Posts on the BookEval.com Blog
How to Get Paid for Writing
Words I Mispronounced
Tips for Writing Dialogue
I've Had Enough of "You" (Second Personal Singular) in Poetry
Find Your Publisher in Less Than One Day
Earning an Online MFA: How it works, by an online professor
Why Fiction and Nonfiction Both Need Subplots
I Can Never Remember What "Exposition" Is
From "Complaining Is Like Bad Breath" to Bestselling Author
Want to Be a Brilliant Writer?
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Recent Posts For Creative Writers: Your Sanity and Mine
Posts at the Sanity Blog, located at Catherine's home, BookEval.com
Workshop Advice That Will Ruin Personal Essays
Bored with Death
Don't write about your uncle's cancer and death. Write about his life.
Pumping Up Prose Style
Competence is not enough anymore.
And I hope you read:
Coffee Makes You FaT
A Writer with $10
11 Lessons from National Novel Writing Month
("the fourth dimension of any novel is its moral dimension")
Interview with First-Time Novelist Peter Leach
(while he waited, he wrote 16 more novels)
Workshop Advice That Will Ruin Personal Essays
Bored with Death
Don't write about your uncle's cancer and death. Write about his life.
Pumping Up Prose Style
Competence is not enough anymore.
And I hope you read:
Coffee Makes You FaT
A Writer with $10
11 Lessons from National Novel Writing Month
("the fourth dimension of any novel is its moral dimension")
Interview with First-Time Novelist Peter Leach
(while he waited, he wrote 16 more novels)
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Latest Posts in the Sanity Bubble
Mental Health for Writers has moved here to the Sanity Blog. New posts worth your while include:
On Giving Up My Land Line (July 15)
I've Had Enough of "You" (Second Person Plural) in Poetry (June 16) (gosh; this one's really popular!)
Two "Things" That Will Improve Your Poems (June 9)
What's "A Rhetorical Poem"? and Why Nobody Tells You About Them (June 7)
A Rare Look Inside the Writer's Cabin (June 4)
"Blue" Material (May 29)
On Giving Up My Land Line (July 15)
I've Had Enough of "You" (Second Person Plural) in Poetry (June 16) (gosh; this one's really popular!)
Two "Things" That Will Improve Your Poems (June 9)
What's "A Rhetorical Poem"? and Why Nobody Tells You About Them (June 7)
A Rare Look Inside the Writer's Cabin (June 4)
"Blue" Material (May 29)
Monday, May 21, 2012
The Questions are Big, the Answers Small
The questions of art are big, but the answers are small:
- For years I didn't want to write. I wasn't blocked; I just somehow wasn't up to it. Realized that I needed but did not have a comfortable chair to sit in, and that the writing table at home was too high off the floor and uncomfortable to work at. Got some used office furniture that is just right. The chair that fits me best is a child's chair. So what.
- I didn't have the time I needed to practice my art. I began to steal the time. It worked for a long, long time and let me write four books.
- Felt too stressed and sickish to do my art. Hayfever, depression, acid reflux, anxiety, joint pain, etc. Turned 45 and realized I was mortal. Problem solved.
- I too often let good ideas get away because I wanted to be polite or look attentive. Now I switch on the light, get up and write the ideas down. Ideas and strange notions flood me during poetry readings and workshops. Now I take along a notebook and pen. Looks like I'm taking notes. I am!
- My "neat gene," inherited from my mom, tortured me into deep-cleaning the refrigerator and dusting the fan blades when I should have been writing. Answer #1: Sports injury left me immovable and all I could do was write. I found cleaning did not matter. Answer #2: Got well. Budgeted for someone to clean the house once a month. Bonus: When she leaves, the house is clean top to bottom.
- I couldn't get solitude, not even a whole hour alone, because significant other, although a writer himself, didn't like that I shut my door to write. I mean, he took action against it. Applied to writers' colonies where I stayed for a couple of weeks at a time. Relief. Then chucked him. Voila, problem solved.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Latest Entries for Writers' Mental Health
Click here for a writerly therapy session or two:
"I'd Rather Be Rejected," May 14, 2012
Link to "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry," NYT, April 29, 2012
"The 13 Most Common Errors on a Novel's First Page," April 26, 2012
"Silence as a Tool in Poetry," April 26, 2012
"The Idea Box," April 17, 2012
"If You Don't Come to My Reading, I Won't Come to Yours, etc." April 14, 2012
"Deleting the Unfinished Work," April 9, 2012
"I'd Rather Be Rejected," May 14, 2012
Link to "Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry," NYT, April 29, 2012
"The 13 Most Common Errors on a Novel's First Page," April 26, 2012
"Silence as a Tool in Poetry," April 26, 2012
"The Idea Box," April 17, 2012
"If You Don't Come to My Reading, I Won't Come to Yours, etc." April 14, 2012
"Deleting the Unfinished Work," April 9, 2012
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Catching Up with the Sanity Bubble
I apologize for having been inactive. Some relatively recent entries worth reading are:
Applying Online for an Official U.S. Copyright (Oct. 16)
Hating the Teacher (Dec. 13)
Not Compromising on Candor (January 1)
Best Yahoo Group for Writers: CRWROPPS-B (January 4)
I Have a Dream for Writers (Feb. 18; scroll down on this page)
The Surprise Package of Life ( March 5)
Ten Reasons to Sleep with a Poet (March 13)
A. Rich vs. The Literary Equivalent of Boned, Skinned, Chicken Breasts (April 2)
Poems About the Past (April 3)
There are other entries, too.
Applying Online for an Official U.S. Copyright (Oct. 16)
Hating the Teacher (Dec. 13)
Not Compromising on Candor (January 1)
Best Yahoo Group for Writers: CRWROPPS-B (January 4)
I Have a Dream for Writers (Feb. 18; scroll down on this page)
The Surprise Package of Life ( March 5)
Ten Reasons to Sleep with a Poet (March 13)
A. Rich vs. The Literary Equivalent of Boned, Skinned, Chicken Breasts (April 2)
Poems About the Past (April 3)
There are other entries, too.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
I Have a Dream For Writers
Feb. 18, 2012
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the lowest point in the history of American writers.
Two score and nine years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, gave a speech known as “I Have a Dream.” A great statesman and great writer, he spoke of another American who had lived a hundred years before, also a great statesman and great writer. Their speeches and writings are read and studied to this day and remain beacons of light and hope for millions in America and the world.
But the tragic fact is that the American writer of our time lives on a mental diet of worry, doubts, and wishful thinking. While new communications outlets multiply, the professional writer, journalist and creative writer live on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, saying they have no work, they can’t make themselves work, that there is no point in writing. Fifty years later, writing seems to have lost its power to move the writer or the reader, and writers languish in the corners of American society, which gladly lets them languish there. So I have come here to discuss our appalling condition.
In a sense I have come here to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it was later agreed that among these rights was the right to a free public education that would allow the nation’s citizens to read and understand the nation’s basic documents and discover all the rights, the history and the literature they were heir to.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation to ensure public literacy and reasonable mastery of written language, America has given public education a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that every school district is too short of funds to have good schools and enough teachers. We refuse to believe that every newspaper and magazine and employer is too short of funds to fairly pay writers. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in those great vaults that hold plenty of money for entertainers, politicians, the insurance industry, the oil industry, the defense industry, and drug companies, none of which could function without writers to put words in their mouths or on their websites.
So we have come to cash this check -- the check that will give all citizens upon demand the education they were promised. We have also come to this hallowed spot, the printed page, to remind America that the matter is fiercely urgent. America’s schools produce masses of functional illiterates and dropouts, and their school boards tell us nothing further can be done. Some enroll in America’s colleges, in which I taught for twenty-five years, where technical, business, or athletic skills are favored over learning how to write and speak. Teachers of college composition find their students painfully unsure about their writing skills, and unable and ashamed to communicate their needs. Teachers are expected to give inflated grades to students who cannot write a coherent paragraph in their native language, students who might, if given a grade of C, try to get the teacher dismissed or start shooting.
Those who never learn to read and write well are slaves--but not to those who do read and write well, because those two almost never meet. They are slaves to those who ensure that those two will never meet by demeaning both and instilling in them contempt for one another.
Writers, this is no time to engage in the luxury of saying “Writers can’t ever make a living,” or “Only chumps pay for content,” or “People don’t read anymore,” and resign ourselves to doing something less. Now is the time to see the doors of opportunity opening to all who are gifted with writing ability, disciplined and driven to follow it as an honorable profession. Writers, it is your choice whether you write to inform, educate, inspire or entertain, but never should it be your choice to mislead. One day you must account to God or to yourself for what you did with your gift. You are fate’s finest instrument.
Writers, contradict those who say that mastery of the English language is an indulgence or a privilege or very common. It is not. Literacy is the right on which all other rights depend. The powerful of America know this, and that is why they shut their doors against you and will you not to thrive. You have heard about the power of the pen. Significantly, that phrase declines to identify the source of power as the one who holds and guides the pen. You may be poor. You may be unhappy. You might not even write very well. But you should never be deterred or ashamed or afraid to act because it might result in error. You and your fellow writers are a source of power and light, kin to Lincoln and King. Take courage during this time that literacy is low, joblessness is high, and the publishing industry is in chaos. It looks bad. This is the moment to act because you can only do better.
It is fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the writer at this important juncture between printed and digital communication. The year 2012 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope writers will now be contented to blog and tweet will have a rude awakening as the nation continues business as usual. One day the hunger for knowledge and understanding, so basic to humankind, will outgrow the pleasure of passing one's time unencumbered by the thought process. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America when the pleasure of mindlessness wears off like silverplate on brass, when more Americans than in 1963 are homeless, jobless and don’t have enough to eat.
But there is something I must say to my fellow American writers who stand on the threshold peeking into the halls of power, wondering if we can market our way in. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and cynicism. Let us reject huckstering and cheap shortcuts to "getting known" when our goal should be work of such quality that employers and readers will seek us out.
We must always conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not be lulled into passive acceptance of industry norms and the social opprobrium directed at us. Again and again we must rise and meet institutional exploitation and poor-mouthing with soul force and confidence. Our marvelous new militancy must not lead us to distrust the publishing or communications industries, because many of us depend on them to make meager livings as freelancers, adjuncts, temporaries, and contract workers. It is our fault. It is our fault because we agreed to write for nothing and the next writer and the next were asked to write for nothing. We have defaulted on our own self-respect and should not be surprised that we receive little respect in return. We believe that businesses, editors, agents and institutions control our destiny. Their destiny is indeed tied up with ours. But understand that it is not we who depend on them; the truth is that they are dependent on us, and not just for manuscripts and money but for our creative ideas and our capacity to inspire.
And as we begin to walk, supporting the tottering publishing industry that was once so eager to shut us out that it refused unagented submissions or works that challenged the views of their stockholders, we must pledge to look at one another and understand that a writer is not a lone figure in an ivory tower, as that great American myth would have it, but part of a vast community growing vaster--although they call us the unknowns, the unpublished, the unemployed, the unwanted. We can never be satisfied as long as there is a talented writer too poorly educated to fulfill his or her potential, or a talented writer who thinks that survival depends on work corrosive to the spirit. Writing is our mission and our service to humanity. There is nothing wrong with it or with us. We will not be satisfied until a writer can be a writer. We will fight for the independence of literature. We will demand value for our labor. We will not be satisfied with less and will use every instrument to achieve it. We will not be bought by sponsors. We will not be embedded. We will not sell ourselves short. We will not allow ourselves and our profession to be demeaned and disparaged. We are fate’s finest instruments. We are truth's finest instruments. We are not less than those those who lie down at night saying, "Thank heaven that no one in America wrote or read the truth today."
I am not unmindful that some of you have become writers out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your dedication to truth left you persecuted and brutalized. You have weathered censorship and exile and depression and death threats. You have suffered for your creativity. All writers have been told that unearned suffering can be redemptive, a kind of honor. It is your choice to decide whether that is true and what your suffering accomplishes. The citizens of the United States of America are guaranteed freedom to write and publish, perhaps without honor, but also without retribution. We are proud of this. And we intend this day to take advantage of it, and to reclaim honor for our profession, if not for ourselves then for the writers of the future, who will have to be bolder than we were.
Writers who cannot concede a need to act should go back to scouring Writer’s Digest and attending conferences on using social media to market and promote themselves until they can admit that those petty, discomfiting tactics almost never work.
I have a dream that writers one day will not be judged not by whom they know but by what they do and how well they do it.
I have a dream that one day children will sit down together, read the same news or the same novel, and assume the freedom to assess, discuss and act on their reading and to write about it.
I have a dream that one day our news industry will be transformed into an instrument of truth and justice.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that writers will one day will not brawl for a slot on the bestseller list or on the faculty, but as colleagues will dedicate a portion of themselves to the advancement not only of their own interests but that of the whole profession.
I have a dream that American writers will one day value themselves not because they won prizes but because each writer, whether journalist, novelist, poet, letter-writer, scholar, or student performs a service to humanity, a service of perception, of a kind no one else ever born will ever give.
This is my hope. This is the faith with which I return to my writing. Have this faith and with me hew out of the mountain of despair a landmark of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform a nation and a profession in desperate need of transformation. With this faith we should study together, struggle together, support one another, stand up for our rights together, knowing we are fate’s finest instruments and our fate begins now.
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the lowest point in the history of American writers.
Two score and nine years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand, gave a speech known as “I Have a Dream.” A great statesman and great writer, he spoke of another American who had lived a hundred years before, also a great statesman and great writer. Their speeches and writings are read and studied to this day and remain beacons of light and hope for millions in America and the world.
But the tragic fact is that the American writer of our time lives on a mental diet of worry, doubts, and wishful thinking. While new communications outlets multiply, the professional writer, journalist and creative writer live on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, saying they have no work, they can’t make themselves work, that there is no point in writing. Fifty years later, writing seems to have lost its power to move the writer or the reader, and writers languish in the corners of American society, which gladly lets them languish there. So I have come here to discuss our appalling condition.
In a sense I have come here to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it was later agreed that among these rights was the right to a free public education that would allow the nation’s citizens to read and understand the nation’s basic documents and discover all the rights, the history and the literature they were heir to.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation to ensure public literacy and reasonable mastery of written language, America has given public education a bad check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that every school district is too short of funds to have good schools and enough teachers. We refuse to believe that every newspaper and magazine and employer is too short of funds to fairly pay writers. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in those great vaults that hold plenty of money for entertainers, politicians, the insurance industry, the oil industry, the defense industry, and drug companies, none of which could function without writers to put words in their mouths or on their websites.
So we have come to cash this check -- the check that will give all citizens upon demand the education they were promised. We have also come to this hallowed spot, the printed page, to remind America that the matter is fiercely urgent. America’s schools produce masses of functional illiterates and dropouts, and their school boards tell us nothing further can be done. Some enroll in America’s colleges, in which I taught for twenty-five years, where technical, business, or athletic skills are favored over learning how to write and speak. Teachers of college composition find their students painfully unsure about their writing skills, and unable and ashamed to communicate their needs. Teachers are expected to give inflated grades to students who cannot write a coherent paragraph in their native language, students who might, if given a grade of C, try to get the teacher dismissed or start shooting.
Those who never learn to read and write well are slaves--but not to those who do read and write well, because those two almost never meet. They are slaves to those who ensure that those two will never meet by demeaning both and instilling in them contempt for one another.
Writers, this is no time to engage in the luxury of saying “Writers can’t ever make a living,” or “Only chumps pay for content,” or “People don’t read anymore,” and resign ourselves to doing something less. Now is the time to see the doors of opportunity opening to all who are gifted with writing ability, disciplined and driven to follow it as an honorable profession. Writers, it is your choice whether you write to inform, educate, inspire or entertain, but never should it be your choice to mislead. One day you must account to God or to yourself for what you did with your gift. You are fate’s finest instrument.
Writers, contradict those who say that mastery of the English language is an indulgence or a privilege or very common. It is not. Literacy is the right on which all other rights depend. The powerful of America know this, and that is why they shut their doors against you and will you not to thrive. You have heard about the power of the pen. Significantly, that phrase declines to identify the source of power as the one who holds and guides the pen. You may be poor. You may be unhappy. You might not even write very well. But you should never be deterred or ashamed or afraid to act because it might result in error. You and your fellow writers are a source of power and light, kin to Lincoln and King. Take courage during this time that literacy is low, joblessness is high, and the publishing industry is in chaos. It looks bad. This is the moment to act because you can only do better.
It is fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the writer at this important juncture between printed and digital communication. The year 2012 is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope writers will now be contented to blog and tweet will have a rude awakening as the nation continues business as usual. One day the hunger for knowledge and understanding, so basic to humankind, will outgrow the pleasure of passing one's time unencumbered by the thought process. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America when the pleasure of mindlessness wears off like silverplate on brass, when more Americans than in 1963 are homeless, jobless and don’t have enough to eat.
But there is something I must say to my fellow American writers who stand on the threshold peeking into the halls of power, wondering if we can market our way in. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and cynicism. Let us reject huckstering and cheap shortcuts to "getting known" when our goal should be work of such quality that employers and readers will seek us out.
We must always conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not be lulled into passive acceptance of industry norms and the social opprobrium directed at us. Again and again we must rise and meet institutional exploitation and poor-mouthing with soul force and confidence. Our marvelous new militancy must not lead us to distrust the publishing or communications industries, because many of us depend on them to make meager livings as freelancers, adjuncts, temporaries, and contract workers. It is our fault. It is our fault because we agreed to write for nothing and the next writer and the next were asked to write for nothing. We have defaulted on our own self-respect and should not be surprised that we receive little respect in return. We believe that businesses, editors, agents and institutions control our destiny. Their destiny is indeed tied up with ours. But understand that it is not we who depend on them; the truth is that they are dependent on us, and not just for manuscripts and money but for our creative ideas and our capacity to inspire.
And as we begin to walk, supporting the tottering publishing industry that was once so eager to shut us out that it refused unagented submissions or works that challenged the views of their stockholders, we must pledge to look at one another and understand that a writer is not a lone figure in an ivory tower, as that great American myth would have it, but part of a vast community growing vaster--although they call us the unknowns, the unpublished, the unemployed, the unwanted. We can never be satisfied as long as there is a talented writer too poorly educated to fulfill his or her potential, or a talented writer who thinks that survival depends on work corrosive to the spirit. Writing is our mission and our service to humanity. There is nothing wrong with it or with us. We will not be satisfied until a writer can be a writer. We will fight for the independence of literature. We will demand value for our labor. We will not be satisfied with less and will use every instrument to achieve it. We will not be bought by sponsors. We will not be embedded. We will not sell ourselves short. We will not allow ourselves and our profession to be demeaned and disparaged. We are fate’s finest instruments. We are truth's finest instruments. We are not less than those those who lie down at night saying, "Thank heaven that no one in America wrote or read the truth today."
I am not unmindful that some of you have become writers out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your dedication to truth left you persecuted and brutalized. You have weathered censorship and exile and depression and death threats. You have suffered for your creativity. All writers have been told that unearned suffering can be redemptive, a kind of honor. It is your choice to decide whether that is true and what your suffering accomplishes. The citizens of the United States of America are guaranteed freedom to write and publish, perhaps without honor, but also without retribution. We are proud of this. And we intend this day to take advantage of it, and to reclaim honor for our profession, if not for ourselves then for the writers of the future, who will have to be bolder than we were.
Writers who cannot concede a need to act should go back to scouring Writer’s Digest and attending conferences on using social media to market and promote themselves until they can admit that those petty, discomfiting tactics almost never work.
I have a dream that writers one day will not be judged not by whom they know but by what they do and how well they do it.
I have a dream that one day children will sit down together, read the same news or the same novel, and assume the freedom to assess, discuss and act on their reading and to write about it.
I have a dream that one day our news industry will be transformed into an instrument of truth and justice.
I have a dream today.
I have a dream that writers will one day will not brawl for a slot on the bestseller list or on the faculty, but as colleagues will dedicate a portion of themselves to the advancement not only of their own interests but that of the whole profession.
I have a dream that American writers will one day value themselves not because they won prizes but because each writer, whether journalist, novelist, poet, letter-writer, scholar, or student performs a service to humanity, a service of perception, of a kind no one else ever born will ever give.
This is my hope. This is the faith with which I return to my writing. Have this faith and with me hew out of the mountain of despair a landmark of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform a nation and a profession in desperate need of transformation. With this faith we should study together, struggle together, support one another, stand up for our rights together, knowing we are fate’s finest instruments and our fate begins now.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Latest Posts in the Sanity Bubble
The dog days are over and the blog is back:
Sic Transit Gloria (11 October)
The Oddity of One's Own New Book (9 October)
'Tis the Season to Rip Off New Authors (8 October)
The Joy of Printing (4 October)
The Writer's Hangover (29 September)
Making $ on the HubPages "Content Farm" (29 September)
The Bar-Code Scandal (10 September)
Walrus Publishing Interviews Me (2 September)
Veblen's Vacation Home (24 August)
Sic Transit Gloria (11 October)
The Oddity of One's Own New Book (9 October)
'Tis the Season to Rip Off New Authors (8 October)
The Joy of Printing (4 October)
The Writer's Hangover (29 September)
Making $ on the HubPages "Content Farm" (29 September)
The Bar-Code Scandal (10 September)
Walrus Publishing Interviews Me (2 September)
Veblen's Vacation Home (24 August)
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