Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

DBQing the rubric

Watch your rubric before you DBQ the column below. Cathy is spot on. Cluttered language is a big problem in education. Where else would English be turned into English language arts (a triple redundancy using a double modifier)?

For the love of phonemes!

It’s back to school time again, which, for parents means that we run the risk of being confronted with jargon. That may go down well in the fine teaching academies of our country, but only raises question marks when you’re trying to understand what your children are doing in school. (A tip of the hat to Rich Zahradnik, whose column last week inspired this one.)

via Moms’ Talk Q&A: A DBQ, By Any Other Name …. – Pelham, NY Patch.

Harlan Ellison, time troll

Harlan Ellison is the patent troll of sci-fi stories about time. I mean that in a good way. I respect Ellison’s tough-minded approach to idea theft, particularly towards Hollywood, where ten people in a room can come up short when looking for one original idea.

I previously wrote about episodes of Outer Limits that Ellison successfully claimed were the idea for the movie Terminator. (Successful in that he has a credit on the movie now and a sealed court settlement.) The Hollywood Reporter reports on his newest effort to protect his intellectual property, this time against “In Time,” a film set to release on Oct. 28:

Science fiction legend Harlan Ellison is attempting to kill a high-profile movie that is scheduled to come out in theaters next month. The Hugo award-winning writer has filed a lawsuit against New Regency and director Andrew Niccol over the 20th Century Fox-distributed film, In Time, starring Justin Timberlake, Amanda Seyfried and Cillian Murphy.

via Harlan Ellison Sues Claiming Fox’s ‘In Time’ Rips Off Sci-Fi Story (Exclusive) – Hollywood Reporter.

The story he alleges was infringed features one of his all-time great titles: “Repent, Harlequin! Said The Ticktockman.”

Nice email on a Tuesday

After a slow summer, it was so nice to get a request for the full manuscript for LAST WORDS from an agent who “enjoyed” the first two chapters. On such one-word reviews I dine for a week.

The art of fiction

With a manuscript done and in the midst of deciding what to write next, I determined to spend the summer rereading all the best books on writing I’d ever read, and reading the ones I hadn’t. Summers being summer—or maybe me being me—I got through one and a half by the time school started. No matter. It was a worthy exercise  just for picking up again John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. In chapter 3, I found a passage that reminded me why this became the writing book for me (really it and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird). Gardner deals with interest and appeal in stories, and in particular, the snobbery that favors the serious over the entertaining:

The result of such prejudice or ignorance is that literature courses regularly feature writers less appealing—at least on the immediate, sensual level, but sometimes on deeper levels as well—than Isaac Asimov, Samuel R. Delaney, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Roger Zelazny, or the Strugatsky brothers, science-fiction writers; or even thriller writers like John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth; the creators of the early Spider-Man comics or Howard the Duck. In theory, it may be proper that teachers ignore thrillers, science fiction, and comic books. No one wants Coleridge pushed from the curriculum by a duck “trapped in a world he never made!” But when we begin to list the contemporary “serious” writers who fill highschool and literature courses, Howard the Duck can look not all that bad.

He does caution readers will be disappointed by the boring sameness of fiction that is merely commercial and shoddy imitation. But in allowing Zelazny and Howard the Duck—I read the original limited comic book series, still own 10 of them—into the conversation, he allowed me to think I could practice the art of fiction (though a “young” writer I was not then and am not now).

 

MA in Tolkien

The Mythgard Institute opened this fall as an online academic outpost for the study of all things Tolkien. You can earn an MA in English on J.R.R., with the first diplomas handed out spring of 2014. “Most of all, we hope to provide students with new opportunities to study Tolkien and related works seriously and with academic rigor, either for their own enrichment or towards the achievement of a degree,” the Institute says.

First and only course for this fall is “The Great Tales: Tolkien and the Epic.” As the institute notes, quoting Sam Gamgee approvingly,  “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

I thought I was having fun when I took a single course in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis during senior year of college.

Credit the often fun Geek Chic Daily for reporting this first (to me at least).

The first day of school

I wrote about the last day of school in one of my early Pelham Patch columns back in June. I would never attempt one on the first day of school after reading the piece by the late Mike Levine linked below. The editor and writer got it so right that his column was re-posted by his paper, The Middletown Times-Herald, two and half years after his death and is now shared around the Hudson Valley on this big day.

Quick, before they leave this morning. Take a good look. Touch their faces, run your hands through their hair.We got antsy with them last month, but now we want time to stand still. Like falling leaves and chilly mornings, some great force signals us today. We are aware of life passing. See the kindergartner with a brave, bewildered smile watching her mother cry as the school bus pulls away. The high-school freshman with a lump in his throat hears his father whisper everything will be OK. Brothers and sisters who fought all summer now hold hands.

via Mike Levine: The first day of school | recordonline.com.

Dyslexia saves the writer

Lost for what to do after my first mystery manuscript received eight nice rejection letters from crime editors and my agent decided to get her MBA and enter venture capital (I still wonder if it was my writing that caused this), I enrolled in the Writer’s Studio back in 1997. Joining the New York-based workshop run out of an elementary school in the Village was the best thing I could have done. In three years, I learned many things, but the most important lessons were about the big three: voice, tone and mood.

The studio was founded by Phil Schultz, who went on to win the Pulitzer for poetry in 2008. In Sunday’s New York Times, he wrote of how his disability made him into a writer, and informed the approach he would teach to the rest of us. If you’re looking for a writer’s education, I highly recommend the Writer’s Studio over the course-catalogs-on-every-street-corner mass manufacturers of continuing ed like Gotham. Definitely read the column:

Philip Schultz is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the author of the forthcoming memoir “My Dyslexia.”

I WAS well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine. When I was his age I’d already all but given up on myself.

via With Dyslexia, Words Failed Me and Then Saved Me – NYTimes.com.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy

“Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy” is one of the great twisty spy thrillers, about thinking and betrayal rather than booms and bangs. I was worried a new version would pale in comparison to the British mini-series, or die on the vine of period-piece dustiness. Not so, says this first review, from THR. I can’t wait to see it.

Huge on period atmosphere and as murkily plotted as its source material, this big-scale European adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 Cold War novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy shows a faithfulness that should fully meet the expectations of the writer’s fans. At the same time, with Swedish director Tomas Alfredson at the helm of his first English language film, one might be pardoned for hoping for a bit of the spookiness of his Let the Right One In or the political passion of le Carré’s The Constant Gardener. Instead this good, old-fashioned square-off between spymasters Karla and George Smiley demonstrates a lot more loyalty than most of its characters. It is one of the few films so visually absorbing, felicitous shot after shot, that its emotional coldness is noticed only at the end, when all the plot twists are unraveled in a solid piece of thinking-man’s entertainment for upmarket thriller audiences.

via Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Venice Film Review – The Hollywood Reporter.

Refrigerator boxes

I’m not a believer in signs and portents, that is, signs and portents in this, the real world. Nothing has ever happened to me that told me what was to come, or even gave me a hint I was heading in anywhere like the right direction. Mine is a plain old world. It’s probably why I love signs, magical vision, foretelling and such in the stories I read. So my experience Wednesday was a new one.

I was helping my neighbor, Manu, put some new furniture on his porch. I pointed out that the kids—my son and neighboring boys—would love to play in the huge boxes the two wicker chairs and couch came out of. My neighbor was surprised at this, perhaps because he has an infant and a three-year-old girl. Or maybe he had a sheltered childhood. We put the three boxes in the front yard, and they instantly became forts, pill boxes, meeting rooms and drawing boards. All the adults who passed by that evening smiled as soon as they saw our box village, all with the same look that said getting to play in huge boxes was the best thing to do in the world when they were kids.

It made me smile too, but for more than kid memories. I started my next novel, a YA time-travel story, just last month. I’ve had the idea for ten years, maybe longer, and the opening scene in my head for the past two. Here’s how it starts:

Jamie is crap-housing around inside the empty Frigidare box. The box shakes and shudders. He giggles like a six year old, which is easy enough for him, since he is one. This is our big reward every time we move. We get to play in a damn leftover box. I knew I was done with going to a new town, a new house, a new school every four months when I didn’t want to roll around in a box anymore. I can’t stand the smell of cardboard. It’s the smell of leaving things behind.

I’ve only got a thousand words, and a bunch of research still to do, and the project may turn out terrible. But when I saw those smiles on Wednesday, it gave me a lift, a burst of confidence. The world was telling me that my refrigerator box would get an emotional response from readers. I believe that confidence begets good work, in the writing game as in any other, and the reaction to those boxes gave me that.