I majored in English in college—I have always loved stories. I can't even remember now what my period of interest was—maybe 19th century English & French literature? That sounds reasonable. I read a fair number of novels, plays and...poetry. Yes, I fondly recall a seminar in French symbolist & surrealist poetry.
Homework was reading poetry, and I remember how first I'd just read an assigned poem. Then I'd go back & look up all the words I didn't know or understand and translate it. Then I'd read my crude translation to try to understand the sense of the individual words and the vision of the poem. Read it again trying to internalize the meaning of the words as I read them. Read it again out loud to hear the language. It took hours to read a few lines of text on a page!
While I was wrestling with this class, I remember going to some event and chatting to two somewhat inebriated English graduate students and explaining that really, I just didn't get all the hoopla about poetry. And having them earnestly explain that poetry was it. The pinnacle. The point. The Ultimate in the pantheon of literature....
I didn't buy it. I figure they just liked to lord it over us lowly undergraduates & needed to pick something obscure and difficult (indeed often impenetrable) and pretend they understood the secret language, and others lacked the refined ear and were not worthy of the key to unlock this treasure. ENC (Emperor's New Clothes) I thought. Nothing there.
Flash forward several years. Had broken up with my college/post college boyfriend, moved to New York, gotten a job. But I was still connected with our collective friends when I found out from other sources that he was getting married to a woman who had banned all of his former friends (our friends) as a pre-condition. He had to give them all up for her, and he did.
I felt compelled to write to him. It couldn't be any kind of lengthy explanation of my disappointment in his actions: his willingness to betray long term friends to satisfy an utterly inappropriate perception of threat. To roll over and allow for such bad behavior. To not stand up for himself. To be so utterly lacking in integrity. No. No explanations.
It had to be brief--no more than 3 sentences. Expressive. Dignified. Ruthless.
I wrestled with words. Wrote and rewrote. Crafted my note. Every word had to have resonance, had to have it's own integrity and then when juxtaposed to another, and another, create a new and nuanced meaning. I flashed back to my conversation on Poetry and realized...
Poetry is it.
It is the challenge of packing the world in a thimble, of making each word do double, triple duty or more. Of creating a multifaceted object that you can turn and turn again, see through it, see yourself in it, see other dimensions within it. Within yourself.
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Charting the points
A highly rational friend recently noted with some surprise that sometimes just saying a problem out loud helped him figure it out.
And why was that?
Have you ever been struggling with something, felt a lack of clarity on which direction to go in, or even understand how you felt about an issue?
Have you written about it in an email, a letter, a journal and gotten an insight from the act of writing? Or talked to someone about it, and gotten a better perspective, even though the person you were talking to hadn't said anything? Or even just bounced something out loud into an empty room, and found an answer rebound back to you?
I expect many have. Most likely everyone has just accepted that experience as being just a strange exercise that for unknown reasons simply seems to works.
But for my rational friend, achieving that insight through those means was a surprise. For him, there hadn't seemed to be any point in talking or writing about the same information or questions that were in his head—what difference would it make? The information was already in his head, it wouldn't change from being said out loud or written down. So it got me thinking—well, why does it help?
And I came up with this analogy:
Do you remember math problems where you would be given a sequence of numbers and asked to figure out what the next number in the sequence was supposed to be? Well, the more numbers you were given in the sequence, the clearer the underlying formula was. So if you were only given one number, correctly guessing the next would be impossible—too many options. If you were given two numbers, then your chances were better, but still had a very high level of uncertainty.
For example 2 doesn't give you much to go on. 2, 4, gives you a lot more, but not enough. The sequence could be 2,4,6 or 2,4,8. So with three data points, you can be far more confident of perceiving a pattern, making an assumption, getting clarity.
So my theory is that when you have a problem/issue in your head, that's one data point. But when you say it out loud, so you are knowing it, thinking it, saying it and hearing it, or additionally writing it and reading it, you are adding more data points and increasing your ability to make a more accurate assumption, to chart a more solid course. And agreed, some of these point only offer a tiny bit of new information--a slightly richer or more detailed appreciation, a new perspective, but it's something; it helps.
In one of those Malcolm Gladwell books, he talks about how you can have a group of two or three friends, but if it expands to four or five, the group often falls apart. He noted that one more person isn't just an addition of one, but for everyone in the group, so the increase is exponential. Everyone is managing not only their own relationship to each person in the group, but observing & incorporating each permutation of every element of each member of the group.
So if you have a group of three, A, B, C, you need to maintain awareness of the relationships between A/B, A/C, B/A, C/A, B/C, C/B and ABC. If you add D, it goes from 7 separate relationships to 16 (A/B, A/C, A/D, B/A, B/C, B/D, C/A, C/B, C/D, D/A, D/B, D/C, ABC, ABD, BCD, ACD). Yes, OK, I may not have all the math right, but you get the point.
The more points you can chart or the more ways you allow your brain and intuition to process information, the better it will be able to build a viable theory, or chart a hypothetical direction to consider.
Also, it's very hard to lie to yourself when you are writing in a journal. Much easier to wrap yourself in denial and not go there if it's just in your head, or even talking. And in fairness, sometimes you don't even know you are lying to yourself until you write something down. Reading it, you think...well, no, that's not quite right, and start thinking about what is actually true.
It is helpful to get an external perspective on things—that's why editors were invented. But if you don't have an editor or critique group, or a boss or anyone to be a sounding board, try putting it out there & using yourself.
You'll have a point. Maybe more than one....
Get your sextant out!
Isabel Swift
And why was that?
Have you ever been struggling with something, felt a lack of clarity on which direction to go in, or even understand how you felt about an issue?
Have you written about it in an email, a letter, a journal and gotten an insight from the act of writing? Or talked to someone about it, and gotten a better perspective, even though the person you were talking to hadn't said anything? Or even just bounced something out loud into an empty room, and found an answer rebound back to you?
I expect many have. Most likely everyone has just accepted that experience as being just a strange exercise that for unknown reasons simply seems to works.
But for my rational friend, achieving that insight through those means was a surprise. For him, there hadn't seemed to be any point in talking or writing about the same information or questions that were in his head—what difference would it make? The information was already in his head, it wouldn't change from being said out loud or written down. So it got me thinking—well, why does it help?
And I came up with this analogy:
Do you remember math problems where you would be given a sequence of numbers and asked to figure out what the next number in the sequence was supposed to be? Well, the more numbers you were given in the sequence, the clearer the underlying formula was. So if you were only given one number, correctly guessing the next would be impossible—too many options. If you were given two numbers, then your chances were better, but still had a very high level of uncertainty.
For example 2 doesn't give you much to go on. 2, 4, gives you a lot more, but not enough. The sequence could be 2,4,6 or 2,4,8. So with three data points, you can be far more confident of perceiving a pattern, making an assumption, getting clarity.
So my theory is that when you have a problem/issue in your head, that's one data point. But when you say it out loud, so you are knowing it, thinking it, saying it and hearing it, or additionally writing it and reading it, you are adding more data points and increasing your ability to make a more accurate assumption, to chart a more solid course. And agreed, some of these point only offer a tiny bit of new information--a slightly richer or more detailed appreciation, a new perspective, but it's something; it helps.
In one of those Malcolm Gladwell books, he talks about how you can have a group of two or three friends, but if it expands to four or five, the group often falls apart. He noted that one more person isn't just an addition of one, but for everyone in the group, so the increase is exponential. Everyone is managing not only their own relationship to each person in the group, but observing & incorporating each permutation of every element of each member of the group.
So if you have a group of three, A, B, C, you need to maintain awareness of the relationships between A/B, A/C, B/A, C/A, B/C, C/B and ABC. If you add D, it goes from 7 separate relationships to 16 (A/B, A/C, A/D, B/A, B/C, B/D, C/A, C/B, C/D, D/A, D/B, D/C, ABC, ABD, BCD, ACD). Yes, OK, I may not have all the math right, but you get the point.
The more points you can chart or the more ways you allow your brain and intuition to process information, the better it will be able to build a viable theory, or chart a hypothetical direction to consider.
Also, it's very hard to lie to yourself when you are writing in a journal. Much easier to wrap yourself in denial and not go there if it's just in your head, or even talking. And in fairness, sometimes you don't even know you are lying to yourself until you write something down. Reading it, you think...well, no, that's not quite right, and start thinking about what is actually true.
It is helpful to get an external perspective on things—that's why editors were invented. But if you don't have an editor or critique group, or a boss or anyone to be a sounding board, try putting it out there & using yourself.
You'll have a point. Maybe more than one....
Get your sextant out!
Isabel Swift
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
A Twist of Lemon
Have you ever had a cocktail? I remember when I was younger being curious about the mystery of mixing drinks, and watching and learning from my father. Cocktails were these magic elixirs, complex, mysterious, alluring. Cooking held little interest for me, but making the right twist of lemon was an art I delighted in learning.
My father enjoyed a martini and took pleasure in the details. The right glass, the balance of tastes, the brand, crushing the ice in his hand with a spoon to get the right size slivers, the perfect chill, the right additions. Everything had impact. Everything mattered. And when I would taste the drink, I had to acknowledge that indeed, it did.
As I recall, we were a lemon twist family. I don't think I learned of olives or onions until some much later date, though limes and even an occasional mint sprig would find its way into a seasonal libation.
But the lemon twist was what made the average drink exceptional.
It started with finding a firm, fresh lemon, with unblemished substantial skin. Not for us those thin-skinned lime-look-alikes. A small, sharp knife was needed and a lengthwise strip would be cut from stem to stern. A bit of white was acceptable, but you were looking to get a nice 1/4 inch (finger wide) ribbon of the yellow top coat, covered with tiny pores.
You'd take that ribbon and squeeze it over the surface of your completed cocktail, white inside toward you, the outer skin facing the drink like—my father would gleefully explain—you were squeezing blackheads. And oil did indeed emerge from the peel squeezing, creating a film of lemon essence, an oil slick on the surface of the drink.
You would then gently sweep the perimeter of the glass with the outside of the peel and drop it into the drink (twisting the peel would deliver similar oil-inducing pressure, but is less thorough, in my opinion). As my father noted, one didn't really taste much after the first sip of a drink. The chill, the alcohol, would often take over, so the fact the oil essence didn't last much beyond that initial sip didn't matter. What mattered was that first sip was exquisite, sparkling, aromatic, heady.
However my experience with almost all ordered cocktails is dreadfully disappointing in this area. Most bartenders take the words "with a twist" at face value, and some variety of a curlicue of lemon appears, extracted by an assortment of designer bar implements and it sits decoratively on the edge of your drink. Useless as teats on a bull.
The whole point of a twist of lemon is to add a touch of fresh lemon oil to your drink, for reasons of taste. Not solely to stick a piece of lemon rind in your drink! But almost everyone misses the point. They make a living doing this, and they still don't have their eye on the donut, the key deliverable, the "beef" and not the bun.
Missing—or just not understanding—the point is not a new issue. It can be a problem for aspiring writers too, who may dutifully following the letter Vs the spirit of instructions. Doing something without really understanding why it needs to be done, what value it offers, can lead you astray. It's often why editorial instructions, tip sheets, etc. can sometimes be non-existent, minimalist or vague—because the requesters know that some information can mislead instead of inform.
In fact, information can distract you from focusing on the point. As an adviser, you really want the creator to understand that it's all about achieving the goal: creating the feeling, having the impact, making the experience happen for the recipient. Not (necessarily) about taking each step correctly, following rules, or delivering on the surface requirements, but not the substance. Instructions or information can be helpful, but when it comes down to it, the question will always be: is it delicious? Do I want to keep drinking (or reading, or whatever).
So if you're having trouble making your text behave, now at least now you'll know what to add to that beverage you're going to be fixing yourself!
Do it with a twist.
My father enjoyed a martini and took pleasure in the details. The right glass, the balance of tastes, the brand, crushing the ice in his hand with a spoon to get the right size slivers, the perfect chill, the right additions. Everything had impact. Everything mattered. And when I would taste the drink, I had to acknowledge that indeed, it did.
As I recall, we were a lemon twist family. I don't think I learned of olives or onions until some much later date, though limes and even an occasional mint sprig would find its way into a seasonal libation.
But the lemon twist was what made the average drink exceptional.
It started with finding a firm, fresh lemon, with unblemished substantial skin. Not for us those thin-skinned lime-look-alikes. A small, sharp knife was needed and a lengthwise strip would be cut from stem to stern. A bit of white was acceptable, but you were looking to get a nice 1/4 inch (finger wide) ribbon of the yellow top coat, covered with tiny pores.
You'd take that ribbon and squeeze it over the surface of your completed cocktail, white inside toward you, the outer skin facing the drink like—my father would gleefully explain—you were squeezing blackheads. And oil did indeed emerge from the peel squeezing, creating a film of lemon essence, an oil slick on the surface of the drink.
You would then gently sweep the perimeter of the glass with the outside of the peel and drop it into the drink (twisting the peel would deliver similar oil-inducing pressure, but is less thorough, in my opinion). As my father noted, one didn't really taste much after the first sip of a drink. The chill, the alcohol, would often take over, so the fact the oil essence didn't last much beyond that initial sip didn't matter. What mattered was that first sip was exquisite, sparkling, aromatic, heady.
However my experience with almost all ordered cocktails is dreadfully disappointing in this area. Most bartenders take the words "with a twist" at face value, and some variety of a curlicue of lemon appears, extracted by an assortment of designer bar implements and it sits decoratively on the edge of your drink. Useless as teats on a bull.
The whole point of a twist of lemon is to add a touch of fresh lemon oil to your drink, for reasons of taste. Not solely to stick a piece of lemon rind in your drink! But almost everyone misses the point. They make a living doing this, and they still don't have their eye on the donut, the key deliverable, the "beef" and not the bun.
Missing—or just not understanding—the point is not a new issue. It can be a problem for aspiring writers too, who may dutifully following the letter Vs the spirit of instructions. Doing something without really understanding why it needs to be done, what value it offers, can lead you astray. It's often why editorial instructions, tip sheets, etc. can sometimes be non-existent, minimalist or vague—because the requesters know that some information can mislead instead of inform.
In fact, information can distract you from focusing on the point. As an adviser, you really want the creator to understand that it's all about achieving the goal: creating the feeling, having the impact, making the experience happen for the recipient. Not (necessarily) about taking each step correctly, following rules, or delivering on the surface requirements, but not the substance. Instructions or information can be helpful, but when it comes down to it, the question will always be: is it delicious? Do I want to keep drinking (or reading, or whatever).
So if you're having trouble making your text behave, now at least now you'll know what to add to that beverage you're going to be fixing yourself!
Do it with a twist.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Harlequin Presents looking for new authors!
This just in: Announcing a brand new writing competition from the world’s best-selling romance series!
It’s an exciting time for Harlequin Presents: from January 2008, there will be 12 of our intensely passionate romances available every month. And with this increase of titles comes a great opportunity for aspiring authors – we will be looking to buy more books for publication!
The old saying goes that first impressions are lasting impressions – and when it comes to reading a Harlequin Presents, that certainly holds true. If the first chapter doesn’t immediately grip the reader with its pace, passion and intensity, then she won’t continue to turn the pages.
So Presents is inviting unpublished writers to show us how they can grab the attention of our readership with first chapters that really sizzle. The INSTANT SEDUCTION competition offers prizes that are chances of a lifetime for the lucky winner and runners-up:
First prize – win yourself an editor for a year!
Two runners-up will be given editorial critiques of their first chapter entries and also a personal telephone consultation about their writing!
Visit the Iheartpresents.com blogsite for full details of the competition – and the chance to prepare for publication with an exclusive series of writing tutorials prepared by the editorial team at Harlequin Presents, including advice on First Chapters, How to Write a Synopsis, Loving the Alpha Male and Generating Emotional Conflict.
These are quintessential stories that capture the pacing, power, passion--and satisfaction--of love. Just about every top selling romance author on the New York Times list started her career as a Harlequin Presents reader, so learn from the masters of conflict, seduction, drama and intensity.
Writers...start your computers!
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