Category Archives: About writing

Random late summer thoughts

Posted on by under About writing, Books, Generic Rant

random3My favorite writer, Mark Helprin, once adjured an audience, of which I had the privilege of being a part, to pay attention to the world around us. This is critical for writers. The topic was touched on with respect to dialog in a previous post.

Paying even a modicum of attention to what’s happening in your family, town, or on the news will supply fodder for countless stories. Market Basket, a lowly supermarket chain, has in recent weeks given us enough storylines, characters, and sub-plots to fill several books, a few movies, and at least one mini-series. Just watch; they’re coming.

What to do? asks the humble scribe of blog posts. With so much to comment on, there isn’t time to do justice to every one. My solution to the problem is to do an occasional dump of thoughts rattling around in this mostly empty skull. This is the first in this blog, although it tends to be a regular ploy in my other blog, Limping in the Light, e.g. here.

Here are a few things backed up in my mental septic system:

Here’s a fun question for you literati: When you go to a bookstore, what section do you go to first? Your answers should lead to a lot of fascinating follow-up discussion.

I recently read a best-selling novel with a couple of egregious problems. This wasn’t mass market pop lit such as “Twilight” or some transcribed TV-show passing itself off as literature. This was a highly regarded, serious novel. Two things stood out to me. One was the author’s obsession with using the word “impossibly” to modify an adjective (e.g. “impossibly large”). I have no problem with that in principle. The aforementioned Helprin will use it occasionally. But this author used it five times in the one book! (Don’t ask me how I noticed this. It’s a curse.)

Another sentence read: “…each <whatever> was more perfect than last.” Some things can be more perfect than others? How does that work?

Although the book received mixed reviews, it won awards and was on the NY Times best-seller list for several weeks. Yet I can’t get anyone to even read my book. It must not be as perfect as that one. ((sigh))

parking-lot1Off the book topic: What’s with people endlessly circling parking lots looking for the closest space? In spite of sky-high gas prices and rampant obesity and the supposed busy-ness of everyone, they waste what’s in scarcity – time and fuel – to avoid what they desperately need: exercise. Just park the stinkin’ car!

Have you noticed that owning chickens is hot?

100_0403CVSIn CVS (a firm already infamous for its extravagant waste of receipt paper, q.v. photo) yesterday, I bought one item that came in a bag. The clerk at the counter put it in one of their plastic CVS bags. I asked her why I needed a bag to put the bag in. She had no answer, perhaps because there is none. Punch in folks, it’s time to bag the bags. We don’t need a bag to carry one item… unless you’re hiding something.

I usually ask for no bag, but the checkout people, who must be on the payroll of the bag manufacturer, sometimes beat me to it. When I ask them (kindly) to keep their bag, more often than not, they stuff it in the trash. Someone’s missing the point.

Living on a busy street, my front lawn serves as de facto trash dump for passing cars. We can learn a lot about the kind of person who has no regard for other people’s property or the cleanliness of the town they live in or drive through. The following items make up 90% of the trash strewn across my lawn:trash

  • losing lottery tickets
  • beer cans
  • fast food containers
  • cigarettes

Who are the slobs who trash our neighborhoods? The list speaks for itself. It makes me think of the old Disney cartoon. It’s cute, but painful.

bob&rayA word to the wise: Today’s phones, whether cell or landline, have the annoying trait of inserting a brief delay between the time the phone is answered and when it will register your voice. Thus, you call someone and they generally respond, “…lo!” My advice: answer the call and count to 2-1000 before speaking.

Reminds me of the old Bob and Ray routine with the fictional reporter Wally Ballou starting his on-the-spot reports by saying, “…ly Ballou here.”

When I was a kid and when my kids were kids, punishment usually meant being sent to your room. A more appropriate form of discipline today would be, “That’s it, I’ve had it with you. Come out of your room and stay out all afternoon!” Much more effective.

 That was an impossibly easy post…

Life is long… and short

Posted on by under About writing, Generic Rant, Movies

Is it possible for two seemingly opposite statements to both be true? On the face of it, the answer would be no, but not so fast. We deal with such incongruities all the time.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence supporting that as a true statement. Yet, we’ve all experienced the veracity of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Christian theology is filled with such contradictions. God is one but God is three. We have free will, but God is sovereign and predetermines our eternal fates.

When it comes to one particular adage, I can’t disagree with one of my favorite characters from another of my favorite under-appreciated movies: Lamarr from “That Thing You Do” says:

"Slow down, young squire. Life is long."
“Hey, hey, hey! Slow down there, young squire. Life is long.”

Lots of folks say life is fleeting and you have to squeeze as much into every moment as possible. But if Lamarr says life is long, who am I to disagree? He’s one of my heroes and he’s never steered me wrong. Think about the last time you were in the dentist chair. Did life go by fast? Or when you’re waiting for the results of a job application or medical test? Or for the writers out there, how about when you’re waiting for a response to a query letter?

In those cases, and in many others, life is indeed looooooooooooooooooong.

At the same time, life is way too short. If you have kids, you know exactly what I’m talking about. One day, they’re potty-training, seemingly the next, they’re finishing a doctoral thesis on string theory (or string cheese; I can never tell the difference). Life couldn’t go any faster than that.

I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to declare how life speeds up as you age. The more years behind you, the shorter the ones ahead. A classic example: When I was in school, summer lasted forever. Those two months, after all, were a significant percentage of my life. Now they represent a miniscule fraction of the whole and the season’s gone before I’ve had time to make vacation plans.

None of this is new; everyone pays lip service to it. But few behave any differently in the face of the increasing velocity of life. Ironically, Lamarr’s advice applies here as well, “Slow down, young squire.” Appreciate the fleeting moment. Get off the information superhighway.

Instead of giving more and creating more, we (myself included) bury ourselves, our gifts, and our talents in a jumble of iDevices, sports, lame TV and movies, innumerable tweets, and more added to the mess every day.

To once more quote the incomparable Lamarr, “Now where I come from, that just ain’t right.”

Title, heading, name, label, legend, banner, headline

Posted on by under About writing, Original writing

badjailThis is a short [story, tale, saga, history, report, narrative] about an [event, happening, occurrence, incident] that never was. It’s just an [excuse, reason, pretext] for using a lot of synonyms of the type I’ve come to call “slangonyms”. Over the years, some words in the English language have spawned so many slang terms to refer to the same concepts, it seems there’s no [end, ceasing, hard stop, finality, culmination, last word].

≈

One [night, evening, after hours] I was at a [party, bash, soiree, affair, shebang, blowout, gala, shindig] with some [friends, buds, pals, mains, BFFs, amigos, homeys, chums, bro’s]. To be [honest, forthright, on the up-an-up, straight arrow, tell it like it is] I was feeling a bit [drunk, tipsy, faced, zonked, merked, high, wasted, totaled, three sheets to the wind, blitzed, corked, tanked, plastered, potted, sloshed, juiced, feeling no pain].

Suddenly the [police, cops, fuzz, flatfoot, pigs, heat, badge, copper, law] showed up and they hauled my [rear end, butt, tail, glutes, tush, fanny, keister, bottom, backside, derriere] off to court. I didn’t have any [money, cash, loot, bucks, lettuce, scrilla, greenbacks, bread, clams, simoleons, scratch, moola, coin, dough], so they slapped me in the [prison, jail, hoosegow, slammer, pen, joint, graybar hotel, up the river, big house, clink, pokey, cooler].

I was so mad, I could just [swear, cuss, curse, spew, be foul-mouthed, flame]. But there was nothing I could do, so I just [went to sleep, passed out, hit the hay, copped some Z’s, got some shut-eye, sawed some logs, crashed].

Other than that, the party was [great, awesome, wicked, fabuloso, slammin’, far out, boss, all that, groovy, hip, epic, cool, stellar, the bee’s knees, fierce].

The end, fini, ball game, end of the line, exuent, finito, done, no mas.

(Don’t you just love the English language? There’s no excuse to be boring!)

Boring conversational topics

Posted on by under About writing

boringA writer should be a student of conversation. Paying close attention to a variety of verbal exchanges helps us compose quality dialog. A sparkling conversation educates not only writers but all who are involved. A dead conversation simply put its participants to sleep. You wouldn’t put boring lines in your book/movie/story/poem. It’s a good idea to leave them out of real life, too.

Here’s a sampling of topics that cause my head to sag, my shoulders to slump, and my eyes to glaze over.

  1. Pretty much anything about the weather is conversational poison, especially when it regards any forecast more than 24 hours into the future. You might as well discuss possible lottery outcomes. Even worse, talking about how often weather forecasts are wrong… which I think I just did.
  2. Any reference to the supposed fact that Saturday Night Live isn’t funny any more is so much fertilizer. It seems as if everyone has their favorite SNL era. Anything before or after that must be lousy. It’s just a matter of taste and timing.
  3. Please don’t tell me how expensive things are now compared to when you were young, unless you’re prepared to discuss said costs in conjunction with average salaries for the given time period.
  4. So they don’t make good, family movies anymore, right? Well, yes and no. There are actually plenty of family movies. It’s just that, for the most part, no one goes to see them. They’re out there, but they tend to get lost in the shuffle of remakes of reboots of sequels made about comic books or candy bars. When I hear this comment, I like to ask the gripers when the last time was that they went to the theater to support those family movies. That usually leads to a series of grunts and shrugs, mercifully ending a boring exchange. (On the other hand, you can have an interesting discussion about why so many R-rated movies have been made when PG and PG-13 movies have historically earned more at the box office.)
  5. Any description of one’s dreams should be banned by law. I’d prefer a root canal without any painkiller.
  6. The workplace is rife with dull comments, such as, “Working hard or hardly working?” The worst of all is when a person walks into an office and finds someone other than its usual occupant. The typical inane reaction is to say something in the vein of, “Wow, you’ve changed!” This is especially painful when the person in the office is of a different gender than its normal resident. Please refrain.

This next one happened to me recently. It’s probably the reason for the post. At a funeral or other such somber event, it’s almost required that we say to one another, “It’s so great to see you. Too bad it’s under such sad circumstances.”

You say it, I say it. The question is, do I mean it? If it’s that great to see you, why don’t I call you or visit you under better circumstances, such as, say, out of a desire to see you?

I guess that brings me to a meta-observation on bad conversational topics. Maybe anything that is insincere or untrue doesn’t belong in a conversation between people who are anything more than casual acquaintances. Save the subtext for the novels and screenplays.

Which reminds me of a dream I once had… scream

Distractions

Posted on by under About writing

block2Is there really such a beast as “writer’s block”? Some writers talk about the fear of the empty page, i.e. getting started. That’s never been much of a problem for me. One cure for writer’s block is to avoid self-editing and vomit up anything and everything onto the page. That’s pretty much how I write anyway. This post is a case in point.

I was struggling with what to write today. I might have blown it off completely, but having a designated day for my weekly post is beyond helpful; it’s crucial. As Charlie Brown sings in his portion of the song “Book Report“…

I work best under pressure,
And there’ll be lots of pressure
If I wait till tomorrow
I should start writing now.

I am, in fact, more likely to get down to work if I have a deadline. Whether I work best under that kind of pressure, I’ll leave to others to judge. Tuesday is my deadline for this post, thus here we are.

Where and when one chooses to write can also have a significant bearing on the amount and quality of work produced. When I’m home, the distractions are many and varied and all come with a misleading urgency because they’re in my face. When that happens, I head for a neutral place, a local coffee shop or restaurant (both of the independent variety, of course) that has free wi-fi and doesn’t mind me hanging around nursing a Coke or a muffin for three hours at a time. (I don’t drink coffee. Go figure.)

Even there, I’m distracted. I carry the number one distraction with me wherever I write: my laptop and, by inference, the Internet. The entire (virtual) world begs me to explore countless pages of inane videos, meaningless sports scores, and boundless trivia.

Sometimes, because I crave natural light, I settle in the front window of a terrific little bakery/cafe. Watching cars drive by becomes my own little reality show. Here’s what I’ve learned:

  • People text while driving… a lot.
  • If they aren’t texting, they’re generally talking on the phone, even if there is someone else in the car. However…
  • Somewhere around 90% of the cars, regardless of their size, have only one occupant. (Could there be a less efficient way to move people around?)
  • People like to stare at someone sitting in the window of a little bakery/cafe.

That’s a lot of distraction. Maybe I’m better off at home. I got this post off, didn’t I?

block

Welcome

Posted on by under About writing
Another novel lost to the sea?

Another novel lost to the sea?

Welcome to my scribblings in the virtual sand. Funny thing about writing in sand, it doesn’t last long. Neither does most of the scribbling anyone does on paper or in electrons. Except for a miniscule percentage of past writing — Homer, Moses, Confucius, Euripides, and Josephus have had a pretty good run — it gets washed out with the tides of time. Books tend to migrate to the back shelves, then to library sales, and finally become compost.

The fate of these words will be the same. I confess to fantasizing that, after some kind of environmental or military apocalypse, all writings of the current age will have been destroyed. Some archaeologist will stumble on something I wrote and judge our entire culture on those findings. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

All told, this is my fifth blog of one sort or another. You might think that’s somewhat self-indulgent, and you might be right. But I like writing, so there you are.

Of the other blogs, one I’ve passed on to others, one to which I regularly contributed has gone on hiatus, and one is quiescent. This nascent series and one other, Limping in the Light, are alive and, well, well.

If you are so inclined, please feel free to click on the little plus sign at the bottom right (you know, the one that says, “Follow”) to be notified of my mostly weekly posts.

God bless you…