The Write Slice: Write or Wrong

Today's post is informative as well as asks for group participation.  I have been asked to give a basic grammar presentation for a writing conference.  But they are worried about people actually attending the presentation, so they asked me to make it more "interesting" and "exciting" than "Grammar 101." My initial thoughts are something along the lines of "You've written the killer story with amazing characters in a beautiful world, but no one seems to catch your vision.  Is it because they cannot understand your vision?" But what do you think? How do we make grammar more exciting?  It's a necessary part of the writing process (some would say necessary evil).  And I frequently tell my students that the reason we learn the rules of grammar is so that we can effectively break them.  And the key word there is "effectively," certainly not "randomly." Grammar is all about creating meaning.  We do not need "gr...

I think I've said before that I am the atypical writer. I don't have a proliferation of ideas floating around in my head.  Mostly the only ideas I feel are worth exploring intensively are occasional dreams that I have. So that usually means I work on one thing at a time. Supposedly though, most writers are working on several projects at a time. I never understood how they could do that because I want to make something just right before I move on. But I had a good friend who enlightened me. I've been working on my historical romance for a long time. Most recently I've been trying to re-write and revise different parts of it. But my friend, Jayrod ( http://the1stog.blogspot.com/ ), helped me realize that I've been working on this so long (years) that my skills and abilities have drastically increased since I started the project. It's not that I can't make my novel perfect, because I certainly can, but it will actually take more work to polish and improve w...

I've always heard that a good book cover design is crucial to a successful novel. It should be carefully crafted to relate to the story, but not give away all your secrets. And of course, it must be eye-catching. I always knew that the cover was important, but I didn't realize how important until recently. I have a four-year-old who loves to read, but he cannot read alone yet. However, he really likes to go to the library and pick out some of his own books. I take him to the library, he grabs a basket, we walk over to the children's section, I plop down on a bench, and he starts looking for books. This usually involves him finding a small section and shelf and stopping there. He can't read the titles, so his only criteria for picking a book is looking at the cover. He doesn't even open it up to look at the pictures inside. He pulls a book off the shelf, looks at it, and sets it in his basket. He continues to do this, pulling from the same location until I tell h...

I watched a movie last night that I thought was fantastic. It was called Equilibrium with Christian Bale. Not only was the storyline great, but the presentation was fantastic as well. This was a movie I was introduced to in my Utopian/dystopian literature class over the summer. It is a futuristic dystopian that has created peace by drugging everyone to eliminate emotion. Bale is the main character who is basically secret police seeking out those who are "feeling" by refusing to take their serum each day. One morning, he accidentally breaks his last vial, and before he can get a replacement, he starts to feel emotion. From that point forward, he decides he would rather not take the serum, and instead tries to help the Underground. Although a movie, it was presented very symbolically like literature. The most obvious symbol was a play on black/white symbolism. The "bad guys" were always in black, and when Bale becomes the "good guy," he wears white.  N...

In my academic and educational training, they spoke a lot about modeling, or "Guided Reading" and "Guided Writing." The idea behind these theories is that inexperienced readers and writers don't really know how to think through their process; they need someone to give them an example. For instance, a Guided Reading lesson would involve the teacher reading a selected passage (perhaps a page or so long), while students follow along with an overhead or personal copy.  Periodically, the teacher will stop the reading and basically voice his/her thoughts out loud. That commentary that goes on inside our heads is spoken aurally to the students.  The idea is that as they see how an experienced reader makes connections to their reading, students will begin to have that internal dialog themselves.  Guided Writing is similar only a teacher writes/revises and voices the decisions they make as a writer. I never disbelieved this theory, but its relevance has been made m...

So during my musings today, I made a discovery that there is an important aspect of writing that I can recognize, but I have no idea how to produce: tone. I will be taking a utopian/dystopian literature class in a couple of weeks and I'm reading some of the novels in preparation for it. I didn't realize how much dystopian literature I had read until addressed so directly by this class. I was reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Fascinating work. In describing the novel to my husband, I realized that (unlike a lot of dystopian literature), Huxley was not specifically creating a dystopian society; instead he was satirizing/warning about where he thought his society was heading. The tone of the novel is somehow different. But I can't figure out how. I can tell there is a difference, and intellectually I know that it has to do a lot with word choice, but I can't tell you what words are creating the tone. To me, it all just seems to be written matter-of-factly, a ...

Congratulations to all of you who have either graduated from college/university, or are about to graduate from high school. It's a big accomplishment. I just graduated myself with my MA in English, and it has been a blast. I am sad that I'm already done because there are so many other classes I want to take. It has been a thrilling and exciting ride. I've honed my craft, had the opportunity to explore genres other than the typical academic ones, and been exposed to a variety of works of literature. I've begun to understand the reason why certain literature lives forever, and I can start to apply those principles into my own writing. I've learned from professors, books, and colleagues. I wouldn't change my experience one bit. So not only is this a shout-out to the graduates, but it's also a shout-out for higher education. If you are debating on attending college, do it. If you are debating on earning your Master's degree, do it. You can learn things f...