Our communities are not always sure of how to handle original writing. While some groundbreaking works are taught to middle schoolers, others are burned or banned. While some writers are hailed as saviors of humanity, others are excommunicated or censored (or worse). Those who toe the line of social norms and challenge society to question their pillars are not only risking being misunderstood, they are asking their readers to take a risk as well.
Switching genres may make one a better writer— eventually— but it can play havoc with one’s confidence. There are many times I sit back and ask myself what I’m doing. Is this project worth the time and effort? Is it meaningful? It’s one thing when a single poem goes nowhere, but two years of work? That’s quite an investment to ultimately see fall flat.
We have all survived our English classes -- elementary, middle, high school. . . some of us college. Many taught by the best intentioned people, teachers we ever had. Because they knew if we could not communicate, could not write clearly we’d encounter problems from our relationships to our employment. And yet there were two things not taught. These things I learned years after my comp classes but from my comp prof, Art Seamans, who wrestled with and continues to wrestle with the Poseidon nature of language. He ultimately forced the two blessings which follow.
Telling is appropriate for many things in a story. It allows you to better control the pace and feel of events than going full force with “showing.” Showing is good for some types of writing more than others. There needs to be a mixture of telling and showing, the proportions of each depend on the story the writer is trying to tell and how he wants it told. To a large degree “Show Not Tell” is pretty flippant advice – not always wrong, but not the solution for everything.
I like technology, - been doing it for longer than dirt is old. I love developing, testing, and learning it. However, have this love/hate relationship with it. It can help and it can frustrate.
Several poets who I worked with through the Writer’s Block Party meetings and with the Journal had asked me to look at their poems and edit punctuation errors, or add punctuation to it completely. I realized that, for many poets, the lack of punctuation is not necessarily a creative choice. I wondered, how might punctuation change the tone, meaning and effect of their work if they knew how to use it?
"Looking back, I realize that many of the classics I’d read in high school and college were written in a much more dense style, and I read those books simply because they were required reading. That’s not to say that I didn’t love them and cherish what I’d read, but I seldom find myself wanting to go back and reread them, because most—like The Heart of Darkness—were just written in a style that required a lot of work, and were tedious to get through because of what I realize now was poorly constructed architecture."
A short story is an invented prose narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with few characters and maiming at unity of effect and often concentrating on the creation of mood rather than plot. What we call “coffee break” reading. A short story is more than 7,500 words that can be read in a single sitting. Describes a single event, a single episode, or a tale of one particular character. Does not usually involve major twists and conflicts, and involvement of various sub-plots and multiple characters is not common. A short story is basically fictional prose, written in a narrative style. The narrative style may either be first or third person.
"Do a second and third rewrite before you show the manuscript to the editor. At the very least, use spell check on the entire manuscript, and then have some friends check for errors. Make it the best you can do on your own so you won’t be paying for a professional’s time to do what you could have done yourself." Patty Zion, from "Working with a Freelance Editor"
We ended the workshop with examples of these techniques by poets such as Robert Frost, Robert Burns, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others. For me as the presenter, the discussion reinvigorated my awareness of these tools and the power they give the poet to touch the reader at a fundamental, emotional level.