Zebrareader and the Writing Process:

Editing and being wordy

2011-06-02T13:33:00.000-07:00

I am reading "Getting the Words Right: 39 Ways to Improve Your Writing" by Theodore A. Rees Cheney. Writer's Digest Books: 2005 that I bought from Powell's the other day. I spent some time at the store to make sure it would be a book I really could use. It is proving to be just that.

In the first chapter, it goes after a habit that I have and one that many writers have and that is including extra words, paragraphs, chapters, whatever. I will look at a chapter or a sentence and love the way it sounds or looks and hate to push the delete key. Not too long ago, I would not hit it at all. Now, I am getting better at it. One writer, Carolyn See, says it is "killing your children". Oh, I can tell you from experience it is exactly that.

Someone asked a friend of mine who is a published writer how he knew how he knew what to put in and what to take out. "Feelings will tell me every time. Make no mistake. When I write some incredibly beautiful prose but it makes me uneasy then I know it is something that needs to be removed. " Another writer who writes some of the best prose in the business removes more than she writes and she just puts it in a special file she keeps on her word processor so she can do it without tearing her nightgown (she writes in her bed clothes.).

I think that is where extensive reading comes in. A writer who reads as well as writes just knows what is working and what is not. If something sounds clumsy, it usually is. Sometimes, you have to put the writing down and take a break and eat some lunch or have some coffee but come back and look at it again. I knew one writer only who was drunk or stoned all of the time he was writing. When everything in his body began to fail, he took an overdose and left this world and he was stoned when he did. I think he was the rare exception. I don't think he ever wrote sober so never knew if he could nor not. He said he could feel his feelings better.

I never write drunk or stoned and when I tried it many years ago and read the result I was convinced that I was not one of those rare examples. I need to be sober when I write. I think I need to be sober when I exist. I often tell people I rarely drink because of the calories, but truth be told, I just don't like the feeling of an artificial high. I get high naturally although never too high because one can fall really fast and long and that is no fun.

Again, I am the kind of writer who depends on feelings. I also listen to what I am writing so I can see and understand what it is I am trying to say. I also put things away and then pick them up again and read them again. Often when I read old blogs, I re-edit them. It helps to put the stuff out there because I am practicing my writing and then publishing them. I don't get paid for my blog, but I try the best I can. I have learned so much blogging.

Of course, it is a one-sided conversation with myself. I often don't know what I am thinking about something until I write about it. If I write something and I feel good about it, and I put it down and come back and still have that good feeling about it then I did it well. The main purpose in life is to have a good time at it. Writing is something I don't have to do, but it is. Call it a compulsion but it is one of the treats of life as reading and listening to music. Editing can be fun too.

Writing to Deal with Problems

2011-05-31T10:50:00.001-07:00

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that the more you travel, the more it becomes apparent you can’t escape yourself. I think when I was growing up, I really wanted to escape where I was, my family of origin and their craziness. Then because the insanity was with me in my mind, I walked right into more it when I established my own family. It took a lot of work on dealing with my inner demons to finally escape so that when I traveled, I did not take the twisted monsters of my family with me.

For the most part, I did most of the inner self work through writing. There was the journal writing, but there was other kinds of writing such as novels, poetry and short stories. I tried therapy at different places and with the exception of one hypnotherapist, I never found as much relief and self knowledge as I found in writing.

I always found words to be miracles in that one could put legitimacy to what was being felt and experienced especially when told repeatedly that it was not happening. It was. The words and sentences were the proof. I gathered all of the facts and put them down and I saw how what I was told was unreal was real. Writing saved my life. Other writers with similar backgrounds have said the same.

It isn’t just people like me with dysfunctional families but members of populations who have lived with the knowledge they are told they are not as good as the main population or that what they are feeling is not right or they should discount their own feelings of worth. I think that is why certain groups of people suddenly burst forth with great writers who express a counter opinion of worth from the mainstream or writers who write in secret in an oppressive government who tells them they are happy and free when they know they are not. Examples are the gay and lesbian populations of many countries including the United States. Women in many countries around the world write in journals . In China, women evolved their own special language so men would not read what they were writing about.

I am not writing here that expressing oneself on paper or on the computer screen is a cure all for depression or for other mental problems because it is not. It certainly did not lift Ernest Hemingway out of his depression. I remember where I was, walking the streets of Imperial Beach in California, when I heard on my small Japanese transistor radio when it was announced that he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot. Many writers could not write themselves out of their mental problems. I just know it helped me stay ahead of mine. Sometimes even writing can’t help. Still, it helps tremendously.

When I moved here to Portland, I did not take my problems with me or for the most part. Maybe I will find out next week I did. Who knows? If I did, I will write about it. What I do know is that I will have a new batch of them here. I will be starting my classes soon and have to deal with the impossible to ignore rejected manuscripts all writers get and the Battle of the Bulge that I have fought all of my life and the battles yet to manifest on the horizon.

Believing the Self

2011-05-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a very dysfunctional family and was taught to disregard what was happening around me. Unfortunately, I learned too well and took those lessons with me into adulthood so that when I met adults I was involved in other people's sick games. I was astonished that I would be involved with the same things that I had tried so hard to escape. Again, what was happening me during those times as an adult I disregarded it especially when people told me that it was not happening. I believed them.

Things have changed. I write the things that are in my head now and I don't care what others say. I report it and take it as the truth. When I first found out that my house was stripped of its contents, I told my adult child that I was thinking of getting rid of some stuff when I got back. I did not want him to feel bad about what he did. When I got back to my house and saw the empty rooms where bookcases and books filled were I was heartsick. I saw the missing paintings, jewelry, television sets, furniture and sat in my room and became depressed and gained 20 lbs. Then I heard my ex-husband was coming back. I moved to Portland, Oregon.

I started to write in my journal and finally get mad. I began to see the enormity of what had happened to me. Then I had to get over the pain and detach and get on with my life. I did it with writing. There is still so much more to do. This morning, I started to edit some of my short stories. I got ready to take some art and exercise classes next month.

The family of my origin was such a dysfunctional family that my oldest sibling became a psychopath, my brother was a drug and alcohol addict who had issues with women and killed himself after a lifetime of unhappiness and depression. My parents are deceased now and although I ended up getting along with my mother during the last few years of her life, I never got along with my father and was glad when he died at 70 years or so. I was always afraid he would be a ghost and haunt me and I am glad to say he didn't. I had nightmares about him for years after his death. I never had nightmares about my mother after her death. I really believe she was a demon. I have nothing to do with my sister for she not only steals but does far worst and is better I stay away from her. All this I carefully note in my journals.

I am being more honest in this writing blog than I have been in the past. When I was a child, my father beat us all up with impunity. No one cared about this in those days of the early 1950,s and I still have the scars to prove it. My mother in her unhappiness beat us as well. Both of them were twisted sexually and abuse all of us from an early age. I worked hard to find help and did in Redding from providers that I paid myself. I could never get help from the Veterans Administration because there were so little help in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for women although this has changed somewhat in recent years. I also found that meditation especially writing meditation was a god-sent for me.

Now, when relatives tell me I said this or that, I tell them I am not in the same situation and tell them I never said that. I no longer let them tell me what is real and what is not. I tell myself what is in reality and what is not. I wish I could have learned this earlier, but it is good that I learned it now than never.

Writing has and is saving my life. Writing dangerously is writing honestly. It is being honest with not only the self but the public. It is putting things down in one's own voice. I have a friend who is gay and was told all of his life that there was something wrong with him because he did not want to find a woman and settle down and have children. He would rather have found a man and had a good time because he does not want to settle down with anyone because like me he finds trusting someone enough to live with is very difficult. Also he finds that he is a very happy man enjoying his life and not beating himself up because he lets others judge him. It took so long for me to stop doing that too. He helped me stop that by reading his memoirs along with my own writing. His family is angry at him for writing about his past with them and uncovering all of their ugly secrets. The last lawsuit was recently thrown out of court. They always are.

Not all of us have such ugly pasts but we all have pasts. We also have presents and it is good to record them because the minute we shut our eyes at night the present becomes the past. I watched an old movie, "The Mating Game", on Netflix last night. Everyone in the movie are no longer alive. I could look up all of the stars such as John Lund and Gene Tierney and see what happened to them after the movie was filmed and where they are buried.

We all end up in the cemetery at one point and it would be nice to record the past so we can read it and learn where we were last year, five or ten years before. It was too bad none of those people in that movie recorded their lives for all of them had interesting ones. Those are the ones who have entries in Wikipedia. Many of us won't. We should be the stars in our own lives. We would be if we are recording our lives and if necessary writing dangerously those things that happened to us to not only release the anger but to help others in similar places as my friend did in his memoirs.

Writing Dangerously

2011-05-23T10:10:00.001-07:00

Pat Conroy in his book, “The Reading Life” talks about his love affair with the English language: “I have always taken a child’s joy in the painterly loveliness of the English language. As a writer, I try to make that language pitch and roll, soar above the Eastern Flyway, reverse its field at will, howl and reel in the darkness, bellow when frightened, and pray when it approaches the eminence or divinity of nature itself. “

That is well and good for Conroy and I can understand how he loves language, but I didn’t start off with that love. Don’t get me wrong, I love language and the words on paper and how the meanings of words sing to me of things, ideas and even about people who lived long ago and even those who live now. I loved writing at first because it put terms and thus validation to what was happening to me. Language made me feel less alone in the world and the horror of my childhood became less of a nightmare because words made it seem like I could share it with others and that there were other human beings who were suffering as much as I was. Later I found out through words that people suffered far more than I did.

For instance, the words or term of post traumatic stress was a miracle when I came onto it and realized that this was what I had and why I acted the way I did. I went to see therapists at the Veteran Administration and would ask them what was wrong with me and the idiot would answer, “why do you need to know?” He would never say. Finally, in my reading I found the answer which was validated by a therapist in Redding, CA. I felt such a sense of relief and also that I finally knew after all of these years.

Perhaps that is why I found the concept of “dangerous writing” so appealing if I understand it correctly is that it seemed to give me permission to write the things that happened to me and to disregard the taboos that is placed on me if I was to tell the world and myself what happened and what still lurks in the shadows of my mind. Tom Spanbauer has his own reasons for writing what he wants to write and I have mine.

It’s ironic in that Conroy went through his own Hell with an abusive father but he had a loving mother. He wrote about it in his novels. I had no such thing. I had two abusive parents and attempts to bond with my mother did not work. I bonded with a brother to some extent and I bonded to books and to an inner world I would escape to during moments of abuse. What makes this whole process even worse was the way I did it. To escape the horrible abuse, I split into different and complete personalities and when I tried to get help for them the medical establishment, in part, disagreed whether or not this process even existed. I am talking about Dissociated Identity Disorder or DID or Multiple Personality Disorder or MPD. It was something to the public to titillate about and not something that saved me from becoming a psychopath. I survived and was abused further by an ex-husband.

I lucked out and I believed it was with spiritual help I found a hypnotherapist who helped me to integrate which I did. I then began to start the process of forgiving although I don’t think that is the right word. I wanted to stop being mad at those individuals so I can get on with life; but I needed to learn from those lessons otherwise I would be taken advantage as I was last year by my own son and his father. I needed to stop living in the same swamp of ugly hell my parents had put me in and escape from those who would attempt to put others including me for whatever reasons. I need further healing so I can let go. I also think I am not the only one in this particular place as I learned years before. There are others who went through what I want through. Maybe I can help others.

I think Spanbauer is right in that one can find redemption and detachment through writing through writing dangerously. If this is what is meant by dangerous writing then I agree. For such a long time I have been trying to figure out how to write what I want to write and was stymied by the inability to do so. Now, I am beginning to see a glimmer of light.

Using Writing To Think

2011-05-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

I have often used my journal to figure out what I think about a certain matter or subject. Often, I will start to write about something and find out my opinion is different than what I thought it would be. Many writers have stated that they write to find out who they are and what they think about things and people.

Pat Conroy in his book, "The Reading Life", (Doubleday: 2010) states: "Good writing is the hardest form of thinking." I can concur on that. I have been writing on a daily basis for many years and it involves turning my thoughts into words and it is rarely satisfactory. It sounds so great, so steeped in wisdom and beauty once it is in the head and so mundane once it is on the computer screen or on paper.

Words are limiting and restricting in what they do to the thoughts. I am always reminded of the example of the word 'snow' and how the Eskimo people in Alaska have so many words to express snow and the English language have so few. When I first saw frost as a teenager in Southern California, all I could do was describe it as dew that is frozen on the ground and cars. I had no idea it was frost and was amazed when someone told me what it was. Another example for me is all the different hues of green of the trees. How do you describe the trees when there is a wind and they are all moving like a chorus of different textures and colors of green?

When you are saying things that are life changing or describing something incredibly important like the death of a parent or the love that you feel towards your child as he or she is being born, you have to put words together in sentences and make it mean what is in your heart and mind and that all depends on your word arsenal and your talents. You face the limitation of the language itself and your own ability to capture the magic.

Sometimes, it works. When you exercise those muscles that go into writing of mind and hands along with the heart and it flows with the spirit of the Tao, it flows freely and it full of the enchantment all magicians yearn for. It soars with the eagles, becomes the substances of rainbows and flies with the foam of waterfalls and in the clouds. Then you feel the extra amount of wizardry that writers feel now and then. It works best when you practice and practice every day and read the words of other writers.

Some writers write because they have stories to tell. I do that. But to be honest, I write because I cannot stop writing. I have to put my fingers on the keyboard or the pen on the paper. Even if no one else reads what I have written, I will still need to write. I also need to read no matter what it is that I am reading, I still need to read. For me, writing and reading is part of the same process. All of it is governed by the process of thinking. Writing and reading is thinking.

Pat Conroy looked at his world through his parents and family. I did not. I lived my life as an individual. I did not look for heroes although there are writers that I like very much, I have no need to see them up close and personal. I just want to read their words. When my sons were growing up, I saw many well-known people with my children and we met numerous ones. The most important reality is my own. I did not bond with any of my family but with books and music.

Conroy also uses novels and other kinds of writing to understand the world he lives in. I do that too. Conroy feels stories are paramount to everything else. Sometimes, I have found ideas to be important and have read novels which were written to express ideas. One of the most important elements in any story that I read is that I must like someone in the story. If I don't like anyone, I rarely stay with the story or book. The same goes for anything including movies. I need to think when I read so the writer must not do all of the work and I am a mindless and passive reader. It sounds too much like television which I don't much like. I want to wonder and question things and come to my own conclusions. PBS is a good example that has some programs that presents ideas and the audience must come up with their own judgments.

There is a lot of the world that I don't understand. That is a lot of motivation for me to keep writing. I like to think about what is happening around me and what it is that is really out there in the world and inside the inner world. I figure I have plenty of to write about. Every time I think I have reach a layer of understanding in my life, another layer is showing up underneath it and the whole process starts again.

Details

2011-05-17T09:38:00.000-07:00

I have wanted to be a writer since the age of 7 years. Although I have read everything I could get my hands on, I knew at that age I was not very talented or capable as a writer. I couldn't spell worth a darn and knew practically nothing about grammar. What I had in my head never did translate onto the page. Of course, I had the excuse that I was a kid. Over the years, that excuse got weaker and weaker, but I wrote anyhow. It was the passion that kept me going.

I read authors that really have this wonderful gift and of course they work hard at it. I am reading "My Reading Life" by Pat Conway(Doubleday:2010) and he writes about books and writing since they are linked in many ways for a writer. He writes: "As a writer, I would have to walk many strange avenues, staying loose and keeping my eyes open, memorizing the names of streets and the faces of strangers, listening to unknown tongues, exploring severe, tended gardens, being aware of the traffic and the besieged faces pressed against windows in dimply lit houses."

I learned along the way, it was not a matter of just learning the words, grammar and way of putting sentences down; I had to learn to notice the details with my eyes wide open and see where I was and remember the people around me, the sounds of the music of life and the emotions of the moment. When I first started to write in earnest, I remember trying to write about walking on a forest path, on a busy street and although I have been there so many times I could not remember. I could not describe it as a writer. I was a big blank. I read other writers' descriptions and they put me as the reader on the forest path or on that sidewalk. I couldn't. They used words I knew the meanings and word structure I was familiar with but they did their homework by noticing the details of where they were on any given moment.

There were times as a young adult, I withdrew into myself and just worked on school work and did the least on whatever minimum wage job I had to get by. Of course, I did my homework but the world during those times seemed surreal. Noticing people and places were not considerations for me at the time and I noticed this deficient in my writing. I did not have a computer as they were not in vogue at the time. My writing suffered greatly. It wasn't a waste for I got through college and never did stop reading. Still, I would walk down the street and feel as if my feet did not touch the ground.

I have since married, divorced, had children and recorded details in my journals. I have found that worked best for me. I have gotten used to noticing my surroundings and my writing as improved tremendously. I even enjoy it now. When I travel, I pay more attention to my journal than the camera. I even sketch different places and love describing the places and people that I see. I am now a confirmed people watcher. I sit with my journal and just write what I observe. People rarely pay any attention to me especially since I have become a senior citizen. I would think laptops would be a great asset in the art of describing one's surrounding since there are so many people in restaurants and other places with their fingers on the keyboards just typing way and no one pays any attention to them.

I am not an expert on what writers should do but what this writer has done and what has worked for me. I know until I started to watch, describe and record my surroundings I was of no use as a writer. I wrote lifeless prose. I had to be able to describe a brick building and the windows in it as well as the doorway in a story. If I couldn't see it in my mind's eye, the reader could not see it either. If I could not see the character and describe him or her, then the reader could not as well. I often read how other writers do it, but it is actually doing it myself that makes all of the difference. I take what other writers do and apply it to what works for me. Everyone does it differently and there is no right or wrong way of doing it except not to do it at all.

The other day, I finished a murder mystery by Georges Simenon, "Maigret and the Apparition" (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1964). I have read many of Simenon's murder mysteries involving Chief Superintendent Maigret. In all honesty, I read this book to discover why his books were vivid and real to me when I read them. I have never been to Paris, but I can see Maigret and the streets and buildings as well as the people of Paris clearly.

It is a simple story involving a shooting of a police officer for an unknown reason. He describes the victim, Lognon, by his nickname, "Inspector Hapless" and he lies in a hospital close to death while Maigret probes the reasons why Lognon was where he was when he was shot. Each time the author describes the food that everyone eats, the buildings they are in and even the clothes they are wearing even the unimportant characters as one woman's husband who works as a night porter. He is sitting in a chair in a ugly purple robe, legs crossed and one slipper dangling from one foot. Yet, the description is not laborious and complicated. Simenon threads his descriptions through a lens that is concise and meaningful. Little does the reader realize that it is the marriages of the victim, Maigret, other characters that are being described. It is not a careless list of descriptions but carefully put together list of details that not only is part of the plot but gives meaning within the story itself. The crime is about art theft and murder but it is about marriage and how marriage differs with different people. There are good ample reasons that Simenon is considered an outstanding writer of this genre. In this case, he did it with details, effortlessly and almost without the reader's notice.

I learned a valuable lesson about the importance about details a while back. I took a speed reading course so I could whiz through my books in college and gain the important information about plots from the books I read. I had to unlearn all of those things I picked up in speed reading because I lost the flavor of the prose and because I missed the details of the book. Now, instead of reading a book just for the plot, I read it for the wholeness of the experience. I am the better for it. The same goes for writing. I put things down slowly and then come back to it with my editing pencil and put the details in it without being wordy keeping in mind the advice about not using adverbs unless my life depended on it.

The only enemy I have in reading is time. Pat Conroy's book is a library book so I have to keep at it and not go at it as slowly as I did with Simenon's murder mystery which I own. I also can't mark up Conroy's book since I don't own it. Still, I don't check out five or six books like I used to do when younger. The most I ever check out is three. I doubt if I will get to the third book before they are due.

I have never taken a creative writing class. I just let myself teach me what I need to know by doing the two essential things every writer needs to do, read and write. Other writers have done the same. When I was writing, I could see I was lacking in that area and needed to fix that hole before I could go on with what I wanted to do. I know there are writers out there that need those creative writing classes, but I am comfortable doing what I am doing now. I leave my options open, "staying loose and keeping my eyes open."

Memory

2011-05-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

I am reading Pat Conroy's book, "My Reading Life"(Doubleday: 2010) and in it he writes about his life as well as the books he read and the books he wrote. He wrote about his life growing up as a military brat, the son of a U.S. Marine fighter pilot. It was a rough life which he describes in his book, "The Great Santini". His mother divorces his father after 33 years of marriage and one year after his father retired from the military.

During his childhood, his father was cruel to his seven children and to his wife and none of them ever told anyone of the hell they lived at home. Conroy wrote: "Because I was born to be a novelist, I remembered every scene, every beating, every drop of blood shed by my sweet and innocent family."(pg 195)

My father was not in the military, but he beat us and drank heavily. My mother finally divorced him after many years of marriage. I wrote about it in the journals I kept as no one cared about child abuse then. My mother never told anyone and denied it until the day she died including the alcoholic rage he would be in from time to time. Alcohol played a part in my brother's death as it plays a part in my sister's life. Luckily, it skipped over mine.

I was with a friend the other day and he had forgotten some of the times we had over the years. We had been friends since the 1980's and he is a very intelligent man and a few years younger than me. It seemed a little sad to me as he has not kept a journal. During the time that I have known him, he has been in a happy marriage to a wonderful partner and they are still happy together.

We were gazing at the journals that I had in a closet in my office in my new apartment. I still have them although I have no idea what will happen to them once I am finally gone; my youngest son saved them when my ex-husband and oldest son did the Purge in 2010 while I was overseas. I will forever be grateful to him for that. When my memories are disappearing, I can look over those journals and be reminded as I was the other day when I read the journal I wrote just before leaving for Korea in March 2010. I remember accurately what I was doing but not what I was feeling.

There were many times, I would look things up to be reminded of what was happening to me at certain times in my life and get a surprise at my reactions at a certain event or be re-acquainted with my feelings for I often remembered it differently. The events I usually got it right but my emotions were often different. Of course, I am looking at the past with hindsight. I could see how my first marriage was falling apart way before it really did. I just did not want to admit it to myself. The signs were certainly there. I am reminded of people who have since left my life. I often described dreams I have forgotten about. I wrote about my fears, angers and loves. I wrote about loving someone that I have long since forgot about. I wrote about the incidents of raising children, some very funny and treasured. My children are middle-age now. I am so glad I did.

Pat Conroy is a very gifted writer and although he is not one of my favorite; I can understand his book about his reading life the same as I can understand about being in a family in which the father was brutal and cruel. He still loved his father, but I never loved mine. I envy Conroy. I think this was possible because of his remarkable mother. I had trouble with my mother who beat us too. My mother came from another country and felt so disappointed in her choice for a husband and took her disappointment out on her children. Although we made peace before she left this earth, this estrangement left its mark on my life. I wrote about it in my journals as well. I don't know the end result of my writing life, but I do know that writing saved my life and continues to enrich my life.

The Two Me's

2011-04-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

I am in the midst of moving. Some of what is being packed are my journals and one journal was sitting all by itself and I looked at it. It was the journal I kept when I retired from civil service in 2002. I looked at parts of it and read this day's entry for it was set in the same time of the year. I could tell immediately that there were differences between the self that was going through a transition in 2002 and the transition that I am going through now.

That is the advantage of keeping journals for I would have thought that there was nothing new between those two periods of time and the journal told me differently. I could tell that I was still tied up with my job at the state agency I had walked out of at the end of March of 2002. There were some communication happening and I was feeling pain and sorrow from it. I was also active with the state union although I was in a transition period with them as well. I was the president of the Northern California part and a assistant chairperson of a committee that was very active in civil rights. On that day, April 28, 2002, I was finishing and returning from training some stewards in Sacramento.

There was no doubt I was feeling doubt about the future as I am now. I think from the writing that I was more tied into the past as I am now. I was angry and hurt from what had happened on the work site and was inclined to think about that. I wanted an end to that pain and tried to find ways of dodging that pain through my writing. I can see dark depression in everything I wrote then and it seems to pour off the page. I can certainly understand that reaction, but I was in no mood to feel it then. I wanted it gone. I wanted to get to the next chapter and to end the one I was in.

Although I am in a similar place, I am not so depressed although I could feel it when I read the journal. The degree of unhappiness that I am feeling is not going anywhere soon as I am not completely happy with the move that I am undertaking although I can see the necessity of it as I could see it in 2002. I will continue to feel what I am feeling now when I complete the final stage to Portland. I am sad about the broken relationship with my oldest son although I am optimistic about healing it sometime in the future. It just won't be happening anytime soon.

I think I am more honest now. I am more honest at how I look at him and certainly more honest at how I look at his father. I need time away from James and I am hoping never to see Dan again. I look at the nine long years that happened between the transition period that occurred in 2002 and now and I want to say that it is about time some growth took place. I am trying not to chastise myself like that anymore. Life has a way of beating one over the head. I don't need to add blows to this.

I look out of my window and can see how things change. A sycamore tree that has been there since I bought this house in 1997 has died and its dead bare branches stretch out from a corner of the window. Two new houses were built across the street and I can just barely see the tops of the roofs. What I can't see so readily are the changes that happened to me over the years. Pictures can show the ravages of time, but not what has been happening inside. Journals can do that. Mine certainly showed me aspects of me that had changed in the chapter of transition when I retired. Other journals that I wrote in Korea showed me other changes. I think I am more able to accept these situations. It still does not mean it gets easier. Change is never easy but as a tree that is tossing and turning never slows down the river my protesting the change never really slows down the passing of the years. It just happens. Life is what it is.

VS Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners

2011-04-26T06:19:00.000-07:00

VS Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners

1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.

2. Each sentence should make a clear statement. It should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements.

3. Do not use big words. If your computer tells you that your average word is more than five letters long, there is something wrong. The use of small words compels you to think about what you are writing. Even difficult ideas can be broken down into small words.

4. Never use words whose meaning you are not sure of. If you break this rule you should look for other work.

5. The beginner should avoid using adjectives, except those of colour, size and number. Use as few adverbs as possible.

6. Avoid the abstract. Always go for the concrete.

7. Every day, for six months at least, practice writing in this way. Small words; short, clear, concrete sentences. It may be awkward, but it’s training you in the use of language. It may even be getting rid of the bad language habits you picked up at the university. You may go beyond these rules after you have thoroughly understood and mastered them.

I am not saying that you should follow the above rules without exception, but these are good rules to keep in mind. I am also a believer in breaking rules too. Still, these rules that I found today are great and if you need some rules in your writing life, you can't get any better than these.

Dark Hour of Despair

2011-04-19T07:50:00.000-07:00

What happens when the dark hour of despair turns out to be a dark day, week, month and so on of despair? When I am writing on my own blog, I try to have the answer before I begin. What does a writer do when she or he turns around and faces rejection on everyone or those we treasured the most? We feel despair and then we pick up the pen otherwise we die. When we feel totally alone in the world and we have gotten old enough when most of our friends have died, we feel the dark night of despair we turn to the spiritual guides but we do it with writing.

Certainly, what is happening to me right now is not unique. When times are hard,writers, artists, are busy expressing themselves through their art. That is why so much of what humans are capable in artistic endeavor develops in hard times. I was born into hard times surrounded by good times. It remains to be seen if I can rise above what has happened to be the artist and writer I need to be in order to express what is happening to me and not fall down to the suspicion that it is not happening but in my mind, the black hole of all writers that rises up as a black wall to stop the words from coming from the mind and soul and yes from the heart. In short, I must believe in myself and my vision.

In all writers, there is a center where doubt comes up and becomes, if allowed, the black hole of despair and decay, some call it the monkey mind and others call it a writer's block, the gray cloud, or whatever. It stops one from believing in one self. Every single writer has a valid message and work to give to the world. It may not end up in the Canon of memorable fiction or non-fiction but every writer if he or she is true to their craft has something valid to offer. One must believe in that. As the putting of one foot in front of another, it is the putting of one word after the other in spite of the fact that others might not agree it does not matter you must believe, the writer must believe.

Some people write and no one reads. That is the miracle of the Internet. I put my stuff out there and some people read. My despair does not involve my ability to communicate for that is coming along just fine. It is my personal life where my family sees me differently than I do. That could be a point of sadness when love becomes a trap, a way of controlling another. I find that intolerable.

I have had love affairs in my life, some consummated and others not; but the greatest love affair I ever had is the one I am still having with the English language. It has been a wild ride that I am determined to continue. It is most useful when the darkest hour of despair is upon me as it is right now. Could anyone ask for anything else?

Lawsuits, etc.

2011-04-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

Ted called me from Key West this morning. I liked that since I just got a call from someone who wanted to talk to my youngest son. I asked who it was since I just put the phone on the charger and I knew my son was still asleep. I said I was my son's mother. He said he was my son's grandfather. I ran to the other side of the house since the only grandfather was my ex-husband's father and I was afraid something had happened to my oldest son who is a state policeman. My son ran and answered the phone and it was his father who had disguised his voice. I breathed a sigh of relief. My son gave his father his correct phone number for future reference although his other brother has it. I have no idea why he needed to call me.

Of course, Ted, was full of espresso and not feeling well as he had just been served a summons. He was ready to release a book in a few days in which he describes a rape that happened to him when he was nine years old. The rapist had read an advance copy of the book that he got from Ted's mother and he felt that people would know who he was from the description. He was suing Ted for damages and an order to stop the release of the book.

"It just brings up all of the things I felt back then," he said over the phone. I could hear the hissing of the espresso machine and people talking in the distance. "He told me not to tell anyone although I was injured. My mother saw the blood on my shorts and took me to the hospital. I told her who it was and she didn't tell the police either. None of us did."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because he was my father's brother and he was supporting us. Dad was somewhere trying to make a big killing or something. My mother said if he was arrested or people knew he raped a boy, he would harm him as a doctor. And we would not have any money to live on. "

That part was not in the book. I had read the advance copy of the book already. It was his best and did not want to see it stopped although I had no idea if his uncle had enough to do that. I asked him about that.

"No, the publisher always makes sure I have plenty of evidence before we start a run of a book. I have a notarized statement from my mother and from a cousin who was raped by him too. He does not know we have that. I support my mother now so he does not have the power of the purse anymore."

I thought about the many writers that did not have that and how many of them have been sued some for good reasons and some for speaking the truth when someone did not want the truth out there. I heard an lawyer at a League of Women Voters say that the worst thing you can do to a public official was to embarrass him or her. I think that goes for anyone. The doctor in question was now retired. I wonder why the cousin did not sue him except that it was beyond the statue of limitations or men still find it embarrassing that they were raped by men. Ted is not one of them, thank goodness.

Ted said that although he knew he was gay before he was raped, but he had nightmares from that experience for years. He had told his uncle that he might be gay and was scared with that knowledge and the good doctor told him that he gave him some lessons on what it was like to be gay. Ted wrote about being powerless and starring at the mattress as he was being held down and for a long time he thought of sex as painful and degrading. He found out it was not that way at all although he has not been able to sustain a long lasting relationship with anyone, but that is another book he will write someday. He did not want to tell me about it as it would ruin the book if he did.

What he did want to talk about was a discussion that he had with another writer who said writers are not what they write about and Ted had disagreed. Another writer who wrote about writing meditation and novels as well was there in Key West for a writer's workshop and she agreed with Ted. She said she had different parts of her self in her novels and that she was her books but in metaphor form. I had to think about that for a while. Am I my books, stories, these blogs? Yes and no.

Ted said that several other writers were of that opinion. Sometimes the stuff they wrote were not of themselves but from somewhere else outside of self, almost a spiritual bonding of the writer and of the Cosmos. I liked that and agreed to it in part. Sometimes when I am writing, something takes over and I am writing with something else I can't identify that writes with me. Sometimes, it is not there. Ted said he never has that feeling but works on uncovering the layers of experiences that is him so he is what he writes. The writing meditation teacher agrees although she feels a spiritual connection it is still her writing,her words.

I am sure the debate continued after I got off the phone. Ted was there with the other writers for the same conference on writing. He is always amazed that people pay so much money to just hear them in person. Sometimes when it is not far from where I live, he sends me tickets to those conferences. I go when I can. It is the transportation that is the problem. Still, he did raise some interesting questions as he always do. There are no definite answers.

The Ending

2011-04-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

A blog that I was reading about advice for writers said that a writer should write the ending of his or her novel first. I always know the ending of a novel that I am working on and of late the ending of a short story although I may not know exactly how the characters will get there. I just create them and let them loose. That may not be how other writers do it, but that is my way. I hate it when they do what they want to do instead of what I want them to do but the ending is always the same. Joe always ends up with Jill or Sally ends up will Sadie or whatever. What I never know is the information they learn along the way. I learn right along with the characters.

There has been many times that I know a character will do something but not for the reason I assumed it would be. I think that happens in real life except in fiction we get to study them a bit before they act or after wards. For instance, my ex-husband trashed my house in my absence last year. I was astonished and never really understood completely why although I have hints. If it was a story I would have been forewarned by traveling with the character before he did it and after wards. I have a feeling the ex-husband is dealing with issues that have nothing to do with me. As a writer I would have been able to play with it in fiction.

I wrote a response to a letter to the editor supposedly written by a fifth grader yesterday in the Record Searchlight. I suspected it was not but by a child but by a parent. The letter writer used the movie, "The Princess Bride", to make a point about reality. Reality has many different sides that we can never see as a human being in the drama that is being played out and a movie is a very thin slice of that drama. Fiction is a more satisfying portrayal of what is happening but is still not the complete truth. Nothing is. I am still learning about things that happened to me as a teenager. I see things that I did not understand back then but now with more information of life understand more. Its a complex business. I cautioned her not to derive her sense of reality from the movies.

As in novels, life has only one ending. That is an easy one. The train track that we are going down at this increasingly fast speed ends the same way. Each of us, no matter how much we hope differently, will die. It is the middle that changes and that is where the pen hits the paper or the fingers hits the keys. The is the whole crux of the matter. A few times when I wrote murder mysteries, which I so love to read, I knew the what the crime or murder was but rarely how it was done. I could come up with why and even who the murderer was. I was short on the details on how the crime was done. The crime was the perfect crime for even I couldn't figure out how it was done. In real life, I was too aware that most criminals are stupid.

I love it when the reasons we do things are a mystery even from ourselves. I see this happen over and over again especially when I worked as a social worker. I see mothers who live controverted lives in their households so they wouldn't find out that their husbands were molesting the children because he was bringing in big paychecks. Ugly as it was, they were unaware consciously they were doing this although it was plain to me. People live lives on several layers all of the time. It is called denial. Heavens know I have been there on many occasions.

Writers live in denial too and that is why we should all have the edit pencil at hand or the delete key handy. We put things away for a time and return and see things we missed before glaring at us. Some writers call it "killing our babies" because we have to delete some of our best writing because it just does not belong in the story. Some writers put it aside to use in another story or book which I think is a great idea.

Time is a great healer for many things in real life but it gives the much needed detachment for our work and helps us spot things we would not have otherwise have seen before. It is that way in life as I wrote I understand things that happened to me in the past because we change. Again, we need it too in our writing although we do have to let our work go and start new stories, books or we get mired in the traps of perfection which is not a good thing for writers, a little but not a swamp that buries us.

My friend Ted who writes memoirs always knows the ending of his books. He is alive when he starts his books and he is alive when he ends it. He likes to say his books are his celebration of his sobriety. He is uncovering one layer after another as he descends into the madness that was his life for so long. Once he exhausts these layers and the mine is finally bare, he figures he will start to write novels or something. He isn't worried. The vein of gold that he is working on is very rich.

I think that is better than Forest who sends his servant-wife out there into the world to have adventures with who knows who and what and then makes her report them in detail so he can write a book about them. I often wonder who takes care of the children when she is out there having adventures. Forest can do that because he is good in turning out good prose, but Ted is right when he says his fiction is surface fiction. His characters rarely understand what is going on around them. They just enjoy the world in lurid phases and enjoy the good life. What the heck, people buy his books but I notice there is always a bunch in the second hand stores. No one seems to want to keep them. Forest always knows the end of his books and after he talks to his servant-wife, he knows the middle. I am curious about his servant-wife's sense of self or lack of one that she is willing to do anything he wants. She even wears clothes that he picks out for her that is very suggestive. She is still young enough to wear them but what happens when she gets too old? Will he find willing women? Experience tells me that if you have enough money you will.

I enjoy writing. I think one should write the way it is the most enjoyable. Of course, most writers don't depend on their earnings to pay the rent or house payment and put food in the fridge. Forest is the exception as Ted is. Most even with books to their credit have day jobs. That is why being a writer has been an occupation for the upper classes. It is certain that I don't depend on it for if I did I would be homeless. There is lots of advice out there for writers. That very fact used to appall me because I thought there must be a lot of writers out there making a living. Now, I try not to think about it and just do what I want to do and have some fun doing it. I think one should always know the end of a story or novel as one knows the end of life but like everything else, it isn't necessary so in fiction. In life, I am afraid nothing you can do is going to get you out of that date with the cemetery no matter what religion you follow tells you. Sorry....

Anger Novels

2011-04-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

I just received a novel that will be released from a friend who wanted me to read it. I was flattered as she is a good writer and she normally writes short stories. She wrote it a few years ago when she was angry with her then husband. She thought I would understand. I divorced mine over 25 years ago and he recently released some pent up anger at me during my absence on my house last year.

Susan said she wrote the novel instead of short stories because she knew her anger was way too big for a mere short story. I asked her if that was the reason she wrote in the first place. She said she did not give it a thought until a mutual friend, Ted, told her that he started to write so he could kill his abusers on paper instead of in person. One cannot go to prison for killing people in a story as in real life. She loved the idea and started the novel with the idea of writing it for her own amusement, but it went into a novel and her agent loved it when she showed it to her.

So, I took some time out of what I was doing to my house and read it and to be honest I could not put it down. It is called "Time out Time" and it is about a mild mannered wife who supports her husband through law school and during the time when he tries to pass the law exams and until he finds a job "worth his talents". Then as soon as he finds the ideal job, he moves out. All this took 15 years. Then on top of that, a neighbor tells her that during the time he was supposed to be studying for his law exams, he was screwing every housewife in the neighborhood who would have him. This was a mirror of what really did happen.

Unlike Ted, she did not want to kill Matt. She wanted to get even. Since, she did not have to support Matt anymore she found an attorney who was able to get her some money but not much. She sold her house which she bought with money she got from her mother's estate although her then husband tried to get anyhow. She had a good attorney and he prevented that since it was premarital money. Her mother died before they were married and she bought it. She quit her job and sold the house for a nice price and for this current time was a miracle. She sold her short stories and the last collection did very well.

She kept returning to the novel and how she got even with her ex-husband. First, she found out the dream job he was able to get was based on the romance he had going with the daughter of the main partner. In the novel she messed up that romance by subtle tricks that showed him involved with other women except it worked even better when it turned out to be true. She dumped him and the law firm edged him out. He found another job that paid him a lot less but several girl friend found themselves pregnant as someone put pin holes in all of the condoms that he kept in his dresser. It was very foolish of him to leave his key under the doormat as he usually did. Susan did not think that would be believable since most woman would take birth control but the editor kept it.It illustrated who the ex-husband's character was and the type of women he was involved with. In a few months he would be having to pay birth control. It was so easy to do since Susan was so trusting during their marriage. He did not think other woman would be so angry.

A surprising thing happened during the writing of the novel. Susan found that her main character was getting over her ex and getting on with her life. She dropped the vengeance game and started to get on with her life. What made the book really real for me was that she did not find romance and find happiness again but she came to grips with the whole fairy tale story itself. She began to examine what it mean to have a life of one's own. She became acquainted with herself and found out what she really wanted in her life. She started to look back on the dreams she gave up so her husband could have his. With the money in the bank, she did what her mother wanted her to do in the first place and that was to enter medical school.

The book was about what goes through a woman's life when she starts to do what she really wants to do and what other people thinks of her when she does. It was a remarkable read. She had become a nurse so that she could work long hours to support her husband. Now, she was free to get on with her life and she was astonished that she wasted so much time on revenge. She was glad he left.

Of course, Susan did not go to medical school; but she started to do the things she wanted to do before she was married. She also never wrote novels because the turn around for money was too long. She is at work on her next novel. Now, she does what she wants to do. She does not think it will be an anger novel though; but I would not want to see her angry again or do I? The novel she wrote far surpasses anything she had written before.

The Very Best of the Best

2011-04-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I can't write which is writer's block because I feel I can't write the best fiction or the best essay. It isn't enough that I can write the best I can do. It has to be the very best. It has to be the kind of writing that turns Gore Vidal green with envy. It has to be the kind of writing that raises Ernest Hemingway out of the grave kind of writing. Of course, I can't do that so I can't write.

Also, what sounds brilliant in the mind sounds mundane on the screen or on paper or when someone like Forest calls you up and tells you that it is crap. Then I run to the lake and just write in my journal where I don't have to be a genus but do have to write and write about how I am not understood by the world.

Oh, there are so many reasons why a writer can't be the best of the best and better than he or she is capable of being although this does not mean the writer doesn't write things that surprises the writer because that happens too. The writing process is such a mysterious process. Sometimes, we are crippled with fear when we leave our bodies and worry about what others think or what our friends and family will think. My friend Ted who writes memoirs told me that before he gave up alcohol and drugs he would drink and take drugs and take to his bed in mortal terror of what his relatives would think of the book he just released because it was so obvious he was writing about them. Then he told me later that they were such Philistines that they didn't even know he wrote books. He wasted his money on all that coke. He was never so glad to give up the drugs although he misses the times he would go to bars.

Ted tells me that Forest writes books that sells and even writes scripts that well known movies are made from but in a few years no one will remember any of his stuff because his work is what Ted calls surface crap. They please people because they don't have to think too much to read it and there is plenty of sex and deviant sex in it. Ted says he knows of several writers who read his books just to get the sex scenes for their own books. One time when Ted was talking to Forest he returned a call and got his servant-wife on the phone. He propositioned her since she said she said he got all of his sex information from their sexual escapades. She said yes and asked where they should meet. Ted was astonished for he was joking and thought she knew he was gay. He told her they had to wait until his meds took care of his STD.

It is true some writers don't have high standards for themselves, but many do. They work darn hard for one sentence or one paragraph. They do research so that what they are writing will be accurate. I read someone's first draft the other day and was knocked over her research of bats which played a part in the story of a biologist. She told me all of the work she did and even the interviews she did with scientists to make sure what she was writing was accurate. Even when you do research, if a fact is too strange for fiction the reader, the editor who sees it first, won't believe it. You have to back it up sometimes in your story with some evidence. One writer could not sell a book until he did that and he put it in the body of the story.It worked. It sold and did very well. There is something to the adage, stranger than fiction.

Sometimes, if you are in a bind when you want to write poetry better than Walt Whitman or win the Nobel Prize with one short story, it is best to write in your journal about the obsession so you can get some balance back. Just seeing these beliefs in writing is enough to get one chuckling to yourself and back to the word processor. I have a friend, Carol, who is an artist and makes an decent income doing book covers, children's books and sells her paintings at science fiction conventions. She also writes on the side and is one of the people who got burnt by a online press service who used her work without pay although it was with her permission. The publisher in question got her mixed up with someone else so that not only did her work get published for no pay, she got no credit for it. She said it took one long soak in the tub before she saw the humor in it and drew a cartoon and sold it to a newspaper and is now considering doing editorial cartoons. She would never have considered doing it without that mistake.

Carol said she knew of an artist who did pornography until the magazine wanted him to do some sex acts he thought might be illegal. He did a children's book instead and had a best seller. People had been telling him all along that he was the best in porn but not anything else. He feels better about his work especially since he has young children. His wife said she does not feel bad about cashing his checks anymore at the supermarket.

A writer's path is a strange one and getting obsessed about being the very best we can be is great but being better than one can possibly be can be the recipe to writer's block. One can say, "I can't write right now because I have writer's block". Forest who writes even during his sleep, as far as I know, never had writer's block. He says he never has. He also says he never edits as it all comes from his brain perfect. One time, I got one of his books free and took an editing pencil to it and I was surprised to see large sections that I would have edited out. Heck, he sells and he likes what he sells and his servant-wife likes to cash his checks at the supermarket. When your brain tells you that you can't write unless it is perfect, take a nice hot bath.

Criticism

2011-04-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

I don't like criticism and will try very hard to avoid it as much as possible. I never read reviews of my stuff although to be honest I rarely get written up but do on occasion. So, it was with great reluctance that I answered the phone the other day because I could see that it was someone I try to avoid as much as possible. Even my friend, Ted, won't take his calls anymore. Jo Ann who just got her first novel published told me that she wanted to slit her wrists after one of his calls. She ended up throwing away her cell phone and it was not a cheap phone. It was one of those Android phones. She stopped the car on a busy bridge in Portland, got out and threw it into the river and then drove off. One guy yelled "Way to go!" She later told Sprint she lost it.

I will call this guy Forest as I know of no one by that name. He is a very successful writer and is far more successful than anyone I know in my small circle of writers. He is also a very critical man about what we all write about and how we do it. Ted told him in no uncertain terms what he could do with his word processor. The rest of us just stay on the phone and listen to him because he does write letters of recommendation to publishers and agents. In short, if I had them, I would say he has me by the balls.

Forest told me that I write too emotionally. I write about people in a too magical way. Life is so good, he says to me in his typical oily manner. You are always so optimistic and that is not realistic. I can hear his doting wife in the background as she fixes him those huge cups of ice because his desk and phone is near his private refrigerator. She cracks the ice tray and drops the ice in the cup and fills them up with his favorite drink, Pepsi Cola. I know he has kids, but he keeps them somewhere for as young as they are I never hear them. Forest tells me sometimes that she rubs his shoulders because he has to spend so many hours in front of the typewriter. Yes, he types his first draft on a typewriter and he likes to collect them. He must have dozens of typewriters.

He told Jo Ann that she wrote her first novel about her father who was a union organizer in too emotional way and that only women would read it. It is too early to tell if he is right or not. "To Kill A Mockingbird" is such a book, I counter. He tells me that I don't know what I am talking about and I bite my pencil in half. Forest said the only reason that Jo Ann got her book published was that the publisher liked books written about unions right now. Oh, he asked did I know her new phone number? No, I lied. I could not reach her. I understand she lost her phone.

Sometimes, I think we put up with too much because we think we need certain people. I think if I don't talk to Forrest ever so often I won't get the help I need when I do need it. He has helped on occasion. Maybe I am afraid to take a chance on finding a market for my stuff without his help. Ted doesn't need his help. He found his readers and he doesn't need him. I don't have such a loyal following. I asked my son to move out of my house and maybe I need to change my phone number too and make it a clean breast of getting bullies out of my life for Forest is a bully too.

Joseph Campbell said that if you follow your bliss, the Cosmos will help you in your quest. Other people have said the same thing and I have found it to be true. Maybe it is time to trust that adage and move on to be my own person and not lean on people who I dislike but think I have to have in my life because I need them. Maybe it is time to trust in my own vision and in my dreams.

It is also important to question why I put up with Forest's negative talk in the first place. All writers come with baggage from our past. It is important that we don't give our creative power away to good luck charms, beliefs we don't question and the truth of living in the present. I am blaming Forest for something I do to myself. He is a target for my anger when the real target is myself and the disdain I feel for his point of view. I can feel superior to him knowing he has made millions from his books but all he has his a servant wife and no friends. The problem isn't his but mine.

That is the trouble with criticism. It makes one look at things we would rather not look at. I don't think I like me when I think of Forest. Maybe, I need to throw the cell phone off the bridge too. I can't tell him where to put his word processor since he doesn't have one which made him even more angrier at Ted than he would have been. I remember Forest telling me several times how mad he got at Ted for saying he had one. I need to put a proper perspective on things and feel more confident in myself and in my own ability to find my own way home.

Writing What I Want To Write

2011-03-16T08:53:00.000-07:00

I have the hardest problem in writing what I want to write. I have all of the good intentions of writing about this subject or that and then I start to write and I end up with something I didn't want. I end up with some lukewarm piece that is thin, lackluster and not at all what I wanted to put down. It's not that I am writing something that wasn't as good as I wanted to write, but that I wrote something I did not mean. I did not put the whole truth down. Fear kept me from pushing the keys down.

Many writers have this problem and I am one of many; but I don't want to be one of many. I want to write or put down what is in on my mind. Is it that I fear other people's reactions? Am I afraid that people will react to the true me? I have been attacked for my opinions before. I was even physically attacked one time and had to call the police. I got suspended from my day job for doing that, but got it back when the union protested this treatment.

I think it extends into my fiction and poetry. I don't think it is a good thing. I wish I could put down what the solution to all of this is, but I don't have it. I have learned lately the first thing in any difficult situation is defining the problem. Well, the problem involves fear. I am afraid. I am afraid of rejection because I don't have enough confidence in myself as a writer. Marcel Proust was afraid of writing about homosexuality at first but did so slowly even though it was not accepted in France when and where he lived. He ended up writing the greatest novel of the 20th century although he was always afraid people would find out he was gay himself. He found the courage. I don't have a sexual orientation problem and even if I did it would be acceptable in today's climate.

I think when a writer puts down her or his words, they are presenting themselves naked to the world. I have always had a very thick wall around me. Obviously, many people do and I am no different. I can still feel the rejection when who I was did not meet with acceptance from my family when I was a child. I was not loved or welcomed by my peers, family through the years. I had not realized that until I wrote this that I was hurt by all of this rejection. All of this is being brought out by my current re-reading of the book, "How to Suppress Women's Writing" by Joanna Russ. I find the book to be very accurate. I think I am beginning to understand.

Women generally exist and think in solitude and it is hard to be honest when everyone slams down on them for this honesty. I can relate to that. Marcel Proust who I wrote about earlier had his mother for a long time and other male intellectuals, but a woman rarely runs across an intellectual for she is condemned for being one and if she is one she is one in secret. We are taught to treasure our families, children and even pets before we treasure our books and ideas.
A woman who cares about ideas is one who denies she is a woman. That is pretty heavy stuff. Even writing all of this is darn hard and difficult.

Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein" but there has been many articles and essays in which it was supposed that it was her husband, Percy Shelley, and even the other men at that party in which the idea of the monster was first brought up by Mary that she wasn't really the author. Jane Austin wrote her novels in the kitchen of her house and George Sands had to take a man's name to get published. Currently, there has been problems in women getting their books reviewed. This problem is far from being resolved. Being a writer is an assault on self confidence whether male or female but it is still more difficult if the writer is a woman.

As a writer, I have face criticism from every quarter of my life. There are no fans out there egging me on to keep writing as there are for men. Maybe if I had some best sellers, I might have a few. I have to do it on my own. The thing is I really love to write. I think I have something to say. I just have to convince myself that I have the right to say it although no one in my family is interested in what I write. I no longer tell family members when I am published, they don't care. I have been on posters and although one was kept, the other was destroyed while I was in Korea. All of the publications my writing appeared in was destroyed. All my books were given away. I exist in a vacuum and I don't think I deserve this, but this is the way life is.

No one is going to read this. I know this, but I don't care. I am alive and kicking right now. I am trying to be who I am on paper or on this screen and if I am not it would not make any difference anyhow. I might as well be me. My life is my life and what happens in it is my doing. I like what I write. It gives me a lot of pleasure just writing and reading. It really does not matter if no one cares as much as it does matter that I care. If a writer does not care what he or she writes then it will all be crap. I don't write crap. I write my stuff and I am going to try and care more about it. As the hair commercial says, because I am worth it.

Philosophy of Writing

2011-03-13T20:23:00.000-07:00

I have a Facebook account and am a member of another. Yesterday, I posted a viewpoint about about a statement that was attributed to His Holiness, the Dali Lama. There was an accompanying news article that His Holiness was stepping down from his political role. I have great admiration of His Holiness and mentioned something about his role as a world leader. Someone who did not object to that but to a term that I had used said that I was not a Buddhist if I used it that way. I explained how I was using it and said that I was sorry for the confusion. He was not satisfied and said that I used other terms that were not in keeping in his tradition. Since, I explained my terms and am not a member of any tradition I thought the matter closed. I was still going to write my opinion whether he liked it or not.

The reason I am including this incident here is because I have written about writing before and wondered if I was not clear about my philosophy of writing. Some writers that I know follow the strictures of certain creative schools such as the one in Iowa as my friend Ted. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Many writers who write today are. I am not. He even taught there for a while after getting his graduate degree. I think it is very good. I just did not go there.

I am self-taught although I have a graduate degree in education from the University of Kansas in Education with an emphasis in English and journalism. I have never taken any creative writing classes. What I know I learned from reading others and reading the books authors write about it.

I have a fairly laid back point of view with a ground base in journalism. I think it is very important to write as clearly as possible. I don't like reading dialect so I never write in it. I show it in other ways. I write poetry as well but since I can't hear meter I never write it. It is a bear to teach it. It is part of my dyslexia. Maybe because I don't hear it, I don't think it is all that important. I can play music only if it has melody and math is something I have never understood although I understand mathematical theory. I have to see patterns before I understand it. I figure there are plenty of people out there with the same problems that I have.

Once I understood there was nothing wrong with me as a writer, I just put my fingers on the keys and wrote. I like what I write. I like what I write in my journals. I like what other writers write but not all authors. I am reading about Marcel Proust now because I love his writing. There are authors out there that are supposed to be excellent and I can't understand their novels or stories; but there are so many authors that I can and I will never run out of them.

Marcel Proust is the greatest writer of his time and his work influences writers today, but he had to self-publish his own books at first because no one wanted to. Many people thought he was a snob which he was not. Few writers' work live as long as his does. I am not going to worry about mine.

The one thing I want to impart on any writer is to write what he or she wants to and not to shape their work according to someone else's standards or to the market. Lots of books tell you that. Throw those books in the trash and do your own thing BUT make sure what you are writing is clear and understood. Use your editing pencil liberally. And send your babies out in the world.

Writing in restaurants

2011-03-06T18:17:00.001-08:00

I am writing in my journal at Starbucks and someone leans over me and asks: "Is that your diary?"

"No." I answer, but I regret it already. Normally no one bothers me when I write in public. He is smiling at me and expecting something to explain what I am doing. "I am writing a letter." I say.

I write in my journal or notebook everyday and most of the time I am just practicing; but sometimes I get tired of being alone and go to places where there are people. There are a lot of people who do that and many use a laptop. I like to write by hand and it is so much easier do it that way. I know the man who was asking me what I was doing was just trying to be friendly. He had seen me in there before and later asked me if I would like to go out and have dinner with him. That does not happen to me anymore as I am a senior citizen. I thanked him but told him I had eaten already as I had. I eat one meal a day and drink coffee or tea the rest of the day. Occasionally I met with other writers and that works out better. We usually go to Denny's who does not mind our being there as long as we don't go during the busy hours. I often go at 2 or 3 am. Denny's is open 24 hours a day and the waitresses like regular customers there at odd hours.

I am one of the writers who have to write everyday. Virginia Woolf mentioned that she wrote most of the time in her notebook to practice as a pianist played the scales. I write in my journal and/notebook for the same reason and to record what was happening in my life. If I didn't, I would find the writing that I did on other projects harder to do. Now, it is so easy to write on these blogs because I am always writing in my notebook or journal. I had a relative who said I was a compulsive writer. Perhaps, but I love writing because it clears my mind and enables me to know what my mind is doing.

Woolf also recommends that a writer should allow all sorts of writing and not try to write well in their notebooks. Give yourself permission not to write well. This can be difficult for some writers to do. If you have to, write whatever you want and then tear it up or delete it. Just develop the freedom to write freely. I used to write and then destroy what I wrote and with this knowledge before hand I could feel free to write what I wanted to write. Soon, I did not have to destroy it.

I am in my room writing this, but I was at Whiskeytown Lake earlier today and wrote in my journal and enjoyed doing that while listening to some classical music. My phone plays music from a music service that I subscribe to. I was able to make a few phone calls and a friend called me. I ate a wonderful lunch from a new supermarket that now tells its customers what entrees in its deli case is gluten-free and which ones are not. It was also very beautiful out there too.

I think writers have the best jobs in the world. I am prejudiced. I enjoy what I do. I don't know too many people who wake up feeling good about doing what they do like I do although there are a few. I have several people I know who are writers and they love writing and hate it at the same time. I can understand that as there are aspects of writing that are pure torture such as book sales or even waiting to see if one's writing even sells. Some writers have writers' blocks and it isn't limited to writers for I know an artist of paintings who has painter's block. That can be especially difficult if you depend on your art to support yourself. I had a monumental case of writer's block before I went to Korea. I don't anymore. That part of being a writer sucks.

When you write in a journal, you are not writing to sell something. It does not matter if you have the right word or not. You just write what comes up and if you don't have anything you write I don't have anything. I have done that many times, but something always comes up even if it is the television show you watched last night. I like to practice writing descriptions of things as I feel I am poor at it. When I was a kid, I liked in Southern California and remember seeing everything covered with ice one morning and wrote it in my journal. I also said so to someone as I have never seen anything like it. The girl who was from Colorado said: "That is frost, Stupid." I was amazed. I never saw frost before. I didn't like what she said to me but we did remain friends for a long time as she became a science fiction writer and artist. She also never lost her rather jaded outlook on life. She died years ago and I still miss her, but I still hear her hard remarks ever so often.

I must sound like a broken record because I have written how important it is to write everyday. If you must be around people, write in restaurants. As I said, Denny does not mind as long as you are there during the off hours. Certainly Starbucks don't mind. I write in parks and see writing being done there all of the time. Write at home or in the tub. Just do it so it fits your lifestyle.

Facebook, Twitter, etc.

2011-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

I have a Facebook and Twitter accounts that were easy to open and are free. I encourage writers to have them because they keep writers in the "loop" so to speak. A writer can also interface with other writers as well and that is important in finding out what is happening in writing and literature. I am the sort of writer who doesn't always like to face the world. Sometimes all I can do is peep at it through the social networks of Facebook and Twitter. Not every writer is that way. Some are very social creatures and those same social inventions can be a real excuse not to write. Still, with all of those disadvantages, it is more advantageous to keep in touch with writers and others through the media than not.

I know several writers who are published and do not have accounts in Facebook or any other account on the Internet. They tend to be a bit older and are fighting the Internet Revolution. I have encouraged them to re-consider. They also have been fighting having a blog as well. Publishers and agents expect them to have them. I don't think writers should ever do things that others expect them to do; but I think it is a healthy thing for all writers to have a nodding acquaintance with the Internet and all that it can do for writers.

The computer was a terribly clever device that opened the writing world to me when I first got the Apple IIE and the Internet was like having a library of a sort at one's fingertips 24/7. I know a writer who was writing about well known dancers and lacked a small fact at two AM and was able to get it off the Internet. The article was due at 8 am. After he sent it off, he was having coffee with me at Starbacks and we were talking about Ginger Rodgers and got into a discussion of whether her mother was a US Marine and could look it up on his laptop. She was. She lived near Medford, Oregon and I knew this tidbit from childhood.

I had met this writer in the first place through Facebook and we were both surprised to note we lived in the same city. We exchanged names of other writers and now know of other free-lanced writers who live in this area. That would never have happened except through Facebook. There is a Writers Forum here in town and none of us are members. Many of those who attend are not published writers.

The Internet and Facebook, Twitter and such groups may seen daunting to the non-user but if you take it one step at a time it can be learned. Those groups go out of their way to make signing up and using their services as easy as possible after all they make money from the people who sign up. They selling advertising space and other related services.

For those of you who don't use their Facebook very often, I suggest that you use it more and use a trademark or symbol that is the same for other social networking media so people will identify with you and either follow you on Twitter or want to be your friend on Facebook. Every so often you will get someone that is a bad match but de-registering them is a very easy thing to do and people do it all of the time. On my Tweeter account I have 100 followers that change constantly and I change the number of people or organizations I follow as well. For instance, on my Facebook, a"friend" kept putting information that was very fundamental Christian which is not where I am at nor anyone else. I simply removed him as a friend. It was no big deal. He was always putting things on my Facebook that was trying to prove there was a god and no one was interested.

Even if you don't have a huge following on any of your accounts, just keeping up on them and writing on them in a regular fashion is very good for the development of your reading and writing skills. It also helps develop a tougher skin to face the rejection slips we all get from time to time. Maybe something will come up that is very negative about these things, then it will be a different matter and you can change your focus. Nothing is set in stone.

The Well Where Stories Come From.....

2011-03-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

"The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection, and with the crime, guilt-and there is the story of humankind. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and the third conquers the wold-and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt."
-John Steinbeck

Most writers on book tours or in writers' workshops are asked where they get their ideas and stories. The paragraph above written by John Steinbeck holds many ideas and story ideas for novels and short stories. Certainly, Steinbeck made us of them in "East of Eden" and other things he wrote. One writer I know has a great deal of trouble coming up with story ideas and another does not. It all depends. I am one of the lucky ones in that I never have trouble coming up with plots. One friend said that Phillip Dick was never at a loss for plots but unfortunately he was always at a loss of salable plots and books. Now that he is gone and in no need for money, his stories and novels are very hot. The films based on his books are often classics like "The Blade Runner".

So where does the stories come from? I have no idea where others come from, but mine come from the daydreams, fantasies and dreams that I have. Where do they come from? Gee, I don't know. When I first discovered Sherlock Holmes in the old Basil Rathbone movies on television when my mother was gone in the afternoon, I looked up the real Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle in the library. I loved those short stories and made up more in my head when I read all of them but with a role in them for a person who acted and looked just like me. Then I dropped that person and just wanted to be more like Sherlock Holmes himself. I got a lot of murder mysteries from those daydreams. The hero became more and more like another character and less and less like Sherlock Holmes. Holmes became my own creation. I had dropped Dr. Watson. I did learn that when you write the story, you had to have another character the detective could talk to. I just changed who he talked to and discovered why all great detectives usually had partners. How else does the reader know what is happening?

To me, it is fun to play with emotions. Love is fun and many novelists have fun with that one. Guilt is another one that Steinbeck used very effectively as many others have through the years. All of the emotions are ripe for stories such as jealousy, greed, and such. Certainly Shakespeare made use of them very effectively. How to portray them on the page or the stage is something a writer or playwright is particularly gifted in doing. What is easy to me may not be so easy to another. I have a friend who is a pharmacist and he has no difficulty performing his duties while I think it is amazing he can even remember what family certain drug groups belong. I think anyone can learn to write well but to construct a good plot is something else.

In summary, some writers are outstanding while others are alright. Some write books that will remain in people's minds for the rest of their lives while others end up forgotten on a shelf. Some writers write difficult prose but compelling plots while others write wonderful books with weak plots. I don't think there is an answer on where the stories come from anymore than a computer program can generate good stories (God, I hope not.). Still, I think it is interesting to think about it.

"The Angel in the House"

2011-02-25T10:24:00.000-08:00

When you are writing, nothing must stand between you and the writing you do everyday. You must do everything within your power to make sure you do it including murder according to the writer, Virginia Woolf. When I first read this statement, I remember feeling stunned. Then reading and thinking about it I realized how important this statement was.

What Woolf was referring to was killing the "The Angel in the House". I had checked out a book, "The Virginia Woolf Writers' Workshop: Seven Lessons to Inspire Great Writing" by Danell Jones (Bantam: 2007). It had this reference at the beginning of the book. Kill an angel? Why? Was Woolf exaggerating? Was she referring to something that only existed in her time but not in mine? The answer became clear as I read on. I discovered to my horror that "The Angel in the House" was something I have been wrestling with all of my life although I did not know the name of this entity. Woolf said: "Had I not killed her, she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing."

The Angel of the House is what drives us all to self-sacrifice, to put our families ahead of our interests. This is our spouses, children and even the house. The more we do, the more this angel demands of us. It is never satisfied. I had a friend that I grew up with who got married right out of high school. She married a U.S. Navy man and for 30 years she sacrificed everything for him, his career in the service, her children and she died unexpectedly from a traffic accident when an alcoholic driving on a suspended driver's license drove into her car. Her husband had just retired and within a year he remarried. I saw them at a party and when he introduced me to his new wife he could not remember his first wife's name.

Many women would know first hand who "The Angel of the House" is, but some men know this spirit too. These are men who sacrificed their dreams for their families and bury their canvases and paints in the attic or put away their dreams of writing poetry and put long hours in the car plant so their kids can have the college education they were never able to have.

The Angel says the writing that is done never equals the importance of making sure the clothes are clean, the dry cleaning is picked up, the dinners are prepared, the dusting is done, the vacuuming is run on all of the floors and so forth. It is important to work a job that helps pay the bills and clean the house and be the helpmate to one's spouse. At the end of the day, there is no time to spend doing what the writer wants to do.

I used to sneak time to read a book from time to time when I was married and my then husband would get irritated when he caught me doing it. He wanted me to watch television with him. I would go to bed to catch a nap but read instead. At work, I wrote during my lunches and breaks. I would go someplace where I would not be disturbed and write. I carried a notebook with me at all times. I also ran to the library to check out books. It didn't help that he did not read. I felt guilty that I was doing something he did not do.

I wanted to watch certain television programs but couldn't as my husband thought they were boring; so I didn't. I never watched "Masterpiece Theater" or "American Experience". Having a VCR and videos that I could check out of the library was heaven sent as I could watch them when my spouse went out. I also learned to get up two hours earlier than anyone else, a habit that I still do now.

My spouse was not to blame for all that I described. I let him make all of those decisions for me as the Angel of the House demanded that I do. I sacrificed everything to make my family happy and was left with nothing but bitterness and the illness without a name, dissatisfaction. When I went to see the psychiatrists at the hospitals for my sadness, the male doctors told me that I did not trust my husband enough. I needed to do more which I did. My angel almost killed me too.

Nothing must stand between the writing a writer must do everyday. If murder is a necessity, then murder that Angel in the House although from experience I can tell you that you will need to kill it over and over again because it will rise from the ashes time and time again to haunt you.

Believe

2011-02-15T10:52:00.000-08:00

"Believe nothing no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and heart."
-Buddha Gautama

One of the things I put down on this blog is that I follow the Buddhist path, so you would think that putting down one of the sayings of the Buddha would be what I would do from time to time. This quote is the single most important quote that I hold dear from the Buddha (Gautama) and you don't have to be a Buddhist to believe in its truth. You have to believe in your own truth no matter what your religion is or even if you believe in an organized religion or no religion at all. I am not here to press anyone to my religion. I don't think it is even important to have one to reach enlightenment. You can do it with meditation alone.

Writing teaches me what I believe in because I don't always know. Humankind know so little about the Universe and even the oceans and even less what is between their own ears. Carl Jung worked hard to know what was in his mind for over 80 years and his intellect was immense and he never reached its outer limits. Writing gives us a tool for learning what is in our minds and one never really knows even as we each pick up the pen and start to write.

We have all sorts of tools to discern this such as writing, dreams, art and other things. Meditation is an excellent way and I use writing meditation to do it. I also use a form of art meditation. You can look up the different ways on the Internet and in books. Or you can make up your own methods. I have done that. I have taken some methods and modified them to fit who I am. That has worked very well. I use a form of walking meditation that I modified from Buddhist masters. It works. I don't think we as human beings can exhaust the number of ways we can come up with different ways we can meditate. Beware of people who have hard and fast rules. I, myself, have no use for such methods but you might like such safe and easy ways of meditating. I don't. I like to make things up as I go along as far as meditating.

I have been a teacher from time to time. When I teach students they are their own teachers and that they should adjust their writing styles to match who they are they sometimes get angry. They think it should be harder than it is. It isn't. In Korea, English is taught first as grammar rules and then as a conversation. It is putting the cart in front of the horse way of learning a language. Children who learn language very easily never learn it this way. The language structure is learned first by internalizing the structure and allowing the self to ascertain what it is that needs to be learned. It almost makes me angry when I see people making writing and other things so much harder than it needs to be.

I like to make everything as much fun to do as I can and that includes writing. Life should be fun and when they put your ashes in a can or your body in the ground or whatever, you should feel if you could that you had one hell of a good time. There are things that might have given you some problems such as health or living in a place where you could not speak or write freely but under the circumstances you did the best you could do and had a great time at it. You should also feel that you used your heart as much as you could and that means loving lots of things including people, sunsets or whatever fit your style.

Writer's workshop

2011-02-13T10:03:00.001-08:00

I went to a meeting of a local writer's club and it was a workshop run by a published poet. She was running it as a workshop for beginning writers who want to be published. She had the standard rules and resources which is in most blogs on the Internet. That probably fit with that writers' organization since most of them are not published other than self-published; however some have been published and they were sneaking out the door which is what I did at the first break.

The information was the exact same information that is given out in most books that are for sale out there and that are contained in many blogs. I saw many people jotting down the information. It was poetry based but she included other information that included all forms of writing freelance. The rules were for the most part based on common sense such as always follow the submission guidelines and keep your rejection slips so they you can burn them when you make your first sale. They were so much like other rules that I had suspected she got them from other sources that I had also read.

The workshop leader was a published poet trying to make a living because poetry does not pay. She had a helper who looked like he may have been a writer or poet doing the same. They just go from one workshop to another trying to make ends meet and submitting as they go along. There are a lot of people who want to say they are writers but don't put the time in and write everyday. These are the writers who go to the workshops and pay the fees that keep other writers and poets alive.

In Buddhism, it is said all of the knowledge necessary to reach enlightenment is within and if you meditate you will reach your goal. In some ways, writing is the same. You can take all of the classwork you want, get all of the degrees you want but all of the knowledge you need is gained from writing everyday and reading. Nothing replaces that. You just do the two in tandem and it will work. It seems almost too easy and most people think it is. It isn't really. You have to put the sweat in and the time in; or you can attend the workshops and listen to the silly simply rules instead of putting your fingers on the keys or your hand on the pen. Oh, yes and the pencil that does the editing. That is it. Even if you think you have nothing to write about you do it anyhow and you will.

Freedom

2011-02-09T19:28:00.000-08:00

I know a writer who has several blogs and they have a huge following. He likes to read mine. He says I am lucky that I have so few right now because I am trying to form what it is I want to do. He can't do that. He wrote a book and it did very well and has been doing the same sort of book since. Every time, he tries to do something else his agent shoots it back at him and tells him that it isn't his bailiwick. The money looks good in his checking account and he has bills to pay; so he will continue in that direction at least for a while. I think he is being nice to me.

I change direction here and there. I read one writer who will give me some ideas and then read another who will give me other ideas and I am off and running. I am trying to put a positive spin on the lack of readers on my blog, but it gets me down at times. I do like the idea of change. I don't like what has happened to my friend or to Ted who can only write about his life in the form of memoirs. He does not have a blog or tweets but he does worry about running out of material. He is just a bit younger than me and one has just so many life experiences and he has this theory that his readers will be able to tell when he is lying. He says he invests his money and plans to change his pen name and do a different kind of writing.

I used to do more editing than I do now. I would get paid fairly well. I don't know how many times I would catch well-known writers lying in their biographies or memoirs about their lives. I could always tell. I figure if I could so could the readers. Usually, I would find a way to tell the writer not to put something in as it is not likely as it is written or it must have at another time when the object in question was invented or something silly like that. One man told a story about a wagon of kids rolling into a creek while he was looking for a way out of an Amazon jungle. He walked back and found the native kids drowned. He said he was just up the river and he escaped from that place alone. The whole story revolved around him and how the Gods made sure he would be safe. I explained that a wagon rolling into a creek full of kids who grew up in that area would have the smarts to jump out or at the very least scream for help. Why would they be sitting in a wagon in the first place in a jungle? Most kids from that area never traveled in a wagon. They walked. He had one improbable adventure after another and he had me removed as editor. Then it was discovered he never was in the Amazon in the first place. Big surprise.

What would have been worse would be for writers to have some of their books published and then have to live down the stuff that was in it. I have been published before and nothing out there is embarrassing. I know of other writers who have on contract writers who write for them and some use their graduate students to write their books for them. That has been embarrassing and they have been accused of plagiarism. Some of them are well known. I lose respect for writers like that.

There has been other writers who wrote successful first books but could not equal their successes in later books. Or one writer who wrote a huge successful book and could not write another. Oh there are lots of reasons, a writer can't write again. It is not a good idea to stop no matter the reason whether you are a smashing success, mid-listed writer or some one who just limps along. If you get out of practice, it starts to show.

Control

2011-02-04T09:49:00.000-08:00

Looking over my life, I have thought people had complete control over what happened to me. They defined where my life was going and even what goals were possible except in my creative mind. I would stay there for long periods of time. I don't think as strongly as I did , but the left over echoes of those ideas are still with me. I fight constantly to overcome assumptions that are in my mind that started life with me many years ago. Many writers fight the urge that they can't write about certain subjects or write a certain and new way.

I have a writer friend who is writing about a woman whose mother was a prostitute, but the daughter has gotten scholarships and is now a doctor. When her mother visits her, my friend can't bring herself to write swear words in her novel although the mother is with others who also do. The doctor does not but she wants to compare and contrast and it is one tool of doing it in the novel. My friend was raised in a family where those words were not said. My friend is considered a mid-listed published writer and has a publisher who wants to publish the book and she really wants to write this book. My friend's father is still a Baptist preacher and the control is strong.

In writing, all of us carry the baggage of our "day lives" into our creative worlds. The stories that interest us most are those we take from the normal routines we experience. We take extracts that are the most interesting and use them. It feels that we are in control and not the other way around. My favorite vision of what life is, is of a river flowing with me on a raft and I observing what going on the banks.

In writing, I take those items of life and then play and move them around and see what happens. I have likes, dislikes, passions and so forth; but I never felt they matter all that much to others. I was convinced that no one really cared what I thought. It was a mindset that I inherited as a child when I had a family that was not interested what the children thought or felt.

Later, I was responsive to what my children were feeling and what others thought. I watched and observed; but for myself I thought no one was involved. I thought them not to care what I thought as their mother. Not good. However, as a writer, it did not matter because it was me who was putting the pieces together although the characters once created did their own thing.

I don't think I am such a nonentity anymore. However as a writer I am the center of my world, and yet I am not. I put the actors on the stage and then I record what they do. I describe the scenery so that the audience can see what is happening and give hints to the interior dialogue the actors might be experiencing if any. People often do not know what they are feeling or thinking and if that is the case, I put that in too. That is life and my inner creative world does resemble the outer world as it should.

I believe very strongly that life comes in many dimensions, the exact number is unknown. Each dimension is as true as the others. I also enjoy moving from one to the other as I believe we do in real life. Some of us rack up more frequent traveling miles than others going from one to another dimension.

I have written about control and how many people want to control others. This is unfortunate for the writers. I think writers exist and work best in environments that is free from such rules and regulations. It is best if we can work hard to get rid of the controls that have been instilled in our minds. Often, we helped put them there. Control never improves a writer but makes them a lesser one.

Using a Thesaurus or how to ignore the cactus

2011-01-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

I have just finished reading the biography of Peter Mark Roget who created "Roget's Thesaurus". The book is "The Man Who Made Lists: Love, Death, Madness and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus" by Joshua Kendall (Putnam: 2008). This thoroughly enjoyable book contains the argument that the use of a Thesaurus has "dumbed down" the English language by such writers as Simon Winchester who I normally love to read. The book itself shows admirably how much we as speakers and writers needed "Roget's Thesaurus".

Before Roget came upon the scene, there was an inferior book that people used and it was hated for its deficiencies as much as it was admired for simply being there. I am one of those people who have trouble coming up with words to say or describe something I mean and end up saying the same word over and over again: "that was nice, oh yes, that was really nice for you to do that. Yes, I like that and it was nice for you to say so."

I don't think in words. I read quite a bit, but I need a Thesaurus to help me with better words to say what I really mean, to come up with a word that is closer to what I really want to say or write. Maybe there are wordsmiths that have a natural talent to come up with the exact word they mean, but I am not one of them and neither was Roget. He needed the list and that is why he came up with it in the first place. He spoke in other languages such as Latin and French and he had lists for those languages too.

There are those insufferable writers who write the perfect draft the first time their fingers touch the keys or put the words on paper. Trust me, I did not want to write "writers". I did not need a Thesaurus to come up with another word for them. No. These are people who think in words, pristine and clear words and I am glad for them. However, the majority of the writers I know are like me. The majority of students I taught in school were like me as well. We needed Peter Mark Roget and am awful glad he wrote that book so many years ago and glad that Penguin has kept it up. He came up with other inventions and one of the things he came up with was the very beginning of the movie industry. He was not only a doctor but a very clever fellow even if his family were the mad hatters of the Victorian Times.

All this comes down to is this, use what you need and ignore those who are insufferable or *ricks.

Overcast

2011-01-30T12:12:00.001-08:00

I read blogs and books on writing all of the time. I even write this one although I am aware few people read it; but I am hopeful. Everyone has rules about writing. I have a few and that is to re-read what you write and edit it. Then wait a bit and do it again. I like to read what I write out loud but that is a personal preference.

One rule is to never start a story with the weather, but I have seen many stories that do that. It is overcast this morning and thought about that rule. Why is it that one can not start a story with the weather? Beats me. There is a rule about not using adverbs and I can see it. He was very loud means about the same as he is loud. The weather? I have seen movies that start with the weather. There was one movie that started off with a funeral and the actor, Tyrone Power, is there standing in the rain with an umbrella. I remember it because it was very effective. I think it was for a character who was played by Ava Gardner. He is in a dark or black suit with the rain hitting the umbrella and he is very sad as everyone stands in the cemetery in the rain. I can still hear the rain hitting the umbrella. The the film switches into the sunshine with a smiling and warm woman character. That has stayed with me although I saw that movie in my childhood and forgot what the film was. I think that is a rule that should be thrown out.

I think when a writer hears a rule or advice one should think about the Buddha's advice. He said that everything should be run through one's heart and mind, if it sounds true then keep it and if it doesn't throw it out even if it is the Buddha (Gautama) who is saying it.

Of course, there is my rule. Read so you can perfect your ear and eye and know what sounds and reads good. I wrote a story many years ago as a kid. I thought it sounded great and the end of the story was of a woman swimming. The person reading it said she sounded like a boat. I read it again and sure enough the woman character sounded like a motor boat. I changed it. I was very grateful. I try and question everything I write and love it when someone does the same with what I am writing. That does not mean I accept it for I often don't. But I do consider it. Who knows? Maybe another character will sound like a boat instead of a woman swimming from a sinking ship.

Writer's zest can make us pests

2011-01-28T12:16:00.000-08:00

All writers remember when they were first turned on by the magic of the written word and the power of our own stories and other writings. Heavens knows I remember very well, and it takes me well into childhood. I know some writers who are published regularly but few make enough money to support themselves solely on their writings. Some are housewives who are supported by their husbands and others are teachers. Stephen King and many writers were high school teachers for a long time before they could finally quit their day jobs and just concentrate on their writing careers. I am doing that now, just writing, but not because I make enough money in writing but because I receive retirement income. If I made enough money in writing, I would "run away from home" and make my home in another place as this place is a bit restrictive. I do better when I live alone.

We get very excited about writing and think it is the greatest life. We also love to read or at least most of us do which is good because it keeps us up on what is happening out there in the world of literature. It always surprises me to hear about people who say they don't like to read and avoid it as much as possible. I used to say something to them and now I don't. There is a commercial on Charter TV that has a young man who says he is going to admit something that few people will own up to, and I thought at first it was something about religion or sexual orientation, but it was his preference for watching television. Then someone says many people will not admit they watch it and someone else says that means there is more for the rest of them to have which of course makes no sense but if you watch television you don't do a lot of thinking anyhow. Television does not encourage analytical thinking.

I can't imagine a life not reading and also not writing something somewhere. I record my life in a journal and have all of the journals. When my ex-husband threw out a lot of my stuff, he did not get his hands on my journals, thank goodness. My youngest son took them and put them in his bedroom. I have all of my journals, for the most part, since I was 15 years old. I don't re-read them. I just like having them and consider them my legacy to my offspring. I wish my mother and grandmother kept a journal. I would have loved reading them.

Trying to get my sons and other relatives to write just gives them headaches or so they tell me. I draw and although the drawings are not great they are mine. I have a relative who is a professional artist and she does not draw as much as I do. I encourage her to draw the view from her house as it is spectacular. She yawns and takes a nap. I drew it in my journal and it does not look like much but I enjoyed doing it.

I remember thinking about how the dreams in my head would make great stories. Wow, I thought. I know others told me that I dream too much. That is what most people tell writers that they live too much in their heads or imagination. When we try and communicate this zest for our love of words and imaginary worlds it makes us pests.

I happen to think there can't be too many poets or writers in this world. That does not mean I love ever poem or story because I don't. But I love the way people try and see what is out there and then translate it into words. I also hope that they take into consideration the fact that they need pencils to edit; but to keep on writing. Even if the only reader is themselves, they should keep at it. As for expressing the enthusiasm for writing verbally, well we should just write about it and then go take a nap.

Editing and asking questions

2011-01-25T07:39:00.000-08:00

I have a new blog in which I am trying to teach myself how to write very short pieces,http://zebrareadersshorttails.blogspot.com/. I have written only two so far and a friend of mine who is a published writer has been helping me with the editing. When I can do it right, I will take it down as there is very little copyright protection and I normally don't put my work on the Internet. It sounded to me, at first, easy. Well, it is not.

The pieces are still too long. I am trying so hard to get them down to three or four paragraphs. I went into writing as a novelist. Writing short stories was very difficult for me; but to condense things even more is proving to be so darn hard.

The editing of "short tails" is even more difficult. I thought I had my editing down pretty good. I have learned that I don't. My friend who is a whiz at it has been teaching me even more. For one thing every single statement in the piece must be justified by another. For instance, I put down that a character was good in management although he hated people. I had to say why and how. I knew the answer in my head but I had to put it down as briefly as possible.

I have a tendency to be wordy. I am learning to throw out the extra words even if I am in love with a phase or a sentence. I love words and fall in love with sentences all of the time. I am learning to throw them out. It hurts, but it is necessary.

So far, no one has been reading the Short Tails and that is fine. One has a lot of freedom when the only reader is the self. My friend who has been helping me is thinking about trying his luck in writing them too. He said they are fun because of the amount of freedom in plot and viewpoint since research is at a minimum. I don't think he will try them out on the Internet but in his notebook.

Repeating words

2011-01-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

Lately, I have read blogs about writers who use the same words too often and some of those blogs wrote that it was not a good idea and others said it did not matter. Both sides of the issue used writers who were published to show support for their side. I am always in favor of not overloading any writer with rules that take the joy out of writing; so I say let yourself be the judge.

By letting yourself be the judge, you just have to read what you wrote with your "pencil" in your hand and see if you like it as a reader. This is where you, the writer, come into your own as a reader. When you read, you know what you like and what you don't like. You know what will help you get into the story and keep you there. You as a reader know what will throw you out of the story quickly. When I watch a television program and they quote a telephone number and they quote 555-whatever, I am out of the story. I know why they do it, but it kicks me out of the "hermeneutic circle" and I am thinking of the script writer and the cameras and crew. (Surely, there is another way of handling this problem of people calling the phone numbers that are quoted on the television. )

There are some standby rules that everyone is supposed to obey such as never start a story with the weather but I have just read a wonderful short story that started with a snow storm. They say never use adverbs which is a good rule but I never say never. There might be a occasion to use one or two. I certain do on occasion. I tend to get wordy so always write a very wordy first draft and then take all of the extra words out in later revisions. Some writers don't want to change, ever after the first draft but I don't mind at all. In fact, it can be fun like looking at a block of stone with a chisel and going over it until it resembles what I want it to look like until it does- or close to it.

When I write these blogs, it is always first draft and then I go over it a few times taking out words and I have often wondered if someone were to read it during that time if things suddenly disappear or appear during the process. It is different when I am working on something. I often write the first draft in a notebook and then transfer it into a computer and then keep going over it until it appears in the form that I want it in. I started to use a notebook because I could not write my story in a computer since I did not have one. I like computers best, but I like transferring it because I often rewrite the story completely. The blogs go into pretty much the way I write them. It is more like journalism which I used to do more.

I don't think writers, as a whole, ever get paid what they are worth. So, it is imperative that they get as much fun out of it as they can. Getting clogged down with all of those rules to my mind is not fun. I also think reading is as important as writing and as much fun too. They are two sides of the coin, so to speak. Reading becomes more important during the editing phase of writing. Also, there are times you want to repeat words. It can be very effective under certain conditions. It's like coffee. One cup of coffee is wonderful and sometimes two cups of coffee is great and sometimes it burns up the stomach. It all depends.

Fear of criticiam

2011-01-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

I know a writer who is afraid of criticism to the extent that when his editor is going to give him some, the editor removes all of the breakable things in his office. There are writers that I have edited their writings and swore I would never do it again even when they came back and apologized for their reactions. It just did not seem worth it.

Writers are no different from anyone else in that fear plays a big part in their lives. It plays a part in my life and has for years. I know one writer who is really good and writes wonderful short stories and who has never sent in one of them. They are all are sitting on the memory drive of her computer or in the drawer of a file cabinet. I even showed her how to send them in electronically. She was amazed but still has not sent in any. She is afraid her stories will be rejected.

All writers get their stuff rejected. Even J.K. Rowland got Harry Potter rejected before she found a publisher. Of course, we all hear about those stories. We also hear about writers who never found a publisher or writers who got their stuff published after their death. What good is that? It isn't because their writing was too good, ahead of its time or just was sent in at the wrong time. Philip Dick's stuff continues to get his stuff published and his work was definitely ahead of its time, but he's dead. Some writers never leave the house because of their looks or because they think everyone thinks they are strange. They fear rejection on those grounds.

I believe there are as many reasons for fear as they are people who have the fear. I know a man who is afraid of living life, working and failing so would rather make himself sick and collect Social Security. There are more of those people than one would think. There are people who make their kids sick so they can continue to collect disability because they are afraid to take their chances working out their falling and getting up. Some people take all of that in stride. Some people take airplanes all of the time while others won't go near an airplane. There are so many examples.

I knew a Zen master who said when the fear comes, breathe and take it in. It is an opportunity to work on your spiritual pathway. It's not pleasant when a time comes in my life when a rejection comes and they do. "Fuck the pathway" is what I want to say and not take a breath and try and learn what life is presenting to me. From experience, it is easier to be present in the criticism because sometimes what is being said is not valid. I can reject it. Or not. I have to be there to make the decision.

Garry Wills

2011-01-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/13/obamas-finest-hour/

In a blog of the New York Times, Garry Wills wrote about "Obama's Finest Hour". The editorial was as finest an editorial I have read in a very long time and certainly equal to the subject it addressed. Not only did it describe someone's moment of inspiration but the writing by Mr. Wills was inspiring as well. He compared the president's speech to that of Abraham Lincoln, not for the first time but certainly made the comparison more concrete. It is being re-tweeted as I write this. I, myself, have done so and included it on my Facebook account.

There is no doubt what Mr. Wills describes as the president's finest hour is exactly that; but the journalist was able to describe the moment to his readers in such a way that readers can now seek a replay for themselves for they are everywhere and listen to it. It provides the essence of the moment when a leader reaches out to console a nation and succeeds. It is as if we are watching another president after the end of the blood bath of the Civil War reach out to console a nation with the Gettysburg Address.

There are writers, no doubt, who write things that sink down into oblivion and are never read by the masses let alone reacted to by many people. There are others who seek to raise awareness of injustice and cruelty within the human population and others who want to bring attention to themselves and some cause that will not be of any advantage to anyone. It is nice to be the kind of writer whose work brings a positive glow to the rest of our lives. Those are the writers who write books like "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee. There are many examples. Of course, there are books such as Mein Kampf(My Struggle) by Adolf Hitler. There are other examples of those books too.

I don't believe in censorship. If one does not want to read a certain book, don't. Certainly, the man accused of shooting the people in Arizona wrote his own opus on the Internet as many who have been convicted of different crimes recently have done. Those who do not read a lot and commit heinous crimes have gone out of their way to put down their own words. I have no intention of reading their words. To be fair, the man accused has not been convicted of any crime.

What I can do is read such writers such as Garry Wills and realize that "we can be better" as President Obama said in his speech and honor those who died in an hail of bullets from a madman's gun. We don't have to blame people and call our neighbors names and even for a short time remember we are all in this life together. As writers, we can help with the healing. That is a good place to be, on the side of angels.

What I want to read...

2011-01-12T23:04:00.000-08:00

‘I write what I would like to read – what I think other women would like to read. If what I write makes a woman in the Canadian mountains cry and she writes and tells me about it, especially if she says, ‘I read it to Tom when he came in from work and he cried too’, I feel I have succeeded.’

-George Orwell

There are times I can't seem to find a story or novel that I want to read. It is like being in bed and being unable to sleep and tossing and turning. I can't find the right position or the right dream. Then I start to think of a story and presto, I am thinking of a character and what he or she would do under this or that circumstances. Later, I start to write it. Ah, that is the story that I wanted to read. I feel so satisfied. Those are the people I wanted to meet, and I did.

I get close to my characters and often spend time talking with them. I know what had happened to them before the story began and often what happened to them after. Sometimes, I asked them what they think of this event or that in my life to see how they would react or I ask them why they did this or that and they tell me. I often am surprised by their answers. Sometimes, I like them and sometimes I don't. I can't make them do anything that is not natural for them to do. I have tried to do this many times, and it does not work.

The characters are never boring unless I have taken a wrong turn. If I am bored, then I have to back track and find out where I went wrong. I can't have Mary kill John if Mary did not want to. Some people think that writers are like God and that we have total control over the people in the stories. What most people don't understand is that like human beings in reality, the people in stories seem to have a will of their own and they are quite capable of breaking your heart.

If I am writing a good story, then I am satisfied with what is happening and feel good when it ends. I feel sorry when it does, but I can't make the people go on when there is no reason to unless another story is beginning. As a reader, I do the same. I get to the end of a short story or book and I feel good about it. Ah, as I close the covers. That was good. Time to start something else.

Realistic expectations

2011-01-11T07:15:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine, who has been in a relationship for some time, was asked by his girlfriend why he loved her. He was stumped. He had no idea. He just knew he did. He told me that he thought at the time that he thought it was one of those questions that had no answer such as why he was a writer. He had no idea about that either although that subject had a lot to do with the previous question. His girlfriend was getting tired of waiting for him to make enough money for them to get married. He was not making a lot of money writing and did not want to make the final commitment to marriage while making so little. That relationship is still brewing.

His girlfriend, who is also a friend of mine, said he was not realistic about his writing and wanted her boyfriend to get a "real job". She was not a writer and did not understand why he even tried to get a writing career going as it did not seem realistic. Oh, oh. The word, 'realistic'. They are young and to be fair the girlfriend is working hard in getting a career started herself. She prides herself in being realistic about her career choice which is in nursing and looking at the future when they could have children. They are both in their early 30's and of course the girlfriend's biological clock is ticking. The boyfriend is a very talented writer but barely makes enough money to support himself and often takes part-time work through-out the year. He does not want to lose her, but also does not want to stop writing either. He is hoping he will not get to the "either or" stage in his private life. He will not consider his girlfriend supporting them both. I guess it is male pride. He also loves his life as a writer and would not want to have to choose.

I was reading a article this morning and it said basically that when someone demands someone to be realistic they are really demanding you to accept their version of reality and reject your own. (The Tiny Buddha http://tinybuddha.com/quotes/tiny-wisdom-on-whats-realistic).
As in many things, reality is so relative and in writing is especially so because the writer is putting down a version of his or her reality. A writer can try to put down what everyone will accept as a general version or put down the writer's. I am of the opinion that the writer will be happiest when the more honest version is used; but then history of literature is full of instances of writers producing work that was not accepted until the writer was long dead. That is not a admirable condition. Dead but rich does not make sense. Teaching English is not a bad job when you consider that many writers often drive cabs, work as night watchmen, seamen, sell from door to door, housewives, social workers, and so on. D.H. Lawrence was actually trained as a teacher until he ran off with someone's wife which in his time was a big no no. He could no longer teach anymore.

So what do you do when someone demands that you as a writer be more realistic? I guess it depends on how hungry you are. I have been lucky in that I was working at other jobs. That could be viewed as unlucky too. I had other mouths to feed. I felt like I was living two or more lives and if I could live my life again I would preferred to have lived just one. On the other hand, I don't regret my children. It is so easy to add responsibilities to one's life and I am glad I did not walk out the door.

Now, I do what I want to do. It makes life so much easier. There are so many articles directed towards writers to research the market and then to perform much like a trained seal. I am not a performing writer but an artist who is also a writer. I think if a writer does not want to be realistic or to be more accurate conform to someone else's expectations then don't. If you do, writing becomes a chore and not much fun. You might as well count widgets.

Solitude

2011-01-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

I am comfortable being by myself. Most writers that I know do. It is hard to write in a crowd although it can be done. Many writers write in cafes and everyone remembers seeing people with their laptops in coffee shops and the like. I don't know if they are writers but there was this coffee shop that had a number of writers who would bring their laptops in and write. After a while the management of the cafe tried to get rid of them and did succeed although some of the writers were well known. They went under because no one else came to their coffee shop. I was one of them and I always bought coffee and what snacks I could eat. I did not bring my laptop but a notebook. I really got mad at them although it was later that I began to see another side to the argument that I did not consider then.

People are a social group and love being with other people and distrust any group of people who are not like they are. Writers are not the only ones who prefer to do something in solitude. Another group and they are related are readers. They like to read books and one sees them in stores with their cups of coffee and Barnes and Noble are often full of them which is very reasonable. Writers are loners or at least some are as readers often are. You have to be in order to do the kind of work you yearn to do. In biographies of writers, they also tend to take long walks by themselves. That is darn close to radical. There are other loners such as scientists and others too numerous to mention here, but as a group, the ones who are social outnumber the ones who are not.

Some of the problems I have had with friends is they like to spend long hours watching television and they like company doing this. I can't stand it. It drives me up a wall. I suppose it drives them up a wall when I am sitting there reading a book or writing on a computer. I have read an essay or two over the years and even a book, "Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto" by
Anneli Rufus. It is a celebration of solitude. It doesn't change the fact that many people are afraid of being alone. Writers, as a rule, are not.

People working in that coffee shop looked at their customers lost in their own world, peering into their laptops or engrossed in their notebooks, it frightened them or made them feel rejected. It made them feel left out. In the movie, "Looking for Neverland ", the creator of Peter Pan has a wife who gets a lover on the side because she feels left out of her husband's world. She tells him that she expected to be a fellow traveler in his creative journeys but couldn't. In a interview with Phillip Glass, the real life wife of Glass says the same thing. She has her young children but feels left out of the world her husband has created.

Writers, artists, poets, composers travel in wonderful worlds of the imagination but they travel alone although what they create can be shared by their readers, listeners, followers. When the writers were sitting at their tables, they can't share where they are going except in rare exceptions with their writing partners and others feel left out. I am guessing here. But I remember the anger of my own partners in the past when I was working and they just stood there and wanted to know why they could not be a part of what I was doing. It never occurred to me that anyone did not have their own world to occupy. Poor muggles.( I will always be grateful to J.K. Rowland for this insight.)

W. Somerset Maugham said that writers have the best job in the world. I agree, but until I had a steady income from other sources I did not enjoy writing as much as I do now. I don't have to depend on the steady supply of sales from my writing. If I sell, great and if I don't, that is ok too.
Part of writing involves reading which is a very nice part of writing. I read what I write and I read other writers. That is fun too, but is all done in solitude.

Writing and empathy

2011-01-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

I was reading the current Bookmarks Magazine and saw a short ad for the book, "Healing Through Empathy: An Expanded Edition" by Dr. Francis Adams. In the short blurb for this book which I have not read or even seen, it states the book "illustrates through actual case histories the vital importance of the doctor-patient relationship and the role of empathy in healing. Dr. Adams calls for a balance between medical science and humanistic medicine. Suggestions are offered for finding the right physician."

It sounded familiar and looked up the name of Patch Adams from the film of the same name and his name is Hunter Adams but the direction of caring for one's patients follows the same path. Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of the patients and to have compassion for another human being. I remember the best doctors and even teachers in my life were those who had empathy towards those who they served.

What about writers? In the books that I enjoyed the most, I remember reading books by authors who seemed to care about the people in their books. Indeed, most writers are those who can put themselves in other people's shoes ,so to speak. I can only speak for myself, but I have often put myself in different characters imagining what it feels like to be older, disabled, a man, a child again and so forth. You can't do that unless you have some empathy for the character to some degree. There are writers out there who have no sympathy towards other human beings and we have all read stories by them. Their characters seem wooden and lifeless. They don't care what happens to them.

J.K. Rowland stated in an interview that when she wrote the demise of a character in one of her books she would cry and get depressed. I have felt the same. Some stories leave me cold and unmoved. I remember reading the book, "The World According to Garp"by John Garner in which Garp's son is killed in an auto accident that left me so upset I could not go to work the next day. I was reading it in unison with others in the nation and more than a few people had to go see their therapists that day. Some comedian made a joke about it. I did not think he was funny.

I don't think an author has to feel empathy to be successful. There are some writers who are very cold and very successful although the ones who are empathic towards their characters outweigh those who are not. I like murder mysteries and appreciate the fact that murderers get caught but not all murder mysteries are those in which the murderers are brought to justice. An exception would be the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsey. Dexter is a sociopath with no feelings but everyone else around him does feel and the reader does not want Dexter to be caught as Dexter kills the bad guy. There is Tom Riley by Patricia Highsmith. There is Marquise de Merteuil from "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and so much more by writers who feel sympathy and those who do not.

Of course, the obvious inference is for the writer to be honest. When I was a kid, there was a girl I knew who would coo over kittens because that was what girls were supposed to do. But I happened to know she hated them because they were dirty according to her and she hated the way they smelled. She was trying to cultivate an image. I have no idea what happened to her. Maybe she married a veterinarian. Who knows? Still, at the same time, I had professors in my college classes that made fun of writers who loved children and puppies. There was this poem about a child who died when he went back into a burning house to get his mother's purse and died. The professor just stood there and made fun of it and I was fighting tears for a child in the ghetto in New York City who actually did that.

I like poems and stories from writers who care about people, nature, animals and life itself. I like writers who allow themselves to be tied up on the Golden Gate Bridge as one did recently for a cause. I like another who wrote poems about nature and his confusion about his sexual identity. I like the Beat Writers. I never read writers who seem to be parroting what is popular and condemning people for one belief or another. I like writers who have empathy and like my doctor because he cares about his patients. I care about my characters too.

Things that give us pleasure

2011-01-05T10:02:00.000-08:00

This morning, I watched the sun come up. The sky was clear for a change and the hues of the rising sun were rosy as the day began. I wanted to run outside and gather it all up and put it all in a box for safekeeping. Since I have come home to Redding, the weather has not been as pleasant as I remember. Unfortunately, this speaks to my habit of hoarding the good things. What am I to do with this?

Well, I write it all down. What else can I do with it? Writing is my way of recording the more pleasanter things and dealing with that I abhor and everything that comes in between. I have the notebooks and journals to prove it. When I win the Nobel Prize (joke) then someone will be interested in them. Until then, I will look at them and know I have gathered the days of my youth, middle age and now senior years. I still get ideas for stories from them but not often. I am one of those lucky writers who only have to put pen to paper or fingers to keys. The story just comes out onto the paper or screen.

This morning was a celebration as I woke up. That in itself was cause for celebration. There will be a time when I won't and Reader you won't have to read an entry about my waking up. Of course, you could read that I woke up dead. I have always loved that saying. I could write: "This morning, I woke up dead. " I think I would have to be a vampire in order for that to be true, but I won't wake up in the morning sunlight now would I?

Listening and reading

2011-01-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a bit complicated. Writers read and listen to themselves when they write. Sometimes, it is the one time they know what they think about certain things and ideas. This has been echoed many times. Writers also read in order to keep up on what is happening in their field and to keep fresh on how to express themselves in words. Things get a bit dull when the only books they read are their own. In fact, it is rare that they only read themselves. Wannabe writers are those who do not read other writers. There are a lot of them.

Listening is an important skill for a writer to have. Reading is part of listening. It is more. It is listening to people so that the plots and stories that we write also stay fresh and inviting to the reader. As a writer, I am very curious about people and not because I want to keep writing stories. I really want to learn what is happening out there. When I listen to people, I hear stories I never thought I would ever hear about. I listen to things on television and radio but nothing beats hearing about what happens to people in everyday life. Walt Whitman loved to listen to people who talked about their jobs and what they did when they relaxed. His poetry is full of the things they did and talked about. His poems are full of life and are alive even today.

Every writer knows there is something inside that takes over when one is writing. You have to listen to that extra something, the muse, that leads you over the rainbow to the words, the stories, the poems that you didn't think were there inside of you. It is important never to ignore that inner voice. It just takes over and off you go into the sunset, into the sky and into the words that you did not think were there. Then there are the characters that are created but come alive on their own volition and start talking and telling the writer where to go, what to do and what to put down on the screen, on the paper and where to take the story. All that involves listening.

Now that I think about it, listening is one of the most important thing I do. It is also important not to listen. I don't listen to the Monkey Mind that says I am not a good writer and that I don't have what it takes to be a good writer or I try not to. I also don't listen to human critics who say things about my writing that I don't agree with. I do consider people's opinions and then I either take it or throw it out. That is hard to do. I have a ton of trash cans I put out every week that is full of stuff that people tell me and I put it in those cans and the trash trucks pick them up every week and there is none of that going out and trying to take the stuff out again like I used to years ago. What goes in those trash cans, stays.

It is fun to write. It is also fun to listen. I love listening to people tell me about what they are doing with their lives and how they are trying to survive. That is what all of us are really doing. No one lives a life full of promise and riches. Everyone has sorrows and problems even if the bank balance is full of money. Someone told me once that he would be so much happier if he had some money to throw at his problems. Perhaps. I know this woman who is my age and is sitting in a convalescent home because her health is very poor and no amount of wealth can change that. A wise man many years ago said life is full of sorrows. It was true then and it true now. Listening helps us get out of those nests of troubles and finds ways of dealing with the life we have now whether we are writers or not.

Making things more complicated

2011-01-03T10:40:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who is a published poet and does alright with poetry. He feels he is successful because he does not have to pay to have his poems published. Yale University publishes his poems and seems very happy to do so. Of course, he does not make enough money to support his cat. Very few poets do. The reason I bring him up here is the comments he makes about my poems and my writings. He does not think too much about them. That's OK for we are still friends anyhow. I don't think too much about his poems. They seem too academic for me.

He has his graduate and doctorate's degrees from Yale University which is probably why they like to publish him. He also gives lectures there at times. He knows all about the technical terms about poems and literature. I used to know them, but I forgot them. I just don't see the importance of remembering them. I can't hear meter so I don't remember the different forms of them. I have dyslexic hearing which my friend does not think exists. That's his opinion. We are not real close. He is always telling me what I am doing wrong in the poems that I have published here and there. He is also a Buddhist and tells me all of the things I get wrong there too.

I am not writing here that it is important not to remember or that one should. I think one should be true to oneself. When I tried to remember all of the definitions, terms and so forth I was so tied up I could hardly write or even talk. I was afraid of talking to another Buddhist. I remember being at a very nice talk at a Buddhist Monastery and one of the monks was chatting away about the definition of a term that I had not heard about before. I listened and then I realized that I just did not care. I was doing just fine where I was so I went for a walk around the grounds and found someone else doing the same. We just sat and watched some cats playing in the sunshine. I went home and made up my mind to be more honest with myself.

Some people need the terms and definitions as anchors which is very good for them. I don't. Some people need to look up their truths in a book. While I love books, I would rather look within. For me, I think one can make something you love a lot more complicated than it needs to be and a whole lot less fun to do. I love to write and enjoy it tremendously. I did learn the rules and try not to break them, but it is like complete sentences. One should never write incomplete sentences but sometimes the work calls for them. If it does, write them. The Grammar Police will not arrest you. As long as you are communicating, that is the most important issue. That does not mean I don't read the rules for I do. I just remember to have some fun too. I pick and choose what I will do in writing. No one else does it for me.

Honesty

2011-01-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

I wrote about enthusiasm on my blog about being healthy and I do tend to communicate my sense of enthusiasm in my writing; but that is not what I want to write about here. Basically, I write here what I have learned over the years hoping that I would put into words those hard learned lessons that I learned over the years. Maybe I can help another writer. Maybe not.

What I did learn was to be honest about what I wanted to write about. If I was enthusiastic, then I wrote that way. If I wasn't, I did not write that way. For a long time, much of the writing that was mainstream was not optimistic or enthusiastic about anything. So, in order to fit in I tried to write like everyone else was writing. I hated what I was doing and a series of writing blocks erupted on my pathway making my road very uncomfortable and disagreeable. I listened to my teachers and professors trying to conform. Since I am like most writers and read, I tried to conform to what I was reading. There was no joy in my writing. I did not have any fun writing, and didn't until I stop listening to all of that crap.

I am not saying that you should be enthusiastic as I am. No, good heavens no. What I am writing here is honesty. Some of what I wrote rings very false now when I read it. I know someone who was very much of a downer as a writer and wrote that way. He hated his life and wrote books that did very well. He never reads his stuff, but he was honest and is proud of what he did in earlier years. Is he more optimistic? No. He still hates his life, but he is married now and feels a bit more optimistic and recently got a job as a syndicated newspaper columnist. That has taken off and he loves that. His books have lost a bit of the edge he had in the earlier years because of that. He thinks he has more of an outlet for his pessimism although he likes to call himself a realist or pragmatist. He reads a lot of William James. Luckily, his book sales have not suffered.

Part of the reason, one writes is that it is fun. If it isn't or it doesn't satisfy something deep inside oneself, why do it? Of course, I could not stop writing if I wanted to. Still, if I lived several hundred years ago and I was writing on paper and it wasn't going anywhere I would still do it. Nowadays, I get to send it out into cyberspace. I even love the word, cyberspace. Ah, life is grand these days and honesty is so much better doing as a writer than anything else.

Perfection

2010-12-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine is a perfectionist. What makes it even worse, she is a poet and a novelist. She does not live very far from me and now that I am finally home I see her slaving away in her office not far from my house trying to find the perfect word for a perfect poem everyday. The last poem she wrote took a year for her to finish. Her first and only novel took her ten years to write. The good side to her work habits is she got her book published and it did well which is a good thing because she has been working on her second book since then and it is half finished and that was ten years ago.

My problem is what is written in my head is not what ends up on the page. I go round and round trying to put down what is between my ears on the computer screen and it never matches what I know is the real story. Sometimes, I give up and turn off the computer and go out for coffee or go hiking up at the lake. In Korea, I could not do that. I also could not find a book to read. Unless I wrote it, I did not find anything to read, so I wrote it. I also could not find many people to talk with in English or any other language I could speak.

We are often trained in the west to regard ourselves as faulty and guilty. It goes along with the Christian tradition of being born in sin. No matter what some writers put down, they are convinced it is wrong and not good enough. Heaven knows, I fall into this category. Part of my writer's block consists of not being good enough to be published or putting something out there that people would hate.

Perfection is a self-imposed set of rules and beliefs that some of us put on and it is rigid and stiff and does not fit anyone. In these set of molds, no one is good enough. Remember the parable about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven? It was dreamed up by some poor scribe to help poor people feel better about themselves but made everyone think how no one was getting into heaven.

I wish I knew a magic portion that would enable writers to just put the words down and do your best and fuck everyone who don't like it. If I knew that magic portion, I would take it too. There is always going to be someone who will say this stinks and that is no good and that is not right for this publication and that is not right for this time and on and on. I wrote something the other day that made me feel like my last car, about two inches tall. My sons sold it to a wrecking yard. The only thing I could do was breath in and breath out.

A Nobel Prize winning writer stayed in his room for two weeks because of a bad review for his last book because he was convinced everyone was talking about him and how bad the book was. Then he found out from his neighbor that the magazine where it appeared never made it into the small village they lived in because of a storm in the mountains. Then the writer worried about the magazine coming in after the storm subsided. Enough is enough. I would have thought a Nobel Prize was enough to give some relief from this perfection and low self-esteem.

If I don't write the books that are in my head, they will stay in my head and die when I do. I care about my fictional characters and don't want that to happen to them. I also don't want that for stories that are in other writers' heads. Everything we as writers write has the potential of not being liked by some reader. That can't be helped. I know of another writer who wrote a book that had limited sales. It was science fiction and 14th of others he wrote and he could never give up his day job of selling suits in a large men's warehouse. Yet, he found out from his publisher that a man was going to kill himself one night but read his book instead and credited his book with saving his life and turning it around. It made a difference to him and helped him write the next one.

Try and push the keys, send that pen across the paper pad or whatever it takes to write your stories and novels. If the monkey of perfection lands on your shoulders and it will, punch it in the groin and keep going. What else are you going to do?

Writing down the sorrow

2010-12-26T10:31:00.000-08:00

I have always kept a journal. I am one of those who love doing it. When I taught writing and English, I encouraged it and never graded the content of it. I was always hoping that people would discover the joy of writing everyday because it definitely has its advantages. I meditate every morning and long incorporated writing into my form of meditation. I adjusted it to fit me. I think that is what each of us should do.

I always felt that there were people who had inner directed lives and those who needed direction from an outer source. I am one of those who sought direction from within. It was a given when I discovered Buddhism even before I knew its name that I would follow that tradition as the Dharma or the teachings come from within and not from any official source and the same goes for Taoism. I am not saying that those who need a book such as the Bible are wrong. No, it is a different path and all paths lead to the same thing in the end.

For me, writing is a basic form of my spiritual practice. When sorrow hits as it often does each of us, I have always found my journal to be a source of great relief and comfort. The Dharma teaches me truths that helps me in this regard. The purists in these religions are forever correcting me in many of my use of terms and concepts. Again, I am comfortable in my individual practice and don't much care about getting "it right" according to certain tradition. I just don't think it is all that important. It is the effect that is important. My beliefs change over the years and I am fine with that too.

Yesterday, someone was very angry at her situation in life and to lash out at the anger that was given to her threw some on me. It hurt me very badly, but I was determined not to let the anger and sorrow that I felt, not travel any further. At least this portion stopped with me. It felt as if someone took a knife and stabbed me with it. It hurt because I care about certain people and it involved those people. I had to go over the situation and visit my part in it. In the past, I did react to her with anger so that part I was guilty. The rest I was not. I felt really bad. I felt as if my Christmas was ruined.

I took my journal out and started to write. I wrote and wrote and soon I was able to leave the emotions that I had felt on the page. I drew pictures and left more on the page. Then I began to remember the things that my own Buddhist traditions and Dharma had taught me. Soon, I was doing other things and started to enjoy the holiday. I had just gotten back from Korea and was alone. However, I really wasn't alone. Soon, I was doing what I wanted to do. It is seeing life from another perspective.

When I was in Korea, I did not have a television so I did not watch it. I could not get the programs that I followed here in this country. I love the program, Eureka. I watched a program on Hulu that I could not watch there either. It was about the sheriff not being able to leave the town of Eureka and being stuck there during Christmas. Someone had left a hydrogen crystal that seemed to be growing bigger and the scientist had disappeared. Then they looked at it from a different perspective and the crystal wasn't growing at all. The town was shrinking. Well, Sheriff Carter and his common sense yet again gets Eureka out of another mess. The program made me laugh. I stopped feeling sorry for myself.

It is amazing how much people like to control others. That includes setting up rules for other people including writers. When I started this blog for writers, I thought I was like other writers and maybe I am except I don't believe in all of those rules. I do believe in journals and in writing meditation at least for me. I never know what I feel and think about certain things until I write about it. Journals help me keep a more organized mind. When I was a social worker, I used to get in trouble all of the time from my supervisor for having a messy desk. I never cared to have one that was super clean and sterile. I cared about the people in my caseload. I never have nightmares about them as my supervisor did and had to eventually quit.

Sorrow and joy will come. They are very transitory. They never stay for long. Writing about them helps when one becomes almost unbearable and the other forgettable.

The Writing Process

2010-12-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

I was reading a blog today about when you should use certain point of view. I thought the essay was well-written and it made a lot of sense except that I never go through that process when deciding what point of view to use. The comments at the end of the article were very positive as was mine except that I never sit down and decide what point of view I am going to use. I let my characters decide. It just depends on what story is and what the characters want to do.

My story or plot is character driven. That is how I started my writing career. I began by developing the who the main character was that I was going to write about. I formulated that person in my mind with a past and present. Usually, there was a pressing problem facing that character and in my story the character or protagonist was going to try to resolve it. How this was done by the character decided the point of view.

If my character, Tommie for example in a story that I am working on now, has a problem trying to figure out why she can't seem to get men to like her. She is attractive and intelligent and has a normal family background. It is such a mystery and the character wanted to tell the reader in detail how normal she is in every way. She went on and on about visiting therapists and asking people about it and no one had a clue except to say there was no problem. It was obvious the way Tommie kept talking to the reader that the story was a first person narrative. She wanted people to see she was normal when it was evident something was a miss. Then slowly the reader could begin to see by the way the character talked what the problem could be. The question is at this point is whether or not Tommie is going to figure it out for herself and what she is going to do about it. The layers are peeled by Tommie herself and the reader sees the truth before the protagonist does.

Another story is about two people both deep in personal tragedy can't see what is happening around them. It takes a supernatural event to knock their depressive glasses off. Both of the characters are not talking to themselves or each other. First person point of view is not what they want. They want the point of view of the third person so that the reader can see all of the events happening and how what is happening on the outside world is connected to the inside world. Again, the reader sees it before they do.

In my stories, the reader is often privy to what is happening before the characters. I just follow along and write what is happening. Sometimes, the main character can reason it out for themselves and sometimes has to be told. I like stories in which there is some transformation takes place. I guess I remember the tough times in my life when I got hints on what to do in my own tough circumstances when a character in a book went through a similar situation and what they did to survive. The stories in which one point of my wall took the hits from thrown books were ones in which a person went through all kinds of trauma and the resolution was a new romance walking or I should say waltzing through the door. How realistic is that?

I am the kind of writer that lets the inner writer loose. I also let my characters loose as well. I figure they all know what should be happening best. Of course I buttress all of this with a fairly substantial amount of reading of other writers and the daily exercise of journal writing and of course the heavy so-called indulgence of dreaming of stories in my head. I can't tell you that huge amount of training that gave me. Most of all, it all feels very comfortable to me.

I let myself tell me what is right and what is not. Maybe that puts me into the camp of the instinctive writer. I don't know. I do know that I have read many writers who often say the same. They just put the pen on the paper or the fingers on the keys and just start to write. I try not to think too much about it and make it more difficult than it has to be.

Twitter

2010-12-05T16:40:00.000-08:00

I have been hearing about Twittering for a while but really did not know exactly what it was. Well, not wanting to be behind the times, so to speak, I looked up the web site. It was explained what Twittering was all about in a video on that site. It was free to sign up, and I did. It was also easy to do.

I thought I needed some special device, and I don't. I am using my computer. I am not going to us the phone that I am using here in Korea as it will be given back to the university that provided it to me in a few days. I will have to ask about Twittering when I get a phone in the States next week. I already know what brand I will be getting as I had a phone before I came and liked it very much. I only use a cell phone for emergencies. I will use the phone service as a land line my son has off his Internet service.

So far, it has been interesting reading all the information that is available on my Tweeter account. I am following those sites having to do with reading, writing, and other sites that looked interesting including my grandson. He is the only one from my family that has a Tweeter account. My oldest son doesn't even have Facebook. Good heavens! How retro.

When I was my grandson's age, I would have been astonished at all of the electronic devices that I use everyday. I would not have even dreamed them up. Now, it is a reality. Who knows what will exist in a few years?

As I wrote, I follow web sites having to do with writing. One gives story prompts. In creating stories, plots, and so on I just create the characters and then follow them as they jaunt through their paces. Who knows what they are going to do? I tried writing a story that was based on a story idea first and it became so boring to me that I gave it up. Everyone does their writing from a different point of view and does it according to their own tastes and methods. Those methods are all valid. Heck, as long as they work one should go for it. I never use a outline although I did for the first book that I wrote. Some writers swear by them. I say just use what works for you.

Right now, Twittering is working for me. If it stops working for me, I will give it up. If you have a lot of followers be careful what you write down and make sure it is accurate. One person that is in the news Twitters (is that capitalized?) before editing her message. I think my "pencil" is my best friend even in the Twittering game.

Writer's Block

2010-12-03T01:21:00.000-08:00

I think every writer has had writer's block at one time or another. I know that I have had this problem through the years. Luckily, I was able to work on my journal and keep that going.

Since coming to Korea, I don't have writer's block as a whole. I discovered that if I had some issues that needed to be looked at in my inner world, I needed to take some time off from writing my book and do some journaling and then I would find that the writer's block would be gone.

In clothes, one size does not fit all. I don't expect what works for me is going to work for others. I am finding that being here in Korea is proving to be one long exploration of my inner world. That may sound egotistical but that is all part of what makes me a writer. If what is happening to me is interfering in my writing, I can't work. I have to work out the problems that life's lessons are showing me.

Because I have been able to deal with some of my memories and past experiences, I have discovered that I have room to do other things such as art. My journal is now full of drawings and far more than there were before. I am even better than I used to be. I am no grand master of the arts, but I like what I do in my journal even if the perspective is still a bit off.

I guess what I am trying to say in a long winded way is when a writer can't work on something he or she needs to look at the reason why the writing stopped. I know if I am writing a book or story and it suddenly it can't progress any further, one reason can be I took a wrong turn and have to unravel the story back to where I liked it. Maybe it is because I need to look what is happening to me at the present time. I don't want to stay away from a writing project too long or it gets "cold". Sometimes, I write in my journal what the motivations of the characters are because I get too involved in the characters and forget where I am. Sometimes, I need to go outside and draw the cat or the lake surrounded by mountains. I find dreams very important in telling me what is wrong. Waking up and grabbing a journal and recording a dream helps me too. I always put down what flashes in my mind at that point.

The most important thing a writer does is breath. Meditation is important and life is even more. Sometimes that is all I can do is watch my breath and feel pretty good I can still do it. Everything changes. Nothing stays forever including writer's block. Just keep writing in your journal. Always do that every day even if it is "whoever is a very good writer. "

Learning from fictional characters

2010-11-29T15:13:00.000-08:00

I know that I have discussed that I have learned valuable lessons from my own fictional characters. That may sound odd, but it is the way things happen sometimes. The other day I was working out a scene in my head about a character who learns he inadvertently caused a death and he is devastated by the information. He is blaming himself. Another woman comes to the cemetery where he is and tells him that although she blamed him for the death of her best friend at first, she no longer does anymore. The waves of violence, according to that character, began many years ago and just kept going until it caused her friend's death, not him. She was in the same place too, but made up her mind that the cycle of anger and violence was going to stop with her. That included self-blame. Enough is enough.

All over the world, violence is continued down generations, creating waves upon waves of anger, vengeance and fueled by more violence. No one remembers how it all began. A small child is beaten and molested by adults and grows up dysfunctional and often attacks others or in the case above attacks herself. On and on it rolls gathering additional anger as it grows like a snow ball down a hill until it is huge.

I had such a childhood and unknowingly added such karma to this world, my own versions of anger when I either correctly or incorrectly interpreted anyone's behavior towards me. I was the snow ball going down the hill and getting bigger and bigger as I grew older. I lashed out at others and of course took out the anger towards myself. Well, like the fiction person I outlined above, enough is enough. It stops with me.

Maybe or even probably the world will not notice my lack of participation in the cycle of violence. I am not laboring under the delusion that it will be noticed, but on some level somewhere it will. I believe that. It is the story of the man who picks up starfish on the beach and flings them back into the surf. When asked if he could make any difference to the huge number of starfish that die breached on the sands of this world, he replied that it made a difference to the one he just threw back into the water. Well, I am going to do this one starfish at a time. Who knows what effect I will have, but I know I will not be contributing anymore anger to this world.

Wasted time

2010-11-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

Writers are the luckiest people in the world. Don't let anyone ever tell you different. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can hear my mother and other relatives tell me that I waste so much of my time just dreaming. Oh, those moments, hours, months, years of daydreaming taught me how to construct plots and characters. They were not wasted, not at all. We as writers are lucky in what people see as a huge waste of time such as daydreaming, is our bread and butter.

I think all writers should be able to deduct all books as a tax deduction and not just some that are directly related to the craft. Writers need to read including anything that looks interesting. We are lucky in that most of us love to read, but it is a necessity for us to do so. I wrote a story about a character who was Lithuanian-American. Luckily, I had just read a book of Lithuanian recipes and used one for the story. I won a prize for that story. Everyone asked me if I was Lithuanian. No, not at all.

I take trips and the details of my trips always end up in some way in my stories and books. I think writers should be able to deduct those trips and not just those that are directly connected to what they are working on. I took a series of trips to the deserts of California to work some archaeology digs. I used that information for years after it happened. It was something I did as a volunteer. I still use the information I obtained on those trips although I have not been there for a long time.

Writers use everything in their lives in contrast to other occupations. I used the experience of childbirth and raising children, buying and fixing a house, working in 9 to 5 jobs and those jobs that were more hours. I use everything including my walks on hiking trails. I use my experience in fixing meals both in those that worked out and those that did not. Occasionally, I go to theater parties in Ashland, Oregon and I use that too and not just the plays.

Sometimes, it is not old messages from parents that are in my brain but ones that I created for myself such as I wasted time not writing but walking in the park. I love to spend time with my grandchildren especially my youngest who loves to go to the train station and watch the trains. I am sure he doesn't think it is wasted time. I don't either, but I use those experiences too. When I do tell myself that I am wasting time, I just have to think about it and I always discover that there was something important happening then. As I said, writers are the luckiest people in the world. Nothing in our life goes into the trash bin.

Looking back on my writing and others

2010-11-25T20:22:00.000-08:00

I worry that my grammar is not up to standard. Who doesn't? I also worry my sentence and vocabulary is too simple, too naked, too bland. When I do edit my writing as I am doing down as I enter what I wrote in a notebook into this blog, I notice that I also have the tendency to be wordy. I think I tend to use 25 words when half that number would suffice.

As so many other writers, I read other writers and marvel how well they describe a summer day, a woman in labor, a man walking alone at night or the underground tunnels under London. Some writers that I read wrote just a few years ago and others from a few hundred years ago.

I try different things when I write to see when I read it later if I can understand what I wanted to portray. I have mentioned in these posts that a pencil is a writer's best friend, but the delete key has replaced it.

There is no doubt that the computer has made my life easier as a writer as it made me a better college student. I don't think in words and often don't know what I htink on any given subject until I write about it. Other writers are this way.

Some writers when they write, ooze their personalities all over their work. One such writer is Richard Rodriquez. It is good he writes personal essays instead of fiction. Some fiction writers include themselves in the narrative of the plot. I am re-reading "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens and although I am enjoying it I am hearing Dickens loud and clear as if he is using a megaphone.

Some writers have been accused of writing in too simple prose such as John Steinbeck. When I read that a while back, I picked up a short story and looked at the writing and found it beautifully crafted. The critic that I read was totally wrong. Steinbeck's sentences and vocabulary are clear, polished and beautiful. Some writers are read in translation and the reader is never sure if the prose is the result of the writer or the translator.

I am going to continue to write, but I am also going to continue to read. I think one can always improve. I will keep the delete button close at hand. What else can I do?

Thanksgiving Day

2010-11-25T00:05:00.000-08:00

I read a blog this morning about not giving up after the envelops carrying your work arrive in the mail with rejection slips. That is true. I have been lucky and grateful on this day of Thanksgiving that when those rejection letters came in and I could not take it anymore, I took a vacation but not from writing.

I remember the feeling of freedom when I knew the stories were not going to be sent in but would sit in the hamper so to speak. Then I could just write and not worry whether or not it sold. Every time I have seen advice to the writer, it was "study the market". I began to hate being a writer when I did. I wrote what would sell and not what I wanted to write. Writing became a chore.

Now, when I write, I write for me. If it sells, great. If it doesn't, I put it away and bring it out again. I write what I want, but I don't depend on writing to pay the bills. I have other income that comes with retirement. I am very grateful for that. I am grateful for Social Security, CalPers, and Veterans Pensions. I do sell occasionally. I now love writing again. It is fun and I write what I want. I am very grateful.

Notebooks

2010-11-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

In Korea, I have one laptop that stays on my student desk in my apartment. It is hooked up to the Internet. I asked for wireless, but the company did not seem to have it. Others in this tech savvy country seem to have those long trailing telephone lines all over their apartments attached to their computers. The only wireless service for computers have been in some universities. I don't know why but there you are.

At first, when I wanted to write somewhere else I really missed not having this laptop to work on my book of short stories. Then I adjusted by buying those cute little books of blank paper they sell in Korea that are of high quality and low price. I have a bunch of them. I use them to write essays and the short stories when I am not in my apartment. I have discovered by the very act of putting them into the computer I have added one more step of editing. It has worked out. I also don't feel encumbered by carrying a laptop over my shoulder.

I had looked around where I normally sit when I am not home, drinking coffee and enjoying cheesecake or a rice burger and I did not see a plug and I am certainly not going to get wireless service. As I wrote, Koreans have it for their cell phones but not for their computers for some reason.

There is something about the act of physically writing that gives one detachment when writing about the story and characters. I don't know if it would have worked for a novel, but for a book of short stories it is working out very well. I think it would work out for a novel if I worked on a chapter at a time. Still, it is not only convenient but fun.

Then I have my journal. I am trying to deal with issues and matters before I go home in three weeks. I don't want to return to the world I was living in before I came here. I had a monster writer's block. I don't have one now. Sometimes, when writing about my dysfunctional family background, I like to be in public. I feel safer, more comfortable than writing about these things alone in my little room.

There are other reasons for the written journal. I also draw pictures in my journal and nothing trains the eye more than drawing. I have been drawing with a black pen and then filling it all in with some colored pencils that I got at Home Plus. The price of the more expensive pencils were a lot cheaper in Korea than in the US. I know there is a way of drawing on the computer, but for meditation reasons, I like doing it by hand. I am also a big believer in writing meditation and create my own way of doing it as I go along.

Many of the notebooks that I have bought here in Korea have English on the cover and some nice artwork. As mentioned before, the quality is very good and they are about one dollar or less apiece. I spent ten dollars and bought ten of them. I bought all that they had with art work featuring a zebra. I even bought an extra blank journal because I am going faster in my journal than expected. I also have one on my computer.

Of course, every writer does what he or she must do to facilitate the writing. I know writers who have to use a certain brand of pen and never use a computer. They send their stuff out to a typist. I know some that stand up and write while others sit in bed and one that loves sitting in the tub (with hot water, natch.). With notebooks, I can sit in bed if I want especially as the weather is cooling down, and it is so warm in bed.

One of my pet peeves are people who tell you how to write. I am trying to learn to keep my mouth shut. I was sitting in Home Plus and several women from a church I attend came by and one of them said as I put a sticker on the date on my journal that "I was like a girl and her diary". I like to use stickers and draw later. I was really pissed but kept my mouth shut. This is a woman who never wrote a journal and that is her choice but I have been writing non-stop since the age of 13. Another writer told me never write in bed because it was so lazy. Very famous writers wrote in bed.

Writers are the freest people on this planet. Be ready to put your hands over your ears when someone tries to tell you how you should write. Create your own system and if it works, use it without guilt. The biggest problem I had in writing was listening to other people including writers. There is only one writer you should ever listen to, and that is the writer that is sitting in your chair. That writer speaks volumes if allowed to speak.

Writing blogs and other educational projects

2010-11-21T22:19:00.001-08:00

I read other writing blogs all of the time. I am impressed by them. I also read books by writers telling other so-called would be writers how to be writers. I look at the classes that are offered online and in the universities and colleges. I am impressed by all of them.

This blog isn't fancy and full of resources you can access such as the places I have visited. No, this is a different sort of blog. I try and put things on this blog that I think writers need to know but are not always told. Maybe that is useless information, but it is information that I found out through trial and error and have become golden for me.

For instance, many places touch upon the need to read other writers. It isn't a need. It is a necessity. If you don't do it, then you are a hack, a writer who will never rise above the waves and waves of mediocre writers out there. That is it, pure and simple. If you don't like to read, then maybe you should try another field of endeavor. There isn't a whole lot of difference between writing and reading.

You can go to all of the schools of writing in the world, but you won't learn as much as you will if you do two things every single day: read and write. You have to write every single day as if your life depends on it because your writing life does. You are the violinist that needs to practice on the violin and if you don't then your talent will wither away. Even if you can't get a story going, write in your journal about anything. I had a monster writer's block until I found out that I wanted to write about some things in my life in my journal that I was not allowing myself to do. Then when I did, I got my "groove" back.

Every day, you need to read and that does not mean you read all authors. You can read the ones you like. I suggest you give up your library card and start to buy books, second hand books or books on sale at your local Barnes and Noble. Then you can go as slow as you want with a pencil and mark the heck out of it. Let the writers that have gone before you teach you how to write and it is a heck of a lot cheaper than taking a class. Go slowly and develop your instinct for what works and what does not. You are alone and no one is saying over your shoulder how to write. Let's face, writing is a solitary affair. It will never be otherwise and you need to learn to depend on yourself.

If there is a third part to this, let yourself dream. Create stories in your head, move the parts and people around and notice what works for you and what does not. If you get bored with the story in your head, chances are others will too. Let yourself loose. Put everything in a fantasy you want and when if you decide to write it, the unrealistic parts will go away. Play around with the imagination. That is what it is for. Have some fun with it. Writing is fun if you allow it.

Lastly, have faith in your creative imagination. If no one is publishing your kind of stories, keep going. If some professor tells you that your stories stink, quit his class and do all of the above. Don't let any editor or critic tell you at the beginning level what works with your writing and what does not. If you are getting ready for publication and an editor wants to change something consider it, but at the beginning put it down the way the story comes to you. And for heavens sake, edit it. Your pencil is your best friend.

Fact and Fiction Writers

2010-11-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

I read a while back that novelists and other writers of fiction often will tell people stories that are not totally true. They often improve the story. It's just the nature of the writer. I know I have this tendency at times. The writers that I have known seem to have this penchant.

The other day I met with a writer who was traveling through Korea after spending some time reporting on President Obama's trip here in Seoul. He is a journalist. He and I went to the same journalism school many years ago. He has relatives who live here in Korea and took advantage and paid them a visit.

He also is a novelist. We talked about this propensity to shaping and creating events and people that writers have. He told me that it was the one thing he could not do as a journalist and the opportunities were there but it was a big no-no. Some journalists who were frustrated fiction writers did give in to this temptation and forever lived to regret it when they were caught by their readers and/or editor. It is much harder to fool the reader than one's editor who often is a young man or woman who doesn't read all that much and does not have the sophistication of a seasoned reader as the readers often are. Sometimes, it was the person being written about who did not like words being put in his or her mouth even if they were better said.

I asked him if he always had this temperament because even W. Somerset Maugham in his book, "Summing Up", warns people that authors are not the most reliable reporters of the people around them.

"Good heavens yes. I used to get accused of telling white lies all of the time. I don't think I ever understood quite why I did this until I met another writer. He was telling me about something that happened to him forgetting that I was there too. I almost didn't recognize the incident. I have since learned all fiction writers do it. Its in our blood, so to speak. As a journalist, I can't do that. I don't have that freedom. If the subject of your story uses bad grammar, then you don't give him a direct quote. If he says something great, then you do. You never burn your bridges with someone you may want to interview again. "

I was the same way and hated the journalism part of my writing career. Sometimes, I would be sitting in front of those large typewriters and want to change things a bit, smooth it out and so forth and I would have to sit on my hands until the feeling past. Now, when I am writing, I give it full rein.

I asked him if he got tempted to change the words of President Obama. He shook his head. "No, the man is very literate and well-read. He is actually a lot easier to follow than the previous president because President Bush said a lot of things you really could not put down or people would think you were making things up. I am not saying this because I disliked the man because I didn't. I just think he has a form of dyslexia and gets mixed up in his words at times. The press is not a forgiving lot."

The one thing that writers do, is describe the shadows of human kind. It is in the stories that we write. Poets write about it as well. We look at life differently as the so-called normal people do. The everyday events of living is just fodder for us to use in our work. In accepting the shadows in others, it is best that we accept it in ourselves.

My friend said: "The best thing I ever learned as a journalist and novelist is that when people start to harp on me for this or that I remember that there is nothing wrong with me. It was one morning when I got up to go to work and I had gotten a call from my mother the night before who told me to watch those tricks of the imagination that I was so prone to. When I opened my eyes I remembered her words along with everyone else. Don't do this. Do this. Stop dreaming. Then I realized that maybe they like their world that way, but I don't. There was nothing wrong with me. I am just fine the way I am. I never looked back."

I think this is good advice.

Consider the source....

2010-11-13T18:16:00.000-08:00

You, the writer, have something you are proud of in print and along comes a critic that slams you against the wall. Being like most writers, you are devastated. Well, before you lower the boom on yourself, please consider the critic. Many critics come from a non-writing background. That does not necessarily precludes them from passing judgment on a piece of writing; but some critics don't read and that does preclude them from giving any consideration of anyone's work.

Some writers prefer that the critic be someone who does not write for a living. I, on the other hand, prefer that the critic be someone who have put some time in writing. The best critic, I think, in the business although he is now getting too old to write much these days is Gore Vidal. His tongue could cut down a forest of trees. I love to read a writer's opinion on different writers. Some writers don't want this and they also have a point. What no one wants is a critic who does not have an educated palette. This is a critic who has no background in other writers past or present. There are some magazines that I no longer subscribe to because they have literary critics who had never read the classic writers and poets. I saw no value in their commentary. It would be like asking someone to judge different kinds of spaghetti sauce who had never ate anything but peanut butter sandwiches. It's not worth considering.

Can Your Own Writing Change You?

2010-11-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

One of the advantage in not knowing whether I have readers is having the freedom to write what I want without hesitation. I would hope if I had lots of readers, I would do the same. However, I realized that what I wrote yesterday evening here (don't pay attention to the official date and times of when these blogs are written because I am on Korean time and these blogs are on some other time.)changed the way I view what I write about.

I was a teacher of journalism for a while and I used to tell the students that we should look look at the student newspaper as if it was the New York Times and it has to be the very best we can do. Many of the students did not respect their own newspaper that much. I did. I like to believe that my blog is right along the best in the business of blogging although in reality it may not be. Who is to say what is best and what is not? It's mine and that is what counts.

I ask myself if what I am writing will contribute something positive the world of letters and if it doesn't I don't put it down. I often go through some written articles on a few publications and sometimes I recommend them for my Facebook page. This morning, I used the same criterion. Is it mean-spirited and does no one any good or is it valid criticism that is basic information that needs to be out there?

I would never have guessed that what I have written would have changed the way I do things. It has. Of course, I quoted other people in my essay of sorts but the general scope of the ideas were mine and they changed the way I do things. They did fit my philosophy and ethical bent. I would not have accepted them so readily unless they did. Maybe, it is Jon Stewart that changed me. Still, it tickled me that I would have been an influence to myself. Here I am, sitting in Daejeon, Korea alone in my tiny apartment giggling over something that I wrote. Maybe, I need to get out of my apartment today. It is a beautiful day.

Being Critical of other Writer's Work

2010-11-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

Since the rally at the end of October held by Jon Stewart in Washington D.C., many people have been questioning their approach to criticizing their fellow citizens regarding politics. Even the host of Countdown on MSNBC has elected to remove one segment off his show, "Worst Person in the World", because of some of the things that were said at that rally. I felt immune since I don't do politics as a rule on these blogs. Still, there was food for thought at that rally.

Then today, I watched the interview of Jon Stewart by Rachel Maddow. Much of what Stewart said was repeated during that interview. The entire interview, by the way, will be available on Dr. Maddow's blog this weekend and I plan on watching it.

So what does any of the above have to do with writing? Actually quite a bit to my mind. The tie in was provided to me by W. Somerset Maugham in the book that I am re-reading, "The Summing Up" that I have mentioned before. Many critics both the ones writers encounter in print, and other forms of the media, and those we see in our daily lives such as friends and relatives can be as mean as those on Fox.

Maugham wrote that critics sometimes write criticism "to compensate themselves for humiliations they have suffered in their early youth. Criticism affords them a means of regaining their self-esteem. Because at school, unable to adapt the self to the standards of that narrow world, they has been kicked and cuffed, they will when grown up cuff and kick in their turn in order to assuage their wounded feelings."

At first, I thought that all of the criticism voiced by Stewart and others about being mean and bad spirited had nothing to do with me. When I said something in print in other places other than these blogs, I thought of myself as clever and my writing as witty. But I was wrong. I was being mean just as much as some of the people on Fox.

I agree that I don't think the folks on MSNBC are as mean spirited and play loose with the facts as those on Fox. What I do as far as a critic is concerned, I might be like Maugham states some critics do and feel that I am righting some of the wrongs that were done to me in years past. It is a fine line between criticism and just plain expression of emotional hurt which has no part in these blogs.

In one job that I had years ago, there was an employee who used to go from one fellow employee to another telling them his troubles both on the job and what was happening at home. He wanted to be taken care of by his fellow employees. He wanted sympathy. Somehow he had grown to expect it. That is not what a good writer does. We use our anger to fuel our exploration of ourselves and others but not to ask our readers to take care our our needs. We also don't use our bully pulpit, should we be be so lucky to have one, to gain vengeance on imaginary foes who for the most part don't exist. To make sure we don't fall into this, it is good to exercise mindfulness, awareness. We are all in this world together.

Cycle of Anger

2010-11-09T20:39:00.001-08:00

In my journal, I have been writing about my anger about people. Some people make me angry as most people do to everyone. When I am driving at home, I am often mystified by road rage because people will get angry over the most littlest details of someone else's driving. For the most part, I never see who is driving and the source of their anger is and remains a mystery to me. I make surmises that they were mad at their spouses or parents or just got a pink slip at work.

This post is not why I am angry at people but how as writers we deal with emotions in our characters in fiction. I decided to write about an angry person named Adam on my "Zebrareader's Much Ado About Nothing" Blog. I described a middle-aged Korean and why he was so angry.

One time in a writers' editing group, that I may have written about before, I asked another writer why a character wanted to quit her job and get another one. Her changing jobs was essential to the plot of the story. She said it wasn't important. I said if you could not explain the character's motivation the story would fail. All you needed was a sentence or two. She disagreed. I think the same goes for anger. If a character is angry, there has to be a reason for it. If a character in a film played by Clint Eastwood is angry, it can't be because it looks good on the screen. That's bad plot development. The film medium isn't always able to explain motivation although good films managed to do so. The same goes for print fiction.

I did not wake up angry at certain people this morning for no good reason. I had reasons for it. I have a past and a present. They are integrated and the experiences and emotions that make up who I am explain the reasons I am mad at certain people. If I am very sure of myself as a writer and an editor tells me my stuff is not right for his magazine, it would not bother me and I would just send it to someone else. If I am very unsure of myself and it took a year to get the courage to send it out because my mother was always telling me I was no good and my teachers reinforced this I would be very angry. If I am writing a story about a writer who is trying to send his or her stories out this would be important.

I don't think it is necessary to explain with huge blocks of detail on characters' emotions and reasons for being otherwise you put the reader to sleep. That is where reading other people's work comes in. You just get a sense of what keeps you interested and what generally turns you off. It is so important to read. I think, personally, that you should read what is popular now and what was popular in the past. I am reading everything I can get my hands on right now by W. Somerset Maugham. It isn't easy here in Korea but I have managed. I was also able to pick up one of his favorite authors, Charles Dickens. I am going to read "A Christmas Story" again but this time with a pencil. I have been reading current authors too.

Sometimes it is useful to read bad books so you know why they don't work. In every instance of a bad book, I don't like reading about characters who act in such ways that I can't figure out why they do and then they change and then I can't figure out why they change. Even in Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Alfred Conan Doyle, characters are consistent and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson characters in all of the stories remain the same. There are other things I don't like in some other books but those are the most outstanding criticisms.

If a character named Judy is consistently happy and never depressed, some sentence should address why this is so, such as being born and raised in a happy and satisfied family. If by reading a book about a happy character named Judy who turns out to be a serial killer, you need some kind of explanation why Judy turned out to like chopping up her boyfriends such as her family wasn't such a happy and satisfied family and that her father was a ritual satanic worshiper who practiced on his family.

In the popular series, Harry Potter Books, there is an evil character named Lord Voldemort. J. K. Rowland explains as the story progresses through the books why this evil lord is so evil. Characters do not develop in a vacuum. In this case, Lord Voldemort was a poor boy named Tom who was disowned by his father who also rejected his mother. He felt a growing sense of vengeance towards the world that rejected him. He also felt anger towards those who would oppose him including Harry Potter and his parents who Voldemort killed. Potter, on the other hand, felt anger but also felt the love and acceptance of those around him at Hogwarts. He was a gifted wizard too but had a heart willing to accept love.

Part of the magic of creating characters is making them real. Real people are not people who live only on the surface of life. They have likes and dislikes, pasts and presents. They also have emotions and ways of looking at the world. We all develop philosophies. We have hopes and aspirations. We have fears and things that makes us angry. We are not stereotypes. I am a bit overweight and many people relate to me as that. I was at a monastery once for a weekend and one monk could not tell one woman guest apart from me because we were both over-weight although we had thirty years difference in age and she was Hispanic and I was not. He never looked beneath the surface of people or he had a disability that make it impossible for him to do so.

Whenever I create a character, I always make an inventory in my mind as to where that person is from and why he or she is who they are. I may not use all of the material that is in my head but it is there. It makes it easier to keep the plot going or at least I have found that to be true. To go back to poor Judy, she gets caught because she sends notes to a reporter who looks uncannily like her first victim. Her father used to scare her with stories of ghosts as well as satanic stories of possession. The reporter working with the police never gives up and seeks her relentlessly because unknowingly to her he is the brother of that first victim and the identical twin. The brothers look like her father who is dead. She leaves clues because she wants to be caught as she is scared of the ghost of that first victim who is in her mind her father. The story is called "Cycle of Anger". The story would not have worked if motivation was not forthcoming.

There are people who express the opinion that writers would make good detectives. No, they would not. If detail is missing, we make it up. That would not work in a court of law. We make good guesses if we are therapists but I am not convinced we would make good therapists. What we are good at, is writing stories.

Support Group for Writers

2010-11-06T18:13:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning and had a great idea. I think there should be a group of writers who meet together and are writers who really write and send their stuff out and talk to each other for self support. I know there are somewhere but I never found them. I am certainly not going to find them here in Korea, and I have tried. Besides, I am going home soon.

I remember going to a group therapy session for women only awhile back. They were women of all ages which was good and all of us served in the military and had that in common. However, I was the only one that was self-supporting and did not have personal drug or alcohol issues. I come from a family full of people who had those problems so I barely squeaked in on that score. I was also the only one that completed college although many were in the rehabilitation program. Many lived at home and I left home permanently when I was 16 years of age. I think the level of trauma of these brave ladies were tremendous and I was able to overcome mine because my resources were sufficient to help me get through. Theirs were not. I did not belong. They knew it too.

Looking in the Internet, I found a writers' group that was active in the town I lived in. I went to that one. Many of the writers did not write full time. Many of them did not write at all. They just wanted to be writers. Very few of them actually wrote and sent their stuff in. Very few actually had things published except for the few that self-published. When they passed around their books, I was appalled at the ones that needed to be edited.

Then I tried book clubs. I was astonished at the leader who chose the books, that were for the most part, out of print. I was very suspicious she chose the books she had read years ago. Another group was a wine and cheese group for women with their husbands and since I did not have one at the time I felt out of place. When I voiced a suggestion that this book group should consider books by women authors instead of the steady stream of men writers I was told "our husbands would not put up with that."

I think I just had bad karma. I lived in a small town. I have a friend that lives in a large city and is a member of several book clubs that he finds interesting. He is also a member of a memoir writing club. If he did not live 12 hours away, I would join them. Maybe there are few clubs for working writers because most writers that I have known usually are not joiners. When I lived in a Midwestern city, I was a member of a wonderful book club. They exist.

So, what should I do to share the joy and the misery of writing. Then I look up and see this blog. I am doing it. I will continue to look for writers groups. I am returning to that small city. The writers club has collapsed. I would start my own if I live alone but my house is full of people now and I don't know any writers anymore in my town.

One of the advantages of writing is writers do very well alone. In general we like the space if it is populated with just ourselves. On the other hand, it is nice to share the fact that the world may not be ready with our brand of writing or we hit the markets at the wrong time or those brown envelops coming back in the mail can be just one envelop too many. I remember asking the Veterans Administration for help in dealing with writers block. The psychiatrist said no in no uncertain terms. He said the VA does not help with things like that. For a writer, writing is like breathing. I should have asked him why not.

So, until I have a group for dysfunctional writers, and name me one writer who is not dysfunctional, this blog is going to have to be it.

Writing on the Internet

2010-11-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article yesterday that a magazine took some recipes from a blog and used them in their magazine without permission and without even giving the author credit. Since, the author thought she did her homework by copyrighting her blog and she was already a published author she demanded a retraction which included an apology and a donation to PEN. The magazine refused and said that anything published on the Internet was up for grabs and that the author should be glad that the magazine did not put someone else's name on it.

All writers steal. But we take ideas and incorporate them into our own and adapt them and make them our own. It is a different matter for a magazine to just steal from a writer and plunk it down in their publication. It is still a rare occurrence. It does happen. I was aware that everything I write on these blogs is gone forever and that is why I don't put original poetry or stories out there on the Internet. I don't feel like giving away my creative efforts.

Poets, don't put your poems on those poetry pages. You have lost them for good. You can't even give them away with your name. They are gone for good. Someone told me that getting a book of poetry published and waiting for a profit is like tossing a penny into the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear it hit bottom. Still, it is never a good idea to give it away so someone else can put their name on it because there are a huge hosts of wannabee writers and poets who would do it. Trust me it has happened to me too.

There was a well known actor who took a screen play and made a movie that was very successful and paid nothing to the screen writer. He thought he could get away with it, but the screen writer was also a well known journalist and knew a very good attorney and he sued and won.

No writer should put his sweat and effort into something and then put it on the Internet. No matter if you can't get it published some other way. Keep it in a drawer and send it out again some other way. The magazine that stole that writer's work was outed and it was a little known magazine. It got an enormous black eye. It did it to another writer and this time it lifted something that was copyrighted the correct way and before it was put on the Internet. Lawyers will get involve this time.

Character's Philosophy

2010-11-04T17:55:00.000-07:00

Can the philosophy of our characters in our stories have a philosophy that is different from our own? Can they teach the writer there is something new in the universe? I have discovered yesterday that the answer is yes.

I used to believe that there is one reality and everyone has a different take on it. One character said that reality is different for each of us and not a different version but totally different. Her reality is full of crazy people and crazy notions. It really is that way and not a different way of looking at the world. It is as she sees it for her. I am a spiritual person and see the world as a very spiritual place but it certainly would not be a spiritual place for someone like Richard Dawkins. He sees nothing spiritual about nature, for example, while I see everything in nature as very spiritual and part of the grand spiritual scheme of things. Who is right? My character, Beth, would say we are both correct.

Of course, my son would say there was a third interpretation and that the writer is just plain nuts. Perhaps. However, until Beth came up with this idea, I never considered it. I think she makes a lot of sense especially after the last election in the US. That can be a way of looking at reality and psychiatrists and psychologists will never help with anyone achieving sanity but just living with their demons; but then isn't that what their job should be?

I have noticed that the characters that I help bring about in my stories come to life on their own but not in a scary way. I am always aware that they are made up. It is easy to just follow them and type up what they do. I have read many accounts by other writers who have the same experiences and other writers who say they never do. I have been working with made up people and stories in my head since I was a very small girl. I am comfortable with the process.

I don't have to make up people who do evil things. I meet enough of them in real life. I don't even have to buy books to read about them. They are out there in everyday life. I met my fill of them even here in Korea and I don't keep them in my head. I just use them when I need them in stories and then chuck them out when they are no longer necessary. Evil is necessary. Don't tell that to those who are waiting for the end of these times when the second coming of Jesus will happen and he will get rid of the Devil. We need Satan. We needed Satan to drive us out of Eden so we could populate the world which we did very well. Without Satan, we would not have art and even philosophy.

Well, enough of my philosophy except to say that I never know what my characters will come up with and that is the beauty of writing and the fun. When I sit down to write, I never know what is going to happen or better said what the characters are going to do. That is why I love to write.

A Dream About Writing or Shoes

2010-10-26T16:30:00.001-07:00

I had a dream about writing. I don't remember having such a dream before. I was going to put it in my journal, but I thought I might as well put it here and it might benefit someone. Who knows?

In my dream, I was a student again in my youth going to college. I was living in San Diego and working in lower fifth Avenue. In those days, it was not the tourist place it is now but a seedy district full of bars, Chinese and Mexican restaurants vying for the business of the large number of sailors that came off the ships in the harbor. There were also pawn shops, tattoo parlors and other such businesses.

It was a bright and sunny day and I had a job selling shoes in a large store that had another business in it. The shoes that I was selling were pretty good ones although I did not have a lot to sell but I felt good about the quality. My brother came by and said hello on his way to work. He was a policeman. While I was outside taking a rest and enjoying the sunny weather, I saw the police stop a vehicle and search it. Then the police came over to me and asked if I had seen a certain person in the neighborhood. I said I was there only part of the time. I was there to watch and observe as a writer would. This was a good place to do it. The police was looking for someone with stolen shoes. I mentioned that I saw a truck with a lot of cheap shoes on it about a week ago on the street. The policeman did not seem interested. I told him that my brother was a state policeman and he wasn't interested in that either. He went into the store where I was selling shoes and I noticed the people who ran the rest of the store had packed up their stuff and left. The policeman left.

The store seemed so empty. I knew that there was a connection between the police arresting the people in the car outside and those leaving the store. They were selling cheap merchandise. Then a woman came in and wanted information about her shoes that she bought from my corner. I said they were good ones and I started to help her although I did not know if I had others in her size to sell them.

The point with all of these shoes and there are a lot of shoes here is the story about not knowing about someone until you wanted a mile in their shoes or moccasins. Shoes for me here are stories about people. I was in the lower Fifth Avenue to gather stories and that part is true. I did not sell shoes but worked in a bar and went to school. I also was there in my dream to learn. I am learning about writing again here in Korea.

I have mentioned before that I am reading "The Summing Up" by W. Somerset Maugham. In the book that I am re-reading, he said he taught himself to read by reading the authors he thought were good and the way he wanted to write. I made up to look again at the authors that I wanted to learn on how to write because I think I took a wrong turn a long time ago. I learned to write stories I did not want to write but wrote stories I thought I was supposed to write. Big difference, at least to me.

When reading Ernest Hemingway, I could taste and feel his stories. I saw clearly what was going on. He learned to write as a journalist learns to write. I liked that. I just did not want to write the kind of stories he wrote although I enjoyed them and thought "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was one of the finest short story I ever read. I wanted more. Then I remember who was the first writer that taught me that the short story was something I could read and enjoy. It was W. Somerset Maugham and read three of them and put them in my Book Journal Blog. What was it about his stories that first made me fall in love with them?

I brought a Sony Reader that stopped working and then many of the books that I had loaded up simply disappeared off the reader. I went back to Google Books and those books disappeared too. There is a new agreement between Google Books and authors and publishers. Many of the books that were there are not there anymore. I can't get them here at all. Then I was able to get the Sony Reader working and charged up with a upgrade. I did not lose the books after all and there it was, all 132 books that I had initially loaded up. Included in those books were more short stories of Maugham and they were from the collection of the South Seas.

Maugham wrote stories about people. When you read his stories it was impossible to ignore the fact that there were emotional, breathing and sometimes people in pain or in passion. I am reading a story now about a man who is angry with another. Sometimes his characters are in deep passion about a woman or about art but the characters are not neutral about anything. Then I remembered reading John Gardner who said that readers always want to care about a character in a story. The plot, Maugham wrote, moved the story along and let the reader know what was happening to the characters. In a word, you have to care about the shoes. You have to care about the story, the people who are walking in those shoes.

I remember reading wonderfully well-written books in which I did not care one way or the other what happened to any of the characters. In Maugham's stories I care what happens to them. That is what keeps me reading. I care because the author cares. You can't let the reader see the devices in the stories to manipulate the reader, but if the author cares about the character he or she has created then the reader will care too and get carried along the same as the writer. When I write, I am a reader too. I am reading what I am writing. Sometimes, I get bored by what I write. Not good.

In the dream, the policeman does not care what is happening on the street, who is my brother and what else is in the room with me. All he cares about is what I am saying. He does not care about how I did my research. What matters is the quality of shoes that I am selling or the stories that I am creating. The store is now open and the clutter of the cheap advice that I was given in the past is gone. My inner police removed them. Now, I can expand and put in my own store what I need to produce a quality product, my own brand of shoes or stories.

Yipes, they are alive!

2010-10-21T04:57:00.000-07:00

As I wrote earlier, I am working on a book of short stories right now. It is my first attempt to do so since I normally write novels. A curious thing happened today as I was working on one story. I was at the coffee shop I go to and came to a place in my story that was a dead-end. I had no idea where to go from there. I went and got a sandwich and a cup of coffee and thought about it. No dice. I had no idea what I was going to do. I even considered throwing out the story except I liked it.

When I worked on novels, I always knew where the book was going. I didn't always know the middle but I knew where it would end up. With the short stories I was writing, I did not. I don't read this form of fiction often. I had just finished a small book of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham that I read the first time when I was a young teen. I was surprised how much I had changed since I first read them many years ago. I still enjoyed them, but I saw different things in them than I did not the first time. I thought, for instance, that many points of irony hinged on a female character more than male characters and that during the time in the mid-twentieth century many authors did more than use women characters in their plots to move things along. They blamed them for a whole variety of things. I think I did that as well in my own stories of that time. Things have changed, thank goodness. I have too.\

Today I looked at my plot and my female protagonist and I had no idea what she was going to do. In a way, she was up against some of the same issues many women were up against in Maugham's stories. She was up against the wall and had no place, no direction that I could think she could go. I was stymied. Well, I was writing in long hand as I do when I am not in my apartment with the laptop. I just put my pen on the paper and let it go where it may because the other choice was to start another story and give up on this one.

I was astonished when the characters just took off and did their own thing. I just followed them recording what was said and what they did and in a very competent manner they finished the story in a way that I liked. In a sense, I also trusted them.

Maybe I had been trying to push the characters around and not allowing them to be who they were. That sounds a bit odd, but I have heard other writers say their fictional characters take a life of their own. I had done my job by giving them their characteristics and the setting for the story. I don't even like pit bulls but one came onto the scene and I dutifully recorded him as he walked outside through the doggie door looking for biscuits and occasionally lying in the sun.

Of course, the story was being done in my head. Who else is up there? Still, all this ability to plan, plot and create did not happen in a vacuum. It was being done effortlessly. I have been writing stories in my head since I was a little girl. Many writers have. I would watch a movie and "improve" it by rearrange the film or read a novel and change it to make it better or just write stories from scratch in my head.

My mother would call it daydreaming. It was fun to do especially on those long walks to and from school, the library, bus stops and so forth. I was a solitary person who lived in a very dysfunctional family. Walking was the only way I could get out of the house and way from the fighting that went on especially when my father had too much to drink. I thought all of that daydreaming was wasted. Not so.

Now it seems, my characters may have lives of their own. I am anxious to let them "loose" again in my next story.

More About Journals

2010-10-12T04:58:00.001-07:00

I am living in Korea right now and getting ready to leave in December 2010. I wrote in my other blog about getting healthier that I have found that in Korea several things that I have benefited from. Here is a copy:

In a few months, December, I will be returning to the United States. In my mind I have been assessing what has happened to me since coming here in March of this year. One of the things that I have noticed is that I have been forced to deal more with myself than I would have normally. Most people around me speak a language that I don't understand. It is hard to get books in English although I have a reader and this computer and the Internet. I am for the most part isolated.

I have been going to a church on Sundays only because they speak English during the service which is getting me down as I don't believe in their doctrines and have major disagreements with many of their interpretations of the Bible. I am not a Christian but am interested enough in the Bible as an avid reader to overcome that, but not in overcoming their interpretation of who is in compliance of God's law and who is not. For example, they are not open and affirming to all groups of people. That is, they will accept gay and lesbian people into their meetings but it is clear they condemn their so-called life style. They are very nice people,though, and I would hate to give up going there.

The one person that I have been getting to know better is myself. This is a surprise. I thought I had been pretty good in writing in my journal, meditation every morning and so on. I haven't even scratched the surface if I can use slang here. There has been a lot of things that I have learned about myself that I did not know before because I had no other choice but to explore myself a bit more since there are no other people to talk to but myself for the most part.

I am writing full time now and established a routine so I won't end up doing nothing; and that means working more in my journal since that task sharpens my writing skills and directs my writing projects a bit more. That also means delving deeper into my self and that has brought up some surprises. It always astounds me that no one really knows the person they live with as a spouse or partner and even less the self.

For instance, I am far more spiritual than I ever thought I was. I used to hide this from friends when I was growing up. There are options that are open for men who have strong spiritual interests as becoming priests, ministers, monks and others but not too many for women. The only ones are nuns and they have little power over their own lives and cannot explore spiritual matters on their own. I tended to keep my spiritual interests hidden to some extent and when I was with people who were strong believers in their own faith it was hard not to question their beliefs especially when it contradicted what I thought was the spirit of what the Eternal stood for. Now, that I discovered this I have no intention of inflicting my beliefs on those who just want to be Christians on Sundays and good people on the rest of the week. I have to accept people's limitations.

Sometimes, each of us believe we have been disliked because of some unknown reason but I find being a loner and a reader I may have hurt my friends feelings when I took off to the library or other places to do my own thing while they did things such as socialize that I did not care to do as much. There was really nothing wrong with neither my friends or myself but a misunderstanding. I know my parents did not always understand me either since I did things they did not understand either such I was the first to complete school and get advanced degrees. They thought I should just get married like my sister.

Being a Buddhist, I know I needed to examine past attachments and disengage so that I won't hold past anger. I used these excursions into the past to do that. The more I did it, the more I realized that everyone was just trying to survive the best they could. No one was against me and that those episodes that I was holding grudges were episodes in which people were mad at me, probably, at the time. I did not have to say "I forgive you" and so on. There was nothing to forgive anyone for.

I have a few extra pounds and sometimes I think those pounds are like a wall of flesh that I use to protect myself. I explored that too. I think that is why I have been able to start losing the weight that I have not been able to for years. I find that I don't need to have this wall of fat anymore. I can protect myself without it. There are bullies out there. I can effectively protect without putting anything between myself and people. I can tell people that it is not ok to talk to me like that or just remove myself from the situation. I also explored why I was so easily bullied in the first place.

I have been afraid of going back home in a sense. I don't want a return to the old world, so I have been exploring that as well. There are no guarantees in life and there certainly are no guarantees in this either. Still, I will have the exact same tools in the States as I have now. I can do this. It has been good being in Korea.

I have always thought that the most important thing that I do is journal and I do it every single day. If I don't, I feel as if I am a long distance runner that is not running or a concert violin player who does not practice. However, as you can tell there is so much more about writing in a journal. It is the communication of the self that I find is absolutely necessary to good health. I found without it, I would not have been as successful as I have in Korea.

Editing, THAT part of writing

2010-09-21T16:47:00.000-07:00

"I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."
-Truman Capote

When I first started out in writing, it took everything in my brain and self-confidence just to put my words on paper. Even then I was scared of the great white space. In those days, I had a huge office typewriter that one had to push down with all one's might and because I was poor I had paper I stole from the public school which was cheap and erasing it meant a hole in the paper. I wanted my words to be golden and unchangeable because I knew what those changes meant to my finished paper.

What made it worse was the fact that I was dyslexic although I did not know the word at the time. Again, I went through Hell trying to get a finished copy that did not need editing and of course that never happened. I don't know what would have happened if the personal computer did not come my way. I do know my grades were minimal in my undergraduate days but were much better because I had a personal computer in my graduate years. The difference was the ability to edit easily. I am one of those writers that need to do it over and over again.

Years before, I wrote everything by hand and then erased, crossed out and then pasted over it with strips of paper and then typed it out. It was a hard process. I did not have a typist or secretary to help me out as many writers in the past had or a brilliant mind as others did. W. Somerset Maugham had a secretary who edited his work along with her duties to type up his stories. Sometimes, writers mailed in their work in longhand and the typists at the publishers typed it.

I learned to type on the tips of my fingers so never had long fingernails. I never liked them anyhow but their existence was an impossibility for me because manual typewriters had to be banged very hard. Now, my fingers just glide over the keys with the greatest of ease and I love it as I watch the words appear on the screen. I remember watching a television program in which this young kid had trained to be a doctor and at the end of the program he would write in his electronic diary or journal. I never got over that image as he wrote and the audience watched his words appear on their television screen.

Editing for me is so much part of the process of writing that I can't do it without that essential step at the end of putting the words down. To me it is like a sculptor and what he or she does with the object of art. You shape it this way and then refine it until it appears the way you want it to. You look up the words and find the one you want. I use to have a dozen dictionaries and
thesauruses and have them around me as I wrote. Now, all I need is the Internet. When I was teaching, I always taught the students the easy way of checking one's spelling and definition as well as look for other similar words and it is so much easier than it used to be. There is always some joker in the neighborhood who looks down his or her nose and says that this modern way takes away from learning it. Well, phooey to them. This very dyslexic person loves the new way of writing and editing. I have learned from the wisdom from W. Somerset Maugham not to give a damn about anyone's opinion about anything. Thank you Mr. Maugham.

I have always felt that Truman Capote was the best editor in that after he wrote, he spent a lot of time shaping what he wrote into easily read prose. He never forgot his editing roots. Yes, there are those stories of writers who produce perfect writing without any editing. I don't believe it. Maugham tells of a story in which he met the Nobel winning writer, Colette, who writes exceptional easily read prose and she told him how she would spend hours trying to get one page right. Colette who is not read much these days wrote "Gigi" .

With all of this said, I don't know how many times I have written something, edited it and then pushed the button for publish such as this blog and found little things that I missed. On this blog, I can correct it but in some places that I post I can't. Editing, of course, does not reside in the fingers but in the eyes. You have to see what is really there on the screen instead of what you meant to be there. There is a poster on a forum that I participate in ever so often and he often says his posts say this or that and they don't. He swears they do but the times I go up on the forum to the posts to check, they don't. He is always bragging he has a PhD in something but it isn't in editing. He never checks his own posts and reads what is really there. We all make this sort of mistakes but a professional writer like myself should be more aware than those who don't.

You have to see your assets and deficits clearly and adjust your writing to make the most of them. Maugham in "The Summing Up", which I am presently reading for the second time, had a skill for plain writing and dialogue. He did not have the talent for using vast numbers of words and complex twists of phrases so instead of trying he just went after what he did do well. He was a good observer of what happened around him. He adapted for it. He edited his work for it. That is why his work even today is so readable. Many critics state that he is not read that much anymore but his books for the most part are still in copyright and there are movies still being done on his books and stories. In your editing process, don't try to put something in your writing that isn't there because you are not good at it. Some of the criticism I have read about John Steinbeck said he wrote too simple prose. Thank goodness he did not change to accommodate those silly critics. His work is still in copyright and read today and reads wonderfully.

Another writer who I am sorry to say I forgot his or her name said "kill your babies". That means when you have written something that seems that it could stand next to Shakespeare and you are editing it and the most memorable phrase just does not fit, you have to ax it. You have to kill that baby. I have done that many times with tears running down my face. Oh, it was so good, but no one will ever know it. Sigh...

Then there is the other side. I gave a story once to a writer who was a friend (we did not stop being friends because of it.) who criticized it for several reasons. I chose to ignore those reasons and submitted it to an important contest and won it. We can accept editing from an editor or publisher or we can reject it. The final decision always rests with the writer, always....

I write this blog on writing and few people ever read it. It used to hurt my feelings ever so often. I also had to edit my writing so many times that it hurt my feelings. My goodness everything hurt my feelings. I am learning to get over that. It's a big world out there. There is room for me as well as other writers. The one thing that is a necessity for all writers is the scissors as Capote states or editing. I am awful glad I finally learned that.

O. Henry's Two Rules of Writing

2010-09-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

September 11, 2010

Today is O. Henry's birthday and thanks to Writers' Almanac (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2010/09/11) I was reminded of this. He was born William Sidney Porter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1862.

I have not been a fan of this author for some time because I was forced to read him all through my school years and television in those early years often used his stories as playhouse productions. I got tired of his stories although they were very good ones.

He had many occupations in his life including licensed pharmacist, convicted felon, shepherd, domestic servant, bank teller and baby sitter. Many of his stories were written while he sat in prison for embezzlement.

Many biographies will tell you that O. Henry was an alcoholic but they also will tell you that he was one gifted writer with hundreds of stories to his name. He died at the age of 47 from liver disease.

In 1909, he gave an autobiographical interview of himself for the New York Times. One part of it bears repeating:

"I'll give you the whole secret of short-story writing. Here it is Rule I: write stories that please yourself. There is no Rule II."

Right now I am working on a book of short stories. I have never attempted to do that before. The one thing I can attest to, is that it is no fun writing short stories that don't please oneself. In fact, it is pure drudgery when you attempt to write what is popular and salable instead of what pleases the self. Many books will tell you that you need to research the market first and then write what is selling. The stories that I have sold were ones that I did not research the market first. I just wrote what pleased me. I am not a writer like O.Henry, but if a writer is not having fun writing, what good is it to be a writer? W. Somerset Maugham in his book, "The Summing Up", called the writer the last free human being. We are. Let's have fun while we are at it and write what we want. The Hell with market research and pay attention to rule no. I.

Happy Birthday O. Henry!

Writing and Reading

2010-09-01T17:02:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned before that I have trouble getting books in English here in Korea. I have found a set of books that are not expensive but are of the classic authors of the past for the most part. They are written both in Korean and English. The books are complete and that was a concern or they seem to be. They are bound in quality paperback and have a nice feel to them.

The reason I am bringing this up is a gem of a book that I picked up in this series, "The Summing Up", by W. Somerset Maugham. Forget all books about creative writing and get this one. I have never heard of it but it is by far the best I have ever read and is full of helpful advice and clear writing that when I read it I swoon in admiration of this author and wish I read this particular book years ago.

To be honest, I have read all of his novels and most of his short stories through the years. Then I learned that he taught himself to write by reading authors that wrote the way he thought he wanted to write. He wrote this book in 1938. He is clear in what he expects from his authors. He expects three qualities in the order of importance: lucidity, simplicity and euphony. I had to look up the definition of euphony which is agreeableness of sound, pleasing to the ear. I sometimes read authors out loud but never thought of their agreeableness of sound as important. Still, two authors he admired were Voltaire and Colette who are favorites of mine especially Colette.

I joined a writers' group once and was surprised at the number of writers who never read at all. They were writers who were not published or were self-published. I did not stay with this group for very long because they could not get the membership list straightened out and I never got a newsletter although I paid my dues.

Every writer I knew that was published both personally and through their work had one thing in common. They all read. What Maugham said about teaching himself how to write was something I already knew. You find writers that you like and admire and you read everything they write and imitate how they do it and then make the best things they do your own.

You would think such simple advice would be just that, too simple; but at that writers' club it was advice most of the writers there that I met did not take. Some of the writers even gave talks to libraries and they were proud of the fact that they did not read. I remember sitting there during those meetings and talks shaking my head and wondering if I had just landed on some strange planet.

I have to read. I also have to write and I often have a hard time distinguishing between the two of these activities as they seem to blend and accentuate each other. It is clear that Maugham had that desire and love as well.

Still working on the book

2010-08-19T04:37:00.000-07:00

I am still working on my book of short stories. I am enjoying it more than I thought I would. I remember reading about an author who just sat down without a plan or an outline and started to write. I have been doing that. Whenever I try to make plans, I end up hating the story and delete the whole thing. Then I find I write the story I have been wanting to do anyhow.

All of my stories continue to follow a theme and I am afraid to put what the theme is here. I think I may goof up what I am trying to do. It will develop on its own. In the past if I told what the story was too much I lost the power to put it down on paper. I have heard other writers having that problem so will stay mum for now. As I wrote, I am having a lot more fun with this book than I expected.

I continue to write in my journal and often take my handwritten journal to places I can work in it. I like doing it so I can have a break although I still spend time on the book before I leave. I usually do some grocery shopping as well. I miss buying newspapers and magazines to read in between writing in the journal but English language publications are impossible to find. I have to do it at home on the Internet. I miss holding a newspaper in my hand.

It's ironic that when I was in the States, had comfortable chairs, pole lights and book stores to go to as well as newspapers and magazines in English, I also had a writer's block that seemed to be the size of San Francisco. Here, I don't have one at all. There is no such thing as a comfortable chair although the one I am in is not bad. There is no pole lights and I have to use the overhead lights which is not conducive to working on a computer. My desk is not at the right angle so my arms get tired and the laptop overheats. I can't watch television and have a hard time finding books to read. I am writing non-stop and having a grand time.

I am not making plans too much in the future except to work on this book. I have savings so would like to stay here for the rest of the year unless something else develops and it could.

Driven By Some Demon

2010-08-03T06:49:00.000-07:00

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."
-George Orwell "Why I Write" 1947

I am working on a book of short stories. It is my first attempt to write a collection. I don't have a title although I do have a theme. I have done novels before and wanted to write short stories to look at some issues about writing. I thought I would just write some stories and send them off. I am in a country where going to the post office might not be possible. Then I started to think I might try a book of short stories.

I have never really like this form of fiction with some exceptions. I loved reading the Sherlock Holmes stories by Doyle as a young teenager. It was during that time when I happened to read some short stories by Somerset Maugham and found that I could like some short stories. Maugham's story "Rain" was wonderful. Since then I have read others in this form and enjoyed them but not often. One that I read not too long ago was "Brokeback Mountain" by Anne Proux. It was a wonderful story. I wanted to do a few things with this form.

I enjoyed the novel more because once I got into a story that I liked, I wanted to stay there a while. I wanted to wear it for a longer period of time and get to know the characters. In a short story, the characters are gone just as I am getting to know them. Already I am finding this the case as I write the stories and I hate to see them go so soon.

The choice of writing and not writing was never an issue. I must write. Even if I never see a successful career other than a hit and miss type of affair as I have now I would still do it. I understand the image of a demon in Orwell's words. I can't stop writing. It drives me to do it when no one is reading me, when there is no guarantee that anyone will ever read me, when what I am writing is not what the public wants or may ever want. It just does not matter. If I am listening to a lecture I tie it into whatever project I happen to be working on. If I listen to a video on Joseph Campbell, I put some of what he said in a story that I am working on. I love doing this. I love writing.

But writing can be horrible and exhausting as Orwell states. It can also break your heart when the brown envelop comes back with the rejection letter in it. Being a writer is a solitary existence and sometimes it can be a lonely one. It can even be a dangerous one in which people attack you or call you names when you are published. When you are paid, it is so little that you wonder if working at a fast food restaurant would make you more money and you suspect it would. People criticize your work but never put their stuff out there. Complete strangers will tell you that they could do it better.

I have decided to stay in Korea for awhile and to sizzle in this humid heat instead of going home. Why would I consider suffering when there is a perfectly good house in Northern California waiting for me? Because with all of the insanity that is here and all of the bad weather I can write here. Who else but a demon can make me do such a thing?

Imagination grows by exercise.

2010-07-17T05:49:00.000-07:00

"Imagination grows by exercise, and contrary to common belief, is more powerful in the mature than in the young."
-W. Somerset Maugham

When I was younger, I had more trouble with the blank page than I do now. Now, I often just sit down and just start to write and a short story or even a book comes out of nowhere. Before, I could never do that. I have a whole set of beliefs why that is so but I really don't know why except I have been at it for a long time and the muscles needed to create are just there when in years past they weren't.

Some of it is due to the journal writing I do everyday. Some of it is due to the dreaming of stories that I do in my head and some of it is due to the books that I read. Some of it is due to the living that I now have. The rest I just don't know. What I do know and evidently Maugham knew as well is the older I get, the better I am at writing.

A friend who has been at it for a long time attributes it to accessing the unconscious because she feels that is where the stories comes from. She also feels that she uses her shadows more as she grows older because she is not afraid of her memories as much as she used to be. I think there is validity in that.

Writers need to read and they need to write and they need to do this everyday. Being alive is important but sharpening the tools that each writer uses for his or her craft is important too. I teach writing on a college level and one of the things that I teach is editing. That is part of writing and developing the eyes so that they see what is actually on the paper so they can change it, if necessary, to reflect what the writer wants to see is part of it. The more you do it, the better you get because your eyes (and ears) grow older and more mature at it. But first, they must be exposed to good writing, your own.

Everything I do and that includes writing, thinking, reading involves doing it so many times that I get better at it. I don't give up if someone says I am no good at it. I just keep doing it. The wrinkles keep coming, The gray and white hair keeps coming into the hair and the years pile up every year but that is going to happen whether or not I write at all. I would rather spend my life writing and getting better at it than not writing at all.

Writing Class

2010-07-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

For one month, July, I am teaching writing in English to university Korean students. I teach two sessions in the morning of roughly 12 students each. They are in all different levels in English. Some are comfortable in English and some feel very challenged. All are trying as hard as they can to master the fundamentals of writing. They sit every morning from Monday through Friday in sweltering classrooms for one hour and an half each. It is very hot and humid in Korea now and the air conditioning in the classrooms are not working all that well.

There are two textbooks and are based on the ESL model(English as a Second Language). They are not expensive as they would be in the United States and are pretty good. I was not given a teacher's book which is a shame.

On the first day, one student got a writer's block and was scared to write one paragraph. I wanted all of them to write one so I could see what level they were at in order to individualize the instruction. He could barely write a sentence. Now he is writing and everything is fine.

Everyone has to write in class and now they have to peer edit each other. This seemed to them easy at first because they could write on the paper "Good" and that would be it. I said that is not what editing is all about. If it is good, why is it good and write down those points. Then the students would ask the writer what he or she meant by this or that sentence. No, I would tell them. If you don't understand something. You write that on the paper. The students are learning to be better editors so they can teach their fellow students and themselves how to be the same.

I read the more interesting papers or "publish" the ones that have the elements of good writing at the beginning of class. I often catch small mistakes I missed so I learn to read their papers out loud when correcting at home and the students see how things are caught when I do. Now, they are reading the papers out loud. We both learn.

One of the things I am teaching them is that as writers, they are in charge of what they put down on paper. I never grade opinions. For instance, we have different religions in the classrooms. Usually since I teach at a national university we try to keep religion out of the classroom, but I just ignore it when it comes up. The students never talk politics and all of the men are veterans since all men have to serve when they are 18. I think everyone has valid point of view.

I have two rules in my classrooms: stay awake and be on task. I don't care what the students do if they are on task. I have gone through one week and I am amazed to how much they learned. Many of them have electronic dictionaries and they cost as much as a laptop but much easier to carry. They are allowed to use those dictionaries and each other.

Although it is a lot more work to teach writing then conversational English, I am really enjoying it. I also think the Korean students are very pleasant and very polite-maybe too polite. They are learning that they are in charge of themselves and what they write about. I don't assign topics only the kind of writing we will be doing that day. Family means a lot to the students and they often write about them and I learn about their background. I talk about my own. July is proving to be very interesting and busy.

The Journal

2010-06-29T04:36:00.000-07:00

"I never know what I think about someting until I read what I've written on it."
-William Faulkner

There has been times, I felt out of place, alienated from the world especially as a child growing up. I certainly have felt this way here in Korea since most of the time I don't understand what people are saying around me. Life can be a series of puzzels in which no answers are possible.

I was on the bus in Daejeon today and it was a pleasant ride other then the fact I was holding on for dear life as usual. The bus driver, a young and seemingly pleasant man, got up while the bus was stopped for a red light and said something very harsh to this lady sitting a few seats behind me. She answered him back as if to defend herself. The bus was was not full but there were a few people. She had several black bags on the floor in front of her. He sat down and then got up and said a few things angerly to her again. The young ladies behind me giggled. She was about 50 years old and I have no idea what that was about. I will never know for I left the bus a short time later.

I have been yelled at on several occasions in which I still don't know why. I don't even know the things that were said to me. It took two months to get my first paycheck and I was scared that I would faint for not having enough food. I had my journal and wrote about how I was feeling and what I felt about the people yelling at me. I love classical music and I missed hearing music for what seemed to me a very long time and I wrote about that. I wrote about not having anything to read as my Sony Reader could not be re-charged since I did not have a laptop. I can look up and see those journals sitting on top of the shelf above this laptop where I am typing this into this blog.

I did not feel I belonged anywhere. I would just sit around people who would be talking around me in Korean and think about going home. I take out my journal and start to write and then I would feel right at home. Then I would not feel so lonely afterall.

Things are better now, but I still have my problems. I still don't understand what is going on around me but I am better in guessing. I feel real affection for certain people especially my landlady who is just a little younger than me but must be superwoman in disquise. Everytime I see her she is working, walking and is always cheerful and then helps me carry my packages up the stairs. She has a huge Victory Garden in the back that is doing well and gives me some produce every so often. Her husband says she is a stuntwoman and is never still. He is very nice too. The other day, he was on the top floor watching the Internet people repair the lines and I told him I wanted to pay my rent. He thought I said I needed some money. He came down to give me some. I said no, I needed to give him some. They keep asking if I want a taxi when I said no because I need to walk otherwise I won't lose weight.

Writing in my journal helps me formulate what I think about things and people. Sometimes, I think one way but after I write in my journal I find out I have different ideas. Then I quote myself in class or in a conversation. Sometimes, I am scared and feel very alone; but after I am writing for awhile I don't feel that way at all.

I know a concert violinist in the United States who has concerts half the year but practices every single day. He told me that when he first started the violin as a kid, his teacher said he was a so-so violinist. He kept practicing everyday and his next teacher was the one who informed him that he had the markings of a concert violinist. He thought the best he could do was play in a good orchestra. Now, he even makes recordings. The journal for me is my practice sessions. I write in it every single day both electronically and by hand. I like the one by hand because I can draw it in as well. I, too, was told that I was a so-so writer. Now, people tell me differently.

There are two things a writer must do all of the time without exception: write and read. The journal is an essential part of the writing when you are warming up to do your writing on whatever project is at hand. Reading is looking at what other writers have done and getting ideas and inspiration for your own work. Both are fun too.

Everything in Life is Writable

2010-06-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

"And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."
Sylvia Plath

I remember a story that an art history professor told in class that as an young man he went to Italy with a bunch of fellow art students, with back backs, and they hiked around the Italian countryside since the art professor was Italian-American and could speak Italian looking at all of the sights. They came across a shepherd with his flock of sheep and asked him what the shepherd thought about living around all of the beauty.

"Beauty? There is nothing here to see, " said the shepherd dumbfounded.

The art students looked equally dumbfounded as they looked up at the ancient Roman aquaduct above them and the ancient Roman ruins that his sheep were grazing in. The shepherd never saw what was around him.

This weekend, a friend and I took a day trip to a small town on the Korean coast. We got off the train (which by the way was extremely pleasant and I highly recommend the Korean trains) and got in a taxi and asked the driver to take us to a restaurant near the beach that was nice. He assured us that there was nothing to look at in that small coastal town but we went. This was a refrain that we were to hear over and over again.

The restaurant was located within walking distance from the beach and a long strand of trees and a walk that was in excellent condition. There were no people in the restaurant, but we were early. She said that we had time to take a walk and we did and she prepared us a meal although my friend and I turned around to see some poor chicken running for his life. As Buddhists, this was not what we bargained for and I have never been in this situation before. We turned to the beach and the chicken was in his next life. The meal was excellent. The beach was famous for his sand baths and I tried not to think about that poor chicken.

The tide was out and I could tell there were working fishermen in the area and the boats were sitting on the beach. There were campers and some very well maintained camping areas along with kids playing games.

We finished lunch and found out that the taxi driver was a Buddhist. We asked him whether or not there other places to go. No, he assured us there was nothing to see. He did take us to an amusement park and we walked across the street to see a large river that was flowing toward the sea. The park was nice but no one was there. We tried to find a taxi again but a nice family took us to a coffee house that they recommended that was one of the nicest coffee houses I have ever been to that had an astonishing view of the sea with boats on the mud and out in the water. I wanted a sketch pad. It was beautiful. We had some great coffee and some munchies and stayed for a while. Then we caught another taxi with the same refrain to the downtown area as there was nothing to see or do.

We walked down the downtown area lined with small shops, full of friendly people and wonderful things to look at. It was unlike Daejon or Seoul. There were no traffic lights as the town was so small but very nice. Then we went into a shop that was crammed full of pots, pans, cups, saucers, bowls and I bought a set of cups and saucers and the price was very low and they were bone china from Korea. We walked through a farmers' market of sorts full of fruits, vegetables and people. It was time to get back to the train station.

Then we noticed that the train station itself looked like one big yellow smiling chetshire cat. We each took pictures. It was quite an adventure. We turned some seats around on the train and my friend looked at where we were going and I looked at where we had been. There was plenty to see in the town where there was nothing to see. Everything in life is an adventure.

Changing The Main Character

2010-06-16T19:39:00.000-07:00

"The only way to change your story is to change what you believe about yourself. Every time you change the main character of your story, the whole story changes to adopt to the new main character."
-Don Miguel Ruiz

I got the above quote from a church bulletin that was meant to tell people that it was alright to change their life. Being a writer, I saw something else. I looked Don Miguel Ruiz up and found some interesting things. Please excuse me, reader, for I did not know who he was. Don Miguel Angel Ruiz was born in 1952 and is a Mexican author of New Age spiritualist and neoshamanistic texts. His most famous and influential work, "The Four Agreements", was published in 1997.

The Four Agreements are:
1.) Be Impeccable With Your Word.
2.) Don't Take Anything Personally.
3.) Don't Make Assumptions.
4.) Always Do Your Best.
(Source Wikipedia)

In creative writing, the writer writes a story about someone and if that someone changes for some reason then it changes the entire piece one is working on. That goes without saying, however I don't know how many times I am reading a book or a short story and the main character or villain does something that is totally unexplainable and the author does absolutely nothing to explain it. As I reader all I can do is say: huh? And after some checking, put the story down.

That does not mean there can't be some hints in the story and I have to do some work to look for it. That can be fun. In some of James Joyce's stories, one does have to look and read between the lines to figure out why some of the characters do what they do in his stories; but the point is the information is in the stories. Joyce provides enough flesh on the bones to give the necessary information and for me it is enjoyable and very satisfying.

I trust some writers to put the necessary information in their work in the first place. Those writers have earned my trust by my reading them in the past. I always look first before discarding a story or even a poem. Things have to fit and I have to have enough to understand and to form a complete image in a piece of art although it may not be what is in the writer's or poet's mind. One of the most beautiful short stories I ever read was "The Dead" by James Joyce because there were so many layers to explore in that story. At every reading, I get more and more out of it because of that factor.

It is enough in one's own life to see the changes that happen and to play detective in trying to figure out what is going on with the people around you and one's own reactions to it. All of us do change. We change moment to moment, day to day, month to month and year to year. It is what life is all about. That is why I love journals because I can go back to the old journals and see how much I have changed over the course of the years. Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. There are many who don't believe that. I had a friendship that broke up over that many years ago. He did not think it was a good idea to enquire too much into one's own life. A writer has to ask and question why a character does this and not that and when change happens, why?

Building a Dialogue with the Self

2010-06-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

I have a post card that is a gift from someone that has a picture of the Contemplative Bodhisattiva from the Three Kingdoms Periods 7th century and is Korea's National Treasure No. 83. He looks like he is deep in meditation and not thinking of anything. He has one leg crossed over another as he sits on a chair of some sort. His elbow rests gracefully on his crossed kneee. His face shows a sense of peace.

Before he got to be a Bodhisattiva, before he became skillful enough to achieve such a deep level of meditation, this man must have discarded all aspects of his ego and that is not an easy thing to do. Many people worship such symbols of Buddhism as dieties centuries later but Buddha Gautama stated so many years ago that he was just a man. The man in this statue had to create a level of communication with his real and true self. He had to accept who he was, warts and all. He had to love the self as he really was, accept the things he did along the way and detach from them. He had to see all of himself as he was and is. The fact that he was able to do it after committing all of the mistakes and errors we all make, made him a Bodhisattiva.

The most fascinting and interesting person we will meet in our lives is ourselves. We know this as children but are shamed out of this knowledge. When we can accept this fact again, love the self again, we can then go on and discover those around us. So many people criticise this view as selfish, vain and even disturbing and some even call those who profess this belief as the "me generation"; yet this way of looking at the self and the world was created out of the Hindu religion by a man in 600 B.C.

I am not trying to convince anyone to become a Buddhist, but in the benefits in building a bridge, a dialogue with the self that can be very important to writers. I know when I was working in a job that often had scholarships that would pay for new careers, the biggest problem was that many people did not know what they wanted to do for a living and had no way of discovering this.

The only way I know to build a dialogue with the self is with writing meditation and with the use of the journal. Of course, some communication is done when we write essays, poetry, short stories, novels and non-fiction. I think it is so important for all writers to maintain a journal and to write in it every single day. Even when I had huge writer's blocks, I would write in my journal about what was happening to me and the fact that I had this huge writer's block.

Sometimes, I commit the sin of wordiness. This particular post is probably full of it. Maybe, I might end up deleting it. I am definitely thinking about it. I am trying to figure out what I am going to do since writing about the fact why I am in Korea seems about exhausted. I can't read books and get ideas since getting books in English is very hard to do. I should do what I am telling others to do. Build a dialogue with myself. Maybe, that is another reason that I am in Korea. Heaven knows, I have plenty of ego to discard.

Not Losing the Days

2010-06-13T18:51:00.000-07:00

"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over her fellows: he or she catches the changes of her mind on the hop. "
-Vita Sackville-West

When I decided to come to Korea, some of my friends thought it was to make a few extra dollars as a college professor, become a English teacher to an extraordinary student, to lose some weight and regain my health. The real truth was that I stopped working at a 40 hour, five days a week grind to finally put in a full time writing dream. From March 2002 to March 2010, I found a million reasons not to do it.

I bought a new television to take advantage of the change over from regular broadcasting to digital, I found a terrific second-hand bookstore and bought all of the new books that I have been wanting to read and proceeded to do just that. I saw my grandchildren often and took them to places they wanted to go and went on adventures with them. I went to England. I had to have major surgery. I did not lose the weight I was going to lose. I did not take the art classes I always meant to take because they were no longer being offered. I bought the books instead but they gathered dust. I let the moments go, ungathered and the opportunities to write unwritten. Soon I would wake in the morning and see the days evaporate off the calendar.

I wrote in my journal and asked my spiritual guardians for help. Well, help did come. I no longer have a television set, nor do I have a second-hand bookstore to buy books and just read after I slept in. I don't have a car to drive around to the different stores. I have to walk everywhere and if I am lucky take the bus. Be careful what you wish or ask for. You could get it. I certainly did.

Now, my greatest joy is to wake up on a day in which I can do some writing before I go to class. I am on a semester break. I can't watch television for I don't have a set. I have a few books in English and I am reading them slowly. I can't order them for they are expensive. I have to work on getting my Sony Reader to work. I wiped out the memory accidently. It is during the monsoon weather cycle so rain is a common occurance so staying at home is something I can do.

As for the writer's block that I had so much trouble with? Well, I don't really have a writer's block anymore. Today I have to go to the store because I need a few things. They could wait, but I need to do some walking. I am going to use the bus to go to the store. It is an excuse to do that. It is not raining at the moment and I want to stretch my legs.

When I do some writing, it slows things down and I don't feel as if I wasted the day. I know I can watch some movies on the Internet although not many as even Netflex does not work here in Korea. I am glad it doesn't. I don't worry about yesterday and I am certainly not going to worry about tomorrow. What I am going to do is enjoy the opportunity life has given me and write because that is what I really want to do.

Expect the Best

2010-06-09T23:04:00.000-07:00

"It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.."
-W. Somerset Maugham

I remember years ago when I was writing I often felt my material, whatever I was working on, was often beyond my control. It was an wild, , twisting and uncontrolable monster that I would yearn to finish just to get it out of my sight. I did not have the confidence to control my own creations and much of what was published did not reflect my best work. I would hear criticism of those pieces and crawl into a corner someplace and lick my wounds. I felt anger for my inability to produce good and credible work and shame for those who would print it. I would not even use a blog like this one because it does not have a decent spell check. I am still a lousy speller.

Then my confidence in myself began to grow and in myself as a writer. I refused to accept anything but the best I could do; if someone did not like what I wrote then I shrugged it off. What surprised me was not only did I like what I created but so did many others. If what I was writing was not the best I could do, I worked on it until it became what I wanted to represent me.

There are some writers who can sit down and write good prose, poetry, non-fiction and fiction without even editing or at least they say they don't. I am not one of those. Editing is part of the creative process and so is the daily writing I do both in my notebook, journal and of course the blogs. I don't do twitter as yet. It does not appeal to me. What has changed through the years is that I expect the best from myself. And, surprise, I get it at least for me I think I do.

I had a college professor many years ago tell me that I was a so so writer. No one tells me that anymore. Now, people often tell me that I have real talent. I write every day, rain or shine whether in mood or weather, I write.

I did not expect the best from me until I had the confidence in myself that I could do it. I still have the monkey mind on my shoulder as all writers do telling me that I am no good and will never be any good but now I have the presence of mind to tell it to shut the heck up.

New Printer

2010-06-04T19:48:00.000-07:00

I needed to download some information for my students in one of my classes and the office sent me to the first floor and then they sent me back to the office. Then they said I needed some money for an ID in order to print some things from the Internet. At that point I was sent somewhere else to download what I wanted from someone computer and printed it. I was asked how many pages did I intend to print? I was getting frustrated.

Then I have been asking all week for the third book of English Instruction for my special student. I was told to wait for permission next week although the office knew I was to teach him this weekend in Seoul. My special student is considered a genus and already went through the second book. I knew I needed to download some lesson plans from the Internet. At this point I am pulling my hair out of my head.

I asked a fellow professor to help me buy a printer. I saw no other way of getting around it. We went to Home Plus, a store in Daejeon and he helped me buy an Epson that was not expensive. I downloaded the needed material for the students in the evening class and the needed lesson plans from the BBC for the special student for this weekend. For 10,000 wons or about $10.00 they delivered the printer and hooked it up for me to my lap top that I have at home. I have the Internet at home. The university will give me an office but no Internet. Since I live across the street from the university, I work from home. The printer costs 162,000 wons or about 162 dollars or a bit less. It is an ink jet. I was puzelled that the Samsong printers did not have better prices and the sales man said they did not sell their inkjets at the store. Samsong owns the store along with a British company. I had intended to buy a Samsong printer. The store would also not install it. I decided on the Epson since they did install it and I had an Epson years ago and I loved it.

Sometimes, when I am writing a story or a poem, I need to just print it and make corrections by hand. I will be able to do that now. It doesn't happen very often, but it happens now and then. When I leave Korea, I will be leaving the printer behind as I will be leaving my furniture, dishes and other odds and ends. It is a shame that I had to go this length to do my job.