Category Archives: essays

How to Revise Your Writing

0
by

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

0
by

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.

On Writing: Writing Retreats and Inspiration

0
by

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~ Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Happy Easter to all!

As a teacher in Catholic institutions, certain things were a given, including annual retreats, often held during the Lenten season, which was something I actually welcomed back then. Retreats are a great way to withdraw from the rest of the world to collect your thoughts and, as a writer, retreats are a welcome time to devote to nothing but the creative process. My writing group recently took a one-day write-in, not quite the weekend retreat we take each year, but a whole day to take a break from our daily hustle-and-bustle just to write with a bunch of like-minded individuals. It’s a wonderful break that I look forward to because when I write at home, there are too many distractions. Not to mention, editing jobs that require a different type of attention. It’s wonderful to just share the creative energy that electrifies the air when 10 people are in one place all writing. It’s also wonderful to share a little bit about what you’re doing, what you think, how you write. It’s a great way to connect with fellow writers who understand your little idiosyncrasies because they also have theirs. That is why I look forward to those little writing “retreats.” They break down the stereotype of the solitary writer. What people don’t realize is that, while writers mostly write alone, they are far from solitary. Writers, like any other creative person, need a creative energy that they get from being among people. They might not necessarily interact with those people or even know them well, but it is precisely those people who feed them with ideas and inspiration to write. People are inspiring and people inspire the imagination. While poets can shoot off the most impressive and sensual combination of words and phrases at the sight of a sunset or a flower petal or a leaf floating on a slip of wind, or even a shoe lost in the mud, prose writers, especially fiction writers, need to see and experience people, life, the whole teeming humanity of it in all its splendor or ignominy. That is what writers write about. Life and everything in, about, and around it. And when we know that others also struggle in their writing, we are encouraged and inspired to continue because success does eventually come, albeit in a varying degrees.

All writing comes from life. That is the simple bare truth about it. No matter how wild your imagination, it is and will always be something about life—and yes, death is part of life because any writing about dead people is in reference to their lives, the people they left behind, the people they meet in death or the after-life or whatever you want to call it. Fantasy writing, no matter how otherworldly or fantastic is about life because your creatures and characters are personified—they speak, think, feel, and behave pretty much the way humans do; and even their inhumanity and non-human behavior is based on what you have seen, observed, read, or researched about. Armed with that knowledge, there really is nothing off limits as far as what there is for you to write about. All you need is one little nugget of truth and a lot of imagination. Sometimes, you worry about not having enough imagination or a creative enough imagination. Sometimes, all you need is the power of observation and the ability to put your ideas down in sentences. Writing, in many ways, helps you make sense of what is happening around you. Every single day, you are bombarded with information and sensory input. All you have to do is put it together like a puzzle. Your pieces can come from anywhere. You might have a character with traits from a dozen different people you actually know or just one or two. You might create a setting that’s a little bit of a dozen different places you’ve been or just a one. You might create a history and future for a single event you read about in the news or witnessed at the bus station. It might be the woman in the line-up at the supermarket checkout; it might be the stray kitten in the gutter; it might be the well-dressed man with the fedora at the bookstore; it might be odd plastic bag swirling with an eddy of dried leaves in the middle of an intersection. All you need is one little prompt, a lot of imagination, and the courage to put pen to paper and write away.

Should you write in first person?

3
by

I do not advise my students to write in the first person, especially when they are just beginning to write fiction. Writing in the first person is especially difficult because the unskilled writer often tends to become an omniscient narrator, which is really an impossibility if you are narrating in the first person. As a first person narrator, you can only see what the narrator sees, experiences, and thinks. Your first person narrator can never know what other people are thinking or feeling except from what they observe or are told. Your first person narrator can never see through walls or what is happening where the narrator is not present. The biggest problem this presents is if your narrator is not even the lead character, because then, the narrator would not be able to say what the lead character is doing in the narrator’s absence. This is not so much a problem in a short story, where the narrator can be present and in the company of the lead character throughout the duration of the story, or at least the majority of it. This is more of a problem in a novel, because it’s really possible for the lead character to be away from the narrator for a prolonged time, in which case the narrator cannot report anything that is happening to the lead character at a particular time unless the knowledge becomes available to the narrator. This is very good for novels about personal struggles or soul-searching.

The easiest point of view to handle and use is the omniscient narrator. As an omniscient narrator, you can see what everyone does at all times. You know what everyone is thinking and feeling, and you even hear what everyone says. Hence, you don’t encounter the problem of “head surfing,” which is a problem encountered when writing in the third person limited or first person perspectives. This is really good for novels with many characters and plots of adventure. The third person limited uses a narrator who can see only inside one character’s head, usually the main character. The narrator can only observe and report about other characters externally. This kind of narrator is a good choice for detective stories or mystery stories.

The Writer’s Ego

0
by

I almost always urge people to write in the first person. … Writing is an act of ego and you might as well admit it.
~William Zinsser

 

Even if writers do not realize it, writing is their way of putting themselves out for the world to see. It’s a way of saying, “Here I am, world. This is me.” They might think they aren’t revealing anything of themselves in their writing, especially if they write about things other than themselves, yet everything they write carries their mark. Little bits and pieces of themselves, their feelings, their beliefs, their values, their choices, their preferences, even their hopes and frustrations, show up in their writing. Not that the readers will always know or find out, but those who do know the writer will know what parts of the written works are really parts of the writer. Fiction writers are probably the best at hiding who they really are in their works because they can put themselves in several different characters with no one character really reflecting who they are. Even the settings of their stories can seem so remote from their reality, the truth becomes unrecognizable except to the most discerning and critical scholar. Poets, on the other hand, reveal themselves in their poetry over and over again, quite simply because poetry is an expression of the self. Whereas prose can be objective and distant, poetry is highly personal and subjective. Poetry is the voice of the soul and for writers to express themselves in poetry is to bare their souls to the world. Either way, writing, more than any other professional pursuit, is a public declaration that the writer is not afraid to let the world know the person behind the work. Even when writing incognito, the writer knows there will be feedback, and it is a rare writer, especially at the start of a career, who will not care what their reading public says. It is exactly that feedback that convinces writers to persevere or, possibly, select another vocation, because writing, as an avocation, is merely dabbling in the art. The person whose vocation is writing will do everything to become completely immersed in writing, to be a writer through and through, to put the id, the ego, and the superego into words.

Using Details in Writing

3
by

You do not have to explain every single drop of water contained in a rain barrel. You have to explain one drop—H2O. The reader will get it.
~George Singleton

When told to provide descriptions and details, inexperienced writers often tend to include too many details, details that have no purpose or that are too much information. How do you know just how much detail to include? My first rule for writing details is to be exact. No matter what you are describing, use the most exact words you can find. Use appropriate terms while avoiding too much jargon, especially if your jargon limits readership severely or makes your writing of interest only to those with the same technical knowledge you are writing about. The exact term can mean the difference between half a dozen words and a single word or two. It also allows you to get directly to the point without digressing in explanations that are not necessary.

The next rule you need to remember is to make sure the details you provide are necessary and important to the story. You might describe a tree and want to write about the multicolored shading of the multitude of leaves; how the branches might twist and turn and scars from nature pockmark the bark; how a squirrel is tucked into an old knot that has rotted out, or the roots jut out of the ground like knees and tentacles. All these descriptions are good and create a wonderful image of a tree, but why would your reader need to see it that way? Does one of the characters see it that way? Unless a character in your story has intimate knowledge of the tree and needs to see all those details—maybe because the character is a botanist or a birdwatcher or a treehugger or someone stuck in that tree for long enough to observe all the little details—there is no need for that kind of detail. If it doesn’t involve the characters, cut it out. If it doesn’t contribute to moving the plot ahead, cut it out. If it doesn’t enhance the reader’s understanding of the characters or the plot, cut it out. If it doesn’t contribute to the overall mood or tone of the story, cut it out.

When you do include details, try to create a bigger picture for things that are encountered as part of a larger setting: a barrel of water instead of raindrops that fill the barrel; a forest instead of individual trees; a blanket of snow instead of hundreds of individual snowflakes. For things characters encounter intimately—for instance, a character who is having the worst time trying to fall asleep will notice everything, from the rustling of leaves outside the window to the lumps in his pillow and the creases on the sheets under him. On the other hand, if a character crashes into bed and falls right asleep, he’s not going to notice whether the sheets are silk or jersey, if the pillows are flat or fluffy, if the birds are chirping outside his window, or even if the bathroom floor is filthy.

Inexperienced writers also have a tendency to want to explain as much as they can. It is important to remember that readers also know a lot of things and it isn’t necessary to explain everything. Unless a character has a very unusual way of putting together a sandwich, there’s no need to explain how a sandwich is made step by step. You need to consider what is common knowledge and assume that your readers will know what is generally known. There’s no need to explain how a car is driven or how a house is built unless it is an unusual car. Even science fiction stories set in space ships don’t go into great detail about how the space ship operates, unless characters are involved in the operation thereof.

It’s exactly what I tell my writing students when creating character profiles and settings. You can write a complete character profile including biographical details, a detailed physical description, and a psychological profile, but not all of that will appear in the story; even if you eventually reveal everything about your character, you certainly should not dump all that information on your readers in a single logorrheic discharge. In the same way we don’t discover everything about a person or place in a single sitting or a single visit, you should only reveal as much details as are encountered and necessary at any given time. Many times, your details will and should only be part of a sentence or two, rarely a paragraph, certainly not a full page. Any physical descriptions should also be interspersed with actions and dialogue. A character’s long hair might be revealed when he tosses his head and his hair flips backwards like a horse’s mane. A weakness for chocolate might be revealed by a bowl of assorted chocolate candies on a character’s kitchen counter or as a centerpiece on a table. It all ties in with the art of showing rather than telling. Filling your prose with descriptions leads with a tendency to tell rather than to show. If you want to create minute detailed descriptions of everything, you might want to try your hand at poetry or creative non-fiction.

Too much detail can be tedious and lead a story away from from its plot. Too many explanations can be tiring and leave nothing to the imagination. They can also burden the reader with too much information. Sometimes, it’s really better to leave things to the reader’s imagination. That’s one of the good things about reading–it stimulates the imagination, and your writing should aim to do that. If you want to explain things, in extensive detail, you might want to try writing non-fiction instead, or instructional materials. Sometimes, you need to give the reader the benefit of the doubt. Readers don’t pick up your book or story knowing nothing. You need to trust that your reader is already knowledgeable about many things, which is why they’re able to read fiction. Unless, of course, you’re writing encyclopedia entries–even then, you need to assume the readers already have certain basic knowledge. Try to think the way the characters would. Describe and explain things according to how the characters see them or experience them. Provide information that will be important to the characters and that will help your characters deal with their problems. Whether or not your character finds the information immediately or later in your story, you have set things up in a world your characters live in, as opposed to blending your world with your story world. If your characters don’t need explanations for certain things, your readers don’t need them either. If your details don’t help your characters or the story, your readers don’t need them. Those are your ultimate cues for how much to include in your fiction.

The Power of Writing, or Why Write?

0
by

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
~William Carlos Williams

I believe that one you are bitten by the writing bug, you’ll never lose your desire to write. There’s something about creating literature, putting words down on paper. It’s a fascinating process that can be extremely complicated if you have no idea what to do, and yet, from the moment each one of us learns to speak, we are equipped with the most important tool for writing: the ability to express ideas in words. This tool of expression is developed to varying degrees in each of us, but not all of us have the urge to express everything we experience in written words. That’s probably because so many people have not had the opportunity to truly appreciate what the written word can convey. People who are exposed to a great variety of written expression, no matter the genre, will realize that they have that same opportunity to express themselves, their ideas, their feelings. If they have been equipped with superior writing skills and understand the effect their words might have on others, it’s as natural as a block of ice melting in heat. Probably the best motivator is knowing you are able to record everything you think, feel, experience in words that you can revisit any time you want to. For others, the best motivator might be knowing that your story, your ideas, your sentiments, and everything you are able to express in words, will be appreciated by someone else. Writers, after all, are people, who need to be heard, who need to connect with other people, who need to know they are not alone in this wide world that can be alienating and difficult to navigate in any given lifetime. In this case, the best motivator is simply needing to make sense of everything, to organize everything into something that is more comprehensible, more tangible, and in doing so, answering important questions that so many people always wanted to ask but were afraid to. Every writer will have a reason for writing, but sometimes, like the mountain that just has to be climbed, we write because we just have to see our ideas as written words.

Like any other form of communication, all writing has a purpose. It doesn’t matter whether that purpose fulfills something writers want only for themselves or for their readers, any writing becomes legitimate once words are committed on paper–or more appropriately nowadays, in a digital file. Like most arts, literature is produced mainly to entertain. However, literature extends beyond a mere art form, because it is also a valuable means of communication. Hence, as written communication, it can fulfill several other purposes: entertain, inform, explain, or influence readers. This is not to say that these purposes are mutually exclusive. While you might set out with a single purpose in mind, in the end, you accomplish all the other purposes to varying degrees. Take fiction writing, for instance. In general, the purpose of fiction is to entertain. In the process of entertaining, however, writers explain many things, inform readers through description and sometimes even provide valuable real-life knowledge, and, in the end, influence readers. Whether the influence simply motivates readers to read more or moves them to step out of their comfort zones and do something new or different, there is no doubt that people have been influenced. Indeed, many a great work of literature has spurred actions and events that are pandemic. The way people think or see things is often influenced by some literary piece, fiction or non-fiction. Literature has the ability to move people so powerfully that societies and religions have been founded on the written word. I don’t need to name books or other works here, because I’m certain you already have some such influential work in mind. In many ways, writers could be motivated by the same singular desire to be immortalized in their works, because otherwise, they would not want a physical record of their work. When successful, it certainly is much better than anyone else’s fifteen seconds of fame!

*****

Only on PEI in Harbourfront’s Lights, Camera, Island!

0
by

A Review by Cindy Lapeña

What happens when big time movie stars from Toronto come to small town PEI to shoot a film? To find out, you really have to see Island author Karen Slater’s Lights, Camera, Island! The Harbourfront Players’ latest offering is a charming comedy that had just the right mix of Island humour and sentimentality. It’s a full-blooded Island production that can only be pulled off by an Island cast and crew. It’s great community theatre that no one will appreciate more than Islanders, as evidenced by the laughter and enjoyment elicited from a highly appreciative opening night audience. Harbourfront Theatre’s relatively new Executive Director Kieran Keller welcomed the audience back to what promises to be a wonderfully entertaining season and it was good to come back and be welcomed by Slater’s ribald slice of Island life.

What makes the script more delectable is how Slater adopted the classic plot of cross-dressing and mistaken identities, not unlike Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will. That, coupled with your friendly countryside folk and the small town gossip mill, became the grist for Lights, Camera, Island! While anyone will enjoy the classic humour, only islanders will immediately pick up on certain jokes such as the gasps and the real reason for the big surprise kitchen party. That said, more of the jokes would have had greater impact if there were much quicker pick-up between lines. Or is that an Island thing as well? One sign of experienced stage actors is how well they are able to ad lib when they forget lines or cues and there is no dead air between lines. Nonetheless, recovery was successful, the audience clearly overlooked those few moments, and a good night was still had by all.

Director Marlane O’Brien must have had as much fun as I hear the cast and crew did while rehearsing this play, which they started working on in workshops, until it finally shaped up into this rollicking piece. What gave the performance that great community theatre flavour is probably the fact that the cast was not comprised of professional actors, just a big group of friends having great fun together. It’s completely plausible some added humour came from the mixed identities that extended to a general confusion in almost interchangeable names of two brothers and brother-like cousin—who sometimes reminded me of the Three Stooges—that added to the merry mix-up that became all the more confusing until it was all sorted out in the end. It’s the kind of play I would have loved to be part of!

###

Why Writers Need Thick Skin

0
by

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.
~Harper Lee, WD

As a career, writing can be one of the most satisfying professions, and yet is one of the most difficult to break into. First of all, everyone has a story to tell, so what is so special about your story? Second, even if you’re able to write your story better than others, who’s going to buy enough copies so that you can live off the income? Third, even if you make that breakthrough bestseller that gets you on the charts and earns you loads of money, you can’t just sit on your laurels. You need to keep on writing because once you’ve got a following, your readers will be looking for more. That’s not the half of it, though.

First you have to break into the market and get published. Sure, you can self-publish, but that doesn’t mean you’ll have a huge following and sell thousands, let alone millions of books. Just getting a publisher is a major problem. Depending on your market or target audience, you’ll have to find the right publisher and convince that publisher that you’re the right fit for them. You need to submit your work and wait for them to decide whether or not they want to publish you. Sometimes, waiting can take anywhere from three months to a year. Meanwhile, you try to send your work to other publishers, assuming they don’t mind you’ve sent your work to other publishers.

Be prepared for rejection. Many times, if you don’t have even a small publishing history, some market visibility, some followers, maybe even some writing awards, publishers won’t even take a second look at your work. Every successful writer has been rejected more often than any of us would care to experience, but it seems to be part of becoming a writer. It definitely is not for the faint of heart, but if you know you have something really good and many other people who’ve read it have told you so, maybe all you need to do is keep on trying. You’re really in quite good company. J.K. Rowling was rejected by 12 publishers before Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was picked up. Jack London’s collected rejection letters on a spike grew to four feet high; Stephen King had a similar spike on his wall that has grown heavy with rejection letters; William Golding’s Lord of the Flies was rejected 21 times; L.M. Montgomery was rejected so many times she put stored Anne of Green Gables for two years before trying to find a publisher again; Dr. Seuss received 27 rejections before his first story And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street was accepted. Many major publishers nowadays will not entertain writers and will only deal with agents. Finding agents is no easier than finding a publisher. Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, was rejected by 60 literary agents before she found one and her book eventually was 100 weeks on the NYTimes bestseller list as well as turned into a movie. If you do decide to take the self-publishing route, it’s not impossible either. One of my favorite poets, e.e. cummings, had great difficulty getting his first book published he went on to self-publishing six volumes of poetry because he couldn’t publish them any other way. Beatrix Potter was so disappointed by numerous rejections she finally decided to self-publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which has sold 45 million copies to date. Nowadays, many writers choose to self-publish first, and if their books gain recognition, accept offers from publishing houses. On the other hand, if your book sells as well as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, who needs a traditional publisher?

Having a career as a writer doesn’t just mean having to get published. That’s just part of it, albeit a great part, because you can’t have that career until you’re published, and on a regular basis. That’s why it’s called a career. More than just being published is the fact that, as a writer, you’re opening yourself up to criticism from just about anyone who comes across your writing. That’s not to say it’s all going to be negative. It’s a huge misconception that criticism is always negative. Criticism can also be positive, but because of the general impression that it is negative, I think the world has decided to just call it feedback–which can be both negative or positive, and which really sounds more neutral. Let’s agree to call it feedback, hereon.

Feedback should be looked at by writers as something helpful or useful because they can get a good idea of how people understand and react to their writing. Without feedback, writers would have no idea what people think, unless people are buying their books like–well–hotcakes. Inevitably, some of that feedback will not be positive or even diplomatic. That’s where thick hides come in. Without those thick hides, writers could become extremely offended by whatever others say. Writers have no business being onion-skinned if they want their work to be read widely. Nobody ever gets 100 percent approval on anything, so be prepared for those naysayers. No matter how good your writing, there will be people who won’t like it. No matter what you write or how you write it, there will be those who won’t agree. If you let yourself be affected by every single thing people say about your writing, you could cripple yourself as a writer. You would be too afraid to put out your work because of what others might say.

On the other hand, if you ignore everything others say, you’ll never learn from your readers and if you need to improve something, you’ll never pick up on that either. It takes time and it takes getting used to. More sensitive people have a harder time putting their work out there, but no matter how sensitive you are, if you want to be a writer and be known as one, you will need to swallow your pride, pick your battles carefully, learn from everything you can, believe in yourself, and maybe, when you can afford it, hire someone to read the reviews for you.

###

On Holidays, Canadian Writers, and Books

0
by

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! And right after that, Happy Islander Day, a.k.a. Family Day in the rest of Canada. In a way, I think it’s great that we call it Islander Day on PEI because that includes everyone and not just those with families. Not everyone has a family to be with on Family Day, so Islander Day is a great way to celebrate everyone. It’s funny that the holiday was created just so there would be a break in an otherwise holiday-less stretch between Christmas and Holy Week, because February happened to be the only month in the year without a public holiday. Not that it matters to me, because I’ve got my very own personal holiday in February! Yay! That said, we can always declare our own holidays, but we don’t always get paid for them. Of course, if you’re unemployed or a freelancer or own your business, then holidays become moot, because you can take any day you want off as a holiday. Believe me, that’s not the way it works because you end up working odd hours and just about any day of the year, because it’s always ‘no work, no pay’ for you. When you answer to an employer, you get paid for public holidays because the law requires it. Why am talking about holidays? Because I’m back working at full time job and will get paid for the holiday! Woohoo!

Holidays aside, a large group of island writers showed up at the PEI Writers’ Guild Winter Social to find out who won bragging rights for the first ever PEI Battle Tales week-long writing contest and to duke it out at a literary trivia contest for free beer and a handful of gift cards, but really, to duke it out. What I found so revealing is that we Canadians know so little of our literary history! My excuse is I didn’t grow up here and I didn’t attend school or university here. Still, the information we have about Canadian literature is so meager, it surprised me. Canada is the only country I am aware of, at present, that emphasizes reading and books so much, particularly through the CBC’s Canada Reads program. I have to admit I do not know how long it has been running–it will take a bit of research and I’m sure there are those of you who know when it started. My point is that even in the study of world literature (and I mastered in literature), Canadian literature never featured prominently. Probably because there never was as much Canadian literature contributed to the corpus of World Literature. In fact, I had been familiar with Stephen Leacock, who seems to be the earliest writer of note on record who has been anthologized worldwide, but he had never been touted as Canadian. Alice Munro was another name that gained international prominence; ater on, I discovered Margaret Atwood, and much later, Michael Ondaatje. Determined to learn more about writers in my chosen new country, I found Guy Gavriel Kay, re-discovered L.M. Montgomery, and Mordecai Richtler, as well as a few others I am still getting acquainted with. I can’t say I know my Canadian authors well enough and I have a great deal of reading to catch up on.

On another note, I just learned tonight that, according to UNESCO*, Canada published 19,900 books, but also discovered the information is from 1996; but more recent data published by Canada Business** puts the number at over 10,000 books annually, mainly because of an increase in the number of publishers or publishing houses in Canada. I would consider that information skewed and not reflective of the actual number of books written by Canadians, because many Canadian writers are actually published in the US and the UK. The rise of self-publishing in the new millenium probably adds much more to that number. That said, we rank 20th in the UNESCO list, which listed total books published in different countries over a broad range of years, from 1990 to 2014. It’s certainly a long way from Oman’s 7 books published in 1996, but nowhere close to China’s 440,000 in 2013, the US’s 304,912 also in 2013, or the UK’s 184,000 in 2011. Taken viz the population, in 1996, Canada published a book for every 1491 people; which is much better than China’s 1 book for every 3084 people; surprisingly close to the US’s 1 book for every 1038 people; but nowhere near the UK’s 1 book for every 344 people, which I pretty much expected. (By books, I mean book titles and not physical copies.) I think that’s a pretty decent ratio, all things considered.

*Book publishing numbers from UNESCO were sourced from Wikipedia

**Jason McBride, “It’s Alive! Canadian Book Publishing Stirs.” August 30, 2013. From http://www.canadianbusiness.com/companies-and-industries/its-alive-canadian-book-publishing-stirs/