writing

they had very very small sleeping bags

Apparently "sluice" can be used as a verb. I had to look it up before I let myself use it.

tl;dr

get rid of sluice

he sluiced the reams of subcutaneous lipid from beneath the patient's dermis, occasionally pausing to take a surreptitious, lingering sip

I like it and I like Tracer Hand's changes (I wanted to say something about the two really symmetrical When/Where statements and how I thought they should be de-symmetricizored)

xpost LJ my god

...awesome

everything I write for my fiction-writing class is horrible and I hate myself for it

I feel that it's a little unfair to say he had "neglected" to pack his own. Isn't that his parents' responsibility, even if he weren't developmentally disabled?

I'm serious!!

^ well caught. Thanks. Serious!

Ma'am, we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. My bartender, myself, and my general manager will not tolerate your hate speech on our property. We have not and will not charge you a cent and you're free to take your business elsewhere. I'd rather not call the police, but if you insist on continuing to disturb our guests I will. Please leave.

lazy zing catalog

Can I answer with a limited N? Using high / mid-century diction in stories about kids to kind of camp up and ironize the drama is ... you know, it gets done a lot, and the returns have been pretty diminished. I feel like you'd have to actually either go full-on Nabokovian with the whole thing or give up on pulling the prose that way.

This thread:

It's no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, 'Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.' By then, pigs will be your style.

Tracer's emendations are helpful. Take them to heart. You might also wish to lose the "promptly".

The material has promise. Depending on where it goes, it could make a strong story, since it seems to be either a meaningful personal memory or a well-imagined situation.

Nabisco has a point about the diction, although I would not identify it as a particularly 'high' diction, so much as a bit awkward and overreaching in places (see more under "sluice").

As you develop the story, try a little less to write as you imagine writers are supposed to write (i.e. with fancy scrollwork), and just concentrate on what you want to make clear to the reader. If a detail seems important to understanding the setting or the action, just write it out plainly; don't try to hook it onto a sentence like a sidecar.

Resist adding highly colored words (e.g. "shoehorned"), unless they feel natural for the job you're asking them to do. Otherwise, it seems like you are laboring to bring forth an effect, any effect. It screams that you don't trust the material to hold the reader's interest.

Instead, pretend you're writing a letter to a friend, or dashing something off to post to ILX. Being stylish can wait until you are ready to write your masterpiece, which, of course, is the piece that displays your complete mastery over the language and your chosen form.

Don't stop now. You're just getting warmed up. Good luck.

Here is some writing advice I posted to the Mindless Prattle forum several years ago. It is as true today as it was then:

How To Write A Good Posting

No one likes to be called "uninteresting", whether or not they know what that means. That's why so many people who might post here on Mindless Prattle don't. If you think about how many people there are, and then you think of how many people post here, I think you'll see what I mean. Fear of being "uninteresting" keeps a lot of people from letting their light shine on Mindless Prattle and that's a shame.

That's why I'm going to tell you how to write a good posting. I want to help all of you write things you can be proud of, things you want to show off to the whole wide world wide web. So, let's get started, ok?

First, use small words. No one likes big words, so use lots and lots of small words. Don't use any words that most folks can't figure out right off. With big words they have to read what you wrote more than once to see what you meant. If you put a lot of big words in there, there is a good chance they'll just get all balled up any way, even if they read it over and over. Then they'll just get mad at you or give up. Short words are easy. Every one likes them. They are good friends. Use them.

Make your sentences short, too. Lots of people run out of breath when a sentence is too long. Then they have to stop right in the middle of it for a while, and that's not a good place to stop. They can lose their place or forget what came before. Using lots of short sentences lets their minds rest a tiny bit while they wait in between. This helps. I don't know about you, but my mind gets tired real quick and maybe yours does, too!

Don't be clever. Most folks like new ideas to be simple, the kind they can get a good grip on right off the bat. But what people really like is to read ideas they have already thought before. That makes it super easy to think them again. Thinking a thought for the first time is always the hardest. So keep those new ideas out of your posting if you can help it. This works out great for Reader's Digest and it will work for you, too.

By now you might be thinking, "Hey! This is easy!" And you'd be right! But if you want to write the best you can, keep reading because there's even more to come!

I bet you never stopped to think how much more exciting it is to read a posting where the writer is real excited about what they're writing. But it's true! Excited writers write exciting stuff. And the best way to let the reader know how excited you are is to use lots of exclamation points! They're cheap, so don't worry!

Here's another smart tip from the writing pros. Write about what you know best. That way you don't get all balled up with looking up new facts about things you don't already know all about. That's just hard work and you might even get mixed up and write it all wrong and not even know it! Why should you risk looking stupid, when you can write about something where you know all there is to know about it? That way you don't even have to think twice about what to say. You can just say it, and that's that.

Write like you talk. Good talkers just grab you by the ears and don't let go. The same goes for good writers, except they grab your eyeballs. If you write like you talk, you'll find the words will just come squirting out of you and onto the page. And right up into your reader's eye, too! That's what you want.

Use colorful words. It's hard to say what words are colorful, but I think you'll know them when you see them. They're the words that zap you and make your teeth hurt, that float as pretty as butterflies, that make your mouth water and your gums tingle. Think of as many colorful words as you can and fling and hurl them all over what you write. Your readers will be hypnotized.

The last thing I have to say is - have fun! Writing doesn't have to be so hard it makes you sweat like a pig. It can be a breeze! So, what are you waiting for? Let your juices flow and you'll write the kind of real good postings that won't be pushed off into the Dunce Corner of Mindless Prattle. So, lick that pencil and get started today! I can guarantee, you won't be sorry.**

**The author of this piece does not actually guarantee that you won't be sorry.

I thought 'shoehorned' worked perfectly well (and that's not just because I really like the word) - it evokes that feeling of uncomfortable tightness that you get from sleeping bags, and the way you have to ease yourself in. Keep the shoehorn!

Also, is this the opening passage? If so, I agree with the removal of 'cruel' in relation to the storytellers. If not, then it may work in context.

I would also say that whilst the advice to keep it simple is important, I wouldn't let it take away all of your style. For example, the stuff above about using short words - yeah, nobody wants to be another LJ, but you don't have to stick to this rule if it feels unnatural. Just check and recheck that you're not too heavy-handed and grandiloquent, and keep asking for input like this.

i agree with nabisco, and i think shorehorned is high diction.

'Shorehorned' might be, but why is 'shoehorned'? Is this just a gut feeling you have? I have explained why I think it is a valid use of words, but nobody has explained why it is high diction/colored/pretentious/whatever you want to call it. Would you rather he put 'snuggled'?

consigned
exiled
crammed
shooed
shoveled

whatever

But all of these have different connotations. If they were consigned, this would imply a militaristic, methodological way of putting the kids to bed. Exiled, the loneliness of the individual comes to the fore. Crammed is probably the closest to the way I imagine shoehorned to be, but actually doesn't work for me as a description of entering a sleeping bag. Shooed is a bit more mischievous, as in 'oh, shoo, you scallywag, go to bed', and shovelled again doesn't have a particular ring of truth to me.

My issue with shoehorned is that it suggests being pushed in: cos the kids are 'tards, are you suggesting they were manhandled by the drunks, or just that their itchy sleeping sacs were constrictive?

Well, you see, I think it lightly suggests some physicality to their bed entrance, but it's more ambiguous than crammed or shovelled. It's cold, but not necessarily violent or forceful.

For what it's worth, this is neither the beginning of a story nor the opening to a section. It's sitting in the midst of a couple of other paras. I was just looking for feedback on this in particular.

Previous sentences suggest that the counselors tell the boys an especially scary story, too close to reality for kids their age, complete with falsified frantic calls to "base camp" etc.

This is leading into a scene where Stephen & Daniel, our heroes, find themselves unable to sleep. They share a blanket and talk about their respective disabilities (and the effect they had on childhood etc) until the sun comes up.

Obv very difficult to write without coming off as way sentimentalist and sappy and overwritten, but I'm giving it a shot. Fiction has never been a strong point, branching out and all that.

Can I answer with a limited N? Using high / mid-century diction in stories about kids to kind of camp up and ironize the drama is ... you know, it gets done a lot, and the returns have been pretty diminished. I feel like you'd have to actually either go full-on Nabokovian with the whole thing or give up on pulling the prose that way.

-- nabisco, Wednesday, September 19, 2007 11:23 PM

I can certainly appreciate the point, but I wouldn't say I'm trying to ironize or camp up the drama. I'm going for "serious" Bildungsroman and all that shit. Does it read like I'm overwriting for the sake of irony?

difficult to write without coming off as way sentimentalist and sappy and overwritten

Go for broken ribs honesty, as straight to the heart as you can. If it still comes off as sappy and overwritten, you need to let go of it.

Does it read like I'm overwriting for the sake of irony?

More samples, plz. Not seen enough yet to go on.

Yeah, it's hard to say with this one section, out of context. "Shoehorned" does have more physicality, if you want the sense of helplessness, dread, of childishness, to an extent,which also goes with "neglected to" and "cruel storytellers" (gotta be somebody's *fault* alla time, that's life for this story's kid) Also, the nervousness of the kid relates to the "heightened diction" I associate with ghost stories (Might all tie together better if you heightened the suggestion[which I'm already getting] that this is perhaps a memory, re-cast in third person, maybe with little bits of breathlessness, something about the tempo of certain sentences or phrases--if you left that possibilty in there--without confirming it through any kind of middle-aged Stephen King Stand By Me narrator taking over, looking back etc)(IF that's the direction you mean to go--just try to get a strong idea or vibe you want to convey)

nobody wants to be another LJ

I have become a default strawman. Woe.

When writing in a more serious context (like a story), I tone it right down. Not everything I compose sounds like a remixed thesaurus.

you have become a default strawman. whoa v. stop, halt, discontinue, cease, quit, desist, stfu.

The story sounds like it will be interesting but I have to agree with others on the tone. It sounds as if it's a coming-of-age story written 50 years ago - the style is a little too self-consciously "literary", which distracts from the story. I think you can get away with "shoehorn", but I'd lose some adjectives, simplify some of the sentence structure, wonder whether things "at least an hour" wouldn't be better than "upwards of an hour", wonder if "dying hearth" sounded a bit literary cliché, eliminate repitions of wool, night, hour etc... if I was your editor, these are the suggestions I'd make:

"The boys were shoehorned into their sleeping bags, most staying awake for at least an hour. While the counselors drank beers around the fire and praised each others' performances, Stephen itched under his standard-issue blanket. Unlike his bunkmates, he hadn't packed a sleeping bag; instead, he'd been given a military green cot and a thin wool covering. It would be the first night of an insomnia that would follow him for the rest of his life. Later, deep into the night and long after the storytellers had drunk themselves to sleep, a flashlight muted by a small hand cut an arc through the darkness."

What's a military green cot?

I guess like olive-drab

I presumed it to be one of those camp beds the military use.

http://www.numberninethegallery.com/artists/stormthorgerson_3.jpg

At the risk of being too nit-picky, does insomnia follow you? Or does it plague you?

I think it can metaphorically follow you - like that Travis Bickle line: "loneliness has followed me my whole life"

The story sounds like it will be interesting but I have to agree with others on the tone. It sounds as if it's a coming-of-age story written 50 years ago - the style is a little too self-consciously "literary", which distracts from the story. I think you can get away with "shoehorn", but I'd lose some adjectives, simplify some of the sentence structure, wonder whether things "at least an hour" wouldn't be better than "upwards of an hour", wonder if "dying hearth" sounded a bit literary cliché, eliminate repitions of wool, night, hour etc...

-- Zelda Zonk, Thursday, 20 September 2007 09:49 (Yesterday)

I've been infected by all the Chabon/Lethem/etc I've been reading.

By the way, for the curious or those who're interested in reading more, I'm sorta blogging this as a work in progress here. Disconnected bits and pieces that have yet to coalesce into a coherent whole, but which had better do so by Monday (my deadline).

" Stephen had begged his parents for a bunk bed at home for months before they relented and got him a fire-engine red with Nintendo sheets. After a week of torturous climb, with awful tendon cramps meeting every ascent, he never slept in the top bed again. His parents never forgot the slight, and well into his own middle age his parents would gripe about the bunk bed they'd bought him that he never slept in.
In other words, he had not "won" the top bunk at Lions' Camp. He had been stuck with it. When Stephen sufferred an inconvenient foot cramp on his way up the oak ladder to the mattress above, he thought he could finish the climb and work out the charley horse once he was safely beneath the blanket. Instead, at the last step, his leg spasmed. He felt himself fall backwards, then the sleeping bunkhouse was met with the sound of meat dropping in a bucket.
For an awful moment Stephen couldn't move. Daniel cried. Rusty gathered Stephen into a wheelchair and pushed him to the infirmary. Daniel followed close behind. After the darkness of the bunkhouse, the infirmary was a blizzard of cold and white. The nurse examined his spine."

ew formatting.

sorry.

hoos something has gone wrong there

I wish I could write, but I am sadly extremely crap at it.

Stephen had begged his parents for a bunk bed at home for months. before they relented and They got him a fire-engine red one with Nintendo sheets. After a week of torturous climbing, with awful tendon cramps meeting on every ascent, he never slept in the top bed again. His parents never forgot the slight, and wWell into his own middle age his parents would gripe about the bunk bed they'd bought him that he never slept in. In other words, he had not "won" the top bunk at Lions' Camp. He had been stuck with it.

When Stephen's sufferred an inconvenient foot cramped on his way up the oak ladder to the mattress above,. hHe thought he could finish the climb and work out the charley horse once he was safely beneath the blanket. Instead, at the last step, his leg spasmed. He felt himself fall backwards,. then the sleeping bunkhouse was met with the sound of meat dropping in a bucket.

For an awful moment Stephen couldn't move. Daniel cried. Rusty gathered Stephen into a wheelchair and pushed him to the infirmary., and Daniel followed close behind.

After the darkness of the bunkhouse, the infirmary was a blizzard of cold and white. The nurse examined his spine.

yeah.

Yep, Tracer Hand has edited it in the right direction. I'd be even more ruthless. An 'ascent' of a bunk bed strikes a slightly pompous note. "For one awful moment" sounds clichéd, "a blizzard of cold and white" sounds a bit try-hard... Like the previous passage, there's nothing inherently wrong with your writing but I think the self-conscious literaryness should be toned down a bit...

his parents sound like DICKS

i mean "the slight"?? he's disabled and goes into spasms trying to reach the top bunk, and they think it's a SLIGHT when he decides he'd rather not be in pain? if that's the way they are then fine, but if that's NOT the way they are then you are sending a weird message that needs more explanation

also, why did he want a bunkbed so hard? clearly he'd never really had experience with one or he'd have realised it was not for him. a movie? a story some kid told him once?

mm, I don't know if that's important, I think the gap between him wanting to be able to climb up, and his parents' dissatisfaction in how he stopped 'trying' to climb and how they took it as an insult to them..

etc.

well like i said, they're dicks

no I'm not imo xp

haha why did I write mask

imagine if people "developed" as much as characters are expected to while going about their business

cf http://www.theonion.com/articles/completely-unrealistic-tv-character-has-complex-mu,33855/

my technique for getting writing done is spending all day worrying about not getting writing done then shitting out a couple of hundred words of shite at 3am. i highly recommend it.

shitting out shite.

To avoid my pirate joke xp

do you think it's good to just go with your gut and write every idea as you have it - and then go back and delete stuff later? like it seems weird to me that one might have the plot going one way on a tuesday evening and then chop it back and make it go another way having read over that work on wednesday. so i sort of am trying to be sure before i put things down... and to use lots of pen and paper before adding to my actual draft. again, i know there's no right answer here.

xpost

har de harr d

well for me it's generally not fiction i'm writing so i'm not sure to what extent useful techniques would cross over, but i find having a pretty clearly defined and tiered structure - e.g. within the one big idea there'll be five main smaller ideas, each of which will again break down to a few smaller ideas, etc - is useful, and then i'll choose a section and start filling it with whatever i have and whatever comes to mind. the big structure will almost always mutate and it means things can start to seem wildly fragmented and stuff that seemed good will eventually have to be deleted, but it helps me to be able to pull things together in that bricolage kind of way rather than having that daunting feeling of 30 pages being in your head just waiting to be typed.

do you think it's good to just go with your gut and write every idea as you have it - and then go back and delete stuff later? like it seems weird to me that one might have the plot going one way on a tuesday evening and then chop it back and make it go another way having read over that work on wednesday.

When I write fiction I begin with a scene: an exchange, an observation, or a character in action. I'll usually jot it down beside bits of song titles, observations about relatives or friends, and other bric a brac. I'll write a couple pages. Eventually plot starts to cohere. I can think of only a handful of times when I've thought through the whole plot. Learning in college how Flannery O'Connor and Carver worked this way helped.

I'll usually jot it down beside bits of song titles, observations about relatives or friends, and other bric a brac

do you mean about the character?

Yep. The observations about my own relatives, friends, colleagues often form part of the fabric, even if all it means is a character listens to Van Halen in the car or something.

Interesting.

I kinda come at character from my acting training, thinking about how they move and where they lead with, how they breathe and their physicality, but also lists of traits and characteristics. I find this is good even when not writing drama, but the current thing I'm working on is a monologue I intend to act in myself, so there is that extra tactic of doing little improvs or playing a piece of music and being the guy live (and hoping my flatmates don't hear and think I'm insane.)

I think I finally have something to share. Can someone recommend a workshop in New York?

i think i'd like to start writing because it scratches an itch. it would be cool to write something i thought was really good. i can only write about myself though because i'm too lazy to research what other people are like and i have a poor imagination.

so, it's jumping onto the poetry train for you then

Ha, ha. Poets are so self-absorbed, am I right? Always waxing lyrical about the smell of their own farts. Not like there's a whole strand of poetry that plays upon the impersonal or anything.

epic and narrative poetry are deeply out of style, but lyric poetry can go a lot of directions other than self-absorbed fartistry. in map's case, it also wouldn't require creating characters or plots, or the kind of imagination involved in creating fictional settings and events, so that his professed weaknesses would be far less relevant to his results.

For something I do every day, I don't actually think about writing very much. The actual activity of it, what it takes to do it. I feel like everyone who writes regularly probably has their own patterns and routines and rituals. Just thinking about it now because I realized it's been two hours since I finished the second of three parts of something I'm writing for tomorrow. Each part's about 800 words. And after finishing the second part I took a break, did some other things, got some food, and now I'm circling back to finish the last part. Which makes me think that two hours is about what it takes to recharge from writing 800 words (or at least from writing the second 800 words of the day). Like, my mind needs time to drift and wander and not work so hard for a little while.

Anyway, it's a curious activity.

I work best in the morning, no set pattern though except that I limit myself to a couple pages a day to have reserves left for the next day.

I would like to write more in the morning, a lot of my work ends up requiring later-day writing. Which can exacerbate the fatigue, for sure.

I remember reading about Ian Fleming's schedule, which struck me as ideal. He would get up in his Caribbean manse and have coffee and cigarettes and write for 2-3 hours in the morning, then retire to the pool and spend the rest of the day eating, drinking and socializing.

when i've had a regular practice, i usually choose a time of day AND a writing medium in which i'm working in order to get me into the proper headspace. otherwise i can't write consistently...so for example, i will write from 9-10 or so most nights for a month or two, but only on my phone in bed. or i'll write from 3-5p in blue books i stole from a former employer, etc etc.

right now i am trying to find the best time, and i am afraid it might be the morning, which means i need to wake up earlier and/or give up my morning reading practice.

Nights are best for me lately. When I'm doing something strictly formatted like my Stereogum column (10 album blurbs, 9 of which are 150 words and one of which is 500, plus an intro features of 2000 words or so) I can bang out, say, 2 blurbs in the morning before starting my day job. I do the big feature part the weekend before turning in the column. But when I'm writing a magazine feature, or a book, I like to work on it from 9 to 11 or midnight, bleary-eyed and tired, and then revise the next day. I usually write my Substack newsletter on the weekend before it runs, though I'll toss a couple of sentences in anytime they occur to me during the week.

I wrote a paragraph today! Most in a long time. Not forcing myself to go any further than what comes easily.

two more today