Three Writing Laws

• Thou shalt shut up and write. You’re not a writer if you’re not writing. Punkt. One of my favorite writers, Sherman Alexie, claims most writers are lazy. He feels being a successful writer requires an intense work ethic. Most will tell you the same. Salman Rushdie and Michael Chabon, two of the most successful novelists today, write from 8 to 5, pretty much, every single day. I’ve heard a rumor that Stephen King only takes three days off in a year. In the end, writing doesn’t happen unless you finally just drop everything else and write something…no matter how rough or nonsensical it is. By the way, I STRUGGLE to follow my own rules.

• Thou shalt be brave enough to be honest. You won’t get anywhere with an audience if you’re holding back. Be honest with yourself. Be honest with your reader. Have the strength to put on paper your most craven thoughts, your most petty desires, your most disgusting habits…just be sure to couch all of that behind fiction and nobody really ever know what is you and what is your imagination.

• Thou shalt find a routine; stick to a routine; and take a routine approach to your routine…and then break it if you want. Whatever it is, be aware of your process and find a regiment that works for you. Organization, methodical planning, and color-coded calendars are not the hobgoblins of creativity. Likewise drunken rants, scrawled dream journals, and lazy walks in the park are part of research and writing. Find what works for you and follow a pattern of your own design.

I realize now I’ve written these laws for me. I’m not sure if anyone else should follow them, but I know I should.

Finishing Our Blogs For This Year

We’ve taken a loooooooooooong break from blogging due to end-of-year exams and one-act work. You will, however, return to the blogs for our last assignment of the year. By Wednesday, June 17 you need to complete the following:

• Write one blog post on this topic: “What are three WRITING LAWS you’ve come to understand this year? What three things can you confidently claim always hold true for the aspiring writer?”

• Write one blog post on a writer you admire. Introduce the writer to us and explain why you like his or her work. Also, you MUST embed a video that connects to the writer in some way.

• Comment on your peers’ blogs. It’s your last chance to earn class credit for relevant, interesting comments. Feel free to blog on anything you like as well. You need not only blog on the topics I’ve listed above. Additional blogs will impress me.

Good Luck!

Don’t Forget Your Short Story Deadlines

Please remember the deadlines. If, for whatever reason, you have technical difficulies with edublogs, you should email your work to me. Click on the links to download the assignments in case you lost yours.

Due, in class, on Friday, April 24: Original Short Story with Reflection

Final Short Story with Reflection

Due, on you own blog, by midnight, Thursday, April 30: Short Story Collection Review

Short Story Collection Review

An Atypical Love Story

Thanks to Brittany V. for her interesting blog prompt. Remember, you have until Wednesday, 22/04/09 to respond with your own prompt and reply to at least two of your peers’ posts.

I got the idea for this atypical couple while in an antique store. See if you can figure out the speaker and the object of his (or her) desire…leave me a comment with your guess.

Still. Brimming with promises. You sit, every curve suggesting flight. You can bend the air around you, the shape of you making it do what you want, yet you stay right there, your shoulders slightly turned away. My coy flirt.

You drape yourself in colors that seem unique to you. That green at your wrists is almost the color of an April leaf. The red around your throat nearly the heart of a ruby. The checked brown of your dress could be rain-soaked earth. But all this plumage, all this fanfare, seems singular to you and only you. Like this world but not of this world.

My tender morsel…I would devour you again and again. Taste you on my rough tongue. Know the span of your limbs. To feel your heart beat quicken as I draw near…

But I have only the courage to watch you and sing to you in my crude notes, all throaty and off-key. Won’t you answer, my little song bird? If not with your sweet voice than with a quick look or a calculated bow of your head? Alas, you just sit there, silent, behind your dead eyes and a strange sheet of ice.

I’ll stay here and waste the day. Let the sun roll along my back until night comes and sleep takes me, shuts my heavy eyes. In my dreams we’ll fly with Cupid’s wings, my downy angel, my love-as-light-as-air. Flutter me with kisses, light and quick. I’ll answer each with one, sharp and deep.

What Would My Superpower Be?

Yes, yes, Spencer! I’m incredibly tardy in my response to your blog prompt. I’ve emerged from “grading hibernation,” though, and I’m ready to respond. I’ve actually answered your question before. Remember, it was one of our role call questions early on in the course? My superpower would come in handy in this case…

I would want the power to manipulate time. I’d like to be able to travel back and forth in time, freeze time for others while I move about and “unfreeze” people or things I need, fast forward through onerous tasks (grading essays, eating beets, or watching “West Side Story” for the umpteenth time because my wife likes it), or “rewinding” highlights of my life.

I’d have to be able to have some shape shifting abilities, too, or I couldn’t go back to the 8th grade district championships where I sunk the game winning shot at the buzzer. There’s no way I could squeeze into those basketball shorts now, and my thick chest hair would be a bit too conspicuous.

My “weakness” would be everything else. I’d retain all normal mortal limitations, and I wouldn’t be able to go to any point in time I hadn’t experienced…so no moving into the future or watching Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address.

It seems like these limitations would keep my humble…for a superhero. I guess I would also have to have a “reset” power of sorts. Have you ever read Ray Bradbury’s short story, “A Sound of Thunder”?

Neal’s Perfect World

Thanks to Sarah D. for this week’s interesting blog prompt. Remember, you need to post and respond to at least two of your classmates’ blogs by Wednesday, March 11. Here’s my stab at a perfect world…at least for today:

Dogs would never need baths and their breath would always smell like lemongrass and shaved wood. Two push-ups a day would be enough to stay fit. Cheese would be good for you. As good for you as kale and beets. Cell phones would be banned. Better yet, they wouldn’t exist. Everyone could communicate telepathically. Still, people would come with mute buttons. Everyone would be a reader and know how to program a DVD player. While I’m on the topic, everyone would have remote controls for time, being able to pause, fast forward, rewind, at will. Obama would be president. Cancer would be a funny word. Renewable energies would be the only sources of energy. TVs would never have been invented. If people wanted to see a movie, they would have to actually get dressed, go out, and interact. Work would still exist. Death would still exist. Pain would still exist. But, there would only be three day work weeks. Each year would have four distinct seasons; rainstorms could only last for a maximum of one hour; and every star in the sky would be visible at night. Oh, and everyone would get a Sequeway. They just seem fun.

Questions for Dennis Hamley, Visiting Author

Blog Prompt for Feb. 26 through March 3
On Tuesday and Wednesday (March 2 and 3), Dennis Hamley will visit FIS. You’ll get to hear him read on Tuesday, and you will work with him in an extended class on Wednesday.

Please report to the library at 10:10 sharp on Wednesday. Yes! You’ll have to give up your morning break, the extended homeroom, and maybe part of your lunch, but I know you won’t mind. You get the unique chance to learn from someone who makes his living with his pen.

In preparation, I’d like you to visit some of the websites below, read up on Mr. Hamley, and respond to this post with at least one insightful question for him. Please read all the comments and DO NOT REPEAT THE QUESTIONS. Early responders have the easier task.

Dennis Hamley’s Website

Oxford Writer’s License

Fantastic Fiction

One Last Link…It’s got new stuff

Will Creative Writing Help Me When I Grow Up?

In this week’s blog prompt, Jessica M. asked us to consider whether or not creative writing will help us when we grow up. If you want to read the best response I’ve read so far…visit Jo’s site. Here’s my response. It’s not as good. Don’t read it.

In the past five years my relationship with writing has started to change. Namely, I feel guilty because I don’t write enough. I could offer excuses–busy life, piles of essays, learning a new language. Yet, for those of you that have heard my German, you know I haven’t been spending all that much time in this last pursuit. Truthfully, I’ve somehow grown scared of writing…sort of. What had always been a source of pleasure, play, and approbation has, in some ways but not in others, become a source of stress and anxiety.

Don’t worry, though. I only partly feel this way. This class, for me, has reminded me of a useful truth. To be a writer, it’s more important to just shut up and get on with it; thinking too much can just get in the way. The sense of play, the daily culture of experimentation, and the freedom to “write the worst stuff in the world”–the bedrocks of our work together–has had the nice effect of waking me from this fugue. As I grow up, then, I realize creative writing can give me the permission to just play…a permission many of us adults need.

Reminder: You Need to Link Your Blogs

If you haven’t already (and many of you have not), please make sure you’ve linked your blog to your classmates’ blogs. It’s especially important to include Brittany V. in your links. If you’ve forgotten how, here’s the list of blog addresses (blog-names-for-links) and a quick video:

Response to Pam J.’s Prompt

Pam asks us to write a mini-story where we work in a group of words she selected. I’ve chosen to write a beginning to a short story using…

SET 1: biology, trumpet, foreign student, penguin

Mr. Burns always waddles into our 4th period Biology class like a bloated penguin. He seems less interested in being there than we do. Last Friday, however, he entered the room and froze, his left foot hanging in midair across the threshold. Roberto, a foreign exchange student, was standing on a lab table and wailing on a silver trumpet. Pete Murkey and the rest of his burn-out crew egged Roberto on, lighting up have a dozen Bunsen burners in tribute to this impromptu concert. We were so certain that Burns would flip out. He did…in a way.

With a wolflike grin, he cut into a rather provactive Samba routine and gyrated to his desk, laughing and mumbling something in Spanish. But here’s the weird thing. That wasn’t the weirdest thing to happen in that Friday class…