Writing craft – Page 13 – Patricia J. Parsons

The beauty of a deadline… (OK, don’t shoot me!)

Posted on 30 May 201230 May 2012 by Patricia J. Parsons

A few weeks ago I picked up a book that I didn’t realize was about deadlines. Okay, I now recognize that Chris Baty’s entertaining little book No Plot? No Problem isn’t supposed to be about deadlines, but it is. Baty, the creator of the National Novel Writing Month says this in the first chapter:

Deadlines are the dynamos of the modern age. They’ve built every city, won every contest, and helped all of us to pay our taxes reasonably close to on time…a deadline is…optimism in its most ass-kicking form…a potent force… (p. 26)

…and it occurs to me that I’ve been sympathetic to this point of view for many years. Just ask my students!

A deadline changes everything about any project that you plan to implement. It moves you past the planning stage and drops you head first into the implementation phase, forcing you to consider milestones along the way. And when the deadline is imposed by an external force (like your boss or your professor or your editor) those deadlines take on even greater importance. Or do they?

I have about a dozen writing projects on the go right now. Some of them are actually academic (low on the priority list at this point in my career), some of them are creative, and some of them are strictly personal. The one project that gets done every week is my contribution to the travel blog I write with my husband. Why? Because I have a self-imposed deadline. I made a personal commitment to a certain number of posts at certain intervals when we started on this project (which will become a book in due course) last fall, and I have neither looked back nor shirked my deadlines since. The truth is that I have never missed an externally-imposed writing deadline, and now it occurs to me that when I have actually taken the time to create personal deadlines, my work has progressed faster and more efficiently than the more organic, artistic approach to work schedules that seem to be common among the ‘creatives’ of the world.

Case in point: I had almost forgotten, but a number of years ago I decided that I’d take a foray into screen-writing. I think it’s because I see plot and dialogue as a kind of film running through my head when I write narrative, so I thought I might capitalize on that tendency. I registered for a script-writing course, and set about learning the nuts and bolts of the process (not to mention learning about the paranoia that seems to run rampant through the film industry: no one wanted to share their ideas for fear of them being stolen – this never seems to happen in the world of books!). After the course was finished, I had a notion of script framework, ideas and scraps of dialogue, but not much else. So, I did what I always do, I bought a book on script-writing.

In fact, I bought several, but the one that really got me to a different level is not Robert McKee’s classic (and wonderful) book titled Story; rather it is a small book called How to Write Movie in 21 Days by Viki King. I followed her framework for getting to a finished 90-minute script in 21 days and it worked. I have the proof of it sitting in a drawer just waiting for a producer/director to snatch up Something I’m Supposed to Do. But I had not noticed that her admonitions about deadlines really got inside my head. In fact she says, “…your deadline…is your friend. Focus to reach your deadline. Make it your priority. Sleep, food and phone are secondary to the deadline…” Okay, this was published in 1988. These days she would have had to add a list of social networking sites to avoid – but I digress.

The bottom line is that if I impose a deadline on myself, I get it done. It’s time I stopped flailing about trying to get the parts of my new novel (actually novels, and articles, and blog posts) perfect, and just get them finished. There will always be time for editing later – with an editing deadline, of course!

Novelist Rita Mae Brown said: “A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.”

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.