Writing craft – Page 13 – Patricia J. Parsons

Journals, Writing craft, Writing rituals

Blogging as writing practice

Posted on 17 Jan 2012 by Patricia J. Parsons

Just like athletes and dancers, those of us who call ourselves writers need to “practice” our craft and “warm up” before embarking on a new piece of work.

Whenever I’m faced with the prospect of a brand new writing project and find myself sitting in front of that blank computer screen, fingers poised over the keys, I need to feel that I am in practice and that I’m warmed up to begin properly. So, how do writers practice when they’re not writing something destined for publication in one way or another? And how do we warm up for the task at hand?

Over the years, many writers have simply kept journals. I’ve done that myself and I continue to do it. I love my journals as any of my regular readers know. I have journals for a wide variety of things. But they do serve me two very different purposes.

The first purpose is for me to have a place to write down ideas as they come to me. Most writers do this and these days many will do it electronically on IPhones and IPads or other electronic devices. I do this as well, but for me there is nothing like my nice pen and my Moleskine journal(s).

Plan B journal — What kind of book notes & ideas reside in this journal? Hmm...

The second purpose for me in keeping journals is for writing practice. Writing guru Natalie Goldberg says, “It’s good to go off and write a novel, but don’t stop doing writing practice. It is what keeps you in tune…”[1] I’ve always loved her approach to writing practice; keep your hand moving. That works fine when I use a pen and notebook, but it’s not so useful when I’m at a keyboard. Maybe it should be, but it isn’t. That’s where blogging comes in for me.

Just like everyone else out there, when blogging first started to become a force, I started a blog. I thought that I could use the blog to make some of the work I do at the university available to a wider audience – but I wasn’t committed to it, and as I look back on the exercise now, I think I really wanted to learn the technical aspects of blogging more than I wanted it to be good pieces of writing. But blogging can be that practice Natalie talks about.

Consider this: if you are a writer, you need to write every day – or at least those five days a week that you devote to “work.” (I know, some of your friends don’t think you’re actually working when all you seem to be doing is sitting at home diddling away on the computer – my mother thinks that if I’m not in front of a class or at a meeting, I must not be working. I wonder where she thinks those books come from?) But you don’t always have a big project – and sometimes when you do, all you seem to be able to do is stare at that blank screen. This is where blogging as writing practice comes in.

Blogging, however, can only be a practice if you are committed to it. This means that you commit to writing almost every day and posting at least every week or two. But do you have to make your every blogged thought available to the masses? In a word, NO!

Not every blog has or needs to have an audience. You can actually blog away with your settings set on private. It does not need to be searchable by the Googles of the world.

For most people, blogging requires an idea that triggers a personal response that then becomes the basis of a blog post that begs for reader response. Blogging in this scenario is a very public activity that begs for that dialogue. Blogging as writing practice, on the other hand, does not need an idea, or an angle. It does not need an audience, and certainly doesn’t need any feedback. It just needs the writer to begin with a word or two – such as “I remember…” as suggested by Natalie Goldberg – and fingers to the keyboard, repeating that two words every time the ideas stop flowing. What’s very important here is that what you write doesn’t even have to be good – it just has to be.

This is how I justify spending time on this and my other blog – the other blog is one that chronicles my other passion – travel. They started out as ways simply to practice and warm-up before a big project. They have, obviously, evolved. That’s the nice thing about writing practice (even in your journals): you never know where they might lead. They just don’t need to have an objective at the outset. Happy blogging!

The Common Craft video reminds us that blogs are “news” of the 21^st century – but as writers, we know better. Blogs can be anything we want!

[1] Goldberg, Natalie. (1986, 2005). Writing Down the bones. Shambhala Publications, p. 17.

Grammar, Writing craft

“Grammar is important”…really?

Posted on 23 Nov 2011 by Patricia J. Parsons

I was listening to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) noon-time ‘open-mouth’ show on the radio as I drove from one appointment to another on Monday. The guest ‘expert’ that day happened to be a grammar expert: I missed the introduction, but I inferred that he was a high school English teacher. He and the host discussed various aspects of grammar, and people called in with their grammar-related questions, as well as their pet peeves. In his attempt to avoid the jargon as he put it, his explanations of why certain English grammar rules are what they are lost something in the translation making it difficult to view his explanations with much credibility.

The show ignited my inspiration to write this blog post and then, oddly (is grammar in the air this week?), colleague Alison Delorey wrote a blog post on our students’ newsletter on the very same topic. Truthfully, though, her post is on grammar as style and you should read it. She suggests that “Grammar can be creative, interesting and exploratory…” and I agree with her; my concern in response to the call-in show, though, is that grammar is first and foremost a framework or structure for verbal communication in general. Grammatical mistakes frequently result in failure to communicate, and so your message, whatever it may be, is lost.

A caller to the radio show guest asked him the simple question: What is the difference in usage between ‘bring’ and ‘take’? It was his answer to this particular question that started to get me riled up about over-simplification of the rules.

His response was to tell her that “I bring” and “You take.” I started thinking about this as the caller also tried to process this new information. I was thinking that this couldn’t possibly be right since you can also bring clarity to a situation (you wouldn’t’ ‘take’ clarity to a situation), and I can take action on something (I wouldn’t ‘bring’ action). Clearly you can also decline both of these words: I bring, you bring, he brings etc. So, it sent me flying to Margaret Shertzer’s The Elements of Grammar (a kind of companion to Strunk and White’s classic Elements of Style, and my bible for all things stylish (although not my wardrobe!).

According to The Elements of Grammar the difference between the two words is this: to bring means to convey toward (the speaker); whereas to take means to carry from (the speaker).[1] There, now I feel better. He had over-simplified it and muddied the ability of the speaker to convey a message.

Although messages can be the victim of the grammar-challenged among us, for me it’s often more of a simple stylistic issue – which takes us back to Alison’s point. In fact, most of the grammar mistakes that I find particularly annoying (somewhat like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard in my world) are personal peeves. So, now it’s my chance to rant a bit.

For the love of god, let us stop turning nouns into verbs! It’s beginning to get out of hand. One curmudgeonly grammarian on the internet came up with examples that even I haven’t even heard. “I’m going to suicide,” “after I enema it all out”, for example, then this grammarian questions when we stopped “writing” books and began “authoring” them. Hmm.

Now if I could just banish the word “impact” used as a verb in my students’ writing, I think that I will have had an impact on (not impacted) their style!

But that’s just me.

[BTW The title “Grammar is Important” is the title of my grammar text from elementary school – other books have come and other books have gone, but I still have this one on my bookshelf from about grade four. What does that say about me?]

[1] Shertzer, Margaret. 1986. The elements of grammar. New York: The Macmillan Publishing Company, p. 144.

Creativity, Writing craft

Putting pen (or pencil) to paper

Posted on 8 Nov 20118 Nov 2011 by Patricia J. Parsons

Do you ever write with a pen and paper? Hmm? Or are you forever hunched over the computer keyboard like most writers these days? If you only ever write at a computer keyboard, I think you might be missing out. Stay with me for a few moments all you tweeters.

I wrote a guest piece for our students’ new online newsletter Symmetry recently on the topic of creativity and how it can be leveraged in fields other than the traditional “creatives.” Some people think that writing creative pieces needs to be done by putting pen to paper – literally.

Ever since I discovered her work in the late 1980’s, I have considered Natalie Goldberg to be one of my major writing teachers. I’ve never met Natalie Goldberg. My writing is not one bit like Natalie Goldberg’s writing. But her early books on writing practice, most notably Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, were my signposts along the journey toward finding my own voice as a writer. And although I’m seriously dedicated to writing while hunched over a keyboard, Natalie’s approach to teaching writing has often given me pause to consider if there is a difference in the extent to which we might be able to mine our creativity when inputting words to a computer versus letting them flow onto paper through our writing hand.

Natalie’s approach to writing is that it is a ‘practice,’ and that by practicing, we improve our writing. We don’t have to publish everything we write. Writing is often for ourselves only. (To tell you the truth, I often read material that I wish the writer had kept to him or herself!)

I’ve talked about Nataile’s timed writing approach in previous posts, but her ideas bear further reflection. She tells us to just “go!” and “keep your hand moving!” That’s where the pen and paper thing comes in—you can’t do this kind of practice with a computer.

She also tells us to “lose control.” This is easier said than done, but I believe that this is how we mine our personal creativity. As writers, we put pen to paper and if we’re able to lose control and keep the writing hand moving, interesting ideas just seem to flow.

Lee Rourke wrote a terrific piece in The Guardian’s book blog recently. In it he refers to longhand writing as a “secretive pleasure.” He says he “can sit in a corner of a café unnoticed and write to my heart’s content. I’m less conspicuous than the iBook brigade, cluttering up London coffee houses and pubs with their flashy technologies.”

Of course, my personal obsession with writing journals is related to the notion of putting pen to paper. Sometimes it’s just nice to sit in a comfortable chair and think. Then pick up that journal and just write. Okay, I will admit that these days I often pick up my IPad and do this, but to tell you the truth, it’s not the same. I highly recommend a good dose of the Natalie Goldberg approach to writing practice – with that pen firmly planted on a piece of paper that (preferably) is contained in a beautiful notebook.