Purple prose prizewinner: the Bulwer-Lytton contest

The Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest is sponsored by San Jose State University, with the goal of finding someone who can write as bad a first paragraph as Edward George Bulwer-Lytton did in 1830 with the opener to “Paul Clifford.”

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

They get thousands and thousands of entries each year, many of which are positively brilliant pieces of writing, in the over-the-top style demanded by the assignment. I’m serious.

Take this, the winning paragraph from a couple years back from computer analyst Dan McKay:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he daydreamed of the dual Stromberg carburetors in his vintage Triumph Spitfire, highly functional yet pleasingly formed, perched prominently on top of the intake manifold, aching for experienced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil dampeners begging to be inspected and adjusted as described in Chapter 7 of the shop manual.

Take about colorful writing! E.B. White would have applauded the extended metaphor, the specificity of the details, the action verbs, the images that pop off the page.

The 2008 contest winner will be announced in the next couple of weeks and I’ll keep you posted.

Practice, Persevere, Purge: wisdom from Ira Glass

So you want to be a writer? Storyteller? Screen or radio writer?

Ira Glass of This American Life (a masterful collector of uniquely gripping radio stories -now also on TV) has great advice for you.  Boiled down, it amounts to three of my favorite p-words:

• Practice (write or record a lot of crap, and maybe occasionally some good stuff).
• Persevere (do it some more, and then some more and then more after that).
• Purge (you’ll produce lots of crap and will need to let most of it go).

But he says this with much more pizzazz than I do, so you must watch these four videos on You-Tube.  REALLY. They’re only five minutes each and packed with wisdom.

Start here - #1: Building blocks of the story. The power of the anecdote. Raising questions and then answering them. Reflecting on the point. Every preacher or public speaker should listen to this one.

Then here #2  Finding a decent story - do lots of work then ruthlessly purge the crap.

Then here #3:  How your work almost always, for YEARS, falls short of your taste, your vision.  But do it anyway. A lot. Persevere. 

And finally #4  Two common pitfalls.

Publish or perish

Publish: to prepare and issue (printed material) for public distribution, to bring to public attention.

Perish: to die, esp. in an untimely manner; to pass from existence.

I’ve had friends in academia who viewed this dictum as a death threat that hung over their heads until finally they had published enough to gain tenure. My own view was that a professor’s job was to TEACH students - and that tenure should be based primarily on that ability. (Silly me - it’s actually about the university bolstering its reputation and getting grant money for research.)

I’m not an academic; I’m a writer, and for writers publishing is what rewards us for a lot of dreary production work.  I can write something and print it out in hard copy, but I don’t feel the pleasure until it’s transformed by some outside entity into a published work for the world to see.

I’ve had lots of stuff published over the years, even had a piece of mine picked up by Reader’s Digest.  (I looked down my patrician nose at RD until I discovered that compared to other magazines, they paid three times as much money for half as many words… Shut my mouth.)

To keep myself from mentally perishing, I need to know that my work will eventually be seen by someone besides me. Which is why I so love blogging on WordPress.

I write my post, I press the SAVE button, preview and correct the post, then press PUBLISH!

Et voilà, I’m out there, and you can see it. No middle man.

No money either…. but money wasn’t my objective. Although money would be good.

Hmm. I could charge for pushing P products: poodles, peonies, peanuts, pajamas, paint, pearls, pigs…

Post #100 - Persistent Practice Pays!

Yay me!  I’ve averaged one post a day for the past three+ months in pursuit of my main goal in blogging: to create a daily writing practice.

I am a writer by profession, but only write under deadline–if you don’t count the occasional dreary whines into my journal.   If one wants to improve in skill or expand one’s ouevre (love that word, ouevre - sounds so Important), one should write every day.

Since self-discipline isn’t my strong suit I had to create a ruse to make me place pen to paper (fingers to keyboard). I needed to feel that I was talking to someone outside my own skull, and that that audience (however tiny) expected me to keep my agreement to produce on deadline.

It’s said that it takes 21 days to make something a habit. For those of us with self-discipline issues, it may take longer.  For me, it took about 60 days to arrive at a point where I WANT to produce a post.  I called the blog 365Pwords, but at this point I suspect I could go on forever, because there thousands of great P-words, and many of them are worth revisiting several times.

Three side benefits of keeping my focus narrow (at least it seemed narrow when I began):

• I see the world through p-colored glasses.  P-words pop up in unexpected places like colorful toadstools after a spring rain.  Oooh. I have to write about THAT.
• Roget’s Thesaurus is my new best friend.  If something noteworthy happens and I’m plagued by a paucity of P-words to describe it, I get out Roget’s and lose myself among a plethora of word associations until I find the perfect one.  (Forget the online thesaurus, folks. Or the alphabetic ones. If you want to boost your creative thinking, you need the original Roget’s on paper.)
• I’ve discovered the dictionary. When I was little and asked the meaning of a word, my mom would say, “Go look it up in the dictionary…” which just pissed me off.   I had resisted it ever since, until the P-word Project.  What riches lie within those pages! Try it yourself sometime. Again, the paper dictionary, not the online one.

The Path to Pithyness: Elements of Style

OK OK. yuk yuk. I am not lithping. (Surprisingly, the word “pissy” is absent from my unabridged dictionary. Not that such an omission has ever stopped me from being a whiny ick now and then.)

Pithy: the essential, central part of anything, the gist. Precisely meaningful, cogent and terse. (From botany – the spongy core of a stem or branch)

Pithyness is an aspiration of mine. I want to get to the core of what I’m writing about using vivid language, no extraneous words, and a punchy snap.

Piece of cake. (ohyeah.)

I have owned E.B. White’s edition of Strunk’s book Elements of Style* for decades but it has collected dust most of that time. Last night I opened to the chapter on composition. For each rule he offers brief explanation and several examples.

Rule 10 is about using the active voice and avoiding perfunctory expressions such as “there were,” “the reason was”, “The fact that”. For example, for the final sentence in the previous paragraph I first wrote “There is a brief explanation…”. “He offers brief…” is much stronger.

Rule 11. Put statements in positive form. Make definite assertions. Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language.   Women find this rule especially challenging; we prefer to be indirect, to our detriment.

Instead of “He was not very often on time,” try “He usually came late.”
Instead of “not important” say “trifling”
Instead of “didn’t remember” say “forgot”
Instead of “did not have much confidence in” say “distrusted”.

I would add — omit wiggle phrases like, “I think…” “I believe…”  Just make your point, no apologies.

Rule 12. Use definite, specific, concrete language. Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.

Yesterday at Toastmasters the table topics questions (extemporaneous pop quiz) concerned summertime activities. One woman spoke about how much she loved summer, how wonderful the weather was, how relaxing, and so forth. Yawn.

Another opened her remarks by saying, “I spent summer afternoons with our neighbor, Miss Bertha, helping her bake blueberry pies…” Instantly we all conjured up our own images of Miss Bertha, the oven, the color and fragrance of the pies. Bingo.

* Check out Maira Kalman’s delightfully illustrated version of this book. If you don’t already own the plainjane version, spend the extra few dollars and get it.

Pimping my practice (of feng shui)

In late May I wrote an article about feng shui for the local newspaper which they liked so much they asked if I’d write one a month for their home & garden section.  This was great news because that first piece drove a really big turnout for my class at a home furnishings boutique in town.  I was hoping it would generate demand for folks to come to my class at Clark College later this year, lead readers to my website, which in turn would lead to more paying clients.

Easy come, easy go.

Just after I submitted my article for July, I get an email from the section editor telling me they’ve made another round of cuts at the paper - staff and content both - and the home & garden section has been greatly reduced and absorbed as a part of the features department under a different editor in the newsroom.

I have a call into her as I write, trying to convince her that feng shui is the perfect discipline for times of economic hardship, because most fixes cost little or nothing.  We’ll see.

Pastoral prose poet: E.B. White

pastoral: of or pertaining to the the country or country life; having the qualities of idealized country life, such as charming simplicity and a leisurely, carefree pace.

I’m celebrating the birthday today of E.B. White, one of my all time top favorite writers, not even counting his children’s books. His essays on the “pastoral” life are as alive now as they were when he wrote them decades ago - poetry in prose. My favorite, “Death of a Pig,” makes me smile just to think of it.

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

Today is the birthday of the man who gave us Charlotte’s Web, E.B. (Elwin Brooks) White, born in Mount Vernon, New York (1899). He was a writer for many years for The New Yorker magazine. He later moved with his wife to a farmhouse in Maine.

E.B. White wrote, “Just to live in the country is a full-time job. You don’t have to do anything. The idle pursuit of making a living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.”

White was a solid liberal whose political writings before and during World War II were especially thoughtful.

He was also a witty aphorist. Here are a few of my favorites:

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.

A good farmer is nothing more nor less than a handy man with a sense of humus.

I don’t know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving he can outwit nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

It is easier for a man to be loyal to his club than to his planet; the bylaws are shorter, and he is personally acquainted with the other members.

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts.

A writer is like a bean plant, he has his little day, and then he gets stringy.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

Peculiar passion - my Vector Graphics computer

In 1980 you could probably count on one hand the number of 40 year-old single mothers who desperately wanted to own a computer. I knew nothing about them except that you could correct your typing errors with an easy keystroke or two, you could move whole paragraphs from here to there and back again, and you could get software to add and subtract flawlessly so I could keep track of my finances.

I wanted to earn a living as a writer, but I was a terrible typist. My writing skills were marginal enough that it often took many drafts before something worthwhile emerged (if ever…). With a computer editing was painless, even fun. And I could keep track of my puny finances without having to take off my socks.

The Apple was available but seemed like just a toy; I wanted to play with the big boys.

So I got me a Vector 3 – a CP/M machine with (wait for it) 56Kb RAM (!!) and a 340Kb (!!) external floppy drive. As you can see, the 72-key keyboard and 12” video screen were all one unit. You loaded the program you wanted to use from a floppy disk, and saved your files onto another floppy.

I also bought a big honking Diablo 630 printer, which created beautiful proportionally spaced output (unlike dot-matriz printers where every letter was given the same width) about twice as fast as you could go on a Selectric typewriter (if you could type).

Vector Graphics Inc was started by two San Francisco housewives in the late ’70s, Lore Harp and Carole Ely - how cool is that! Harp’s then husband was technical director. The Harps’ divorce ultimately brought the company down. Lore Harp took a brief left turn and invented a funnel women could pee into when it was inconvenient to use a toilet, and then became a big gun at IDG (which owned Infoworld, among other tech publications), and now is a venture capitalist with lots of bucks and a position on the MIT board of trustees.

But I digress. The computer and printer plus Magic Wand word processing and Execuplan spreadsheet cost an absurd amount of money ($8,000 if I recall!) but I never regretted it for an instant.  It paid for itself in the articles I sold, technical editing I could do, and jump start I got on computer literacy, because believe me the road was rough and rocky.  Tech support? No such thing.

I finally sold the system in 1985 to another Vector owner who wanted a backup for spare parts should her system have problems.

I’ve been a geek ever since, owning countless computers over the years, many of which I built myself. It must be said, however, that I no longer much enjoy getting under a computer’s hood. I just want it to work and keep working. And when it doesn’t it’s all I can do to keep my zen cool.

PHUCK!!!

I know I said I’d only be using P-words on this blog that were of the voiceless bilabial plosive sort, and that I would eschew fake P-words that sounded like F, N, S, or T, but today I must break that rule.

My workhorse computer, “Big Mama,” came down with the phlu yesterday – totally phucked up - and I’ve spent most of the past two days trying to restore her health. Windows won’t come up, but tries in so many peculiar ways that I now think it’s the hard drive. I am tech savy enough that usually I can fix such glitches, but this one just got worse and worse. I went so far as to call in a mobile tech I called who was also baffled. And I’m $140 poorer. So far.

And OF COURSE I HAVEN’T BACKED UP my most important files in a couple of weeks… so I stand to lose a lot of data if I have to reformat (or get a new drive). Monday I’ll have to find a shop with a good bench to see if they can at least get those important files off. THEN I have to do the unbelievably noxious task of reinstalling programs on a new drive.

Pshit! (The P is silent.)

Perseverance #1

Some topics deserve more than one take. Like perseverance. Since it is my Achilles heel I’ll probably need more than one go at it.

Perseverance - continuing resolutely despite obstacles, opposition, importunity. Tenacity. From the Latin perseverare: per- through + severus severe

Perseverance is what gets things done in this world.  I believe it’s one of the world’s Seven Virtues.

In her memoir, Opposite of Fate, Amy Tan describes what happened after the wildly successful Joy Luck Club was published. All her writer friends began warning her of the Horrors of the Second Book, and how she might as well just toss it now because it would get lousy reviews when compared to her First Book, the Best-Seller.

Despite the stress and various physical ailments she kept writing - beginning not one Second Book but about five of them. She’d write between 30 and 70 pages before realizing she’d hit a dead end, so she’d begin a new and different book. Over and over. Finally she got a character she liked and wrote 100 pages… but then she realized the real story began on page 98 so she tossed all but the last two. This happened more than once.

Then she developed a devastating case of Lyme disease, which went undiagnosed for months and months, causing memory loss, headaches, fevers, pains, you name it. Her mother got Alzheimer’s and died. Through all this she kept on writing.

What is MY problem?

I wimp out so fast - at the littlest bump in the path. If it’s too hard, too undefined, too remote, forget it. I’ve got more immediate things to do.   Write a book?

I suddenly remembered a dentist appointment.

Was that a dust bunny under the bed? I’d better vacuum.

Wouldn’t the bathroom look better with yellow towels? They’re on sale at Macy’s…