I am doing the internet equivalent of the old-fashioned writer's dawdle of sharpening pencils. I am finding writerish things via Google and YouTube. Because both of these videos made me laugh out loud and think that pencil-sharpening time is about over, here they are. Kurt Vonnegut, whom we can also thank for this:
1. "I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or
murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what
is.'"The actual advice here is technically a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's "good uncle" Alex, but Vonnegut was nice enough to pass it on at speeches and in A Man Without A Country.
Though he was sometimes derided as too gloomy and cynical, Vonnegut's
most resonant messages have always been hopeful in the face of
almost-certain doom. And his best advice seems almost ridiculously
simple: Give your own happiness a bit of brainspace.
Too many days spent too tightly ensnared in our own company or even more alarmingly, our own thoughts, may drive us to distraction. I am trying to get back on track. Being reminded that others are out there in one-man gliders, hoping to catch the necessary thermals and ridge lifts to carry them a safe and predictable distance helps.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012
If you are feeling flat or lost or unconnected and have any of his books on your shelves, grab one and open it anywhere. Or go to Google and find his quotes. Let them fill you and tell you this life is a both-hands business, no shilly-shallying, no farting about. We have to throw our arms around it, somehow calm its tentacles and shrill voice and befriend it for the impossible thing it is. With grateful excess of passion for a man who had no use for lukewarm.
We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
Ray Bradbury
Saturday, October 27, 2012
October 27
 |
| Wayne Thiebaud's "Cut Cakes" |
To do today:
Celebrate son's birthday, savor and delight in the gift he is, has always been. Appreciate the way in which his gentle nature, his humanness, his forgiving inclinations, his loyalty to friends, his questing mind remind me of what I value in this world.
Trust that all is well.
Find the joy in this moment, the present conditions.
Begin The Longer Piece, even if just a working title and opening paragraph. Do not mess about. This is important.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Clarity - not as easy as you might think
For all that YouTube offers, could there not be an original album version of Bob Dylan's "Oh Sister?" Could the covers perhaps be categorized separately? No disrespect to those musicians, just the sincere yearning to hear, on demand, the song as it plays in my head.
So having said ix-nay to that morning jukebox tune, and wherever it was taking me, I landed instead on a Van Morrison original in which my favorite part, and they are all grand, is the spoken-word segment..."I didn't know you stayed up so late..." and "...gotta play this Muddy Waters..." and more. The surely not-by-chance encounter he depicts stirs personal memory of a late-night caller in another century, another incarnation. A Dorianne Laux poem, "Antilamentation," posted by Elizabeth a few days ago, begins with the admonishment to "Regret nothing..." It is some piece of writing, enhanced by her inclusion of a recorded reading. I saved it as an ideal, the exercise I practice in hope of coming close. I took as its message that I must pay even more attention, make (and write down) the connections of this to that, not settle for anything less than the perfect word, the searing image, the truth. I've learned that, even in conversation before it becomes writing, clarity is my most reliable sidekick, a precision about what was, the straight razor cut that leaves nothing befogged. There is my assignment for today, for the rest of my days. And before the mail is collected tomorrow, I also have an art commitment to be completed with the same fervent intention. Not doing things by half-measures take a lot out of a girl. Let me rest a while in the music.
So having said ix-nay to that morning jukebox tune, and wherever it was taking me, I landed instead on a Van Morrison original in which my favorite part, and they are all grand, is the spoken-word segment..."I didn't know you stayed up so late..." and "...gotta play this Muddy Waters..." and more. The surely not-by-chance encounter he depicts stirs personal memory of a late-night caller in another century, another incarnation. A Dorianne Laux poem, "Antilamentation," posted by Elizabeth a few days ago, begins with the admonishment to "Regret nothing..." It is some piece of writing, enhanced by her inclusion of a recorded reading. I saved it as an ideal, the exercise I practice in hope of coming close. I took as its message that I must pay even more attention, make (and write down) the connections of this to that, not settle for anything less than the perfect word, the searing image, the truth. I've learned that, even in conversation before it becomes writing, clarity is my most reliable sidekick, a precision about what was, the straight razor cut that leaves nothing befogged. There is my assignment for today, for the rest of my days. And before the mail is collected tomorrow, I also have an art commitment to be completed with the same fervent intention. Not doing things by half-measures take a lot out of a girl. Let me rest a while in the music.
Monday, April 16, 2012
It was a large refrigerator
After beginning a clunker of a post, which sits in draft exuding hope thick as bus exhaust, I felt the need to refresh, that is to say, develop, something close to reliably consistent descriptive writing. If that's not possible, I have no back-up plan.
The only actual writing teacher I ever studied with had a label, refrigerator words, that included: large, cold, dark, pretty, young, words that, by themselves, fall short of creating an image. My brain has a setting - auto selected - in which everything intended to be creative goes flat and I begin channeling a Stepford wife who majored in refrigerator words.
It has been nearly two years since whatever angels hover around my left ear suggested that I find, in bloglandia, more writers. I found them/you and one link led to the next. I was given the breadcrumb trail to other writers whose names I might never have known, books of which I could have remained ignorant, music too far outside my sphere to have been discovered any other way. If we are sent messages from the universe, affirmations that, contrary to our crippling doubts, we are going in the right direction, I received a large one, as in five-pound, double-layered, heart-shaped box of See's candy, that morning.
For today I decided against the Colin Farrell clip in which he talks about writing poetry, my gift to myself as I grapple with the possibility that this blog is on its way to becoming 45% fanzine. It would have been helpful, illuminating, to have examples of my favorite descriptive passages. I was ill-prepared and knew I'd be distracted by something shiny if I tried to find those samples mid-post.
I may play with assignments such as we were given in the writing workshop. I may start with things that are shiny.
The only actual writing teacher I ever studied with had a label, refrigerator words, that included: large, cold, dark, pretty, young, words that, by themselves, fall short of creating an image. My brain has a setting - auto selected - in which everything intended to be creative goes flat and I begin channeling a Stepford wife who majored in refrigerator words.
It has been nearly two years since whatever angels hover around my left ear suggested that I find, in bloglandia, more writers. I found them/you and one link led to the next. I was given the breadcrumb trail to other writers whose names I might never have known, books of which I could have remained ignorant, music too far outside my sphere to have been discovered any other way. If we are sent messages from the universe, affirmations that, contrary to our crippling doubts, we are going in the right direction, I received a large one, as in five-pound, double-layered, heart-shaped box of See's candy, that morning.
For today I decided against the Colin Farrell clip in which he talks about writing poetry, my gift to myself as I grapple with the possibility that this blog is on its way to becoming 45% fanzine. It would have been helpful, illuminating, to have examples of my favorite descriptive passages. I was ill-prepared and knew I'd be distracted by something shiny if I tried to find those samples mid-post.
I may play with assignments such as we were given in the writing workshop. I may start with things that are shiny.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Monday, June 21, 2010
Meanwhile,
My fiction writing teacher loathed what she called refrigerator words; words like big or heavy, small, long, far, close...HOW big? she would ask, HOW far? Big tells you nothing without comparison. And so they invented humongous; problem solved. Forgive me, Marsha, for the times I have allowed that easier, softer way to lure me. The ability to think in words and pictures cannot be a common one; finding the reasons why this is similar to that is the game we will be playing until our thoughts run out.
To be a writer is, for me, to be a life-long apprentice. How do you quantify mastery as a writer...do the words cause you to weep, give you goosebumps, send you reeling like a Monty Python fish slap? How it feels in my writer's heart is that fresh degrees of precision await, if I take the time to reach them. Within the writing world, there are measures of achievement - published books, stories and essays and opinions selected by periodicals of note - and yet it does not feel incomplete simply to have a self-assigned task every few days, more often if possible; a sampler of what I hope are my best stitches or the newer ones which I'm trying out.
My memory was once such that my family would quiz me on meals we had eaten in certain locations along the California roads we traveled. Some of the towns we never saw again; to others we returned at least once a year. Now I can remember favorite meals at a Mojave cafe but not the name of the coffee shop. With a map in hand to prompt me, I could at least identify places we stayed overnight. From that it might be possible to recall dinner or breakfast, but mostly the names of restaurants have faded.
Occasionally the specifics are essential to the story, and there is the accuracy death-grip that comes from reporting. Then, if you factor in the vanity of recalling minutia over so many decades (all yawning lapses of time and event notwithstanding), I am uncomfortable, though not every moment, admitting that some of the pieces are gone.
This, you have guessed by now, is tap dancing, stalling before I am ready to burrow back into the cave of the drooling carnivore that "Wedded" turned out to be. On the days when mumbling and shuffling are as good as it gets, I give thanks for whatever sound and movement can be mustered. With the fantods upon us, any sign of life is reassuring.
To be a writer is, for me, to be a life-long apprentice. How do you quantify mastery as a writer...do the words cause you to weep, give you goosebumps, send you reeling like a Monty Python fish slap? How it feels in my writer's heart is that fresh degrees of precision await, if I take the time to reach them. Within the writing world, there are measures of achievement - published books, stories and essays and opinions selected by periodicals of note - and yet it does not feel incomplete simply to have a self-assigned task every few days, more often if possible; a sampler of what I hope are my best stitches or the newer ones which I'm trying out.
My memory was once such that my family would quiz me on meals we had eaten in certain locations along the California roads we traveled. Some of the towns we never saw again; to others we returned at least once a year. Now I can remember favorite meals at a Mojave cafe but not the name of the coffee shop. With a map in hand to prompt me, I could at least identify places we stayed overnight. From that it might be possible to recall dinner or breakfast, but mostly the names of restaurants have faded.
Occasionally the specifics are essential to the story, and there is the accuracy death-grip that comes from reporting. Then, if you factor in the vanity of recalling minutia over so many decades (all yawning lapses of time and event notwithstanding), I am uncomfortable, though not every moment, admitting that some of the pieces are gone.
This, you have guessed by now, is tap dancing, stalling before I am ready to burrow back into the cave of the drooling carnivore that "Wedded" turned out to be. On the days when mumbling and shuffling are as good as it gets, I give thanks for whatever sound and movement can be mustered. With the fantods upon us, any sign of life is reassuring.
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