writing

For hardworking, disciplined folks, I've composed a list of my favorite tools of procrastination, all in the name of creativity.

For example:

2. Start your exercise program by trying out that new zumba/spinning/yoga class at the gym (dancing on a bicycle with one leg behind your back)

6. Clean out your fridge (what is that substance in the Tupperware container anyway?)

15. Troll YouTube for funny videos

Read the list in its entirety.

I'm up today at The Master's Artist considering the question of whether we should publish or perfect our work.

On the one hand, why would I want to put anything out there that is less than my best? I have one opportunity to impress, and I don't want to waste it. One must dress for success. Plus, we all know this is the answer the agents want to see. Case closed.

On the other hand, my work will never match the ideal I have in my head. The novel is perfect. Until I translate it onto page. If I wait until perfection, I'll never publish. (Perhaps some of you have better luck with attaining the unflawed and unblemished.)

On the other hand, settling for mediocre art leaves a bad taste in my mouth (although that could be last night's garlic sauce). Art and excellence go together like beans and rice. If choosing publishing over perfection means settling (such a dirty word), I'll have none of that, thank you very much.

Read the rest here.

I'm up today at The Master's Artist.

A sneak preview:

One by one, the fourth graders approach the podium, perhaps praying to Erato, the muse of poetry, to offer their poems. Chins tucked, microphones held precariously in the general vicinity of their mouths, half-whispering, they rush through their pieces. Half of the works are entitled “I Am.” The others are acrostics of their names, their favorite things, and in one case, a dead sister.

Read the rest here.

I'm blogging today at The Master's Artist.

A preview:

"Hold on! Let me get my camera!" She swished out of the water, her large gold hoop earrings glinting in the sun. The tourist, a complete stranger, waited at the top of a 35-foot drop. The teenaged girl grabbed her camera--not bothering to dry her hands--positioned, and focused.

"Okay," she said. "I'm ready. Go."

The tourist jumped off the cliff, straightened into a pencil before hitting the water.

You can read the rest here.

I've been honored with an invitation to blog regularly at The Master's Artist.

As my friend (and now co-blogger) said, "What is this place coming to?"

Nevertheless, I will pop my head up on The Master's Artist every other Tuesday, beginning today.

A snatch from my inaugural piece (unless you count my guest blog a few weeks ago, but since that was a trial run, I suppose we can still call this one the inaugural post):

In my college music composition study, I worked on a violin unaccompanied sonata for an upcoming master class. For the first movement, I took a five-note motif and stretched it, condensed it, turned it upside-down and inside-out. I layered it in fugue and counterpoint. I syncopated its rhythm with hemiola.

In other words, I made that sucker work.

“Nice ideas in the first movement, but the second movement is where you really shine.” He pointed his long, bony finger at me. (Okay, so it wasn’t really bony, although it was long, but bony fingers make better stories.) “In this lyricism, I begin to see you.”

Harsh words to take as a young composer. It got worse.

Read the rest here.

Update: Sorry the links were not previously working. They're working now.

Confession: I don't love words.

Not as some do, studying etymologies, saving pennies (George Washingtons, Ben Franklins) to purchase the Oxford Dictionary.

An odd confession for a writer, I know. But saying "I love words" or "I love the word fructuous. Don't you just love fructuous?" is akin to claiming an adoration for a certain note. "How wonderful is Eb? I just love that note!"

I leave the word-loving to the poets. I take words, without care to their feelings, and manipulate them, use them willy-nilly to create stories, characters, and, yes, rhythms. I don't care if the word sounds nice or crass, if it would impress a Cambridge scholar or a soldier on the frontlines of Afghanistan.

This is not to say that I don't agonize over word choice. I stare at a sentence for hours trying to figure out what's not working about it, which word offends. Changing a single word can transform a maudlin sentence into a heartwrenching one, a bland paragraph into something amusing, a bitter passage into a sarcastic one.

This is not to say I don't turn words over while washing the dishes, folding laundry, or showering. I take the words of my story wherever I go. (Hence the need for my handy-dandy Nancy Drew notepad.)

In the end, if you want to know the truth, the words I use are not up to me. My characters make the decisions. Don't blame me if that curse word's there. I didn't put it there. My character did. Hey, I can't help it if one of my characters likes antiquated terms. She likes to read old books. Personally, I think she's a pain in the neck, but what can I say? And yes, her husband uses all of those economic terms. Everything can be broken into financial illustrations according to him.

At least I don't have a character who talks in limericks.

Yet.

"This is the same daughter-in-law who stole your grandmother’s china right from your house?” a woman in the table behind mine says.

I dig my Nancy Drew notepad from my purse to jot down this tidbit.

A second voice chimes in. “Wait. She stole your china? Why?”

“To sell it on Craig’s list, if you can believe that.” This from the offended woman, apparently.

I consider asking my lunch partner to switch seats with me to better see the facial expressions and hand gestures. But I don’t think I could hear as well from her seat.

“Did she tell you that?”

“No! Get this—you know how I love finding odds and ends on Craig’s List, right? Well, I just happened to see this china that looked exactly like my grandmother’s, so I clicked on it out of curiosity. I didn’t even know mine was gone at that point.”

Read the rest at The Master's Artist.

Birds tweeting (in nature, not on Twitter) interrupt the Boardwalk sounds.

It's not a real Boardwalk carnival, mind you. The children at recess in the elementary school a couple of blocks from my house sound no different from children running around the wooden slats with dripping ice cream cones. The construction machines (at same elementary school) sound like roller coasters winding up, taking their cars to the top of hill before releasing them to adrenaline.

And the cars rushing down the major street four blocks from my house become the waves cresting, crashing, and rolling back into the arms of Mother Ocean.

In this carnival, I write today.

This is my backyard studio.

(Pretend you don't see the magazine that's not distracting me from my writing. Not at all.)

Butterflies, birds, and squirrels keep me company. (Yes, the squirrels and I have declared a cease-fire for the moment. That's how beautiful this day is.)

The morning dove who's taken up residence in our gutters

She's shy. I had a hard time catching this shot.

Red-breasted something-or-other: That's the official species name.

I just watched this little sheila grab an earthworm from my garden (no! I need those earthworms!) and swallow half of it. She bounced toward me with the other half hanging out of her beak as if offering it to me. Too bad the memory card from my camera was in the computer. 

A few words from writers today on novels and on writing:

But there is a certain diffidence about me, not very obvious socially, to my own mind, that prevents me from going all out, as you call it. I assemble the dynamite but I am not ready to touch off the fuse. Why? Because I am working toward something and have not yet arrived. I once mentioned to you, I think, that one of the things that made life difficult for me was that I wanted to write before I had sufficient maturity to write as "high" as I wished and so I had a very arduous and painful apprenticeship and still am undergoing it. This journeyman idea has its drawbacks as well as its advantages. It makes me a craftsman--and few writers are that--but it gives me a refuge from the peril of final accomplishment. "Lord, pardon me, I'm still preparing, not fully a man as yet."

- Saul Bellow (in a letter to David Bazelon about Bellow's novel, The Victim), emphasis mine

The burden of [Frank O'Connor's] criticism is that fiction has not been faithful to Stendhal's definition of the novel as a mirror dawdling down a road. Instead it has insisted upon going behind the mirror, becoming self-absorbed and indifferent to that crowd which it had once brilliantly particularized . . . On the whole, he regretted this development. What he longed for was candor, not circumlocution, cards on the table rather than held close to the chest. For this reason and others, he could not approve of Joyce, feeling that when artistic method had become so dominating life was lost. He liked and practiced a more open confrontation.

- Richard Ellmann about Frank O'Connor in his introduction to O'Connor's Collected Stories

It's all the rage these days to say what you learned at a writer's conference. So here's what I learned:

1. You can remove a tick by rubbing it with soap counterclock-wise. Not that any of us had ticks, mind you. But I learned this.
2. Aldi's sells a wine for $2.99 called the Winking Owl. It's pretty decent. Also, Aldi's doesn't take credit cards.
3. I'm not so strange after all. Wally Lamb also writes so he can find out what happens to his beloved characters. I like this man.
4. Eugene Peterson used to write to share what he knew and felt. Then he went through what he called "the badlands." There he learned to write into what he didn't know. I like this man, too.
5. A tanka is like a haiku, except it has five lines. And I think the syllabic scheme is somewhat fluid, but I'd have to check that.
6. Basket-weavers are in danger of pulling their hip muscle.
7. I learned how to dance a semi-colon.
8. Some writers consider themselves expert brooders (i.e. Proust, Chekhov, and Cheever). I'm in good company.
9. The Art of Tea does indeed sell to individuals.
10. The term "human person" is redundant.