AN INTRODUCTORY
CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM
(MONOGRAPH NUMBER TWO)
by Dan Lukiv
B.Sc. (mathematics), The
University of British Columbia (UBC), 1976;
Teacher Training (kindergarten
to grade three), UBC, 1977;
Writer’s Digest’s Advanced
Novel Writing Program, 1997;
M.Ed. (creative writing), The
University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC), 2003
Introduction
This introductory creative writing program exposes the
student to all major literary genres. It offers the teacher a simple,
methodical teaching process and the student straightforward assignments that
address fundamental writing concepts. The assignments and concepts can be
teacher-delivered through the lecture-format. But a simpler teaching method
also exits. The teacher could distribute the course to students, encourage them
to get started, and answer questions as they arise—answer them either personally/individually or through
group discussions.
In the program, I repeatedly refer to examples of poetry
and fiction. Often I use my own work, to help me explain particular concepts of
writing in the various genres. Sometimes the same poem or fiction excerpt shows
up in more than one section because, logically, that poem or excerpt may exemplify
more than one concept. I hope the occasional repetition does not bother
anybody.
Table of Contents
Part I—For Teachers
Chapter 1—Direction
for Creative Writing Teachers from Three Research Studies
Chapter 2—What Is
Creative Writing and What Is a Creative Writer?
Chapter 3—A
Marking Rubric
Part II—For Students
Unit
1:
Unit
2:
Unit
3: I. The Scene; II. More Scenes;
Unit
4:
Unit
5:
Unit
6:
Unit
7:
Unit
8:
Part III—Resources for Students and Teachers
The
Lead Guitarist (part of Unit 4)
For
Writers Only (part of Unit 6)
Part IV—Arthur (Canadian poet), Thomas (Canadian poet), and
Elizabeth (Canadian fiction writer): Recommendations for Elementary and High
School Teachers
Chapter
1—Arthur
Chapter
2—Thomas
Chapter
3—
Part I—For Teachers
Chapter 1—Direction for Creative Writing Teachers from Three
Research Studies
I conducted three qualitative research studies that
explored events in elementary and high school that had encouraged three
established Canadian writers (respectively: Arthur [pseudonym, in the name of anonymity],
a poet, Study I [MEd research], 2002f, 2003b, or 2003c; Thomas [pseudonym], a
poet, Study II, 2004b; and Elizabeth [pseudonym], a fiction writer, Study III,
2005e, 2005f, 2005g) to seriously take up
creative writing as adults. In the sense that what events in school encouraged
Arthur, Thomas, and
In the first person point of view, each teacher
should ask him/herself whether or not:
I promote the joy and wonder of silent reading
of poetry and fiction____
I promote the joy and wonder of listening to
poetry and fiction fluently read aloud____
I promote the joy and wonder of listening to
songs____
I promote the wonder of uninterrupted language
experiences____
I promote the intrigue and wonder of flights of
imagination fuelled by the connotative and imagistic value of words____
I promote the excitement of verbally punning
and joking____
I promote the excitement of students’ informing
others about they have read____
I promote the joy and exhilarating freedom of
writing down thoughts and feelings based
on poetry and fiction read, and I openly value those thoughts and feelings____
I promote the exhilarating freedom of choice of
reading material____
I promote the satisfaction and excitement of
receiving sound direction about how to write well, and I do so
compassionately____
I demand, from a humanistic point of view, the
best from students____
I value, love, see each student as
sublimely unique____
I encourage students to be the best that they
can be, no matter what their gifts or deficits are____
I provide lots of opportunities for students to
write poetry, stories, and plays____
I provide opportunities for students to use
their writing in performances (e.g., public reading, plays)____
I read students’ good writing—even non-assigned
work that they bring to school—aloud, as examples for others____
I have students read their own good writing
samples aloud, as examples for others ____
I provide special events—for example, concerts
in which students are the performers—that may become memories students use as
writing resource material____
I present students’ writing to established
writers who praise the works and/or provide helpful direction____
I provide a variety of reading experiences
(poems, stories, non-fiction), in the hopes of instilling a love of stories and
a quest for knowledge, providing students with subjects to write about____
The more checks a
teacher has, the more closely his or her school-based events exemplify,
collectively, the phenomenon of what events in school encouraged Arthur,
Thomas, and Elizabeth. For an in depth look at the events that gave rise to
this checklist, please consider Part IV of this text.
Chapter 2—What Is Creative Writing and What Is a Creative Writer?
Arthur, Thomas, and
Elizabeth provided me with rich interviews filled with memories of relevant
school experiences—relevant with respect to my research question, that is. I
speak of these experiences in terms of elementary and high school as opposed to
college and university. I speak of these participants as creative writers, as
individuals who produce what I will shortly define as creative writing.
Although somewhat circular
in logic, that last sentence answers: “What is a creative writer?” Likewise,
mathematicians produce mathematics. Physicists produce physics. Music composers
produce musical scores. Dancers produce dancing. These individuals stand
defined by what they do.
So, then, what is
creative writing? Although I believe that generally all writing is creative—in
fact, I believe that generally all thinking is creative (Smith, 1990)—I do not
want to dwell on those ontological premises. I define creative writing of poets,
fiction writers, and dramatists in the same way many others define it:
Creative writing is writing that expresses the
writer’s thoughts and feelings in an imaginative, often unique, and poetic way.
Creative writing is guided more by the writer’s need to express feelings and
ideas than by restrictive demands of factual and logical progression of
expository writing. (What is Creative Writing?, 1999)
In the words of distinguished novelist Ernest J. Gaines (born in 1933
C.E [Our Common Era]), creative writing is “imaginative writing....Though the
creative writer draws from factual sources, sociology, psychology, politics,
religion, etc.,...he should use all of that information imaginatively—never
[just] factually” (Gaines, n.d.). Creative writing, then, conveys feelings and
personal ideas more than information, as opposed to expository writing, which
conveys information more than feelings and personal ideas (What is Expository
Writing?, 1999).
Now that I have
provided a picture of creative writing, I’ll provide in the next chapter
a rubric for marking it.
Chapter 3—A Marking Rubric
How should creative
writing teachers mark students’ work (see, e.g., Lukiv, 2001f, Chapter One:
Sunglasses and Evaluation)? I place no dogmatic direction before teachers, but
I do provide what I would call a reasonable rubric (see, e.g., Laurie, 2005).
Each assignment, in any given unit of work, that involves creative writing as
opposed to an expository response could score 25 marks, divided up according to
these categories:
a. 5 marks: degree of effort.
b. 5 marks: degree of originality/creativity
(see Chapter 2: What is Creative Writing and What Is a Creative Writer?).
c. 5 marks: level of appropriate grammar and
technical skill (a departure from usual standards, as in the case of e. e.
cummings’ upper/lowercase and line formatting anomalies, and in the cases of
James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Donovan
A. Landers’ stream of consciousness, should come with an explanation from the
student about the need for such a departure).
d. 5 marks: degree of willingness to discuss
how to improve an assignment (with respect
to individualized teacher-student conversations).
e. 5 marks: degree of effort to complete a
final draft with respect to discussions about how to improve the work (i.e.,
with respect to d).
A student who tries
hard (a: say, 5/5) but turns in a work that lacks originality (b: say, 0/5) and
displays poor grammatical structure and technical skill (c: say, 0/5) may still
score a passing mark by conversing with his or her teacher about how to improve
the work (d: say, 5/5) and then writing up a final draft that incorporates at
least some of the teacher’s direction (e.g., with respect to grammatical
changes, aesthetic considerations, and cliché-ridden statements [e: say, 5/5]).
The student could score 15/25, for this assignment. Of course, if the work
ranks as perfect: score, 100%.
I haven’t discussed
what constitutes a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 out of 5 for each of a, b, c, d, or e. Laurie
(2005) creates a marking rubric for high school arts students’ art projects,
which could correlate with many of my assignments if I considered her “Not Yet
Within Expectations” as a 1, “Meets Expectations (Minimal Level)” as a 2,”Meets
Expectations (Higher Level)” as a 3, “Fully Meets Expectations” as a 4, and “Exceeds
Expectations” as a 5 (p. 15). But each of these “numbers” still requires a
working definition. Rather than create a possible dog-pile heap of definitions,
I leave them for individual teachers to conceptualize—teachers who, I’m sure,
are fully capable of defining what a 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are to them for each of
a, b, c, d, and e.
As for expository
responses, teachers may wish to mark according to the a, c, d, and e
categories, or they may wish to mark according to the b category too. Really,
just as all thinking could arguably be termed creative (Smith, 1990), so could
all writing (see the previous chapter), at least at some level of originality.
Part II—For Students
Unit 1
Contents:
What do you
want to get out of this course? Be specific. That will help me (hereafter, your
teacher) help you focus on your interests. If you tell me that you want to
write a novel, that you’ve wanted to write a novel ever since you said your first words—Is that comic relief (Comic Relief, 2007)?—and that your entire happiness in life rests
on your writing a novel this year, then I’ll consider altering some assignments to
accommodate your obsession, I mean interest. (Please note: In this course, I
draw attention to assignments by writing them in bold, blue, 16-font text.)
Please consider, however, that what seems colossally
important today may not rank so in a year or decade or two. For example, when I
took Creative Writing 202 at the University of British Columbia, back in 1974
in the previous century—yes, the
previous one—lanky, dark-bearded Professor
Harlow (born in 1923) asked, “Why don’t each of you students tell us what you want to get
out of this course.” In the workshop-setting class in
the classroom with water-stained walls warped by age, I said, “I, I want to learn how to write a good children’s story. I’ve
always wanted to write children’s, um, stories.” I gulped. Did I sound narrow minded? Simple minded?
Well! Fine if I did, I figured. I wanted to write children’s stories! But within five years of that confession, I
found something else of colossal importance. Writing poetry. The day I saw my
first poem in print, in a literary journal called Repository (no, not Suppository),
I remember thanking Professor Harlow in my heart for introducing me not only to
the art and craft of fiction and dramatic writing; he taught me lots about
poetry writing too.
My hope as your teacher,
then: that you will write in several genres, experiencing their distinct, and
sometimes not-so-distinct, flavours, and that you will one day get some of your
work published (in literary journals, magazines, newspapers, even books (The
Canadian Writer’s Market [McClelland & Stewart] and The Poet’s Market and
The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market [Writer’s Digest Books]
will give you access to names and addresses of publishers). If you wonder what
I mean by genres, then consider these: poetry, fiction, the play (for stage,
tv, or radio), and the mime.
Again, what do
you want to get out of this course?
II. The Mime.
Consider the following lists
of verbs:
is scuttle
have chomp
was scream
were pound
am fling
Which column list above
sounds or seems more interesting to your eye, ear, or emotional psyche? If you
say the left-hand list, then you have just begun to worry me. The words in the
right-hand list possess an energy that the limp others simply don’t have. Writers know that. They also know that if they
are to keep their readers entertained and interested in their work, energy-charged
verbs in the active as opposed to the passive sense definitely
help.
Active
At
the talent night in the dimly lit log restaurant, Martha sang—actually, she screeched through—”Puff the Magic
Dragon.”
Passive
At
the talent night in the dimly lit log restaurant, “Puff the Magic Dragon” was sung—actually,
was screeched through—by Martha.
As Bates (1980) points out, “the active voice gives writing a sense of strength,
energy, vitality, and motion. The passive voice slows things down” (p. 20). You should answer for yourself why the
active example of Martha exists more energetically than the passive one (see,
e.g., Active and Passive Voice, 2004). If you believe, on the other hand, that
the mighty passive dwarfs the weak active, and if you like is better
that fling, then my worry for you has jumped to a quantum level.
Mime, and I don’t mean
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, relates to activity, as biology
relates to life and as mathematics relates to if and then.
Mime relates to activity means that the mime, “a play in which the actors use gestures and movements,
not words” (Mime, 1993, p. 119), =
distilled action. Red Skelton used the mime in many of his stand up acts, and
audiences loved his miming expertise, his emphatic facial expressions and
limber arms and legs. I know I did.
Why do I keep talking about the mime? To set up this
statement:
Write like a mimer mimes.
Just as I said you should answer for yourself why the
active example of Martha exists more energetically than the passive one,
you should also answer for yourself why you need to write like a mimer mimes.
To help you come to terms with this last italicized
statement, write a mime, giving stage directions for your mimers. Make sure you
have a beginning, middle, and end (as in a story), and if you have a theme that
shows us something truthful about life—that would be great.
And, as you write, think about tools. Certainly a
carpenter’s tools include things such as a hammer, saw, tape measure, and
level. Certainly a mimer’s tools include his arms, legs, expressions, emphatic
and descriptive gestures (Benefit From, 2001)—his entire body. A writer’s tools include at least energetic verbs in the active
voice. To help you write your mime, by your keeping your mimers physically
active through your use of directions that employ energetic verbs in the active
voice, here are two published examples of short mimes, written by two of my
former students, for you to consider:
Breaking Up
by Laura Larose (17 years old). Published
in CHALLENGER international, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1998, p. 3.
Characters: a young man (M) and woman (W).
W: Sitting on the floor, head on her knees, sobbing.
M: Enters, looks at woman.
W: Notices man, turns her face away from him, and wipes her tears away.
M: Concerned, he approaches her, crouches, and puts his hand on her
shoulder.
W: Angrily she pulls away, and quickly stands.
M: Also angry, he stomps his feet and punches his hand.
W: In pain, she places one hand on her chest, and then clutches it into
a tight fist.
M: Roughly, he grabs her, hugs her.
W: She pushes him away, and sadly turns her back to him.
M: Confused, he spreads out his hands as if to ask, “Why?”
W: She sits down sadly.
M: Turns and walks away, takes one glance at her, then he exits.
W: Lowers her head to her knees, sobbing.
Did you notice the lack of verbs the like of is,
had, was, have, were, am, will, will
be, have been, are, should, could, and would?
Such verbs don’t really give life to a mime, don’t they?
Untitled
by Pat Figel (17 years old). Published
in CHALLENGER international, Volume 10, Issue 1, 1999, p. 4.
Characters: A young man (G); another young man (P).
G: Sitting as his desk, a perplexed look on his face.
P: Walks in, puts his hand on G’s shoulder.
G: Pushes the arm away.
P: Gets a look on his face as if to say, “What?”
G: Looks back as if to say, “Sorry.”
P: Brings out his hand in a friendly gesture.
G: Accepts it and shakes it.
P: Leaves room, looking back with a smile and a wave.
G: Stays sitting down, but he too smiles and waves back.
Do you have a better sense of how writers should
write as mimers mime? To create energy, writers use energetic verbs in the
active voice just as mimers use physical action and facial expression? Yes, I
know we can’t create energy (The Law, n.d.)—but in the dramatic sense, writers
can. Do you have a better understanding of how writers and mimers create a
sense of something happening?
For the writer, often the use of action-charged
verbs translates into character action. Interestingly, a character’s action, in
other words what he or she does, and, for that matter, what he or she says in a
dramatic context of conflict between him or her and someone or something else,
defines, at least in part, that character’s personality, make up, manner, sense
of being, individuality, uniqueness. Knott (1977) speaks of
characterization [as] a by-product of watching
people in action and hearing them speak [dramatic action if in a dramatic
context (of conflict)]. When they do this [action], they reveal [through drama]
who and what they are. But this means the writer has to know his people
so well that he literally cannot imagine them doing anything “out of character”
[action that doesn’t fit their personality]. As his people come to life
[through action], as they begin to react to each other [more action], to
struggle [through action] their way to some resolution, they must choose
[through actions] only those options that are consistent with their
character—that is, with the writer’s own sure knowledge of them” (p.
50-51).
Really, “interest is
engendered by what a character does” (Hatcher, 1996, p. 22). His or her
motivation catches the reader’s eye/interest in the context of “characters are
living, thinking creations, and they have reasons for doing what
[action] they do” (Banks, 1988, p. 53).
A story told through action, then, transcends a reporting. The following
joke that I wrote (1997d, p. 26) reads as an anecdote, a reporting, void of
much dramatic action (note: Skipping in itself is an action, but without
conflict, it cannot rise to the level of dramatic action):
Our Dog Steals
Our dog steals—a boot
here, a doll there. He’ll pant in exquisite delight, standing over his loot in
our yard.
Once I had to return a purse to a neighbour. She wasn’t
impressed.
Then he brought us a mucky rabbit carcass. That rabbit—that pet—had been the
prize of the purse lady’s children.
I shampooed and blow dried it. That night I sneaked into
the purse lady’s yard, depositing “fluffy” in its cage.
My wife threatened to disown me. But my plan was flawless!
Except: the next day, as I slinked to my car, the purse
lady saw me from her yard: “Hey, you! Do you know what happened? Yesterday our
rabbit died, so I buried it, but now it’s in its cage! And it’s all—clean and fluffy!”
I wrote the anecdote (a fictionalized account of a true
story one of my former grade two students had told me) up as a story, with
action that helps characterize the first-person narrator, his wife, and the
neighbour. The action of what characters do and say fills scenes that create a
sense of reality that the joke version lacks. Breakfast All Day (Issue
10, 1998a, p. 29), a magazine printed in
***
A Thief in the Family
Why is our dog a thief?
Yesterday morning, on my way to my Neon Sport, as I toted
an armful of marked papers for my grade three students, I tripped over a welder’s
helmet. The papers flew up, and I crashed.
With my wind knocked out, I sat on dewy grass, beside
Toby, our gargantuan brown mongrel. He licked my face.
I didn’t yell at him. I certainly didn’t want to attract
any neighbour’s attention, and so, once I’d felt my strength returning, I
dumped the helmet in our shed, where many other items—stolen items—lay in a
heap: a glove, an assortment of toy cars, a Cabbage Patch doll, a baseball, a
pair of runners, a sweater, a shoe, and a pair of boxer shorts.
Who owned these things? How would I return them?
I phoned my wife during my lunchtime:
“Hi, hon,” I said, using the students’ phone in the
hallway. “Guess what Toby left in our yard today?” I chuckled. “A—”
“Ralph,” she said, “we have a serious problem.”
“Mr. Friedenburger,” a ten-year-old named Robbie said,
tugging my free arm, “there’s a fight in the playground, and there’s blood.”
“Ralph,” my wife said, “there’s a rabbit in our yard. It’s
mucky and grey—and dead! I think it’s the
Carlsons’ pet.”
“Mr. Friedenburger!” Robbie said. “Aren’t you going to do
something?”
“Well?” my wife said. “What are we going to do?”
“Are you sick, Mr. Friedenburger?”
That afternoon, I gave my students 30 minutes of
Read-What-You-Want and one hour of Do-Your-Own-Art-Thing-And-Don’t-Bug-Me. As
they worked, I thought about the gloom that had haunted me when, at nine, my
car-smashed dog, Queenie, died in my arms on our porch. The thought was too
horrible to relive. But there I was, in front of 24 self-absorbed primary
students, trying to forget my dead pet. I tried not to think that the Carlsons
had three children who’d loved Buffy, their rabbit, and that it had often
followed them around the yard, like a Siamese cat or family dog.
I thought about families we knew—families who lived on farms and would like a dog (“A
dog that steals and kills neighbours’ pets,” I thought).
When I got home, I found the rabbit in our mud-room. But
it definitely didn’t look dirty. It sat on all fours, and its fur looked
fluffy, clean, and silky. I bent over, peering closely, to make sure it was
really dead.
I stood up, finding my wife with her hands on her hips. “I
shampooed and blow-dried it,” she said.
I swallowed, studying her face, trying to detect the
early stages on insanity. But in spite of her strained expression, she appeared
well put together: mascara, eye shadow, puffy hair, the blue dress I love.
“What’s going on, Betty?”
“We’re putting it back tonight. Nobody’ll ever know.”
“It’s dead,” I reminded her.
“I know,” she said, with her teeth clenched.
She worried me. “Hon, I’ll tell you what we’re going to
do. We’re going to find Toby a new home.”
“Ralph!” she said, aghast. “My father gave me that dog
before he died.”
“I know.” Then I groaned.
“Tomorrow,” she told me, “you’re going to start building
a fence.”
Scratches at the door told us Toby was home again. I was
afraid to look outside. Maybe I’d find somebody’s purse. Or another dead pet.
Later, after two Spanish coffees each, we ventured into
the October night air. I packed the corpse under one arm; Betty clutched the
flashlight in one hand.
Toby (locked up) scratched at the back door to get out. If
we ever tied him up, he’d howl as if he’d been gut-shot, and if we ever locked
him indoors, he’d scratch and scratch the front or back door and fill the house
with an odour that only a vulture would enjoy.
We sneaked along our lane to the Carlsons’ yard—two houses down. All was quiet except for the distant
sound of a train passing through town.
We found the chicken-wire cage open—not surprising—and then carefully I placed the rabbit—dead Buffy—inside.
He resembled a little, lost, dark cloud in the starless
night.
Had the Carlsons discovered that the rabbit was missing?
Well, no plan was perfect. I heard a car door slam in the driveway. A motor
started. Headlights flooded the yard with light. Fortunately, we were hidden
behind a thicket of rose bushes.
On the brink of humiliation, we ran back to our house. I
felt guiltier than usual letting out Toby to wander the streets, but his
disgusting odour gave me no other sensible choice.
“Tomorrow,” my crazed-looking, puffing wife told me, “you’re
starting that fence.”
We had another Spanish coffee each, and then we crashed
in bed.
The next morning, as I headed to my car, I found Toby
ripping apart a book—The
Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. In
the lane, I met Mrs. Carlson. She waved for me to stop my car. My heart beat
accelerated. I felt sweaty. My hands and feet felt cold. I pushed down on the
window switch, and as the glass descended, I noticed how loud the electric
motor sounded.
Mrs. Carlson stuffed her head into my car, almost knocking
me over with tobacco-breath: “Mr. Friedenburger!”
“Call me Ralph.”
“I’ve just got to tell someone!” She was about forty, and
her face reminded me of Genghis Khan. “Our pet rabbit died yesterday! I buried
it! I buried it while the kids were at school! But this morning! There it was!
In its cage! And he was, you know, dead, but all clean and fluffy!”
***
Do you agree that energetic verbs such as toted, marked,
tripped, flew, crashed, knocked, sat, licked, yell, clutched, and dumped create
opportunities for action (in terms of movement or character
interaction/conflict) more than less energetic verbs such as has, was, am, are,
should, and is.
Isn’t is
essentially a boring verb (Landers, 2005a [born in 1953])?
As a point of interest, why do you suppose this excerpt
from The Great Train Robbery (Porter, 1903/2004), a famous silent film—in fact, it created a standard that many classic
silent film directors thereafter tried to reach for (Smith, 2004)—uses so many active verbs?
Great Train Robbery, The (1903)
by Edwin S. Porter [lived
1870-1941 C.E.].
Story by Scott Marble.
1 INTERIOR OF
RAILROAD TELEGRAPH OFFICE.
Two masked robbers
enter and compel the operator to get the “signal block” to stop the approaching
train, and make him write a fictitious order to the engineer to take water at
this station, instead of “Red Lodge,” the regular watering stop. The train
comes to a standstill (seen through window of office); the conductor comes to
the window, and the frightened operator delivers the order while the bandits
crouch out of sight, at the same time keeping him covered with their revolvers.
As soon as the conductor leaves, they fall upon the operator, bind and gag him,
and hastily depart to catch the moving train. (Porter, 1903/2004, part 1)
List the verbs in this Train
Robbery excerpt that translate into dramatic action.
Do you agree that words for writers are like brush
strokes for artists? To help you think about brush strokes, I mean words, and
how powerful they are for communicating thought to others and creating in
readers a sense of immediacy, let’s explore
something writers call stream of consciousness—a unique form of expression that requires the author
to consider words in all their cultural, psychological, sociological,
historical, even spiritual glory. Dorothy Richardson (lived 1873-1957 C.E.)
wrote Pointed Roofs (Richardson, 1915/2004), “the first stream of consciousness novel in English,
although [she] disliked the term…, preferring to
call her way of writing interior monologues” (Dorothy Richardson, 2006, Writings, para. 1). I also
prefer the term “interior monologues”; it seems less ambiguous and more self explanatory
than its stream of consciousness counterpart, but convention shelved
Stream-of-consciousness writing asserts itself through
such strange combinations of words that your thinking about it may reinforce in
your mind how thoughtfully writers must use them, just as how artists
must use brush strokes. Consider Hemingway’s (lived 1899-1961 C.E.) thoughtful use of odd
combinations of words in his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929/1997).
The story—based on Hemingway’s own
experiences—is set in World War I
In chapter 32,
Henry thinks to himself with the second-person
pronoun of “you,” the longest usage of the technique in the novel. The
narrative also loses it journalistic precision and slips into ungrammatical,
awkward sentences: “...but you loved some one else whom now you knew was not
even to be pretended there; you seeing now very clear and coldly...”
This is Hemingway’s foray
into…stream-of-consciousness writing…, and it not only pulls the reader into
Henry’s mind, but has another effect: it signifies how much Henry has removed
himself from his former way of life. He must temporarily detach himself from
his person to see how he has detached himself from the army, and he does this
by stepping outside of himself and addressing himself as “you.” (Wayne, 2002,
Summary and Analysis of Book Three, Book Three: Chapter XXXII, Analysis,
paragraphs 1-2)
In the following
stream-of-consciousness example, you may sense Henry’s detachment from the WW I
Italian war effort, as he mentally prepares to reunite with Catherine, the
woman he loves:
You did not love the floor of a flat-car nor
guns with canvas jackets and the smell of vaselined metal or a canvas that rain
leaked through, although it is very fine under a canvas and pleasant with guns;
but you loved some one else whom now you knew was not even to be pretended
there; you seeing now very clearly and coldly—not so coldly as clearly and
emptily. You saw emptily, lying on your stomach, having been present when one
army moved back and another came forward. You had lost your cars and your men
as a floorwalker loses stock of his department in a fire. There was, however,
no insurance. You were out of it now. You had no more obligation. If they shot
floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with an
accent they had always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be
expected to return when the store opened again for business. They might seek
other employment; if there was any other employment and the police did not get
them.
Anger was washed away in the river along with
any obligation. (Hemingway, 1929/1997, pp. 209-210)
During a first, perhaps hurried, reading, this excerpt
might seem like strange combinations of
words, even inept combinations. But Hemingway didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 (Ernest
Hemingway, n.d.) for incompetent writing. If you don’t see Hemingway’s choices of words as thoughtful, I encourage you to
re-read the excerpt. Remember that our own interior monologues sometimes
utilize bizarre cubits of grammar. Thoughtful word choices help a writer
capture that bizarre quality according to his or her own stylistic choices,
needs, and biases.
Stream of consciousness/interior monologues, then, come
in a variety of flavours. Ernest Hemingway (e.g., A Farewell to Arms, 1929/1997) is one. Gertrude Stein (as in the following excerpt
[she lived 1874-1946 C.E.]) is another:
[From
her The World is Round:] But mountains yes Rose did think about
mountains and about blue when it was on the mountains and feathers when clouds
like feathers were on the mountains and birds when one little bird and two
little birds and three and four and six and seven and ten and seventeen and
thirty or forty little birds all came flying and a big bird came flying and
they flew higher than the big bird and they came down and one and then two and
then five and then fifty of them came picking down on the head of the big bird
and slowly the big bird came falling down between the mountain and the little
birds all went home again. (as quoted in Rico, 1983, p. 139)
Rico comments on this passage
as one that
rushes
headlong without pause, connected only by a myriad of “ands” and a pattern
of interlocking recurrences: “birds,” “mountains,” “down,” “flying/flew,” “feathers,” all of which set up their own punctuated rhythm.
Stein once compared her writing technique to the frames in a motion picture
that present a moving series of instantaneous visions in a rhythmic pattern.
(p. 139)
Do people really think in the
way, according to Stein, Rose thinks? If you, the reader, accept, go along
with, Rose’s stream of consciousness/inner
monologue, then the answer might as well be yes.
I have three more stream of consciousness flavours to
present to you. Globally the most well-known one: James Joyce’s (lived 1882-1941 C.E.) Finnegans Wake, which
famously
opens with the second half of the sentence that starts at the very end of the
book. This circular view on history was inspired by the Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), as is suggested in the novel: “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms
begin” (FW 452.21-22). Vico postulated a cycle of three ages
(the mythic or theocratic era, the heroic or aristocratic era, and the human
era), followed by a period of renewal, which he called ricorso.
The overall structure of Finnegans Wake shows
a similar pattern. The
text
is divided into four Books….Book IV
consists of only one chapter, a ricorso which “brings us back to Howth Castle and Environs” on the first page of the novel. The capital letters
H, C, and E refer to the main character, HCE (which can stand for Humphrey
Chimpden Earwicker, Here Comes Everybody,
…The “characters” in Finnegans Wake are
archetypes or character amalgams,
taking different shapes. For instance, ALP, the mother or the female principle
in the book, often appears as the river Liffey, running through Dublin….The …title Finnegans
Wake refers to the Irish ballad “Finnegan’s
Wake” about a man called Tim Finnegan. This hod-carrier
falls from a ladder and seems to be dead. At his wake, the mourners start
drinking and spill some whiskey on Finnegan’s face, which brings him back to
life again.
…By leaving out the apostrophe
in his title, Joyce turned Tim’s case into a universal tale of Finnegans who
fall and wake again. (Van Hulle, 2002, paragraphs 2-5)
Clearly, according to Van Hulle’s (2002) comments, “the book is far from simple”
(Finnegans Wake, 2006, para. 11). “The book is far from simple” also
according to the following: Typically,
for the stream-of-consciousness writer, words, images, events and thoughts
emerge from the reality he or she tries to create inside the minds of conscious
characters, which can create a complex panorama of symbols and allegory, but in
Joyce’s case, he steps as a writer into the sleeping, the
unconscious, mind, spinning a reality through dreamscape. In that sense,
Joyce creates a reality of his own. His new
reality is completely freed from the rational logic which dominates our waking
state. Instead it resembles the logic of the dreaming mind, or the working of
consciousness, where images are subject to constant movement and
transformation. In place of realistic characters, in Finnegans Wake Joyce
creates types: “Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies”. The
spatiotemporal interaction in Finnegans Wake not only conveys the idea
of time without boundaries between the past, present and future, but it also
expresses the relativistic fusion of time and space into a timespace continuum.
(Zanzi, 2005, Joyce’s Concept of Time, para. 2)
Given this “new
reality,” the book ends with
Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done
through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread
wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly
dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There’s where. First. We pass through grass
behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us
then. Finn, again! Take. [Note: Finnegans Wake] Bussoftlhee, mememormee!
Till thousandsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long
the (Joyce, 1939/1976, p. 628)
Where does that last
sentence end? Well, the book “draws in mythologies, theologies, mysteries,
philosophies, histories, sociologies, …[etc.], and dozens of languages to
create the world drama in whose cycles we live” (Finnegans Wake, 2006,
para. 11). In phase with that comment: “As well as leaving the reader to
complete [the last sentence] with his or her own life, it can be closed by the
sentence that starts the book—another cycle” (para. 12):
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle Environs.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores,
fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica on this
side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war:
nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens
County’s gorgois while they went doublin their mumper all the time: nor avoice
from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatick: not yet, though
venissoon after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s
fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. Rot a peck of
pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow
was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. (Joyce, 1939/1976, p. 3)
I ran my SpellCheck through these Joyce quotes, and it died.
The book, a dream
sequence, or anti-sequence, in terms of Joyce’s non-sequential flow of time
that mixes up past, present, and future, begins with these
Finnegan-dream-thoughts by Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, who in the waking world
may be a man called Porter (Barger, 1998). If the text reads as an interior
monologue of HCE while he dreams, then we could name the monologue a stream of
unconsciousness. In the novel Margins (Landers, 2005a, 2005b, 2005c,
2005d, 2005e, 2005f, 2005g, 2005h), in which the main character, Donovan A.
Landers, semi-sleeps, his interior monologue exists as a sort of stream of
semi-consciousness.
The stream travels
backwards in time through a barrage of questions that Donovan asks. For
example, “Who is Geronimo?” At a literal level, he is the principal of Donovan’s secondary alternate education program for senior
students who find themselves in a substandard school “outside” the regular
school system. As students, they are marginalized. As a teacher outside the
regular high school where so-called real teaching happens, so is Donovan.
Geronimo, an administrative outlier, really, doesn’t fit into mainstream education too well either. The
stream of semi-consciousness refers to Donovan’s school, which has just burned to the ground, due to
an Aveo that ended up nose first in the school’s stairwell and somehow ignited itself.
Donovan, also a poet, weaves some of his poems into his
monologue, as his tired mind explores marginalization from a variety of points
of view. The monologue refers to other characters: Jacobina, his frustrated
wife who finds motherhood without a career frowned upon in her circle of
acquaintances; Pavlos, a student on the run who still thinks he is being
charged for a murder he didn’t commit; Jim,
a Jehovah’s Witness way outside mainstream
religion; Machteld, Donovan’s youngest
daughter who often feels left out; and others.
Again, “Who is Geronimo?” At the symbolic level, who is anybody, and especially
who is anybody marginalized? Here is Landers’ novel’s entire stream
of semi-consciousness (2005g):
[[Jacobina said, “You look really worn out, Don.” Yes. Sleep. What is sleep? Is. What is is? What is an
Ethiopian? What is an Ethiopian not? What is
Now, write, for as long as you can stand, brush
strokes, I mean words, any (even nonsense) words that come to mind—any thoughts, phrases, clauses, sentence
fragments, or whatever other language you notice galloping about in your mind.
This will be your stream of consciousness. I hope you notice how powerful words are for
communicating thought, even peculiar stream-of-consciousness thought, to
others, and for creating a reader’s sense of
immediacy.
IV. More Stream of Consciousness
Let me stir
your imagination. Imagine a stream of consciousness that someone you know
(friend, relative, schoolmate, or workmate, or a character you invent) might
experience. Put yourself in his or her mind. Be someone else for awhile.
V. Show, Don’t Tell
Again, let me
stir your imagination: Write a paragraph to display a character’s predominant emotion (assuming one exits),
but don’t tell us what emotion you’re displaying. In other words, show
us through action, through how the character acts. Define his or her emotion
through that action (does this remind you of the mime?) and perhaps through
dialogue. You might even record his or her thoughts (include only specific
thoughts that help describe one emotion).
To help you crystallize in your mind what I mean by
showing, as opposed to telling, consider this series of examples—of King Quibil—from my novel for children, entitled Quibils and
Quirks (1997e, 1998, 1999):
From
Chapter One (note the showing in these examples)
“Chop off their heads!” hollered King Quibil—a five-foot tall fur ball, with two arms and legs, who
was waving a sword. “Chop off everybody’s head! Teach them a lesson they’ll
never forget!”
From Chapter Eight
The king leapt onto a fallen tree to
make a speech:
“Quibils, a friend of ours has been
insulted, treated like a common skunk!” He shook his fist. “We’re going to town
this moment, to get to the bottom of this!”
From Chapter Ten
King Quibil pounded his Royal Rod on
the stone floor. “This means war!”
From Chapter Twenty
King Quibil whacked his Royal Rod on
the hard floor. “I’ll ask the questions!” He scowled at the Royal Attendant. “Where’s
Hooper?”
From Chapter Twenty-One
“What? Who told you our plan?” [King
Quibil’s] hair puffed up. “They’re spies!”
Consider, too, this example:
Tom stepped inside the classroom and slammed the door
behind him. An algebra text on one dusty shelf fell over. He stomped to his
desk, sat down, and glared at Bobby, nervously seated next to him.
“What’s your problem, ya dumb fart,” Tom said.
Telling instead of showing Tom’s demeanour might read as follows:
Tom was angry and belligerent.
Action certainly can help describe a character’s mood or disposition. Hall (1989) agrees:
Action
is the most effective way to demonstrate character….Action catches the eye. It shows instead of telling. It demonstrates traits. It interests
while it informs, and the image, and so the demonstration, remains fresh in the
reader’s mind’s eye as
exposition or static description will not. (p. 46)
You, the student, may heartily agree with that quote, but
you may ask, “Where do characters come from?” Where did your characters come from who you used in
your mime? Perhaps they came from your memories based on real or vicarious
experiences. Often,
the
characters we create are drawn in part from people we have known or observed,
without our in any sense attempting to recreate the person on the page. I may
borrow a bit of physical description, for example, or a mannerism, or an oddity
of speech. I may take an incident in the life of someone I know and use it as
an item of background data in the life of one of my characters. Little touches
of this sort from my own life experience get threaded into my characters much
as bits of ribbon and cloth are woven into a songbird’s nest—for color, to tighten
things up, and because they caught my eye and seemed to belong there. (Block,
1979, pp. 74-75)
With this discussion on
action and character in mind, remember to show readers your character’s predominant emotion—but don’t tell.
VI. Student’s Favourites
You’ve arrived at the last assignment of this first unit.
Take a little time to think about what you enjoy writing. List some of your favourite stories, novels, plays, and/or
poems (you’re welcome to write up the poems, if you wish). Say what you
especially like about each favourite in your list. You’re welcome to refer to favourite scenes,
chapters, and/or lines. This exercise
should help you think about what you especially like to write about. And what
you especially like to write about will be a source of great energy for you
when you do write.
That sort of energy in your heart translates into
passion. Likely, your passion expresses what you know about people, places, “sociology,
psychology, politics, religion, etc.” (Gaines, n.d.). What you know—whether you write sci-fi fantasy or
realistic, contemporary drama—should form a reservoir of data: life data, life
experience. With regard to that data, Bryant (1978) explains that
what Joseph Conrad said about all
novels…applies: you must create a world in which you “can honestly believe,”
yet in some way “familiar to the experience…of…readers.” That means researching
the historical or scientific, or imagining the fantasy world of your novel, knowing it thoroughly as a
consistent world….And it means your creatures and their story must connect
symbolically with contemporary people and concerns. (pp. 22-23)
Bryant (1978) quotes the writer’s adage, “Write
what you know” (p. 20). But she adds that “the injunction to write what you know must not become
a strangle hold on the imagination” (p.
21). Writers can learn what they need to know through research.
Stephen
Crane…wrote about battles he had never fought or seen, wrote
with no combat experience at all, but he talked with men who had before he wrote
The Red Badge of Courage. And although Civil War veterans complained
that Crane got some of his facts wrong, their complaints became irrelevant as
readers realized the deeper truths of his classic which became a new model for
men-in-battle novels. (p. 21)
Evens poets may find a need to do research, to enable
then to write knowledgably about their subjects. I have experienced and
fulfilled this need repeatedly as a poet, even more so than I have as a short
story writer or novelist. I know that research into the lives and antics of
ravens helped Landers put together the following poem:
Corvus Corax—The Raven
(1998, pp. 10-11)
Siberian storm
front-prophet,
MacBeth-black
cloud,
And Poe’s ache—
This trickster,
This ravenous clawer of
Fruits and seeds
And rotting flesh,
This coniferous roamer
And desert nomad,
Croaks like a mournful
hag
Or mimics that
diminutive
Brainless crow.
Inuit carvers
Immortalize this
prankster-
Thief haunting ice
fishermen,
This vaudeville clown
who dumps
Snow on
Yellowknife-victims
Beneath steep metal
roofs.
In the torrent
You fed Elijah
Between ravines and
crags,
Your thunderbolt
blackness
Filled aerial
somersaults
And upside-down fly-bys
In courtship
Or mere play.
You taunt wolves—
Peck their hairy tails—
But feast on their feast
Between tricks that
The Haida often recall.
You croak of the glee,
the surprise,
The excitement and anger
and
Tenderness in the blood
Of every man,
Of every Noah sending
forth
A query—
“Is all well
On dry ground?”
You are the
shaggy-throated
Roamer, the blue
jay-cousin,
And cleverest passerine.
When you mate, it is for
life,
And there is no child
abuse
In your beak or claw.
You are the clown of the
forest,
The king of the pun.
To me, that poem speaks of more than
art and skill, but also of knowledge. Without Landers’ acquiring a knowledge of ravens, his art and skill
would have, I’m quite sure, fallen on their
noses.
I took an interest in the
picturesque city of
The Toll Bridge
(2002j)
About south of Pap Doc’s headlust of secrets,
Freighters
Caribbean-fondled diesel
Between manicured gables
and pastel storefronts
Of
Curaçao of giant
cactuses, divi-divi trees,
But not giant ones,
And wonderful oil
refineries
And desalting-mongery.
In
The Queen Emma (your highness)
Pontoon Bridge opens
widest for the warm
Ships
That belch between this
pastel drama, and
Draws toll for
Footers in shoes.
No toll for the barefoot
and callused.
In
When the ships are
north,
Or who knows where,
The rich hide their
shoes
And the poor borrow
Shoes to wear.
One day, I took an interest in
dragonflies; my research allowed me to create this poem:
I Have Never Traveled
Beyond (1999a)
I have never traveled
beyond
The crack of gunfire;
O, I’ve visited backyard
swimming pools
And steamy swamps
And mountain-locked
lakes where
Dragonflies turn at 2.5
G’s
And dance
In mosquito-air
And shore-side ballrooms
of
Green.
I’ve seen them
outperform
Timid damselflies
(That rest with upturned,
Not sideturned, wings),
In 60 mph sprints
And moment’s-notice
backward-, forward-,
Sideway-, or
hover-steps.
30,000 images to 80% of
its brain-mass
Locate mosquito-meat at
60 feet
At dusk—
And 24 frames per second
of “In Love and War”
Are still-photos
For this sniper
extraordinaire,
This metallic flash of
blue
Or green or yellow.
The wet larva,
Sometimes after years of
skin-altering,
Settles on a reed;
The change, the growth,
Like the workings of
testosterone
In a boy’s blood—
Watch the skin
along the thorax split:
A new life,
A new hunter of aphids
and beetles
And tiny frogs,
A new sniper in
Philippine-
Canyons,
A new jewel for ponds
and
Riverbanks—
A new insultingly-named
Helicopter
Within the zing
Of bullets.
I have never traveled
beyond
The crack of gunfire,
But I have seen
dragonflies
Everywhere.
I don’t claim to be a foremost authority on dragonflies, but
I managed to utilize what I had learned about them to write a poem an editor
deemed worthy of publication. By the way, that poem reminds me of Dorothy
Bryant’s (1978) reference to Anton Chekhov (lived 1860-1904
C.E.) who said we should write our stories “in our own blood” (p. 20 [her paraphrase]), meaning that our passions,
not just our personal interests and related research, should drive our writing,
and who also said that “we shouldn’t bother to write unless we [feel that passion]” (p. 20 [another paraphrase]). I apply that last
sentence here: Research should prepare us for writing poems (stories, too, of
course) that emerge from our life’s blood.
Here is one about a very poor place called
Bowls Beneath Leaks
(1998/1999, p. 14)
To cement, glass, and
steel,
Where spires gleam above
Traffic-whine,
tetracarbon-
Clouds, and florescent
shorts
On camera-festooned
tourists.
But above this arcade,
Los Cerros cling to
hillsides
That rain churns into
gravity-ravaged
Muck:
Steps become cataracts,
and
Garbage-toboggans race
down
River-filled gutters
Like oysters down a
throat,
And zinc-roofed homes of
Rain-blackened boards or
Flattened cans or
Packing cases
(“This side up,” some
still read)
“Elbow” for space and
boast signs:
“Pego Cierres” (“I Put
In Zippers”),
“Cortes de Pelo” (“Haircuts”),
“Se Venden Helados” (“Ice
Cream Sold”).
Consider a sunny day:
In one of 500 barrios
(Some named after “saints,”
Others after hope
(El Progresso
(Progress),
Nuevo Mundo (
El Encanto (Delight))),
A boy’s voice in a
battered
Loudspeaker cries out:
“Onions! Yuccas!
Plantains!”
(In English?)
Barter-quick poor close
deals
With this barter-quick
child
On his bent tailgate.
Nearby,
A bow-spined man spray-
Paints a 23-year-old VW
In an unpaved street—
A side-street packed
hard by
Foot
and tire and sun—
But he releases the
trigger
To watch a long-chassis
jeep
Climb the 18% grade of a
“highway”
Called Si Dios Quiere
(If God Wills).
And in that jeep,
Twelve passengers, with
Knees crammed under
chins,
Inhale each other’s
odour.
A fat lady guards a bag
of tomatoes
From too many feet.
The driver, after
spitting tobacco-gob
Out his windowless door,
Pampers the clutch with
a “good”
Place to stop;
Two wild-haired women
In tattered dresses
Tumble out the back
doors,
And then the jeep
Trails a water truck
that
Drips at a seam
Like a bleeding soldier.
The two women enter
A bodegas—a green-paint-
Peeling-off-like-old-labels-on-
Old-cans home to a
school,
Pharmacist/doctor,
And household items,
like beer,
For the poor.
No house numbers,
No glass for barred-up
windows, and
No mailmen to pace the
maze of
Cramped walkways between
Hill-rooted homes—
Homes
In which coffee and
bland
Arepa with jam are
As common as babies,
Homes
In which hospitality,
In spite of armed
robbery and suicide,
Makes ranchitos warm for
many
Who often say,
“Están en su casa.”
(“Make yourselves at
home.”)
I have never been to
Not Under Arktos, The Bear (2002h)
An ice-tide of breadth,
Shrinking and spreading in earth flow,
Circling a fish drawn up and solid
In five seconds,
And steel dropped, turned to shards.
Brutal beauty, this ice-desert-
Home of the wingless midge
And Aristotelian balance to the
North Bulk.
See the
Big as
Fed by seven solid floes,
Puking ice berg cities
Of blue mammoth
For chinstrap penguins
To jabber on.
James Cook awed and repelled and attracted
By windswept blue
Ice-islands
Sloshed and dunked by tyrannosaurus teeth
Of sea-salt and whirl.
Send the gold-rush skins of blood-bare
Seals to
Step on mainland moss
that can’t hide
One print for one
decade.
Dig a great heal into
this humpbackless,
Ozoneless antipode.
This ice-fist freezes
What it can.
Research: Worth the effort. If you find yourself lacking
in the knowledge you need to write a work of fiction, poetry, or drama, then
don’t short-change that work by focussing only on art and
craft. Without knowledge of our subject, we may provide wrong information.
Edgar Rice Burroughs did that when he created tiger-fighting Tarzan—but “there are no tigers in
Back
to assignment VI. Students’
Favourites: In case you’ve forgotten what the assignment is: List
some of your favourite stories, novels, plays, and/or poems. What do you
especially like about each one? Perhaps the list will help you think about what
you especially like to write about. I
said earlier that What you especially like to write
about will be a source of great energy for you when you do write. I
modify that statement to read What you especially
like to write about based on knowledge of your subject will be a source of
great energy for you when you do write.
Remember this phrase: writing based on
knowledge of your subject. Apply it! Know your material! Or learn what you
need to learn! Given appropriate information, “a man can write about a woman in childbirth” (Bryant, 1978, p. 22), “a woman can write a story set in a male army barracks” (p. 22), “an adult can write from the point of view of a
child” (p. 22), and “a middle-class black from the point of view of a poor
white” (p. 22), but
three
things are necessary. First, objective observation, as much as is possible.
Second, the imagination to expand, to create “the unseen from the seen” [quoted from Henry James]. Third, dipping down into
that deep part of yourself where you are like all other human beings, feeling
as they feel, knowing as they know, living their story as you write it. (p. 22)
Students:
1) know your material (objective observation/reading); 2) apply your
imagination; and 3) search into that interpersonal part of yourself that
connects with many others—or run the risk
of embarrassing yourselves and receiving a steady stream to rejection slips.
End
of Unit 1. Seven more to go.
Unit 2
Content:
Elements of Fiction
Once upon a time: Really, that’s how all stories start.
Once upon a time each of us is born, and once
upon a time everybody meets [his or her love or loves] and once upon a time
something happens that makes our lives difficult or interesting, and we set out
on quests, well-meaning or ill-advised, that will lead us to a sad or happy
ending to the story. (Offbeat, 2004, para. 4)
You, the writer, add in the protagonist (the hero of the
story). The protagonist or main character becomes the writer’s main vehicle for action in terms of people engaging
in dramatic action and dialogue. By dramatic I (again) mean in the sense that
the story or play or narrative or dramatic poem has characters who deal with
conflicts.
A main character needs three attributes:
—A need or
want: to find the secret of the lost
gold mine, to escape the evil dragonmaster,
to win the heart of his or her one true love—whatever….
—A strong
point: courage, love, generosity—some personality trait that confers on him or her the
potential for triumph.
—A
fatal flaw: fear, greed, laziness,
gullibility—some trait that, unless overcome,
may lead to the character’s downfall.
(Kittredge, 1992, p. 56)
Of course, protagonists—main characters—and other “characters
who want something are interesting, and the higher you set the stakes, the more
interesting their stories will be” (Kittredge,
1992, p. 56). One definition of a protagonist: a combatant (Protagonist, n.d.).
That definition helps us see him or her as someone who fights against a
problem. The writer hopes for a positive correlation between the depth of the
fight (D) and the severity of the problem (S). The amplitude of readers’ interest (A) varies directly as a function (f) of
that depth and severity (in the world of mathematics: A = k[f(D,S)], for some k—i.e., A varies to some degree k times
the function f of D and S). In the world of drama/fiction,
a high amplitude for A translates into a page-turner. As the problem worsens,
the story, or the protagonists’ decisions and
actions, drives itself forward.
Our
character will try to solve the problem, but his or her efforts will only worsen
the problem. Still, our hero or heroine [protagonist] won’t give up; instead, through actions and insights that
grow from the [protagonist’s] strong
point, he or she will learn about the fatal flaw. With this
knowledge, the character will make a final, enormous story-climaxing
effort—overcoming the fatal flaw, using
the strong point, and triumphing over the story problem. (Kittredge, 1992, p.
53)
There was a time, back in 1977, while I was taking
Professor Harlow’s Creative Writing 497 course at
the
I sat before his
cluttered desk, and he looked over his black-rimmed glasses, somewhat
apprehensively, at me:
“Dan,” he said, “I read
your story…It’s awful, Dan. I only marked up the first three pages, because
after that I couldn’t stand it any longer. I mean, I read it all, but…it was
just awful.”
I didn’t shrink like
“Yes. This isn’t a
story, Dan.” He looked at me over the upheld story-pages as if they were a
chasm between us that he was trying to eliminate.
Not a story. I was definitely
thinking about that. But I had lots of knowledge, or so I thought, about the
elements of fiction! Plot. Scene. Transition. Theme. Protagonist. Antagonist.
Conflict. I could even write clear prose, or so my English 303 composition
teacher had told me. But, somehow, according to Professor Harlow, I had not
written a story.
“Not a story?”
“No. A story is about
somebody with a problem that gets worse and worse, until some sort of
resolution takes place. What you have written is not a story.” Again, he was
looking over his glasses at me. He was looking for a spark of understanding.
Then he made sure I understood what he meant. He provided examples of stories
we both knew. He spent a lot of time reasoning with me, helping me understand
those examples.
That event was like a
revelation, silly as that might sound until one reads the often inept products
of neophyte writers who don’t understand what
This discussion of character draws up from my mind the
question, Who tells his or her story? As part of some Aboriginal oral
traditions, community-approved custodians tell stories.
These stories have been handed down for
thousands of years. Story telling is such a special part of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander people’s culture as it explains the creation of all
things, why things happen, where to go and not to go, how to find food,
cultural practices, laws, history, family associations, tribal boundaries and
the relationships with every living creature and feature of land, sea and air.
Story telling is an important
oral tradition of many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups. Like
traditional Australian languages, cultural stories belong to specific
Traditional Owners groups. Permission to tell these stories can only be given
by the custodians of these stories and this should be respected. (Traditional
Use, n.d., Story Telling, paragraphs 1-2)
In some stories, given the first person point of view,
the main character exists as a sort of secondary custodian. For example,
“Drat!” I said, peering out the window. I
breathed on the glass and fogged it up. I wiped a circle, drawing a peep hole,
and spied a soggy world. “The ground is wet, the air is cold, and I’m stuck
inside,” I complained.
“Morris,” called my mother. I
heard her rattling dishes in the kitchen. “Clean up those pots and pans.”
“She’s been so grumpy,” I
thought. “Ever since she brought Tommy, my new brother, home from the hospital,
she’s baggy eyed, bad tempered, and boring. Who needs a mother who never takes
me to the zoo? Either she’s nursing Tommy, cuddling him, or she’s cooking or
cleaning. Tonight she’s cooking shepherd’s pie. I hate shepherd’s pie! And I’m
getting sick of my brother’s endless crying. His mouth ought to be corked.”
(Landers, 2005k, Our Television is Weird, paragraphs 1-3)
Morris, the main
character, the protagonist, the narrator (secondary custodian): As Morris
speaks, thinks, and reacts, we construct a picture of him in our minds. The
author-created story comes to us through Morris’ senses (sight, smell, touch,
hearing, taste, intuition, and humour: our seven senses). But Morris and the
author define two different custodians. The author (primary custodian) writes
about Morris (secondary custodian) who relates his thoughts, actions, and
sensory input to us, the readers, creating a specific “relationship among
writer, character[ ], and reader” (Burroway, 1988, p. 58) as a sort of contract
that the writer honours throughout the story, without employing “illegal”
shifts of points of view (1988).
Therefore, Landers wouldn’t suddenly shift,
without substantial aesthetic or structural needs, to writing about Morris in
the, say, third-person (he-did-this, he-did-that) point of view. You might call
such a shift custodial bad manners. Other “contracts” can exist: For example,
sometimes the author and first-person narrator-protagonist define the same
person (custodian), as in an autobiographical novel (see, e.g., Landers, 2005a,
2005b, 2005c, 2005d, 2005e, 2005f, 2005g, 2005h), creating a “relationship
among [writer/character] and reader.”
Not surprisingly,
A first-person narrator may be a major
character and is often its protagonist…. [, but] a first-person narrator may
also be a minor character, someone within the story but not centrally involved,
as in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” which is told by a member of the
town who is not active in the plot but has observed the events. The author’s
choice of point of view has a significant effect on the story’s voice and on
the type of information given to the reader. (Definition of Point of View,
n.d., para. 1)
In this context of
point of view, and other literary elements, the author must set a very
important stage for a “willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge, quoted in
Rosenberg, 1992, p. 75).
The notion is crucial to what all fiction
writers are really after: getting our readers to agree to pretend, just
for a while, that these characters are real people with real issues in their
lives. Adhering to whatever point of view [first, second, third, or multiple
third person; or omniscient; or objective] you choose can help with that
because you won’t be giving the reader any unnecessary reminders that your
story is, quite literally, a string of lies. [Even autobiographical novels
invite their authors to fictionalize to some extend for the sake of
drama/reader interest.] It’s much better to help them pretend, instead of
making it difficult. (1992, p. 75)
The author’s choice of
point of view can help create the needed “willing suspension of disbelief.” In
short, the wrong choice may work against that suspension, as in the following
short story excerpt: I have, in the name of academic interest, changed it from
third person to second:
You squeezed the button on your can of Lysol spray,
filling your living-room with strong-smelling mist.
“Take that!” you said. “Miserable germs!” You coughed on the clouds of mist, but you
didn’t care.
“I
hate germs and I hate dirt!” you said.
But killing germs didn’t make you feel better. You
gazed angrily out your living-room window. Scraps of paper littered the road.
Dust covered sidewalks. For that matter, dust covered everything. And factory
and car exhaust fogged the air.
“I can’t stand it!” you exclaimed. “Why
is this city so grimy?”
You yanked at your hair. Two
handfuls fell to the floor. But you didn’t take any notice of you two new bald
spots. You anxiously searched the sky. You watched a thick bank of dark clouds
roll in from the west. They twisted and billowed. Soon they’d drench the city
with rain polluted from dirty air.
“I’m going to clean up this miserable city once and
for all!” you shouted. “I’ll be a hero!”
You jumped up and down. One foot knocked over your
fishbowl. The rug soaked up the greenish water, while Flipper, the goldfish,
flopped about and gasped. You tossed Flipper into a coffee pot and then left
your home. (Landers, 2005l, The Day the Sky Rained Soap Suds paragraphs
1-8)
The second-person point
of view may have worked fine for Hemingway’s short-lived stream of consciousness,
highlighting, deftly focusing the reader’s attention on, Henry’s detachment
from the Italian army and separation from Catherine, the nurse he loves. But in
my “The Day the Sky Rained Soap Suds” example, the distance generated between the main character—the “you” person—and the reader
through the use of the second-person point of view does not work well. For me,
that story in second person lacks the necessary immediacy that the third-person
version generates. The second-person result: a less than “willing suspension of disbelief” for the reader; for the writer, an unacceptable
result.
The second-person point of view, simply put, “exists, [but] it
is not used very often because making the reader part of the story can be
awkward: ‘You walk to the end of the road and pause before heading towards the
river’” (Definition of Point of View, n.d., para. 1). In short, there exists an
awkwardness to this relatively little explored point of view, which could refer
to the reader generalized or to a particular reader or character (e.g.,
Hemingway’s Henry) as the “you”
(Burroway, 1998). Delineation of character tends to fog up.
In the spirit of the
previous two paragraphs, the original excerpt from “The Day the Sky Rained Soap
Suds” reads, more appropriately, as follows:
Abner Normal squeezed the button on his can of Lysol
spray, filling his living-room with strong-smelling mist.
“Take that!” he said. “Miserable germs!” He coughed on the clouds of mist, but he didn’t
care.
“I
hate germs and I hate dirt!” he said.
But killing germs didn’t make him feel better. He
gazed angrily out his living-room window. Scraps of paper littered the road.
Dust covered sidewalks. For that matter, dust covered everything. And factory
and car exhaust fogged the air.
“I can’t stand it!” he exclaimed. “Why
is this city so grimy?”
He yanked at his hair. Two handfuls
fell to the floor. But Abner Normal didn’t take any notice of his two new bald
spots. He anxiously searched the sky. He watched a thick bank of dark clouds
roll in from the west. They twisted and billowed. Soon they’d drench the city
with rain polluted from dirty air.
“I’m going to clean up this miserable city once and
for all!” he shouted. “I’ll be a hero!”
He jumped up and down. One foot knocked over his
fishbowl. The rug soaked up the greenish water, while Flipper, the goldfish,
flopped about and gasped. Abner tossed Flipper into a coffee pot and then left
his home. (Landers, 2005l, The Day the Sky Rained Soap Suds, paragraphs 1-8)
Do
you agree that reads much better than the second-person version? As weird as
third-person Abner appears, the reader has good opportunity in this story to
identify with or relate at least at some abstract level to this pathologically
obsessed clean-freak. The story works. Its “willing suspension of disbelief” meets Coleridge’s approval. I think.
I caution the student,
then, about using the second-person point of view (although exploring the unorthodox seems to capture many
writers’ imaginations); I also caution him or her about using the omniscient.
This “least restrictive point of view” (Rosenberg, 1992, p. 78) allows the
author to “comment on what’s going on in the protagonist’s mind or in a minor
character’s head, but also he or she is perfectly free to discourse on events
happening offstage, or warn the reader that something is about to happen” (p.
78). The author may make political, psychological, sociological, historical,
religious, ad infinitum references from the present, past, and even the
proposed future. Do you see a danger here?
In the hands of an
inexperienced writer, does this freedom relate to a teenager who wants more
independence than his or her wisdom and experience warrant? In view of a “son’s
or daughter’s urge for greater independence, what are parents to do? [Isn’t]
that urge…like a compressed spring held in the hand[?] Let it go suddenly and
it will fly off uncontrolled in an unpredictable direction” (Making Your
Family Life Happy, 1978, p. 152). The inexperienced author who lets him- or
herself go with the omniscient point of view may find it “makes the
reader [too] aware of author manipulation and can lead…the author…into
depending on coincidence rather than character for plot complications” (Irwin
& Eyerly, 1988, p. 51).
The well-apprenticed
writer may, however, create the necessary “willing suspension of disbelief”: He
or she may use the omniscient point of view to develop “a sense of atmosphere,
then quickly and smoothly shift[ ] direction into third person, focusing on
just one central viewpoint character” (Irwin & Eyerly, 1988, p. 51; see
also, Backes, 2006). But “an entire book written with the omniscient point of
view does not allow the reader to identify with any one character or know whose
story you are telling” (Backes, 2006, para. 6).
The mature writer
recognizes what Backes says, and therefore thinks through which characters’
thoughts he or she relates, and when or where in the story they should appear,
even recognizing that he or she, as a narrator, becomes a character in the story. In fact, if the novelist or short story
author writes as him- or herself, then logically his or her voice will echo
throughout the fiction: “Fielding’s voice is heard in Tom Jones as is
that of Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859)” (Points of View, 2005,
para. 1). Here reads the start of A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the
epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of
despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all
going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the
period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest
authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the
superlative degree of comparison only.
There were a king with a large
jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of
Dickens (lived 1812-1870 C.E.) the narrator and
satirist begins this memorable work with word strokes of irony, darkness, hope,
and political insanity. Dickens, socially and politically wide awake, prepares
the reader for the best and the worst of his usual armload of characters. His
voice provides a perspective throughout that in a way creates a Dickensian
universe in which the story breathes heavily, and yet, throughout the novel,
the “willing suspension of disbelief” does not falter.
The much less
experienced writer of fiction may, however, irritate the reader and destroy
that “willing suspension” through something called author intrusion, especially
when he or she ineptly wields omniscience. When the author makes a character say
or do something out of character or when the narrator makes an omniscient
statement that gongs rather than harmonizes with context and plot, then that’s
author intrusion (Rosina, 2006). In other words,
[the] author uses language in such a way that
the reader is aware of the reading and the author. If writing fiction is like
photography, then author intrusion is the finger on the lens….The problem can
be…writing that is too flowery or filled with too many obscure words. (Byerly,
2005, Waking the Reader up, para. 2)
The experienced writer’s characters speak and act according to their
personalities and circumstances, generally eliminating the problem of author
intrusion. Experienced writers know when to place appropriate limits on the
omniscient point of view, remembering that although they may make all kinds of
judgemental, sociological, psychological, religious, moral, historical,
ethnographic, and allegorical interjections, any of these that clash with
context, plot, or character must be deleted (Burroway, 1988).
Experienced
writers let their characters be themselves, no matter what point of view used.
I have discussed the first-, second- and omniscient-points of view already. Now
I’ll elaborate on the single- and multiple-third-person varieties. By
single-third person, I mean the reader sees a single character’s thoughts. For
example, Landers (2005i) uses this viewpoint in the following picture-book
story, told from Joe’s perspective:
Joe the Cliff-Hanger
The day Joe climbed up
towering Canyon Cliff, he slipped and fell:
A
H
H
H
H
H
H
But his safety rope
saved him—and while he trembled, and his teeth chattered, he climbed carefully
to the top.
“There’s a gooseberry
bush,” he said, feeling better, “and I love gooseberries.”
But then Joe saw a
hairy beast tramping amongst a clump of leafy trees. Out walked a grizzly bear,
standing up on two legs. He was enormous. His eyes looked fiery. His claws
shone.
“RRAAARROOOOOO,” growled the ferocious bear.
“Raroo,” Joe said, in a squeaky voice.
The bear opened his
huge mouth wide. He had jaws like a steel trap. Teeth gleamed like butcher
knives.
Joe wasted no time. He
scurried up a jack pine.
“Na, na,” Joe said,
gazing down at the grumpy bear. “I’m the king of the castle.”
Around and around the
tree lumbered the angry bear. Finally, he became dizzy and left, thrashing
fiercely through the forest as he walked.
Joe waited until the
thrashing sounds had disappeared, and then he started to climb down the tree.
“Mountain climbing is
for mountain goats,” he said. “I’m going home.”
But a gust of wind
swooped down from the sky. Joe then discovered he’d scaled a rotten tree. It
snapped and fell over:
A
H
H
H
H
CRASH! Joe hung
alongside Canyon Cliff, clutching a spiny limb. His feet dangled in deep, deep
mountain air.
“Help!” he cried.
But no help came; the
limb snapped. Down he fell:
A
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
H
Splash! An eddy of wind had pushed Joe away from
the deadly rocks below. Instead of plunging to his death, he’d landed in
“I’m alive!” Joe exclaimed, and he blew bubbles.
But he wasn’t safe. A monstrous fish, with too many
teeth, was about to chew Joe to bits. He kicked his feet and swam with all his
strength.
Fortunately, the fish was too fat to catch up.
Joe, dragging himself up a sandy beach, had escaped, but
he felt too tired to stand.
“This is the worst day of my life!” he said.
Then, because he was too weary to do much else, he fell
asleep. Then he woke up. His mother was knocking on his bedroom door.
“Time to wake up, sleepy-head,” she said.
“Is it really morning?” Joe asked, from beneath his
crumpled blankets.
“Of course it’s morning,” she said, sticking her head
inside his room to look at him. “Do you think I’d wake you up in the middle of
the night?”
Joe peeked out at her and the green walls that surrounded
him. “No,” he said, feeling foolish. “I guess not.”
“What do you plan to do today?” his mother asked.
“I thought about mountain climbing,” Joe said, trying to
remember what Canyon Cliff and
She frowned. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Joe said.
“I’m glad you were,” she said.
“Can I stay home and bake cookies?” Joe asked.
“Suit yourself,” she said.
“Thank you,” Joe said. “Thank you very much.”
Really, the “third-person
viewpoint offers a [good] sense of reality” (Irwin & Eyerly, 1998, p. 52). “Joe
the Cliff-Hanger” presents Joe’s, and Landers does not intrude upon it through
author intrusion. This is Joe’s single-third-person story!
But what about the
multiple-third-person viewpoint? What does that mean? A story, or in particular
a longer fiction (a novella or novel), may employ this viewpoint in the sense
of the author’s non-intrusively telling the story through more than one
character.
I used
multiple-third-person viewpoints in my children’s novel, Quibils and Quirks (1997e,
1998, 1999), allowing the reader to experience the madcap, sci-fi fantasy
adventure through the “thoughts, actions, reactions, even psychological
hang-ups” (Irwin, & Eyerly, 1998, p. 52) of many characters. Consider the
beginning of the novel in its week-by-week-serialized format (note the
occasional omniscience [in blue]):
Chapter 1: The End of Porksville—
Or Professor Hamburger Arrives at a War
“Chop
off their heads!” hollered King Quibil—a
five-foot tall fur ball, with two arms and legs, who was waving a sword. “Chop
off everybody’s head! Teach them a lesson they’ll never forget!”
Armed quibils filled the south end of
Battle cries mixed with gasps and screams. The king, his
belly full of peppermint tea, yelled, “Charge!” People ran north along
The bald butcher wanted to grab his meat cleaver and
storm the quibils. The baker wanted to use his fish net to capture the king. He’d
have held the king as a ransom for peace. But each man had two broken legs.
Both squirmed in wheelchairs, rattling along
They sped by a row of birch trees that “joined” the
bakery to the grocery store. Behind the trees, in a clearing, Professor
Hamburger, in his time machine, landed.
This invention—aside
from the control center—resembled a 4x4
car, without fenders, boasting many red, yellow, and blue flashing lights. As
it landed, it banged and banged, as loudly as a
Then
the banging and wavering stopped.
Professor
Hamburger, inside the time machine, heard screaming and yelling.
Next
Episode/Chapter 2: Meet our story’s hero—orange Hooper Quirk.
Last Episode/Chapter 1: Professor Hamburger, in
his time machine, landed in Porksville, and heard screaming and yelling.
Chapter 2: Why Is The Mayor Wearing a Diaper?
The
professor, a skinny man with a wild beard, heard the horrible noise and
shuddered. He climbed out of the control center—it could have been a doorless wheel house from a
tugboat—and headed nervously to the row of birch trees.
He peered between two trunks. Quibils, waving swords or
clutching spears, chased people! Quibil-stink nearly made him pass out.
Dizzily, he escaped back to his time machine.
The banging and wavering returned. They stopped. Inside
the time machine, instead of Professor Hamburger, sat a dazed Hooper Quirk.
Where
was the professor?
Orange Hooper, a 10-year-old boy with cauliflower ears,
was trying to shake off his first ride in the time machine. But he had no time
to recover. He heard that racket!
“Chop off their heads!” somebody bellowed.
“What on earth?” Hooper exclaimed. But as he studied the
awful spectacle from between two trees, he, unlike the professor, smelled
nothing strange.
Meanwhile,
as Hooper trembled, the mayor, in a diaper, was gurgling in Dr. Dewknob’s
office.
“You’re a great help,” the doctor, who had a shiner, told
the mayor. “Quibils are attacking people, and you’re sucking your thumb.”
The mayor pulled his fat thumb out of his mouth, and
said, “Goo, goo.”
Next
Episode/Chapter 3: We begin to answer: “What led up to this quibil-invasion?”
And we meet Hooper’s carrot-munching family.
Last
Episode/Chapter 2: Hooper saw attacking quibils, and the mayor said, “Goo,
goo.”
Chapter 3: Home Sweet Home
Let’s go back to two days before
the quibils invaded Porksville, to begin to see what led up to this disaster:
The Quirks lived in an orange cottage centered in
“Open that window,” Mrs. Quirk, who had a swirl of red
hair, said. She stirred a pot of carrot soup. “I can’t stand that wretched pipe!”
Mr. Quirk eyed wincing Hooper. They sat at the kitchen
table. Mr. Quirk smoked his pipe, exhaling greenish clouds.
“Why don’t we eat porridge like normal people?” Hooper
said, cringing, holding up a carrot flake as if it were a cockroach.
“That reminds me,” Mr. Quirk said, “tomorrow you start
school.”
“All right!” Mrs. Quirk slapped a ladle on the counter. “I’ll
open the window myself.”
Mr. Quirk blew smoke into a long stream. Then he said, “You’ll
learn about history and geography.”
Mrs. Quirk glared at her husband. She opened the kitchen
window, sat down, and poured herself a bowl of carrot flakes. “Maybe there’s
oats in the pantry—if beetles haven’t eaten them!”
“What’s history?” Hooper asked.
“It’s different from herstory,” Mr. Quirk said. “Boy
things versus girl things.”
Mrs. Quirk sprinkled sugar on her flakes. “That’s French.”
“Nonsense,” Mr. Quirk said. “History is about men, but
herstory is about women.”
“I want to be a martian,” Hooper said.
Next
Episode/Chapter 4: Find out why Hooper wants to be a martian.
Last Episode/Chapter 3: Mr. Quirk told 10-year-old
Hooper, who wanted to be a martian, about school: “You’ll learn about history
and geography....History is about men, but herstory is about women.”
Chapter 4: Why Do Quibils Stink so Much?
“I
want to be a martian,” Hooper said.
Looking at her son, Mrs. Quirk closed one eye. “I don’t
know any martians.”
“But geography,” Mr. Quirk said, “is all about wood—pine, spruce, and birch.”
“I want to be a martian,” Hooper said, “because I want to
be green.”
Somebody pounded on the door.
“Come in!” Mrs. Quirk said, looking
irritated.
The door swung open. There stood Mooch, a quibil—a four foot tall fur ball with skinny arms and legs.
And a chicken tail sprang up like a fountain on his head.
“Well, well,” Mr. Quirk said. “Come in; have a bowl of
carrot flakes.”
But the Quirks had never noticed
how dreadful Mooch (or any other quibil) smelled.
After breakfast, Hooper and Mooch headed outside. Hungry
Hooper feasted on a mouthful of raspberries. But Mooch—a lover of raspberry leaves—flinched.
Then
Mooch, sitting on a willow stump, dangling his legs, said, “I want to go to
school too. I want to learn to read.”
As they spoke, clouds swept across the evergreen hills.
Soon galloping wind shook bushes.
“There’s a storm brewing,” Mrs. Quirk said, standing at
the open kitchen window. “You’d better get inside before you’re blown all the
way to
Next
Episode/Chapter 5: Will smelly Mooch also attend school?
Last Episode/Chapter 4: Smelly Mooch wanted to go
to school like Hooper. (Remember: quibils weren’t stinky to Quirks.)
Chapter 5: How Many Kids Eat Spiders?
“But I feel nervous about attending school,” Mooch said,
his hair dancing in the wind. “Besides, I’ve never met any other humans. So
maybe you should go to school alone the first day.”
Hooper
agreed. “Then I’ll describe the whole day to you.”
“And if I like it,” Mooch said excitedly, “I’ll go with
you the next day.”
Then Mooch, who loved a storm, jogged home to gather
slugs and liquorice root—gifts—for the king.
Hooper, back inside his warm house, heard wind howl in
the chimney. He saw his father, seated at the kitchen table, reading a mouldy
book.
“This dictionary by Professor Hamburger says quibils are
stinky two-legged rodents,” Mr. Quirk said with surprise. “What do you think
about that, Mable?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Hooper said, flattening his
wind-tossed hair. “Professor Hamburger is a fool.”
“Hooper!” Mrs. Quirk said. “Don’t speak like that.”
“Why not? You call Dad a fool.”
“Yes, well,” Mrs. Quirk said, “you never mind about that.”
*
The next day, Hooper, shy about meeting his classmates,
was relieved as he entered the log school. In short, at first they didn’t see
him. They had their backs to him and were watching a hawk-nosed boy chew a
daddy-long-legs.
Next
Episode/Chapter 6: Hooper meets
As you can see, I jump about from character to character,
for dramatic effect, using the multiple third-person point of view, but I also
throw in a dash of omniscience.
One more point of view remains for me to discuss: the
objective or lens-of-the-camera viewpoint. The author who employs this point of
view does not describe his or her characters’ thoughts or emotions. The author writes actions,
gestures, facial expressions, descriptions, and dialogue, but no workings of
the mind. Consequently, “readers know
only what is going on in front of them, never gaining any direct insight into
what a character is thinking or feeling—just as though they were watching television or a
movie” (Rosenberg, 1992, p. 80).
Rosenberg
(1992) warns writers about “using camera eye [objective viewpoint] in a
novel….Camera eye automatically distances readers from the protagonist, and few
readers will put up with that for a whole book” (p. 80). That may explain why
Steinbeck uses an interesting mix of the objective and omniscient in Of Mice
and Men (1937/1975).
The story of George Milton and Lennie Small is
a simple tale of two migratory ranch hands who have nothing in the world except
each other. George took Lennie, who is child-like in his mental capabilities,
under his wing following the death of Lennie’s aunt. The relationship between
these two men embodies the spirit of friendship and is the basis for the
expression of all themes in the book. (Lemke, 2001, para. 4)
In Steinbeck’s story
about George and Lennie, he reports what he sees fit to report, but that
implies his bias or personal point of view colours the work. Cline (n.d.) says
There is no such thing
as an objective point of view.
No matter how much we may try
to ignore it, human communication always takes place in a context, through a medium,
and among individuals and groups who are situated historically, politically,
economically, and socially. (paragraphs 1-2)
I have to agree with
Cline. Actually, authors, no matter what literary point of view they use,
colour their work through their own personal biases, pet peeves, passions,
perspectives, ontology—reality (Lukiv, 2004a). Perhaps you will agree with this
statement: Although the objective viewpoint means the reader should know only
what a camera would see (
Can the objective
viewpoint, then, be purely objective? Apparently, no. Really, how could it be
purely objective for Steinbeck as he wrote Of Mice and Men, especially
given his view of the “historical[ ], political[ ], economic[ ], and social[ ]”
(n.d., para. 2) climate of late 1930s California that established a setting in
which his characters interacted. Additionally, Steinbeck—in terms of themes he
explores—omnisciently moves his “camera” here and there, “filming” in its field
of vision the banks of the Salinas River, a ranch bunk house, Crook’s harness
room home, and the barn, much as the camera person who films and edits clips of
x1, x2, and x3. He even steps inside Lennie’s
mind at the novel’s end, revealing thoughts that turn hallucinogenic,
manifesting themselves for Steinbeck to “film” with his “camera.”
In the novel, we read
such words and phrases as “unhappily,” “uncomfortably”
and “with dignity”[. Similar examples] continually show up in the course of the
tale….At one point in [the] first section, when George asks Lennie what he has
in his pocket, Lennie makes a simple denial, “cleverly”…But according to whom
is this statement “cleverly” made?…In many other places in the novel certain adverbial and adjectival modifiers clearly emanate from
the omniscient awareness of the novelist. (Of Mice and Men and Other
Novels, 1996, pp. 18-19)
Omniscient awareness?
Don’t statements here prove the novel’s viewpoint is essentially omniscient?
Yes, if you like. Many would say yes
(see, e.g., Of Mice and Men: SparkNotes, 2006).
Consider this further example, in which
omniscience lies in Steinbeck’s interpretive comments (placed in italics by me)
about what the “camera” sees:
Lennie reluctantly reached into his pocket. His
voice broke a little. “I don’t know why I can’t keep it. It ain’t nobody’s
mouse. I didn’t steal it. I found it lyin’ right beside the road.”
George’s hand remained
outstretched imperiously. Slowly, like a terrier who doesn’t want to
bring a ball to its master, Lennie approached, drew back, approached again.
George snapped his fingers sharply, and at the sound Lennie laid the mouse in
his hand. (Steinbeck, 1937/1975, p. 9)
But
I said Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men using a mix of the omniscient and
objective viewpoint? Where, then, does the objective viewpoint arise? I’ll
start answering the question by referring to this viewpoint as third person
objective (Point of View Handout, n.d.) in light of the abundance of he said
this and she said that and he did this and she did that statements
that lack omniscient adverbial and adjectival modifiers and references to
thoughts and feelings. In spite of Steinbeck who colours scenes by directing
his camera, here is one example of that objective viewpoint:
Slim took his eyes from old Candy. “Huh? Oh!
Hello, Crooks. What’s’a matter?”
“You
told me to warm up tar for that mule’s foot. I got it warm.”
“Oh!
Sure, Crooks. I’ll come right out an’ put it on.”
“I
can do it if you want, Mr. Slim.”
“No.
I’ll come do it myself.” He stood up.
Crooks
said, “Mr. Slim.”
“Yeah.”
“That
big new guy’s messin’ around your pups out in the barn.”
“Well,
he ain’t doin’ no harm. I give him one of them pups.”
“Just
thought I’d tell ya,” said Crooks. “He’s taken’ ‘em outa the nest and handlin’
them. That won’t do them no good.”
“He
won’t hurt ‘em,” said Slim. “I’ll come along with you now.”
George
looked up. “If that crazy bastard’s foolin’ around too much, jus’ kick him out,
Slim.”
Slim
followed the stable buck out of the room.
George
dealt and Whit picked up his cards and examined them. “Seen the new kid yet?”
he asked.
“What kid?” George asked.
“Why,
Curley’s new wife.”
“Yeah,
I seen her.”
“Well,
ain’t she a looloo?”
“I
ain’t seen that much of her,” said George. (1937/1975, pp. 55-56)
Perhaps you see this scene working, as do many other similar dialogic
scenes in spite of the objective viewpoint
“distanc[ing] readers from” (Rosenberg, 1992, p. 80) the characters,
because it metaphorically parallels the distance between the actual lives of
rootless George and Lennie and their imagined lives as property owners.
The book, then, possess
a certain objectivity in places, an omniscience in others.
*
That Steinbeck gets away with his use of his
point-of-view choices in the work means that he establishes a “willing
suspension of disbelief.” I’ll explain further: In spite of the maxim that art
mimics reality (Schulwolf, n.d.), and therefore art stands in a sense a lie,
the fact that Of Mice and Men stands as Steinbeck’s imagined
reality that George and Lennie might experience has not bothered too many of
the tale’s readers. Most have accepted the lie. They have acquired a “willing
suspension of disbelief.” They have made the “fiction true” (Updike, 1988, p.
4). Studied in universities, colleges, and high schools, and turned into
To say that a work of
fiction works also means that in the end,
“things work out” (in the resolution), and the reader
has a sense of completeness, even though the ending might not be happy.
Resolution
By completeness, I mean,
in part, that if you are writing a short story, or, for that matter, a novel, and
in its opening setting you mention a rifle above a fireplace, then you’ll need
to “shoot” it off before “the end,” or
the story will lack proper resolution (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov,
2004-2005)—although some might argue against that dictum (Lehmann-Haupt, 2003).
You are welcome to break “Chekhov’s dictum,” but beware of breaking rules/laws
before mastering how to use them (Lukiv, 1999b; see also, Chapter 8 of For
Writers Only, later in this course).
So, when does that resolution
take place? In the words of Gunn (1988), with regard to the short story,
after the climax comes the resolution, the
resolving of the situation established early in the story, the solving of the
problem. The situation should be resolved by the actions of the protagonist,
not by an outside agency; and the situation resolved must be the situation that
launches the story. The protagonist can fail or succeed or, in more
sophisticated stories, both fail and succeed, and the story can be a tragedy or
a comedy, or something in between. The resolution also is called the falling
action. (pp. 17-18)
That definition of the resolution essentially applies to
the novel too. I say essentially because the novel, with its world as
opposed to the short story’s microcosm,
likely presents the reader with a number of major characters, with one
protagonist who stands out. Along with those characters: Their dramatic
conflicts should flow into climaxes, even though the one climax of the
protagonist should stand as the novel’s
A tidy story/novel relates to
that action or sequence…that [addresses] the
conflict [equilibrium implied]….The major combatants come to blows. The
protagonist meets his antagonist(s) for the final battle. The central dramatic
question is answered. There is a win, a loss or a draw, although [readers]
prefer [stories/novels] with winners and losers, not draws.
The climax is fairly easy to
identify. One of the key ways of recognizing a climax is that [the resolution
or] all the actions following the climax are an acceptance of the
situation derived from the climax. (p. 83)
If you understand what
I’ve described in this section entitled Elements of Fiction, then you’re ready
to write fiction. Stephen Vincent Benet called the short story “something that
can be read in an hour and remembered for a lifetime” (quoted in Boles, 1988,
p. 5). I might call the novel “something that can be read in [quite a few
hours] and remembered for a lifetime.” If you understand what I’ve described in
this section, perhaps you’re ready to write a truly memorable work. I hope you
are. But even if you aren’t yet, you
soon may be, especially if you fully realize that writers deliberately weave
the elements of fiction into their stories and novels—as deliberately as I just
typed deliberately.
I. Plot Types
Fusion and sequence plots are
two examples. In a fusion plot characters make decisions that bring them “together”
in a pivotal or climactic scene (e.g., Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet [1597/n.d.]; and my Quibils
and Quirks, 1997e, 1998, 1999), whereas in a sequence plot a linear story
line focuses on one character, whose decisions take him or her from the story’s
start to finish (e.g., Landers’ Margins, 2005a, 2005b,
2005c, 2005d, 2005e, 2005f, 2005g, 2005h).
In a more general
sense, however, all stories fall into one of three plot-type categories:
1. Man against man;
2. Man against his environment; and
3. Man against himself.
Some might argue that a
fourth type, man against society, also deserves recognition, but really this “fourth” could
logically fall into “man vs. man conflict” (Allingham, 2001, 3d, para. 1).
List a movie, story, or novel that falls into each of the
three plot-type categories.
II. Point of View
Flip through a
short story collection. Find a story written in:
1. First person; and
2. Third person (write down the titles and
names of the authors).
First- and third-person are the most commonly
used points of view used today.
Take a page
from one of these stories you referred to in II, point of view and
rewrite it, switching from first- to third-person point of view or vice versa. Notice how the change alters the tone and sense of
the story. The first person viewpoint creates for the reader a great sense of
immediacy, as if he or she were personally living the plot, whereas the third
person viewpoint creates a sense for the reader of watching ever so closely the
events and how they relate to the characters involved.
IV. Writing a Short Story
Write your own
story. It could be a spy-thriller, a murder mystery, a romance, a horror story,
a character study, or an-erupting-volcano-threatens-Montreal story. Relate
whether your story is man against man, his environment, or himself.
For your story, you’ll need a main character
(protagonist) with a problem that gets worse and worse, and you’ll need a
satisfying climax and conclusion/resolution/falling action/denouement (you
might want to look this last word up). And use plenty of energy-charged verbs
to breed plenty of action!
Write like a mimer mimes
Remember that words like “talk,” “race,” “glance,” “yell,”
“lift,” “bend,” “kiss,” “punch,” and “glide” denote action, whereas words like “is,”
“are,” “was,” “will,” “have,” and “am” don’t. Admittedly this last bunch, the
actionless verbs, are necessary at times, but too many of them create a
passivity or lack of energy in a story, transporting it into that universe of
tales readers don’t bother to finish reading.
To help you think about the elements of fiction that I
have written about in this unit, consider searching for those elements in the
following story, written in a picture-book style for 5- to 10-year-olds
(Landers, 2005j):
Laura
In 1902, Laura, a lonely dressmaker, lived with her cat,
Snuggles, in
“Everything I own smells like chicken fried rice,” she
said, picking up Snuggles and pressing his nose to hers. “Even you smell
like chicken fried rice.”
She decided to move to the woods, near crystal
How she loved that home. And how she loved to wrap
herself in her goosefeather quilt at night.
But soon she knew that she was still lonely.
“I need some fun,” Laura told Snuggles one hot day. So,
that same day, they hiked to
After she’d swum, she and Snuggles enjoyed a picnic.
Laura ate chicken sandwiches and drank lemonade.
“Life should always be this wonderful,” Laura said.
Snuggles, with his belly full of chicken and cream, lay
on her lap and purred.
The next day Laura planned another picnic. “But I need
more food,” she told Snuggles. So she walked the short distance from her woods
to Pineville to buy bread and sausages and cheese.
One lady on
“Yes, I am,” Laura said, gazing downwards.
“Well—I’m in a big hurry,” the lady said. “I’ll visit you
tomorrow. Don’t you live in Mushroom Woods?”
Laura sighed. “Yes.” She wanted some company.
A young man then whistled at Laura. She felt her face
blush.
While she was leaving town, the same young man approached
her. “May I help you carry your grocery bags home?” he asked.
Laura, noticing his dark moustache, giggled. But she
nodded “Yes.”
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“In Mushroom Woods,” she said quietly.
“Pardon me?”
It was hard, but Laura made herself speak up: “I live in
Mushroom Woods.”
“Yeah?” he said. “I hope you like mushrooms.”
Laura smiled. “I do,” she said. She noticed that he had
broad shoulders.
After that, Laura and that man, Charlie, saw each other
lots. One day they went swimming together in
Charlie’s eyes were bright blue. He splashed Laura. She
splashed him back. He asked Laura to marry him. She felt so excited that she
began to cry.
Laura and Charlie got married in Pineville. Laura had
made her wedding dress. In fact, some of the women at the wedding wore dresses
that she had made.
After the wedding, Laura and Charlie loved to sit by the
fireplace at night. They loved each other and Snuggles. But they felt lonely
sometimes.
Laura and Charlie decided to have a baby.
One year later, one fall morning, Laura gave birth to a
girl. They named her Mary-Anne.
Mary-Anne screamed a lot. But they loved her. They loved
her so much that they couldn’t imagine life without her.
One night, as Charlie enjoyed the fire in the fireplace,
he said to Laura, “Let’s take Mary-Anne to
Laura, cradling and nursing Mary-Anne, said, “So you can
splash me as usual?”
Charlie laughed and pulled at his moustache. “The
sunshine and fresh air will do Mary-Anne good,” he said. But he looked closely
at Laura and frowned. All the night before she’d tried to soothe Mary-Anne who’d
had an upset stomach.
Laura sighed. She felt so tired that the thought of
packing a picnic lunch made her feel more tired.
“Maybe,” Charlie said, stroking Snuggles on his lap, “I
should take Mary-Anne tomorrow. I’ll pack a lunch, and you can sleep all
afternoon.”
The next day, after Charlie had left with Mary-Anne,
Laura lay with Snuggles on her bed. Her goosefeather quilt made her feel warm
and cozy.
Snuggles purred.
Laura said, “Do you ever feel lonely, Snuggles?”
Snuggles kept purring.
“Neither do I,” Laura said. And then she fell asleep.
V. Writing Poetry, the
Implied Author
In a sense, you had to become
the protagonist while you did exercise IV. You had to think like him or her.
You had to get inside his or her brain. You must also get inside the brain of
the implied author of any poem you’re writing that does not describe
your perspective, your psyche—you. Oh, yes, you’re writing
it, but who is the one speaking? He or she is the implied author. When the
voice of a poem I write defines me, I am the author and no implied author exists;
however, when the voice defines somebody else, I am still the author, but I am
not the implied author. When you write a poem you describe the feelings and
thoughts of someone indeed, but that someone can, frankly, be anyone you make
up. Does that make sense? If at the end of this section your answer is no,
speak to me (e-mail me if you’re one of my
online students) about your confusion.
Now, you already tried to get inside the brain of someone
else when you did exercise IV in Unit One. [Remember?: (Unit One) IV. More Stream
of Consciousness. Let me stir your imagination.
Imagine a stream of consciousness that someone you know (friend, relative,
schoolmate, or workmate, or a character you invent) might experience. Put
yourself in his or her mind. Be someone else for awhile. Don’t tense up. Relax.
Unless, of course, you want to be tense. Write. For as long as you can stand.]
Perhaps revisiting that exercise helps you see that poets and fiction
writers’ non-conceptual, non-reflective sense of the lifeworld
(Elveton, 2005)—their sense of the world
they live in—and their formal conclusions,
knowledge, and thematic objectives colour their implied authors’ choice of words and characters. What Steinbeck was
and all that he stood for coloured how he made up George and Lennie’s personalities and motivations, their psychological,
socio-emotional, and cognitive identities.
(By the way, the lifeworld of any individual exists according to his or
her experiences; memories; knowledge; emotional, intellectual, and otherwise
intelligence; creativity; genetic psychological dispositions; emotional scars;
triumphs; losses; social, familial, and romantic interactions; beauty marks;
physiology; choices; biases; assumptions; and collective viewpoints and
conclusions.)
In my following poems, notice the voices of the implied
authors. Those voices are not mine, although they do at implicit levels
represent my thematic directions; my non-conceptual, non-reflective sense of
the lifeworld; and my formal conclusions and knowledge (let’s face it, I wrote these poems!). Simply
stated, those voices reveal my implied authors’—my first-person narrators’—personalities. But: I am the author, given my ontology
(Lukiv, 2004a), given my sense of reality or existence, given me. And yet, I am
not the implied authors of these poems any more than John Steinbeck is George
or Lennie in Of Mice and Men.
Grean
Peace (1997b, p. 26)
I don’t know why I like
coffee
In a Styrofoam-cup;
Maybe I like killing off
Ozone.
What about you?
Do
you really care about bugs,
Herbs, and hardwood from
Rain forests?
I don’t,
But I care about coffee—
Himalayan’s the best,
and
This lousy jewellery
shop
Where I’m bought and
sold
Like a Clerk X
(When did that Malcolm
guy
Get shot?)
For six bucks an hour—
They’re lucky I’m not a
thief.
I could rob this joint;
My wife could use a big
Rock.
Anyway,
I deserve this coffee
break,
And the way I figure it,
Ozone can go to hell.
I Heard on CBC
(1998c, p. 78)
I heard on CBC
That this engineer guy,
Like he invented an
alien
Abduction prevention
Security system,
Aye?
You plug it in beside
Your bed,
And it measures these
ion things
That aliens make.
The buzzer goes off,
Aye,
And so you wake up and
decide
If you want,
You know,
To let the aliens abduct
You.
I heard for 399 bucks
They’re selling like
hotcakes.
Exchange Program (1998b,
p. 32)
I
think I ought to be
A
politician,
Aye?—
And,
like, send those anorexics
To
Or
other
Wastelands—
We
could adopt all their beer-bellied
String
beans,
You
know?—
And
like feed them—
Then
those horn-hipped
Ex-babes
with no boobs
Could
do what they’re bent on doing—
Starving
to death.
Memories (2000b)
Laughter doesn’t remind
me of
Anything,
Not of Peter Sellers’ “party,”
Nor the mad mad mad mad
Pilgrimage to “W.”
Laughter doesn’t remind
me of
The day I fell into the
pond outside
Sedgewick Library—
You laughed so hard
You pulled a muscle in
your neck.
You had to look straight
ahead
For a week.
I should have looked
straight ahead.
I wouldn’t have tripped
over the
Stone ledge.
Laughter doesn’t remind
me of
Your soft hand in mine,
And it doesn’t remind me
of
The deep color of your
lips
Either.
My Home (2002g)
Midhbar—
Oasis of amhaarets
(A word Pharisees
Spit)—
Is my home,
My wind and rock,
My snakes and scorpions
That thrive where I eat
And urinate
And will die.
This is my barrenness,
My yeshimon,
That surrounds me like
my
Heart
And
children.
A Boy on a Horse
(2002b)
A ghostly hand rips
The
cord between
Me and the round earth.
And there I am, riding—
A pharaoh without a war,
A sailor adrift in a
Mine field of
manure-scabs.
I clutch the bow,
Push back on the stern,
And dangle legs in
Barracuda-water,
While they watch
the sailor,
The city-sap,
Sail like a helmsman
without
Arms. “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
They might as well force
Me to sing
For these buxom aunts
And boozed-up uncles.
“Do ‘Old MacDonald.’”
“Don’t be a spoil-sport.”
“Don’t forget to quack, quack,
Quack, like a duck.”
I hate them, these war-
Creatures of Genghis
Khan.
I hate their barn-stink.
I hate these wormy reins.
And what right,
I might add,
Do they have to be big
And to jerk?
I see my parents gazing
Up, up at me, smiling
As if they’ve drunk
Too much beer.
Give me back me—
A new king on a
White horse:
Ha!—
And take me home to my
Skateboard.
A Boy and His Bear (2002a)
Teddy bear,
teddy bear,
Jumping on
me,
With cute
little body
All covered
with hair,
How could
you do this
To someone
of three?
How could
you do this
To someone
like me?
Are you upset
I forgot
you again,
Under my
bed
For a week
and a day?
Remember, a
boy,
With such a
wee brain,
Has many a
toy
With which
he must play.
But teddy!
Don’t cry!
You’ll
still be my friend!
We’ll stay
together
Right
through to the end.
We’ll
cuddle and kiss
And hide
under covers;
We’ll fight
and make up
Because we
are brothers.
I’ll never
forget you
Ever again.
Come on,
dear teddy,
Let’s play
with my train,
So dry off
those tears
You silly
old bear;
You’re
going to get moist
And ruin
your hair.
I’ve told
you once,
And I’ve
told you twice,
I’ll never
again
Put
you on ice.
But now
that I look,
And now
that I see,
You’re
falling apart
Right at
the knee.
Oh teddy
bear, teddy bear,
Look at you
now.
Your seams
are so wide
As you sit
and you stare.
Tell me
what happened,
You silly
old bear.
Tell me
what happened,
And make me
aware.
You mean I
did that
By hugging
And kissing?
I squeezed
you so much
You lost
all your fat?—
Oh teddy
bear, teddy,
We’re
getting nowhere.
Don’t you
know that
I really do
care?
To stuff
you and fix you
I really
must try,
But should
I tell Mummy
How you
made me cry?
Now write a few poems. I think of poems as
super-concentrated language emerging from “life’s blood.’ Many poets use this language to explore the essence
of experience. In terms of super-concentrated language:
Poetry should make your “toenails twinkle” (Dylan Thomas
as quoted in Drury, 1991, p. 5). What did Thomas mean? If they don’t make your “toenails
twinkle,” they aren’t poems. Emily Dickinson, however, defined poetry
differently: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I
know that is poetry” (as quoted in Drury, p. 5).
Who needs drugs?
If a “poem” stops you shaving, it really is a poem figured
A. E. Housman (Drury, 1991, p. 5). Robert Graves thought a poem should
make “the hairs of one’s chin...bristle” (as quoted in Drury, p. 5).
Emily, I believe, didn’t shave, so she had her own ideas. I wonder if she knew
Beethoven’s friend called Furry Lisa. William Wordsworth defined poetry as the “overflow
of powerful feelings” (as quoted in Drury, 1991, p. 5).
Do you agree with these people? I know I do. At any rate, write a few poems—metaphysical,
extranatural (poetry in a spiritual context), narrative, lyric, dramatic,
metrical, rhyming, or free verse (Bugeja, 1994) or any other type (Types
of Poetry, 2000-2006).
You should find definitions for the main divisions of poetry in a literary
dictionary (e.g., Dictionary of Literary Terms [
For each poem written with the voice
of an implied author, write a paragraph
that describes that person. Tell me quite a bit about him (or her). I want to
know what he thinks and feels.
You might
wonder why I’m asking you to describe your
implied author(s). Writers typically draw together notes (see, e.g., Walker Percy
Papers, n.d.), sometimes extensive, about
their characters in fiction and even poetry, to make sure they fully understand
and can clearly visualize their own creations. How vividly can a writer write
about the thoughts, feelings, behaviour, physiology, or physical features of
somebody who only vaguely exists in his or her psyche? Two of my novels contain
a large collection of bizarre characters with not only very different physical
characteristics, but also very different motivations, perceptions, lifeworlds.
I knew: Once characters’ differences
blur in the writer’s mind, the characters on the
page lose clarity for the reader.
As
I wrote those novels, I kept files of extensive notes about my characters,
notes that I regularly read to make absolutely sure no blurring took place in
my mind. When I write a poem through the eyes of an implied author, who like a
character in a novel or story or play is a creation of my mind, I clearly
define that person’s psychological, emotional,
motivational and otherwise make up, even that person’s physical features. The more real the implied author
is to the author, likely the more real the poem to the reader. Many people who
know about this need for character delineation write commercially available
self-help books or computer programs especially for novelists (see, e.g., Novel
Writing?, 1996-2006). These books or programs may also help poets define their
characters and implied authors.
VI. Brevity, Thematic
Poetry Collections, a Warning for Writers
In the Charles Dickens’ days in
Writers, especially novelists and short story writers,
understand the significance of that last sentence. Boles (1988) explains:
In
many commercial stories [and novels] of the kind published up through the
[19]20s and into the ‘30s,…background [detail] was as bulky as a horsehair sofa,
dominating the induction of a story while its characters, and its readers,
waited for the action to start. Dress styles were lingered upon, furnishings
were depicted at paragraph-length, fabrics were named and sometimes priced.
This opulent sandbag approach to a story is no longer necessary or at all
desirable. (p. 14)
The author today who fills
pages with description had better write ingeniously fascinating, entertaining
prose. Even historical and science fiction that frequently requires enough
detail to establish context and setting had better rise far above the
pedestrian. My warning: Writers who refute this advice may find themselves with
drawers full of rejection slips.
Generally speaking, then: Don’t say things you don’t need to say. Brevity is the key. Consider the
following brief description and ask yourself if it captures your attention:
But
know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here.
For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self-assuming, haughty,
blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, having no natural
affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce,
without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up [with pride], lovers
of pleasures....” (New World Translation, 1984, 2 Timothy 3:1-4)
In about sixty words of
prose, we find a global condition defined inductively. Brevity.
To help you focus on brevity, I’m not going to ask you to write prose. Rather, in view
of poetry’s innate need for concentrated
language, and essence of experience, I’m going
to ask you to write some particularly word-lean poems in the spirit of Mark
Twain’s comment to a friend: “I would have written a
shorter letter but I didn’t have the time” (quoted in Guidelines for a
Thank-You Letter, 2006, bullet 6)—and in the spirit of Anton Chekhov’s
statement that “the art of writing is the art of abbreviation” (quoted in
Boles, 1988, p. 6). The exercises will
help you think about how few words your prose can get away with while at the
same time the exercises will help you hone your poetry-writing skills and learn
about an established, word-bare word-form.
Haiku (2005a)
Perhaps that word brings to your attention a concise form
of poetry, one that many call imagistic, with line one of 5 syllables, line two
of 7, and line three again of 5 (Wakan, 1993). You may say that every word must
count; that often permanent and transitory images are linked for an evocative
effect; that the present tense is essential; that a seasonal word grounds the
poem in time; and that the words show, in images, but do not tell the
reader how to feel. Such a traditional view, however, is often replaced by
innovations that push the boundaries that define haiku today.
Rengé, editor of Haiku Headlines, “prefers
In
terms of fine modern haiku, no.
We might think of haiku as “poetry of suggestion, of
understatement” (Virgil, 1991, Introduction), as poetry of “moments of special
awareness that...make one feel the wonder of the ordinary seen anew”
(Introduction), as poetry of essence that establishes “a delicate mood, a deep
emotion by new associations of images” (Introduction). Although the haiku poet
doesn’t generally tell the reader what emotion to feel, he provides “his reader
just enough of a glimpse of a reality to allow the reader to experience the
emotion it engendered in [himself]” (Introduction). The haiku poet provides
that glimpse through images exquisitely
objective and concrete (Welch, 2004).
You’re welcome to apply what I’ve said about haiku to a
related form called senryu. Some people like to argue about what makes a haiku
versus a senryu. “You could say,” according to Naomi Wakan, “that senryu
make you laugh at human foolishness, and haiku make you ponder or wonder”
(1993, p. 62). Others have their own distinctions: “Senryu are usually humorous
or satirical....Unlike haiku, senryu do employ poetic devices such a
simile, metaphor, personification” (Virgil, 1991, Introduction). For me, haiku
may also use literary devices (Ament, 2003) such as simile, metaphor,
personification, and onomatopoeia, and, for me, haiku
1. refer
exclusively to nature,
2. often contain concrete imagery that appeals
to the senses, and
3. fill two or three lines;
4.
Also for me, senryu fulfill “2,” “3,” and “4,” but I have to
add that although senryu may refer to nature (see “1”), they definitely
refer to people.
The following examples, an excerpt from one of my
collections, may help you see the interesting marriage that haiku and senryu
can make of brevity and imagery:
chapter 1 (2006a)
january 1
late this
night, while
my family sleeps,
i lie
awake and dream
january 2
i toss and
turn—
our hamster runs
on its
squeaky wheel
january 3
crows swarm
beneath thunderclouds
and gyrate
january 4
a lone
cloud
in this expanse of
blue—
i close my eyes
january 5
the ocean
sunset
fills clouds with
gold
bouillon
january 6
a tugboat
pushes
upriver. a man on
deck
waves
january 7
the sun
sets
into the black
ocean—
silence
january 8
my
13-year-old
says in “fam’ly
life” she learned
hair grows on
gentiles
january 9
i’m told,
at the gym,
showered women
stand about
naked and gab
january 10
the nurse
sighs—
she wakes the old
woman
for her sleeping
pill
january 11
two little
boys
“i got
bitten by
a bugeedo once.” “no,
a busquito.”
january 12
the horse,
writhing on its
back,
legs in the air
january 13
two girls
laugh at the
man flexing his
tattooed
biceps
january 14
snow-droopy
trees
fill this hillside
with speckled
white
january 15
the cat
darts through
the open
door—hamster
in its mouth
january 16
the autistic
boy*
staring out the
window
suddenly laughs!
*brian
january 17
these stars
that my ancestors
also
pondered
january 18
a fiery
yolk
sets on the
sea—someone’s
pain ends
january 19
again,
monday—
crows follow the
garbage truck
to feast on scraps
january 20
willow
tentacles
shake off snow as
the
north wind blows
january 21
afternoon
snow
on the skylight
makes me
warm
january 22
at the gym,
the lady working
her abs
looks afraid
january 23
“bringing
up baby”—
i love that movie,
but wish
the actors weren’t
dead
january 24
outside the
glass door,
the cat covered
with snow sits
and meows
january 25
at sunrise,
the snowy forest smells
eucalyptic
january 26
again
tonight,
gulls cry in the
distance—
night sirens
january 27
his
wheelchair halts
as he argues with
someone
not there
january 28
in the pink
sky,
several clouds,
curled—
salad shrimp
january 29
at the gym,
a fat man grunts,
lifts,
and farts
january 30
low tide—
one man stands
alone and
watches anchored
ships
january 31
a
quarterhorse
kicks up its feet
in a white
pasture
I find this marriage of brevity of words and imagery
exhilarating, but I find it a difficult form of writing. Iterative imagery,
common in Shakespeare’s and dramatic
poetry (Dyson, n.d.), along with its cumulative power, doesn’t find space in haiku or senryu. Just the right word,
just the right fewest words, along with evocative imagery that finds a place in
the reader’s psyche to
resonate/reverberate/echo, evoking thoughts, smells, schemata (Schema
[Psychology], 2006), pictures, memories, emotions—that’s a tall order
for two or three little lines. But I find the effort worthwhile; I love haiku
and senyru; I love writing them.
I
know I’m asking you to transfer what you learn about how to
use language concisely when writing haiku and senyru to how to use language concisely
when writing fiction, and certainly other forms of poetry too, but I’m sure you can make the transfer complete. One reason
for you to make the effort: If you don’t
ruthlessly chuck out the unnecessary, you run the risk of watering down your
work to the point of boring your reader, who may yawn, put down your work, and
switch on the tv. Consider the wisdom of Boles’ (1988) turning the following early draft (from “Sweet Chariot,” a short story) excerpt
Journey
was a looming, rangy man with the high cheekbones of middle
into the following in the
final draft:
His eyes held hints of wildness and rushing away. (p. 11)
Always consider the wisdom of
eliminating superfluous words in any form of writing.
Now, try your hand at writing
a collection of haiku (ten or twenty poems of brevity), not necessarily along a
particular theme, although you certainly may write along that path.
Thematic Poetry
Collections
Thematic collections create an interesting
inter-imagistic effect between the poems as each one connects to all others
through a sort of thematic-neural-interface. I attempted to
incorporate that effect in some of my haiku collections (e.g., Faces of
Winter, 2001b; Robert’s
Roost, 2001d), as I have in some of
my non-haiku poetry collections (e.g., The Wise Man, 2006c; Corpus
Callosum, 2003a).
Some editors and publishers today feel that a collection
of poetry must follow a theme, but, of course, that bias does not mean
that all poetry collections should. And yet, therein lies
A Warning for Writers
In general, provide editors, who don’t like wasting their time, with what they ask for. For
example, if an editor advertises, in the Canadian Writer’s Market
(Tooze, 2004, 2007) or The Poet’s Market (Breen,
2005) or other places, for thematic collections, then why not honour such
requests? That said, however, writers sometimes manage to succeed outside the
mandate box. But if you’re going to
convince an editor to step outside his or her publishing mandate, then you’re going to need extraordinary powers of persuasion
and a magnificent product.
Don’t allow the
following sort of scenario to mar your writing career:
The
Book Proposal
As the traffic-watching sun
Tries in vain
To heat, through
Smoked glass,
The gym-toned editor’s
24th-floor office—
She sighs before her
Coffee-stained,
Oak-thick desk,
Thumbing through
A tidy proposal:
Tips for the homeless.
“But homeless don’t
buy books,”
She scribbles
Beside the smudgy
Letterhead.
How unfortunate to send an
editor something he or she doesn’t want or need,
or, even worse, to write and submit something that an editor deems utterly
valueless.
Poetry may follow a variety
of patterns that are visually intriguing, metaphorically shaped with regard to
subject or theme, formulaic, expressly fun to read, or otherwise. The next
group of poems, an excerpt from my collection entitled A Difference
(2001a), explores a variety of patterns:
Hummingbirds
spring-humming birds,
as peculiar as gone-to-seed
dande lions,
quiver with
x = y-precision;
they chase kinfolk
from the red juice-feeder.
as graceful as a whisper,
as gentle-looking as a sleeping
child,
they dart and hum—
tiny heli-planes,
minuscule,
zigzagg ing
missles,
nectar-
eating
pecking order-beasts
that d i s
a p p
e a r
each
fall.
Did You Hear The
did you hear the
raintrain
traintrain traintrain traintrain traintrain traintrain traintrain tra
(Thanks to Anita Virgil for her train-poem
in
One Potato Two Potato Etc
[Peaks Press,
CROAKING
croaking
croaking
did you hear the frogs
croaking
croaking
croaking
croaking
croaking
croaking croaking
croaking
at the pond?
On Scalding Glass
A porch light whitely
Attracts brown moths
take off
That land and and
Land
and
take
off,
But later,
On the cool deck,
They’ll twitch and die
Like expatriated fish.
People Who Forget
people
who
forget
why
they
live
forget
why
they
die
Unspoken
e(cr
ow
ded
r
oo
m)
mpt
i
nes
s
Try writing your own poetry
(several poems) using patterns that add, rather than subtract or confuse,
meaning. That’s part of the
trick with this sort of poetry. A pattern for its own sake may turn a poem into
amateurish word-bunk. But a pattern integrated into the poem’s meaning may tattoo itself into a reader’s psyche forever. I think that’s good. If you think that’s good too, then you may enjoy some of e. e. cummings’ patterned poetry (e.g., Tumbling-hair, 1923/n.d.b; who knows if the
moon’s, 1925/n.d.c; i have found what you are like, n.d./n.d.a). (By the way,
what I refer to as patterned poetry, others such as Powell (1973) refer to as poetry
forms.)
Prose
writers also at times use patterns for visual, aural, thematic, or metaphorical
effects. In the story “Joe the
Cliff-Hanger” [see Unit 2], Landers (2005i) uses a visual and aural pattern that highlights the
helplessness of Joe’s not only falling, but falling,
the reader discovers, within a dream.
Other tools too exist that poets and prose writers use,
one of which I’d like to consider here:
repetition. (Not only writers in general, but teachers know its value [You Can
Improve Your Memory, 2001] related to memory retention.) Consider the
repetition of mountain and bird imagery in the Gertrude Stein excerpt (Rico,
1983) in the stream-of-consciousness subsection of Unit 1. Repeated imagery
creates visual echoes, if you will, and a sort of intellectual rhythm.
Repetition of the pronoun “you” in the Hemingway excerpt (A Farewell to Arms,
1929/1997) in Unit 1 highlights Lieutenant Henry’s sense of detachment from the
military. Joyce’s (1939/1976) myriad repetitive references to rivers in Finnegans
Wake remind readers of the great flow of life and also reinforce a river-city
river duality that allegorically and thematically relates to Adam and Eve, the
parents of “all the Irish and all
humanity” (Rosenbloom, n.d., p. 1).
Writers use repetition to reinforce themes, thoughts,
images, events, and memories, and to set up foreshadowing. Look at the repeated
parallel sentence structure in this first paragraph from A Tale of Two
Cities, by Charles Dickens (1859/1997):
It
was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it
was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was
the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going
direct the other way...”
What is Dickens trying to do here? Many things. For one,
he repeatedly uses parallelism to compare opposites, which defines in part the
setting of
In the following poetry
example, notice the repetition of earth-wide peace-and-prosperity imagery that
relates to Israel’s 40 years of general peace and prosperity under the reign of
King Solomon (Israel, 1988, p. 1231), who symbolically stands for the Greater
Solomon, Christ Jesus, as king of the 1000-year kingdom that will care for a
paradisiacal earth (Preparing for the Approaching, 1970).
Regarding Solomon.
72 O God, give your
own judicial decisions to the king,
And your
righteousness to the son of the king.
2 May
he plead the cause of your people with righteousness
And of your
afflicted ones with judicial decision.
3 Let
the mountains carry peace to the people,
Also the hills,
through righteousness.
4 Let
him judge the afflicted ones of the people,
Let him save the
sons of the poor one,
And let him crush
the defrauder.
5 They
will fear you as long as there is a sun,
And before the moon
for generation after generation.
6 He
will descend like the rain upon the mown grass,
Like copious
showers that wet the earth.
7 In
his days the righteous one will sprout,
And the abundance
of peace until the moon is no more.
8 And
he will have subjects from sea to sea
And from the River
to the ends of the earth.
9 Before
him the inhabitants of waterless regions will bow down,
And his very
enemies will lick the dust itself.
10 The kings of
Tar´shish and of the islands—
Tribute they will
pay.
The kings of She´ba
and of Se´ba—
A gift they will
present.
11 And to him
all the kings will prostrate themselves;
All the nations,
for their part, will serve him.
12 For he will
deliver the poor one crying for help,
Also the afflicted
one and whoever has no helper.
13 He will feel
sorry for the lowly one and the poor one,
And the souls of
the poor ones he will save.
14 From
oppression and from violence he will redeem their soul,
And their blood
will be precious in his eyes.
15 And let him
live, and to him let some of the gold of She´ba be given.
And in his behalf
let prayer be made constantly;
All day long let
him be blessed.
16 There will
come to be plenty of grain on the earth;
On the top of the
mountains there will be an overflow.
His fruit will be
as in Leb´a·non,
And those who are
from the city will blossom like the vegetation of the earth.
17 Let his name
prove to be to time indefinite;
Before the sun let
his name have increase,
And by means of him
let them bless themselves;
Let all nations
pronounce him happy.
18 Blessed be
Jehovah God,
Who alone is doing
wonderful works.
19 And blessed
be his glorious name to time indefinite,
And let his glory
fill the whole earth.
Amen and Amen.
20 The prayers of David, the son of Jes´se, have come to their end. (New
World Translation, 1984)
The repetition of pleasant, even exquisite, earthly
images draws attention to spiritual and physical blessings of paradise restored
on earth, a recurrent Biblical theme (see, e.g., Isaiah 11:6-9). Walt Whitman’s (lived 1819-1892 C.E.) “Miracles” also uses
repetition, of such simple images that we infer that what we take for granted
in the world around us, from a spiritual or physical point of view, deserves a
lot better press.
Miracles (Whitman, 1900/2005)
Why! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love—or sleep in the bed at night with any one I
love,
Or sit at table at dinner with my mother,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds—or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sun-down—or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring;
Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best—mechanics,
boatmen, farmers,
Or among the savans—or to the soiree—or to the opera,
Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery,
Or behold children at their sports,
Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman,
Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial,
Or my own eyes and figure in the glass;
These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring—yet each distinct, and in its place.
To me, every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same;
Every spear of grass—the frames, limbs, organs, of men and women, and all that
concerns them,
All these to me are unspeakably perfect miracles.
To me the sea is a continual miracle;
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—the ships, with men in
them,
What stranger miracles are there?
Whitman made his
poetic images resound through repetition. Through repetition, fiction writers
may accent a character’s physical or
personality traits. Note how Landers (2005l) repeatedly refers to an obsession
of cleanliness in the neurotic main character in this excerpt from his story
entitled “The Day the Sky Rained Soap Suds”:
*
Abner Normal squeezed the button on his can of
Lysol spray, filling his living-room with strong-smelling mist.
“Take that!” he said. “Miserable
germs!” He coughed on the clouds of mist, but he didn’t care.
“I hate germs and I hate dirt!”
he said.
But killing germs didn’t make
him feel better. He gazed angrily out his living-room window. Scraps of paper
littered the road. Dust covered sidewalks. For that matter, dust covered
everything. And factory and car exhaust fogged the air.
“I can’t stand it!” he
exclaimed. “Why is this city so grimy?”
He yanked at his hair. Two
handfuls fell to the floor. But Abner Normal didn’t take any notice of his two
new bald spots. He anxiously searched the sky. He watched a thick bank of dark
clouds roll in from the west. They twisted and billowed. Soon they’d drench the
city with rain polluted from dirty air.
“I’m going to clean up this
miserable city once and for all!” he shouted. “I’ll be a hero!” (paragraphs
1-7)
Write a paragraph of fiction
that introduces a character, and use
repetition to make certain traits memorable. Note that a writer
might use character tags—idiosyncrasies
or physical or malevolent attributes (e.g., “Mr. Boston eyed the young lady’s diamond necklace once again” [is Mr. Boston a thief? If he is, his eyeing
would represent a character tag]) that he or she refers to repetitively—especially for characters not mentioned for many
pages, thereby reminding the reader of their significant personality and/or
physical features. A woman’s big nose
might remind the reader of her incessant nosiness. A man’s cold hands might serve as a tag for his lack of
compassion. Brooks (1982) refers to character tags as
those
external aspects—either visual or aural—that set one character apart from another. Whether the
details are of physical appearance, clothing or speech, they should be vivid and symbolic—for they are the permanent or habitual qualities of
your characters that identify them and make them memorable…[For example,] Grandmother
always had a jigsaw puzzle set up somewhere, and she would sit for hours
aimlessly pushing the pieces around. She never seemed to care if she finished
the puzzles. They merely provided an excuse to sit and think about how her life
had turned out. (p. 129)
Personally, I have a lot of fun thinking up character
tags. I love the way they can prompt characters to jump to life in readers’ minds, and I have taken many lessons about their
resurrecting power from one of my favourite writers—Charles Dickens. He
was
a genius at creating memorable characters [with memorable character tags]. Some
were so exaggerated that they were almost caricatures—but never quite. Instead, he made them more real to us
than most of the people we meet in our own lives.
Even if you’re not
as brilliant a storyteller as Dickens, you can still bring your characters to
life; you can still put memorable, powerful people into your storytelling.
After all, if your characters aren’t
memorable, you have no story. (Card, 1988, p. 30)
In
David Copperfield, Dickens’ (1849-1850/1985) Uriah Heep repetitively rubs “his skinny-fingered hands together [a character tag]” (Card, 1988, p. 30), reminding the reader of his
false humility and stab-others-in-the-back malevolence. Of course, if Uriah
Heep had been a real person, there would have been more to him than his rubbing
together his bony hands; really, in the sense that you create characters to
fulfill certain dramatic requirements of your story, they are not real, but
simplified, people.
For example, David Copperfield (Perdue, 1997-2006c) may
autobiographically relate to Charles Dickens himself, but David Copperfield is
not a real person: “Real people live in the world as
it is” (Scholes & Klaus, 1971, p. 74). Neither the
story, novel, nor play defines the world “as it is,” but
rather each defines a world as the writer writes it. In the real world, “biological, psychological, and social conditions
affect the behavior of real people” (p. 74)
in a holistic sense. Not so in the story, novel, or play, in which “dramatic and [in particular for the play] theatrical
necessities determine the nature of characters. Thus characters are like real
people in some respects, but in other respects they are not like real people at
all” (p. 74).
Memorable characters exist in the simplified world of the
story, novel, or play, and those characters’ complexity, even in a sophisticated character study,
will lack the complexity of a real person in his or her lifeworld. Writers
accept this axiom. Even writers of complex characters—e.g., Leo Tolstoy (Leo Tolstoy, n.d. [lived 1828-1910
C.E.]) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Fyodor
Dostoevsky, n.d. [lived 1821-1881 C.E.])—humbly accepted the limitations of
their art and craft and worked with simplified characters within their
simplified lifeworlds.
End of Unit 2. Six more to
go.
Unit 3
Contents:
What elements combine in
fiction to tell, I mean show, a story? Now that you have worked and read
through Unit II, likely you agree that major elements include scene and
dialogue. Rockwell (1970) defines a scene in this way:
1.
One of the divisions of a drama; especially: a) A division of an act during
which there is no change of place or lapse in continuity of time. b) A part of
drama or narrative presenting a single situation, dialogue; an episode. 2. The
place in which the action of a story, play, etc. is laid; hence, place of
occurrence or action. (p. 82)
That sounds like a reasonable
definition. I could add that scenes generally take you along the plot-line,
from the story’s start to its finish.
Scenes in plays actually have names (Act 1, Scene 2). For
example,
Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 2 (Shakespeare [lived 1564-1616 C.E.], 1606/2000-2006)
SCENE II. A camp near Forres.
Alarum within. Enter
What bloody man is that? He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
The newest state.
MALCOLM
This is the sergeant
Who like a good and hardy soldier fought
‘Gainst my captivity. Hail, brave friend!
Say to the king the knowledge of the broil
As thou didst leave it.
[SERGEANT]
Doubtful it stood;
As two spent swimmers, that do cling together
And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald—
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villanies of nature
Do swarm upon him—from the western isles
Of kerns and gallowglasses is supplied;
And fortune, on his damned quarrel smiling,
Show’d like a rebel’s whore: but all’s too weak:
For brave Macbeth—well he deserves that name—
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish’d steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valour’s minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps,
And fix’d his head upon our battlements.
DUNCAN
O valiant cousin! worthy gentleman!
[SERGEANT]
As whence the sun ‘gins his reflection
Shipwrecking storms and direful thunders break,
So from that spring whence comfort seem’d to come
Discomfort swells. Mark, king of Scotland, mark:
No sooner justice had with valour arm’d
Compell’d these skipping kerns to trust their heels,
But the Norweyan lord surveying vantage,
With furbish’d arms and new supplies of men
Began a fresh assault.
DUNCAN
Dismay’d not this
Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?
[SERGEANT]
Yes;
As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.
If I say sooth, I must report they were
As cannons overcharged with double cracks, so they
Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorise another
I cannot tell.
But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.
So well thy words become thee as thy wounds;
They smack of honour both. Go get him surgeons.
Exit Sergeant, attended
Who comes here?
Enter ROSS
MALCOLM
The worthy thane of Ross.
What a haste looks through his eyes! So should he look
That seems to speak things strange.
ROSS
God save the king!
DUNCAN
Whence camest thou, worthy thane?
ROSS
From Fife, great king;
Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky
And fan our people cold. Norway himself,
With terrible numbers,
Assisted by that most disloyal traitor
The thane of Cawdor, began a dismal conflict;
Till that Bellona’s bridegroom, lapp’d in proof,
Confronted him with self-comparisons,
Point against point rebellious, arm ‘gainst arm.
Curbing his lavish spirit: and, to conclude,
The victory fell on us.
DUNCAN
Great happiness!
ROSS
That now
Sweno, the
Nor would we deign him burial of his men
Till he disbursed at Saint Colme’s inch
Ten thousand dollars to our general use.
DUNCAN
No more that thane of Cawdor shall deceive
Our bosom interest: go pronounce his present death,
And with his former title greet Macbeth.
ROSS
I’ll see it done.
What he hath lost noble Macbeth hath won.
Exeunt
Actors and sets may leave the stage while other actors
and sets arrive onstage, often behind a dropped curtain that signals formally
to the audience that shortly the play will launch a new scene or act. But
usually in fiction the reader gets the sense that one scene has ended
and another has begun. A writer will often place text, lengthy or, preferably,
short, between two scenes to create a transition from one to the other. Note
the transition texts [in blue] in the following
excerpt from the beginning of Landers’ (2005m)
story called “Cabbage and Confusion Don’t Mix”:
A brass bell jingled above the glass door.
Henry Cabbage, the new grocer in Krabb Cove, looked up. He stood behind the
silver cash register, his big lips stretching into a wide smile like a slice of
moon.
“Hello,” he said kindly. “Can
I kiss you?”
His customer, a lady, had been
admiring the shiny apples on his fruit stand. “Store is cleaner than that other
grocer kept it,” she’d nearly said. But Henry’s question almost made her curly
hair straight. “I beg your pardon?” she said indignantly.
Henry saw that she was upset.
He felt bad. “Something bothering you today, oh witch?” he asked, and his wide
smile grew even wider.
The lady’s face turned white. “Just
who do you think you are?” she exclaimed.
Confused Henry scratched his
round head. He had terrible dandruff. His hair began to snow. His thick eyebrows
knitted together. He opened his mouth to speak. But, like a fiery wind sweeping
out the door, she left, slamming the door so hard that all the windows rattled.
Henry shook his shaggy head.
The lady’s weird behaviour had bewildered him. “What a queer one,” he said, and
then he flicked a pesky fly off his raspberry nose.
Two hours later, he
felt even worse. His cash register shone, but it was empty.
“When will I make some money?”
he said. Henry wanted to make Krabb Cove his home, but he was broke.
Then, the brass bell jingled
again. “What a beautiful sound it has!” he thought.
A boy entered the shop. He had
knobby knees, elfish eyes, and a chicken tail. He wiped his nose on his sleeve,
and then he spoke:
“So you’re the new grocer.” He
sneered. “Hope you like frogs.” Grinning, he yanked a huge, green frog out of
his shirt and shoved it in front of Henry’s face. “Hope you like this one!”
Henry scowled. The frog had a
wart on its nose. Henry felt afraid. He didn’t want customers to come in and
find a frog in his store. He wanted to make some money! In short, he had to
sell food! And who’d buy food at a frog-filled store?
“If that is for me,” Henry
said nervously, “then I’d like to eat it, right now!”
“What?” the boy cried. “Eat a
frog?”
“Naturally,” Henry said,
noticing more ugly warts on the frog—hairy warts. It burped. Henry wondered, “Are
warts really contagious?”
The boy grinned. He shoved the
frog closer to Henry’s face.
Henry thought, “I told him I
wanted to eat it! I warned him!”
So Henry grabbed the clammy
beast, took aim, and pitched it through the nearest open window.
“Hey!” the boy wailed. “You
threw away my frog! Waaaa! I want
Henry couldn’t believe what he’d
heard. “I did no such thing!” he said sharply. “I ate it, but I certainly did not
throw it away!”
The horrible boy wouldn’t
listen. He ran home, sobbing until his lungs ached.
He’d planned to complain to his mother, but she was busy telling her husband
that the new grocer had wanted to kiss her, and that he’d called her a witch.
A
scene: a package of drama, a unit of text that lives through conflict that
characters experience, that propels the story forward, that allows readers an
emotional experience. Readers want an emotional experience beyond intellectual
curiosity. Well executed scenes provide what the reader yearns for, often as an
escape from his or her routine, as a sort of holiday from the mundane, and
these scenes, the writer hopes, disallow the reader from putting the book down
or, worse, shelving it indefinitely, even forever. So important are scenes that
you the writer
must
think in terms of [them]….You are
building scenes as you plan and write your story or novel.
For this is what a novel or a short story is: a
succession of scenes, some long, some short, all—like beads on a string—tied together by the story line. In film-making,
cutting the film is a crucial art, since how the film is cut—that is, how swiftly we move from one scene to the
next—is what determines its pace, a most important element.
Sometimes, in fact, judicious cutting has been know to salvage an otherwise
poor film, giving it a vitality and thrust it lacked before it reached the
cutting room. (Knott, 1977, p. 54)
Drama. Emotional intensity. Brevity. Interesting
characters with big problems to deal with and lots at stake. These elements
breathe energy into scenes. So does setting. By “the [sparing] filling in of background” (Bryant, 1978, p. 40), scenes exist with a setting “beating behind the words” (Boles, 1988, p. 14): “Even a story delivered entirely in dialogue—an experiment not to be encouraged” (p. 14)—[begs a place,
a setting, a] ‘thereness’ (p. 14) to happen within.
Most scenes use dialogue along with description and
narrative statements. Writers use a combination of elements designed to
characterize, dramatize, move along the story, entertain. Consider those
elements in these chapters from my serialized children’s novel, Quibils and Quirks (1997e, 1998,
1999):
Last
Episode/Chapter 5: Professor
Hamburger’s Dictionary said quibils stink, and Hooper, at school, watched a
boy chew a daddy-long-legs.
Chapter 6: Hooper’s Ears Catch “Fire”
Hooper quietly settled into a cold, empty desk. He
sniffed the air. It smelled like sweat. He noted sagging shelves of books that towered
up dark walls. A paper airplane soared across the room, landing in his ear.
Miss Snapdragon entered. She used the same red door that
Hooper had used, but she slammed it shut.
The students, including the daddy-long-legs-muncher,
swung around in their desks, facing her.
“My word,” Hooper thought. “She’s as skinny as a Zulu
warrior, and she has a lump of brown hair like an upside-down hornet’s nest.”
“Good morning!” she exclaimed.
“Good morning, Miss Snapdragon,” many droned.
“Where’s my new student?” She spied the rows. “Aha! There
you are. You look awfully old to be in grade one, Hooper Quirk.”
He tried to swallow; he couldn’t.
“You’re as orange as a carrot,” she said. “And you have
cauliflower ears.”
Hooper felt them. How hot they’d become!
“I’ll
bet they call you Hooper the Pooper,” said a boy with a square face.
Many
giggled.
“What’s
that?” Miss Snapdragon said, scanning the children, like a Roman general
scanning slaves. “Children who get out-of-hand write LINES.” And she glared at
Hooper as if he were the cause of all her problems.
Next
Episode/Chapter 7: Hooper’s first day at school gets worse—and worse!
Last
Episode/Chapter 6: Miss Snapdragon told Hooper he had cauliflower ears; a
boy called him “Hooper the Pooper.”
Chapter 7: Hooper Quits School
“Hooper the Pooper,” the square-faced boy said again, but
quietly.
Many stifled giggles.
“People and vegetables should be separate!” announced
Miss Snapdragon. “Why are you here?”
“I—I want to be a
martian,” Hooper replied.
The class roared with laughter.
“Quiet!” Miss Snapdragon stepped forward. “That’s BETTER.
Now—why do you want to be a martian?”
“I want to be green.”
The next rock-slide of laughter was too much. Out of the
school Hooper ran.
“Come back here!” she ordered.
But
he kept on running.
Miss
Snapdragon demanded quiet; the children laughed harder.
“One hundred LINES for EVERYBODY!” she yelled. “You BRATS!”
Hooper
stomped homeward, along a snaky trail. Along the way, he found Mooch hanging
like a bat from a spruce limb. Mooch’s chicken tail aimed at the ground.
Hooper, wiping his eyes, smiled. “What are you doing up there?”
“Shhhh,” Mooch said. “The king and I are playing
hide-and-stop-seek.” He explained: both hid, and then the first one to...He
stopped. Straightening his legs, and flipping like a cat, he landed on his feet
on the ground. “Aren’t you early to be going home from school?” he asked.
“I hate school.”
Next
Episode/Chapter 8: King Quibil hears about Hooper’s awful day—and decides that all the quibils should march into
town.
* * *
Last Episode/Chapter 30: King Quibil called Mooch a spy and sent him to the
dungeon to join Mr. and Mrs. Quirk.
Chapter 31: Miss Snapdragon Remembers Hooper The
Pooper
Two
guards had tied rope around Mooch’s ankles. They lowered him headfirst into the
dungeon. Blood rushed to his head. The pressure made him feel as if his brain
might explode. He felt queasy, too, and wondered if he could keep from throwing
up (down) on Mr. and Mrs. Quirk.
“I’m
going to break your necks!” Mrs. Quirk yelled. “You fur balls!”
Mooch
covered his mouth...
*
As
he did this, Miss Snapdragon, in her living- room, poured a glass of pepper
juice, and grumbled:
“I hate children!” She placed the crystal juice decanter
back in her dusty china cabinet. “I hate the way they cough and burp.”
“Brats!”
She settled down between lumpy cushions on a love seat. “That rotten child,”
she said. “Hooper the Pooper! Ha! He has ears like a cauliflower. Ha!” She
swatted a horsefly in midair. It crashed on the wood-stove, twitched on its
back, and began to smoke. And she remembered telling Hooper that people and
vegetables should be separate. “Haaaaaa!”
A splash of pepper juice tumbled into her windpipe. Her
chest burned. Awkwardly, she placed the glass on a rosewood table, trying to
compose herself. But coughs shot up her windpipe, like Roman candle-fireballs.
Next
Episode/Chapter 32: Arthur, the baker, threatens to get Miss Snapdragon
fired.
Last
Episode/Chapter 31: Miss Snapdragon
got pepper juice in her windpipe, and began a coughing fit.
Chapter 32: “I Teach Brats”
Stooped over in pain, Miss Snapdragon paced back and
forth. She wiped her stinging eyes. The phone rang.
“Hello!” she said.
“Hello.”
“For goodness sakes.” She coughed. “Who is this?”
“Arthur, the baker.”
“Well, whoopee-do.” Then she thought she saw a face at
the window above the velvet armchair. She took a second look, but all she saw
between the open blue curtains were lilac leaves.
“The town council wants to speak to you about the quibil
invasion this morning,” Arthur said. “We want to meet you at the Town Hall
immediately.”
“Is that a fact? Well, I’m no town father. I’m a teacher.
I teach brats—children.” She coughed. Her
throat hurt. “Why don’t you phone the mayor? Isn’t he supposed to be in charge?
Or is he too fat to make the trip all the way to the Town Hall?”
“You, you...” He nearly called her a bag of wind. “Some
of us think there’s a link between your new student, Hooper, and the quibil
invasion.” The baker took a deep breath. “So, Miss Snapdragon, you must come—or I’ll have the Town Council fire you.”
“That’s telling her,” his nearby wife said.
“Fine, then!” Miss Snapdragon slammed down the receiver. “You
idiots!”
Next Episode/Chapter 33: Miss Snapdragon, forced
to attend a meeting at the Town Hall, does what she does best—insult people.
If I have done my job as a fiction writer properly, these
chapters should, through my use of dialogue, description, and narrative
statements characterize, dramatize, move along the story, and entertain. As for
dialogue, “the most important thing is to choose language appropriate to the
[character], so that the reader ‘sees’ what he or she may be thinking” (Leavitt & Sohn, 1979, p. 175). In addition,
make
the [dialogue] lead up to a climax, to a positive conclusion from what has been
said. The reader should finish with the feeling that the subject is over, at
least for the time being, and that the next bit of talk will be about something
else. (p. 175)
The trick for writers: to make the dialogue sound
realistic when in fact it often isn’t
realistic at all. Have you ever seen a transcript of an interview? The
hideously large number of ums and aws and other word whiskers and unfinished
thoughts that often inundate interview text rests as the definitive proof that
real differs markedly from dramatic dialogue.
Tape
a casual, spontaneous conversation and transcribe it to paper. What was exciting
and alive to the ear is now erratic, unintelligible, and dull. Most of all, it
appears unrealistic. Good dialogue is not actual speech, but it contains the
flavor of actual speech….Good dialogue
sounds natural but is not verbatim. This means written speech [dialogue as
found in fiction] is often condensed and brief. (Irwin & Eyerly, 1988, pp. 91-92)
Irwin and Eyerly (1988) explain that “if fiction is artful lying, dialogue is pure deception” (p. 91). What does that mean? If “art mimics reality” (Schulwolf, n.d., para. 1), and fiction is a “string
of lies” (Rosenberg, 1992, p. 75), then fiction and its dialogue are “only an
approximation of reality, not reality itself” (Irwin & Eyerly, 1988, p.
91). Consider this single-scene vignette
and ask yourself, would a grandfather and his granddaughter really speak this
way to each other? And yet, does the dialogue seem to work nevertheless?
My Front Teeth (2000a,
p. 8)
“I love you, Grandpa,” Mary said, as she sat on his knee.
“I love you, Pumpkin,” Grandpa said.
“I’m getting new teeth,” she said. “They’re popping
through my gums.”
“You’re getting new teeth,” Grandpa said, “and I’m
getting old.”
“See my gaps?” Mary said. She pointed to her mouth. “I’m
getting new teeth, and I’m getting bigger.”
“So you are.” He nodded. “Does that mean I’m getting
bigger too?” he asked.
“Everybody gets bigger,” Mary told him. “Patches got
bigger. He’s a mutt, and now he’s fat. Doesn’t he waddle like a duck?”
“Yes, he’s a big, fat dog,” Grandpa said. “If he loses
his teeth, will he get bigger?”
“Everybody gets bigger,” Mary said. “That’s how people
fill up their skin.”
“I haven’t filled up my skin yet?” he asked.
“Look at your hand,” Mary said. “See the wrinkles? See
the wrinkles on your face? You haven’t filled up your skin yet, Grandpa.”
“But you don’t have wrinkles,” he said.
“That’s because I’m too small,” Mary explained.
“You’re not too small to grow new teeth, though, are you?”
he asked.
“Grandpa!” Mary frowned, and then added, “I’m going to
grow new teeth and I’m going to grow up to be just like you.”
“And shave?” Grandpa asked.
“Will you still love me if I don’t shave?” Mary asked.
“Still love you?” Grandpa said. “What makes you think I’ve
stopped?”
“Do you still love me, even though I lost my two front
teeth?” Mary asked.
Grandpa said, “Yes, Pumpkin”—and then they hugged.
Do you find the dialogue “condensed and brief”? I hope so. Does the vignette give you the sense of
what a scene should do as a dramatic unit? And, as for this case, does the
gentle conflict allow you an emotional experience? I hope so. Does the vignette
fill in for you what the grandpa and granddaughter think and feel? I hope so.
Note that just as dialogue in a scene fills in the reader’s
sense of what characters think and feel, description in a scene fills in his or
her sense of “place” and “time.” Rockwell (1970) refers to “a place boundary”
and “a time boundary” (p. 82), implying that the writer needs to use
description to define “the where” and “the when.” Sometimes writers play with
such rules. For example, “My Front Teeth” makes “the where” Grandpa’s lap and “the when”
Grandpa-and-Mary-the-Granddaughter time.
I. The Scene
Find a scene
from a short story or novel and write it out.
II. More Scenes
Draw a box
around each scene in the story that you wrote in Unit 2. (Why do you think I’m asking you to do this?)
Write a scene. Think about how you will mix dialogue, narrative
statements, and description without slowing down the story. And think about
using a general comment to start a scene. For example, will you start with a
general comment and then move on to specifics? Landers does that in the
beginning of “Cabbage and Confusion Don’t Mix”:
A brass bell jingled above the glass door [What
and whose brass bell? What and whose glass door? Upcoming specifics answer
those questions]. Henry Cabbage, the new grocer in Krabb Cove, looked up. He
stood behind the silver cash register, his big lips stretching into a wide
smile like a slice of moon.
The setting creates a
backdrop, a sense of place, and prepares the reader for the upcoming dramatic
interchange between Henry Cabbage and his first customer, a lady he horrifies.
Hemingway (1936/1995) starts “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and
its first scene by saying: “It was now lunchtime and they were all sitting
under the double green fly of the dining tent pretending that nothing had
happened” (quoted in Rockwell, 1970, p. 86).
Hemingway establishes a time and to some degree a place. Then the first
and succeeding scenes unfold specifics about what has just happened where and
to whom.
Perhaps you will end your scene with a general comment or
summary statement. The single-scene vignette “My Front Teeth” ends with “Grandpa
said, ‘Yes, Pumpkin’—and
then they hugged,” which summarizes the warmth and
love between a grandfather and his granddaughter. The end of the second scene
in Landers’ “Cabbage and Confusion Don’t Mix” summarizes the
weird conversation between strange Henry and an insolent boy toting a
wart-ridden frog, and sets up scene three.
The horrible boy wouldn’t listen. He ran home,
sobbing until his lungs ached. He’d planned to complain to his mother, but she
was busy telling her husband that the new grocer had wanted to kiss her, and
that he’d called her a witch.
You need to think about how
to begin and end scenes. A catchy start combined with a catchy finish suits me,
but a broader sense of that word catchy exists in these words: convocative (van Manen, 2002a), evocative
(van Manen, 2002b), invocative (van Manen, 2002c), provocative (van Manen,
2002d), revocative (van Manen, 2002e), and vocative (van Manen, 2002g).
You may find my references to van Manen’s writing peculiar, in view of his stature as a phenomenologist
rather than a fiction writer, but he makes interesting comments about meaning
in text that writers in any genre should consider. As he says, “the more vocative
a text, the more strongly the meaning is embedded within it” (2002f, para. 1).
As a phenomenologist, I think about that, but as a poet and a fiction and
non-fiction writer, I also think about that. The references in the previous
paragraph also help me think about the need for depth and breadth and layers of
meaning in text, whether in a line of poetry, in a scene, or at the start or
finish of a scene.
All right, then. Write a scene.
IV. Scene as in a Stage or
Radio Play, or a Movie
Scriptwriters, like fiction
writers, must master the use of scene. Movie scripts use scenes, which include
dialogue, and they also include directions for physical movement and
camera-shots (long-distance, middle-distance, close-up, panning). They may
describe the sets and type of music needed. Play scripts also use scenes, but
they clearly don’t describe camera shots. Naturally radio play scripts also use
scenes. But radio plays differ from other play forms largely due to their need
for sound effects (a phone ringing and ringing and ringing in a radio play
could have a riveting, suspenseful effect on a radio audience). (Note: Radio
plays air most weekdays on
An excellent, perhaps definitive, book on the different
forms of scriptwriting, with respect to your writing for television, motion
pictures, the stage, animation, and radio, entitled The Complete Book of
Scriptwriting, by J. Michael Straczynski (1996), discusses much more than
the use of scene to make a script. Scriptwriters need to know “the business,” a
somewhat complicated business of writers knowing who to contact, how to present
an idea and a finished manuscript and to whom, and how to keep in the
business. You could call this information the nuts and bolts of scriptwriting.
To help you think about screenplays, consider this a
plot-line summary for I Am Sam, a screenplay:
Sam Dawson has the mental capacity of a
7-year-old. He works at a Starbucks and is obsessed with the Beatles. He has a
daughter with a homeless woman; she abandons them as soon as they leave the
hospital. He names his daughter Lucy Diamond (after the Beatles song), and
raises her. But as she reaches age 7 herself, Sam’s limitations start to become
a problem at school; she’s intentionally holding back to avoid looking smarter
than him. The authorities take her away, and Sam shames high-priced lawyer Rita
Harrison into taking his case pro bono. In the process, he teaches her a great
deal about love, and whether it’s really all you need. (Plot Summary for I
Am Sam, 1990-2006, para. 1)
Here is the first scene of the movie, just before Lucy’s birth:
I Am
Sam (2001)
by Kristine Johnson &
Jessie Nelson.
Shooting draft, 2001.
INT. STARBUCKS -
We’re watching a
pair of hands arrange white sugar packets,
blue Equal packets,
and pink Sweet and Low into small
containers. With precision and lightning speed, the mixed
up
colors and crumpled
packets are transformed into neat little
color-coded
rows. Wait, this container has three
Equals and
four Sweet ‘n’
lows. The hand quickly plucks the mutant
Sweet ‘n’ Low. There.
Symmetry.
We move up those
hands and meet SAM DAWSON as he surveys his
domain. Something about him. He’s extremely compelling,
uniquely
handsome. But it’s more than that. Those eyes,
they sparkle with
the wonder of a child. Life’s cynical
edge
has not etched it’s
path across this face. They light on a
COFFEE CUP held by
one of the Regulars.
SAM
Double double decaf low-fat Cap.
BRUCE
You got it, buddy.
SAM
Good choice very good choice.
Sam moves along,
commenting to CUSTOMERS as he places Sweet
‘n Lows on tables,
the self-appointed host of Starbucks.
SAM (CONT’D)
Mocha rumba Frappuccino no
whipped, half
low, half non. Excellent choice. Very
good choice.
He stops in front
of sale mugs and turns them so that the
logos all face the
same way. His boss GEORGE approaches.
GEORGE
Sam, they called. It’s time for you to
go.
Sam FREEZES, but
doesn’t turn around.
GEORGE (CONT’D)
Sam, did you hear me?
SAM
“It’s time for you to go.”
GEORGE
Yes.
SAM
It’s time.
GEORGE
Good luck.
Without another
word, Sam walks straight out the door.
EXT.
Of
course, a music-score and directions for camera shots would add other dramatic
elements to the script. That said, Straczynski (1996) so thoroughly discusses a
multitude of dramatic elements, including a survival-guide approach to the
business side of scriptwriting, in particular screen writing, that I freely
recommend his book to aspiring screen writers. If, however, you want to learn
mostly about playwriting for the theatre, then I recommend The Art and Craft
of Playwriting, by Jeffrey Hatcher (1996).
Notice that the scene from I Am Sam “isn’t a random stretch of action. It arises for a reason,
and it’s going somewhere. It has meaning. It has point: at
least one thing that needs to be shown or established at that spot in a
[screenplay, story, or other fiction]”
(Dibell, 1988, p. 43). That first scene of I Am Sam tells us many
things. It creates a “sense of place
and time, an anticipation of what’s to come, a
reflection of what’s past. But first and foremost, a
scene must advance the plot and demonstrate the [personality of its] characters” (p. 43).
Now, view a scene from a
movie. Write down:
1.
Dialogue (who says what?).
2.
Camera-shots (close ups, medium shots, panoramic views).
3. Physical movement (do characters move, and if they do, from
where to where?).
4.
Mood/type of music (describe any changes).
Next, write your own scene-script (one scene) for a stage or radio
play, or movie.
Remember that “scenes
are…specific stages by which your…character[s’]
motivations are enacted against opposition, internal or external or both” (Dibell, 1988, p. 44). Remember, too, that “a motivation against no opposition is boring” (p. 44).
V. Writers Approximate,
Mood and Tone
Imagine a lake-side artist
painting a landscape. Does he include everything that he sees, every shape,
object, and color, or does he approximate through the breadth of his brush
and/or trowel strokes? In the spirit of that question, consider a commercial
photograph. To the precision possible given the quality of the camera and its
film used, that photograph cannot focus on detail beyond a certain limit, but
must at least meet a level of acceptability deemed necessary by its
photographer and a consumer willing to purchase it. Now then, consider the
detail necessary for not only a photographer and his customer, but also an
artist and his buyers, and a writer and his readers: You see a commonality
here, don’t you?
Writers, like artists, use strokes, although they are word
strokes, with a variety of breadth. My father, an artist who sold abut two
thousand paintings during his career, taught me the value of well-placed globs
or smears (strokes) of paint.
I was ten when he told me, “You can’t put
everything in a painting, son. Not even Robert Bateman [Robert Bateman, n.d.]
can do that.” He held up a trowel and a wide
brush. “That’s what these
are for.” He taught me that artists approximate and that
viewers of paintings, through their imaginations, fill in the grass blades, the
leaves, the minuscule bubbles of a stream.
Up
close, his paintings’ brush and trowel strokes that
depicted valleys, mountains, farm scenes, waterfalls, ocean waves crashing,
meadows, and streams deep in rainforest, looked, to me, clumsy and rough;
however, from a distance of ten feet from the canvas, I saw how these coarse
experiments in oil transformed into wild statements of energy that celebrate
nature. He achieved these transformations through approximations.
Writers approximate too. In Unit 2, I discussed a writer’s need for brevity of words, especially in view of
today’s reader who quickly bores of too many details.
Really, brevity of words = approximation. Writers don’t describe everything in, say, a room. To try to write
about it all is ridiculous. They describe what they need to describe, letting
the reader fill in the rest. The writer’s choosing the right details creates the tone, mood,
and focus necessary for the story. The right details also allow the reader to
fill in, through his or her imagination, what the writer chooses not to
mention.
As a writer, you might say a house is “a big, white box with lots of windows and purple
curtains” (from my Quibils and Quirks, 1997e, 1998,
1999, Chapter 22), or you might take Dickens’ (1852-1853/1993) route in Bleak House, as
related by Esther Summerson, a first-person narrator of much of the novel:
It was one of those delightfully irregular
houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where
you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where
there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find
still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green
growth pressing through them. Mine, which we entered first, was of this kind,
with an up-and-down roof, that had more corners in it than I ever counted
afterwards, and a chimney (there was a wood-fire on the hearth) paved all
around with pure white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the
fire was blazing. Out of this room, you went down two steps, into a charming
little sitting-room, looking down upon a flower-garden, which room was
henceforth to belong to
This description of Bleak House continues for about seven
hundred more words. Does Dickens overload the text with description? Some might
say yes. But many Victorian readers celebrated Dickens (Perdue, D.,
1997-2006a). They loved his stories, his characters, and his descriptions,
which provided many with pictures of scenes outside, far outside, their
lifeworlds. Curiously, this master storyteller and character spinner appeals to
many readers today. His novels provide the modern reader with a unique historical
perspective that transports him or her well over one hundred and fifty years
into the past, providing pictures of scenes outside, far outside, their
experience.
His [Dickens’] voice is so distinctive and
inviting, his characters so vivid, the plots so engaging even at their most
absurd, his style so flexible and expressive that I find him far superior to
anyone writing today. He is so infectious a writer that it is easy to get lost
in his art and never want to come out again. (Hearn in Perdue, 1997-2006a,
para. 14 [last para.])
Today’s reader
reading a contemporary novel, however, likely won’t put up with eight or nine hundred words of
description unless they speak ingeniously, hypnotically, very
entertainingly, to that reader. And yet, he or she likely will put up with some
description, especially if the writer doesn’t forget about the energy that action, not static
description, generally injects into a story. Seuling (1991) would agree:
Details
in books...tend to help create atmosphere, but if they are implanted correctly,
they do not intrude on the reader. Descriptive information about characters and
settings should be woven into the action, the real storytelling, and only if it’s
important. To say that a girl has pigtails is obtrusive. To say that a girl’s
pigtails flew out behind her as she raced down the street gives the reader more
significant information about the behavior of your character. (pp. 100-101)
This discussion about description, brevity of words,
approximation, and action reflects previous discussions in this course; your
completely understanding these concepts will help you write stories or
especially novels that readers will actually finish. Consider how Landers
(2005a) uses sparse description, understated satire, and at least a sense of
action to create a most peculiar classroom setting and satirically humourous
tone for the beginning of his novel Margins:
Our class in the abandoned girl’s bathroom with
a pink door had begun. A shortage of space existed district wide. A grade-eight
student who apparently had no friends whatsoever had set the curtains in the
library at Central High ablaze last year, turning the entire wooden structure
into a pile of smoky ashes. Twin-engine planes bombed it repeatedly with orange
powder, but the flames rose like Alexander the Great. They climaxed in a
refractive heat swell that people felt for a block all around the school; then
they retreated quickly into benign bits of fire that firemen with hoses easily
conquered.
The pink-doored cuboid looked
better than the room without windows in the basement of my small school. In
that sub-room, the building’s main sewer pipe ran from ceiling to floor, like a
crooked, rusty pillar. I could have chosen that rectangular place for my
classroom, but it looked like a tomb.
For a time, my students and I
shared the “pink” room with three toilets, but after four requisitions to the
maintenance department, they finally disappeared. One Tuesday we were still in
the “only diarrhea-proof classroom in the district,” as I sometimes told my
secondary alternate students. The next day the toilets and the pink stalls had
been removed, replaced by three plywood sewer plugs. The Grabber, as some
students called the speckled fungus that had grown and made itself at home in
one of the bowls, was gone. Forensically, the only elements that betrayed the
room as a genuine classroom were the size, the pink door and window trim, the
many capped pipes that stuck out of the walls, and the aluminium vent that
joined our space with two other bathrooms on the same floor of the building
with no name. One bathroom served boys and men, the other, girls, women, and
staff.
Once our red-faced, wrinkly
Superintendent of Schools told me laughingly, “At the Board Office nobody knows
what to call this old building. Myself, I call it The Barn. Ha!” (Chapter 1,
paragraphs 1-3)
Do you want to continue reading the novel? If you do,
then, for you, Landers has succeeded as a writer. Surely you want readers to
want to continue reading your work. You desire to succeed as a writer. Armed
with an understanding about description, brevity of words, approximation, and
action, in the light of that desire, write a
paragraph or paragraphs to start a story or novel, giving the reader a setting
without describing too many things in too much detail. If you weave action into
the description—all the better. And give the paragraph a mood, a tone—an atmosphere.
VI. More Mood and Tone
Rewrite that
beginning you just wrote with a totally different mood, tone, atmosphere.
Write what you
feel like writing: a few poems, a short story, a chapter or two for a
novel, a radio play, a one-act play, or
a short movie-script.
End of Unit 3. Five more to
go.
Unit 4
Contents:
I. Poetry, Beginnings, Meter
As you continue to read
poetry, you will likely discover many types. Some you may like, others you may
never like. A poem may be metaphysical, extranatural, narrative, lyric,
dramatic, metrical, rhyming, or free verse (Bugeja, 1994). Scholars and poets
frequently delineate poetry, drawing attention to words such as: acrostic,
ballad, cinquain, clerihew, diamante, didactic, epic, epigram, epitaph,
etheree, fable, ghazal, haiku, kyrielle, kyrielle sonnet, lanturne, limerick,
minute poetry, mirrored refrain, monody, monorhyme, naani, nonet, ode, ottava
rima, palindrome, pantoum, quatern, quatrain, quinzaine, rispetto, rondeau,
rondel, rondelet, sedoka, senryu, septolet, sestina, shape poetry, song,
sonnet, tanka, terza rima, terzanelle, tetractys, tongue twister, triolet,
tyburn, and villanelle; and even drawing attention to new forms of poetry such
as: alliterisen, clarity pyramid, diatelle, epulaeryu, essence, lento, lannet,
la’tuin, monchielle, monotetra, paradelle, pleaides, rictameter, swap quatrain,
trijan refrain, triquatrain, trios-par-huit, and villonet (Types of Poetry,
2000-2006).
No matter what labels poets or scholars place on poems,
however, they share this commonality: “poetry
is an experiment in the use of the power, the capacity, the emotional impact of…words” (Jones, 1978, p. 87). Often our “lives are made up of the trivial” (p. 87) and mundane, but poetry is different. It “concerns itself with the opposite” (p. 87), the sublime side of experience. It stands “self-evidently [as] the most highly concentrated form
of language” (p. 87). Its intensity of
language, and essence of experience—often
referred to implicitly (Lukiv, 2006b or 2007)—allow the reader to see into the heart and mind of the
poet or the poet’s implied author or both.
The reader takes an emotional and possibly intellectual
ride; the poet hopes the reader finds the ride, the experiment in language,
cathartic. But “a poem is not a piece of writing designed to allow its readers
to express their feelings” (Dessner,
1979, p. 144). Rather, a poem is “an expression
of its author’s feelings” (p. 144), and
generally, good readers of
a
good poem [each similar conclusions]…about
the nature of the feelings expressed by it. A poor poem, one in which there is
little [or a confusing] expression of feelings, gives its readers little to
agree about. (p. 144)
A good poet, then, has the
good sense to try to make his or her work sensible/acceptable to readers in
general, or at least to readers of a specific poetic school of thought.
A good poet, too, has the good sense to submit his or her
work to appropriate publishing venues (see the sub-section A Warning for
Writers, in Unit 2). Perhaps a poet writes free verse, which, according to
Jerome (1980), “uses lines that are of any length
the poet chooses, without any set measure (or meter)” (p. 26). That poet will not submit poetry to literary
journals that publish only rhyming or metrical verse. Conversely, a poet who
writes rhymes won’t submit work to a journal whose
editor(s) refuse(s) to publish rhyme. Why anger or frustrate editors? Don’t you feel that editors who make their wishes clear
according to a specific poetic school of thought deserve to receive what they
wish for?
Given your respect for editor’s needs, your experiments in poetic language, I hope,
will fill print or Web pages of literary journals or anthologies and even
collections of your poems. If you choose to write metrical verse, you need a
concrete, full understanding of terms such as foot, feet, metre, and line
length (discussed in Unit 7). If you choose to write rhyming verse, you need a
solid understanding of the different sorts of rhymes (also discussed in Unit
7). If you choose to write free verse, you need a good understanding of how to
create a variety of line lengths (Jerome, 1980) and, as in most forms or types
of poetry,
Line Ends
Do you know how to enjamb? I coined that word from
enjambment, which in poetry refers to when
one line ends without a pause and continues
into the next line for its meaning. This is also called a run-on line. The
transition between the first two lines of Wordsworth’s poem “My Heart Leaps Up”
demonstrates enjambment: My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the
sky.” (Meyer, 2003, Enjambment)
Enjambment creates lines of suspense, anticipation,
tension, as opposed to end-stopped lines that create closure or resolve
conflict or tension (Jerome, 1980).
End-stopped lines reflect normal speech
patterns and are often marked by punctuation. The first line of Keats’s “Endymion”
is an example of an end-stopped line; the natural pause coincides with the end
of the line, and is marked by a period: A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
(Meyer, 2003, End-Stopped Line)
When poets, on the
other hand, combine the natural pause of an end-stop with the anticipation of
enjambment, they give birth to rhetorical line breaks, or “natural pauses or
units of meaning” (Jerome, 1980, p. 26). Jerome (1980) says that “many
free-verse poets of the early part of [the 1900s] used primarily rhetorical
line breaks, as in this passage from Amy Lowell’s ‘Lilacs’ [note the first five
lines], a poem you will find in most anthologies of American literature: ‘Lilacs,
/ False blue, / White, / Purple, / Color
of lilac, / Your great puffs of flowers / Are everywhere in this my New England’”
(p. 26). The commas in those first five lines are not as terminal as periods,
creating anticipation for the reader to carry on. Even stronger anticipation to
carry on, however, lies in the pure enjambment of “Your great puffs of flowers”?
You’re welcome to look
at the following collection of free verse, entitled The Lead Guitarist,
that I had published in 2000. You may find yourself quickly noting the
assortment of line breaks within frameworks of lyrical, narrative, and
near-metaphysical poetry, and, although the collection has no thematic
foundation for all 25 poems, you may find yourself noting an assortment of
themes that individual poems explore. I use the word explore because any
creative writing becomes some sort of experimental exploration.
The collection may help
you consider how you might prepare/format one of your own collections. Many
free Web sites exist that will allow you to place your formatted work online
for readers earth wide to view. For example, http://www.20m.com/
(Cheap Web Site Hosting, 2006) will allow you to set up a home page, and many
other pages too, free of charge.
I hope you enjoy the
work, with its variety of characters, subjects, and moods.
The Lead GuitaristÓ
(a collection of 25 poems)
by Dan Lukiv
Dedication: for Julie, Kimberly, Christine, Melissa, and
Heather
*
Many thanks to D. M. Thomas
Dan Lukiv is a poet, novelist, short
story and article writer, and an independent education researcher (hermeneutic
phenomenology). His creative writing has appeared in 18 countries. His formal
apprenticeship includes intensive personal direction from writers such as
Canada’s Professor Robert Harlow (Scann, a Canadian masterpiece), the
USA’s Paul Bagdon (West Texas Sunrise series), and England’s D. M.
Thomas (The White Hotel, an international masterpiece), and includes
studies at The University of British Columbia (The Creative Writing
Department), the acclaimed Humber School for Writers (poetry writing program),
and Writer’s Digest School (novel writing program).
He
and his wife have four daughters; one still lives at home (
He
serves as an elder in a congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Quesnel,
where he teaches public speaking.
Credits
Various
poems in this collection have appeared in one or more of A Journal of
Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetics, Western People, BC Teacher,
Firm Noncommittal, Green’s Magazine, The Speaker, The
Cariboo Observer, The Alberta Teachers’ Association Magazine, *spark, canadian
content, A Career Counselling Symposium (BCTF Lesson Aids), Coffee
Break, The Brunswickan, CHALLENGER international, Authors,
The Writers Publishing, Creative/Artistic Narratives of Illness,
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, The Journal of Secondary Alternate
Education, Students On the Net (Singapore), Deep South (New
Zealand), Artslink (South Africa), The English Teachers’
Online Network of South Africa, Current Accounts (England), Purple
Patches (England), Electric Acorn (Ireland), ars poetica
(Australia), The Bear Deluxe Magazine (USA), Landscaped: Collected
Calls of the Wild Anthology (USA), Poetry of the People (USA), Waterways:
Poetry in the Mainstream (USA), Academic Exchange Extra (USA), Neovictorian/Cochlea (USA), Syncopated
City (USA), Poetry Magazine (USA), Fuel (USA), Omnific (USA),
Poetic Voices (USA), Poetic
Realm (USA), Poetic License (USA), Fullosia Press (USA), Emotions
(USA), Up Dare? (USA), Anthology Magazine (USA), The
Sunflower Dream (USA), Pandaloon (USA), Writing (USA), Poetree
(USA), Poet’s Market (USA), Seeker Magazine (USA),
Creative Juices (USA), The Online Writer (USA), Improvijazzation
Nation (USA), Fresh Ground (USA), Poetry Explosion Newsletter
(USA), Entre Nous (USA), The Blind Man’s Rainbow (USA), and Arnazella
(USA).
Praise for The Lead Guitarist
“An original voice and a
quirky, deeply humane vision…[Lukiv’s] work deserves publication”,
D. M. Thomas,
“To come across original and
brilliant poetry, and to be moved by it upon first reading is a rare experience
for me...[Lukiv’s work] caused a...stir in my stomach”,
Robert Delamar, *spark.
“I enjoyed [this work]”, Rod
Riesco, Wilderswood Press (
“Well-written”, Melanie
Callahan, Caitlin Press.
“I truly enjoyed reading
[Lukiv’s poetry]”, I.R.B.,
“Very good,” Richard
Olafson, Ekstasis Editions.
“A good manuscript”, M. L. Moeller, Sunflower Press (
“[The poetry] has a definite quality”, Ekstasis Editions.
“Interesting”, Anamnesis Press (
“I have read and re-read,
and lived awhile with The Lead
Guitarist [collection]...of 25 poems. There is much in [Lukiv’s] work
that I admire”, William Slaughter, Mudlark
(
Table of Contents
The Poems
Tarantula
Winter
Reptile
Whirlpool
Night-Loons
Arctic
Killer
The
Goat
The
Lead Guitarist
The
Teacher
The
Graveyard Shift at 7-Eleven
The
Poet
The
Insomniac on a Military Base on P.E.I.
Her
Story
Dinner
for Two
Skipping
Stones
In
the Pickle-Jar
Latchkey
The
Kitten
One
Hot Day
Beer
Bottle-Knives
At
The Home
One
Way Ticket
The
Thinker
My
Home
Bowls
Beneath Leaks
Best
TARANTULA
Far from Scythian
Females, in
The Amazon-
Jungle of monster-
Leaves, where
Nobody severs
The right breast
To make the bow fit,
Little-clad
Men-folk eat
Tarantulas. Held
Between two sticks
Over flames that burn off
Leg-hair, the
Salty meat sizzles
And steams.
Tang and season are as
Foreign as a Visa card
Or an army helmet. But
Tarantulas abound. Crack
Open
The crustacean shell
For the jungle-
Candy.
An entomologist on CBC
Said you cannot compare
The meat to anything—
Not to rabbit or chicken:
Tarantula is to tarantula
As bullets are to bullets
And hate is to hate.
These people love tarantulas.
They love the spicy
Meat.
WINTER-REPTILE
In the dawning valley,
A
cloud-snake—
A
bread-dough-viper—
Lies
along the
Ice-mottled
river,
Sliding
from sand cliffs
To
beach-homes,
And
back,
Like
a fickle breeze,
Or
key-jumping
Jazzman.
It’s
a vapour-tunnel,
A
wintry plume on its belly,
A
vertebrate hiding from the sun
That
awakens people
And
burns fog.
WHIRLPOOL
Glacial water/
Blue-green silt spins
A whirlpool,
A twirling eyeball
That slides—as mindlessly
As a bullet—between
Diluvian boulders of
Discarded mountains,
Spinning, spinning
Like a planet
Or a dream,
But the raw current
Grabs hold,
Unwinding the weird screw,
And then it’s gone;
As quickly as life
Leaves the eye
At death,
It’s gone.
NIGHT-LOONS
The night, like this dock,
Is mine:
The dark waves of
Look oily—
Hardly a ripple—
As loons cry
(Their voices disturb me),
And I wonder:
Would I be happy
If I could remember everything
I’ve forgotten?
Another loon cries:
The sound is hollow and cold,
Like echoes in a barge.
I wonder:
Have I ever actually
Seen a loon?
I can’t remember.
ARCTIC KILLER
Polar bear:
Hiding,
With a paw,
Your black nose
(Ingenious)
As you stalk prey.
You’re eidolic,
A Portuguese man-of-war,
To the flesh
You eat.
Photographer-pilots
“Captured” you
In your white desert:
Click.
But you,
In an 8 by 10 paradox,
Weren’t there,
Like a
Without a virtual
Image.
Even infrared fails
To capture you
Who,
Like a black hole,
Harvests solar heat
That black skin
Absorbs.
Ultraviolet film
Exposes you:
A great,
Black amoeba,
As unphotogenic as
The small,
White seals
(They too are
Heat-absorbing miracles)
That you eat.
You stalk men—
You,
The most beautiful
Of all bears
(Some say)—
Just as Nimrod
Stalked men
In war-play.
In a zoo-cage
You’re adored
By awe-struck children
(“He’s so cute!”),
But in the wild,
Face to face,
You’re a gargoyle
With teeth
That kill.
THE GOAT
A cream goat,
Crusty with manure,
Has a full bag.
She butts away
Smaller goats.
She
wants a mouldy orange
Overlooked
in
Black mud.
THE LEAD Guitarist
From
a winter-scarred porch,
I peer at the skyline—
I’m a radar
Scanning for altitude
(Not that you should steer
By radar: that’s like inviting rocks
Into your hull).
I see lines of Trans Atlantic
Clouds
As grey as poor rhythm
And as long as Beethoven’s ninth.
But I imagine them as
Simply grey beasts,
Or ship-punching fists,
Or strings of blue hearts lost
In Les Paul-pickups—
Pickups that change finger-licking
Scribbles
Into electric licks
And screams.
I scan the blue sky above
The grey lines;
I’m a
Sighting a dream-wave,
A Cariboo logger
Attacking lunch,
And a sunbather
With red shades.
Before my day ends,
I’ll turn the colour blue
Into an overdrive-
Feast,
In spite of the ache—
In spite of
Me.
THE TEACHER
Electric heat and humidity
Assault me
This morning
In my classroom,
Both leftover from yesterday’s
Coup d’etat of summer.
I reach out to open a window,
But I discover a “fat” bee
Peering through Plexi-glas,
Helplessly still,
Watching the world
Die.
Its stinger-abdomen
Barely twitches.
Its wings,
Like agate-wafers,
Droop.
A clump of pollen,
As green as grasshopper blood,
Sticks to one leg:
I open the window, and
A page flies off my desk.
Armoured bits soon
Pulse and twitter.
Wings tremble.
The bee flies away,
Sleepily,
Mind you,
But off it goes,
With legs dangling
Like numb tentacles.
I sit at my desk—
Uncluttered at last!—
Peering at my lesson plan:
“Lead destroyed
But I look away,
Craning my neck
To feel cool air flowing
Across my face from the
Open window.
Yet again I feel cheated.
The children I’ve taught
Will leave.
You’d think I’d get used to
All this,
This last day,
But I don’t,
I haven’t.
I search for a travel brochure,
Anything to take me away,
For a few minutes,
Before the kids clamour down the hall
One last time
To say hello and
Goodbye.
THE
GRAVEYARD SHIFT AT 7-ELEVEN
PROLOGUE
“Just stay relaxed,” my new boss
Says, his mouth half full of
Burrito-bits.
I
A greasy-haired man
Without shoes, pants,
Or underwear—
Just a plaid shirt and red
Socks—
Asks for Export A,
Grips money in a
Yellow-fingered fist
And grins as if
He knows something
I don’t.
“Cat got your tongue?”
He asks before leaving, and
Then he holds a door open
For a short lady—
A librarian?—
A lady so shaken
That she drops her wallet
That spews out change
That he squats to retrieve.
Like a mannequin,
She can’t seem to move,
Refuse the change
That he drops into her hand,
Nor take her eyes off him.
He leaves,
Shaking his head
And
chuckling to
Himself.
II
A thick-necked man leans
Across the Windex-clean counter,
Grabs my shoulders,
And—
He has an Iroquois cut
(An orange and black strip
Of bristles):
This is not an
Afterthought—
And he says,
“Phone the police!
I take psycho-chemical drugs,
But they aren’t working!
I feel violent!
I’m going to do something
Terrible!”
His eyes look as if they belong
In a Van Gogh
Self-portrait.
He runs outside;
I phone the police while he
Blocks people from
Passing into or out of the store.
Nobody argues with him.
And finally,
Within four minutes,
Four officers (RCMP)
Reluctantly wrestle him,
In front of the doorway,
Into
handcuffs.
III
A bald, scrawny man
Kicks a “regular” gas pump,
Yells at it—
I can hear cursing
Through double-paned glass—
And then,
Waving a squeegee,
Like a Ninja warrior with his
Nunchaku,
He enters our temple of
Submarines
(He has only one earlobe),
And cries,
“Don’t phone the police!”
He smashes the squeegee
Through counter glass.
He attacks the cash register,
Coffee pots,
And freezer windows:
$10,000 damage in three minutes.
IV
Another man, vacant,
Like
a basement without a house,
Pulls
out a five from worn-out jeans,
Pays
for two litres of Coke,
Looks at his change,
And says,
“How much do I owe you?”
“You already paid,” I say.
“You must be mistaken,” he says.
We argue;
My partner, Burt, and he
Argue;
Burt gives up:
The customer pays him from
Another five,
And after that he pays me
From a ten.
He leaves,
But he returns, empty-handed,
Six minutes later,
And wants to buy more Coke.
We ignore his pleas for one hour;
Finally,
He leaves.
EPILOGUE
This was the graveyard shift
At
7-Eleven,
But I wrote it in the present
Because,
As a bored dog catcher,
Now,
I often relive drama
That was burned into my
Brain.
But what I really want to be,
I think,
Is a composer—
Not bad-tempered,
However,
Like Beethoven,
Nor moody,
Like Rachmaninoff,
Nor funny-looking,
Like Paul Williams,
Nor short-lived,
Like Mozart.
By the way,
I rented “Amadeus” last Monday night,
And I loved the music,
But I thought it was terrible
That Mozart wrecked
Salieri’s life.
THE POET
The man in the living-room (gyproc
And oak trim)
Can’t see his station wagon
Outside the finger-smeared window—
The car like a giant cockroach
Asleep under an orange streetlight;
The man can’t see his own reflection
In the picture window of the neighbour’s
Dark house across the truck-smashed
Road;
The man can’t see these things
Because he’s watching a movie about
Van Gogh
And dreaming about what a great poet he’d
Have become
If he’d been more mad.
THE INSOMNIAC ON A MILITARY BASE IN
Bullet birds,
Flashing
by a streetlight,
Picking off moths.
I don’t like them,
But I did my job in
In our bedroom,
I rest elbows on the
Lead paint window sill.
“Don’t sand that stuff,”
The sergeant said.
“It’ll
make you lose
Your marbles.”
I take a deep breath;
Birds dive out of darkness
And then back in:
I’d like to
Shoot them.
My wife stirs behind me:
“What are you doing?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Oh.”
And then she falls back
To sleep.
HER STORY
“All right,” she said,
Lying back on her belly.
“Do it yourself.”
“You’re a real sweetheart,”
He said, tossing a bottle
Of sunscreen
Into a red beach-bag.
“Shut up.”
He leaned away from her
And the white sun;
He used an empty Coke bottle
To draw a big circle in the
Black sand:
“What time is it?”
“I wish we’d never come here,”
She said, trying not to
Think of—
“I’m going in.” He stood up
And dipped a foot into the hot sand
Beside her striped towel.
Then he raced to the water.
“Don’t bother to come back,”
She said, raising her head,
And she almost repeated it
Loud enough for him to hear,
But instead she wiped her
Stinging eyes.
Dinner for Two
White wine, soft jazz,
An awkward touch,
An eye’s occasional
twinkle,
Aeons interrupted
With words like, “You
were born
Where?”
Then dinner arrives.
Cutlery clinks;
The man and lady thank
the
Ramrod waiter.
The man winks;
Boldness swells
In his lungs.
He slices through
Cordon bleu.
“I’ve never had cordon
green,
Either,” he says,
laughing.
Her upper lip twists
Into an Elvis lifeline.
His eyes widen as the
knife
Opens the protein bolus—
“Yuck!” he exclaims,
“It looks like puss
inside!”
He laughs.
She,
Beneath
her ballerina bun,
Halts in time, like a
poem,
With unchewed cordon
bleu
In her gape.
He laughs again,
And then chews heartily.
SKIPPING STONES
Across the metallic skin
The shale skips,
Wounding the gentle
stream
As if a sniper shoots
true.
Again and again,
The hunt continues,
.22 slugs into an
Elephant’s hide—
Blood angry it cries—
All inside the hunter’s
eye.
Finally, a smooth, flat
rock,
As black as a beetle,
Follows a Gatling row,
Exploding the sun-fired,
Cold surface,
All the way to the other
Clam-clattered bank.
The bare-chested boy
rejoices,
Glances at the sun-ball,
And smiles at the wind.
IN THE
PICKLE-JAR
The
kitten
In
the pickle jar—
That
still smelled
Of
dill and vinegar—
Meowed,
barely audible to
The
young captor,
And
scratched the glass
And
bumped its head
Against
the metal lid,
And
panicked,
And
twisted,
And,
finally,
Died
Curled
up.
His
enraged sister,
Who’d
found the “coffin”
Beneath
his bed,
Deposited
her kitty-in-a-jar
On
the supper table,
Between
plates of spaghetti
And tomato sauce;
Then his father
Spanked
him,
And
sent him to bed
Hungry.
LATCHKEY
Turquoise eyes,
Like a
Crow-black hair,
And gleaming braces—
She runs home from school
(To embrace her husband,
She pretends),
To let herself in,
To wait for her
Mother and father.
She stops at the daffodils—
Lilliputian arrows
That barely pierce
The dark soil—
And breathes in deeply,
Dreaming that her husband
The soldier
Is a dead soldier.
And then, the sight of
Two salamanders—
Ex-patriots from the frog-
Croaking swamp?—confuses
Her: How did they end up
Caged in an ice cream-bucket
In her weedless yard?
She passes budding
Lilac bushes filled with
Unborn purple;
She unlocks and opens
The heavy oak door,
And hears her gerbil
Running again
On a squeaky wheel.
THE
KITTEN
A blonde girl
Exhales mist
Into the night.
Her eyelashes are wet;
She wipes her cheeks dry,
But she wears no makeup:
She is too young for that.
She calls again
Into every dark space,
Tree, and bush,
Into every molecule
For her kitten.
A car rattles past;
Her brother should not have
Left the porch door open
Three nights ago!
She
bites down hard.
Her mother,
At the kitchen window,
Shrugs her shoulders
And smiles between
Peach-coloured curtains.
The blonde girl calls out,
More weakly,
Under the yet-barren
Mountain ash
And along the mucky trail
That weaves between
Pussy willows
To the lane.
At the lane she turns to
Glance at the roof,
Searching for a kitten silhouette
In moonlight.
She ignores her mother’s
Frown,
And later, she cries
Herself to sleep
In her hard bed;
She bites down often
And snores.
In the morning
She glares at herself
In the mirror.
She locks the bathroom door,
Shutting out her brother,
Her mother, too.
Today
she will wear
Mascara,
Even if her brother laughs
Or her mother disapproves.
She is unskilled
With the little brush.
Her hand shakes,
But she is a determined
Young lady
Today.
ONE HOT DAY
A girl
More than watches
Buzzing hornets and bees
Darting like heat-seeking
Missiles, flashing inside a
Plume of apple
blossoms. And
In the hot breeze a petal—
A flesh-eating arm—
Falls,
Twirling through a whorled—
Reluctant?—dive,
Glinting, a snowflake with
What sort of
character?
And then more petals abandon
Their stronghold:
paratroopers
Lost in
Lands like a Spitfire,
And a blue jay deftly searches
For ants on a limb.
The buzz is music,
An ominous roar
Above her ears and
Swimsuit. She shivers.
She loves the music and
The pink
(Her bedroom is pink),
But now, in a moment as long
As a sigh, she feels
Alone,
peculiar,
As if abandoned in a
Wasteland.
Then:
Quick as a startled deer,
Or soldier,
She finds shelter,
Swimming like a white fish
In her small pool.
BEER
BOTTLE-KNIVES
The creek,
Mindlessly clear,
Spews gems into
Dragonfly jet stream
And pollen breeze.
Children, in the
Cold water, play
Like seal-cubs,
Rolling, squealing;
Crying:
Beer bottle-glass—
Like leftover mines
In French meadows—
Has stabbed her right arch;
Red clouds obscure her
White feet.
Children run to her,
Help her hobble
To the grassy shore.
“Pull it out!”
“Squeeze it!
“Where’s your mum?”
A freckled boy adds,
“You should have worn
Runners, like me”:
She, seated amid
Shivering dandelions,
Watches his thin lips move,
And she hates them,
Just as she hates
The blood pouring
From her foot.
AT THE HOME
A fork scratches a plate—
Chalk screeching
In a mouldy
Classroom;
A scolding eye;
A mouthful of
Niblet corn;
A smile;
Some of the corn
Falls out.
“Do you want any salt?”
“What?”
“Salt?”
“What?”
“Do you—”
A fork scratches a plate—
A needle grating
A record on a
Victrola;
A sigh.
The old woman eats
With her mouth open,
While her daughter
Looks at her watch
Again.
ONE WAY TICKET
A poplar stands
As straight as subtraction,
Until the wind blows,
Making the green head sway
Like an old man
Lost on a corner,
Looking for his brother.
Then he remembers a storm;
It rushes into his mind,
Like water down a drain:
Poplars
swayed between the
Barn and porch.
“Heavens!” he said,
Fogging up the kitchen window.
“I hope they don’t fall over and
Hit the house!”
But his memory dissolves,
Like rage at the end,
And the storm becomes a
Truck that honks:
He has almost stepped into a
Mine field!
He surveys the flatland—
No, the rutted asphalt.
The truck roars
Through first gear,
Becomes a disappearing
Tailgate,
As he remembers,
He saw his brother
Lose his legs
At Passchendaele.
The old man tries to recall his
Brother’s name,
While blasts of wind stir up
His white hair.
He tries to flatten it,
But gives up,
Like the poplars that fell over
In that storm.
He wonders whether they
Landed on the house,
But all he recalls
Is a smashed fence.
And that reminds him:
Cedar makes the best fence posts;
At The Phoenix Home, however,
The fence posts are green:
(Pine?—spruce?)
Treated with a preservative
(Not creosote).
And in his room,
In
He has a guitar with
Three strings that hangs
Over an accordion that
Only screeches.
Also in his room is a captain’s bed,
With four handy drawers,
But Mary and he had an iron bed—
She made chicken-feather mattresses:
One for them and one for each of the
Kids.
The light at the corner turns green.
He remembers what that means,
Just as he remembers the
On the tv in the Golden Lounge:
Some people in
Buy their parents or parent
A one-way ride on a train
To anywhere far
Away.
The light turns red;
He has forgotten to cross the street,
But he won’t tell anybody,
Especially the people looking at him,
That he’s forgotten his brother’s
Name,
And that he keeps seeing poplar trees
Falling on his prairie
House.
THE THINKER
A toothless old man
Drinks cold coffee
Alone.
He scratches his scalp—
Dandruff floats in his coffee,
Like snow-flecks.
He wonders—
But soon only his coffee
Matters.
MY
HOME
Midhbar—
Oasis of am haarets
(A phrase Pharisees
Spit)—
Is my home,
My wind and rock,
My snakes and scorpions
That thrive where I eat
And urinate
And will die.
This is my barrenness,
My yeshimon,
That surrounds me like my
Heart
And
children.
BOWLS BENEATH LEAKS
To cement, glass, and steel,
Where spires gleam above
Traffic whine, tetracarbon
Clouds, and florescent shorts
On camera-festooned tourists.
But above this arcade,
Los Cerros cling to hillsides
That rain churns into gravity-ravaged
Muck:
Steps become cataracts, and
Garbage-toboggans race down
River-filled gutters
Like oysters down a throat,
And zinc-roofed homes of
Rain-blackened boards or
Flattened cans or
Packing cases
(“This side up,” some still read)
“Elbow” for space and boast signs:
“Pego Cierres” (“I Put In Zippers”),
“Cortes de Pelo” (“Haircuts”),
“Se Venden Helados” (“Ice Cream Sold”).
Consider a sunny day:
In one of 500 barrios
(Some named after “saints,”
Others after hope
(El Progresso (Progress),
Nuevo Mundo (
El Encanto (Delight))),
A boy’s voice in a battered
Loudspeaker cries out:
“Onions! Yuccas! Plantains!”
(In English?)
Barter-quick poor close deals
With this barter-quick child
On his bent tailgate.
Nearby,
A bow-spined man spray-
Paints a 23-year-old VW
In an unpaved street—
A side-street packed hard by
Foot and tire and sun—
But he releases the trigger
To watch a long-chassis jeep
Climb the 18% grade of a “highway”
Called Si Dios Quiere (If God Wills).
And in that jeep,
Twelve passengers, with
Knees crammed under chins,
Inhale each other’s odour.
A fat lady guards a bag of tomatoes
From too many feet.
The driver, after spitting tobacco gob
Out his windowless door,
Pampers the clutch with a “good”
Place to stop;
Two wild-haired women
In tattered dresses
Tumble out the back doors,
And then the jeep
Trails a water truck that
Drips at a seam
Like a bleeding soldier.
The two women enter
A bodegas—a green-paint-
Peeling-off-like-old-labels-on-
Old-cans home to a school,
Pharmacist/doctor,
And household items, like beer,
For the poor.
No house numbers,
No glass for barred-up windows, and
No mailmen to pace the maze of
Cramped walkways between
Hill-rooted homes—
Homes
In which coffee and bland
Arepa with jam are
As common as babies,
Homes
In which hospitality,
In spite of armed robbery and suicide,
Makes ranchitos warm for many
Who often say,
“Están en su casa.”
(“Make yourselves at home.”)
BEST
“I’ve got a twenty-five hundred
Square foot home,”
A man with breasts says as
Jacuzzi steam fondles
Hand-held
Beer cans.
Other fat men
Bathe in chlorine
And Visa,
And roll lottery numbers over
In their minds. But
They aren’t like walruses
Spinning over an ocean floor,
Searching for fish
To eat raw,
Because they like theirs deep-fried:
Up one comes for air;
CO2 bubbles still
Fizz in his throat.
Then children arrive,
And laugh;
A girl in a peppermint bikini
Asks, “Can
we buy some pop?
We’re hot!”
The men climb out;
They’re hot too.
The ice-cold beer
Is too warm,
And there must be something else
To do
Anyway.
A list of the author’s poetry collections:
The Photon
Cellar (serialized in
The Cariboo Observer, 1994)
Poems Straight
From Quesnel (Quesnel
Writers’ Group, 1997)
One Little, Two
Little, and so on (Island
Scholastic Press, 1998)
Cariboo-Winter (Island Scholastic Press, 1998)
Men and Women (Island Scholastic
Press, 1999)
I Love You (Island Scholastic Press, 1999)
Exchange
Program (Island
Scholastic Press, 1999)
The Germans
from
One Little, Two
Little, and so on II (The Poets’
Corner, USA, 1999)
The Wise Man (Writers Brew Press, England, 1999)
The Wise Man (serialized in Over the Edge,
1999/2000 [2nd ed.])
The Lead
Guitarist (serialized in
*spark, 2000)
Skipping Stones
(
After the Rain (Borders & Time, 2000)
The Winter Sun (Haiku and Tanka Anthology,
2000)
At the Home (Poetry
Quesnel:
Between the Two Rivers (Quesnelnews.com, 2000)
Not Just
Another Day (
The Ruby of the
Universe (serialized in
canadian content, 2000/2001)
Robert’s Roost (
Spuds for
Jonathan (The
Brobdingnagian Times
A Difference (
Thirteen
Goslings (moments,
2001)
Faces of Winter
(canadian
content, 2001)
Granville’s Cafe: A Collection (
On Scalding
Glass: A Collection (
I Love You (CanTeach,
2002)
Están En Su
Casa (ETONSA,
White Fog: A
Dog Day Collection (
The Comet
Shower (3 Cup
Morning, 2002)
Poet in a Lawn
Chair (canadian
content, 2002)
Still the Sky
Glows Lavender (The Poets
Lounge,
Corpus Callosum
(
Her Story (Poetry of the People,
A Boy on a
Horse (The Online
Writer,
Beans for Hugh
and Linda (Coffee Bean
Memories of
[UBC*] (
Six Blackbirds (
The REM Poems (
The Nurse Sighs (
The REM Poems (Feelings of the Heart,
For the Math
Gyze, poems (Academic
Exchange Extra,
The Comet
Shower (3 Morning
Cup’s Best Poetry [Anthology], 2005);
Life on Mars (serialized in Seeker
The Wise Man (The Poet’s Haven,
The Nurse Sighs (Talvipaivanseisaus Special No.
8,
[A collection
of poems written under a pseudonym] (published in 2005)
[Another
collection of poems written under a pseudonym] (published in 2005)
Coffee International (New Cilans
Coffee Bar, 2005,
The Wise Man (
The Artist (
One More Year to Remember (serialized in Academic Exchange Extra,
The Teacher,
and other poems (McNaughton
Centre Poetry Reading, 2007)
Over the
Shoulder: Bibliographic Poetry (
Feline
Narratives (
A Day of
Target Practise (
Summer on
the Farm (
Poems of
Malady (
Corpus
Callosum (
Memories [of
UBC] (
The REM
Poems (
Memories [of UBC] ([an
excerpt of 11 poems] CHALLENGER international, 2007)
One More Year to Remember (
The Photon Cellar (
Between the Gums (
Whirlpool (
Margins (
Winter in a Pond (
Is That
Men and Women (
Perhaps you noticed the variety of ways I start
the poems. My goals for those first lines? To not only set the poems up, but
also to grab the readers’ interest. All poets do well to spend time thinking about
their poems’ beginnings. “The night sky
is only a sort of carbon paper” (Sylvia Plath, “Insomnia,” as quoted in Drury,
1991, p. 11) is a great first line, don’t you think? Drury (1991) explains “there is no formula for making a good first line, but
it must have a certain freshness and allure. You don’t need to shout or to shock the reader, but you have
to do something enticing or interesting” (p. 11). He quotes many first lines as examples.
A sudden blow. The great wings beating still,
—W. B. Yeats, “Leda and
the Swan”
Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
—
Night
Music Slanted
—Etheridge Knight, “Cell Song”
I play pool. I aim toward the faces
—Sandra McPherson, “Games”
Runs falls rises stumbles on from darkness
into darkness
—Robert Hayden, “Runagate Runagate”
Is friendship with men like friendship with
birds?
—Molly Peacock, “Friendship with Men” (Yeats, Bishop,
Knight, McPherson, Hayden, &
Peacock, as quoted in
1991, p. 11)
Although first lines may not serve as cliff hangers, they
should spur readers on to read more. First lines should catch a reader’s eye (e.g., imagery), ear (e.g., sounds of letters or
words), heart (e.g., emotional context), and/or mind (e.g., intellectual
context). First lines may draw on any or combinations of the senses. Really,
the more ways the poet can capture the reader’s interest, the better.
*
I have discussed poetry and beginnings,
or first lines; now I’m moving on to
Meter
and the feet that fill it up. Feet. For example: Did you ever as a
child phone up a butcher and ask, “Do you have pigs’ feet?”
The usual, somewhat
reluctant response: “Yes.”
“Then wear shoes and
nobody will notice.”
I don’t want to talk
about that kind of feet. I’d like to speak about metrical feet in poetry. A
line of verse could have one or two or three or more feet. What does that mean?
For that matter, what is a foot for a line that has feet?
I’ll
begin by speaking about an iambic foot (iamb). It, like any other foot, has its
own distinctive sound, or rhythm. An iamb “goes from an unstressed syllable to
a stressed one, as happens in words like divine [diVINE], caress [caRESS],
bizarre [biZARRE], and delight [deLIGHT]. It sounds sort of like a heartbeat:
daDUM, daDUM, daDUM” (Hennequin, 2000, Iambic Pentameter, para. 2). If ever you
wished to live as a hobo, you might appreciate the iambic feet of this line:
I wish I were a bum.
Do you hear the unstressed and stressed syllables?
I WISH I WERE a BUM.
Convention amongst poets and scholars often dictates using U’s to
distinguish soft or unstressed syllables and /’s to distinguish accented or louder ones.
U /
U / U /
I
wish I were a bum.
Switch the order of
stressed and unstressed syllables, and iambic turns into trochaic. Dr. Suess
(lived 1904-1991 C.E.) used trochaic meter in “the title (and first line) of One
Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” (Dr. Suess, 2006, Poetic Meters, para.
4; also Dr. Suess, 1960). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (lived 1807-1882 C.E.) The
Song of Hiawatha remains one definitive example of trochaic meter, found
demonstrated in the following famous excerpt
from [The song’s] Hiawatha’s Childhood, where the accented syllables of
each trochee have been bolded [in red]:
By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the
wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis. Dark behind it rose the forest, Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees, Rose
the firs with cones upon them; Bright before’ it beat the water, Beat the clear and sunny water, Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water. (Longfellow quoted in Trochaic Tetrameter,
2006, paragraphs 1-2 [Poem originally published in 1855])
Proper formatting of
the excerpt looks as follows:
By
the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By
the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood
the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter
of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark
behind it rose the forest,
Rose
the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose
the firs with cones upon them;
Bright
before it beat the water,
Beat
the clear and sunny water,
Beat
the shining Big-Sea-Water. (Longfellow quoted in The Song of Hiawatha [article], The
Song of Hiawatha excerpt (1855/2006), Description, para. 2)
If
I apply U’s and /’s to, say, the first
line, its trochaic (/ U) pattern reads as
/
U / U
/ U / U
By
the shores of Gitche Gumee,
Are
you hearing jingles or rhymes with trochaic or iambic bounces to them? “Jack
and Jill went up the hill.” Do you hear three trochees (trochaic feet) followed
by one stressed syllable (hill)? Or you could find two trochees followed by one
amphimacer or cretic (/ U /):
/
U /
up
the hill
Where
do amphimacers or cretics come from? Outer space? They come from the same place
iambs (iambic feet) and trochees come from. The planet Phasar. Right. They come
from language of rhythmic patterns of beats (stressed syllables). Even when we
don’t purposively read or speak in rhythmic patterns, we often unknowingly
place beats at conventionally recognized places, “as in Peter Pan [/ U
/]” (Amphimacer, 2005, para. 1). Except for the anomalies of the two lines in blue, Tennyson’s
(lived 1809-1892 C.E.) “The Oak” makes each of the other lines a pure
amphimacer:
Live thy life,
Young and old,
Like yon oak,
Bright in spring,
Living gold;
Summer-rich
Then; and then
Autumn-changed,
Soberer
hued
Gold again.
All his leaves
Fall’n
at length,
Look, he stands,
Trunk and bough,
Naked strength. (?/n.d.)
If the an amphimacer
defines a / U / rhythm, then what defines its opposite?: U / U. Called an amphibrach, it too finds a place in verse and on the
tongue. Can you remember that re MEM ber (Amphibrach, 2000) is an amphibrach?
Similarly, “the word ‘undying’ is an amphibrach: un DY ing” (Miller, 2006, C.
The Amphibrach, para. 1). Miller (2006) uses the example of amphibrachs to
highlight how a line of poetry may contain a variety of feet:
“The
sportsmen keep hawks, and their quarry they gain.”
/the SPORTS men / keep HAWKS
and / their QUAR ry / they GAIN /
/amphibrach/amphibrach/amphibrach/iamb (para. 2)
Although four feet in “length,”
three are amphibrachs, one an iamb. Does
this mean that a line of poetry may jump about rhythmically? Yes, providing the
writer can get away with the jumping, in the sense that the beat sounds
acceptable and not artificial or forced to the reader. Actually, that statement
reflects an axiom worth noting here: Authors may get away with anything readers
are provided to let them get away with. If a reader of science fiction allows
himself a “suspension of disbelief” by “believing” in time travel, then he or
she may accept the premise of my novel Quibils and Quirks (1997e, 1998,
1999), H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine: An Invention (1898/2000), many Star
Trek episodes, and the Back to the Future trilogy (Zemeckis, 1985,
1989, 1990).
The author, then, can
get away with his or her lines of poetry jumping about rhythmically? Yes,
sometimes. A fundamental reason for poets using a variety of feet in their
metrical poetry rests in the plain truth that
any poem of more than 3 or 4 lines which
adheres absolutely to [a single pattern or type of foot in its] meter quickly
becomes boring, so the poet usually finds ways of varying the meter from line
to line….Trochaic substitutions in iambic meter are common:
/ SOFT is / the STRAIN / when
ZEPH / yr
Here, the first iamb is
replaced by a trochee. [Or, the first foot is a trochee rather than an iamb.]
(Miller, 2006, Normative Meter, para. 2)
Other reasons for a poet’s
varying the meter include drawing attention to “different aspects of [a] theme”
(Schiller, n.d., para. 2) and establishing certain moods or character traits.
Notice in the following poem the bounce in the metre in the final quatrain, which
conclusively sums up Henry Slaughter.
Old Henry Slaughter (2002i)
Two flat feet
Make a cozy seat,
And ten fat toes
Are good as garden
hoes.
Big knobby knees
And pockets full
of bees,
Long straight legs
Like clothesline
pegs!
An overhanging
belly
Like a shirtful of
jelly,
And a ski-jump
nose
That he often
blows.
One green eye,
And a blue one
Too,
Not to mention
His owl named HOO!
A polka dot tie
That is six feet
high,
A sack full of
bats,
And another full
of cats.
They call
him Henry Slaughter,
And he lives in a
tree.
He once had a
daughter,
But she ran away
to sea.
The many effects (Marillion, 2006) of variety in metre could help focus
the reader’s attention on not only character, but also on the humour, irony,
satire, or rhyme of a particular phrase or line or word. Sometimes, too,
certain traditions of usage emerge with respect to what feet go where.
For example, “Shakespeare,
among others, often ends iambic pentameter [five iambic feet] on an unstressed
syllable, so that the last foot sounds like this: daDUMda [from another point of view, the reader could view
daDUMda as an amphibrach as in reMEMber?]. The ending with
the unstressed syllable is more common in Romance languages, such as Spanish
and Italian” (Hennequin, 2000, Iambic Pentameter, para. 4). Clearly, then,
creative and traditional use of meter have their places in metrical poetry, and
the possibilities for variety grow exponentially as we consider more types of feet,
as in the two new types I’d like to introduce in the next quote.
There can also be multiple substitutions within
a single line:
/ WHEN to / the SESS / ions of / SWEET SI / lent THOUGHT
Here, the pattern is /trochee/ iamb/ pyrrhic/ spondee/ iamb
/HOLD like / RICH GAR / ners the / FULL RIP / ened GRAIN
/trochee/ spondee/ pyrrhic/ spondee/ iamb
The last two examples are rather extreme…. But both these examples contain
the pattern “/pyrrhic/ spondee/”—this pattern is frequently called the “double
iamb [or minor ionic: U U / / (Foot, 2006)],” [as opposed to the double trochee
(or major ionic: / / U U) [The Critical Poet, 2006]] and is considered a
legitimate variation of (and substitute for) the normal iamb. Shakespeare,
Keats, and Frost, among others, make frequent use of the “double iamb” as a
substitution. (Miller, 2006, Normative Meter, paragraphs 4-5)
We know what an iamb
and trochee are. But a pyrrhic and spondee? Perhaps you already knew what they
are before your reading this unit. At any rate, a pyrrhic, a foot of U U
rhythmic softness, stands opposite to the spondee, a foot of / / rhythmic
loudness. You would probably agree that “it is difficult to construct a whole,
serious poem with spondees” (Spondee, 2006, para. 2). When I think of an entire
poem written in spondees I envision a carpenter rather furiously pounding
nails, pounding nails, pounding nails. BAM! BAM! That reminds me of Barney and
Betty Rubble’s adopted son (Flintstones, n.d.). Too much pounding reminds me of
a headache.
Usually “spondees…occur
as variants” (Spondee, 2006, para. 2). They provide punchy-sounding double
beats that offer metrical variety. Pyrrhics also provide metrical variety, but
with soft (not bam bam) syllables. What, then, would a poem written entirely with
pyrrhics sound like? Soft soft, soft soft, soft soft…ZZZzzzzzz.
Pyrrhics won’t likely
carry the rhythmic weight of a poem, but they can serve a purpose in other
contexts. For example, double pyrrhics could stand as rhythmic preparations for
strong images, or moments of calm—although some “academics are liable to argue
tirelessly about whether there really is such a thing as a pyrrhic” (Newman,
2004, The Naming of Feet, para. 2), Miller (2006) shows in
/ WHEN to / the SESS /
ions of / SWEET SI / lent THOUGHT
…/trochee/ iamb/
pyrrhic/ spondee/ iamb
and
/HOLD like / RICH GAR / ners
the / FULL RIP / ened GRAIN
/trochee/ spondee/ pyrrhic/
spondee/ iamb (paragraphs 4-5)
that we can reasonably accept pyrrhics’ existence.
*
I’d like to discuss a
few other types of metrical feet. One is the anapest (U U /): it fills poetry
lines with an energy that makes them sing out with rhythmic bounce. In fact,
the “anapaest can produce a very rolling, galloping feeling verse” (Anapest,
2006, para. 3). For example [accented syllables in bold red],
The
Assyrian came down
like a wolf on the fold
And
his cohorts were gleaming in purple
and gold
And
the sheen of their spears was like stars
on the sea
When
the blue wave rolls nightly on deep
[lived 1788-1824 C.E.] “The Destruction of Sennacherib” [1815/2006], as quoted in Anapest,
2006, para. 3)
I
hear a cheerful madness here along with a sort of syncopated rhythm that
reminds me of jazz. I also hear an old popular-in-elementary-school joke. “What
did the Lone Ranger say as he headed to the dump?”
“To
the DUMP [U U / (anapest)]
to
the DUMP [U U /]
to
the DUMP DUMP DUMP.” [U U / and / / (spondee)]
The
dactyl (/ U U), however, reminds me of a waltz, as in the case of the slow lilt
of the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Note the accented beats of the
bold red and the three syllables of “skii-ii-es”:
Picture your self
in a boat on a river with
tangerine tree-ees and marmalade
skii-ii-es. (The Beatles, as quoted
[1967/2006] in Dactyl, 2006, para. 3)
A
foot in a line of verse may be an iamb (U /), trochee (/ U), anapest (U U /),
dactyl (/ U U), spondee (/ /), pyrrhic (U U), amphimacer (/ U /), amphibrach (U
/ U), double iamb or minor ionic (U U / /), double trochee or major ionic (/ /
U U), or some odd combination or derivative of these (see, e.g., Landman, 2001;
Metrical Feet, 2006), and each line of verse must contain from one to x number
of feet. Here are examples:
Monometer
= 1 foot:
Thus I [1 iamb]
Passe by,
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And gone. (excerpt from Robert
Herrick‘s [?/2002, lived 1591-1674 C.E.] “Upon His Departure Hence,”
as quoted in Monometer, 2006)
Dimeter
= 2 feet
Workers earn it. [2 trochees]
Spendthrifts burn it.
Bankers lend it.
Women spend it.
Forgers fake it.
Taxes take it.
Dying leave it.
Heirs receive it.
Thrifty save it.
Misers crave it.
Robbers seize it.
Rich increase it.
Gamblers lose it.
I could use it. (“Money,” by Robert Armour, as quoted in Ode to Money, ?/1998;
see, also, Dimeter, 2006)
Trimeter = 3 feet
The idle life I lead [3 iambs]
Is like a pleasant sleep,
Wherein I rest and heed
The dreams that by me sweep.
And still of all my dreams
In turn so swiftly past,
Each in its fancy seems
A nobler than the last.
And every eve I say,
Noting my step in bliss, [1 trochee, 2 iambs]
That I have known no day
In all my life like this. (“The Idle Life I Lead,” by Robert Bridges, as quoted
in Poezia, 1893/2006)
Tetrameter = 4 feet
Anapestic tetrameter [U U / times 4]:
“And the sheen
of their spears was like stars on the sea” (excerpt from Lord Byron’s “The Destruction
of Sennacherib,” as quoted in Tetrameter, 1815/2006)
Iambic
tetrameter [U / times 4]:
“Because
I could not stop
for Death” [excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s
(lived 1830-1886 C.E.) “Because I Could
not Stop for Death,” as quoted in Tetrameter, 2006; see also,
Trochaic
tetrameter [/ U times 4]:
“Peter, Peter,
pumpkin-eater”
(English
nursery rhyme) (Tetrameter, 2006)
Pentameter = 5 feet
This meter sounds its beat in about “two-thirds of
medieval and Renaissance English poetic forms” (Hennequin, 2000, 1. Iambic
Pentameter, para. 1), “used extensively by William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth, to
name but three of the many poets who have employed it” (Pentameter, 2006, para.
1).
Sonnet #18
Shall I compare thee to
a summer’s day?
[5 iambs]
Thou art more lovely
and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease
hath all too
short a date:
Sometime too hot
the eye of heaven
shines,
And often is
his gold complexion
dimmed,
And every fair
from fair sometime
declines,
By chance, or nature’s
changing course
untrimmed:
But thy eternal
summer shall
not fade,
Nor lose possession
of that fair
thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest
in his shade,
When in eternal
lines to time
thou grow’st,
So long as men
can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this,
and this gives life to thee. (William
Shakespeare, as quoted in Love, 1609/2003, Procedure, Sonnet #18)
Hexameter = 6 feet
Romans and Greeks used hexameter as their standard for
epic poetry (Hexameter, 2006). Homer, a Greek poet (lived 754-700? B.C.E.
[Before our Common Era] [Homer, ?/2006]), authored in the Greek of his day the Iliad
and Odyssey, epic poems that define the start of Western Literature
in the minds of many literary and historical scholars. Cummings (2003) explains
that Homer employed dactylic hexameter (/ U U times 6 per line), but D’Emilio (2006) more precisely says
the meter of Homer’s poems was DACTYLIC
HEXAMETER , consisting of six feet (parts) in which each foot was either a DACTYL
[/ U U] or a SPONDEE [/ /]. The final foot was either a spondee or a
trochee [/ U]. These are examples of the meter of typical lines:
1. <>| L L | L s s | L s s | L L | L s s
| L s | (L = long [or accented] syllable, s = short [or unstressed] syllable)
[pause, spondee, dactyl, dactyl, spondee, dactyl, trochee]
2. | L s s | L s s | L L | L s s | L s s | L L | [dactyl, dactyl, spondee,
dactyl, dactyl, spondee] (D’Emilio, 2006, 2. Oral Poetry, bullet 8)
Certainly for me, this discussion of hexameter has a cerebral vagueness
to it, but a concrete example, as in my use of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet # 18” in
the Pentameter subsection, would require my having a sufficient knowledge of
Homer’s Greek for me to analyze lines from The Iliad.
Heptameter = 7 feet
Iambic heptameter has fourteen syllables, and therefore
some refer to it as a fourteener (Uvic English, 1995), but remember that often
poets of metrical verse ensure a
degree of variation from line to line, as a
rigid adherence to the meter results in unnatural or monotonous language. A
skillful poet manipulates breaks in the prevailing rhythm of a poem for
particular effects. John Donne, for example, rarely held to the meter of his
lines for more than a few feet at a time. (1995)
Although a popular
element of prosody in the 1600s, iambic heptameter stepped aside for iambic
pentameter (see the pentameter subsection); however, “heptameter has an
advantage of being readily divided in groups of four feet, then three, as often
found in ballads” (Clark, 2006, para. 1).
The ballad form is a sweet one, and ever
present in poetry. This verse form alternates lines of four feet (hinged on
four stressed syllables or beats) with lines of three feet . The feet are
usually iambic (weak syllable/strong syllable), but don’t have to be. This
4-3-4-3 etc. arrangement creates a kind of lilting cadence that lends itself to
sweet poetry….
To use a
classic example of the form, consider this—
MARy HAD a LITtle LAMB – 4 beats [trochee, trochee, trochee,
single accent]
its FLEECE was WHITE as SNOW – 3 beats [iamb, iamb, iamb]
and EVeryWHERE that MARy WENT – 4 beats [iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb]
the LAMB was SURE to GO. – 3 beats [iamb, iamb, iamb]
That is a VERY basic ballad stanza, one
EVERYBODY knows. Note here that not all the feet are iambic….But the 4-3-4-3
[or 7-7, heptameter, heptameter] line scheme is there. The stanzas of a ballad
(and the overall piece) will always end on the 3 beat line. (Chakravarthula,
2004, paragraphs 7-9)
Octameter = 8 feet
Once upon a
“The Raven” ranks amongst the most famous of poems, but octameter ranks
low in popularity amongst poets and readers (see, e.g., Zahhar, 2005). Can you
see why?
*
Thank
you for staying with my discussion about metrics. Now let’s move from metrical
devices to literary ones. I’ll list some
for you to think about:
Onomatopoeia (look for words
that conjure up sounds)
Comparison and association [with respect to
imagery] are sometimes strengthened by syllables which imitate or reproduce the
sounds they describe. When this occurs, it is called onomatopoeia (a Greek word
meaning name-making), for the sounds literally make the meaning in such words
as “buzz,” “crash,” “whirr,” “clang” “hiss,” “purr,” “squeak,” “mumble,” “hush,”
“boom.” (Nellen, 1994-2005b, Onomatopoeia, para. 3).
Example: “Tarantula,”
stanza 2, p. 207
Little-clad
Men-folk eat
Tarantulas. Held
Between two sticks
Over flames that burn
off
Leg-hair, the
Salty meat sizzles
And steams.
Metaphor (X = Y)
What do I mean by X = Y? A metaphor
essentially equates two dissimilar objects, images, or ideas in a unique way,
denoting “a likeness or analogy between
them” (Metaphor, 2006, 1). Consider the metaphors in stanza
one of my “One Hot Day” (pp.
246-247):
A
girl
More than watches
Buzzing hornets and bees
Darting like
heat-seeking
Missiles, flashing
inside a
Plume of apple
blossoms. And
In the hot breeze a
petal—
A flesh-eating arm—
Falls, [a petal = a flesh-eating arm]
Twirling through a
whorled—
Reluctant?—dive,
Glinting, a snowflake
with [the falling petal = a snowflake]
What sort of
character?
And then more petals
abandon
Their stronghold:
Paratroopers [falling petals = paratroopers]
Lost in
Lands like a Spitfire,
And a blue jay deftly
searches
For ants on a limb.
Simile (X is like Y)
If a metaphor means X = Y and a simile X is like Y,
then are metaphors and similes related? Yes. Consider the relationship in the
following discussion:
A simile is a figure of speech [or
literary concept] in which the subject is compared to another subject [X is
like Y]. Frequently, similes are marked by use of the words like or as
or [than or resembles]. “The snow was like a blanket”. However, “The
snow blanketed the earth” is also a simile and not a metaphor because the verb blanketed is a shortened form
of the phrase covered like a blanket. A few other examples [of similes]
are “The deer ran like the wind,” “The raindrops sounded as popcorn kernels
popping,” and “the lullaby was like the hush of the winter.”
The phrase “The snow was a
blanket over the earth” is the metaphor in this case [snow = blanket].
Metaphors differ from similes in that the two objects are not compared [X is
like Y], but treated as identical [X = Y]. (Simile, 2006, paragraphs 1-2)
Consider the similes
from the “One Hot Day” stanza I used in the metaphor examples:
A girl
More than watches
Buzzing
hornets and bees
Darting
like heat-seeking
Missiles, flashing inside a
Plume of apple
blossoms. And
In the hot breeze a
petal—
A flesh-eating arm—
Falls,
Twirling through a
whorled—
Reluctant?—dive,
Glinting, a snowflake
with
What sort of
character?
And then more petals
abandon
Their stronghold:
Paratroopers
Lost in
Lands
like a Spitfire,
And a blue jay deftly
searches
For ants on a limb.
Imagery (pictures in the
mind)
Are metaphors and similes images, pictures in the mind?
Unless the metaphors equate or the similes compare only concepts, likely, yes.
Images, and related schemata (Widmayer, n.d.), create much of the convocative
(van Manen, 2002a), evocative (van Manen, 2002b), invocative (van Manen,
2002c), provocative (van Manen, 2002d), revocative (van Manen, 2002e), and
vocative (van Manen, 2002g) nature and power of poetry. Images, or pictures in
the mind, spring up in the reader’s mind as he or
she reads words, either individually, or as phrases, clauses, or even
sentences. My advice to poets: fill your poems with as much imagery as
possible; make them thick forests of images. Rain forests.
Consider the images in my following poem (“Whirlpool,” p.
210):
Glacial water/
Blue-green silt spins
A whirlpool,
A twirling eyeball
That slides—as mindlessly
As a bullet—between
Diluvian boulders of
Discarded mountains,
Spinning, spinning
Like a planet
Or a dream,
But the raw current
Grabs hold,
Unwinding the weird
screw,
And then it’s gone;
As quickly as life
Leaves the eye
At death,
It’s gone.
Does this poem provide you with images/pictures in your
mind? I hope so. Without them, the poem doesn’t work. Images should ground the poem in the minds and
hearts of readers at intellectual and emotional levels. Images help the poet’s experience or essence of that experience to become
the reader’s.
Alliteration and Consonance (a
repeating of consonant sounds)
An alliteration is “the repetition of [an]
initial consonant sound[ ] in [a variety of places in] neighboring words”
(Nellen, 1994-2005a, para. 1), as in the following line from Lord Tennyson’s “Come
Down, Old Maid,”
The moan of
doves in immemorial
elms. (as quoted in Nellen, 1994-2005a, para. 3;
see, also Tennyson, ?/2005)
But often the repetition concerns only the initial consonant, as in the start of “Best Western Reunion,” p. 248:
The
creek,
Mindlessly clear,
Spews gems into
Dragonfly jet stream
And pollen breeze.
Children, in the
Cold
water, play
Like seal-cubs,
Rolling, squealing;
Crying:
Although creek, clear, cold, cubs,
and crying aren’t successive,
but, rather, are somewhat close to each other, they nevertheless create
an alliterative sense through the repetition of the hard c sound.
Consonance is “the repetition of consonant sounds in a short
sequence of words…anywhere within the word[s]” (Consonance, 2006, para. 1).
This definition means that every alliteration is an example of consonance, but
each example of consonance is not necessarily an alliteration.
Assonance (a repetition of vowel sounds)
Assonance occurs when the vowel sound within a
word matches the same sound in a nearby word, but the surrounding consonant
sounds are different. “Tune” and “June” are rhymes; “tune” and “food” are
assonant. The function of assonance is frequently the same as end rhyme or alliteration: All serve to give a sense of
continuity or fluidity to the verse. Assonance might be especially effective
when rhyme is absent: It gives the poet more flexibility, and it is not
typically used as part of a predetermined pattern. Like alliteration, it does not so much determine the structure or form
of a poem; rather, it is more ornamental [in terms of intriguing, lilting, or
image-focusing sounds]. (Assonance, n.d.. para. 1)
Note the long i vowel
sound (in red) in
“Winter Reptile” (p. 209):
In the
dawning valley,
A
cloud-snake—
A
bread-dough-viper— [does
the repetition of the long i sound help
Lies along the reinforce the image of a viper?]
Ice-mottled river,
Sliding from sand cliffs
To
beach-homes,
And
back,
Like a fickle breeze,
Or
key-jumping
Jazzman.
It’s
a vapour-tunnel,
A
wintry plume on its belly,
A
vertebrate hiding from the sun
That
awakens people
And
burns fog.
Write a few poems. They may be any type (e.g., metaphysical,
extranatural, narrative, lyric, dramatic, metrical, rhyming, or free verse). But make them lively. Make them “sing out”
your or your implied author’s “life’s blood,” and make the beginnings “grab”
the reader. For example, “The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper” (Plath,
1971/n.d., stanza 1), already mentioned, really is a great first line, don’t
you think?
II. Characterization,
Showing, Not Telling
I want to harp on
characterization in terms of fiction writers’ showing, not telling. Why? Because just as poets must
write interesting images, fiction writers must write interesting drama. In
general, stories told, like imageless poems, bore readers.
I don’t want you to fail as a fiction writer, so I’m reminding you:
Dramatizing…does not mean employing lots of lovely descriptive
adjectives and adverbs. Exposition is telling about something. Writing dramatically
is showing it. It is the difference between reading a newspaper account of an
automobile accident and being in the accident yourself. (Knott, 1977, p. 44)
Consider the following examples:
Telling
Marlene was a slob.
Showing
Marlene wore another dirty dress. She had a leaf in her
thatch of hair, and jam, red jam, sat like a mole on her chin.
Showing/Dramatizing
Marlene wore another dirty dress.
“You’re
ready?” her husband, Bartholemew, said in precise syllables.
She glared. “What does it look like?” She had a leaf in
her thatch of hair, and jam, red jam, sat like a mole on her chin.
“All right,
then,” he said. “Let’s go.”
To help you think a little
more about how to characterize through showing, and dramatizing, read through
the beginning few chapters of The Great Gatsby and quote parts that show
how Fitzgerald (1925/1992) introduces Nick Carraway (the narrator), Jay Gatsby,
Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, and Miss (Jordan) Baker. Refer to some of what
they do and say. Characterize each in a paragraph format.
Write a scene.
Make it
IV. Starting a Story—that First Paragraph
Now I want you to think about
beginnings. Beginnings for stories or novels. Here is sage advice from Sorrels
(1988):
1. Who…is the story about?
Usually you want your readers to form a picture of your character immediately. They need to know the basics
as soon as possible. Gender, for example, approximate age, and social status
and race if it’s important. (p. 90)
2.
If your story is not set in the present, then you need to convey that
information in the first few lines. (p. 90)
3. Where
is your story happening? You need to communicate this in the opening, and
usually without an elaborate description of setting. (p. 90)
4. Viewpoint
should be clear in the first paragraph. Most readers will probably assume that
a story is told in the third person, because that’s most common—until
they find out otherwise. So if you’re
writing in anything other than third person, make that clear as soon as you
can. And in a first person story with a male byline, most readers will assume a
male narrator, and vice versa, so if your narrator is of the other
gender, make that clear [the sooner the better]. (pp. 90-91)
5.
The hero [who] wakes up, stretches, climbs out of bed, showers, shaves, brushes
his teeth, eats breakfast [is boring and so is his story]….So…plunge right
in. (p. 91)
6.
Another way to seduce your readers into your story is to give them some
really fine writing in the first couple of lines….The first line is to make
them want to read the second line, and… (p. 92)
7.
You can also capture your readers’ interest in
the opening lines of your story by a strong appeal to their senses. We
experience our everyday world through sight and sound and touch and taste and
smell, and you can ease your readers into your story world by a strong appeal
to one or more senses. (p. 92)
Her are some examples of novel beginnings that you might
find arresting:
A Thriller (The Last Juror; Grisham, 2004,
p. 3)
After
decades of patient mismanagement and loving neglect, The Ford County Times
went bankrupt in 1970. The owner and publisher, Miss Emma Caudle, was
ninety-three years old and strapped to a bed in a nursing home in
A Horror Story (for young readers; My Hairiest
Adventure, Stine, 1996, p. 1)
“Why me?” I moaned out loud. “Why is it always me?”
But nobody could hear me.
Except for the pack of wild dogs chasing me.
A Murder Mystery (Appointment With Death,
Christie, 1938/1984, p. 3)
“You see, don’t you, that she’s got to
be killed?”
The question floated out into the still night air,
seemed to hang there a moment and then drift away down into the darkness
towards the
A Satire on
Alternate Education (Margins,
Landers, 2005a, Chapter 1, paragraphs
1-5)
Our class in the abandoned girl’s bathroom with
a pink door had begun. A shortage of space existed district wide. A grade-eight
student who apparently had no friends whatsoever had set the curtains in the
library at Central High ablaze last year, turning the entire wooden structure
into a pile of smoky ashes. Twin-engine planes bombed it repeatedly with orange
powder, but the flames rose like Alexander the Great. They climaxed in a
refractive heat swell that people felt for a block all around the school; then they
retreated quickly into benign bits of fire that firemen with hoses easily
conquered.
The pink-doored cuboid looked
better than the room without windows in the basement of my small school. In
that sub-room, the building’s main sewer pipe ran from ceiling to floor, like a
crooked, rusty pillar. I could have chosen that rectangular place for my
classroom, but it looked like a tomb.
For a time, my students and I
shared the “pink” room with three toilets, but after four requisitions to the
maintenance department, they finally disappeared. One Tuesday we were still in
the “only diarrhoea-proof classroom in the district,” as I sometimes told my
secondary alternate students. The next day the toilets and the pink stalls had
been removed, replaced by three plywood sewer plugs. The Grabber, as some
students called the speckled fungus that had grown and made itself at home in
one of the bowls, was gone. Forensically, the only elements that betrayed the
room as a genuine classroom were the size, the pink door and window trim, the
many capped pipes that stuck out of the walls, and the aluminum vent that
joined our space with two other bathrooms
on the same floor of the building with no name. One bathroom served boys and
men, the other, girls, women, and staff
Once our red-faced, wrinkly
Superintendent of Schools told me laughingly, “At the Board Office nobody knows
what to call this old building. Myself, I call it The Barn. Ha!”
“Listen,” Aldous, who occupied
one of the seven well-scratched wooden desks, said,
“You can hear someone taking a whizz.”
A Sci-Fi Fantasy (for
young readers; Quibils and Quirks, Lukiv, 1997e, 1998, 1999, Chapter 1)
“Chop off their heads!” hollered King Quibil—a five-foot tall fur ball, with two arms and legs, who
was waving a sword. “Chop off everybody’s head! Teach them a lesson they’ll
never forget!”
Armed quibils filled the south end of
Battle cries mixed with gasps and screams. The king,
his belly full of peppermint tea, yelled, “Charge!” People ran north along
Write a paragraph to start each of these:
1. a spy-thriller
2.
a murder mystery
3. a romance
4. a horror story
5. a character study
6.
an-erupting-volcano-threatens-Quesnel or another impending-environmental-disaster story.
End of Unit 4. Four more
left.
Unit 5
Contents:
It refers to “the use,
choice, and arrangement of words and modes of expression” (Diction, 1992, p.
272). According to Arvey (n.d.), it’s
the author’s choice of words. As such, diction
is an important element of style. Not only can diction set the tone of a piece
of writing (form the reader’s attitude to the story) but, as used by a single
character, diction also can reveal much about that character and so form the
reader’s attitude toward him or her. (Diction, para. 1)
That means you, the writer, must consider your audience,
your character(s), your own style, knowledge, and life’s experiences (lifeworld), and “local” meanings of
words. Your work must ring with an appropriate tone. Your words and their
arrangement; theme(s); scenes; chapters in the case of a novel; characters;
metaphors (and use of other literary devices); setting; historical,
sociological, religious, and psychological context; and sequence and pace of
events must exist in a melodious tone that no element cacophonously
contradicts. The reader must sense the wholeness of that tone. Cacophony robs
the story/novel of realism, of that ring of rightness, and of that sense that
you, the writer, actually know what you’re doing. Wholeness = professional
writing. If you renovate a million-dollar house by using materials like low-end
level loop carpeting in the living room, that’s cacophony. If your story is a million-dollar house,
your low-end carpeting will tell your readers that you’re an amateur. Wholeness of tone—absent. That would show you have not learned the full
value of Coleridge’s “willing suspension of
disbelief.”
But you do understand the full value of that quote, don’t you?—and, therefore,
you’re “use, choice,
and arrangement of words and modes of expression” will contribute to a melody
that pleases your readers’ intellectual,
aesthetic, emotional and perhaps even spiritual ears.
More About Diction
In Unit 4, you used quotes from Fitzgerald’s (1925/1992) The
Great Gatsby that helped define Nick Carraway (the narrator), Jay Gatsby,
Tom Buchanan, Daisy Buchanan, and Miss (Jordan) Baker. Let’s focus on that delightful specimen called Tom
Buchanan. Explain in what ways Fitzgerald’s diction
was appropriate, in view of who Tom was, who he was speaking to, the audience
the novel was written for, and Fitzgerald’s own background.
II. Novel Writing, Plot, a
Plan
It’s time for you to go from
wet feet to soaked all over. In different words, soon I’m going to ask you to try your hand at novel writing.
I’m not suggesting that you write a complete work. For now, think about at
least a loose plan, which would take you from A to Z, along at least a 120-page
journey.
On that journey, you’ll have room, page-wise, to develop
characters. Block (1979) says
you
[will] have space to move around in, space to let your characters develop and
come to life, space for your story line to get itself in motion and carry the
day....Short story writing taught me quite a bit about effective use of the
language. I learned, too, how to construct a scene and how to handle dialogue.
Everything I learned in this fashion was valuable.
When I wrote a novel, it was as if I were
working with heavy weights...
Characterization
was at once a very different matter. Before my characters had existed to
perform specific functions and speak specific lines.…When I wrote a novel, the characters came to life for
me. They had backgrounds, they had families, they had quirks and attitudes that
added up to more than the broad lines of caricature. I had to know more about
them in order to make them maintain vitality over a couple of hundred pages,
and thus there was more substance to them. (pp. 10-14)
I hope that quote helps you deepen your sense of the
novel.
Now, once you have a plan, even a loose one, you may write two
chapters (possibly consecutive), either from the beginning, middle, or end of
your novel. Naturally, you’ll need a
story to write about; you’ll need character and plot, events and trouble—and worsening trouble and worsening, worsening
trouble. (Have I made my point?) You’ll need
an interesting main character who has a lot of determination to deal with the
plot of that trouble, and who has a lot to lose if he or she doesn’t triumph.
As for plot, Hall (1989) calls it
an
arrangement of events, an ordering of raw life. It is what distinguishes
fiction from a mere chronicle of events, from a news story. It is the dynamic
element of fiction; a progressive development toward some significant and
satisfying end...; the partial disclosure, temporary blockage, the further
mysteries, which create the tensions of suspense, leading to the final
breakthrough, when meaning is revealed and emotion felt. (p. 60)
Let’s return to the plan. I mentioned earlier that
you should think about at least a loose one. Granted, some established writers
only sometimes or never use an outline. Theodore Sturgeon, a science-fiction
writer, said he didn’t plan because he figured if he
didn’t know what was going to happen next, then neither
would the reader (Block, 1979). I employed that concept, to some degree, when I
wrote Quibils and Quirks (1997e, 1998, 1999). Although I knew how I
wanted the novel to begin and end (a loose plan), I didn’t know precisely how the chapters in between would
fill up. I found the writing exhilarating in the sense that I often found
myself saying, “Now what does this story need
next?” and shortly thereafter racing to my word processor to
write down what I’d come up with. Block (1979)
speaks of others who throw detailed planning out the window: for example, Willo
Davis Roberts and Tony Hillerman. He namelessly refers to others he knows who
plan minimally or not at all.
On the other hand, Byrant (1978) speaks about a plan as a
concrete and necessary element for novelists, especially neophyte ones. She
says
one
of the most crippling myths believed by beginners is that the novelist plunges
into writing a book with nothing but an inspired vision and a kind of mad
energy.
You may have tried...this..., going pretty far into it
on inspiration and black coffee. But chances are that about halfway in, if not
sooner, your energy began to wane, certain components of character began to
blur, strands of plot became tangled, and you began to hear the ominous
creeping in of cold doubt that you really are a novelist after all. At this
point you gave up...again (p. 35)
What will you do? Plan? Not plan? My advice to you:
Beware of overconfidence. Beware of under planning. Perhaps you wish to write
only the two chapters I’ve assigned for
this section. Planning for two may not seem as important as planning for ten or
20 or 30. If, however, you truly wish to complete a novel, you should know that
many wannabe novelists start novels but few finish them. So beware of wasting
time. It’s precious. Besides that, I must say that my writing
200 pages of junk lacks the satisfaction and joy of writing two pages of
quality fiction that captures readers’
attention. Do you feel the same? At any rate, your time is your time just as
your wastepaper basket is yours. Use both as you see fit.
As
you write through planning or by the seat of your pants, give your chapters
(except for the last one, unless you’re
writing a serial) a hook. Irwin and Eyrly (1988) explain:
Many
writers, including Charles Dickens, published first in magazines, a chapter a
time—emphasizing the notion that each chapter, in a sense,
was entire unto itself, yet urged the reader forward. The use of chapters
demands careful attention to the last lines because they have to be satisfying
in themselves, yet at the same time they must make the reader wonder that
happens next [the hook]. An obvious use of such a technique was “Who shot JR?”
which carried the interest in the tv series “
Landers’ “Joe the Cliff-Hanger” (pp. 88-92) demonstrates repeated use of hooks, or
cliff hangers, to keep the story for youngsters rolling along. The same
principle works for adult novels for adult readers.
George
deftly used his razor to slice off the remaining hairs bristled on his double
chin when he saw, just above him in the mirror, a plunging knife.
Does that sound like a good
hook, or cliff hanger, for the end of a chapter?
Now plan, or don’t plan, and write two chapters. And,
remember the rules and principles you’ve learned so far.
End of Unit 5. Three to go.
Unit 6
Contents:
I wrote a little book, entitled
For Writers Only, designed to encourage and direct new writers. I call
the first chapter Writer’s Block. Please
read it. The other chapters deal with other issues, including off-beat
perspectives, that writers may enjoy reading about.
FOR WRITERS ONLYÓ
by
Dan Lukiv
“I loved...For Writers Only”, Tina Stanton, Borders & Time
Credits
Various works in this
collection have appeared in one or more of Word is Out, BC Teacher,
The Artist’s Journal, CHALLENGER international, canadian content,
CanTeach, Canadian Writer’s Journal, The
Source, The Journal of Secondary Alternate Education, Laughing
Bear Press (USA), Poetic Voices (USA), Up Dare? (USA), You
Can’t Take it With You (USA), Creative Juices (USA), Writer’s Forum (USA),
The Path Not Taken (USA), Omnific (USA), Poetic Realm (USA),
Poetic License (USA), Cyber Literature: A Bi-Annual Journal of
English Studies (India), The English Teachers’ Online Network of South
Africa, and Artslink (South Africa).
Table of Contents
Chapter
1.
Writer’s Block
2.
Corpus Callosum
3.
Inspiration/Perspiration
4.
Haiku 1
5.
The Poet
6.
You Want to be a Poet?
7.
Translate
8.
Lukiv’s Rules for Writers
9. Haiku 2
10. Shadow Boxing in
11. Tip
12. Quesnel Writers in Bloom
13. Creativity
14. Haiku 3
15. Get Over it!
16. Fun With Language
17. A Tool of the Subconscious; and
Lateral-Thinking Ecstasy 18.
Reviews of Poetry Collections
19. If They’re Worth
Their Weight in Salt, or Gold, or
Seaweed
20. What Encouraged Me to Become a
Writer
1.
Writer’s Block
I want to talk about writer’s block, but I can’t think of
anything to say—kidding!
Writer’s block is like constipation. I’m sure you know
the cure for constipation—jumping on a trampoline. Ha! As for writer’s block,
however, consider what Lois Duncan says in How to Write and Sell your
Personal Experiences:
I have noticed in myself that writer’s block most frequently
occurs after a
time of emotional spending. When I first realised that I
had found the man I
was going to marry, I could not write. (1979, p. 196)
The first thing to do when you find yourself
a victim of writer’s block
is to accept it for exactly what it is; not the end of
the world, but a rejuvenation
period. Let yourself rest. Be good to yourself. Call it a
vacation.
(p. 196)
[Or] begin something totally different from
anything that you
normally write. If your specialty is romance, try a
science fiction story. If you
write confessions, tackle a factual article. If you
generally write for adults, try
a juvenile; write a poem. (p. 197)
Jack Hodgins, in his A Passion for Narrative: A Guide
for Writing Fiction, mentions:
Many writers find getting started the hardest part. By “getting
started” they
sometimes mean beginning a new project. Margaret Laurence
said that she
came into a book with incredible difficulty. “I do everything possible not to
begin until it becomes absolutely impossible to evade any
longer, that is, the
torture of writing becomes less than the torture of not
writing.” (Margaret
Laurence, quoted in Eleven Canadian Novelists
[Gibson (Ed.), 1973]).
(Hodgins, 1993, p. 36)
Margaret’s humour aside, some writers are so tortured
by their inability to write something decent or, more along the theme of this
chapter, to write something at all that they dream up what Hodgins (1993) calls
“stalling techniques,” providing those
with writer’s block alternatives to their dealing with it. “Interviews
with writers are filled with catalogues of stalling techniques (washing dishes,
sharpening pencils, staring at the phone and willing it to ring)” (p. 36).
Some writers, on the other hand, prepare for the
possibility of tomorrow’s writer’s block by, as Hodgins says, “stopping work in the middle of a sentence so that it’s
necessary to finish that sentence the next day, rereading and revising
yesterday’s work, pretending that it isn’t ‘real’
writing but only ‘making notes’” (1993, p. 36).
The point to remember: Don’t give up. Really, that is
All
writers seem to agree that it is important to be at the desk, or at least in
the right room, ready to go. Mordecai Richler says that
there are some days
when he finds it impossible to begin, yet he will spend
his four hours in his
office anyway. “I may
read magazines, I may do a crossword puzzle or check
all the baseball averages...” (Mordecai Richler, in Eleven Canadian Novelists
[Gibson (Ed.), 1973]). (Hodgins, 1993, p. 36)
Again, don’t give up—unless
you’ve decided that writing isn’t important enough to sweat over. But if you’re
going to keep up this never-ending apprenticeship, then perhaps this morsel of
advice from Hodgins will help you:
Difficulty with just beginning a day’s writing may be
lessened by eliminating
any sense of obligation to be writing something to be
proud of. Until you
have completed a first draft of a story or novel, you
have no responsibility but
to entertain yourself, explore your material, and follow
your characters
around. (1993, pp. 36-37)
Actually, many professional writers’ first drafts might
embarrass them if such drafts slipped into the public forum. So: write. Even if
it stinks. Besides, a lot of writing is rewriting. Or you might switch from
your writing in one genre to another. If, however, writer’s block completely
chokes off your writing breath, don’t despair. Wash dishes. Do a crossword
puzzle. Watch a movie. Take a vacation! Rejuvenate! And remember, just as
people survive constipation, writers survive writer’s block.
2. Corpus Callosum
One to one,
A moonrise,
A to z,
A Van Gogh sunflower,
A wart,
A face,
Mr. Spock’s ears,
Azimov’s foundation,
If x, then y,
If x, then then,
5 + 2,
Horton hates a Who,
Chart a flow,
Paint love orange,
Stay on the line,
Ever see a man with
no eyebrows?,
Red light: stop,
Red light: Jim Morrison,
I before e,
Milkwood tea,
Compound words,
The woman is a pig,
Run through the gears,
Van Gogh self-portraits,
A thousand words spoken,
A Mona Lisa silence,
How to fix a plugged toilet,
What is gravity like?,
A brain is an organ,
The green is the right
dreamscape.
3.
Inspiration/Perspiration
Some
people speak about the Muse inspiring them, giving them the words to
write, firing them up with the thoughts, images, and technical wizardry to
compose a great poem—or work of fiction. But I figure the Muse is simply
sweat and craft and clear thought.
I’m not alone in such a stand. Ellen E. M. Roberts, in The
Children’s Picture Book, says:
Probably Tom Edison was right when he described genius as
“one percent
inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Daniel
Manus Pinkwater,
the author of such picture books as Bear’s Picture
and Around Fred’s Bed, has
this to say on work and inspiration: “My method and
theory of art: I have this
desk. When I spend a number of hours per day seated at
it, I usually end up
having written...something. When I don’t sit, I don’t
write...I would not take
a million dollars for that desk.” (1981, p. 165)
Perhaps Pinkwater’s desk provides that 1% inspiration.
But his tongue in his cheek essentially says that hard work, not some ephemeral
Muse, gets the job done.
Now then, if you truly want “to be” a poet, or fiction
writer, you may, if you want to, wait for this Moose—I mean,
Muse chap, gal, actually: the Muse can be any one of Calliope, Clio, Erato,
Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania—to
drop in, but you might (should) find better success by simply firing up your
word processor and applying that “ninety-nine percent perspiration” thing.
4. Haiku 1
Poet in a lawn chair,
Sleeping, pen in hand,
Mouth open.
5. The Poet
The man in the living-room (gyproc
And oak trim)
Can’t see his station wagon
Outside the finger-smeared window—
The car like a giant cockroach
Asleep under an orange streetlight;
The man can’t see his own reflection
In the picture window of the neighbour’s
Dark house across the truck-smashed
Road;
The man can’t see these things
Because he’s watching a movie about
Van Gogh
And dreaming about what a great poet he’d
Have become
If he’d been more mad.
6. You Want to be a Poet?
[This discussion applies to fiction writers
too.]
Do you want to be a poet? If you do, I hope you don’t
mind hard work—writing, rewriting, reading poetry, rewriting, reading
about poetry, rewriting, reading what critics say about books of poetry,
rewriting, reading literary journals, rewriting, taking creative writing
courses, rewriting (Any pattern here?).
Hard work implied:
It’s what made tennis great Billie Jean King wear out
several pairs of tennis
shoes every week when she was young, practising on
the court every day
until after dark.
It’s what made basketball immortal Bill
Russell…study moves
made by other NBA players, then practise them endlessly
until they
became his own.
It’s what made Margaret Mitchell go through
countless rewrites of
Gone With the Wind
in order to get everything just right.
Great practitioners in any field make it look
easy, so bystanders
murmur in awe about talent. What the bystander never sees
is the agony of
effort, study and practise that made the final
performance appear
effortless—the fruits of professional
attitude [or hard work].
(Bickham, 1996, pp. 3-4)
To further quote Bickham, author of The Apple Dumpling
Gang, and about eighty other novels, “‘Talent’ is what people say you have
after you have worked like [crazy] for years to improve yourself” (1996, p.
3).
In different words: Lift weights—big
muscles follow; apply the advice of the previous paragraphs—talent
follows.
Again, do you want to be a poet?
7. Translate
Tone,
It’s the key,
Or the axe—
Words might lack
The clarity of
y = x2,
But only the polyglots
Care,
Or complain,
I cogitate
(Blaaagh!).
And Ezra
Do you remember him?
He was no linguistic prude,
Or prune;
He tossed Cantos-salad,
Like a juggler tossing
Knives,
Like Robert Lowell
(Scoundrel, poet, or both?)
Juggling fidelity
And freedom
(Whose Imitations
(“Reckless with literal meaning”)
Sang its own songs?),
Carving sculptures
With chisel and Bly’s 8 steps,
Aiming for “rightness of hand,”
Like a trembling archer
Aiming for the deer’s
Heart.
8.
Lukiv’s Rules For Writers
1. If you want to be a writer, then write, write,
write—journal
entries, stories, plays, movies,
poems,
whatever turns your crank.
2.
Be honest, to yourself. Be honest to your own
experience
and emotions and be honest to your
audience.
Don’t insult your readers by lying to them.
What
does that mean? Be true to your feelings, to
your
vision, and to the realities you have seen.
3.
Don’t bath in ambiguity. Be specific, concrete. Why
say
the house was a mansion when you can say it had
eight
gables and 12 bathrooms?: You may be
ingeniously
general and abstract when you’ve become a
genius.
4.
If you try to show off your ability or knowledge,
you
run the risk of making people sick.
5.
Read, read, read. That’s like saying write, write,
write.
In fact, merge the two: read, write, read,
write,
read...Right?
6.
Don’t preach. You’ll bore people so much they’ll
cross
whirling rapids to avoid reading your work.
7.
Make sure your work is about somebody worth reading
about.
8.
Make up what you need, but make it true again to
your
vision, and to the realities you have seen. [Re-read 2.]
9.
Don’t break rules until you’ve mastered your art and
craft.
Then you may be ingeniously unorthodox.
9. Haiku 2
Poet in a lawn chair:
His pen lies in tall grass
As he still sleeps.
10. Shadow Boxing in
Thought
Permeates “singing thought”1
As air fills a city:
The “non-intellectual,
Anti-decorative”;1
The coffee in a teacup,
The
“art of the mental...
[In the] context of
The physical.”2
A fish hook
Stabs a trout;
A series of tugs,
A flash of silver
Above the blue lake—
A chain reaction:
Images fathering images—
Lateral discovery,
Gut feelings,
Even logic;
Mathematical meat cleavers
And clams that play accordions3
Become a symphony
Of birth,
A kettle of “elusive...
Shadowy thoughts”4
Poured into clear tumblers
To study.
1. Robert Graves
2. Marvin Bell
3. Wallace Stevens
4. Ted Hughes
11. Tip:
Magazine editors sometimes take poems or 50- to 150-word
anecdotes (appropriate for their magazines’ themes) as fillers, even if they
don’t advertise a need for such. For example, Wildflower, a beautifully
orchestrated magazine of photographs, art, and articles, accepted one of my
poems, about the ladyslipper, although the magazine does not request poetry and
generally does not use it. Here is the poem:
Ladyslippers (1997c, p. 25)
Ladyslippers:
Pumps for Barbie dolls?—
Toy poodles of a
Canine landscape?
Pale, defenseless:
They turn lettuce-brown,
Then die,
After human touch,
But one law forbids
This death-kiss:
Herod-magi protect
These dwarfs,
These echoes of
And that melody that
One day
Twanged.
Pumps for Barbie dolls?
Since the exile
And flood,
Ladyslippers bloom
In gentle clusters,
In the roar of
Traffic.
12.
Quesnel Writers in Bloom [mostly for teachers]
Do you enjoy teaching creative writing? Many of us do.
But isn’t it frustrating that the poems and stories our pupils sand and polish
seldom get an audience beyond author and teacher? Eighteen years ago I cut down
my frustration in this regard. I assembled a forum for my secondary alternate
students—a literary journal I call CHALLENGER international.
Volunteers
print about fifty copies per issue, which we distribute mostly to secondary
alternate students throughout our school district. These issues are the
collective effort of many of my students, myself, and our secretary, each
helping out as one or more of the following: typist, proof reader, gopher,
author, co-editor, artist. Co-editors read submissions and vote on whether or
not they merit publication (illustrations may also be published if our
co-editors find their quality acceptable). Submissions often come from our own
students, but because we are advertised in The Poet’s Market1,
we also receive work from students, even established writers, internationally.
Once we’ve gathered enough material, a volunteer word processes the journal.
Next, proof readers go over the printed original several times, uprooting typos
and spelling and grammatical errors.
Some of our young writers have found other publishers: in
Canada, The Cariboo Observer, The Cariboo Advocate, Kids World
Magazine, The Word is Out, Teacher, The Student Voice,
Against the Wall, Western People, To the Wall, and TG:
Voices of Today’s Generation; in the USA, StudentsWrite.com; and in
South Africa, The English Teachers’ Online Network. I hope some of their
poetry and prose, one day, will fill pages in first class Canadian literary
journals such as The Fiddlehead, Malahat Review, and Grain,
and in fine international markets.
*
Here are two poems and one editorial note CHALLENGER
international has published, to let you taste some of its flavours:
Two Poems
Houses
out of Boxes, by Kerry Randall (18
years old)
Thought mumbles through
my breath
breaking the soft silence.
Happiness has past
dripping off my skin.
I seem to remember
my strange days
making houses out of boxes
mastering my future.
And the fragile fish
show off their silent strokes
and I still perch
deeply.
Kindergarten, by davemoss (19
years old)
i’m a
kindergarten i used to sail
now i’m away
that is it
contagious
contagiouse
i’m a bird
a bird
bird blue
you
are in my
skye
tickles
my
tears
but my waves on
the
ocean
eye see you
An Example of an Editorial Note
Poetry is my first concern in this issue. Poems that CHALLENGER
international has published, and new ones, lie awake inside. Be careful
they don’t jump off the page and into your blood.
I hope they make your “toenails twinkle” (Dylan Thomas,
quoted in Drury, 1991, p. 5): Thomas’ thrust: If they don’t make your “toenails
twinkle,” they aren’t poems. Emily Dickinson defined poetry differently: “If I
feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry”
(as quoted, p. 5.).
Who needs drugs?
If a “poem” stops you shaving, it really is a poem figured A. E.
Housman (Drury, 1991, p. 5). Robert Graves thought a poem should make “the
hairs of one’s chin...bristle” (as quoted, p. 5). Emily, I believe, didn’t
shave, so she had her own ideas. I wonder if she knew Beethoven’s friend called
Furry Lisa.
I hope you enjoy this issue. William Wordsworth defined
poetry as the “overflow of powerful feelings” (as quoted in Drury, 1991, p. 5).
I hope you overflow.
As
for reviews of CHALLENGER international, here are seven:
1. “I have just finished reading the latest edition of CHALLENGER
international. Great stuff! ... I really appreciated it, but the big
winners are the kids. I know kids feel validated when they see their own work
in print.”
—Tina Quinn,
former Associate Principal of Secondary Alternate Programs in
2. “I have just read CHALLENGER international...I
found it to be very interesting...I particularly enjoyed the poetry.”
—Ed Napier,
former Director of Instruction in Quesnel.
3.
“CHALLENGER international is commended for distinguished accomplishment
in clarity and interest...I am most impressed by the variety of topics you
address as well as the quality of the articles and poems submitted.”
—Dr. Debra
Cullinane, former Co-ordinator of Student Support Services in Quesnel.
4. “CHALLENGER international is an excellent
vehicle for students to express themselves. Their views on life through stories
and poetry show others how they think and feel. Another positive example from
students expressing themselves through writing is that it could relieve tension
caused from their stress. We all look different, but most of the time we are
all the same on the inside, and CHALLENGER international helps us see
that.”
—Kathy Olsen,
McNaughton Centre graduate.
5. “I enjoyed reading these poems. Thanks for continuing
this project.”
—Nate Bello, Principal,
McNaughton Centre.
6. “Excellent stuff.”
—Richard Wink, poet (
7. “[A] good company
[of authors].”
—Luis Benitez, poet (
8. “I am reading this
new issue with pleasure, knowing new poets…It is really something I am enjoying.”
—Luis Benitez, poet (
Footnote
1I
encourage writers to submit poetry, short fiction, novel excerpts, and black
pen drawings. I’m open to “any kind
of work, especially by teenagers (Ci’s mandate:
to encourage young writers, and to publish their work alongside established
writers), providing it’s not pornographic, profane, or overly abstract” (CHALLENGER, 2002, p. 86). E-mail submissions
only: lukivdan@hotmail.com.
13. Creativity
Divergent thinking.
Lateral thought. Hey, like what’s that? Know what I mean, Vern? C—aye—N—aye—D—aye.
What did Earl Birney, the poet, say about creativity?
I
think all children who aren’t born into absolute idiocy are artistically
creative.
With
a favourable kind of environment and education, most of them, I suspect,
grow
up retaining some creative powers as men and women. But there’s also a
strong
social urge to conform..., to stop really thinking, or even feeling deeply,
for
one’s self. Artists are people who resist this conforming pressure, at least
with
part
of their energies. They’re...given to fantasy, to lively speculation, humorous
or lugubrious exaggeration, games of pretending, and to uninhibited delight in
images and, in the case of writers, in words themselves. (1966, p. 27).
Are you given to fantasy, speculation, exaggeration,
pretending? Do you love rhubarb?—I mean, do you love words? Images?
Symbolism? Do you love E = mc2 or Beethoven’s ninth or
Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men? Is creativity your joy or burden or both?
And, by the way, what does lugubrious mean?
14. Haiku 3
Poet in a lawnchair—
A niece looks closely and asks,
“Mummy,
has he died?”
15. Get Over it!
Do you enjoy an audience? If you’re a
stand-up comedian, then you enjoy an audience that laughs at your jokes. You
want people to enjoy your art and craft. If you like to write, then likely you
want others to read your work and enjoy it. Sometimes shy ones, however, worry
that once people read their poetry or prose that those people will mock their
work, perhaps even laugh at them, and as a result they refrain from trying to get
it published.
My advice to these writers: GET OVER IT! If they
can’t get over that worry, they’re pole
vaulters without poles. If they’re actually not shy at all, but,
rather, unusually indifferent about readership, like the writer Lois Duncan
talks about in the following excerpt from her book called How to Write and
Sell your Personal Experiences, then that’s
another story:
I
[Lois Duncan] was once a speaker at a writers’
conference where all the participants submitted manuscripts along with their
registration forms. These were judged, and the authors of the best were awarded
free tuition.
That year the grand prize went to a huge and richly
realistic novel about life in a mental institution. When the conference
director phoned to give the winner the happy news, he was startled to discover
that the story was autobiographical. The author was an inmate at just such an
institution, and two attendants escorted him to the awards dinner.
The judge for novels was an editor from one of the top
publishing houses in the country. He was so impressed by the manuscript that he
phoned home and was given permission to offer a contract.
“This is really a red-letter day for you, sir,” he
told the author grandly. “We want to publish your book!”
“That’s nice of you,” the writer said, “but
I just burned it.”
When the stunned editor asked incredulously, “Why?”
the author said simply, “I was through with it. Now it’s time
for me to start on something else.”
Unlike that author, most of us want our work to be
read. We want it to be published. (1979, pp. 209-210).
CHALLENGER international [Ci, a literary journal], in concert with those
last two sentences, offers an opportunity for neophyte writers, shy as they
might be, to grow a thick skin. Ci offers neophytes the dignity of
displaying their wares alongside the works of established writers. Neophytes
and significant others may submit work to me, the editor (see the footnote of
Chapter 12).
16.
Fun With Language
Do you enjoy reading catchy
titles?
Aliens kidnapped me and fixed my teeth
I believe I read that in a tabloid once upon a time there
was a princess with a wart on her nose—I mean, I read that in a tabloid
once. Maybe twice.
I also remember reading this one:
Chocoholic mother gives birth to sugar-coated baby
Good readin’, aye?
Those from tabloids were written purposely for selling
copies. But sometimes writers inadvertently write headlines that ring with
hilarity rather than logic. Consider these (Untitled, 2000):
Plane too close to the ground, crash probe told
Miners refuse to work after death
Juvenile court to try shooting defendant
Two Soviet ships collide, one dies
Killer sentenced to die for a second time in ten years
Cold wave linked to temperatures
War dims hope for peace
If strike isn’t settled quickly, it may last
awhile
Enfields couple slain; police suspect homicide
Red tape holds up new bridge
Deer kills 17,000
Typhoon rips through cemetery, hundreds dead
Jay Leno (“The Tonight
Show”), like his predecessor, Johnny Carson, has great fun
with such bloopers. He reads them before millions of princesses with warts on
their noses—I mean, before millions of aliens who fix teeth; I
mean, before aliens with warts on their noses who fix teeth.
I know I’m being silly. But we can have a
lot of fun with language. Thomas Hood said, “They went and told the sexton, and the sexton tolled
the bell” (Pun, 1993, p. 159).
I
said we can have a lot of fun with language. Stand up comedians know that like
nobody else. I hope you have fun with language. And if you write a
blooper, a misplaced modifier (“A coffee table
stood before the fireplace with carved legs and a glass top”; “Never give
fruit to a baby that hasn’t been strained” [Shaw, 1986, p. 298])—or if
you write some other ridiculous spice of illogic, then laugh at yourself.
Rodney Dangerfield laughed at himself lots. Maybe he “[didn’t] get no respect,” but he made lots of money as a comedian. And I think
he had fun.
17. A Tool of the
Subconscious; and The Conscious Mind and Lateral-Thinking Ecstasy
1. A tool of the
subconscious.
Early in my math and physics
studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC), I learned of a valuable
tool that has helped me repeatedly as a writer. If I couldn’t
solve a problem quickly, I didn’t sweat it for long. I shoved the
problem into the back of my mind, into a place of subconscious, a psychologist
might say, and forgot about it.
Does that seem illogical? A contradiction? Shouldn’t
a person work, work, work through a problem? Well, glory to the work-a-maniacs.
But I found my subconscious often solved the problem, somehow, and then tossed
the solution into my thoughts at the most amazing times: while I was waking up
in the morning or from a power nap or while I was seated on the pot. Needless
to say, I spent lots of time seated on the pot and waking up. Ha! They helped
get me through my math and physics courses. Har!
This tool—this placing a
difficult problem in my subconscious and then waiting for a solution—has helped me, helped me, helped me as a writer! J. D.
Bates knows what I mean: “Try using the
[tool] many professional writers rely on: think hard about the subject, then
relax and let your subconscious mind take over. You’ll be
surprised how well this works [because of]...the words [you’ll]
“conjure up” (1980,
p. 42). I modify this advice, however, by saying that your thinking too hard
about the subject may wear you out. To avoid the drain, don’t wait too long to toss the problem into the
subconscious, letting it do the work somewhere in those shadows of the
psyche. I call my advice a tool of the subconscious. I certainly used it
often while I tried to find solutions to some of the time travel logic problems
I had to work through in my children’s novel,
Quibils and Quirks (1997, 1998, 1999). How many times my subconscious
has tossed solutions or possibilities into my conscious mind!
2. The conscious mind and
lateral-thinking ecstasy.
Sometimes, however, I consciously
find solutions or possibilities formally through brainstorming, creative
thinking, lateral thinking, or “clustering”‘ (Rico,
1983, p. 173 [italics mine]). In the
context of those synonyms, I have coined a term that I call lateral-thinking
ecstasy (Lukiv, 2001a, Chapter 7), the word ecstasy referring to the
exhilaration I find in creative thought. Actually, this process/experience of
lateral thinking, revisited many times, has enabled me to work through many
problems I have encountered as a poet and fiction and article writer. The
process frequently helped me sort out what direction Quibils and Quirks
needed next—i.e., lateral-thinking would help
me answer, “What does the novel need now?” Then I would unleash my mind, entertaining, really,
possibilities (the very substance of creative thought).
Lateral-thinking
promotes clarity of thought, even the discovery of innovative writing
solutions. Solutions and clarity sometimes become food for even clearer
thoughts that translate into cloudless language, illustrations, examples, or
analogies, helping the writer to write like a pro—like an
Asimov. Bates says, in fact, that “Asimov...is…
18. Reviews of Poetry
Collections
The
forementioned collections of poetry have been published through Island
Scholastic Press,
Leaves in Water, by Dimitar Anakiev
Dimitar Anakiev, a physician and poet, born in
He writes in Serbian, Slovene and English, and his work
has been translated into Japanese, German, Finnish, and Bulgarian. In Knots:
The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku Poetry, he writes about his
Balkan homeland: “Great political instability in the [Balkan] region (known
worldwide as the ‘powderkeg’) has forced our poets to consider that war has
become almost a kind of a ‘seasonal’ phenomenon which devastates Southeastern
Europe on a regular basis, like a tornado, say, unexpected and yet predictable.
This last decade of the century has been replete with such disaster” (Anakeiv,
1999, p. 9). Some of his haiku reflect that “political instability,” whether he
refers to “old barracks” or a crushed lizard beneath “the wheel of a troop
carrier.” Many other haiku, however, take us beyond the bullets and bombs to “beech
bark,” “hot chestnuts,” a “garden snail,” and a “gypsy funeral.”
Dimitar Anakiev’s first language isn’t
English, but his English haiku, like Joseph Conrad’s
fiction, make a wonderful gift to that language.
Jump Rope Rhyme, by Esther Cameron
Esther Cameron’s poetry, sometimes playful, as
in “Jump Rope Rhyme” (“bluebells
cockleshells…eevy ivy over”), sometimes playfully Homeric, as in “Songs my Mother Taught Me” (“the family
windows, blooming with sleep and astonishment, / behold him, not magnifico, but
fool”), reveals a mature art and craft and deep insight
into human nature.
The Gift Egg, by Elana Wolff
Elana Wolff’s The Gift Egg reminds me
of this comment by Emily Dickinson: “If I
feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” This collection establishes Wolff as a mature poet.
Whether in “Muskrats”‘
reminder that rain falls on the “righteous…and unrighteous [Matthew
Polaris, by Nick Vair
Eighteen-year-old Nick Vair writes with wonder,
celebrating our universe. But he also writes about the pitfalls, the dangers,
of our imperfect decisions: “Polaris” says “[He] will see
our terrible fall. / He is the eternal Polaris.” “Unknown” speaks of “Black
space, / Dark place, / The endless void / Of endless sorrow,” reminding us of the greatness and sorrowful darkness
of our universe, creating a pathetic fallacy, a mirror for mankind, a message for
us to stop and think about our potential for “horrifying”
designs.
A Book of Days, by Paul Gotro
Paul Gotro writes wonderfully simple images that stay
stay stay with me, like “hoofs of my
rage / pounding across a black meadow” and “wind driven leaves” and “ice bitten
rooftops.” My heart-lyre responds with its
own music that vibrates my whole body. A Book of Days spreads an
emotional landscape that turns me into a frequent visitor. This is a landscape
of honesty, ice—and hope: “I find
me [Paul says] / under the golden trees of your [Jean’s]
morning, / alive / and safe within the glory / of your eyes.”
Dear Teacher, by Dawn Willey (20 years old)
Dawn Willey’s poetry is real like a broken
bone, an aching heart, or tears on a cheek: “The Bitter Dawn” says “Tired of crying, / Tired of pain, / I let you go / To
keep me sane.” She wrings blood out of her
words, and rings a loud bell against injustice, selfishness, indifference, and
abuse. In “Words for an Abused Woman” she says succinctly, “The mark of your hand still white on my cheek.” Her poet’s voice, and her pain, haunts me!
Rocked on Blood, by Kerry Randall (18 years old)
Randall’s poetry cuts through flesh—our
flesh. As she says, “temporary hysteria / I think / or
could it be sadness / releasing itself / in a different angle.” Her poetry opens her heart to us and reveals a voice
so poignant that readers, especially young readers, often say, “I love this!”
a flowery pot in blue
my room, by dave moss (20
years old)
moss’s poetry and art reveal a wonderful
mixture of kindergarten-spontaneity and calculated thought. His work transcends
the usual, the mundane, the grammatically correct (or should I say correctly
polite?). He weaves a colourful word-play and Pied Piper-artistry that
sometimes knocks readers over in happy astonishment, as in “Brain Feever”: “Spanish tomatoes / in their canoes / flew over
berries, / carrots, and shoes / …Apple eyeballs
/ crunchy frogs / fungi polyworms.”
Forgive us our Sins, by Julia Shtromberg (21 years old)
Julia
Shtromberg from
The Wolves, by Jerad Lindland
This 14-year-old author, living in
Point-Blank-Poor, by Dr. Coral Hull
Original. Charged. Dr. Coral Hull’s poems speak about
poverty and related psychological pain: “we work with our bodies, we don’t use
our minds / ??what is this supposed to mean??”; “Don’t know how much longer I
can last. / Also, I’m frightened of lasting too much longer”; and “charity
begins at home. For those that live in one.”
A
master of her art and craft, this poet from
Spring Comes to
Clear unpretention carries Richard
Luftig’s poems. Their simplicity of language and their humanity bring a breath
of fresh air to the poetry scene. For example, “their limbs have sagged / and look ready to break, / their
spotted bark undressed” (“Spring Comes to Nova Scotia”); “His dentist’s
nightmare, that bridge / and plate rotten and corroded by years / of
Hollandaise sauce and lemon juice” (“George Washington’s Bridge”); and “I can attest
that crows are respectful / of human impatience and wrath and full / of
intelligence” (“April 26”). Nothing
esoteric, nothing fake. His poems remind me that being awake and alive is good,
very good.
Namdaemun Sestina, by
Rocco de Giacomo
Rocco de Giacomo presently lives and writes in
Zen Garden/Emergency
Exit, by George Swede
George Swede’s Zen Garden/Emergency Exit is a warm
lake. Every time I dive in my senses tell me, “You
really are awake, aren’t you?” Three crows warm themselves on a small chimney,
gulls stroll along a vacant runway, a retired colleague’s office plant has
nearly grown to the ceiling, and a Muslin in an airport lounge prays toward an
emergency exit. These images and many others beckon me to stay, swim more. Hm.
I have other things to do. I should leave. But, no, what was that one about the
“Traffic light / stuck on green— / first buds”?
I should leave, but I think I’ll stay a while longer.
Home, by Cory Gibson
Since losing the use of his legs in
an automobile accident, this young man has helped to establish wheelchair
basketball as a thriving, exciting sport in
To Hell and Back, by Kevin Higgins
Kevin Higgins, a well-seasoned poet from
Sadness
wanders through these poems. In “The Leader” Higgins seems to prophesy the coming of a leader of
pain and sadness: “He’ll hit
you with a killer smile / and a million grudges bound together in one big fist.” There is too much darkness in these poems because
there is too much in the world, in ourselves. I think that is what Higgins is
saying, and I think that is why he warns us: “poison of the sort we possess / is best kept bottled
and, where necessary, frozen.” (“Families and how to Survive Them”).
A
List of Poetry Collections Published by
Randall, K. (1998). Rocked
on blood.
[Canadian author].
moss, d. (1998). a flowery
pot in blue my room.
Press. [Canadian author].
Willey, D. (1998). Dear
teacher.
author].
Gotro, P. (1998). A book
of days.
[Canadian author].
Vair, N. (1999). Polaris.
author].
Wolff, E. (1999). The gift
egg.
author].
Anakiev, D. (2000). Leaves
in water.
[Slovenian author].
Cameron, E. (2000). Jump
rope rhyme.
[American author].
de Giacomo, R. (2000). Namdaemun
sestina.
[poetry from
[Australian author].
Lindland, J. (2000). The
wolves.
Maier, K. (2000). The way
life is today.
Shtromberg, J. (2000). Forgive
us our sins.
Zack, M. (2000). Post-Op.
Gibson, C. (2002). Home.
Higgins, K. (2002). To
hell and back.
author].
Luftig, R. (2002). Spring
comes to
Arnold, R. (2003). Shoes
lost long ago.
[Canadian author].
Keis, J. (2003). I think
too much.
[Canadian author].
Anderson, D. (2003). Hidden
among the pine.
Press. [Canadian author]. ISBN 1-894976-08-8.
Guglielmo, D. (2003). Summer
soliloquy.
[American author]. ISBN 1-894976-09-6.
Caughlan, J. W. (2003). A
journey of discovery.
Press. [Canadian author]. ISBN 1-894976-10-X.
Cui, J. (2003). To the butterfly, and other poems. Island
Scholastic Press.
[American author]. ISBN
1-894976-14-2.
Vallance, R. (2003). Four sonnets.
[Canadian author]. ISBN
1-894976-15-0.
Kay, B. (2003). The forest fires of 2003.
[Canadian author]. ISBN
1-894976-16-9.
Mackenzie, D. (2004). This Aboriginal voice: Collected works.
Scholastic Press.
[Canadian author]. ISBN 1-894976-18-5.
Khan, A. (2005). A fractal
kind of love.
author].
ISBN 1-894976-23-1
Brokos, M.
(2006). The eye examiner’s office.
Wink, R. (2006). Comfort
for the modern.
Briggs, K. (2006). Riding
shotgun.
author].
Zeng, M. (2006). Luster.
Benitez, L. (2006). The
elephant’s afternoon and other
poems.
Stubbington, J. (2007). No
chance, and other poems.
Press. [Canadian author].
Benitez, L. (2007). Mighty
cicadas and other poems.
Press. [Argentinean author].
19.
If They’re Worth Their Weight in
Salt, or Gold, or Seaweed
Our planet supports the weight of much poetry by a great
variety of people—some good poetry by beginners,
some even better by poets as seasoned as pot roasts. Do good and even better
poets share common goals? Yes:
1. To write something worth reading;
and
2. To write something that moves
readers through concentrated and
evocative language.
These poets, if they’re worth
their weight in salt, or gold, or seaweed, likely follow, perhaps
instinctively, these, or most of these, rules as written by Lawrence Jay Dessner,
in his book How to Write a Poem:
1. Write a poem.
2. Respect your
reader.
3. Respect
yourself.
4. Be specific.
5. Find your own
language.
6. Read other
people’s poems.
7. When in doubt,
leave it out.
8. Make it up.
9. A poem must
have a hero.
10. Grow up.
The Rule of Rules: Tell the
Truth. (1979, p. 181)
I know that a poet who doesn’t “write a poem” is an
astronaut without a spaceship. A poet who doesn’t
respect himself or his audience; who speaks in generalities; who steals other
people’s language; who doesn’t read
poems (except his own); who rambles for the sake of writing something,
anything, even if it makes him cringe; who steals other people’s
images; who has no hero or heroine interesting enough to merit even fleeting
note from readers; who rants rants rants like a toddler; and who lies is likely
a poet whose work—let me see, how
should I say this?—whose work stinks.
(I’m thinking of very old, very lumpy milk right now.)
I said “likely” in that last sentence because there’s
always some rotten genius somewhere who breaks the rules and gets away with it.
But if you’re not to poetry what Einstein was to mathematics,
then you’d better, like me, stick to the rules (or to most of
them).
P.S. Where’s my spaceship?
20. What Encouraged Me to
Become a Writer?
Do you know what forces in your past encouraged you to
pursue particular interests? You’re probably an
apprentice writer. Did any experiences in school encourage you to take up
writing? Are you also a photographer? Did any experiences in school encourage
you to take up photography? Are you a scientist? Nurse? Mechanic? Piano teacher?
Whale expert? Talk show host? Chemical engineer? Editor? Did any experiences in
school encourage you to pursue your line of work? I am a secondary alternate
teacher, but I am also a poet and a fiction writer, and I wonder about what, if
any, experiences in school encouraged me to take up creative writing as a
past-time and as a profession...I discover several in my mind, several that stand
like great trees on a somewhat barren landscape.
I’ll begin with
an experience from primary school. I clearly remember my grade three teacher
asking us students to read a story that showed me how much fun and how
interesting my looking at the world from a different perspective could be. In
the story, the farmer-husband and the housekeeper-wife each complained about
his or her lot in life and work load. Each decided the other had life easy,
very easy, and so each traded places. The husband became the housekeeper, and
the wife became the farmer. The result was hilarious because each was
hopelessly incompetent. That farm and the home became a kind of bedlam filled
with burnt food and mooing, unmilked cows. I looked at housekeeping through the
eyes of the farmer, and I looked at farming through the eyes of the wife. I
became hysterical.
From the day of my reading that story, I have never
forgotten how much I enjoy looking at the world from different, unusual
perspectives. I believe that story has encouraged me to dream up bizarre people
in fantastic circumstances. I refer to some of my characters—Hooper Quirk, Booger Jimm, Professor Hamburger, Dr.
Dewknob, and Miss Snapdragon—in the time
travel adventure of my Quibils and Quirks (1997, 1998, 1999).
Now I’ll step into
grade four: I vividly recall an experience that introduced me to the joy of
creative thought. I wrote the experience up as “Chapter Seven: How Big is the Universe?” in The Master Teacher: A Collection (2001a).
Here is an excerpt from that chapter:
The school year: 1962/63. I was in grade four, attending
Sir Wilfred Grenfell
Elementary
School in East-side
perfectly
juxtaposed the formalistic schooling I had already experienced
there
for over three years. I relate perfectly to Neil Sutherland in his “The Triumph
of ‘Formalism’: Elementary Schooling in
I knew no other schooling system, so those hours at
school actually seemed normal. “It was a [normal] system based on
teachers talking and pupils listening, a system that discouraged independent
thought, a system that provided no opportunity to be creative” (Sutherland,
1995, p. 106). But one day in grade four, in 1962/63 still in the clutches of a
century of formalism, learning briefly changed for me. Our usually-stern,
aloof, precisely-accurate teacher surprisingly said, “We’re going to do
something different today. We’re going to talk about the universe. I’m going to
ask you a question, but there is no right or wrong answer. Now then: How big is
the universe? Does it go on forever, or does it stop? And if it does stop, how
does it stop? Remember, now, there are no wrong answers.”
Our teacher worked hard to encourage us to allow our
imaginations no limits. I (and my fellow classmates) slowly recovered from the
shock of being invited to participate in such an unorthodox assignment. I
believe I felt my brain turning on. Perhaps new-found numbers of
neurotransmitters had jumped to life. My brain seemed to soar across a chasm
filled with 5 x 4 = 20 and other, apparently-for-the-moment, unimportant facts
to an expanse, a landscape, on which any thinking would do.
What a day! Fifteen years later I learned in UBC
teacher training classes that my fellow students and I were brainstorming,
creatively dreaming up ideas, and about ten years after that I learned that
some people call it lateral thinking. Comments leapt from our grade
four-mouths:
“Maybe it never ends.”
“How can something never end?”
“Maybe it starts all over again.”
“Maybe it ends at a brick wall.”
“Could the universe be a circle? So wherever you go,
like in a spaceship, you end up back where you started?”
Our teacher, who I remember looked delighted,
continued encouraging us to dream up as many possible answers to her “How big
is the universe?” question, until we
literally ran out of ideas. How different from lessons I had digested daily at
school—lessons for which “teachers
conducted individual or group drills of number facts or the times tables”
(Sutherland, 1995, p. 106) or conducted arithmetic races that determined
winners and losers. I thought about those possible, and according to our
teacher, anything-will-do “universe” answers for hours after that class, in
which no one, that I can recall, won or lost. Each time I ran those answers
through my mind, I felt exhilarated.
Thereafter, and unfortunately, the daily program of
formalistic schooling didn’t often offer the luxury of brainstorming—brainstorming within a framework of open-ended
discussions (another term I learned about during my UBC teacher training). Such
discussions, for me the food of lateral-thinking ecstasy, or call it sublime
creative thought, killed the boredom that Sutherland aptly describes:
Pupils
freed themselves from the bonds of [tedious] routine as best they could. Some
learned to talk to neighbors in such a way that they were rarely seen or heard,
or to throw balls or wads of paper when the teacher was not looking. Some “mastered
the skill of copying...without ever needing to comprehend” and were thus able “to
dream outdoor matters while rarely missing a word.” Others travelled to the
pencil sharpener as frequently as they felt they could get away with the
practice. This activity was especially popular in classrooms where the
sharpener was on the bookcase under a window; then one “could have a look out
of the window.” (Sutherland, 1995, p. 109)
Through the remainder of my public education, I longed
for any creative outlet school had to offer. (pp. 16-17)
This
opportunity for creative thought, this total acceptance of my ideas by my
teacher: The experience made me feel drunk with joy.
So
did my playing the guitar for my grade five class. We had been studying about
the lives of master composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Brahms,
and about the musical instruments of their day. I told my teacher I played the
guitar, and she asked me to bring it to school the next day to perform for the
class. The exhilaration that next day of entertaining those students was almost
more than I could stand. “We’ll have to call you Elvis,” one boy teasingly said afterwards.
To do something creative, to present ideas that are
appreciated, to entertain others: A pattern of what I liked was welling up
inside of me.
In
grade six our teacher took us to the
Although I had no focussed direction of creative pursuit,
I continued to discover what made me feel passionate. In grade seven our
teacher read aloud A Christmas Carol (1843/2000) by Charles Dickens. The
first page remains alive in my mind. The atmosphere of death Dickens created by
referring to Scrooge’s dead friend Marley intrigued me and filled me with
wonder:
Marley
was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of
his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the
chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for
anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own
knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been
inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery
in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed
hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore
permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
(Dickens, 1843/2000, Stave 1, Marley’s ghost, para. 1-2)
I remember saying to myself, “I don’t know who this Dickens guy is,
but he sure knows what he’s doing.” I wanted to
know how one goes about using the printed word to make others feel emotion. The
wonder of that grew inside me through junior high school. Teachers, and
students who were good readers, read aloud The Red Pony (1945/1993)
and The Pearl (1947/2000) by John Steinbeck, The Old Man and the Sea
(1952/1999) by Ernest Hemingway, and The Chrysalids (1955/2001) by John
Wyndham. We students silently read Animal Farm (1945/1996) by George
Orwell, Moonfleet (1896/1951) by John Meade Faulkner, and
The wonder of how to do that remained passionately alive
in my blood, but not until grade twelve, in English 12, did I realize I wanted
to write, to be a writer, to be someone who writes creatively, to be
someone whose works are appreciated, to be someone who entertains others, to be
someone who thinks hard, and to be someone who thinks and sees through other
perspectives, other points of view. Our teacher, a substitute, I might add,
asked us to do something novel, like my grade four teacher who had asked us how
big the universe might be. He asked us to write a poem about absolutely anything
that we wished to write about. A poem of our choice! I wrote all right. And he
read it.
He looked at me after he had finished reading the poem
and smiled. He smiled! “I don’t
know what it means,” he said, “but it’s interesting.”
As I looked up at him leaning over my desk, I was
spellbound by his interest. Although I had written something that he found
confusing, he nevertheless found it interesting! I wanted to be a writer from
that day forward.
That desire grew even stronger when I, as a student creative
writer, received, from a successful writer, regular, personal attention in
Fiction 497 at UBC.
[In
the Elements of Fiction section of Unit 2, I related the following experience
from the point of view of the fiction writer’s need for conflict, lots of conflict that drives the
protagonist deeper into trouble; here I’m using the same experience to show that personal
attention—good advice from a trusted
teacher and accomplished writer—can inspire
students to want to become writers.]
I’d handed in my first short story for the tutorial
course, in which Professor Harlow met privately with me for about an hour each
week to discuss my latest efforts.
I sat before his cluttered desk, and he looked over
his black-rimmed glasses, somewhat apprehensively, at me:
“Dan,” he said, “I read your
story…It’s awful, Dan. I only marked up
the first three pages, because after that I couldn’t stand it any longer. I mean, I read it all, but…it was just awful.”
I didn’t shrink like
“Yes. This isn’t a story, Dan.” He looked at me over the upheld story pages as if
they were a chasm between us that he was trying to eliminate.
Not a story.
I was certainly thinking about that. But I had lots of knowledge, or so I
thought, about the elements of fiction! Plot. Scene. Transition. Theme.
Protagonist. Antagonist. Conflict. I could even write clear prose, or so my
English 303 composition teacher had told me. But, somehow, according to
Professor Harlow, I had not written a story....
“Not a
story?”
“No. A story is about somebody with a problem that gets
worse and worse, until some sort of resolution takes place. What you have
written is not a story.”
Again, he was looking over his glasses at me. He was
looking for a spark of understanding. Then he made sure I understood what he
meant. He provided examples of stories we both knew. He spent a lot of time reasoning
with me, helping me understand those examples.
That event was like a revelation, silly as that might
sound until one reads the often inept products of neophyte writers who don’t
understand what
That personal attention
burned a tattoo in my psyche: I want to be a writer.
These experiences define highlights in my education.
Through my use of “free imaginative variation” (van Manen, 1990, p. 107), which has helped me root
out incidental themes which I won’t bother to relate, I express
those highlights in terms of one essential, broad theme: Events in school that
promoted my looking at the world through “different” eyes;
that promoted the wonder of creativity; that promoted the joy of my thoughts
being appreciated; that promoted the excitement of entertaining, or emotionally
moving, others; that promoted the excitement of focused thinking; and that
promoted the joy of understanding how to write have encouraged me to become an
adult creative writer.
What about you?—apprentice writer. Perhaps you’re also a photographer, scientist, nurse, mechanic,
piano teacher, whale expert, talk show host, chemical engineer, or editor. Are
you scanning your own mind for experiences that encouraged you to pursue
writing, or that encouraged you to pursue another field of work? This journey
of mine back through school has felt good. I’ve juxtaposed past experiences with what I do now as a
writer, and the emotional result seems to be that I feel more whole, although I
can’t really explain why. I hope your journey through your
mind, if you choose to take it, makes you feel good and more whole too.
References
Anakiev, D. (1999). From
movement to literature. In D. Anakiev & J. Kacian (Eds.),
Knots: the anthology of southeastern European haiku
poetry (pp. 7-14).
Bates, J. B. (1980). Writing
with precision: How to write so that you cannot possibly
be misunderstood
(3rd ed.).
Bickham,
J. M. (1996). Writing and selling your novel.
Digest Books.
Birney, E. (1966). The
creative writer.
Company.
CHALLENGER international. (2002). In N.
Breen (Ed.), The 2003 poet’s
market.
Dessner, L. J. (1979). How
to write a poem.
Dickens,
C. (2000). A Christmas carol. Retrieved
Stormfax Web site: http://www.stormfax.com/dickens1.htm (Original
work published 1843)
Drury, J. (1991). Creating
poetry.
Duncan, L. (1979). How to
write and sell your personal experiences.
OH: Writer’s Digest Books.
Faulkner,
J. M. (1951). Moonfleet.
published 1896).
Gibson, G. (Ed.). (1973). Eleven
Canadian novelists.
Press.
Hemingway,
E. (1999). The old man and the sea.
work published 1952)
Hersey,
J. (1989).
1946)
Hodgins, J. (1993). A
passion for narrative: A guide for writing fiction.
ON: McClelland & Stewart.
Lukiv,
D. (1997, 1998, 1999). Quibils and Quirks. The Cariboo Observer,
serialized
over 108 issues from
Lukiv, D. (2001a). The
master teacher: A collection.
BCTF Lesson Aids.
Lukiv,
D. (2001b, August). Those gyze in the English department. The English
Teachers’ Online Network of
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Campus/2159/art10.htm
Orwell, G. (1996). Animal
farm.
work published 1945)
Pun. (1993). Dictionary of
Literary Terms.
Rico, G. L. (1983). Writing
the natural way.
Roberts, E. M. (1981). The
children’s picture book: How to
write it—How to sell it.
Shaw, H. (1986). Handbook
of English (4th Canadian ed., rev. by D. Carley).
ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson.
Steinbeck,
J. (1993). The red pony.
1945)
Steinbeck,
J. (2000). The pearl.
1947)
Sutherland,
N. (1995). The triumph of “formalism”: Elementary schooling in
Wilson (Eds.), Children, teachers, & schools:
In the history of British
Untitled. (2000, May). Quesnel
District Teachers’
Association Newsletter, 11(9).
van
Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action
sensitive pedagogy.
Wyndham, J. (2001). The
chrysalids.
published in 1955)
Let me take you back to Chapter 1: Writer’s Block in For Writers Only. Detail
some practical steps that you feel may help you emerge from the inactivity of
writer’s block to write poems, drama, and/or stories that will further
define your writer’s highway of success, i.e., your list of publishing credits.
Speaking of publishing credits, the next section will
help you establish yours by showing you how to get your work into editors’ hands.
II. Submitting Work to Publishers
Publication of your poem,
story, or novel—isn’t that one of your goals? If you’re going to think like a writer, and not like the
person
1)
Internet publication
Many
Web site companies provide free Web space in exchange for their placing
advertisements in that space. For example:
http://signup.20m.com/cgi-bin/path/signup
This
sign up page provides you, free, up to 20MB of 20m.com cyber space. I have used
20m.com to create a Homepage as well as other pages/links that feature some of
my publications that are presently out of print. You’re welcome to look at what I’ve put together.
http://danlukiv.20m.com/ Homepage
http://danlukivb.20m.com/ The
Teacher, and other poems
http://danlukivc.20m.com/ Over
The Shoulder: Bibliographic Poetry
http://danlukivd.20m.com/ A Socio-Emotional Program for the Language Arts (non-fiction)
http://danlukive.20m.com/ Feline
Narratives (poetry)
http://danlukivf.20m.com/ A
Day of Target Practise—three
poems
http://danlukivg.20m.com/ Summer
on the Farm (poetry)
http://danlukivh.20m.com/ Poems
of Malady
http://danlukivi.20m.com/ The
Wise Man (poetry)
http://danlukivj.20m.com/ Corpus
Callosum (poetry)
http://danlukivk.20m.com/ Memories
of [UBC] (poetry)
http://danlukivl.20m.com/ The
REM Poems
http://danlukivm.20m.com/ Distracted
(abstract art)
http://danlukivn.20m.com/ The
Master Teacher: A Collection (non-fiction)
http://danlukivo.20m.com/index_1.html
Home-Grown Publishing (non-fiction)
http://danlukivp.20m.com/ The
Staff Meeting (abstract art)
http://danlukivq.20m.com/ A
Career Counselling Symposium (non-fiction)
http://danlukivr.20m.com/ A
Symposium on Aboriginal Education (non-fiction)
http://danlukivs.20m.com/ A Symposium of Unorthodoxy in
Education (non-fiction)
http://danlukivt.20m.com/ School-Wide
Literacy (non-fiction)
http://danlukivu.20m.com/ One More Year to
Remember (haiku and senryu)
http://danlukivv.20m.com/ Earth
(abstract art)
http://danlukivw.20m.com/ The Photon Cellar (poetry)
http://danlukivx.20m.com/ Vacation (abstract art)
http://danlukivy.20m.com/ Oversight (abstract
art)
http://danlukivz.20m.com/ Numeracy Dog (abstract
art)
http://danlukivaa.20m.com/ Between the Gums (poetry)
http://danlukivbb.20m.com/ Whirlpool (poetry)
http://danlukivcc.20m.com/ Margins
(poetry)
http://danlukivdd.20m.com/ Winter in a Pond
(haiku and senryu)
http://danlukivee.20m.com/ Is That
http://danlukivff.20m.com/ Men and Women (poetry)
Free
publishing sounds good to me, especially in the context of the following:
It
has been said that freedom of the press is for those who own one. The
electronic age puts a “digital
printing press” into the hands of anyone who
owns a computer and has access to the Internet. (Curtis & Quick, 2002. p.
3)
For an in-depth discussion of the world of e-publishing,
you may find How to Get Your e-Book Published (Curtis & Quick, 2002)
more than helpful. My e-publishing discussion, however, focuses only on free
Web pages, as mentioned, and, as the next paragraph highlights, submissions to
Internet zines: magazines, journals, and anthologies.
Submissions to Internet zines generally follow the
usual protocol for submissions to printed publications: submit a covering
letter and a submission (poetry or fiction). Read and follow the direction editors
of zines provide writers! If you don’t, you
run the risk of being ignored. Consider the A-to-Z list of e-zines at
http://www.zeroland.co.nz/literature_journals.html (Literary Ezines, 2006)
Focus on one e-zine, take at look at its “Submissions” direction
for authors, and print out that direction.
An editor’s
direction may save you time from submitting the wrong type or style of work to
a particular e-zine; in some cases you will discover that some e-zines are
temporarily not accepting submissions: for example, “Literary Salt is on
temporary hiatus. We will not be accepting
submissions till further notice” (Literary Salt, 2006, Submissions). You’re
welcome to read that statement online for yourself (providing it hasn’t
changed):
http://www.literarysalt.com/submissions.html
As for the submission itself:
An e-zine journal may request the package through e- or snail mail. Here is one
possibility (no absolute template exists) for an e-mail poetry submission to an
e-zine:
*
Author’s name
Author’s postal address
Author’s Homepage address, if available
Author’s e-mail address
Author’s telephone number
City, Province, Postal Code
Date
Editor’s name
Editor’s title; for example, Editor-in-Chief
E-zine’s Name
Editor’s address
E-zine’s postal address
E-zine’s Web address
Dear [Editor’s name]:
I have read several issues of [e-zine’s name] online, and I have
particularly enjoyed [names of poets; titles of their poems]. [If you like,
include comments about why you have enjoyed those poems.]
I am submitting herewith [list your poems’ titles]. I hope they fit your
editorial needs and complement the poetry I have read on your Web site.
My poetry (if you have no published works, refer to 3) has previously
appeared in [list publications that have used your work:
1) if the (credit) list is long, then you may
want to refer to a resume attachment (a .doc or .rtf file is probably your best
universally readable choice);
2) if the e-zine’s submission direction says “no
attachments,” then you’re welcome to list your credits after your poetry, in
the body of your email (some editors love to read credits, others hate to [?]);
3) if you have no previously published works,
then you may want to say you’re a new writer trying to establish yourself; you’re
welcome to refer to creative writing courses you have taken or are presently
enrolled in].
Thank your for your time.
Sincerely,
Author’s name
*
Some e-zines will actually
publish collections of poetry if you, the poet, are able to convince the
editors that your work has something extraordinary or at least special to offer
their readers. Seekers Magazine accepted my proposal to serialize a
collection entitled Life on Mars (2005b, 2005c, 2005d), a thematic
exploration of war on Earth. Actually, I have found many e-zine editors willing
to publish my poetry collections online, even though these editors have not
requested collections in their “Submissions” information
for authors.
2)
Print publication
Print
journals, magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses have proliferated
worldwide, creating multitudinous opportunities for authors. Books such as the 2006
Poets’ Market (Breen [Ed.], 2005), Novel & Short Story Writer’s
Market 2007 (Mosko & Schweer [Eds.], 2006), and the Canadian Writer’s
Market (Tooze [Ed.], 2004, 2007)
provide thousands of places that publish poetry and fiction, whether in
magazine, journal, newspaper, or book formats.
Here is one possibility
(again, no absolute template exists) for a snail-mail poetry submission to a print journal:
*
Author’s name
Author’s postal address
Author’s home page address, if available
Author’s e-mail address
Author’s telephone number
City, Province, Postal Code
Date
Editor’s name
Editor’s title; for example, Editor-in-Chief
Journal’s Name
Editor’s address
E-zine’s postal address
E-zine’s Web address, if existent
Dear [Editor’s name]:
I have read a sample copy (sample copies are generally available at a
nominal cost to authors) of [journal’s name], and I have particularly
enjoyed [names of poets; titles of their poems]. [If you like, include comments
about why you have enjoyed those poems.]
I am submitting herewith [list your poems’ titles]. I hope they fit your
editorial needs and complement the poetry I have read in [journal’s name].
My poetry (if you have no published works, refer to 2) has previously
appeared in [list publications that have used your work;
1) if the (credit) list is long, then you may
want to include a much abbreviated one or refer to an enclosed envelope or
paper-clipped package that contains the complete list in a resume format,
giving the editor the option of whether or not he or she wishes to read through
those credits; as I mentioned already, some editors love to read credits, others
hate to—[?];
2) if you have no previously published works,
then you may want to say that you’re a new writer trying to establish yourself;
you’re welcome to refer to creative writing courses you have taken or are
presently enrolled in].
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Author’s name
*
You may adjust the letter to
suit other possibilities such as a fiction submission or a column or book
proposal. Again, follow editors’ directions for submissions. Book proposals
should follow a general rule of sequence: 1) send a query letter; 2) if invited
to submit, mail an excerpt of the book/novel (often editors request the first
three chapters) and an outline; and 3) if further invited to submit the entire
book/novel, then—that’s good! For help in writing a query letter, I
recommend How to Write Irresistible Query Letters (Cool, 1987), and for
general information about the business side of writing, I recommend Writing
Freelance (Adamec, 2000)
Outlines for fiction should
highlight each character the first time each turns up, as you will notice in
the following outline for my novel Quibils and Quirks, and should run
only a few pages:
*
OUTLINE FOR QUIBILS AND QUIRKS,
a children’s novel of 27,000 words, by Dan Lukiv
Credits
This novel was serialized in The
Quesnel Cariboo Observer from March 1, 1997 to August 31, 1999, and various
chapters have appeared in Students On The Net (Singapore), The
English Teachers’ Online
Network of South Africa, CanTeach
(Canada), and CHALLENGER international (Canada).
*
Hooper Quirk, a 10-year-old boy, who, like his
parents, is orange from eating too many carrots, has cauliflower ears, and he
has the most horrible teacher—Miss
Snapdragon—that the log schoolhouse in
Hooper, the protagonist/hero, goes to school. His incredibly
rude teacher, however, insults him and hurts his feelings so deeply that he
runs out of school and heads home. But on the way he meets his friend, Mooch,
a quibil (a four-foot tall fur ball with two skinny arms and legs), who is
playing hide-and-stop-seek with the volatile and fat King Quibil.
Hooper tells his story. The enraged king, Hooper, nervous
Mooch, and hundreds of quibils march to town—Porksville—to find
out why Miss Snapdragon, the teacher, was so awful. But, unknown to themselves,
quibils smell so terrible that they make most humans (the Quirk-family,
for some unexplained reason, can’t smell quibil stink) gag and swoon and behave
absolutely beastly.
The quibils, in Porksville, are attacked by smell-weary
inhabitants. The quibils retreat to the
I say the war doesn’t take place in the end, but “in the
end” follows some major interruptions: Hooper discovers the time machine,
climbs aboard, and accidentally triggers the start sequence (thereby
temporarily thwarting the professor’s stop-the-war plans). Hooper plummets
himself into a subplot of bizarre twists that threaten his return and bring a
motley bunch into the story—grimy Booger
Jimm, a hot-tempered quibil named Quabbit, a hosshopper named Goopy,
a tyrannosaurus, and four terrified quibils who also accidentally
take the time machine for a “spin.”
Hooper does return to his rightful time and space. He
helps Professor Hamburger find a solution for preventing the war from taking
place. So there is no invasion. No war-fomented violence. No chopped-off heads.
Hooper confronts Miss Snapdragon about her rudeness. She
has a change of heart, realizing that, really, she was largely responsible for
the quibils’ decision to invade Porksville. And her change of heart (although
her harsh nature remains intact) makes her particularly attractive to Professor
Hamburger.
Miss Snapdragon becomes Mrs. Hamburger. Hooper goes to
school.
His problems throughout the novel are many-fold; they
focus on his horribly rude teacher, his own inability to express his feelings,
and his how on earth do I get out of this?-time machine nightmare. These
problems he deals with in a hilarious string of events. The recurrent theme
reveals that a lack of kindness and compassion for others breeds discontent,
hurt feelings, and, worse than that, sometimes war. In the end, Hooper has
learned to be more assertive, and Miss Snapdragon learns to be kind.
*
Now,
apprentice writer, as part of this course’s requirement, you will soon put together a submission
of either poetry or fiction. Consider this direction for formatting
submissions:
1) Hard-copy submissions. Fiction: double spaced,
with a word count and author’s name and
address on the first page. On each of the other pages: title, author’s name, page number. Poetry: one-and-a-half or double
spaced, with a line count and author’s name
and address on the first page of each poem. On other than first pages: title,
author’s name, page number.
2) E-mail submissions. Stories or poems in the
e-mail body already have the author’s
address in the covering letter, but line counts for poems, word counts for
fiction, by-lines, and titles still should apply as for hard-copy submissions.
If the editor you’re submitting work to prefers
attachments (.doc or .rtf, for example) to submissions in the e-mail body, then
you could use the same format that you would for a hard-copy submission
(sometimes editors print off these attachments).
Your opportunity has arrived.
Prepare to submit poetry or a story to an e-zine or print publication by
putting together an e-mail or snail mail submission to an editor. Let me see
the submission before you send it off. To pass this course, by the way, you must
submit your work for possible publication.
End of Unit 6. Two left.
Unit 7
Contents:
You have covered types of
feet: the iamb (U /), trochee (/ U), anapest (U U /), dactyl (/ U U), spondee (/
/), pyrrhic (U U), amphimacer (/ U /), amphibrach (U / U), double iamb or minor
ionic (U U / /), and double trochee or major ionic (/ / U U). You have measured
line lengths in poetry in terms of numbers of feet, and considered the rhythmic
sense of these feet. Now I’m going to suggest another way to analyze poetry,
assuming the poet-songwriter sets it to music, from a musical rhythmic rather
than a metrical rhythmic point of view.
A musical rhythmic
view, such as I will propose, looks at poetry more in terms of the time span
that fills a bar (Bar, 2006) than in terms of the accented and unstressed
syllables that fill a foot. Songwriters understand the concept because they
measure out their words to music in terms of finite spaces of time divided into
unit bars. Tap your foot about one tap or beat per second and read aloud the
following line, making sure your foot touches the floor each time you read an
accented syllable:
/ / / /
I think, yes I think, that the day
is black.
(from a metrical rhythmic point of view,
this has an iamb, two anapests,
and another iamb.)
If you think of that line as
a bar of four beats, and of the time space between any two consecutive accented
syllables as equal to the time space between any other two consecutive accented
syllables, then you understand what I call musical rhythm in poetry. I’ll apply this concept to “I Have a Car,” a poem
and a song I wrote as part of a collection entitled I Love You (2002e);
again, tap
your foot about one tap or beat per second, or faster if you like, and read
aloud the following lines, making sure your foot touches the floor each time
you read an accented (foot-down) syllable
:
I Have A Car (2002e)
[Chorus]
/ /
I have a car, I have a car,
/ /
I have a car, I
do;
/
It snorts and
bangs
/
And rattles and
clangs;
/ /
I have a car, I
do.
/
/
One day
when I drove too fast,
/ /
I could not be the
one that’s last.
/ /
Sheep did bleat
and hens did cluck,
/ /
And pigs they hid
themselves in muck.
[Chorus]
/ /
I have a
car, I have a car,
/ /
I have a car, I
do;
/
It snorts and
bangs
/
And rattles and
clangs;
/
/
I have a car, I
do.
/ /
I drove
along
/ /
I drove the
farmers all insane.
/ /
One shook his fist
to make me stop;
/ /
I hit the brakes
and they went “flop.”
[Chorus]
/ /
I have a
car, I have a car,
/ /
I have a car, I
do;
/
It snorts and
bangs
/
And rattles and
clangs;
/ /
I have a car, I
do.
/ /
Down a hill
the motor roared;
/ /
We hit a rock and
then we soared.
/ /
Cows did moo and
ducks did quack;
/ /
We hit a tree and
made a smack.
/ /
I had a
car, I had a car,
/ /
I had a car, I
did;
/
It banged and
popped,
/
And then it
stopped;
/ /
I had a car, I
did.
Note that I have not provided a jazzed-up discussion of musical beats
that places a syncopated beat at a place/note/word other than at the usual
place/note/word (Seyer, n.d.) as described in my “I Have a Car” example. I
provide, rather, a straightforward musical rhythmic point of view.
Write a few poems, whether musical
rhythmic, metrical rhythmic (metrical verse), or free verse. For musical
rhythmic poems, write in the /’s above the syllables with the foot-down beats
(accents), as I did for “I Have a Car.” For metrical verse, write in the /’s
and U’s as usual above the accented and unstressed syllables (see, e.g., Unit
4, Section on meter).
II. Rhyme
Meter infuses poetry with
rhythm, rhyme with musical echoes. The intellectually and emotionally pleasing
combination of rhythm and rhyme has intrigued, entertained, and thrilled
readers and oral poetry audiences for thousands of years. You may choose to
write free verse as do the majority of poets today, but there exist a minority
who happily write rhyming (and often metrical) poetry and who must search a
little harder than free verse poets for journals that will publish their work
(see, e.g., Breen [Ed.], 2005).
For those who feel driven to write rhyme, and for those
who want an exposure to its elements, please consider this list of rhyme types
concerning the final syllables of words:
1.
Masculine: Jill/hill. Trout/sprout.
Mop/top. Only one syllable rhymes (Rhyme, 1995).
2.
Feminine: Fighting/biting. Creaking/speaking. Flower/power. Two syllables rhyme (Rhyme, 1995).
3.
Triple: Glorious/victorious.
Laziness/craziness. Rotarian/totalitarian. Three syllables rhyme (Free Online,
1996-2006).
4. Pararhyme: bell/bill.
Look/leak. Trim/tram. “The consonants
in two words are the same, but the
vowels are different”
(Pararhyme, 2005, para. 1).
5.
Off rhyme: Day/dough. Bone/thin.
Crime/scram. Escaped/scooped. “A partial or imperfect rhyme, often using assonance
or consonance only, as in dry and [mile] or grown and moon.
Also called half rhyme,
near rhyme, oblique rhyme, slant rhyme“ (Off
rhyme, 2000, para. 1).
Rhyme (1995) often takes place at the end of lines (end-rhyme),
but also occurs within lines (internal rhyme). Poets using rhyme try to make
their lines sing with sounds that echo between and within lines to create a
musical sense and drive that both delights readers and focuses their attention
on images related to one or more of the senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch,
taste—and even humour.
Beans (2002c)
Beans are for cowboys
Who ride on the
trail.
Beans are for
beggars
Who ride on a
rail.
Human
beans,
Lima beans,
Kidney beans, too.
Deep down
inside,
They can swell up
your hide.
They’re really a
danger
And smell like a
manger
When they’re made
known
In a cloud that is
blown.
Mexican,
Salad,
Refried,
And baked.
Beans are
for people
Who have much at
stake.
I wrote this poem for kids. It was a lot of fun to
write. I imagine Dr. Suess had a blast writing his picture books of rhyme and
madness. Try your hand at writing a few rhyming
poems for kids. Perhaps you’ll have
a blast too. I know I certainly did when I wrote:
Old Henry Slaughter (2002i)
Two flat feet
Make a cozy seat,
And ten fat toes
Are good as garden
hoes.
Big knobby knees
And pockets full
of bees,
Long straight legs
Like clothesline
pegs!
An overhanging belly
Like a shirtful of
jelly,
And a ski-jump
nose
That he often
blows.
One green eye,
And a blue one
Too,
Not to mention
His owl named HOO!
A polka dot tie
That is six feet
high,
A sack full of
bats,
And another full
of cats.
They call
him Henry Slaughter,
And he lives in a
tree.
He once had a
daughter,
But she ran away
to sea.
A variety of rhyme schemes
exist. Note that for lines of poetry that end with rhyming words, convention
allows us to communicate what lines rhyme with what lines (i.e., what rhyme
schemes exist). For example:
Old Henry Slaughter
Two flat feet [a]
Make a cozy
seat, [a, feet-seat]
And ten fat toes [b]
Are good as garden
hoes. [b, toes-hoes]
Big knobby knees [c]
And pockets full
of bees, [c, knees-bees]
Long straight legs
[d]
Like
clothesline pegs! [d]
An
overhanging belly [e]
Like a
shirtful of jelly, [e]
And a
ski-jump nose [f]
That he often
blows. [f]
One green
eye, [g]
And a blue one [h]
Too, [i]
Not to mention [h]
His owl
named HOO! [i]
A polka dot
tie [g]
That is six
feet high, [g]
A sack full
of bats, [j]
And another
full of cats. [j]
They call
him Henry Slaughter, [k]
And he lives in a
tree. [l]
He once had a
daughter, [k]
But she ran away
to sea. [l]
The rhyme scheme, then, for
this poem: aabbccddeeffghihiggjj // klkl. Although this rhyme scheme and
others do not follow universal conventions, many do. Consider this list of
examples:
·
Chant royal:
Five stanzas of “ababccddedE” followed by either “ddedE” or “ccddedE”.
(The capital letters indicate a line repeated verbatim.)
·
Cinquain:
“ababb”.
·
Clerihew:
“aabb aabb”.
·
Couplet:
“aa”, but usually occurs as “aa bb cc dd ...”.
·
Enclosed
rhyme (or enclosing rhyme): “abba”.
·
Limerick:
“aabba”.
·
Monorhyme:
“aaaaa...”, an identical rhyme on every line, common in Latin and
Arabic.
·
Ottava rima:
“abababcc”.
·
Rhyme royal:
“ababbcc”.
·
Rondelet:
“AbAabbA”.
·
Rubaiyat:
“aaba”.
·
Sonnet
·
Petrarchan
sonnet: “abba abba cde cde” or “abba abba cdc cdc” [or
“abba abba cde dce”].
·
Shakespearean
sonnet: “abab cdcd efef gg”.
·
Simple 4-line:
“abcb”.
·
Spenserian
sonnet: “abab bcbc cdcd ee”.
·
Onegin
stanzas: “aBaBccDDeFFeGG” with the lowercase letters
representing feminine
rhymes and the uppercase representing masculine
rhymes, written in iambic
tetrameter.
·
Spenserian
stanza: “ababbcbcc”.
·
Tanaga:
traditional Tagalog
tanaga is aaaa.
·
Terza rima:
“aba bcb cdc ...”, ending on “yzy z” or “yzy zz”.
·
Triplet:
“aaa”, [usually occurs as “aaa bbb ccc ddd...”].
·
Villanelle:
A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2, where A1 and A2 are
lines repeated exactly [and] which rhyme with the a lines. (Rhyme
Scheme, 2006, bullets)
For an example of a famous
villanelle, read Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” (Thomas, 1951/2002-2006).
In the following sonnet, notice the abab cdcd efef gg (Shakespearean-sonnet)
rhyme scheme:
Sonnet 18, by W. Shakespeare
Shall
I compare thee to a summer’s day? [a]
Thou
are more lovely and more temperate: [b]
Rough
winds do shake the darling buds of May, [a]
And
summer’s lease hath all too short a date; [b: off rhyme]
Sometimes
too hot the eye of heaven shines, [c]
And
often is his gold complexion dimmed; [d]
And
every fair from fair sometime declines [c]
By
chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed; [d]
But
thy eternal summer shall not fade, [e]
Nor
lose possession of that fair thou owest; [f]
Nor
shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, [e]
When
in eternal lines to time thou growest; [f]
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
[g]
So
long lives this, and this gives life to thee. [g]
The first eight lines make a
statement, the next four a counterstatement (note “But thy eternal” (9
[meaning, refer to line 9]): “but” usually introduces contrast, conflict, or counterstatement,
heightening our sense of adventure as we read. The last two lines form a
conclusion. Davidson (2003) describes the first quatrain (four lines) with
respect to comparisons: “The speaker [Shakespeare, or the implied author,]
introduces the comparison of his beloved to ‘a summer’s day’” (para. 2). Did
you notice that “when he describes ‘rough winds [that] do shake the darling
buds of May,’ (3) he is using rough winds as a metaphor for capricious chance
and change [a comparison in the context of wind = chance], [but] he implies
that his beloved does not suffer from these winds as summer does [a contrast]”
(para. 2)?
Note further statements
of comparison in the second quatrain, in which “the speaker anthropomorphizes
the sky, or ‘heaven,’ (5) by using the metaphor of an ‘eye’ (5) for the
sun,…invok[ing] the image of his beloved’s eyes” (Davidson, 2003, para. 3). But
the next four lines make a counterstatement, diverging from “the primary
conceit of the sonnet, the comparison of the speaker’s beloved to a
summer’s day” (para. 2 [italics added]). A summer day may fade, a woman’s
beauty may fade; however, “the speaker boasts that his beloved [and therefore
her beauty (some say Shakespeare is actually referring to his son, and not a
woman)] will not suffer the same fate as a summer’s day because he has
committed her to ‘eternal lines,’ (12)” (para. 4).
Of course, poets use
counterstatement in poems other than sonnets, as I do in the following poem:
The Tree
(1996b, p. 2)
A
leafless tree
On
a hillside
Is
still black,
Like
a chimneysweep’s
Worn-out
brush.
The
tree is distant,
Like
an orange sky
Or
a dead lover.
A
bird lands
On
a bony limb
For
only a moment,
And
then it flies like a bat
Into
the steel-blue sky
Of
-30.
I
long for the green breath
Of
spring,
But
still,
I
love that tree.
The poem’s first four stanzas set up an implied author’s dark point of view for the winter scene and its
parallel to certain end-times, possibly, in particular, to the life’s end of someone he loved. Call this a statement. The
last stanza introduces contrasting imagery that changes the dark focus on the
death of that loved one to a brighter focus on life as suggested in “green breath.” The
final two lines present the conclusion that introduces a contradiction: The
poet loves that winter tree. One implication: how strange we are, people of
contradictory thoughts and emotions, who can love something that reminds us of
pain.
Back to Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18.” The last two lines, a
couplet, concludes the sonnet by boasting “that, unlike a summer’s day, his
[Shakespeare’s] poetry and the memory of his beloved will last ‘so long as men
can breathe or eyes can see’ (13),…provid[ing] a stark contrast to the time
period [of] ‘a summer’s day’ (1),…[thereby] exalt[ing his] poetry along with
the beloved” (Davidson, 2003, para. 5). Do you find a lot to think about in
this poem? Do you find it evocative? Convocative?
Invocative? Provocative? Revocative? Vocative? Are you surprised at how famous
this poem remains, approximately four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote it?
Find another sonnet, Shakespearean or otherwise, and, if
evident, explain
its statement, counterstatement, and conclusion. Also describe its rhyme
scheme. To help you find an example, try a Google (www.google.com) search of “Shakespearean sonnet” or “Spenserian sonnet” or “Petrarchan sonnet.”
IV. Contrast: Conflict
Consider the significance of
the word but: “I know I’m late, but…” She’s a good cook, but…” “Yes, he’s tall, but…” That
word creates contrast, conflict, drama, argument, counterstatement, a bend in
the road. Shakespeare knew what he was doing by using it to start his
counterstatement: “But thy eternal summer shall not
fade” (9). If and is the word of congeniality, then but
is the word of contention. If and = agreement, but = disagreement. If and =
statement, but = counterstatement.
Here is an example of contrast through the word but: “His
eyes are so bright, but he has that flat brow of stupidity.” Likewise, here is
an example of conflict: “She opened the gift, but she hated him for giving it
to her.”
Experiment with the word but
in a poem or two.
V. Writing a Sonnet
Using either
the Petrarchan (abba
abba cdecde or abba abba cdcdcdc or abba abba cdedce), Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg), or Spenserian (abab bcbc cdcd ee) sonnet form
(Rhyme Scheme, 2006), write a poem (see sonnet definitions below). I appreciate
that I’m setting you up for a challenge, especially if you’re a free verse and
only a free verse poet; therefore, if the challenge seems too irrelevant to
your interests as a writer, then you may write a poem or poems in the form of
your choice instead.
Consider the following
definitions of these three sonnet types (Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and
Spenserian):
Petrarchan: The Petrarchan
sonnet, also known as the Italian sonnet, originated in
It is a sonnet in its classic form and tends to
split into two sections, known as octave (eight line stanza) and sestet (six
line stanza). The octave has two quatrains, rhyming a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a; the first
quatrain presents the theme, the second develops it. The sestet is built on two
or three different rhymes, arranged either c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-d-c-d or
c-d-e-d-c-e; the first three lines reflect on the theme and the last three
lines bring the whole poem to a close.
(Petrarchan Sonnet, n.d., para. 1)
Shakespearean: The sonnet form
used by Shakespeare, composed of three quatrains and a terminal couplet in
iambic pentameter [the usual metre for sonnets in English] with the rhyme
pattern abab cdcd efef gg. Also called Elizabethan sonnet, English
sonnet. (Shakespearean Sonnet, 2006, para. 1)
Often the Shakespearean sonnet runs with eight lines of statement, four
of counterstatement, and two of conclusion.
Spenserian: The Spenserian
sonnet, invented by sixteenth century English poet Edmund Spenser, cribs its
structure from the Shakespearean—three quatrains and a couplet—but employs a
series of “couplet links” between quatrains, as revealed in the rhyme scheme:
abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee. The Spenserian sonnet, through the interweaving of the
quatrains, implicitly reorganized the Shakespearean sonnet into couplets,
reminiscent of the Petrarchan. One reason was to reduce the often excessive
final couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet, putting less pressure on it to
resolve the foregoing argument, observation, or question. (Poetic Form: Sonnet,
1997-2006, Sonnet Variations, para. 2)
V. Rhyming Poetry, Cliches
Write a few
rhyming poems. Beware, beware, beware
of thinking that because they rhyme that they’re good poems. Although finding
rhymes might be easy (programs exist online that help users find rhyming words
for the most obscure entries [e.g., Free Online Rhyming Dictionary,
1996-2006]), writing a poem that through imagery pleases the logical and
emotional dimensions of our minds demands ingenuity that steers clear of 1)
clichés, 2) the ordinary, and 3) the boring. These three rocks can pierce the
hull of your poem (or story). And sink it.
Here are examples of clichés:
lost your marbles
in the blink of an eye
serenity now!
as confused as a cow
knee deep in spring thaw
barkis is willin
live to a ripe old age
without further ado
there is no place like
home
strong as a lion
milk of human kindness
as much use as a yard
of pump water
in the eye of the tiger
no quarter given
can of worms
rode hard and hung up
to dry
for the life of me
spit and polish
pea brain
shooter’s touch
(basketball cliché)
shutting up shop
like being shot out of
a cannon
get it down pat
spit and polish
Mad as the Mad Hatter
I don’t know him from
Adam
time to kill
worthy of his salt
dime a dozen
king’s English
as innocent as a dirty
hoof print in virgin snow
a harried housewife
labour of love
to be one’s own man
a broken record
paying lip service
it takes two to tango
a snare and a delusion
whatever lifts your
skirt
hear me now, believe me
later (Random examples from Cliché Finder, 1996)
Now that you have read
this list, you could likely define a cliché through the process of induction. I
say induction as opposed to deduction, through which you would use a definition
of a cliché (a generalized statement) to determine whether or not a phrase,
clause, or sentence (a particular instance) were indeed a cliché. An induction generalizes from specific
examples or instances to make a statement of definition that covers
them. If you used an induction of my 39 cliché examples, then you might find
yourself with a definition of a cliché similar to Friedman’s (1996):
A cliche is not just something that lots of
people say; It’s something that lots of people say
and it conveys some sort of idea or message. A cliche is, in other
words, a metaphor characterized by its overuse. (para. 4)
Do you see why you need
(I do not refer to fictional characters who use clichés in their
speech/thoughts as part of their vernacular) to avoid using cliches? Overuse of
any phrase, clause, or sentence generally kills, blurs, or alters its meaning.
The result: obscure, even irritating text. If you enjoy vagueness as opposed to
clarity, and if you enjoy irritating others, clichés are your friends.
I spoke of three rocks—clichés, the ordinary, and the boring—that can pierce
the hull of your poem, or story. I have discussed what defines a cliché. Do I
need to explain what defines ordinary or boring writing?
I hope I don’t. But if
you wish to read an example, a short one, consider this:
Betty was a nice girl and she had black hair.
She was neat and her bedroom was neat too. She got along well with her dad and
mum and three brothers and two sisters. She lived in a house in
Three lines into this story, and already it deserves a firing squad.
The following poem does
no better:
Untitled
I like you
Because you
are my friend
And I like
friends
So I like
you
I like you
so much
Where’s that firing squad? What makes these
two examples ordinary and boring?
End of Unit 7. One left!
Unit 8
Contents:
I. Detonation, Connotative
Value, Evocative Power
Each word has a detonation.
I am not referring to explosions (Detonation, 2006), but rather to a word’s literal, exact (i.e., dictionary)
meaning/definition. I use the adjective exact with reference to the
precision of definition possible given a word’s cultural, historical, sociological, inter-galactic,
socio-emotional, socio-economic, psychological, religious, and/or spiritual
context.
Connotation, on the other hand, refers to meanings—words, thoughts, imaginings, or images (with regard to
any or all of the senses)—that a particular
word brings to mind. Certainly, with regard to any particular word, its
connotative meanings may enrich your writing, helping the reader think of
subjectively, divergently related schema or language according to his or her
experiences/knowledge/memories, and imagination. I could take this discussion
one step further by adding that connotative meanings enhance the evocative
power of poetry and fiction.
Let me explain. Evocative works encourage readers to
visualize real or vicarious memories or images from the past, present or
future, especially given a thematic foundation. The connotations of words in a
poem or fiction naturally work together to help readers visualize those
memories or images. In the light of a work’s theme or themes, evocative power, then,
logically can stand, at least partially, as a function of connotative value
in a linear or perhaps exponential relationship. In simpler language, increased
connotative value pumps up evocative power.
Really, poets and fiction writers want to maximize
evocative power. I know that when I see little evocative power in my work,
especially my poetry, I soon find myself analyzing the words I have chosen,
evaluating the connotative worth of
those choices. I also find myself evaluating the connotative and logistic
value (within a thematic point of view) of words juxtaposed in the same line or
phrase or clause or separate lines or stanzas as a composer would evaluate the
harmonic and logistic value (within a thematic point of view) of particular
notes played together or in a proximity of one another.
Consider this discussion of juxtaposition at a metaphoric
level: Vicariously drop a rock into a pond, and watch the ripples spread out
from the centre of disturbance. Those concentric ripples, a metaphor for connotations
in the mind, could amount to a few or many ripples. The word or centre of
disturbance from a poem = the rock dropped into the pond. The ripples
concentrically run along the pond as connotations run through a reader’s consciousness. More ripples relate to more
connotations. Now consider juxtaposed words that relate to more than one rock
dropped into the pond. In terms of my ripples metaphor, juxtaposed connotations
originate from a variety or chorus of centres of disturbance (words) just as
concentric ripples that run into each other in myriad angular combinations
originate from a variety or chorus of rocks dropped into a pond. This is
beginning to sound like a physics problem of wave interference (Lesson 3:
Behaviour of Waves, 2004). Read William Faulkner’s fiction and William Shakespeare’s poetry to experience masterful results from
juxtaposed connotations. And, of course, all these juxtapositions based on
connotative value translate in evocative power.
In the following poems, I have explored themes related,
in part, to classes in physics and mathematics that I took at UBC 33 and more
years ago; although such poems might make you wonder about connotative value
and evocative power, in view of the scientific world of variables and Greek
symbols and coefficients that some who dislike mathematics might consider
sterile, nevertheless, I tried to breathe such value and power into this
collection that I call Memories [of UBC].
Memories [of UBC*]Ó
by Dan Lukiv
*UBC:
Forward
If you haven’t entered a college or university for a post-secondary
education, but you plan to, you might wonder what sorts of classes and events
will fill your hours. The following poems describe some of my university
experiences; yours would be unique, of course, to you, your circumstances, and
your place of schooling. I took my undergraduate training in mathematics,
physics, and creative writing many decades ago at UBC, but the memories remain
alive in my psyche. Very much alive. I would like to share some of those
memories with you. I hope that they enrich you.
The Physics Student
Trigonometric orbs
And Fourier green-waves partly filled
With Greek letters of
An expanding universe too distant,
For the moment,
In his brain that seems to hurt,
He thinks.
The physics student,
His eyes glazed—
Too much adrenaline and thyroxin
In cerebral arteries?—
Determines to reach the bus stop
On time,
For the cross-town trip
Amongst sweat-smelly homo sapiens;
Well-gaited, he walks headfirst into a
university
Telephone pole,
Bounces immediately backwards,
Stands shaking his head,
Clutching his notebook and
Hieroglyphic text
As if they were dwindling provisions
On a space station; he has not yet
Noticed
His mismatched shoes—
One brown, one black,
One with no heel.
But he makes it to his bus
On time,
Trying not to rub the Cyclops-blotch
On his forehead.
The Mathematics Professor
He stops, mid-
Equation-jumble, mid-thought,
Eyes
staring upwards,
Scratching his Garfunkel head
With one end of a chalk stick,
Releasing white dust into his
Hair-nest—
Snow builds up on plaid shoulders,
Even on cracked leather shoes,
Until he jerks into action,
Epiphanied,
Filling the green board with
Further hieroglyphica.
This, in the auditorium of many seats,
For a little clump of fourth-year
Hyperbolic experts,
Who have grown unmoved by these
Blizzards that come
And go.
The Literature Professor
When I showed him 7 pages
Of calculations bobbing, I suppose,
In a stormy
That revealed, I said, how far
Minuscule earth,
Given, of course, the devil-liar had taken
3 days to accelerate
Before landing—
7 pages smack in the middle of 15
Called “The Mythology of
The literature professor sat looking,
looking,
Looking up at me. I felt my heart too much
As I exposed my handiwork engraved
On the most expensive vellum
I could purchase.
He didn’t actually notice, I think,
That he was shaking
His head.
“I’m trying to show that the arts and
sciences
Aren’t really that far apart,” I said,
But he just kept looking,
Shaking his head even harder.
The Cuboid
The second-floor, glass-and-steel walkway
Between the English the mathematics buildings
Had cut-outs of crows on the clear walls
To discourage little birds from crashing
To their death.
Sometimes it worked.
At Sea in a Storm
At the scarred table in the galley,
A deckhand sits and
sleeps,
Crammed into a corner,
As his mug vibrates,
Spilling coffee down his
fingers—
Newly black-grained
From tow-lines
And rope.
The tug,
Hauling an oil barge,
Dives into another
West Coast valley, and
Then soars up,
Up another wall of jade.
He actually sleeps for
an hour
In the bawl of diesel
pistons,
Rattling dishes,
And a pot of roast beef
that
Clamours in the
oil-fired oven.
Suddenly the wheelhouse
door
Springs open:
“Asleep?” the skipper
yells.
“Get up here and steer
this boat,
Ya bloody college
student!”
Like a confused snake,
The deckhand’s mind
reacts,
Slides into a blinding
landscape.
His eyes are volcanoes
In a white face.
His stomach fights hard
To throw up.
He steadies himself
As another blast
Throws the tug up and
down
As if it were a toy
In angry hands.
Trembling,
He leaps for the outside
door,
Dives for the rail, and
Adds his own bile
To the great gall
bladder
Of time—
And sweats.
Jade water and rabid
foam
Roar past.
Wind yanks at his hair.
Salt-air drives itself
Up his nostrils.
Dizzily he walks
Like a roller
coaster-drunk
Through the sea-tombed
Galley.
The wheelhouse door
slams behind him
As the tug leans
Hard to starboard.
The deckhand takes the
wheel
From the bloody skipper.
His stomach sucks his
strength,
Like a parasite,
Leaving arms and legs
shaky,
As he stares wide-eyed
Through wet glass
Into a crashing world
Of madness.
New Math
Gulliver didn’t know about
The speed of light,
He hadn’t heard about
the
Fundamental Theorem of
Arithmetic,
And he was too early for
Einstein’s
E = mc2
Or his bigger find that
“The most
incomprehensible thing
about the universe
Is that it is
comprehensible.”
Gulliver didn’t know
that
Feasting bacteria die
In their test
tube-waste,
But he could have known
that
A family of 2 has 1,
A family of 3 has 3,
And a family of 7 billion
has over
24 quintillian1
Human
(You know?)
Relationships?
He could have told
The Yahoos
About that.
1. n(n-1)
2
The Alphabet
In Dubliners,
Duffy “lived a little
distance
From his body,”
Like a plucked brain,
Like a leaping Antaeus.
The touch of her hand
On his cheek
Might have cured him,
But he’d neither learned
the alphabet
Of simple somersaults
Nor held the Roman
torch:
Mens
(A sound mind in a
sound body).
O Duffy Descartes:
“I think; therefore,
I am
[What?]”
The Couple From
Radium Hot Springs:
Polished silver—
No water spots.
Her dark eyes seemed to
dance
In spite of the
Greyhound-day
Of double-shifting
Along the Rocky
Mountain-
Roller coaster.
Tiredly, through clean
glass,
We gazed down at human
walruses
Basking in geothermal
pools
Across the mad highway.
“Can we afford steaks?”
My wife asked, looking
impish.
Of course, as I drank,
Sucking up water
garnished with
An orange straw and
lemon slice,
The answer was no.
But it was the last
night before
The rubber-tired
We settled for veal and
Slings with red
umbrellas.
“Could we join you?” he
said—
A no-necked Englishman
Obscuring his also broad
wife.
“It’s rather busy, isn’t
it?”
She said, peering around
His shoulder.
How unfortunate.
Expensive food, a long
day
On a long bus, and
A screeching sing-along
hostess.
“Certainly,” I said. “I’ll
sit
Beside you, dear.”
They looked large.
They ordered steaks.
They lived in
Shared a big bottle of
Pee-coloured wine,
And searched hungrily
for
A conversation.
“Where do you work?” I
asked.
His big face relaxed.
“Jaguar. I’m an engineer
At Jaguar.”
“I teach literature at a
college
You’d never know the
name of,” she said
Immediately.
He chewed his
As if it were gum
And she cut hers into
minuscule
Bits perfect for a
rodent.
I
was an overly-tired third-year
Physics student at UBC,
And my wife was a
secretary
Who often watched the
walruses
Across the highway;
She smiled at me when
she could
Get away with it.
Once she got caught,
And the entire
restaurant seemed
Momentarily
As quiet as a logarithm.
But our conversation
continued:
“Do you have any
Children?” I asked after
Embarrassing myself by
asking him
If 220 volts in
Like 110 in
His face, ruddy
Like a D.H.
Lawrence-antagonist,
Turned purplish,
Like incisor-slopes
At the end of 10 miles
of straight
And wavy asphalt.
He actually spit a lump
of steak
Into his pee-coloured
wine.
“Children?” he said. “This
is
My daughter!”
“Oh?” I said.
My wife, who had her
shin wrapped
Around mine,
vice-gripped my hand.
“Do I look that old?” he
said.
I was okay at Calculus,
But not at “this.”
I looked at his purplish
face
And white and brown eyes
And thought of a mutant
crocus
That consumed meat.
“He doesn’t mean you
look old,”
She said. “He means I
do.”
She had pale lips,
As pale as tripe:
Suddenly I saw her
reciting Keats,
Making the universe
rhyme
For fans of Monty
Python.
I couldn’t look at my
wife.
The laughter, the
giddiness,
With the fury of a
madman,
Pushed at my throat,
Made my jaw ache.
I couldn’t look at
anything
But my Sling and red
umbrella.
In our hotel room,
We collapsed on the
silver-quilted bed,
Laughed and rolled
And fell off,
And as we rolled around
on the
Level-loop rug, I said,
“They looked awfully
cozy
On the bus!”
Which made my wife cry.
And I thought, as we
both
Remained hysterical,
That John Lennon was
right:
“I am the walrus,
Koo, koo, kachoo.”
Unspoken
e(cr
ow
ded
r
oo
m)
mpt
i
nes
s
See the Pearls
See the pearls
That men dive
Too deeply
For,
Like rage
At the bottom
Of Dylan Thomas’
Beer.
Coleridge
As opium-sweat
Beads on your brow
And your pay-the-rent
Newspaper columns remain
Closed tombs
In your ship-tossed
Mind,
Your wife grinds her
teeth,
Your child nurses what’s
left,
And flames in the
fireplace
Flicker with Wordsworth.
As opium-sweat
Mats your hair
And stings your eyes,
You compose
Your “Kubla Khan,”
Like a deaf Beethoven,
Like a night-crazed
Mozart,
Like a rabid dog
Alone on a raft
At sea.
Shadow Boxing in
Thought
Permeates “singing
thought”1
As air fills a city:
The “non-intellectual,
Anti-decorative”;1
The coffee in a teacup,
The “art of the
mental...
[In the] context of
The physical.”2
A fish hook
Stabs a trout;
A series of tugs,
A flash of silver
Above the blue lake—
A chain reaction:
Images fathering images—
Lateral discovery,
Gut feelings,
Even logic;
Mathematical meat
cleavers
And clams that play
accordions3
Become a symphony
Of birth,
A kettle of “elusive...
Shadowy thoughts”4
Poured into clear
tumblers
To study.
1. Robert Graves
2. Marvin Bell
3. Wallace Stevens
4. Ted Hughes
Translate
Tone,
It’s the key,
Or the axe—
Words might lack
The clarity of
y = x2,
But only the polyglots
Care,
Or complain,
I cogitate
(Blaaagh!).
And Ezra
Do you remember him?
He was no linguistic
prude,
Or prune;
He tossed Cantos-salad,
Like a juggler tossing
Knives,
Like Robert Lowell
(Scoundrel, poet, or
both?)
Juggling fidelity
And freedom
(Whose Imitations
(“Reckless with literal
meaning”)
Sang its own songs?),
Carving sculptures
With chisel and Bly’s 8
steps,
Aiming for “rightness of
hand,”
Like a trembling archer
Aiming for the deer’s
Heart.
Memories
Laughter doesn’t remind me of
Anything,
Not of Peter Sellers’ “party,”
Nor the mad mad mad mad
Pilgrimage to “W.”
Laughter doesn’t remind
me of
The day I fell into the
pond outside
Sedgewick Library—
You laughed so hard
You pulled a muscle in
your neck.
You had to look straight
ahead
For a week.
I should have looked
straight ahead.
I wouldn’t have tripped
over the
Stone ledge.
Laughter doesn’t remind
me of
Your soft hand in mine,
And it doesn’t remind me
of
The deep color of your
lips
Either.
Saturday,
The let’s-stop-smoking
Workshop
leader had
Lots of red
hair
And purple
nails:
“My name is
Professor Thompson,”
She said.
“I’m a
psychologist.”
The first
question came from
Someone
called Jack
In a muscle shirt:
“When,” he
asked bluntly,
“Do we get
a smoke break?”
From your own portfolio—or, if you prefer, from another source—choose a poem and evaluate its evocative
power and the connotative value of various words. Write up your comments in
paragraph form.
II. Analyzing Poor Writing
You’ve learned a lot about
creative writing so far. If you read and study books about writing, you’ll
learn even more. And if you write and write, you’ll learn more and MORE. You
can even learn by reading poor creative writing. To
help you in this regard, find a poem and a scene of fiction or even a whole
short story that you deem poor, and review each in paragraph form in terms of
what makes it an inferior piece of writing.
As writers, we must develop highly defined skills as
self-reviewers or editors, governed by a quick eye for aesthetically,
intellectually, stylistically mature writing. Along with that quick eye, we
must, like shrewd business-men or -women who objectively evaluate the worth of
making changes to their investment portfolios in the pursuit of increased
income, make changes to words or phrases or clauses or lines or images or
metaphors or paragraphs or scenes or dialogue or cliff hangers in the pursuit
of better writing.
Without that quick eye and objective follow through,
mediocre writing may remain forever mediocre and unpublishable. Aunt Bertha or
your mother may read it and say, “Oh, [Danny],
that’s really [note the vagueness here] nice.” Reviews based on sentimentality or the desire to be
honest overpowered by the desire to say something pleasant won’t help you progress as an author—won’t help you dig
in and make changes to your writing about which a voice of logical wisdom in
your mind may say, “This writing stinks” or “If you think an
editor is going to let you get away with this, you’re a dunce.”
Rewriting is no embarrassment. For writers, not
rewriting, however, often can be. As I said in For Writers Only, in
chapter one: many professional writers’ first drafts would embarrass them if
such drafts slipped into the public forum. If a work requires ten drafts to
get it right, then nine may amount to failure. Professional writers may love
their Aunt Berthas and mothers, but they know where to go for good reviews for
their work. They go inside themselves for honesty and a swift kick to rework
the poetry or fiction to make it publishable, and sometimes they also go to
peers who appreciate authors’ need for honest
and useful reviews.
Let me be perfectly clear: If your Aunt Bertha makes
wonderful apple pies and your mother makes cabbage rolls from heaven, then you
know where to go for apple pie -and cabbage rolls. If your pal, Ralph, the
PhD-literary, perhaps even author, guy, doesn’t know how to be anything but straightforward and insightful,
then you know where to go for reviews of your work.
Review one of your poems and
one your scenes of fiction that fall short of good, or great, writing, and
explain why they do. Then as a business-man or -woman of words, ruthlessly
objective in terms of your pursuit of fine writing, rewrite that poem and
scene, making them better, making them the best writing you can pen.
Writer’s interrupt “the
story’s [short story, novel, play, or movie’s] continuity to portray an episode or incident that
occurred earlier” (Flashback, 1993, p. 79). The strength of this technique? It
can create a “sense of the past” (Card, 1992, p. 66), providing events relevant to a
work’s theme(s) or to characters’ motivations. The problem with this technique? The
forward momentum, the story’s forward flow,
of “action stops” (p. 66). The point for
writers, then—the use of flashback must
have a strong premise, must represent an essential literary need.
From the eye’s
perspective, a flashback may look like any other scene, with its dialogue and
narrative statements, showing the story through concrete dramatic action. The
flashback, on the other hand, may look more like a narrative block as in the
following example from Landers’ Margins:
I looked into her manic eyes—I had never stood
close enough to her before to notice how beautifully green they were—and “saw” [here comes the flashback] my grandpa’s second wife,
who’d often wandered into the forest during thunder-and-rain storms to search
for Jesus. She’d return, that heavy, muscular woman, to her two stepsons,
telling them how she’d found her saviour, her eyes terrifyingly manic, her long
hair in thick strands randomly arranged on her face. Grandpa would send money
home from his railroad job in the
My dad, one particularly
thunderous night, in which she looked particularly crazy and wet and sure that
she had seen Jesus in the forest, made up his mind, at 15, to leave home. His
step-mother had dripped on the floor, telling both boys repeatedly, “Jesus is
my saviour! Jesus is my friend!” After she left, probably to cook up a batch of
oats and raisons for the next day, he told his brother that he was hitchhiking
to Vancouver that night before she took an axe to them and chopped them up into
little pieces and that he was going to get a job and that if his brother knew
what was good for him he’d come along.
Dad lied about his age and
ended up working on a freighter that headed for Singapore, and his brother,
Uncle Winky, lied about being older than 14 and ended up apprenticing with a
shoemaker on Hastings Street in downtown Vancouver.
[Back to the story.] I realized I was staring.
Remember to evaluate your story’s need for a flashback against your reader’s wish that you “not make that trip [back]…Think twice” (Knott,
1982, p. 145). Doing so may save you from an editor’s rejection. But, of course, the right and relevant
flashback may satisfy both the story’s need
and the reader’s interest.
The
reverse of the flashback, the flashforward, offers a stranger temporal shift.
The
flashforward (or prolepsis, also sometimes
known as…flash-ahead) in a narrative
occurs when the primary sequence of events in a story is interrupted by the
interjection of a scene
representing an event expected, projected, or imagined to occur at a later
time…Although the flashforward technique is used less frequently than its
reverse, the flashback, it
is often useful for defining the futuristic structure of science fiction stories,
or for depicting the ambitions of a character. (Flashforward, 2006, para. 1)
The same cautions that tell writers to beware of flashbacks apply here.
Beware of interrupting the linear flow of any story.
IV. Literary Ellipsis;
Zeugma; Adverbial Surprise; Mental Action with a Climax; Transitions; Titles
When I write, I don’t usually say, “Hm, I think this line needs an ellipsis, zeugma,
adverbial surprise, or mental action with a climax.” Rather, my first-draft intuition and art frequently
grab every literary device within the realm of imagination that my
neurotransmitters run across in psyche space. Even during the editing or
writing of a second, third,…or nth
draft, I generally don’t concretely
name the literary terms I’m using. I
doubt that most writers are much different from me. But in the name of my
communicating with you, I’m going to define
ellipsis (literary ellipsis, that is), zeugma, adverbial surprise, and mental
action with a climax as effective literary devices that can help you turn
ordinary into distinctive prose that sings with your stylistic voice.
Ellipsis: I don’t refer
here to the “…” that omits words or to words
implied (e.g., “‘The average person thinks he isn’t.’ –[ ] Larry Lorenzoni / The term ‘average’
is omitted but understood [implied by the text, inferred by the reader] after
‘isn’t.’” [
The
wind howled. A boler cap from somewhere soared through the air, whirling about
like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz [Fleming (Director), 1939/2005].
And then, whirring became so intense, even behind the spectator’s glass, that
the aerodynamics engineer at the Boeing-wind-chamber-test-station pushed
foam-ear-protectors into his auditory canals.
Like the literary ellipsis, a zeugma allows room for
reader surprise by delaying full explanation.
A zeugma [omits words that logic replaces, and
uses] parallelism,
the balance of several words or phrases. The result is a series of similar
phrases joined or yoked together by a common and implied noun or verb. (Zeugma,
2006, para. 1)
Notice the commonality of the verb took in the parallel phrases
in the following zeugma, and note the omission of she took [a
non-literary ellipsis (
When
Barbara left, she took our Pioneer stereo (200 watts), the bedroom suite, all
the living-room furniture, and a chunk of my heart the size of the Bismark.
Mental action with a climax also refrains from telling
the full story until the final words:
I
tore off the “Happy Anniversary” wrapping paper. In the brown box, I knew—I knew she’d bought me that diver’s watch. I tore the
box apart. There it was! Just as we’d seen it together in Regal Jewelers! Good
to 300 meters. A green luminescence lit up its digital face. It even displayed
the phases of the moon!
Then, empty-handed, I sat back in my armchair. Barbara
had left me five years ago.
Literary ellipsis, along with its siblings zeugma and
mental action with a climax, can delight readers through a writer’s friend: surprise. The adverbial surprise can too.
For example,
“I’m going to punch your lights out,” he said happily.
Another writer’s
friend: transition. Whether you’re a public
speaker (Benefit From, 2001; Theocratic School, 1971) or writer,
you need sentence-to-sentence or paragraph-to-paragraph flow that the reader
finds smooth, logical, and satisfying. Poor transition creates reader tension
and disappointment. Consider these statements about paragraph-to-paragraph
transition from a classic book about clear writing:
Begin
each paragraph either with a sentence that suggests the topic or with a
sentence that helps the transition. If a paragraph forms part of a larger
composition, its relation to what precedes, or its function as a part of the
whole, may need to be expressed. This can sometimes be done by a mere word or
phrase (again; therefore; for the same reason) in the
first sentence. Sometimes, however, it is expedient to get into the topic
slowly, by way of a sentence or two of introduction or transition. (Strunk
& White, 1918/1979, pp. 16-17)
The public speaker, like the writer, also requires good
transitions. Notice how the following advice from a book about public speaking
helps writers and speakers alike:
Frequently a bridge between ideas can be built simply
by a proper use of connecting words or phrases. Some of these are: also, in
addition, furthermore, moreover, likewise, similarly, hence, thus, for these
reasons, therefore, in view of the foregoing, so, so then, thereafter, however,
on the other hand, on the contrary, contrariwise, formerly, heretofore, and so
forth. Such words effectively join sentences and paragraphs.
However, [transition] often calls for more than such
simple connectives. When one word or phrase alone will not suffice, then a
transition is called for that leads the audience completely over the gap to the
other side. This might be a complete sentence or even the addition of a more
fully expressed transitional thought.
One way such gaps can be bridged is to try to make the
application of the preceding point a part of the introduction to what follows.
(Theocratic School, 1971, pp. 149-150)
The advice from these quotes should help the essayist and
article writer in most cases that require transition, but the fiction writer
may frequently need more. For example, he or she may want to jump through many
mundane events to focus on a point somewhere in the future:
Bill
locked up the bank’s glass doors, sighing, breathing in tetracarbon fumes. The
next morning, he cracked open three eggs. All three yolks had blood spots.
From the bank’s closing to
Bill’s breakfast time—omitted because
it isn’t, in the case I’m purporting,
necessary.
Another way author’s jump through time periods: the four-line skip:
Bill locked up the bank’s glass doors, sighing, breathing
in tetracarbon fumes.
The next morning, he cracked open three eggs. All three
yolks had blood spots.
Really, the four-line skip
often equals:
a) the curtain, in a stage play, going down between two
scenes;
b) a dissolve (fade-out), in a movie; or
c) a short musical interlude or a narrative comment in a
radio play.
Fiction writers’ transitions, that skip the non-dramatic (mundane) fill
that encourages readers to give up the world of reading for oceans of tv, deserve
thoughtful use.
Although poets may not find themselves using the fiction
writers’ skip that I just mentioned, they nevertheless need to
use transitional devices that allow readers to emotionally, intellectually, and
aesthetically step image to image, line to line, stanza to stanza. Notice the
simple transitions (in red) I use in the
following poem;
Finch-Folly (2001e,
p. 3)
An arrowhead,
As chiselled as
Is so unlike an eyeball
Trudging out of carbon-
Soup.
And
a house,
Without human hand
For inhuman clay,
Was never built,
Was certainly never
An arrowhead,
But
an ear—
Its womb filled with
Primeval slop—
Is soup incarnate,
A bee in Beethoven’s
Cochlea,
A quarter note
In a song of war.
But
do not re-read
This
poem
That nobody wrote.
Now, find examples of
transitions you have used in your fiction, your poetry too. Describe them.
Next on the list of items I want to discuss before ending
this program: titles. Floyd (2006) offers some good advice:
An enjoyable short story or novel might never
get read by the public (or, more to the point, by an editor or agent) if the
title doesn’t do its job. In the publishing world, a good title is like a good
opening paragraph: it should be interesting. It should attract the reader’s
attention. At the very least, it should be appropriate to the rest of the
piece. (para. 4)
He adds that a title “should not be dull” (A Few Rules of Thumb, para. 1) and “easy to remember” (para. 2). Make a list of
five good titles (poems, stories, novels, and/or movies) you’re familiar with, explaining why each is
good. Decide whether you should re-name some of your stories or poems, and if
you do decide to, present the old and their respective new titles here.
V. Student’s Choice, Submissions
Decide what writing project
(your last in this course) you should work on (a few poems, a short story, a
stage play, a radio play?). Once you complete the project, prepare it for
submission. Find publishers who might be interested in your work: The
Canadian Writer’s Market [Tooze, 2004, 2007], The Poet’s Market [Breen,
2005]), or other relevant sources. Keep me informed about how all your
submissions for this course do. I want to know! Contact me at: lukivdan@hotmail.com.
End of Unit 8. No more units!
End of the program. But not
the end of your apprenticeship.
Part IV—Arthur (Canadian poet), Thomas (Canadian poet), and
Elizabeth (Canadian fiction writer): Recommendations for Elementary and High
School Teachers
Chapter 1—Arthur
Chapter 2—Thomas
Chapter 3—
Chapter 1: Arthur
We may not require all
our students to become creative writers, but some students, given the right
environment, like marigold seeds given the appropriate combinations of
soil, nutrients, water, and sunshine, might germinate into poets or fiction
writers. Perhaps one will attain the stature of poet Irving Layton or Margaret
Atwood, or of fiction writer Earl Birney or W. O. Mitchell. Some students might
germinate into great dramatists. On the other hand, some students might
germinate into poets, fiction writers, or dramatists of humble ability. That is
fine too. If we, as educators, want to think about what that right environment
might be, the themes from Studies I, II, and
Theme One—Silent
Teachers who offer
their students a variety of silent reading experiences through reading
programs, literature programs, access to class libraries, visits to school
libraries, visits to municipal or otherwise public libraries, visits to book
fairs, and creative book displays may be encouraging some students to become
creative writers. Silent reading opportunities encouraged Arthur. They
encouraged me (Lukiv, 2006b or 2007). The Ministry of Education (BC) lists a
vast number of resources for silent reading in each of its three guides
(hereafter, The Ministry,1996a, pp. B-9 to B-126; 1996b, pp. B-9 to B-122;
1996c, B-9 to B-103).
Theme Two—Listening to Poetry and Fiction Read Aloud and Listening to Songs
The Ministry’s (1996a,
1996b, 1996c) three guides do not encourage Language Arts teachers to consider
the benefits of singsongs and do not address the benefits of teachers reading
to students. But the International Reading Association tells teachers to “provide
opportunities for students...to be read to each school day” (Supporting Young
Adolescents’ Literacy Learning, 2002; also see, e.g., Goodman, Goodman, &
Flores, 1979; Koltin, n.d.). Teachers who provide, especially in the primary
grades, class singsongs, and teachers who provide quality oral reading of
poetry and fiction, may be encouraging some students to become creative
writers. These provisions encouraged Arthur. Jack Hodgins (1993) relates that
one teacher reading fine fiction aloud encouraged him to take up fiction
writing (Lukiv, 2006b or 2007). I had many similar experiences (2006b or 2007).
Theme Three—Uninterrupted Language Experiences
Teachers who allow students
blocks of time, without interrupting their sensory perceptions or their flights
of fancy with questions or other assignments, to enjoy language experiences
such as videos, free reading time, read-aloud poetry and fiction, and
professionally-performed plays may be encouraging some students to become
creative writers. The Ministry (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) refers to videos of movies
and plays, novels, short story and poetry collections, scripts, and electronic
media that could serve as content for uninterrupted language experiences.
Theme Four—Flights of Imagination
Teachers who allow
students reasonable opportunities to daydream; who openly value flights of
imagination, or lateral-thinking ecstasy; who display passionate interest in
the connotative and imagistic “life” of words; and who provide texts rich in
connotative and imagistic words or phrases may be encouraging some students to
become creative writers. Many of The Ministry’s (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) resources
just referred to in Theme Three—Uninterrupted Language Experiences could serve
as connotative and imagistic fuel for students’ imaginations.
Theme Five—Verbally Punning and Joking and Informing Others
Teachers who allow,
within the limits of reason, students in class to pun and joke and verbally
inform others about what they have learned may be encouraging some of them to
become creative writers. These teachers provide a classroom stage on which
students “manipulate language for...expression” (The Ministry, 1996a, 1996b,
1996c, p. 3), which refers precisely to what writers do with language.
Theme Six—The Freedom of Writing Down Thoughts and Having Those Thoughts
Valued
Teachers who
passionately discuss with their students thoughts and feelings based on poetry
and fiction texts read in class, and who openly value students’ attempts to
write down those thoughts and feelings may be encouraging some of them to
become creative writers. The Ministry (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) speaks frequently
about the benefits and pleasures of writing and the need for teachers to value
their students’ efforts.
Theme Seven—The Freedom of Choice of Reading Material
Teachers who encourage
students to explore literature through freedom of choice and through easy
access to literature may be encouraging some of them to become creative
writers. I refer to many avenues in the subsection Theme One—Silent Reading of
Poetry and Fiction that teachers could use to provide literary freedom of
choice, and The Ministry (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) lists a great library of literary
resources that could also provide that freedom.
Theme Eight—Sound Direction from Compassionate Teachers
Teachers, notably
compassionate, who provide students sound direction about how to write well may
be encouraging some of them to become creative writers. The feedback these
teachers provide helps students do the very work of writing: “manipulat[ing]
language for...expression” (The Ministry, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, p. 3).
Chapter 2: Thomas
Many English teachers
know a great deal about the mechanics of the language. Professor Harlow, long-time
head of the creative writing department at the University of British Columbia,
and author of the critically-acclaimed novel Scann (1972), made a
comment to me in 1976 that helps me here (Lukiv, 2001g): “Dan, those gyze in
the English department understand language. They can dissect a sentence and
explain all the grammar. I can’t do that very well. But I know how to write.” He still does.
But Language Arts teachers (English teachers included) who know plenty about
grammar and dissecting sentences and yet do not write professionally as
creative writers may find themselves wondering how to inspire students to
become professional writers, let alone to reach the literary heights of D. M.
Thomas, Margaret Atwood, John Hodgins, Wole Soyinka, Thomas Akare, or Lindsey
Collen.
Study II gives Language
Arts teachers direction. If I break Thomas’ essential theme into its parts, the
direction looks like this (confirmed through participant review):
Part One
1. Demand, from a
humanistic point of view, the best from students;
2. Value, love, see
each student as sublimely unique;
3. Encourage students
to be the best that they can be, no matter what their
gifts or deficits are;
(Notice the focus on demand
in “1” and encourage in “3.”)
Part Two
4. Application of “1,” “2,”
and “3” may encourage a student with creative
writing ability or
interest to become a poet, novelist, or dramatist;
[The next two points of direction refer to
benefits in a general sense that some students may experience due to teachers’
application of Thomas’ theme in the classroom.]
5. Application of “1,” “2,” and “3” may
encourage a student with any ability
or interest—e.g., mathematics, languages,
history, physics—to develop that ability or pursue that interest; and
6. Application of “1,” “2,”
and “3” may encourage students to develop
positive,
lifelong-learning habits.
Chapter 3:
If the themes of Study
III define the essence of the phenomenon—namely, lived school experiences that
encouraged
Theme One—Opportunities to Write Poetry, Stories, and Plays
Teachers who provide students
with lots of opportunities to write within a variety of genres may be
encouraging some to become creative writers.
In my experience as a creative writing teacher,
I have found that one student will balk at an assignment that another embraces.
Therefore, a teacher truly interested in encouraging students to write and
enjoy the experience should develop a portfolio of activities. Consider this
list of creative writing textbooks that contain many creative writing
activities: Bickham, 1996; Block, 1979; Bryant, 1978; Bugeja, 1994; Cassil,
1975; Clark, Brohaugh, Woods, Strickland, & Blocksom, 1992; Dessner, 1979;
Dickson & Smythe, 1970; Drury, 1991; Fredette, 1988; Hall, 1989; Irwin
& Eyerly, 1988; Jones, 1978; Powell, 1973; Roberts, 1981; Seuling, 1991;
Wakan, 1993; Wyndham, 1972; see, also, Rico, 1983. Consider, also, creative
writing Web sites, which contain essentially the same sorts of activities as do
print materials (see, e.g., About Teens, n.d.; Horner & Khan, n.d.;
Love, n.d.a; Shiney & Shiney, n.d.). The BC Ministry of Education and many
Language Arts curriculum guides also offer direction that should help teachers
develop a portfolio (see, e.g., Best, et al., 1998; Bogusat, et al., 1999;
Booth, Booth, Phenix, & Swartz, 1991; Jeroski & Dockendorf, 2000;
Sterling & Toutant, 1999; The Ministry, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c; Tuinman,
Neuman, & Rich, 1988; Tuinman, Neuman, & Rich, 1989).
Teachers
who provide publishing opportunities (Lamb, 1984; Love, n.d.b.; Lukiv, 1996a,
2002d) may also be encouraging some students to become creative writers. I say
this because some of
Theme Two—Teachers Read Her
Writing Aloud, as Examples for Students
This theme reminds me
of one of Solomon’s inspired statements, at Ecclesiastes 2:24: “A man [or
woman]…should…see good because of his [or her] hard work” (New World Translation,
1984). When teachers read
Publication: This
common denominator for Elizabeth’s play productions and her writing read aloud,
reinforce, for me, that teachers should consider providing a variety of
publication opportunities: display cases of students’ picture book stories;
students’ stories stapled/taped to classroom walls (Lukiv, 2002d); literary
journals of students’ works (Lukiv, 1996a); play productions of students’
dramas; students’ writing read aloud before small-, medium-, or large-sized
gatherings; collections of students’ poetry or stories; sections of students’
writing in school annuals; and even professionally bound anthologies of
students’ poetry and/or fiction (Bouvier & Sorenson,
1976)—these describe a world of publishing opportunities that may encourage
some students to want to become writers. Teachers who read
I relate to
Each of the other students in the class was in
the third or fourth year of his or her Bachelor of Arts program. I, the science
guy, stuck out as an oddball. Armed with a slide rule, a text on electronics,
and another on differential equations, I entered the classroom. I had
efficiently stapled the hem of my Fortrel pants to keep them neat.
During our first class, we spoke about our
majors and what writing experience each of us was bringing to the course. When
I spoke about my majors, some whispered jokingly to each other.
“What are you doing in this course?” a
fourth-year history student sarcastically asked me.
As a science student, with only a first- and a
second-year literature course and a second-year creative writing workshop/course
under my belt, I had far less formal training in writing than my
classmates.
“I like to write,” I
said.
He frowned, somewhat
condescendingly, and said, “One of my profs told me this course would be a
breeze in view of all the essays I’ve written in my history courses. He told me
that it would probably be a waste of time. But I figured it would be an easy
course to help me boost my GPA.”
After the first essays
had been marked, our professor brought them to class to hand back to us. But he
kept mine as the last one to return. He said, “This was the only ‘A’ essay in
the whole class. Although there are a few things that would have improved it, I’m
holding it up as an example. The essay discusses not just one, but three subjects,
and actually has something specific to say about each. The rest of you need to
learn to be specific in your writing, and to use concrete examples to support
your statements.”
Although he didn’t read aloud the essay,
whereas
Theme Three—Special Events as
Resource Material
In our multicultural
classrooms, the opportunities for special events abound. Keith Osajima laments
that “those who do not know about or have never experienced a… family gathering
of any sort in the African-American community [have] missed something. For
those who have never heard a Native…storyteller or who haven’t danced the
salsa,…[they’ve] missed something” (1992, p. 92). We should have no need to
lament. Astute teachers who survey the cultural heritage of their students may
create a wealth of classroom events that could become the resource material for
some students who become adult creative writers.
Could James Joyce
(1916/1976) have written the bazaar scenes in “Araby,” a story about a
romantically frustrated boy, if he had not visited a bazaar as a child? Could
Dickens (1855-57/2005) have written so authoritatively about an English debtors’
jail in Little Dorrit if he hadn’t known anybody, such as his father,
who had spent time in one? Could W. O. Mitchell (1947/1993) have written Who
Has Seen the Wind if he had not grown up on the Canadian prairies? Could I have written “The Farm” if I had not visited
my grandfather’s farm as a boy?
*
THE FARM (2004c)
Death that keeps grandpa silent
In a 25-year-old coffin, rotted,
I’m sure,
Releasing neither theme
Nor river-flow,
Just echoes, from the imploding
Timbers, or perhaps from a clotted
Coordinate of my brain or mind
Or heart—
His tyrannosaurus-cherry tree
That spoke in hums and whirs and strange
Night voices that said, “Beware of
What you cannot see. Beware of
Death, little boy.”
And that olfactory-raping
Chicken coop:
Why was it so big? Like the barn?
Like grandpa’s bedroom and bed?
Like his temper that his mad wife
Sometimes unleashed?
The farm, and the horses,
They were big as the ocean,
Big as the whole universe.
The outhouse once used
Remained a fly’s paradise,
A terrible reminder that not everything
Turns out fine,
Like the neighbour who fell off
A horse and ended up retarded.
“Have some mushrooms,” my glee-picking
Half uncles would say.
“Come on, Danny, ya city slicker.”
They’d fry them—poisonous?
The kind that dissolve and
Rupture kidneys?—
Sizzled and black
In butter, with the acid smell
Of cooked onions everywhere
Like the chicken manure outside.
My jaw never opened for mushrooms,
Warts of the apple orchard.
Cow manure would get me,
Sometimes every hour,
As it squeezed into running shoe
Tread, to sleep like the bats in the attic
At day.
The monstrous wasp-whirring
In the cream separator as
I’d turn the heavy handle with all my
Skinny-armed might—
I grew drunk almost, on the huge sound
Of that mini metal beast.
“Stop that
noise!” Reality always
Reminded me this was not
My universe,
Which made me wonder whether I
Actually had one.
I certainly had never heard
Of the word marginalized.
A razor-sharpening belt
That could have girded
Hercules,
A washboard-crater-
Driveway to this wonderful, horrible
Planet called “the farm.”
And the preserves,
Concealed and protected in Sheol,
Where 15-year-old cherries in dusty jars
Lay still as boredom—
Still as eggs of prehistoric fish
Embalmed in rock.
O, the theme of it all,
The rusty tractor that
Smoked and scuttled and
Screamed.
But it’s the dungeon,
The cellar, that I see,
In the grassy hump between the house
And outhouse.
Grandpa, who baked pies like
A magician,
Who finally sent his wife to
The mental institution,
Floats in one of those jars,
Beside the cherry eyeballs,
Pickled in time,
Themeless, without the flow of
Fiction, or even non-fiction.
Grandpa, gone in the coffin
That must be going—
I loved his pies so much
I want to cry.
*
One of
Interestingly,
Arthur (Lukiv, 2006b or 2007) found that several special school events had
played roles in encouraging him to become a writer: poetry and fiction read
aloud, a movie, a play. Jack Hodgins (1993) was inspired to become a writer
through one high school teacher’s reading aloud Hemingway’s The Old Man and
the Sea (1952/1999); I had similar experiences (Lukiv, 2006b or 2007). I
realise these examples weren’t full-scale events as Christmas concerts were for
Elizabeth, but they were nevertheless special events, implying that the teacher
who has the knack of turning the ordinary into the extraordinary; of turning a
poetry read-aloud into a celebration of that poetry; of turning a novel
read-aloud into a likewise celebration; of turning a class that is sleepy-eyed
on a dreary cloudy day into a class that revels in the variety of clouds that
come and go like fog, winter, spring, summer, fall, and life too may be
encouraging some of their students to become future writers—writers with
cerebral storehouses of resources available to power many of their poems, stories,
novels, and plays.
Theme Four—Presenting Students’ Good Writing to Established Writers
Teachers
who present students’ work, good work that deserves praise, to established
writers for review, may encourage some of those students to keep on writing,
perhaps for the rest of their lives. Where can teachers find local writers who
might agree, without even receiving payment (schools typically run on reduced
budgets these days, although administration might set aside some funds for
author reviewers), to visit their classes to verbally pass on encouraging
comments to student writers, or who might agree to comment through e-mail or
letters on students’ writing that teachers pass on to them?
Often local bookstore
owners, librarians, newspaper editors, and high school English teachers can
provide the names of authors living within their communities. Local writer’s
groups may have established writers as members. Faculty at local colleges and
universities’ English Departments may provide names. More adventurous teachers
may want to contact authors outside their communities through the post or
e-mail. Publishing houses will usually forward letters addressed to their
author clients.
In 1996, I contacted many authors to acquire
permission to use excerpts from their works in my Creative Writing for
Senior Secondary Students (1997a). I wrote to their publishers who
forwarded my requests to the respective authors. My choice, however, now, in
2008, in the age of widespread e-mail-speed-of-light communication, would be to
do a search—a Google (www.google.com)
search, for example—of the author’s name and the word e-mail: for example, “Robert
Harlow” e-mail. That will likely help me locate an e-mail address that
Robert Harlow uses. The beauty of e-mail contact resides in its efficiency. How
quickly and cheaply one can contact a multitude of authors who exist “out
there,” many of whom, I’m sure, would offer insights on students’ writing as
Nellie McClung offered hers on Elizabeth’s work (Lukiv, 2006b or 2007).
If the students’ creative writing teacher, however, is a
published writer, then all the better. I trusted Robert Harlow’s direction
because of his success as a writer. In time,
Theme Five—A Variety of
Reading Experiences
Arthur found that a
variety of silent reading experiences (poetry and fiction) promoted the wonder
and joy of reading, and that they encouraged him to become a writer.
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Copyright © 1997, 2008 by Dan Lukiv. All rights reserved. Except in the case of fair usage as defined by the American Psychological Association (referring to fiction or non-fiction quotes up to 500 words; poetry of a few lines, or less than three in the case of three-line haiku or senryu, or one line in the case of a two-line poem, may also be quoted), no part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the author. For more information, contact the author at lukivdan@hotmail.com.
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