How To Write

[Bmichael]

Our first lesson is about sentence/concept structure – creating interesting and vivid sentences to grab and keep your reader interested.

Here’s an example of three sentences. All are basically conveying the same message.

1. New Jersey is smelly.
2. Of all the states, New Jersey is the smelliest.
3. In the history of the United States, New Jersey has always smelled bad …and its governor likes donuts (a little too much).

Which sentence, in your opinion, expresses the message the most effectively?

If you chose number 2 or 3 – you’re incorrect and here’s why:

The first sentence is quick and to the point. It tells the reader exactly what he/she needs  to know about New Jersey.

The other two sentences are too long and laborious -   filled with ineffective commas, ellipses, and parentheses, all designed to blow smoke and disguise the real problem with New Jersey – you can’t order a fried egg –“sunny side up” in a restaurant.

I swear. Look it up.

The main thing to remember is never fill your stories with adjectives and/or adverbs – except when absolutely necessary. Nobody has time for that crap.

We’re busy.

Vacuuming With The Stars is on tonight. It’s the finals.

 

[Westerly_2]

How best to ask the question?

 

1. Why is New Jersey called The Garden State?

2. You can partake of the knowledge of Good and Evil in New Jersey; is that why God dubbed it The Garden State?

3. Governor Chris Christie was president of his class and a major athlete in high school. Did the world cast posies at his feet, thereby invoking the term “The Garden State”?

 

(In the interest of brevity being the core of sense, choose #1. It is clear, concise and doesn’t contain hidden religious or political baggage).

BTW: Does anyone have a clue as to why New Jersey is "The Garden State"?

[Marilyn]

#1 it is!  And here's way more information than you need, to answer the question:

http://njmonthly.com/articles/lifestyle/reaping-what-they-sow.html

[Bmichael]

The art of writing is little more than the act of feeling.

Writers are illusionists…magicians – artists painting pictures with words.

They are catalysts that challenge a reader to join their story.

Those that succeed find satisfaction.

The rest become best sellers.

[Bmichael]

I came across this recently – written by a friend, it’s a small piece of a much larger work - one of several gems happily discovered here and there throughout the story.

 

• “What does it do to a man to have his freedom taken away?  How does he remake his days, manage the interminable minutes, the everlasting hours?  How does he find quiet within the constant low pitch of noise, beneath the perpetual glaring overheads?  And what comfort in the nearness of so many but the company of none?  Each day indistinguishable from the one before, with no prospect of relief in the one to follow.  The terrible absence of beauty.  How does he abide in such sterile separateness?”

*Used without permission…so what?

 

 

[Marilyn]

Good stuff, B! I could hear the humming, squint against the glare, experience the loneliness or prison life. Is your friend a pro? Should be!

[Bmichael]

From NPR:

There is a story today about the world’s largest boring machine that broke down 60 feet underground while digging a tunnel under Seattle – creating a significant engineering challenge to repair it.

A reader (cubistguy) took issue with the following excerpt and  chastised NPR:

“One person close to the project says they probably could have still fixed it, but he says it would sort of be like a dentist doing a root canal without direct access to the patient's mouth.”

cubistguy • 3 hours ago

"One person close to the project says they probably could have still fixed it, but he says it would sort of be like..."

Poor writing skills, NPR.

 

Apart from the interesting analogy, what is cubistguy’s point? What’s wrong?

 

[Bmichael]

Book News: Children's Books From North Korean Dictators?

by ANNALISA QUINN

March 14, 2014 8:09 AM

 

Departed North Korean leaders Kim Jong Il and his father Kim Il Sung are both credited with producing children's books, according a doctoral candidate at Australia's Sydney University.

In a research paper published in The International Review of Korean Studies, Christopher Richardson writes that Kim Jong Il is credited as the author of a book titled Boys Wipe Out Bandits, "an ode to the redemptive power of ultra-violence," while Kim Il-sung is seemingly responsible for the fable The Butterfly and The Cock.

 Richardson told The Guardian that being credited with the books doesn't necessarily mean the late leaders of the Hermit Kingdom actually wrote them: "Even the publishers in the DPRK maintain a degree of ambiguity about the authorship of these tales, attributing the stories to Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, whilst acknowledging they were written down by someone else, The government thus musters a team of ghost writers whose job is to capture the essence of the leader's political and literary wisdom, known as 'the seed.' "

The father-son pair aren't the only dictators who had literary aspirations: Joseph Stalin was an amateur poet, Iraq's Saddam Hussein wrote a book, and Libya'sMoammar Gadhafi wrote treatises, essays and stories.

 

[Bmichael]

ALCOHOL:

Because no good story ever started with someone eating a salad.

[Westerly_2]

"A bunch of the guys was whooping it up at the veggie burger shop. The music man, with his sleeves rolled up, was playing a soulful harp." No? Really? Let me think....

[Westerly_2]

How about this?

Iron Mike cleared off his work table, leaving a space for bottles of the blue lady’s beer and a large, broad-bottomed mug. The blue lady, his muse, had never let him down. He preferred to scratch out the story outline on paper first, before tapping on the keys.

            It was many, many bottles later before Mike realized he was sitting at his table no more. Where were the walls and why was the room spinning? How had he arrived at the foot of this revolving stage on which a bevy of bodacious beauties bounced? From somewhere in back a man’s voice barked: “Hey, Mikey!” A shot rang out….

[Bmichael]

From The Rumpus

 

“THE.” “DIALOGUE?” “NOVEL!”

BY ALEXANDER KALAMAROFF

August 9th, 2014

The dialogue novel is a unique creature. In it the conversations among characters are the primary or only means of narrative advancement—so the initial experience might be similar to reading a play or movie script, where we’re tasked to mentally dramatize what we’re reading. But the dialogue novel is intriguing because it is not meant for stage or screen. And compared to its compatriot, the monologue novel—which has a substantial history shaped by Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and W.G. Sebald, to name only three masters of that form—the dialogue novel is quite rare. While they can be challenging to read, dialogue-dominated narratives create amazing opportunities for philosophical inquiry, stylistic originality, and stunning creativity that are surely worth exploring.

With the release of Dave Eggers’s Your Fathers, Where Are They? And The Prophets, Do They Live For Ever?, there’s been a bit of buzz about all the talking in the novel. Eggers’s tale is told entirely through dialogue, without a single physical description or psychological detail to guide us. Thomas, a slightly unhinged guy in his thirties, is holding an astronaut, a retired Congressman, and his mother, along with a few other people, captive in an abandoned military base and is questioning them about why the world is the way it is. In a negative review for the New York Times, Michiko Kakutina called this Q&A format “a straightjacket that prevents Mr. Eggers from exercising his virtuosic powers of description.” It’s not surprising that some readers may be off-put by this constricted approach to storytelling. But this constraint has been employed to perfection by a diverse array of writers, including Diderot, Donald Barthelme, David Foster Wallace, Lauren Myracle, and Thomas King.

*

 

[Westerly_2]

Hmmm.... Are you going to jump in?