Once again, I’m shirking my blogging responsibilities today in order to work on a review, for the Book Book blog. (This time around, it’s Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi’s The Monster of Florence.)
As before, I offer you instead a couple of YouTube treats.
Let’s start with a trivia question. Who said this?
There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.
[Theme from “Jeopardy”]
Ding!
An essential part of the toughening-up process, for anyone who aspires to be published by someone other than himself, is: how to handle the fact that not everyone — perhaps not anyone — but the author may be interested in publishing his work.
(As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bad manager of my own career in at least one respect. Which is, I just don’t submit it to enough places (or rather, to enough people). So maybe I’m not the right person to offer advice about this. But, well, since when have actual qualifications ever denied a blogger his or her say? Right. Never.)
For one reason or another, as Speak Coffee reminds us, handling rejection letters from editors, magazines, publishers, and agents is suddenly (again) a hot topic. The links she provides in that post are handy, but I especially liked the (now four-plus years old) frank, editor’s-eye view of the rejection letter by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the Making Light blog.
Nielsen Hayden is an editor with Tor Books, and she took it upon herself to explain, as carefully as possible (but with occasional frustration), what an editor might mean by rejecting a given manuscript:
Back in my college days, I took a course in semantics. One of the more revelatory learnings I acquired from that course’s professor was the power of function words: all the “stuff” which fills in among the supposedly more robust verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. Presented with a paragraph of all those “important” words and no function words, it’s hard to make sense of it. Just a pile of verbiage, really. On the other hand, a paragraph of nothing except function words instantly, in your mind’s eye, acquires all the strength of an understandable structure — like a skyscraper’s underlying girders — because the function words define the relationships among words.
A classic example* is the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” as seen here with the function (and other “null”) words dimmed out:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome rath outgrabe.
…and here, with the function words emphasized:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome rath outgrabe.
A few weeks ago, agent Nathan Bransford posted two open-ended questions on his blog, a week apart: “What’s Your Favorite Word?” and “What’s Your Least Favorite Word?” I can’t swear to this, yet I believe every single nominee in both categories — including my own — was an “important” word. Let’s take all those commenters at their (ahem) word, and assume those are their favorites and least favorites.
Per the title of this post here, though, what’s the single most amazing word in the English language — the word whose weight is out of all proportion to its size and apparent significance? I bet it’s a function word. Here’s my nominee:
In lieu of a longer post still in the works, and with a nod to writing in the water‘s current discussion of knowing when the story is done, and done well and right: I offer this, Folk Tale #6 from Book Two (“Fire”) of The Zen of Programming:
Five novices went into the master’s office, crying “Woe, woe! We have heard that our project may be cancelled.”
The master said, “All things continue until they stop.”
Hearing this, the novices returned to work.
Per today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac:
Suck It Up
by Paul ZimmerTwo pugs on the undercard step through
The ropes in satin robes,
Pink Adidas with tassels,
Winking at the women in the crowd.
At instructions they stare down hard
And refuse to touch their gloves,
Trying to make everyone believe
That this will be a serious dust-up.But when the bell rings they start
Slapping like a couple of Barbie Dolls.
One throws a half-hearted hook,
The other flicks out his jab,
They bounce around for a while
Then grab each other for a tango.
The crowd gets tired of booing
and half of them go out for a beer,
But I’ve got no place to hide.A week after a cancer scare,
A year from a detached retina,
Asthmatic, overweight, trickling,
Drooling, bent like a blighted elm
In my pajamas and slippers,
I have tuned up my hearing aids to sit in
Numbness without expectation before
These televised Tuesday Night Fights.With a minute left in the fourth,
Scuffling, they butt their heads
By accident. In midst of all the catcalls
And hubbub suddenly they realize
How much they hate each other.They start hammering and growling,
Really dealing, whistling combinations,
Hitting on the breaks and thumbing.
At least one guy crosses a stiff jab
With a roundhouse right and the other
Loses his starch. The guy wades into
The wounded one, pounding him
Back and forth until he goes down,
Bouncing his head hard on the canvas.The count begins but he is saved
By the bell and his trainers haul
Him to his stool as the lens zooms in.I come to the edge of my La-Z-Boy,
Blinking and groaning from my incision,
Eager for wise, insightful instruction.He gets a bucket of water in his face,
A sniff on the salts while the cutman
Tries to close his wounds with glue.
His nose is broken, eyes are crossed,
His lips bleed like two rare steaks.
His cornermen take turns slapping his cheeks.
“Suck it up!” they shout.
“Suck it up!”
…and a Paul Zimmer bonus, not from The Writer’s Almanac, just in case you don’t already know this one:
The Great Bird of Love
by Paul ZimmerI want to become a great night bird
Called the Zimmer, grow intricate gears
And tendons, brace my wings on updrafts,
Roll them down with a motion
That lifts me slowly into the stars
To fly above the troubles of the land.
When I soar the moon will shine past
My shoulder and slide through
Streams like a luminous fish.
I want my cry to be huge and melancholy,
The undefiled movement of my wings
To fold and unfold on rising gloom.People will see my silhouette from
Their windows and be comforted,
Knowing that, though oppressed,
They are cherished and watched over,
Can turn to kiss their children,
Tuck them into their beds and say:Sleep tight.
No harm tonight
In starry skies
The Zimmer flies
Short version: As an exercise, start a story with one “found” sentence, and end it with another:
First sentence:
I ask your forgiveness.
Last sentence:
I am a mountain tiger.
Note: The italics as presented above don’t have any significance; they aren’t meant to emphasize the text, nor do they indicate that these lines are spoken by someone.
Extra credit: Involve in the story, in some way, the image of the woman at the left. She may be a character in the story (either the “I” in the first and last lines or someone else), perhaps the story will be about the work of art itself.
Report back sometime before Labor Day.
Long version:
From whiskey river:
The extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire since the word go. — Annie Dillard
Writer’s dilemma: “Show, don’t tell.” “But how do I show somebody who’s uneasy? Isn’t that why we have the adjective ‘uneasy’ in the first place — sort of shorthand for all the… the stuff an uneasy person might do?”
Um, no.
Enter The Emotion Thesaurus, a (weekly?) Thursday feature at The Bookshelf Muse.
You start to type how your [Main Character] is cringing in terror and then stop. You glance back a page and shake your head. Somebody cringed in the last scene — can’t use that one. Hot, shuddering breaths? Nope, breathing’s already come up a million times in this book, so that beat won’t work. You need something different, something unique to show fear. His eyes widened? His face was a frozen mask? Pu-leeze. The POV police are screaming at the thought.
The joy and energy starts to leak out of you. The excitement that brought you here is fading. You can’t seem to find the right way to show the rawness of your character’s fear. Everything action you come up with seems trite or hollow or cliché.
Reality trickles in: the coffee’s even colder now, and the mailman has gone. Your flyers are probably out there on the step, about to blow away. And of course the eerie silence means your dog no longer needs to go outside. You sag in your chair, defeated by a descriptive beat.
As you leave to mop up Mr. Ruffy’s mess, you glance at the computer screen and think, if only I had a thesaurus of emotional beats.
…Now, if you draw a blank on how to show your character’s emotion through a physical action (a beat), we can help. Each Thursday we will introduce new cardinal emotions to our thesaurus, offering you an ‘idea bank’ for the times when you get stuck. You can scroll through our lists, and see if one of our ideas sparks one of your own.
For instance, here’s a selection from yesterday’s post, on “impatience”:
A couple of months ago here, I posted a long short story I wrote some years back, called “Sing, Sing, Sing.” Whatever else that post might have accomplished, it’s managed to get a certain amount of attention from Googlers. Among other variations, hits have come to the post from searching on these phrases:
and my favorite:
(Hint: The Goodman version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” — despite its title — has no words. Straight instrumental.)
In the interest of serving those who might really be searching for information about or analyses of the piece (surely one of the most famous recordings in jazz history), I thought I’d elaborate some about it, using excerpts from my story.
There’s so much news every day. Who can keep up with it all…?
For example, I’m a couple-three months behind the curve on this:
One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened…
Ms Antonelli says the jacket “started growing, growing, growing until it became too big. And [the artists] were back in Australia, so I had to make the decision to kill it. And you know what? I felt I could not make that decision. I’ve always been pro-choice and all of a sudden I’m here not sleeping at night about killing a coat…That thing was never alive before it was grown.”
Will wonders never cease? Apparently not. Just for starters, what are the odds that a work of art made from mice would have originated with an artist named Catts?
(More details on the Victimless Leather project from Wired, a few years ago.)
