It’s June! How is it time flies so fast? Is it a sign of age, perhaps? Once we are out of school and start working, maybe have a family, the time just seems to go by in a flash. It’s not like the days are really any shorter, no matter how much it may seem that way. It’s a sign of how busy we’ve become, how much we’ve filled our lives so that there is no time for anything else but work, work, work. For people in the creative fields like writing and art, we actually take time to enjoy the little things in life. We have the capacity to expand each moment, extend the experience, so that we are able to explore and absorb the minutest detail, savor the tiniest nuances of sound, shape, color, flavor, and feel. Rather than whisk through a day, we saunter and flow from one minute to another. It is the very time we choose to take that gives us the details that spice our creations. Indeed, how else would we be able to describe the exquisite beauty of a flower tenderly unfurling its silky petals, releasing its gentle scent to waft on the breeze and float lazily about us, permeating our pores, almost suffocating us with sweetness that lingers for but a moment but lasts in our memories forever? In people’s mad rush to amass as much material wealth and possessions as they can, to maintain classy lifestyles touted by fashionable magazines, to constantly outdo, outbid, outshine the next person, they have forgotten how much beauty, fulfillment, pleasure, and satisfaction they can get from simply slowing down and savoring the little things, the details, the nuances of life. That is where true meaning and meaningfulness is–in the simple, innocuous pleasures of life.
Category Archives: essays
Jaunty Jovial June
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“I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where it was always June.” |
One of the delights of living on Prince Edward Island is the experience of June. Although associated with summer and one of the hottest months of the year in most countries, June in Prince Edward Island is, to say the least, pleasurable. The temperature in June ranges in the teens with occasional spikes to the low and mid 20s and nights hovering around the low double digits. If you come from a tropical country like I did, that might sound chilly, since the coolest temperatures in the coldest days of January might drop to 18. Here on the Island, that would be the perfect June day sans rain. We do have the occasional sprinkle or thunderstorm, especially at the cusp of May and June, when temperatures might still drop to single digits overnight or in the early morning. The atmosphere does border on muggy when the higher teens climb to the 20s. The best days are when the temperature remains above 16 and below 23 and the sky is the purest blue from one horizon to another, perhaps a dotting of fluff or even a thin blanket of shredded cotton spread across and over the countryside, a whisper of air ruffling the uppermost leaves and branches of the trees. On such a day, you can go anywhere on the Island, be it the beach, a park, a pond, river, or trail—or even just your porch, deck, or balcony—and bask in its luscious glory.
It’s All About Weather
0Without a doubt, the weather is probably the most common and most frequently used conversation starter in the world, and certainly on Prince Edward Island. Consider how often the weather is used in a greeting: “Nice day!” “Lovely weather we’re having!” “Lovely day for a walk!” “How’s the weather up there?” “Hello, sunshine!” “Enough rain for you?” In most parts of the world, the weather might be fairly constant. In the Philippines, for instance, there are only two seasons: wet and dry. The dry season is hot and—you guessed it—dry! Wet weather, on the other hand, can be anything from a drizzle to a downpour to an honest-to-goodness typhoon, which occurs approximately 20 times between June and December. As a result, the weather really isn’t a common conversational starter unless it’s to ask during a storm how many inches of water your house went under.
One of the first things I learned when I arrived on PEI is how changeable the weather is. Especially on a bad-weather day, I have heard time and again that if you don’t like the weather, you only have to wait 15 minutes and the weather is likely to change. In reality, it doesn’t always happen that way. I have seen gloriously sunny days stretch on forever and I have seen winter storms trapping people at home for nearly a week.
The one constant, which is probably responsible for the frequent changes in weather, is the wind. In winter and spring, it can be wild and wicked, taking scarves, whipping your coat about, pushing you ahead or knocking you down. For someone with long hair like me, it doesn’t make sense to brush it in this weather because the wind constantly blows it into my face and tosses it in every direction. The good thing about that is, on a dreary day, it also blows the storm clouds away. Unless a downpour is promised, there isn’t any point to carrying an umbrella about because a light drizzle from a blanket of gray clouds quickly disappears as the wind sweeps clouds away and clears the sky. In summer and autumn, the wind is a gentle whisper, cooling down any burning the sun might bring, keeping you fresh whether at the beach enjoying the sun and surf, hiking through a natural park or the confederation trail, reading a book on a city park bench, or traipsing in and out of shops in the city. It’s one of the perks of living on a small island in a temperate climate sheltered within a cove.
Another fairly constant feature of PEI weather is the sunshine. We have lots of sunshine all year round, except on those cloudy days when a storm is brewing and the sky is pelting down precipitation in various forms. Even then, it never stays dark and dreary for days on end and by spring and all throughout summer and fall, we enjoy sunlight anywhere from as little as 8-10 hours a day to as much as 14 hours through the June and July. What can beat that? No wonder people like to talk about the weather so much, half the time, it has to do with trying to guess what the day will bring.
On another note, May is when spring comes into full bloom with temperatures staying above zero and more often hitting double digits at the hottest time of the day. We’ve had our first day of 26 degrees, which was warm and muggy because of the rains, but I don’t hear any complaints because we’ve also had several wonderful sunshiney days, even if the temperature remains at single digits. It’s getting there for sure. While it’s nice and sunny, it might be a little too cool for some people to spend at the beach or out walking, especially if you’re a sedentary writer who prefers to stay indoors and write or read. That and the fact that spring is the prettiest and dressiest season certainly contribute to its being (possibly) the most written-about season of the year in poetry. I imagine spring inspires a lot of positive emotions, hope, light-heartedness, and, of course, love and romance, hence the outpouring of such emotions in poetry throughout the centuries. And because the weather in spring can be as changeable as a young heart’s fancies, it should elicit a more spontaneous outpouring of poesy in writers. So, if you are feeling somewhat uninspired and looking for something to write about, don’t underestimate the weather. Thousands of poems have been written about it and thousands of more will be written. If you can say a great deal about the weather, you certainly will have a lot to write about it as well!
On Writing: Vividness, Vocabulary, and more on Said
0Vivid descriptions are key to drawing readers deeper into your writing, whether prose or poetry. Your challenge as a writer is to create images and scenes with words, to reproduce intense emotions and experiences with descriptions so your readers can experience what you have. It’s creating vicarious experiences for readers, affording them a glimpse into your world, into your mind. Writers who do not take advantage of the wealth of words available in the English language create their own handicap and limit their writing to the mundane. Besides limiting their potential, writers who do not stretch their vocabularies where the language takes them also limit their potential to teach their readers the beauty and power of language. As a writing teacher, I am committed to helping my students improve their vocabulary because vocabulary is essential to writing. A writer with a poor vocabulary is like a runner with only one leg.
I have written several times about using exact language, especially in writing, and it’s not something I will ever stop writing about. Society is no great help in this regard, especially when it promotes vague language by using words such as “stuff” and “things” for objects, or “nice” and “great” for anything positive. Writing teachers have been trying to teach their students year after year how to use more precise language, more vivid words. After all, writing is about creating images for the reader in words. If your writing cannot provide the reader with sufficient details to recreate the picture or scene you, as the writer, imagined, then you have failed. Let me revisit “said is dead”. If you haven’t yet found enough words more vivid than “said”, here’s a short list of “a” words to get you started.
Acknowledged, acquiesced, added, addressed, admitted, admonished, advised, advocated, affirmed, agreed, alleged, allowed, announced, answered, approved, argued, assented, asserted, assumed, assured, asked, attested, avowed.
As a reminder, I admonish writers not to use a dialogue tag to merely repeat or state the obvious. In this case, I refer to writing a question in dialogue and ending it with a question mark, then using the dialogue tag “she asked” or “he asked”. The use of a question mark to end a sentence, in itself, indicates a question has been asked, hence, the dialogue tag can be dispensed with and replaced with a description of an action or expression, instead. For instance, what do people do when they ask questions? Some might raise an eyebrow or both eyebrows, frown, shake their head, raise their hands to their sides with palms facing up, scratch their head, or rub the back of their neck. As in previous writing, I continue to recommend keen observation of behavior because that is what will give you, as a writer, the images you will recreate in your writing.
On Writing: How Much Detail Do Characters Need?
2“In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!”
~ Anton Chekhov, Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886
Some of my students have asked me how much detail they needed to include when creating character descriptions or character profiles and I have always told them there is no such thing as too much. In fact, I encourage them to invent as much detail as possible, because those details will make their characters more real. How do you decide what details to include when creating a character profile? I tell my students to look at their characters from different angles: physical, psychological, professional, and biographical.
The physical description is straightforward: What is your character’s physical appearance? You should include everything from gender to height, weight, girth, hair and eye color, skin color, nose, ears, mouth, teeth, hand size, feet size, and so on. While highly detailed physical descriptions do not always play a huge part in stories, they can certainly be part of the main character’s problem, if not the main problem. Otherwise, a character’s physical attributes will affect how that character will interact with other characters or the environment. For instance, an unusually tall character might have to stoop to go through certain doorways, look down when speaking with others, or push back a seat to fit in a car or at the dining table. Physical descriptions should also include any physical defects, abnormalities, or diseases. Not to be overlooked are physical issues or distinctions such as moles, birthmarks, limps, missing fingers, a broken nose.
Character psychology ranges from personality type to personality disorders, phobias, insecurities, likes and dislikes. This would also include habits and mannerisms that distinguish this character, such as nervous habits, tics, stutters, and the sort. Beliefs can also be included in character psychology, as these shape the way people think and act. Our gangly tall character might be uncomfortable with his height and this would show in a slouch or a general discomfort or uneasiness when interacting with shorter people.
I recommend separating professional and biographical characteristics even if a character’s professional description could be included in biography. This helps distinguish a character’s past from present. Biographical details would include information you’d find in a birth certificate: date of birth, place of birth, parents, and birth order. It would also include family history, places lived, educational background, religion, work background, affiliations, achievements, and awards. This is also where knowledge and skills can be described. A character’s professional description would focus on the character’s current job or occupation, skills, and knowledge. This can be significant because a character’s current job could explain a great deal about habits, work hours, milieu, relationships, preferences, economic status, and so on.
Creating characters can be tricky. After all, you are trying to create real people–or beings, as the case may be–on paper through nothing more than words. We know real people are not perfect, so there really is no reason your characters should be perfect. In fact, they will be the most perfect if they are flawed. That is what makes your characters more real, more human. All the best literature in the world, from the age of classics to contemporary times, reveal characters with a particularly fatal flaw which becomes the cause of the character’s downfall. It can’t be just any arbitrary flaw, either, That fatal flaw must be part and parcel of your character’s complex being–just like any human being. The more intimately you know your character, the better you can lead your character through your story. You will also know what your characters will do, how your characters will think, feel, act, and react because you know every little trait and quirk your characters possess. All those details come from a well-written, highly detailed character description. As I also tell my students, whatever you write in your character profiles and character descriptions don’t necessarily have to appear in your story. Your character profiles and descriptions are your guides to how your characters will behave throughout the story, what they think, do, and plan to do. At no time must you feel obliged to dump your whole character description on your readers in one sitting, unless you plan to choke your readers on unnecessary information. Sure, the information might be important, but not all at once. The way to reveal your character to your readers is gradually. We do not get to know any one person we meet in real life in a single sitting. As a matter of fact, it sometimes takes us years to get to know people–and even then, we sometimes never get to really know every little thing there is to know about them. In the same way we reveal the setting in a story as it is encountered by the characters, we should reveal characters in the story as they are encountered, and character traits and details as they would be revealed in real life. Think of it the same way you meet a real person: the first thing you notice are physical details. Their appearance, their dress, their mannerisms. If you are in the same situation, you might discover that person’s professional attributes–what their job is, what skills they have, where they work. As you continue to interact with that person, you discover a little more–maybe a bit of their family, where they live, where they used to work or study. The longer your relationship and interaction, the more you learn about that person. That is just how your readers should encounter and be acquainted with your characters. Of course, there are ways to accelerate the process, for instance, in an interview or a tragedy–nothing reveals character more than a tragic event. This is when people are at their weakest and also when we see just how strong they really are. Regardless of the scenario you create to reveal your character, remember that not everything will be revealed at once. It’s always good to keep some things a mystery. It’s one of the reasons people are interesting.
On Writing: Developing your Fictional World
0Writing fiction requires the creation of the world within which your characters exist. The shorter the fiction, the smaller the world, simply because you don’t have much time to include or describe a very large world in short stories. In fact, one of the limitations of a short story is restricting the action to a single scene. On the other hand, if you write a novel, your world will necessarily be as big as wherever your story takes your characters.
World creation is not simple and becomes less so as the world expands. You need to know every single detail of your story world, whether it is modeled after a real setting or completely fictitious. The easiest way to do it is, of course, to pattern your story world after the real world you know. Whether it is a single room, a house, or a whole village, you can create your story world with better details than if you have no idea what the story world looks like. Is your character a teenage male? Pattern that after your teenage son or nephew or brother’s room. Is it an old house? Use your grandparents’ house or some old house in town which you have access to. Is it a museum? Visit your local museum. Do you want to use a complete village? Get a map of your village or some little village you want to use, rename the streets, change the names of the commercial establishments, put in your landmarks, and voila! You have your own village. You can add or remove buildings as you need, but regardless of the changes, you will have a complete setting where your characters can come alive. It’s a little more difficult if you’re writing fantasy and creating a whole world because you don’t have much to go by. Despair not! All you need to do is take a detailed geographical map of a particular area, region, island, country, or continent. The geographical map will give you a land with the physical features you want. Throw in forests, add a few more mountains or water systems and you’ll have a wonderful land your characters can explore and adventure in. As usual, I advise students to take advantage of the Internet. Get your maps from Google maps or Google Earth. You can also use Google to explore specific areas by using street views or searching for photographs that give you incredible details of nearly any place in the world. The Internet also provides you with boundless information on architecture, history, culture, anthropology, economics, technology – just about everything you need to create your own world in such minute detail the information could overwhelm you. Unlike the past when writers were limited to write only what they knew or imagined, writers nowadays can travel around the world and experience different cultures enough to include that in their stories. Your biggest problem will be how to become more selective, what to include, what not to include, and how to make use of the information you gather in your writing.
With the glut of information available on the Internet, writers can be overwhelmed and end up creating an information dump. Beginning writers, in particular, need to restrain themselves from including every bit of information they write when developing their setting. This is often the case with my writing students, who have felt so attached to the settings they developed, they felt compelled to include everything in their stories. The point of creating detailed settings prior to writing the actual story is to know the setting so intimately your characters can walk through them blindfolded–or, at the very least, not walk right through a wall another character just bumped into. Creating a detailed setting description helps you create consistency in the physical environment so it is clear your characters are moving around in the same space. What you should not do, however, is to describe the whole setting before the story begins. As far as I am concerned, the best way to describe your setting is to reveal it as the characters encounter it. If your story begins in the bedroom, by all means, describe the bedroom, but don’t go ahead and describe the rest of the house until your character leaves the bedroom and moves through the house. If your character stands at the bedroom window and looks out, by all means, describe the scene outside the window, but don’t describe what the rest of the neighborhood is like. If your character eventually goes down into the basement, don’t describe the basement until your character goes there. That way, you will never be in danger of dumping a load of irrelevant information on your readers. You will have less of a tendency to digress, as well. The same rule of thumb should be applied to other characters in the story, as well. Do not describe them or introduce them until your active character meets them or encounters them. It’s a good way to keep your readers involved and keep your writing focused.
Valentine’s Day Again, or Love and Other Emotions
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You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. |
Valentine’s Day is around again and, while that might not mean much to some people, it certainly means something to the masses victimized by commercialism. At the very least, it’s a good time to reflect on love and its accompanying emotions. Yes, love afflicts people with various emotions, depending on the situation. When we fall in love we are elated, feel joy, happiness. Sometimes we become obsessed with the object of our attentions and we end up despairing, miserable, insecure, and uncertain if the attention is unreciprocated. If the one we love loves someone else, we become jealous or envious, which can lead to anger and rage. When we lose love, we go through sorrow, grief, despair, and misery all over again. When our love is reciprocated, we become excited and exuberant. Clearly, love is one powerful emotion that floats us up to cloud 9 or has our heads in a tizzy. No wonder people celebrate Valentine’s Day. It brings the promise of so much more than just chocolates and roses. It reminds us what it is to be alive.
Imagination is enhanced by inspiration and, usually, the best inspiration comes from being in love. That’s probably why literature is littered with so many love poems, songs, and love stories. Love and courtship have certainly been the motivation for countless historical events, giving rise to a couple of eras when the subject of literature revolved around the themes of courtly romance, chivalry, love, and beauty. Even outside those eras, there has been no shortage of literature dwelling on similar themes. However, I believe imagination is likewise enhanced by any other powerful emotion. A great deal of writing has emerged from anger and rage, fear, despair, grief, depression, and joy. Inspiration certainly is not limited to what only those emotions evoke—humans are afflicted with myriad emotions in varying intensities and writers take advantage of that. Writers are moved to express the infinite nuances of each emotion in countless ways and fill millions of shelves with the whole gamut of emotions pouring out of millions of characters that entertain and—yes—inspire the reading world.
Writing Short Stories: Beginning with Character
0In my short story writing classes this year, I started a new approach that’s working wonders. We started with creating the main character, the protagonist and giving that character a problem. I’m going out on a limb and saying that’s all you really need: a character and a problem. You might wonder how that becomes a story. The story comes from how that character reacts to the problem. Usually, you’d think a character with a problem would want to solve the problem. Not all the time. Sometimes, characters will try to avoid the problem or ignore it. Or they will try to get rid of the problem–not necessarily solving it–but hiding, disguising, or pawning it off on someone else. Does that sound familiar? That’s because that is exactly what people do when they’re faced with problems: they try to solve them, avoid them, or get rid of them. There is a requirement before you can even write how your character approaches the problem: you need to know your character intimately–possibly even more than you know yourself. You need to know your character’s traits, which I identify as physical, psychological, and professional. Remember, not all traits are ideal–just because nobody is perfect. All human beings are complex and have one or more shortcomings, flaws, or faults, and this reality should reflect in your characters. Physical traits include all physical characteristics, down to crooked yellowing teeth and a mole on the left elbow. Psychological traits include personality, emotional profile, even personality types. An easy way to get general psychological traits is using zodiac personality traits or look at personality profiles based on different tests (Enneagram or Myers-Briggs are easy to find). You can also include habits and preferences, similar to a slumbook — favorite color, favorite song, favorite clothes, favorite movie, favorite food, and all other favorites as well as any particular dislikes. Professional traits don’t necessarily mean your character is a professional. This is just a way of describing what a character does–and professional can simply be a housewife or househusband, student, or retired navy captain. After identifying your character’s traits, you need to create a biographical history, a background, family, friends, associates, milieu. You need to know where the character grew up, lives, works, studied. You need to know what your character has for breakfast and where he or she gets coffee. Finally, you need to examine your character’s motivations: Why do they do what they do? Why do they think, act, speak, or feel a certain way? What makes them happy, sad, angry? What are they passionate about? Only when you know how your character feels and thinks will you be able to write how your character will react, what your character will do when faced with a particular problem. Then you will have a story.
What writers do for the holidays
0If you’re like me, you’ll probably be taking advantage of the holiday season to write because it’s a nice chunk off work. Of course, since I’m completely off a regular job, I have all the time in the world to write and paint now, until I find another job. That also means I have all the time in the world to procrastinate. I could make up several excuses not to write or paint: my apartment is a mess, thanks to soon-to-be-gone neighbors; I haven’t decorated for Christmas, although considering it’s two days away, what’s the point in decorating; I’ll be cooking up a storm for Christmas dinner, although considering my apartment is a mess, there’s not much room to debone a turkey, and since all I do is end up eating the same meal every day for the rest of the week until New Year’s, when I’ll probably roast another turkey that’ll feed me until Valentine’s day, so what’s the point, really, of making a huge meal for one person; there are new castle puzzles online and completing them with 500 pieces makes a satisfying couple of hours; I could catch up on tv series and movies I’ve missed and binge watch Fibe On Demand or Netflix; I could try out my brand new Amazon Prime video and catch up on shows that aren’t on Fibe On Demand or Netflix; I could catch up on my reading, finally; I need to finish prepping for my winter courses; I need to clean up my apartment since it’s been a mess for the last three weeks, thanks again to my inconsiderate neighbors; I need to catch up on my advanced courses–and since I haven’t been signing in every week, I’ll need to start all over again just to refresh my memory; I need to resume my French lessons–and since I haven’t touched those books for the longest time, I’ll need to review everything again; I need to update a lot of things on my websites, including adding new content, etc.; I need to continue making and posting online content for sale; I need to make more new crafts for sale; and the list goes on. There are some things I can do at the same time, of course, such as my laundry and anything else; or keep the TV on as I work on my computer–it’s pretty much how I keep abreast with all the shows I want to see; then I’ll watch them all over again because I won’t remember seeing a thing or will forget the stories because I was engrossed with writing or painting. My point is, we writers are probably the most creative people when it comes to thinking of ways to put off writing. Thank goodness for a weekly newsletter that keeps me writing something. It would be just as easy to set it aside, but we don’t want to disappoint.
Whatever it is you decide to do throughout the holidays, may you have the best of the holiday season and wishing you find some time to get a bit of writing in!
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and the Best of the Season to you all!
On Writing: Good vs Good
0The best stories don’t come from “good vs. bad” but “good vs. good.”
~ Leo Tolstoy
One problem writers have is determining what thematic conflict to use in a story. Stories can universally be classified according to theme, the most common of which is good vs. bad. Since the inception of literature as an oral form, themes revolved around the hero, who eventually epitomized things a culture considered good, and the enemy or villain, who eventually represented what was bad or evil in a culture. Hence, the clansman who returned with a bear or a lion was the hero who brought home food to the clan while defeating the predatory, monstrous, man-killing beast, which came to represent evil. The hero could be the warrior who defeated the leader of an aggressive tribe or the mother who saved her child from the threatening rapids of a swollen river. It’s not difficult to see how attributes of good and evil can be assigned to the character elements involved. These characteristics were transferred to different characters, including the popular animal characters in fables. Fast forward to contemporary literature of the 21st century. As early as the latter half of the 20th century, the term “hero” was replaced with “protagonist” and the “enemy” or “villain” was called the “antagonist”. This most likely had to do with the influence of a growing political correctness that demanded a greater sensitivity to the use of derogatory terms. It suited literature well because, quite often, the antagonist could not be defined because of the very familiar man vs nature conflict. Also, because the enemy might not be nature but also might not be human, what used to be man vs beast soon became man vs other, the “other” being anything from beast to monster to alien to technology, e.g., machines, robots, and computers. The rise of anti-heroes and reluctant heroes as very real characters also made it easier for literature to adopt the “protagonist” label—the central character in the story, around whom the plot develops. The concept of the anti-hero fits well with the idea that not all struggles or conflicts are between good and evil. This was a simplistic way of looking at the world proposed by religion: anyone who followed the church and its rules was good, anyone who did not was bad; by extension, any character who practiced the values espoused by religion was good. As such, characters were written with characteristics of what was considered good and righteous, or strove to achieve those traits. The moralistic tale Pilgrim’s Progress was just that: a Christian’s journey through temptations and tests that strengthen his Christian faith and values. Realistic literature later on dispensed with the notion that characters were either good or bad, instead revealing the inner workings of the human psyche. In truth, good people sometimes do bad things and bad people also do good things. That’s the reality: people are complex. So when complex people are portrayed facing complex situations that mimic real life and encounter other characters who are just as complex, literature suddenly becomes much more interesting and exciting. I still believe people are basically good. Those who are truly evil have mental and psychological aberrations as a result of some faulty wiring in their synapses that prevent them from deriving satisfaction of pleasure from positive experiences. The basically good ones are those who face reality, encounter other good people and don’t always agree in varying degrees. It’s those little conflicts from day to day heightened to literary proportions that give writers a bottomless reservoir to draw from.
Cindy Lapeña: Creativity Unlimited 