Category Archives: Random thoughts

Short Story Appreciation

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There is creative reading as well as creative writing.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

My Short Story Appreciation course at the Seniors College will begin in October and I’ve found nine new stories, all recent winners of a variety of writing contests from all over the world, so there will be a fair sampling of different cultural literature. One of the reasons I’m really excited about this course is having a fair-sized group of adults to share ideas with. It’s not an easy topic to bring up and if you and your friends haven’t read the same texts, there’s not much you can discuss with them. In a class, however, you all get to read the same text, dissect it, and discuss it. You get to share ideas, interpretations, and impressions and leave knowing there is a group of people you will meet again who might or might not share your thoughts and feelings, but who make reading a text more interesting because of the varied knowledge, experiences, and opinions they bring to the discussion. How fun is that?

I know one of my favourite classes was literature, no matter where in the world it came from. Is it any surprise I mastered in Literature in English? That said, there are several levels of reading and the appreciation of literature increases with each level. Different sources will mention anywhere from 2 (literal and figurative) to 5 levels. So we can cover all bases, we’ll look at the 5 levels: 1) lexical; 2) literal; 3) interpretive; 4) applied; and 5) affective.

As the word suggests, lexical comprehension involves understanding the words in a text. This is less of a problem as readers mature because of the broadening scope of their vocabulary. Improving your lexical comprehension is simple: if you don’t understand a word, consult a dictionary or thesaurus. Unfortunately, not all words mean exactly what the dictionary tells us, unless you have a comprehensive dictionary that includes idiomatic expressions and colloquial usage. That also includes localisms and dialect, as well as nuances in the use of words. Quite often, we will be able to determine the meanings of words, phrases, and expressions from the lexical milieu—or the surrounding words and paragraphs. The way the words are used, who is using them, what the speaker’s expressions are—all these can be determined from the lexical milieu or context. It can get a little more complicated: lexical meaning includes grammatical understanding. If we don’t understand the way sentences are structured, we’ll have difficulty understanding implied meanings.

Literal comprehension comes from understanding all the facts presented in the story or text. You understand it literally when you can answer the basic questions: who, what, where, and when. Sometimes, understanding at the literal level is easier than lexical comprehension because the facts don’t change; word meanings can. The interpretive level of comprehension involves answering the questions why, how, and what if. This involves reasoning, extrapolation, and prediction. When interpreting literature, we try to figure out characters’ motivations, processes, progression, and intention. Applied comprehension is when we try to see the connections between the text and existing knowledge or opinions. We decide things like right or wrong, make judgements and comparisons. When we attempt to understand the social and emotional aspects of a text, we comprehend the story on an affective level. We are able to connect motives to the development of both plot and character and, thereby, comprehend the story in its entirety, from every possible angle. It is a level of appreciation that improves with maturity and age because then, we are better able to apply the higher-order thinking skills involved in the latter 3 levels of comprehension. These higher levels of comprehension are what the Short Story Appreciation course aims to achieve.

The World is Your Macrocosm

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“A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.”
[Speech upon being awarded the Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels (Peace Prize of the German Book Trade), Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 2003]
~ Susan Sontag

Labour Day Weekend has passed and your kids are all back to school so you should have a little more time on your hands to write. I know I was extremely busy the past weekend, finishing a couple of art commissions, which you can see on my personal blog, Creativity Unlimited, as well as in Facebook on Art ‘n’ Words. I’m back to editing and writing and preparing for a grand reunion of my high school class, the majority of whom I haven’t seen since out silver jubilee nearly 15 years ago and others I haven’t seen since we graduated from high school. Yet, it’s a connection I look forward to renewing because it’s a connection to the past, a former life I lived that played a pivotal role in my growth and development, in molding my thoughts and values and, in many ways, my spirit. It’s not often we are given the opportunity to revisit the past, but as writers, it often helps to explore every little thing we experienced, magnify it until it is larger than life, and mold it into all the stories that make up the canon of our lives. This is why we need to pay attention to the world around us because it is the macrocosm of the world within us.

As a literature and writing teacher, I can never emphasize enough the need for keen observation. It’s no different from being a scientist. Scientists depend on observation. They watch everything, observe everything, using all their senses. Even when scientists use machines to help them speed up or slow down certain processes or observe things at levels physically impossible to humans, those machines perform only what they are made to do and scientists still have to interpret the results they glean from machines. Machines help magnify details the naked eye cannot see, sounds the human ear cannot hear, flavors and smells our taste buds and olfactory senses are not always sophisticated enough to detect, or even textures too fine for our coarse skins to feel as anything other than smooth. It is closely paying attention to the world around them that gives scientists a basis for making generalizations and coming to conclusions. They would never be able to make predictions or estimations that would be even remotely probable. The same is true for writers. Without paying close attention to the world around them, writers would never be able to accurately describe behaviour, actions, reactions, relationships, or even settings, objects, and milieus. Without all the information they acquire from observation, writers would never be able to project what they know into fictional people or fantastic worlds. Regardless of what race or make characters are, regardless of their environment, we use what we know of people and our environment to make our stories as realistic as possible. It’s the only way our stories will be understood and appreciated by our readers who are, as far as we are concerned, human, and therefore sympathetic to anything identifiably human. No matter how alien, we like to imbue our characters with human-like behaviour because that is how humans interpret the rest of the world. Anything else would be, for want of a better word, too alien.

On Writing: Good vs Good

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The 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.

Books and Me

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Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
~John Waters

I must confess, I cannot resist books. When I migrated to Canada nine years ago, I very painfully parted with about 2,000 books, at least, and only because my sister-in-law offered to buy them for her daughter, who wanted to study comparative literature or some such course. Those were only the books I collected, of course, and did not include any books I borrowed or read in libraries. The books I kept with me, following me across the ocean in several boxes were hardbound coffee table books, encyclopedia-types, art books, and my whole collection of dictionaries and writer’s references which I know would be hardest to replace, besides being in constant use and creating an unmatchable reference collection. Since I arrived, I have bought and borrowed dozens more, many of which I’ve read and disposed of by donating here and there or passing on, others I’ve kept in my bookwormy habit in case I want to read them again or simply because I want them around, mostly the fantasy and sci-fi ones, because that’s where my writing feels like going when it finally has the chance. Above all, there is a new shelf slowly filling up with books I acquired because I want to read them—eventually. I have found even less time to read now that I am no longer a student, juggling work, job searching, art, writing, editing, balcony-gardening, cooking, writing, baking, following insanely addictive TV series—because that’s another area I want to explore to take my playwriting—volunteer work, teaching, volunteer teaching, consulting, networking, keeping house (which tends to be very minimal, with so many other things to occupy me), and my cat. Oh, yes. And sleeping. I still always bring a magazine or book in my purse (one reason my purse is always heavier than it needs to be) to read while waiting—for a bus, an appointment, an order, my doctor, etc.—and have about 5 or 6 books in my “next to read” pile under the “currently reading” book on my bedside table. My “books to read” shelf is, of course, next to my other bedside table with its mini bookshelf full of books to read, as well, all within reach of my bed. Once read, the books go back to the spare room which is a library-computer-art-storage room where the tall shelves are, along with a few boxes of books read-and-good-to-donate-because-I’m-not-reading-them-again—basically, contemporary literature, best sellers that are not likely to go classic, and fast lit—my action-adventure-detective-mystery-spy pile which I don’t plan to collect anymore because, at this age, I need to start thinking of unloading so my kids don’t have to swim through tons of book. I’m leaving instructions to have them all donated to a book bank or library or school, if I don’t give them away, swap them, or sell them off first. Whenever possible, I’ll grab the book from our well-stocked bright, airy, air-conditioned public library (nothing like the dark, musty archives of dated, poorly maintained, and skeletal public libraries in the Philippines) because I just don’t need to keep a copy of every book I’ve read (thank goodness for our school library where I grew up—I’d never get all those books to fit into my room!). Nothing compares with the feeling of a book in your hands and the anticipation of discovering what lies between the covers—where you’ll go, whom you’ll meet, what they’ll do. My younger self could stay up all night, night after night, trying to finish a book just because I didn’t want to leave its world. My much older self still wants to do that but finds the call of sleep often more powerful than the call of the printed words, the characters, the worlds I am transported to. Thankfully, those things also come in my sleep, even when I don’t hold a book in my hands. When I die, I want to be buried with a book in my hands—I don’t know which one yet, maybe one I still haven’t read that might entertain me for a while in the afterlife, maybe the one I’ll be holding and trying to finish as I draw my last breath. Ever since I was a child, I’d marvelled at epitaphs people had on their tombstones. I want mine to read “Her life was her book.” I might think of another way to word it, but I’m fine with that for now. I just look forward to that day when I’ll be sitting on some shelf listening in awe to the conversations my books have in that infinite library in the sky.

A great portion of my early book collections were classics, of course. I had a whole bookshelf of literary classics by playwrights from every literary period that ever existed in the Western world, as well as several from the Eastern world. I had every drama by the Greek and Roman playwrights. I had miracle plays and mystery plays from the medieval ages. I had the complete works of Shakespeare—because no self-respecting playwright or literary major would be caught without them! I had Spencer and Marlowe. I had all manner of Victorian drama. I had Reformation drama, Black drama, Edwardian drama. I had absurd plays, which became my favourite. Brecht, Ionesco, Camus, Capek, and Gogol sat side by side with Eliot, Williams, and Wilde. They partied at night while I slept, I’m sure with Simon, Osborne, Stoppard, and Wolfe. G.B. Shaw and Pushkin would heatedly discuss politics with Fitzgerald and Solzhenitsyn. Then Lao Tzu might walk up and calm them while Kikuchi Kan laughed down at them from an upper shelf. In another bookshelf, James Joyce and Yeats might be reminiscing Ireland with Michener on one of his rest stops from his travels, or talk about existentialism with Mishima and Kawabata while Kierkegaard, Kafka, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky convinced Salinger and Camus to get real. Clavell, Caldwell, and Follett would argue the finer points of medieval architecture with Tolkien, while Carroll and Twain played pranks on Lewis and Auel and London lit a fire under them all. They would all, of course, poke fun at the shelf where Leithold and other unremembered names projected abstractions and other complex formulations while debating the validity of theorems. (After university, that shelf stayed at the bottom, out of reach, isolated, and eventually half-forgotten.) The second most active shelf, of course, was where Yeats, Eliot, Blake, Shelley, Longfellow, Browning, and Wordsworth spun silvery cobwebs around Sappho, Oates, Browning, Lowell, and Dickinson.

Afraid to Submit? Here’s Why You Should!

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You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.
~ Isaac Asimov

Everywhere you turn, you’ll hear similar advice: send your work out and be persistent. You’ve heard all the stories about how many times some of the best-known writers have been rejected. We all need to face the truth. There will always be rejection out there. Consider the odds: hundreds of thousands of people who want to be writers sending their manuscripts to several hundred reputable publishers around the world—yes, reputable. We all want to be published by the big five or whoever is on top of the publishing heap at the moment. Many times, it’s not even possible to get near one of those publishers because some of them will only deal with agents. So you’re stuck with publishers on the periphery. Again, because of all the people who believe they’re great writers and have just the work that will be the next bestseller, even those publishers are swamped with manuscripts for review. It’s no wonder it takes upwards of three to six months before you even get a response. Publishers also are extremely selective about the genres they publish. They like to maintain their image and tend to look for work that fits what you might call their “product lines”. Some publishers will only pick thrillers, others only science fiction or fantasy, still others only romance. Bigger houses might have several different lines, brands, or labels to suit a variety of genres. I’d like to think, despite their niche, most publishers are always on the lookout for manuscripts that will win prizes or top the bestseller lists—or both. If it’s a bestseller you’re after, you don’t necessarily need to aim for a prestigious literary award. In fact, many bestsellers will never have medals on their covers, but their authors probably don’t care. Bestsellers come and go and most stay on top of the lists until the reading public fancies a new book. Sure, sometimes a lot of marketing hype goes into the resulting sales, but I like to believe you can’t keep a good book down. The authors just have to make sure the books get out there by all means possible. Look at it this way: a rejection letter can be a badge of honor. It means you tried!

While my manuscripts to do not sit in drawers eating their heads off, they might be standing around in neat rows in several file folders in my computer, pretending to be many things besides words. Sometimes they’re soldiers at attention, not unlike the Royal Guards of London, their tall fuzzy hats standing above everything. Other times, they’re fashion models sashaying down digital runways, their loops and tails flouncing and bouncing about with a sassy attitude. There are days they’re tiny tots let loose in a playground, jumping from one play contraption to another like vivacious little monkeys let loose from their cage. And then there are the days they’re rapidly multiplying bacteria building teeming colonies that eventually turn on each other until they all calcify into crumbly chalky patches in my hard drive. I’m convinced they take on a life of their own and rewrite themselves when I’m not looking at them so they seem like complete strangers when I visit them in their virtual abodes. I might take one or more of them and try to whip them into forms palatable to readers besides myself but it’s a losing battle because my words tend to have minds of their own. One day, I will drag them out of their comfortable beds and push them out in the world to find their paths the way grown children should and hope they find their own homes elsewhere. Maybe they’ll bring me back grandchildren.

Writing the Truth

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One of the things many of my short story writing students seem to find most difficult is writing fiction based on fact. They try to fit a real story into a short story plot without changing a thing, but want to use the true story as the basis of their short stories anyway, because they want to explore why it happened, help others understand the situation, or just share it because it was interesting to them. The hardest thing to explain is that they do not need to stick to the truth when they are writing fiction. In fact, many times, the truth might seem stranger than fiction. Many things don’t make sense, especially when the writer learns about the story from several different sources. Probably the hardest thing to teach aspiring writers is how to sift through all the details they think they should include to find the greater universality—the truth they want to really write about. Quite often, writers might start out without even knowing what truth they are writing about and go about it in a roundabout way. In fact, we are surrounded by stories, a great deal of them worthy of writing. However, we might not always have enough information to write the story. Thankfully, there is such a thing nowadays as microfiction. If we can’t write that novel, we can find publishing platforms for stories under 1,000 words. All you need to start with is a single event. As a writer, it’s your job to fill in the details that led to that event and the details that ensue from that event. If you were a journalist or a researcher, you would be looking for all the people involved, uncovering motives, personalities, histories. You would look at what happened to the people involved, how each of them felt after the incident, what they did, what they thought, what it did to their lives. Because you’re writing fiction, however, instead of looking for the facts before and after your story event, you weave the stories, inventing lives for each of the characters, giving them motives, personalities, histories so your readers know your characters intimately. You create an ending after the event, allowing your characters to somehow triumph over their situations even if it did not happen that way in real life. You devise some form of closure so your readers will have closure, because readers need that—even if their closure happens several books after the first. When that happens, you can celebrate your success in producing a series.

We know that the universal truth conveyed in timeless stories—the classics—is something we seek as writers. To plan a story around this universality is usually not as easy as it is to write about an event and discover the universality from that. The value in starting this way is that the writing can be more spontaneous and less forced. What is important is that the story itself is sound: in plot and structure, language and imagery, characters and motivations. As you develop your story, you need to weave in elements that resonate with the rest of humanity, mostly by working around powerful emotions: love, hatred, triumph, despair, fear, greed, ecstasy. These are what make stories interesting. If your characters don’t feel any of these, your readers aren’t likely to feel much for them, either. You need only read an anthology of short stories from any cross-section of history to find all these emotions. You need only read the winning stories from contests over the last handful of years to get a feel of the emotions that litter fiction and you will understand what makes fiction universal. Everything else can be invented. What will stand out and touch the readers are the emotions. Those are your greater truths.

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Humor à la Papa

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Happy Father’s Day to all of you, especially our writing dads.

Being a dad is a really special thing, because as a dad, you are half responsible for bringing children into the world and bringing them up. In some cases, you might even be bringing up your children by yourself, and that makes you all the more special. Today’s world is so different from the world I grew up in, and so much has changed, even in the way kids are brought up. There’s a lot I don’t agree with because I see the huge difference between those of us brought up a whole generation or two ago, and I can’t say I’m in complete agreement with all the changes. I do like the fact that Dads are no longer tyrants in the home, where the best thing he is known for besides bringing home the bacon is meting out punishment that moms can’t seem to do. I like the fact that more and more dads are accepting the role of co-parent, taking a more active role in raising their kids. I like the fact that dads no longer need to show themselves as perfect or infallible and are allowed to be emotional and human, which is what they really are, after all. I can’t say my dad was perfect or infallible, but somehow, my mom made it seem like he was someone we had to fear because he could give us a worse and more painful spanking (or belting) when we were particularly bad, which really didn’t happen. Nonetheless, that’s one of the reasons I tried to be on my best behavior all the time, to avoid being the object of my dad’s ire. My mom also warned us to always be quiet and not disturb our dad when he was watching TV, napping, reading the newspaper, or doing some work at home. As a roentgenologist, my dad often read x-rays at home, something he did for free at a clinic in our neighborhood; he also read x-rays for a couple of other clinics, which would bring the plaques to him at the end of the day and return to pick them up the next morning. He did this in his small “office”–a corner where he had a lightbox, table, typewriter, and several books and journals. He would stay in that corner when he was also studying something new, reading medical journals, or some other books or newspapers and magazines. When he was in that corner, we could not disturb him or my mom would pounce on us, telling us to leave him alone. But then, my mom was from a generation when dad was god and children were meant to be seen, not heard. While we had a chance to be heard every now and then, dad was still god and my mom made that very clear. Nonetheless, my dad tried his best to be a kind, generous dad. What really set him apart from my mom was how he loved to tell jokes and the supper table was usually his venue for sharing the latest joke he had read or heard from his fellow doctors. His attempts at joviality and light-heartedness were usually frowned at by my mom, and my siblings often had a good laugh with my dad at the supper table. It’s one of the memories I cherish and probably one of the reasons I enjoy reading joke books so much. I’m pretty sure my brothers and I picked our sense of humor from my dad. I just wish I could remember all the jokes he shared, although I know medical humor is not always a brand everyone finds funny. Because of my dad, I used to buy joke books. I had the Irish, Jewish, Medical, Religious, Lawyer and a wide range of topical Joke Books poking fun at all the usual races and professions people love to poke fun at. In fact, I’ve been considering compiling all the jokes I like to share on Facebook into a book. There’s always a good market for laughter!

Why I like books better than movies

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I have to confess that, while perfect balance makes for excellent aesthetics, it doesn’t stimulate the mind as much as imperfection does. Literature, in particular, is probably one of the most difficult art forms to perfect, simply because (besides mastery and manipulation of the language itself) the best and most interesting subjects are imperfect. I’m talking, of course, of humans. We can’t deny our boundless curiosity about the condition of other humans if only to find out whether others share the same or similar lives. We want to know about their relationships, their childhood, their problems and insecurities, their jobs, their friends and family, their triumphs and weaknesses. We want to know how they deal with things, react to stimuli, behave in different situations. We want to know how they think, feel, eat, and sleep. We want to know how they take failure or celebrate victories. It’s not so much that we’re nosy, but that we have an innate need to connect with others and feel we belong to a community–a tribe if you will. Humans, after all, are social creatures and thrive in communities. The best way we can find our nurturing communities is by finding people we can relate to. The best way we can survive is knowing we are not alone, and knowing that other people experience whatever it is we go through. When we can’t find enough affirmation in the people around us, we look beyond our communities to see how we’re doing comparably. Many times, we can’t experience enough directly and that’s where literature comes in. Literature is probably the best art form that fills the void created in our lives by things we might otherwise never experience. I personally think it’s even better than watching movies or television because it provides details that the eye might miss while allowing our imaginations to interpret literary descriptions according to personal preferences and familiar models, rather than just witnessing someone else’s interpretation. That’s why I more often than not prefer a book over the movie version.

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.