Showing posts with label writerly advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writerly advice. Show all posts
3/14/11
2/7/11
BABY NAME BOOKS ARE INSPIRATIONAL FOR CHARACTERS
I love BABY NAME BOOKS! I like to browse through them - collect them ! That's because I'm inspired by names to develop characters.
Get this: In college I wrote a long story in which I made up a name for a character. It was an unusual name but felt right to me. In fact, it was as if this character, who I came to know well, was telling me what their name was, the way you hear some babies, before birth, whisper their name to their mothers or commuicate it silently as newborns. So I went with this character name. But in critique sessions in my writing workshop the professor and a couple students told me that the name was too unusual, that they got stuck on it while reading. Not good!
I tried, I really did, to find another name for this character. I questioned my motivations for naming this character something unusual. But then again, she was hardly an ordinary person. I was grateful that I could find and replace, using the computer, when the time came to change the name, but simply I never did find another name for the character and the manuscript remains in storage at this time.
Then recently I was looking through a baby name book and there it was - for the first time I had ever seen it in print - this unusual name I had used for the character!
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights
Get this: In college I wrote a long story in which I made up a name for a character. It was an unusual name but felt right to me. In fact, it was as if this character, who I came to know well, was telling me what their name was, the way you hear some babies, before birth, whisper their name to their mothers or commuicate it silently as newborns. So I went with this character name. But in critique sessions in my writing workshop the professor and a couple students told me that the name was too unusual, that they got stuck on it while reading. Not good!
I tried, I really did, to find another name for this character. I questioned my motivations for naming this character something unusual. But then again, she was hardly an ordinary person. I was grateful that I could find and replace, using the computer, when the time came to change the name, but simply I never did find another name for the character and the manuscript remains in storage at this time.
Then recently I was looking through a baby name book and there it was - for the first time I had ever seen it in print - this unusual name I had used for the character!
C Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including International and Internet Rights
3/15/10
THE "RING" OF TRUTH by CHRISTINE TRZYNA
THE RING OF TRUTH
by Christine Trzyna C 2010 All Rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved.
When I was in a writing class at a community college years ago, I ran into the problem of people critiquing my short fiction using the word "YOU" instead of "YOUR NARRATOR" or "THE FIRST PERSON." Now, I used the first person as my tense in most of my stories because I consider that the most personal and immediate voice, with other tenses too distant and maybe abstract, and so I can understand that what my stories had was "THE RING OF TRUTH."
Our professor emphasized that THE RING OF TRUTH was a very good thing. My readers cried at my stories or laughed at them. This was pre-computer and I was not a great typist. Sometimes I was irked because someone who read my story was irked by a typo that could be caught and fixed in no time with today's SPELL CHECK. (I never use the other editing functions on computers since I intentionally write breaking some of the rules as is but thank-you SPELL CHECK!)
Although my short fiction had THE RING OF TRUTH but was not the truth (I would call it non-fiction) some of my fellow writers continued to treat me as if I COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE HAD THE IMAGINATION I DID (or DO). For instance, I wrote a story about a young woman coming to terms with not having a father, a coming of age story in which the tension was between the young woman and her mother. From that point on, though I told him I had been born into a stable marriage and had both parents in the household, one of our group members always talked to me personally as if this was an issue for me. I guess when one has IMAGINATION it may include EMPATHY.
Maybe part of the problem with having the prized RING OF TRUTH in my work was that few believed my truths because they themselves were turning their realities into "fiction." Still, even if you know this is true of a class, round table, or workshop member, I think it's best to use THE FORMAL LANGUAGE OF CRITIQUE. You have no right to further the belief among strangers that what you know to be true of a friend is true!
by Christine Trzyna C 2010 All Rights including Internet and International Rights Reserved.
When I was in a writing class at a community college years ago, I ran into the problem of people critiquing my short fiction using the word "YOU" instead of "YOUR NARRATOR" or "THE FIRST PERSON." Now, I used the first person as my tense in most of my stories because I consider that the most personal and immediate voice, with other tenses too distant and maybe abstract, and so I can understand that what my stories had was "THE RING OF TRUTH."
Our professor emphasized that THE RING OF TRUTH was a very good thing. My readers cried at my stories or laughed at them. This was pre-computer and I was not a great typist. Sometimes I was irked because someone who read my story was irked by a typo that could be caught and fixed in no time with today's SPELL CHECK. (I never use the other editing functions on computers since I intentionally write breaking some of the rules as is but thank-you SPELL CHECK!)
Although my short fiction had THE RING OF TRUTH but was not the truth (I would call it non-fiction) some of my fellow writers continued to treat me as if I COULD NOT POSSIBLY HAVE HAD THE IMAGINATION I DID (or DO). For instance, I wrote a story about a young woman coming to terms with not having a father, a coming of age story in which the tension was between the young woman and her mother. From that point on, though I told him I had been born into a stable marriage and had both parents in the household, one of our group members always talked to me personally as if this was an issue for me. I guess when one has IMAGINATION it may include EMPATHY.
Maybe part of the problem with having the prized RING OF TRUTH in my work was that few believed my truths because they themselves were turning their realities into "fiction." Still, even if you know this is true of a class, round table, or workshop member, I think it's best to use THE FORMAL LANGUAGE OF CRITIQUE. You have no right to further the belief among strangers that what you know to be true of a friend is true!
1/2/10
4/5/09
VIRGINIA WOOLF quote
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
3/30/09
TONY HILLERMAN from SELDOM DISAPPOINTED answers "Where do you get ideas?"
Tony Hillerman
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers
page 253
The answer to the "Where do you get the ideas" question is that writer's minds are a jumbled, chaotic attic cluttered with plot notions, useful characters, settings for events, bits and pieces of information, overheard remarks, ironies, cloud formations, bumper sticker slogans, unresolved problems, bon mots, tragedies, heroics, etc. One's memory contains enough stuff to produce three or four longer versions of "War and Peace" if only once could sort it out and from it into a coherent fable.
That leads to the next FAQ. "When do you write?" One writes while peeling potatoes, driving to work, standing in line, suffering through a boring mo vie, eating oatmeal, digging out dandelions, trying to drift off into naptime sleep. Finally when the sorting is mostly completed and the next scene is set in the imagination, one goes to the computer and types it onto the screen.
I liken the writer to the bag lady pushing her stolen shopping cart through life collecting throwaway stiff, which, who knows, might be useful some way some day....
Seldom Disappointed - a Memoir
C 2001
Harper Colins Publishers
page 253
The answer to the "Where do you get the ideas" question is that writer's minds are a jumbled, chaotic attic cluttered with plot notions, useful characters, settings for events, bits and pieces of information, overheard remarks, ironies, cloud formations, bumper sticker slogans, unresolved problems, bon mots, tragedies, heroics, etc. One's memory contains enough stuff to produce three or four longer versions of "War and Peace" if only once could sort it out and from it into a coherent fable.
That leads to the next FAQ. "When do you write?" One writes while peeling potatoes, driving to work, standing in line, suffering through a boring mo vie, eating oatmeal, digging out dandelions, trying to drift off into naptime sleep. Finally when the sorting is mostly completed and the next scene is set in the imagination, one goes to the computer and types it onto the screen.
I liken the writer to the bag lady pushing her stolen shopping cart through life collecting throwaway stiff, which, who knows, might be useful some way some day....
3/25/09
JEAN COCTEAU quote
"A writer develops the muscles of his mind. This training leaves hardly any leisure for sport. It demands suffering, falls, laziness, weakness, setbacks, exhaustion, mourning, insomnia, exercises which are the reverse of those which develop the body.
From OPIUM, the Diary of a Cure, Peter Owen Limited Publishers, London MCMLVII
From OPIUM, the Diary of a Cure, Peter Owen Limited Publishers, London MCMLVII
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)