Tag: the year of the craft

Logophile

March 26th, 2014

Dear lotion pump manufacturer,

This may seem a strange request, but I am a writer who loves words, and I wondering if there is an industry term for the crusty glob of lotion that clogs the tip of a dispenser. Because you attempt to design products to prevent these clumps, I thought you might have a name for them. If so, would you mind sharing the term with me?

Thank you,
Andrea Badgley

~

Sometimes I feel like a lunatic, like when, on the day I wrote a collage on Lunacy, I sent the above email out to several soap and lotion dispenser manufacturers. I have no need for the term. I’m not working on a piece about lotion or its dispensers; I have no place for the name once I have it. I just want to know: what is the word for that crusty bit?

When I sent out that email, I was researching lunar words for my Wednesday word work – moon, lunacy – when I came across this entry in the dictionary:

lu·nu·la n. A small crescent-shaped structure or marking, esp. the white area at the base of a fingernail that resembles a half-moon.¹

lunula

Who would have thought there was a word for that half-moon at the base of our fingernails? I was awed by this for some reason, that this seemingly useless body part (is it even a part?) would have a name. In a quest for a decent photograph of a lunula, I followed the word down the internet rabbit hole and, as I gagged over photos of thick, yellowed, and sometimes even green finger and toenails, I discovered that our nails are evaluative tools for doctors: the health of a patient’s fingernails can be indicative of nutrient deficiencies, diabetes, anemia. And it occurred to me, when a doctor evaluates, she needs a name for each body part; she can’t be writing a report and say “that little white thing at the base of the fingernail, the half-moon shaped bit, is not the right shape.” She’s a busy woman. She needs to have language to say “Lunula is malformed.”

This precision of language is my favorite takeaway from Strunk and White’s gem, The Elements of Style:

Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise.²

In order to be concise, writers, like doctors, need to have language that allows for this precision. We need to have words. We need to have names.

Everything has a name. Even the snipped tips of green beans. On a recent radio quiz show episode, a guest player canned green beans for a living. The host asked, What are the tips of green beans called, the end things that we cut off? I hate those things – surely you guys have a name for them. Snips. They are called snips once they’re snipped off (EVM when they are still on: extra vegetative matter).

Green bean snips (original photo credit: http://yireservation.com/recipes/dry-fried-string-beans/)

When you need a name for a thing, you go to the people who work closely with that thing, like doctors for human anatomy, or green bean canners for green bean anatomy. And for lotion dispenser diagnositcs? You go to lotion dispenser manufacturers. In writing group, we talked about words, and precision of language, and how everything has a name. Like the globby chunk of dried lotion that clogs the dispenser. My friend Lesley said, There must be a name for that. I’ll bet people in the lotion industry have a name for it.

I have not yet received a reply to my emails, but that day, when I was under the lunar influence, I thought a good name would be operculum, like the door attached to a moon snail’s foot, the door that seals off the entrance to its shell. If I do not hear back from the lotion pump people, and if I ever have occasion to write about the crusty bit that clogs a pump’s tip, that is what I’ll call it. An operculum.

*log·o·phile n. a lover of words.³

¹ “lunula.” The American Heritage College Dictionary. Third Ed. 1993. Print.
² Strunk, William, Jr.; White, E.B. (2000). The Elements of Style (Fourth Edition). Boston: Pearson. p. 23.
³ “logophile.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 26 Mar. 2014.<Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/logophile>.
9 Great Openings

March 14th, 2014

This week in our writing group we worked on openings. We each selected an unpublished work, excised our first paragraph to a separate sheet of paper (to keep the work discrete and achievable), and rewrote our openings. We began with the first sentence.

This was hard work. That one sentence carries a heavy burden, a pack laden with all the supplies for a journey before the reader has consumed a single morsel to lighten the load: tone, setup, character, summary, the launch, a hook. The essence of the entire piece.

1. For inspiration, I pulled favorite novels off the shelf and copied first lines into my notebook, like this one from A Prayer For Owen Meany:

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. (John Irving)

Wow. Right? I mean, I was ready to put everything down and start reading Owen Meany again. But then I realized I don’t write fiction, and I certainly don’t write novels, so maybe I should find inspiration in the type of work I do write: creative nonfiction. I made a list of essays and nonfiction pieces that have stuck with me, and I dug through internet bookmarks and compilations of The Best American Essays to find their openings. Here are the ones I wrote in my notebook. Notice the compelling titles; the title carries tremendous weight as well, and when combined with a great opening, a title can be unstoppable.

2. So You Hate Short Stories? by Jacob Tomsky on Book Riot

I always hated short stories.

I considered reading a short story like going out to dinner and only ordering an appetizer. Want a real meal? Eat a goddamn novel.

3. Rejection Sucks and Then You Die: How to Take a Dear Sad Sack Letter (And Shove It) by Alexis Paige on The Rumpus

Maybe the rejection letter was curt, churned out like a widget, or maybe it was wordy, with a misused semicolon, and penned in a respectable Serif font.

4. Seven Essays I meet in My Literary Heaven by Jennifer Niesslein on Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog

1. The Essay that Manages to Be Funny, Poignant, and Thought-Provoking All at the Same Time.

5. This Is Not a “Travel Blog” (But It Is a Travel Blog) by Cheri Lucas Rowlands on Writing Through the Fog

In her essay about life on tour with a rock band, Claire L. Evans says that travel teaches her more about time than it does about place. I agree.

My favorite kind of “travel writing” — or I suppose writing about place — embarks on an inner journey, and uses a physical location as a diving board into one’s depths, into their mind.

6. A Hidden Writing Life by Simone Gorrindo on Vela Magazine

For the first time in my life, I have a room of my own in which to write.

7. An Unwanted Guest by Simone Gorrindo on Vela Magazine

I didn’t see the jellyfish, but I felt it—a searing pain at my ankle that shot up through my leg, bringing me, in a matter of seconds, to my knees in the sand.

8. “Small Rooms in Time” by Ted Kooser in River Teeth (The Best American Essays 2005)

Several years ago, a fifteen-year-old boy answered the door of a house where I once lived and was murdered, shot twice by one of five people – two women and three men – who had gone there to steal a pound of cocaine.

9. Swerve by Brenda Miller on Brevity

I’m sorry about that time I ran over a piece of wood in the road. A pound of marijuana in the trunk and a faulty brake light—any minute the cops might have pulled us over, so you were edgy already, and then I ran over that piece of stray lumber without even slowing down.

Enjoy, and I hope you find inspiration from these too.
Lunacy

March 10th, 2014

“I’ve… been too much in my head. Why don’t we take a walk?” (McLain)¹

~

I’m not sure if pursuing writing is a good idea for me. I think it makes me crazy. I’m moody, brooding about my latest idea, working things out in my head, withdrawn as I think and think and think. I am irritated because the dishes aren’t done and I clatter them roughly, this beautiful earthenware we received as wedding gifts. I don’t want to wash these plates; I am impatient to write, or read about writing, or research my diaries, or deconstruct the Best American Essays. I am in my head, trying to find the guts of the story in my boat rides piece, trying to figure out how to write my trustworthiness of narrator idea, worried that the tone of my fainting piece isn’t right. Wondering if its worth blogging about our son’s little-boy-voice query, “Do you get paid for your writing?”

I write every morning. I wake at 6 o’clock to write for an hour before the rest of the house stirs. But instead of emptying my head, the practice jostles ideas that elbow and shove to get themselves onto the paper first. They are quite rude and occupy an awful lot of space, and because I cannot release them all in one hour in the morning, they create noise long into the day, so much noise that when I prepare dinner, I am not able to simultaneously chop pecans and answer our daughter when she asks me a question.

I worry I’m pulling away from real life in order to chase ideas around in my head and maybe catch a few and throw them down onto the page. And not even get paid for it. I wonder if it’s worth it. Does writing make me happy? What are all these ideas I want to get down, and why?

~

Ebb tide –
willows
dip to mud. (Basho)²

~

Moon snails. Luna moths. Aurelia aurita: the moon jelly. These are favorite animals. Moon stone enchants me. Moonlight on snow, moonlight on water: they pull my insides out, they compel me to poetry.

There is magic in the smooth spiral of the moon snail-shell, the absinthe glow of the luna moth, the grace of the gelatinous moon jelly. The milky moonstone mystifies; opalescent in its luster, it makes me want to swim into it. Snow sparkles blue on a full moon night, as if diamond trees shook glittering dust from their branches; light paints a white path on black water under the silver coin in the sky.

Tides rush in, bulge, and recede, like the ideas in my head.

~

I write on the toilet – there is not a second to spare. I have to pee, but I don’t want to lose the words.

~

lu·na·cy (lo͞oʹ nə-sē) n. 1. Insanity, esp. insanity relieved intermittently by periods of clear-mindedness. 2.a. Great or wild foolishness. b. A wildly foolish act. 3. Archaic. intermittent mental derangement associated with the changing phases of the moon. [Root leuk-. Light, brightness]³

~

My writing cycle:
(see also: tide cycle, moon cycle)

~

lu·cid·i·ty (loo-sid-i-tee) n. 2. The ability to see things clearly; rationality; sanity. [Root leuk-. Light, brightness]⁴ ⁵

~

The moon snail tongue is acid and many-toothed; it is the moon snail who is responsible for the perfectly drilled holes in clam shells along the beach. Sometimes moon snails are cannibals.

The adult luna moth has no mouth. It cannot eat. In its winged form, it only lives about a week.

The moon jelly drifts with the currents.

The night is dark and full of shadows.

~

Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie. (Poe)⁶

~

Everything has a name. During Wednesday word work, when I researched lunar words, I came across these entries:

lunula n. A small crescent-shaped structure or marking, esp. the white area at the base of a fingernail that resembles a half-moon.⁷
lunette n. 1. Archit. A crescent-shaped or semicircular space, as over a door, that may contain another window, a sculpture, or a mural.⁸

Naming invokes connections: a part of my body with a heavenly body, our dwellings with the cosmos. Words help us piece the universe together.

~

Bright moon: I
stroll around the pond –
hey – dawn has come. (Basho)⁹

~

We had a come-to-Jesus meeting in our writing group. We spent the morning discussing what we each want from the group and how we want to spend our limited time together. To my great delight, we agreed to bring current works-in-progress each Thursday so that we can push up our sleeves, reach in with bare hands, and pull the guts out. We will dissect and probe, expose paragraphs, transplant words, poke sentences to make them jump. After group, I wrote hard and well. I couldn’t stop smiling.

On the way to soccer practice, a song I liked came on the radio. I turned it up, sang out loud, let go my grip of the steering wheel so I could do jazz hands. I caught our son’s eye in the rearview mirror and could see him grinning at his crazy mom, dancing in the front seat. I grinned back and sang louder.

The tide rushes in.

~

¹ McLain, Paula. The Paris Wife. New York: Ballentine. 2011. E-book.
² Basho. On Love and Barley – Haiku of Basho. London: Penguin Books. 1985. Print.
³ “lunacy.” The American Heritage College Dictionary. Third Ed. 1993. Print.
⁴ “lucidity.” Def. 2. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 7 Mar. 2014.
⁵ “lucid.” Etymol. The American Heritage College Dictionary. Third Ed. 1993. Print.
⁶ Poe, Edgar Allan. Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Works. New York: Gramercy Books. 1985. Print.
⁷ “lunula.” The American Heritage College Dictionary. Third Ed. 1993. Print.
⁸ “lunette.” Def. 1.b. The American Heritage College Dictionary. Third Ed. 1993. Print.
⁹ Basho. On Love and Barley – Haiku of Basho. London: Penguin Books. 1985. Print.

When I declared 2014 to be The Year of the Craft for me, some of you asked that I share my writing group’s homework exercises here. We’ve been working on structure, and this was an experimental craft work piece using found words (from other writers, from dictionaries, from drafts in my WordPress dashboard, from my old diaries) and the collage structure as described by Priscilla Long in The Writer’s Portable Mentor.
Join me for a writing challenge at The Daily Post

February 24th, 2014

Have you ever noticed how when you focus your attention on something, that thing grows? It works for both bad and good: you focus on your fears, and you become paralyzed with terror, or you focus on your co-worker’s faults and those minor flaws balloon into defects of character. And the good? If you give attention to your garden – if you water, prune, prop up seedlings, talk to the flowers – your plants flourish; if you carve time for exercise, your body becomes stronger; and if you declare 2014 to be The Year of the Craft, if you put your head down and dedicate your writing year to craft-work, your writing life expands beyond the borders of your blog.

At least that’s what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I received an email from Krista, an editor at WordPress.com, asking if I would be interested in writing a guest post for The Daily Post‘s Weekly Writing Challenge. The Weekly Writing Challenge, published every Monday, is a craft-focused prompt intended to spur the blogger into new writing territory. I’ve participated in previous challenges, and when I received Krista’s email asking if I’d like to write one (hello craft-work universe!), I wondered if I should mute my enthusiasm and act all professional by responding with a “Thank you for the invitation. I would be happy to consider writing an installment.” Instead I wrote something to the effect of “YES! YES! YES!”

This is why I don’t get paid.

Anyway, the challenge I wrote – Weekly Writing Challenge: Object – is live today, and I hope you will play along. It was inspired by dozens of prompt-based generative writing sessions with my writing group, in writing workshops, and at my desk at 6:00 am, rubbing sleep from my eyes, wondering what I’ll write about while I pull a slip of paper from a gold and white Chinese tea tin.

If you are looking for tips to get you started, try this post:

Five Tips for getting words on the page

Thank you again to Krista, Michelle, and the editorial team at WordPress.com for thinking of me. I hope I did y’all proud.
Growth Spurt

February 10th, 2014

credit: author Lydia Kang from The Word is My Oyster

If you are a parent, or have ever been around the parent of a new baby, you may be familiar with the term “growth spurt.” It is usually paired with the words, “I don’t know what’s wrong with Little Johnnie – he must be going through a ____” (growth spurt).

Babies get fussy during growth spurts. None of a parents old tricks work – change the diaper, add a blanket, remove the socks, coo, bounce, rock, swing. Things are changing inside Little Johnnie, things we can’t see, and let’s face it: it’s uncomfortable. Scary. Whatever is going on, it’s unfamiliar, maybe even painful, and Johnnie doesn’t like it one bit.

I think that’s what’s happening to me right now. Through kismet or coincidence (or perhaps because it is a basic, necessary skill), both my writing group and the craft book I’m reading are intensely focused on structure. As in, structure your writing instead of pantsing it, build it a skeleton before dressing it with skin, and your work will stand erect. Structure is the foundation and the frame; without it, building a piece is a tenuous process, like trying to build a house out of shingles, but with nothing to nail them to. You must contort yourself to hold the shingles up while you frantically staple them together.

I have never structured my work before. Ever.

At first, I was ravenous for information and experience, like Little Johnnie at the breast, gorging in preparation to grow. I told my group, I get it now! I get why revision evades me – because I’m moving shingles around without knowing what I’m nailing them to. I told them, I can’t wait to tackle this homework, 9 paragraphs on a concrete, a noun, something you can touch and taste and see:

1. Facts
2. Origins
3. Ancient perceptions
4. Facts
5. Anectdotes
6. Personal story
7. Metafacts
8. Historical story
9. Personal return to subject

Writing into a structure. I thought, look, it’s all laid out! I thought, this will be fun! This will be easy! I will write about turquoise. Turquoise is simple, it’s not fraught with personal drama that I’m afraid to get close to on this first attempt at a new way of writing. Look how great this will work! I will have paragraphs. I can move them around to observe the flow of information. I can experiment. I can play.

Three weeks and ten hours of active writing later, I’ve got not nine paragraphs but four. Four paragraphs and they are B-O-R-I-N-G.

Meanwhile, my Andrea Reads America project confronts me with a problem I’ve never had before: because I am reading deliberately, writing my reactions, and comparing works, and because I am simultaneously studying the craft of writing, I have become a critical reader.

I don’t want to be a critical reader!

I don’t want to be that peppery old snoot who doesn’t like anything except the finest, the top shelf, the Hendrick’s gin only, please. I liked it better when I liked everything. There are so many more opportunities for pleasure that way. Sure my appreciation of a finely-crafted novel is more profound now, transcendent almost, as when we ate at a five star restaurant and the food was so good we didn’t want to profane the experience by talking. Diners around us chattered while they absently forked steak that melted like butter, or sipped tomato soup that wrapped around your tongue like having God in your mouth, and my husband and I thought, they are not giving this food the reverence it deserves. They’re not even paying attention.

But not every meal can be a five star fine dining experience, and not every novelist can achieve sublimity. I used to be able to accept that, but now my tolerance for fiction that doesn’t work for me has plummeted. It’s not fair for me to expect perfection, especially because I appreciate how difficult it is to achieve, and because I fail so miserably at achieving it myself, yet I can’t help now but notice flaws and see where things don’t work in my reading life.

So I’m fussy. I’m uncomfortable. My reading and writing worlds are changing, and it’s painful, and I don’t like it one bit. Can’t I just go back to when it was easy? When I pantsed my writing and I liked everything I read? Can’t someone coo at me and make it all better?

I take comfort from our children, our Little Johnnies who fussed and flailed and suffered and screamed their way through too many growth spurts to count. And on the other side of every one of them, after they suffered their torment, our babies smiled, they laughed, they radiated serenity. They came back to their happy selves again. Only they were bigger. Deeper. Less like babies, more like people. They had grown.

The nine paragraph structure my writing group is working with is from Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor; the craft book is Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner.
Strategies for a year of craft: a weekly writing schedule

December 23rd, 2013

I’m all fired up after declaring I will dedicate next year to craft work within my writing practice: technique, structure, word choice, revision (gulp). The moment I pressed publish on my previous entry, 2014: The year of the craft, the moment I made the decision to postpone submitting until I have a firm grasp on writing, I felt giddy about focusing on what I love (writing) instead of what writing might get me (publication).

So giddy, in fact, that I read The Elements of Style, the first of my craft work resolutions, before the new year even began. I read the tiny guide-book in two sittings, chuckling and highlighting “Aha!” passages throughout (see review on Goodreads). Strunk and White invigorated me, and I went directly from the final page of their delightful little book to the first page of the latest issue of Creative Nonfiction. The special double issue, which celebrates the magazine’s 50th volume and 20 years of publication, chronicles the history of creative nonfiction, the genre, and Creative Nonfiction, the journal. The essays on its pages – sharp, poignant, beautifully written, and on a level I have not yet reached – convinced me of the rightness of my resolution, and I realized I’d better come up with a plan of action while my resolve is still strong.

I debated whether to share my steps here because, well, the titles are kind of embarrassing. “Mentor Monday.” “Talking Tuesday.” But the thing is, I’m not a young thing anymore; I need memory aids. If I want to hit several elements of craft work, and if I want to practice them regularly, I need to make time for each one in my week. And I’m pretty sure the only way I’m going to remember what I want to do each day is via a mnemonic device that works for me: alliteration. Here’s my plan, in all its cutesy glory:

Mentor Monday

I dedicate Mondays to craft exercises prescribed by writing mentors (i.e., the books I resolve to read this year). Specifically, I plan to work through Priscilla Long’s The Writer’s Portable Mentor. I plan to work through Long’s exercises with my writing group, but if you want to adopt this schedule, any mentor will do. Most writing books include writing prompts or exercises, and Monday is the day I plan to focus on that aspect of craft.

Talking Tuesday

Revision advice that crops up again and again, across writing books, across writers, across writing blogs and websites and comment sections, is to read your work out loud to listen for mistakes. I, too, have written about reading out loud, and how effective it is for finding holes or unnecessary repetition or phrasing that just doesn’t sound right. But despite learning the lesson first hand, I rarely remember to read my work out loud. Tuesdays will now be dedicated to the auditory element of revision.

Word Work Wednesday

This may be the day I’m most excited about in the week. I LOVE word work: exploring dictionaries, cataloging color names, mining for verbs, making mind maps. In February of 2013 I started a lexicon. At first I registered a favorite word every couple of days. Now it sits dusty on my writing shelf, along with all those writing books I started and abandoned because I was burning with submission fever. No more. My lexicon will get a work out every Wednesday in 2014. This Wednesday, Christmas day, I plan to collect words for the color red: holly berry, cherry pie, peppermint swirl.

Workshop Thursday

I didn’t really need an alliterative title for this one because I meet up with my writing group on Thursdays; it is unlikely I will forget what Thursdays are for. In weeks we don’t meet, however, I will spend Thursdays doing what we normally do in writing group: 10 minute prompted writes, exercises from writing books, and planning for the next week’s work.

Free Friday

Do I need to explain this one? Friday is for whatever the heck I want it to be for.

Wisdom Weekends

That sounds awfully stuffy doesn’t it? If you can come up with a W word for reading, please let me know. I plan to dedicate weekends, if I have leisure time, to catching up on reading: magazines (Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction); literary journals (The Sun when I finally save enough money for a subscription), online journals (Vela magazine, Brevity), and of course, all the writing books I aim to finish throughout the year.

That’s the plan for 2014. I’ll let y’all know mid year how it’s going. Until then, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may your resolve hold for all your 2014 resolutions!

P.S. If you have any favorite festive yuletide words, please share them here. I’d love to gather them in my lexicon for this week’s Word Work Wednesday. Thanks!