Monday, May 31, 2010

Questions Writers Ask

As an editor and writing coach, I am often asked questions like: Am I a good writer? Do I have potential? Do you think I can sell this piece to The New Yorker?

This question will come up this week at the writing workshop I'm teaching in Doha, Qatar. Many of the fledgling writers here have had little opportunity to take workshops or discuss their literary dreams. I give them a lot of credit for signing up and showing up. I have some answers and suggestions for them but I can't tell them they'll be best-selling authors. I can't tell anyone this, of course.

In this post Jane Friedman, of Writer's Digest, offers solid responses to those Can-I-do-this questions writers so often ask.




Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Pushing the Boundaries: Writing Deadline

Nothing like a deadline to get us all in gear.

Here are some good summer dates that will keep us working and submitting--on our
nonfiction essays. Three thousand words or fewer and the truth. I think you can do it.

Monday, May 24, 2010

A Blog? A Website? What Does a Writer Need: When and Why

This is an excellent post about blogs and websites--when you need which and how to use both.


12 Submission Possibilities

My students are always looking for good markets for their writing.
Some of these publications sound interesting--definitely worth checking out:

http://www.writersdigest.com/article/12-literary-journals-your-future-agent-is-reading

Sunday, May 23, 2010

Lost

I just lost a post. It was one of the best things I've ever written. Trust me. After some serious edits I published it.

Voila!

What appeared?

The first draft.

My honed piece?

Gone.

What!?

So this is why my husband tells me to compose in a text editor, then cut and paste into the blog. Sigh.

I should have watched the final episode of "Lost" instead of writing tonight.

Lost

I just lost a post. It was one of the best things I've ever written. Trust me. After some serious edits I published it.

Voila!

What appeared?

The first draft.

My honed piece?

Gone.

What!?

So this is why my husband tells me to compose in Word, then cut and paste into the blog. Sigh.

I should have watched the final episode of "Lost" instead of writing tonight.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Weekly Writing Roundup, May 7


Hey there. Every Friday I'm going to post links to a few articles and essays I've come across during the week that I hope you'll find useful and interesting. Feel free to comment; I'd love to hear from you.

What are you doing (or did you do) after college? I love this Op-Ed from the Times about the author's experience after graduating. I want to write about the cross-country tour I took with a dance company--in an old school bus and with our director's three young children. How about you?

Many of you are writing about your ancestors. Here's a craft piece on giving them flesh and blood:

A writing friend, Lyn Hawks, just published "Gramma's Day," a piece that uses a simple device to explore her grandmother's life and her own. You might want to play around with the form--using then and now.

And who better than William Zinsser to offer tips on memoir writing? (By the way, he publishes a piece every week, William Zinsser on Friday).

And for grammar geeks! Getting started on sentence diagramming:







Wednesday, May 05, 2010

The Big-Word Problem

Recently I vetoed reading a poem as a writing prompt in a workshop--it used big words that people might not know. I didn't want the participants to spend any time having to decode the poem's meaning.

"I am so glad you didn't use a poem with words we might not get," one workshop member said. "Poetry needs to be accessible, have strong images, not difficult words."

"Yeah, I hate that," another student said. "Big words put me off the author."

I thought of the scene in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when Alice and her new rodent and bird friends are trying to dry themselves after swimming in a pool of Alice's tears. (She shed the tears when she was huge and crying about being too big to fit through the tiny door that led to the lovely garden.)

The Dodo chimes in about how to get dry: "I move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more energetic remedies."

"Speak English!" said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!" And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile: some of the other birds tittered audibly.

"What I was going to say," said the Dodo in an offended tone, "was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race."

Such a wild yet wise book.

Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English (originally published in 1926) advises writers to be: "direct, simple, brief, vigorous, and lucid."

The vocabulary chapter says: "Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long."

Oops. Big word alert: Circumlocution, in case you don't know, means: a roundabout or indirect way of speaking; the use of more words than necessary to express an idea.

Well, sometimes a big word is simply the best word. Still, I try to avoid them in my own writing and in the writings I share with my groups.

William Zinsser states in Zinsser on Friday that we should write with "no unnecessary parts." Big cumbersome words that are off-putting and intimidating are, indeed, unnecessary parts.