view, even the names used, whether of places, people, or events. Next, check your work for style: in particular, check consistency of voice, syntax, and word choices. Finally, proofread your work one more time before you send it to your editor. In between each step, leave at least a day up to one week before you begin the next step, so that it almost feels as if you are looking at your work with fresh eyes.

As you become more confident in your writing, you will be able to combine steps or tackle them in a different order, something you are more comfortable with. My rationale for recommending this order of editing is: (1) to start with something simple and objective (mechanics) because it helps to clear your mind, before (2) moving on to content and style, which is more complex, and (3) ending with proofreading, which is  relatively simple, hence allowing you to return to a more objective state of mind and giving you that bit of detachment that allows you to let go of your work and send it to your editor.

On Writing: Finishing

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The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
~ Ernest Hemingway

 

Endings. Whether it’s short or long fiction, sometimes the hardest thing to do with something you’re writing is how to end it. I have heard of many writers who write with an end in mind. In a way, that could make things easier because your only problem would be to figure out how to bring your story to that ending. Of course, sometimes, the characters have a mind of their own and decide to move in a different direction, turning your expected ending into something completely unexpected. Some writers are inspired by a great beginning. I imagine Dickens’s beginning for A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” gave him a huge field to explore, assuming he started that story with the beginning. Not every writer writes purely out of sheer inspiration, and I don’t imagine every great book began with the ending in mind. The more methodical and structured writers will plan their stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end. In fact, that is how I teach students to write their stories. I do emphasize that this is a plan, a blueprint, if you will, for the story, and the final work may not even be anything like the original plan. However, with a clear story arc formed by three distinct parts—beginning, middle, and end—you can proceed along a path that gives your story direction. I’d like to say that, most of the time, it should and will work out as planned, and it does, especially if you build on the basic parts and not lose sight of them. As you write, though, it’s important to be flexible and adapt to how your story develops. Sometimes, you might see a better ending or a more effective climax; or, as you write your ending, you realize you need to revise your beginning. That’s all to be expected. The worst thing that can happen is when you insist on writing the story the way you planned it even if the other story elements aren’t fitting in as planned. I’m not saying you should ditch the whole story, maybe you should just change it and work with what is getting written. You might end up with two completely different stories. When writing a novel, it becomes a little more complicated because you are dealing with several characters, several subplots, several scenes. Sometimes, some of the characters threaten to take over the lead, sometimes the subplots become larger than the main plot. There will always be a great deal of adjusting and adaptation as the smaller stories develop and the characters interact. No matter what ending you plan, once your characters come alive, your novel will have a life of its own and will continue. Unless you have excellent control over it, the tendency will be for that novel to beget a sequel and another until it becomes a series. That is how sequels, trilogies, quadrilogies, quintilogies, and so on have become so popular. Neither reader nor author wants the story to end. However, end it must, and if it can only happen by killing your favorite characters, then so be it. What is important is that the novel is written, ended, and completed. That’s quite the accomplishment, especially considering there must be thousands of novels that writers began to write that were never finished.

We often hear our elders, teachers, mentors, and parents, no less, to always ‘finish what you’ve started.’ In a world where everything seems to get shorter and shorter, fiction being no exception, it seems harder to complete a novel when you’re not even sure people will be reading it through and through. Nonetheless, there is a market for novels, with upwards of 50,000 novels published in the US alone. The number is an approximation, based on 2007 statistics, and if a projection is made worldwide, there might be upwards of 80,000 novels published each year in English alone. Top sellers reach circulation numbers of at least 1,000 books each week to get into the NYT (New York Times) bestseller list, which is the most significant and probably most prestigious bestseller list to be on. PEI bestseller status is achieved with a sale of 900 books and numbers are greater in the rest of Canada. This is actually good news for writers because we know there are still readers out there, so go ahead, write that novel, but make sure you finish what you started. As a writer, I am living proof that it’s easy to start a novel–I must have started about a dozen already–but it’s nowhere nearly as easy to finish one. Poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction are child’s play in comparison. I have to admit length is a huge factor. Anything else but a novel can be done in a single sitting. (Incidentally, I’m only speaking of creative writing here, as opposed to academic writing. Academic books also take a very long time to write, certainly more than one sitting.) Poetry might take a few minutes. Short fiction, depending on how short, can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours–with the exception of the longest short stories every written–forty pages of print takes more than a couple of hours. Essays and all other forms of creative non-fiction can also be completed within an hour or less. But a novel! To write 35,000-50,000 for a children’s novel, 80,000 words, which is the standard length for a YA novel, or over 100,000 words for a 200-page novel can easily take 100 hours, assuming you can write 1,000 words per hour. If you type fast and the ideas are just pouring out, you might get out more than 1,000 words per hour–that’s about 4 pages of print, double-spaced. So if you were to write just an hour a day at that rate, you’d have your 200-page novel in about 50 days; a month or less if you wrote two hours a day at that rate; if you’re a full time writer and spend at least 6 hours a day writing, you might have a novel in half a month. Pretty impressive, but you’d have to be a very methodical or very manic writer, or a combination of both–which is what I’d say most writers are. If your aim is to write a book a year, aiming for 1,000 words per day, or about an hour of writing, can get you enough content to fill a 200 pages in a couple of months, leaving you the rest of the year to edit and revise–which really usually takes a lot more work than the original writing. Unless you’re a very methodical writer and have everything planned out down to the last scene so that practically all you need to do when you’re writing the book is putting in the dialogue, or whatever other method highly disciplined writers do. The point is to write, write as often as you can, and aim to finish what you started. Otherwise, you’ll get a dozen opening pages that will, in all likelihood, be chopped out anyway. It’s time for me to take my advise.