One reason I love writing is because I love playing with the language itself. I enjoy finding that perfect word, twisting it in a strange way, or otherwise crafting something original. English is amazingly maliable, and is constantly incorporating new words and evolving how old ones are used. It’s been like this throughout its history, with even the standardization of spelling being a fairly recent development.

If you share my interest in the wordification of English, I strongly encourage you to watch this great video series from the Open University on the History of English. There are ten videos, each over a minute long, spanning from the Anglo Saxon invasions through English’s evolution as a global language.

The first video is below, and the rest of the fabulous History of English series is on OU’s YouTube channel.

I made the mistake of volunteering to write grant proposals for a small, local, non-profit organization.  I have a little background in what a grant needs to say, and I enjoy writing, so it seemed a natural fit to make a contribution to a worthwhile cause.  Like every new experience there was some learning involved, most of it in the frustrating, irritating and regretting category. 

After figuring out how to overcome the first hurdle, how to request money for administrative costs when foundations are loathe to donate money for just that reason, and then learning to maneuver the Giant Charity Dollar Consolidator’s computer system, I thought my task was largely accomplished.  Until I ran into the Comma Queen, the underpaid, highly detail-oriented program coordinator of this unnamed local non-profit.  That’s Program Coordinator with a Capital P, Capital C as I was reminded in the first round of edits.  She also declared that a comma should be inserted in every series of nouns before the ‘and’ – papers, pens, and pencils. 

Whereas I was under the impression that particular comma style had been retired sometime in the ‘70’s and was no longer the standard.  After the third editing round-about, late the night before the grant deadline, I threw up the white flag and added in the last of the missing serial commas for the Comma Queen. 

Once the dust settled from our Passive-Aggressive Comma War, I decided to seek out who was right, me or the Comma Queen.  I found an old high school grammar text book, a 1965 edition of the Modern Grammar and Composition which is clearly marked THIS BOOK IS THE PROPERTY OF THE STATE.  The three students who were issued the book from 1966 through 1968 had signed their names on the front inside cover, the last being my brother-in-law.  Why it’s on my bookshelf, at a distance of a thousand miles, two states and  four decades, is a mystery to me.  Nevertheless, it served my purpose even if it is a crime of possession that hopefully the State of Texas never discovers.

Well, round one goes to the Comma Queen.  The text clearly showed that a comma is required before the ‘and’ in a series.  That was in 1965.  Unconvinced, I sought out more current sources of expertise and it turns out the series comma is an either or situation.  In journalism, the series comma, or as it’s referred to by some, the Oxford comma or even the Harvard comma, was dropped for expediency.  In literature it’s still the standard.

I was satisfied with a draw in the Passive-Aggressive Comma War.  However, after reading more about it, I must admit there are times when that extra comma makes for better clarity.  Example — I owe my life to my two brothers, Chloe and Lucy.

My brothers aren’t named Chloe and Lucy.  The intent was to identify three subjects, not two with subsequent names.  It’s misleading without the series comma.  There are lots of other examples on when the series comma is necessary. And, some claim, for consistency sake, it should always be used.

So now I’m going to have to sit down with the Comma Queen and show her the difference, when it’s needed and when it’s not.  Maybe then we can sign a treaty, calling an end to the Passive- Aggressive Comma War.  Hopefully negotiations will be concluded before the next grant proposal comes around.

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A friend lent me the book A Cat is Watching by Roger Caras. It’s only about cats, but in it was a surprisingly simple supposition to explain the invention of poetry – to bridge the vast gap between my interior reality and yours.  Seeing it out of context, like a sort of sideways glance in a one-liner, had more meaning than any of those intellectual essays on poetry in literary magazines.  It felt like an impromptu gift from random reading.

Reading at random, outside your preferences and genres, is good for the would-be writer or for that matter, most everybody.  A certain amount of promiscuity in reading tastes can be a source of new ideas, rejuvenation and salvation. Say you’re submerged in writing a novel; it’s safer to cross the boundary into reading non-fiction while you’re writing.  It saves you from the problem of comparing your style with another author, it removes a possible source of envy, and it gives your brain a break.

How to Welcome Randomness in Reading

A while back when an old friend of the family died, none of his heirs wanted his collection of books.  He was a right-wing, gold-bug, arch conservative small town doctor.  By happenstance his library ended up with me.  Many of the books were those heavy bound medical reference books with the kind of pictures that bring on the gag reflex. But when I saw his 1852 edition of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Other Phenomenon of Crowds I knew I’d stumbled into a real treasure trove.  It’s the all time classic tome about the psychology of feeding frenzies, asset bubbles and market manipulation, the best known being the Tulip Mania. It was out of print and had been impossible to find.  The collection included dozens of gems I never would have known about or run across.   

Not everybody can rely on a source of random must-reads falling into their lap like my legacy library.  But the next best thing might be the discount table at the book store.  I’ve had more luck finding a satisfying new book amongst the castoffs of the publishing money machine than on the Best Seller’s display.  Caesar’s Woman opened up the world of Rome in the series by Colleen McCullough.  My Antonia by Willa Cather was mesmerizing and led me on a year long quest to read most everything she wrote.  Patenting the Sun was a two-dollar non-fiction book about the polio vaccine that induced a sensation of pulling back the curtain and seeing the obvious hidden by everyday life.

Boredom is another useful motivator to push your reading limits.  It’s the only reason I read Death of Salesman. Rainy day ennui got me to pull it off the bookshelf in the family TV room because there was literally nothing else to do.  Those pitiful images of disappointment and the tragic lesson about how life can get derailed so easily was powerful stuff to a bored teenager.

Invite a little chaos into your reading habits, you might find some amazing ideas in the least expected places.

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“The wise man questions the wisdom of others because he questions his own, the foolish man, because it is different from his own.” —Leo Stein, American art collector and critic

In an 1817 letter to a friend, the poet John Keats describes one of the qualities that makes writers like Shakespeare so great: negative capability. Keats defines this trait as “…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In other words, this is the ability to sublimate one’s own individual assumptions about the world and write about uncertain (or potentially polarizing) topics in such a way that the author’s own views remain unknown. It is also the recognition that there are often grey areas in life which cannot be resolved through rational means. This requires an extraordinary degree of objectivity, and it’s much harder than it seems.

To enter into the mind of other people (or things) and speak from their point of view is an essential goal for writers, and certainly Keats demonstrates this skill in “Ode to a Nightingale,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and “Ode On a Grecian Urn.” Often some of the most engaging literary works are those where there is no clear side taken on contentious issues (such as the free will versus predestination dichotomy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex). But the question is, how can writers break free from their own personal perceptions and approach subjects from a more objective point of view? Consider these strategies:

1. Read writers who are good at negative capability. I’ve mentioned Keats, Shakespeare, and Sophocles. But there are plenty of other notable authors, such as Emily Dickenson, William Wordsworth, Anne Rice, Walt Whitman, and John Updike.

2. Learn to view situations from other people’s perspectives. Imagine not what you would do if you were facing their circumstances, but rather think about what they would do and why.

3. Step into the unknown. Force yourself to write about subjects or situations you are uncomfortable with (or know little about).

4. Write in a new genre. Tell a familiar tale in a different format. For example, if you normally write short stories, turn your narrative into a poem (or vice versa). Or you could try turning a poem into a screenplay (or vice versa). Different literary conventions require different sensibilities, and this can lead to breakthroughs in our perceptions of subjects.

One of the joys of reading is having the opportunity to experience situations from someone else’s perspective. To do this convincingly, writers must learn to put aside their own ideas about the world and imagine alternative possibilities. This is terra incognita for many people, but by embracing this approach, you may discover new avenues of creative potential.

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Mark Twain claimed that, before he ever published a book, he would “always read the manuscript to a private group of friends, composed as follows:

1. Man and a woman with no sense of humor.

2. Man and a woman with a medium sense of humor.

3. Man and a woman with prodigious sense of humor.

4. An intensely practical person.

5. A sentimental person.

6. Person who must have a moral in, and a purpose.

7. Hypercritical person—natural flaw-picker and fault-finder.

8. Enthusiast—person who enjoys anything and everything, almost.

9. Person who watches others, and applauds or condemns with the majority.

10. Half a dozen bright young girls and boys, unclassified.

11. Person who relishes slang and familiar flippancy.

12. Person who detests them.

13. Person of evenly-balanced judicial mind.

14. Man who always goes to sleep.

“These people represent the general public. Their verdict is the sure forecast of the verdict of the general public. There is not a person among them whose opinion is not valuable to me; but the man whom I most depend upon—the man whom I watch with the deepest solicitude—the man does most toward deciding me as to whether I shall publish the book or burn it, is the man who always goes to sleep. If he drops off within fifteen minutes, I burn the book; if he keeps awake three-quarters of an hour, I publish—and I publish with the greatest confidence, too. For the intent of my works is to entertain; and by making this man comfortable on a sofa and timing him, I can tell within a shade or two what degree of success I am going to achieve” (from Who Is Mark Twain?)

Who is our audience? While the notion of “art for art’s sake” certainly has its place, at some point writers must ask themselves what they really hope to accomplish by putting words on paper. If you’re writing fiction (be it a potboiler or more serious “literary fiction”), the story had better be engaging, otherwise you’ll likely lose your readers before you’ve begun.

The same is true for non-fiction. Although the purpose of your writing could be simply telling a true story or providing information, there are effective and ineffective ways of doing this. Historical writing, for example, often lands somewhere on the extremes of the audience-engagement spectrum: either it’s a compelling narrative that breathes life into figures from the past, or it’s as dead as Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones.

So remember Twain’s analogy, and no matter what we are writing, let’s all try to keep that drowsy fellow on the sofa awake.

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I cannot believe I am even putting these two activities together in a title. Individually, each carry enough anxiety to my heart and in some cases a huge amount of disappointment. At any given point in time, there is a huge possibility that goals set for either task are slipping further and further away.

Last week as I closed the velcro on my work out gloves for the 20th strength training session, I began thinking about my commitment to both exercise and writing and reached an epiphany. The ability to miss commitments in both are deeply rooted in reasons that are identical twins.

Try it for yourself. Make a quick list , your Top 3 reasons,  that are at the root of you blowing writing goals or skipping exercise commitments. Common reasons that often surface to the top are not enough time, too many distractions; fear of failure and not seeing positive results fast enough or not having a strong enough belief that your work will yield winning results. We are looking for the major win, the loss of weight quickly or the best seller right out of the shoot. Yet we know that most successful people take incremental steps with extreme discipline towards their goals. They master majoring in the minors. Start writing consistently, schedule writing time and shoot to hit it consistently for 10 straight times.

What would be your idea of something you could do this week to get back on track  or stay on track with your writing goals?  It’s likely to be found in the small minor things.  Take small steps and I’d love to hear what you are doing.

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In his collection of journals entitled Confessions of a Barbarian, the twenty-five-year-old Edward Abbey ponders the progress he is making on his first novel:

“The novel, my terrible novel, will drive me to ruin…A frightful labor!

“And the worth of it, the quality—the problem worries me night and day. At times I’m afraid to read what I’ve written, almost superstitiously afraid—and then at other times I do work up enough courage to hastily read snatches chosen at random. The effects are mixed—parts of the book seem hilariously funny, beautifully written, packed and quivering with life. And then I’ll read the same passage again, or another, and it will seem dead as junkyard iron, pretentious and false, weak, thin, spineless, empty and hideous.

“Who is right? The critic or the author? I swing constantly, if erratically, between power and confidence, and antipodal despair; between surges of triumph when I look at myself grinning at me in the mirror and can say, “Abbey, oh Abbey, you monstrously clever fellow,” and dank gloom of dark defeat, convinced of failure, crushed by doubt…”

I think all writers can empathize with these sentiments, regardless of their inherent abilities or levels of success. Writing is a lonely business, and when we are “in the zone” and experiencing the sweet rush of creativity, nothing seems impossible. But of course, those rushes don’t last forever, and at some point we go back and reread what we’ve written and wonder if what we’ve crafted is really any good at all. “I’m a hack!” we say. “A fraud! Why would anybody want to read this?”

On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that a gifted and respected wordsmith like Ed Abbey experienced the same ups and downs the rest of us do. For most of us, it is a natural part of the creative process. Yet this knowledge does little to shake off our self-doubts.

Speaking personally, I’ve found that being part of a writing group does wonders to keep my creative fires burning. Part of this is the accountability it affords, but more importantly, the honest and encouraging feedback my group provides is enormously helpful in pushing me through the “desert moments” of the creative process.

What about you? How do you combat the struggles and doubts that come with writing?

Taking a manuscript into a critique workshop is an expedient and sometimes necessary step to understand how readers view and respond to any given piece you’ve written. At their best, a workshop is a coming together of equally skilled and similarly committed writers under the guidance of a master of the trade, both as writer and pedagogue.

I’ve never been in one of these.

My experience has been in workshops where there was a broad sampling of participants, in both writing ability and commitment to the process. Some felt more like a beauty pageant, or worse, poker game, than a learning experience. It’s almost unavoidable, the collective, nuanced accounting of who’s the most skilled, the most inventive and the most likely to be published, tainted with the underlying fear that you may be the runt of the bunch. Oh sure, there will be the “what I love about your work” comments, and a few helpful suggestions, but unspoken is the competitive racking and stacking that goes on inside everyone’s head. Is his novel more likely to be published before mine? Did the group respond better to her story or mine?

Add in instructor bias and group dynamics being what they are, a workshop can very quickly devolve into an exercise in group- think based on the instructor’s preferences and prejudices. If minimalism is the favored style, then luxuriously layered descriptions, or a steady stream of consciousness loaded with emotional nuance are going to get less than enthusiastic reviews. Reading the instructor’s work beforehand can help to identify those biases. But, the knowledge can be a double-edged sword. If you don’t particularly enjoy their style or genre, that can prevent you from fully appreciating their comments and suggestions, and thus undermining what might well be good advice.

If you venture into the arena of a workshop, measure your sense of accomplishment not by how popular your manuscript was, but how much you learned about it. And, be sure to remind yourself that Kafka’s work would have been skewed, roasted and trashed with great enthusiasm in the beauty pageant of most workshops.

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One of the distinguishing features of modern society is our preoccupation with originality. Giving proper credit to the creator of something is the basis of everything from copyright law and patent offices to anti-plagiarism policies in high schools and universities. Much of this stems from an artist’s desire to get noticed in some way (as well as paid). While this desire is certainly not bad, the quest for originality also carries certain temptations.

In the 1934 book, Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande discusses some of the dangers that often plague inexperienced writers:

“When the pitfall of imitation is safely skirted, one often finds that in the effort to be original an author has pulled and jerked and prodded his story into monstrous form. He will plant dynamite at its crisis, turn the conclusion inside out, betray a character by making him act uncharacteristically, all in the service of the God of Originals. His story may be all compact of horror, or, more rarely, good luck may conquer every obstacle hands down; and if the teacher or editor protests that the story has not been made credible, its author will murmur ‘Dracula’ or ‘Kathleen Norris,’ and will be unconvinced if told that the minimum requirement for a good story has not been met: that he has not shown that he, the author, truly and consistently envisages a world in which such events could under any circumstances come to pass.”

I see this all the time when I ask my high school students to write narratives. What starts off as an interesting story suddenly ends with a “surprise” twist: The starving orphan is actually the long-lost child of the city’s wealthiest citizen; the heroine’s disease is miraculously cured with an experimental drug; or worse yet, “I woke up and realized it was all a dream.” When I point out that these sorts of endings are not very convincing, the students counter, “But I wanted my story to stand out.”

Brande reminds writers that the key to originality is not distorting a tale into something unrecognizable. Rather, it is telling a story from your own perspective. “There is one sense in which everyone is unique. No one else was born of your parents, at just that time of just that country’s history; no one underwent just your experiences, reached just your conclusions, or faces the world with the exact set of ideas that you must have. If you can come to such friendly terms with yourself that you are able and willing to say precisely what you think of any given situation or character, if you can tell a story as it can appear only to you of all the people on earth, you will inevitably have a piece of work which is original.”

Remember what Agnes Mure MacKenzie says about originality in The Process of Literature: “Your loving and my loving, your anger and my anger, are sufficiently alike for us to be able to call them by the same names: but in our experience and in that of any two people in the world, they will never be quite completely identical.” This principle is true regardless of genre, and when you think about it, isn’t bringing individual experiences to life in an engaging and believable way the basis of all good—and original—art?

I recently attended a weeklong workshop at the venerable University of Iowa.  This was my second year, and it seemed this time around more was gained from the experience.  It was an advanced short story workshop. 

Here are a few of the insights I took away.

Keep your promises.  The craft books all say it, Chekhov’s gun being the best example. Nevertheless, until it appears in your own work, it’s hard to see a promise made at the beginning that wasn’t kept.  In my case, I’d set up the reader to expect a resolution to something on page one, and didn’t realize it. It took a seasoned reader to point it out. My first instinct was to delete the promise until I realized it would be a more satisfying read to come up with a plausible way to keep the promise.

Combine Characters. Short stories are inherently, well, short. Too many characters, especially if they serve a nonessential purpose in the story, should either be eliminated or better, combined with an essential character to get the work done but without unnecessarily confusing the reader.  If multiple characters are needed, say a bar scene, don’t try to give names to everyone, but do give a sort of handle, or code to differentiate the masses for the reader.

Titles Should Do Double Duty.  We went through several examples of titles that were both intriguing and satisfying.  Here’s a change I made to one of my own. The title went from “The Frog with the Red Spot” to “What Did the Frog Say”. The latter came from an actual line in the story. Using a line within the story is a much better set up. The reader discovers the meaning of the title while immersed in the story.

Why is more important than How or What. Getting characters moving, talking and acting is important, but the action shouldn’t get in the way of understanding why a character made one choice over another. Whether through interior dialogue, or gestures, a character’s intent is more meaningful than the action itself. A reader will keep a tally of questions if the writer doesn’t provide the emotional logic behind the action.

The Page Two Move. The story starts in the dramatic present and then suddenly comes to a halt on page two as the author stops to provide the back-story. The more a story unfolds without flashbacks full of only description and exposition, the more interesting it is for the reader. Stay in the dramatic present as much and as long as possible.

Subjecting your story to a room full of strangers is a painful experience. However, often strangers are the ones who help us see our story for what it can be, and offer suggestions that can satisfy the reader even more. And, that’s what it’s all about.