Post 15 – Purple Prose (A Small Screed)
I get rather annoyed when writers and writing teachers talk about paring down word usage. Stephen King supposedly said “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.” It’s a coy and clever sentiment, Mr. King, but I respectably disagree. There have been many times when I knew the word [...]
Post 14 – Good Enough
Writer James Thurber said, “Don’t get it right, get it written.” Musician Pat O’Bryan said, “You can work on an album until it’s perfect. And dead.” James Agee started writing A Death in the Family in 1948. He was still revising it in 1955 when he died. It was published posthumously. If you are striving [...]
Post 13 – A Writer’s “Finger Exercise”
When a music student learns to play the piano (or the horn, I imagine) his teacher will give him finger exercises do daily to condition his fingers and his ears to become limber, to know where the notes are, to know how to move from one to another and know what they sound like. The [...]
Post 12 – Coffee And (A Character Study)
Today I thought I’d do something different, and post part of a character study I started writing a few years ago about a married couple and the town they lived in. Someday, I’ll use some of this for a larger piece, perhaps a novel, about the town I grew up in until I was thirteen. [...]
Post 11 – Big Words
I am often accused of using too many big words when I write. Often the accusation is continued with “when a small one will do.” I have several problems with that accusation. First of all, I don’t use big words for the sake of using big words. (Yes, there may be a small element of [...]
Post 10 – Avoid Clichés – Unless You Don’t
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that I had a thought that I hoped wouldn’t become a cliché. It turned out that the thought was so cumbersome and convoluted that chances of that happening were very small. (I almost said moot, but that would be entirely too cliché.) However, it started my mind swirling around with [...]
Post 9 – Don’t Leave Your Ego at the Door
In our free writing guidebook, On Writing With a Partner, we take to task the people who tell you to “leave your ego at the door” when you come in to a creative session with other writers. For a writer to enter the creative environment having left his ego to wait like an expectant father, [...]
Post 8 – The Power of Art
I had a conversation with a friend in high school, sometime back during the Lincoln administration, about art and society. She was a talented piano player and singer who was becoming disenchanted with art. She said that, with everything that was going on in the world, it seemed to her a life pursuing art was [...]
Post 7 – The Myth of “Write What You Know”
We as writers have often heard the dictum or rule to “write what you know.” I first heard this when in grade school, and it really puzzled me. I liked to read fantasy stories and wondered how they were written if that rule were true. When I heard it, I had just read Mary Mapes [...]
Post 6 – Face It, You’re Not Good Enough
Many writers and other artists are often confronted by that voice put into their heads by family, teachers and society in general that they aren’t good enough. They aren’t talented enough. They are fooling themselves to even try. If we aren’t yet fully conscious of these thoughts, they can run our lives, and thwart our [...]
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