There are many rules about writing prose fiction. Any creative writing course will drill those rules into you. But don’t be fooled. These “rules” are merely guidelines that help you focus your prose. But they aren’t commandments. I think there is only one real rule so far as prose construction goes:
Rules about writing should be followed, unless they shouldn’t.
Continue reading “The Worst Good Writing Advice I’ve Received So Far”
The consistently excellent J.C. Cauthon (J.C.’s for life, yo!) writes about my own Achilles heal: getting into the rhythm of writing.
Specifically, she writes about trying to find the groove of writing again. You know how it is: thousands of ideas, mere minutes of free time. Life intervenes. A move half-way across the country is intervening in mine. But once you start down the dark side of not writing, forever will it…
Damn, I am SUCH a nerd.
Continue reading “Word Count: Struggling to Find My Rhythm Again”
This week, we visit P.L. Thomas’ excellent site “The Becoming Radical.”
In this post, Thomas discusses the need for poetry in education, and how poetry and fiction seem to be falling by the wayside in favor of testing scores needed to justify school funding.
The testing requirements alone are evil, but the cutting out of poetry from the curriculum is a travesty. Poetry is an essential to education as well as life. But I’ll shut up about it because Thomas puts it far better than I can.
In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”
“No, no. You’ve got something the test and machines will never be able to measure: you’re artistic. That’s one of the tragedies of our times, that no machine has ever been built that can recognize that quality, appreciate it, foster it, sympathize with it.”
Paul Proteus to his wife Anita in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano
“So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens” is, essentially, a grammatical sentence in the English language. While the syntax is somewhat out of the norm, the diction is accessible to small children—the hardest word likely being “depends.” But “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams is much more than a sentence; it is a poem:
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens.
A relatively simple English language sentence shaped into purposeful lines and stanzas becomes poetry. And like…
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A recent post shared on Patty Jansen’s excellent blog “Must Use Bigger Elephants” via the recent Weekend Redirect via got me thinking…
Great Sci-Fi is about the present. Whether addressing general inequality, sexuality, norms, political conflict, terrorism, the nature of power, or whatever other bees angrily circle out bonnets, it places contemporary problems in the future. There, characters can hash it out using fantastic technologies and hide behind applicability or metaphor.
Because of this Sci-Fi authors and audiences tend to be dreamers. Many have suffered from some kind of persecution themselves, or at the very least feel like square pegs. There is something egalitarian about Sci-Fi… something that lauds the individual.
So why is there so much sexism and racism in the Sci-Fi genre?
Bad writing.
I mean really bad writing.
I love it.
I find it inspirational. Whenever I read a terrible published work, I step back with a little reverence and more awe than I anticipated.
Discovering really terrible writing is like discovering a smell so bad that you have to share it with family and friends. It’s so bad that it becomes a bonding experience.
The BIGGEST minutiae 