Writing

Stylin’

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One of my co-workers came to see me in my office today. He said he was interested in writing. He was particularly curious, he said, as to how a writer develops a style.

Here’s the answer I gave him. It’s probably not the last word on the matter, but this is how I understand it, based on my own experience.

First, you find an author you’d like to be like. And you try to write like him (or her). This isn’t actually part of the process as such. It’s just where most of us start. You’ve got to start somewhere, so most of us start as imitators. When I was a kid, I tried to write like Poe, I recall.

This derivative writing is the raw material from which you begin to build your identity as a writer. It’s Square One, nothing more, really.

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A Shining Moment of Chivalry

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Sharon Pelletier writes on her experience among chivalrous men. I used to be chivalrous. Perhaps I still am, but I feel like it anymore. Maybe my light is dimming. Maybe when the dragons you fight are within you, that feeling of chivalry gets lost.

Authors, Writing

How Is a Novelist Like a Gardener?

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They both go digging around. Man, that’s bad. Gimme a minute to come up with a better answer. In the meantime, Athol Dickson has returned to blogging and talks about the similarities betwixt novel writing and gardening.

hmm, how is a novelist . . . The good ones call a spade a spade?

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Government Representatives Ride in Herds

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I am told the Congressman John Conyers, seen in this video, has argued in the past that congressman should read the bills they are passing. Through the link, you’ll see him making fun of that idea.

Voting on legislation you have not read is completely immoral! I can understand partial readings and using summaries in part, but more than once congressmen have been surprised by the bills they voted into law, and that must stop. Throw them out, if they can’t keep up with things on Capitol Hill, and for the leaders in both parties who encourage herd mentalities with our congressmen, throw them out too or raise the noise make them slow down to represent us, not their party or lobbyists or any special interests other than us.

Fiction

“Save the World, Save Time for Tea”

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John Wofford reviews Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for Patrol. He writes:

“In Smith’s promises that Zombies transforms Austen’s ‘masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read,’ and press materials that declare Austen ‘unavailable for media contact,’ Pride and Prejudice and Zombies becomes a calculated twist on our own media-saturated, nothing-as-sacred/everything-as-entertainment approach to … well, everything.”

Reading

15 Books

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(This is a meme from Facebook. I figured I’d cross-post it.)

Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. The Bible. Obvious, but also true.

2. The Screwtape Letters. The first book that told me that reason was of God, and that God approves of pleasure. Seemed too good to be true at the time.

3. That Hideous Strength. A difficult book that’s worth wrestling with. The inspiration for Wolf Time.

4. The Lord of the Rings. I’ll never forget my first reading of the Mines of Moria scenes, and the charge of the Riders of Rohan.

5. Heimskringla. The essential text for all my novels.

6. Mere Christianity. It all seems so elementary today, but on my first reading I struggled with every page.

7. Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. Almost a perfect book.

8. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger. A friend mentioned my name to him personally, recently! I made squealing noises like a teenage girl.

9. Prince Ombra, by Roderick MacLeish. An obscure, but extremely fine, adult fantasy that was very inspirational to me before I got published.

10. The God Who is There, by Francis Schaeffer. Actually, any number of his early works could be mentioned here.

11. Moby Dick. I waited until I was an adult to read it, and so had the privilege of actually enjoying it.

12. Julius Caesar by Shakespeare. The first Shakespeare play I read.

13. Conan the Adventurer, by Robert E. Howard. First gave me the idea that I could write heroic fantasy myself.

14. The Bishop/Weiss trilogy by Andrew Klavan. A hard-boiled detective story on an entirely higher plane.

15. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Who can forget his first Sherlock Holmes?

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Speling styll maturs

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If you don’t think spelling matters, you’d still better watch it when you’re programming your GPS. This couple in Italy misspelled “Capri” and ended up driving 400 miles in the wrong direction.

Poetry

When the World Ends

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I’m not sure what all Czeslaw Milosz is thinking about in his poem, “A Song On the End of the World,” but the closing seems to speak to those who could take up a higher call, but do not because they are too busy.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

No other end of the world will there be,

No other end of the world will there be.

No other end of the world will we anticipate, because we have today’s simple worries to occupy us. No high calling is on us than to clothe and feed ourselves. Some of us could be prophets, teachers, leaders, or encouragers, but we aren’t because we’re too busy or maybe too distracted. Maybe we’re blogging too much.

I suppose the first step out of this is prayer.

Writing

Back When Everyone Read His Grammar Book

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Where are you in the grammar debate/squabble over singular third person pronouns? When anybody is opening a door, should we write that anybody is opening his door, his or her door, or their door? I’ll state upfront that using his or her is just a waste of words and speedbump in your sentence. The issue is really whether we should use the singular his or the plural their, becoming comfortable with their being used for one person.

Until today, I thought his was the singular, gender neutral pronoun, and unless you’re talking about girls (like I am when I talk about the little people in my home), then you should say things like everyone should use his napkin, not his shirt. This afternoon, I read in an NYT article that they has been used for individuals for centuries, and a grammarian named Anne Fisher changed it.

Fisher’s popular guide, “A New Grammar” (1745), ran to more than 30 editions, making it one of the most successful grammars of its time. More important, it’s believed to be the first to say that the pronoun he should apply to both sexes. . . . Meanwhile, many great writers — Byron, Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope and more — continued to use they and company as singulars, never mind the grammarians.

Well, if Austen, Thackeray, Eliot, et al used it, I’m not going to complain ever again.

Fiction, Reading, Writing

How is Reading for ‘Escape’ a Bad Thing?

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Suitcase near antique wooden doorway on beach Travis Prinzi writes about fantasy in literature, leaning on Tolkien’s Fairy Stories essay. He asks why do many readers assume authors are just writing for the fun of it, not crafting an artwork to one degree or another.

The real “gnosticism” in this discussion is not the artist who builds a story on an imaginative key, but one who thinks that books provide some “escape” from the “real world,” and that this escape is a good thing. Tolkien wrote,

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in a prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?

For Tolkien, the pejorative use of “escapism” was married to the false belief that current trends define Real Life – the electric street lamp, for example, is nowhere near as permanent as Lightning. But most of us know more about the lamp, because it’s more relevant to our daily existence. The fairy-tale takes us to the lightning, the “more permanent thing.”

More permanent things–that’s what I want to write about.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture