A is for Aardvark on February 1

Hi readers and writers,

Aardarks can eat amazing quantities of ants, and are vital to ecosystems where they occur. For today, Feb 1, 2013, it can inspire us to think of 5 words beginning with "a" and use all five in one sentence.  Please post in comments.  See the Alphabetaphilia posting for more details.

cheers, Laura

Photo from Wikipedia Commons: This image was originally posted to Flickr by MontageMan at http://flickr.com/photos/98178986@N00/2419604286

Alphabetaphilia coming soon!

Dear readers and writers,

Last year in February, I ran Alphabetaphilia for the first time.  I asked people each day in February to come up with a list of five words beginning with the same letter (A for February 1, B for February 2, etc) and write a sentence using those words, putting it in the Comments section under the daily photo prompt.  It was fun to read all the rare and grandiose words people came up with, and the sentences were crazy.  So I want to do it again.  WARNING:  on this WP site, I have to moderate the comments, so there will be a small delay before your posting appears.  Do not panic and repost six times.  Or, if you do, I will try to post it only once.

At the end of the month, I will work with another writer friend to select a sentence using each letter and produce a chapbook of the 2013 Alphabetaphilia project.  Soon, you will be able to download last year's pdf from this site so you can see what it looks like.  You may let me use your real name or use a WP alias account and have that alias receive author credit for any of your sentences we select for the chapbook.  Questions?  Comments?  Get your alliteration motors running!

cheers,
Laura

Vinegar and Salt

Hi readers and writers,

When I write my first drafts, definitely to Anne Lamott's prescribed degree of non-excellence, I often reread them and wonder, "Where's the beef?"  The thing I tend to leave out is the tension.  One of my friends from many years ago once made a dish called Slum Gullion, essentially Beef Stroganoff with burger substituted for the steak.  She forgot the vinegar and salt, and it was so bland we had decided never to use the recipe again until she reread it and realized what she had left out: the taste, the subtle items that make you want more so you can figure it out.  My first drafts can be that way.  The bones of the story are there, but the lines between them are all slack and there's nothing urgent about how things are connected.  Revision is where I actually put together the motivation, the tension, the stress and write them into the story.

Adding tension sounds like there's no way it could work.  Not true, though.  It's implied there already, but in the written part, it's not featured.  I just need to bring it out, show the dialog with subtext and conflicting desires, let the characters try to move the story towards their individual dreams.  I often cut out text that is over-the-top descriptive or contains information in excess and replace it with these elements that ratchet up the stakes for the characters.

What are your revision strategies?  Do you need to add tension, or do you concentrate on the beauty of the sentences, or do you add subplots?

cheers,
Laura
Image from Creative Commons/Wikipedia with thanks.

Alphabetaphilia Starts Weds, Feb 1, 2012. Simple Directions.

Hi friends of reading and writing,

Here is the fast version of February Alphabetaphilia:
The letter of the day matches the order in the alphabet.  Feb 1 is A, Feb 2 is B, etc.  The last three days are wild cards, any letter you choose.

Choose five favorite words that begin with the letter of the day (your LIST).

Make up a sentence using those five words (SENTENCE)

Post the LIST and SENTENCE on this blog (www.westcoastwriters.blogspot.com) under the Day and Letter title, as a COMMENT.  It will take up to a day to be approved and posted (sorry, I have a busy life).

If you miss a day or two, no problem, you can make up the days you missed OR just skip them.  No need for guilt.

That's it.  Hope to see you around playing with the glorious alphabet and words that sound delicious all during February!   Laura

For the love of sentences

When I had barely begun as a creative writer, I was lucky enough to take a class with Verlyn Klinkenborg. He focused our attention on sentences. Every week he harvested sentences from all of our submitted papers and handed out a sheet entitled "some sentences." It would more appropriately have been entitled, "some sentence disasters." Each class period, we revised these mistakes into clear, useful sentences and discussed why the earlier versions were confusing, unclear, and grammatically incorrect. It was eye-opening to me. I had taught first year writing seminars at my college holistically, as I was taught, emphasizing essay structure and ignoring sentences. Now I was caught by sentences, their simplicity and complexity, by how some people could write a whole page sentence that I could understand easily, by the way that others stuck to the simplest forms of sentence.

A new book by Stanley Fish explores sentences and argues convincingly for writers to pay attention to them. Here is one of Fish's favorite sentences: "And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities that we call meaning." He cites Anthony Burgess's novel Enderby Outside. I like the way this sentence portrays words, sentences, and meanings.