A Flotilla of Flummoxing Flamingos

Free-form Friday

I should probably begin by explaining the flotilla of flummoxing flamingos.

Here's the offending line:

The next morning, Penderwick's front walk was blocked, again, by a flotilla of flummoxing flamingos. 

It all came about because my friend, Pat Martinez, invited us to play with the present participle in adjective form. 

"We can take a plain old verb and change it to a present participle by simply adding ing. We can then use it to modify a noun. Notice the fun language and description that comes to life."

It was a fun little exercise, but fun can lead to trouble: now I need to know who Penderwick is and why he seems to be afflicted with flamingos.

Image: Darren Robertson / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

First Fantasy

Reading thuRsday

The first fantasy book that captured and catalyzed my imagination was the last book in the Chronicles of Narnia. I stumble upon The Last Battle in my elementary school library after exhausting their meager collection of books on World War II. I think it was the "battle" in the title that originally caught my eye.

I was mesmerized by the apocalyptic themes (it was easy to entertain apocalyptic notions during a time when everyone assumed nuclear war was inevitable) and enthralled by the conceptual scope of the fantasy. I found the theme of ever expanding vistas of worlds wider and richer than the one we know to be particularly compelling.

The transcendental surrealism (not a label I had at the time) of the story was far more effective than a mind-expanding drug. I got my first taste of the way in which one could understand something more deeply and vibrantly if they were unencumbered by the constraints of ordinary experience.

And that was it: one (metaphorical) puff and I was hooked.

What was the first fantasy novel you read?

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Why do you Write?

Writing Wednesday

Why do I write? The simplest answer is that, like everyone else, I need to express myself. And of the many modes of self-expression, I prefer those that are more permanent (than, say, a dance) when I need to "sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world."*

Indeed, if we define writing as assembling sequences of symbols in some medium--signatures, lists, notes, messages, letters, email, presentations, reports, and so on--almost everyone writes. Like ants who live in an exquisitely complex world of chemical signals, we live in a constant stream of encoded symbols.

But very few of us call ourselves writers. That's because "writers" produce a particular kind of writing: work that is consumed by people in general instead of someone in particular.

There is a question everyone who has ever flirted with the fantasy of writing for general consumption must answer for themselves: "Why do you think you can and should write things that others will want to read?"

There are many answers, but after you peel away motives like vanity and fame that can't endure the grueling course that is the life of writing, the only sustainable answer is that you write because you must.

I write because that's the only way to appease, at least for a time, the voices in my head.

Why do you write?

* Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Stanza 52

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Writing Technology: Green Screens

Technique Tuesday

Let me begin by confessing that I'm still trying to work out what topics are appropriate for this theme. So, in the interim, I'm going to dive right into some technology. (Yes, it's the blogging equivalent of the magician waving a handkerchief to distract you while the assistant wheels the elephant onto the stage.)

I started playing with computers when green screen, character-mode displays were state-of-the art (I preferred amber over green, but that's another story). The original Macintosh (yes, that's what they were before they became hip enough to afford a three-letter name), splashed onto the scene with a full-time graphical user interface (GUI).

A few years later, folks from the English department at the University of Delaware published a study in which they argued that the quality of freshman papers written on a Macintosh was lower than those written on PC-class computers with character-mode displays. Oh, the papers produced on Macs looked better with well-laid-out text and proportional fonts, but (so the authors of the study claimed) the content of those papers was less well-thought-out than the papers composed without the graphical blandishments.* They suggested that this was because the students tended to believe that their papers were good (and more importantly finished) because they looked good.

The study and its claims were controversial. But I think there was a kernel of truth in the observation that there's value in a writing system that gets out of the way between you and your words; that removes even the little distractions life formatting.

Of course, now that we all use graphical interfaces the point may seem moot or at best hopelessly retro. Perhaps, but there are several applications for various platforms that give you a full screen with nothing there but your words.

I used a package called Write Monkey** on my Windows systems to finish drafting my current manuscript after I fell under the oppression of gainful employment and had substantially less time to write.

Having an editor in which I could focus entirely on my words helped me use my limited writing time well. You can achieve a similar effect with the Full Screen mode in your standard word processor. Perhaps it was the retro angle, but I enjoyed the way, Matrix-like, that the black background faded away and the words seemed to float free.

Of course, life is ever as simple as it should be and Write Monkey has its drawbacks, most of which come back to the fact that it is a text editor, not a word processor. This means that you get plain double quotes instead of the nice opening and closing quotes that Word supplies as you type. Also, Write Monkey doesn't convert a pair of dashes into an em-dash (again, like Word). I turned this liability into a feature: after writing about a chapter with Write Monkey, I import the text into Word and use the fact that quotes and em-dashes need to be corrected as an excuse to edit the new material.

For those of you who prefer Macs, I understand that Writeroom provides similar functionality. There's also JDarkRoom, which is written in Java and should run on your platform of choice.

What tools have you found that help you concentrate on your writing?

* Graphical Blandishments - that's how the animators for the Charlie Brown specials were credited.

** I have no connection with Write Monkey and received no consideration for this mention.

Image: luigi diamanti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

What is a Maker?

Making Monday

The simple (and simplistic answer) is someone who makes. Of course, the problem with a simple answer is that it doesn't work as often as it works.

What do I mean?

Consider the analogous question, "What is a writer?"* If we answer in an equally simplistic fashion, that a writer is someone who writes, then we've included everyone who arranges letters into words, from a thug scrawling graffiti to the author of a thousand page tome, in the definition. Implicit in the question is the qualifying assumption that others must find some value in your work to be a writer.

So, to play with the analogy, a maker would be someone whose work others value. That definition, at least, allows us to exclude, for example, people who make messes.

Oh, you might say, you mean creative types: artists, musicians, designers, etc.

Yes, but I also mean engineers. You see the making I'm getting at involves both hemispheres of the brain: on their own, right-brain passion and left-brain pragmatism produce works devoid of life. Both must be involved to bring a new thing into the universe.

Put another way, bright ideas (generally valued at a dime a dozen) are only the genesis of making. A true maker has both the skill and the fortitude to do the work (sometimes hard, sometimes tedious) to realize the idea and bring it to its final form.

To illustrate with writers, many people have ideas that could be great stories or books. What sets the writer apart from the many people is that they do the work to turn a, "Wouldn't it be cool if ...," into three or four hundred pages of coherent, entertaining prose.

Does that make sense? What do you think?

* We're speaking colloquially here. It would be more accurate to ask, "What set of activities and attributes are necessary and sufficient to call someone a writer?"

 Image: Bill Longshaw / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Free-form Friday

In the world of work, Friday is often acknowledged as the end of the week with a relaxation of formality (e.g., casual or dress-down Friday). In the interests of not breaking too many traditions, my theme for Friday will be free-form. I'll lean toward fun and try not to stray into frivolous, although I shouldn't be too surprise if a flotilla of flummoxing flamingos made the occasional appearance.

Image: Photography by BJWOK / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Reading Thursday

For reasons that will become clearer with time, makers are more open to the worlds, both internal and external, and the wonders therein.

Similarly, the best writers are often also the best readers; literary omnivores.

On Thursdays, we'll look at books--primarily middle grade and young adult fiction, but we won't necessarily limit ourselves to those categories. We'll strive to improve our craft by appreciating good (and occasionally not-so-good) examples of others' work.

What recent books would you like to talk about?

Image: Michelle Meiklejohn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net