Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

Yet another tribute, but he deserves it.

The past couple of months have been sad ones for readers; first Maurice Sendak, now Bradbury.  We kept seeing him on PBS, kept reading new, insightful articles from him in newspapers and magazines, and somehow began to wonder if he'd found some magic elixir that would help him live forever. It would seem perfect for a writer of speculative fiction to somehow magically become a character in one of his own stories.  

But Bradbury was indeed mortal, but unlike most of us, he left so much insight on beauty and creativity that his words and the images they created will live forever.

First, there's Neil Gaiman's tribute. Imagine reading an author, idolizing him or her, and then becoming an author yourself and ending up not just meeting your idol, but actually becoming friends. Hanging-out, going-for-coffee friends.  

Bradbury had wide-ranging influences.  Something Wicked This Way Comes is dedicated to actor/dancer/director Gene Kelly. An entire treatise on writing was influenced by the character of Snoopy in Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip.

So, in an attempt to cobble together some cool stuff without this post turning into a 50,000-word tome, here's just a small sampling. From a program that aired on PBS in 2008:

Love what you do and do what you love. Don’t listen to anyone else who tells you not to do it. You do what you want, what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.

On reading as a prerequisite for democracy:

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country — we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way.

Sadly, this isn't as true as it should be.  Because people a) don't read or b) don't think about what they read, there are all kinds of misconceptions about history and science being perpetuated on social media and in viral e-mails.In the interest of keeping this blog as apolitical as possible, I'll say no more.

On creativity and the myth of the muse, in Zen in the Art of Writing:

That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

 I understand that creating is often an organic process, that sometimes our creation takes on a life of its own or goes in a completely unexpected direction, but I also believe the creative person should always remain in control of his or her creation. To use the excuse "[fictitious character's name] wouldn't let me change [whatever it was about him or her]" is, in my not-so-humble opinion, too often used as a copout or an excuse for sloppiness on the part of the writer.

 The best  conclusion to a Bradbury tribute would be these words from Fahrenheit 451:

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

Thanks, Ray, for leaving us so many pieces of your soul.

New addition to Characterizations tab

My take, part the second, on creating strong female characters. There are four articles; scroll down for the more recent  ones.

Not dead yet. Also: Middle readers deserve better

I'm still in school, attending workshops to prepare for the new Core curriculum, and I have been working on two editing jobs, so, apologies again for my inconsistency.

I've recently discovered websites where I can go to get free books for my Kindle e-reader, so I'm trying to broaden my horizons with more middle-grade books as well as some mystery-suspense and women's fiction. The middle-grade books are in anticipation of my new responsibility teaching 7th and 8th-grade reading next year.  I would love to find some good stuff to recommend to my students.  Unfortunately, that's turning out much more difficult than I'd anticipated.

The last two middle-level books I read were shockingly bad.  Great story ideas that completely fell apart in their execution. Somebody explain to me how this crap gets past editors and publishers.  The books I've read so far have been published hardcover at a couple of major big-box publishers.

Is it because authors, editors, and publishers all perceive 9-12-year-olds as being completely indiscriminate as to prose, pacing, and character development?  Are they thinking that, as long as they're entertained, kids don't care about quality writing?

To which I reply:  How are young people to appreciate or even demand quality writing when they haven't been exposed to enough of it to tell the difference?  If anything, they are the group of readers that are the most deserving of quality, as they are forming their own tastes and exploring a wider world.

*steps off soapbox*

I leave you with a quote from Madeleine L'Engle, one children's writer who respected her young audience:

"You have to write the book that wants to be written.  And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."

Thanks for stopping by.  See you next week.

Inspiration and the best explanation of "show don't tell" ever

Still sounding the drumbeat of "show don't tell" and "trust your readers," I give you this, one of the best and most concise explanations I've ever read:

"Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."  ~Anton Chekhov


Or the glint of light in a puddle, or or through the leaves of a tree, or even, less romantically, off the roof of a car or the blade of a knife in the hand of a character.



I have editing and grading to do, so over the next two weeks, I'll be posting shorties shamelessly borrowed from great writers.


Thanks for stopping by.

Don't bother to "Pardon my French"

You call them swear words. Or profanity. Or vulgarity. Or simply “bad words.” Mr. Spock, ever democratic and unemotional in his assessment of human behavior, called them “colorful metaphors.” 

I, however, like to call them “sentence enhancers.”

Briefly:  Both my parents were from blue-collar immigrant backgrounds. Rough lives spent in the military, working in coal mines and oil refineries, coupled with--in some cases--lack of education or English skills--made my grandparents and my great-grandparents expert users of these often-effective words.  My parents, both white-collar and college-educated, still remained close to their roots during my early childhood, using fluently (though, in my mother’s case, a bit ashamedly) the strong words they’d heard from their roughneck fathers and grandfathers. We children, of course, got our mouths washed out with soap for using such words. Which obviously made the words all the more tempting and delicious and ourselves all the more sneaky about their use.

If you're feeling brave, read on:

Hanging out my shingle

After years of helping people polish manuscripts, I've decided to open a small side business.  I help with all phases of the writing process, from zero draft to sending the query letters, or any stage of the process at which you find yourself.

I used a template and didn't do anything with a lot of "bells and whistles," but I plan to get my own logo in the next few months and will be updating the site often.

Come visit!

Lynne's WordNerdy Editing

Google Crome leaves off one of my backgrounds.  Until I get it fixed, please use Firefox.

My business e-mail:  lynne@wordnerdyediting.com

Anne Tyler interviewed on Goodreads

To mark the release of her 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, the usually-shy Anne Tyler did an interview with NPR last week--her first NPR interview in 35 years--and another on Goodreads, which made the site's April newsletter. In the interview, she talks a bit about her writing process, which I always find fascinating. She writes with a Pilot gel ink pen (I'm guessing her pen preferences have changed since she started writing, as gel inks weren't around in the 1960's) on unlined white paper. I actually know of some twenty-and-thirtysomething writers who hand write at some point in their process as well, so it isn't just a generational thing. At a certain point in her process, she reads aloud into a tape recorder. I believe I've suggested reading your work aloud or having somebody you trust read it to you (see Revision Strategies tab, the article "What if I can't find any problems in my writing?"). There are free digital recording programs such as Audacity that will enable you to record yourself or somebody else reading your work. A ten-dollar mic would do just fine for a voice recording that doesn't have to be stellar quality.

Every Tyler novel is about ordinary people in fairly mundane situations, but it's the quirks she gives them and the sometimes unconventional ways in which they deal with these situations, their search for transcendence--and the subtlety with which Tyler writes--that take her work up a level from "popular" fiction.

For the first time in her career, Tyler has tackled a subject I never thought I'd see her try.  In The Beginner's Goodbye, a grieving widower is visited by the spirit of his dead wife. This subject matter could turn maudlin or didactic in the hands of a less skilled author, so I'm eager to see how Tyler handles it. If you're waiting to find out what her personal views are on the subject of an afterlife, you'll have a long wait.

My personal favorite Tyler novels and which would I recommend?  Glad you asked.  Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, and Breathing Lessons. Among her more difficult, darker reads are:  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Amateur Marriage, Celestial Navigation, A Patchwork Planet. I have also read and appreciated A Slipping-Down Life, If Morning Ever Comes, Digging to America, and Ladder of Years. A Slipping-Down Life and If Morning Ever Comes are two of her earliest novels; it's interesting to see how her writing has evolved.  She admits that she wouldn't recommend any of her first four novels to anyone to read. That kind of modesty is refreshing and rare these days, and my personal opinion is that she's better at her worst than many authors are at their best.