| | | Winter Issue | | | Spring Issue | | | Summer Issue | | | | |
|
|
The Official Propaganda Organ of the Cincinnati Writers Project Tonya Mitchell By now many of you may have heard that our friend and fellow member, Scott Heile, aka Rough of Rough Draft, is officially "on leave" from CWP for the foreseeable future. Hey, it happens. Sometimes we need to concentrate more on just writing, or on other things. So it goes. . . Scott, if you're reading this (I'm not letting anyone take you off the membership list! No way!), I miss you already. Here's a look at what's inside this issue: Marcia Eckstein After eleven months I feel I'm still learning the job of President, Cincinnati Writers Project. My favorite moment was discovering the ancient meeting notes and articles of incorporation of the CWP from the '80s, typed on a typewriter, wherein Dallas Wiebe and others outlined their vision for this group. One of the original goals was "to support the publications of CWP members." To that end, we're now in the process of spreading the word about our next CWP anthology. We have a timeframe, an editor, and judges, but what we really need are exquisite works of prose and poetry. We want to be able to say that this is the best from our part of the globe. We want others to know that we are serious about this writing thing. You have all autumn and winter to create your masterpieces. Expand yourselves. Don't take the easy route. Anything you truly love will love you back. In April, submit your piece. History will record the rest.
Woody Carsky-Wilson Next year the Cincinnati Writers Project celebrates its 25th anniversary. What better way to commemorate the group than publish an anthology that showcases, to put it bluntly, simply great writing. The best of the best. This is your chance to shine in front of your peers and show them how hard you've worked, to prove you listened to your colleagues in group when they gave so generously of their time and expertise. This is also our chance to strut the CWP to the community and the world at large. Here's what you need to know to be a part of this special anniversary edition: 1) Is this a story worth telling? 2) Is this a story told well? If the answer to #1 is NO, but the story is written in the most divinely inspired prose ever, then it will be rejected (in similar beautiful prose). If your story passes through the first gate, but has some flaws, then you've got some wiggle room. With our last anthology, some stories we accepted required not a single edit, while some required complete and painful rewrites. Both are fine. We're aiming to please the reader, not looking for an easy task. Break any rule you want as long as your story or poem is solid and helps build an excellent anthology. Entries will be judged anonymously by three judges, and a fiction editor or poetry editor. We will provide personalized rejections and acceptances aimed at helping you become a better, more successful writer. (This is something most professional publications don't do.) Stay tuned for the official call for entries.
Ryck Neube At Thursday group as we critiqued a story, X (name disguised to protect the guilty) turned to me and said, "But you told me never to do that." Okay, if there's one rule of writing: There are no nevers. For every rule there are a thousand exceptions. Only a fool says never. On the other hand, I've never denied that I'm a raving fool. And I believe I have the history to prove it. The following week, his statement led to a discussion about how we might show emphasis in dialogue. (Pity X wasn't there.) Yeah, emphasis is a pain. In daily life, our babble is punctuated with no end of emphasis. Word grenades explode from our mouths. People yell. Spittle flies. Fists slap palms. A single word lunges from our sentence to punch stronger than our physical self could. So how do characters speak with passion? Well, the pundits will instruct a writer to give their words the power, rather than play gimmick games with CAPS or italics, bold or. . .ellipses, exclamation points or strange fonts, etc. They are right AND wrong!!! "Getting a reader to stop and think can be deadly. If I'm going to engage extra brain cells, there'd BETTER be a reward." In X's story the emphasis was added by capitalization. DAMN straight! That's a great punch. Trouble was. . .EVERY other WORD of DIALOGUE was CAPITALIZED!! As a reader, I stopped listening. WHY, I kept asking myself, would that word. . .be emphasized? Is the author trying to tell me something important? Is the son of a biscuit trying to get me to THINK?!!! Getting a reader to stop and think can be deadly. If I'm going to engage extra brain cells, there'd BETTER be a reward. Should the writer's emphasis ring false, READER me is going to stop right there and find something more satisfying to read! Maybe Steinbeck. He made it easy to finish his work. So X was reacting to another story going through group with CAPITALIZED words in it. Two, to be precise. When Reader ME stopped to listen, I could hear WHY. . .those. . .two. . .words. . .needed emphasis!!!! Okay, back to the basic theme of my article. Amateur writers tend to make the same mistakes. They abuse the tricks of the trade. Editors see these abuses in a thousand manuscripts a day until they become rejects on sight. What's easier? For me to tell you to NEVER DO IT?? Or explain how 99% of the TIME, don't do it. . .but now let me spend six hours explaining how you can get away with it? That's why pundits lecture about never doing these things. Exceptions to the rules can make for powerful writing, but you have to handle them with care. Close your eyes. Imagine you have a stick of dynamite in your hand. Your spouse and children are next to you on the sofa. Is this the right moment to light it? Maybe. I know a lot of parents and kids who deserve it. TWO all capped words in a five thousand word story. . .. IF they are the right words, no editor will reject the story because of them. Even if they are the wrong words, all an editor will do is request you change them after they buy your tale. Now, if there are TWO HUNDRED emphasized words. . .. My writerly friends, THINK about every step you take off the reservation of the normal format and font. Ask yourself. . .does this change, does this punctuation!!!!!! improve my story? THINK HARD. Do you need to light the dynamite right now? Do you feel lucky, punk? (I've always wanted to use that Clint Eastwood line.) HAVE I made this article annoying enough to prove my point? (TM: yes!) I posit that, Yes, you can ignore the rule. Drop in an all-capped word or an exclamation point or fill-in-the-blank once or twice at the right point in a story, and the reader will go WHOA! Or as Al Pacino from Scent of a Woman would say, WHOOO-AH. And I apologize to everyone I've told, "NEVER." I was simply too lazy to explain the endless exceptions to the rule. One note here. . . I have seen many different fonts in a novel used correctly exactly once in my fifty-seven years on this planet. (Oh, double adverbs. . .there ARE rules against that!!!) C. J. Cherryh once wrote about an alien whose multi-lobed brain worked as a committee. Different fonts made the brain's internal debates easier to follow. Don't try it. Cherryh is a world-class writer with more genius than most of us will ever have. I admire her courage for trying it. BUT. . .it still wasn't a good read. Dudes and dudettes, keep it simple until you sell a million books. THEN you can do anything your heart DESIRES. Until then, please keep it simple. Unless you feel lucky, punk.
Tonya Mitchell I admit it, I'm a word lover. Most of us writers are. I subscribe to dictionary.com's Word of the Day and get a new word dumped into my inbox every morning, seven days a week. It's like taking a daily vitamin to keep my brain healthy without the bitter aftertaste. A few days ago, I stumbled across savethewords.org. In an effort to keep rare and almost never used words alive (hundreds of them are dropped every year from the English language!) the site offers you the opportunity to adopt the word of your choice. Pick a word on the site, any word, read its definition, then pledge to use it in "conversation and correspondence as frequently as possible" to keep it from disappearing from the English language forever. If you really can't decide which word to take home and nurture, the site will choose one for you. How easy is that? Did I mention it's free? Here are some examples of forgotten, unloved words that may become extinct without your help: LARDLET: n, small piece of bacon used to enrich meat. MINGENT: adj, discharging urine BOREISM n, behavior of a boring person EPALPEBRATE: adj, lacking eyebrows Just think how your word might improve your writing! At the very least, check out the site. It's a hoot. SaveTheWords.
Karen George Ever since I learned about the Chicago poetry workshop from a fellow poet over a year ago, I longed to attend. I wanted to improve my poetry, but I can't deny that the main reason I wanted to go was that Li-Young Lee, my favorite poet, would be taking part in the Chicago workshop. So when the e-vite arrived in my inbox from Fran Quinn, organizer and leader of the workshop, I jumped at the chance to register for the September weekend. The workshop, "The Poetry of Voice, The Poetry of Silence," explores the partnership between the oral and written traditions of poetry that have become divorced in contemporary poetry. The workshop aims to bring them back together, so that more powerful poems come to life and go in directions the poets haven't ventured before. On Friday I took the affordable Megabus to Chicago. The workshop was held in the home of a workshop participant, a cozy and casual space with couches and easy chairs. "A discussion began about the interplay of words and silences, and the marriage between the visible and invisible, in order to make the silences sing, the invisible take shape in poems." That evening, we each read a poem of our choosing, in the Irish Hooley Tradition. A discussion began about the interplay of words and silences, and the marriage between the visible and invisible, in order to make the silences sing, the invisible take shape in poems. Saturday's session involved learning to read contemporary poems, with an emphasis on the sound characteristics of the line, stanza, pitch patterns, and tempo of each poem. Quinn stressed the importance of the poetic community made up of both living and dead poets, of using them as our mentors, of "mining our poetic heritage." "Quinn encouraged us to go deeper. . .until we arrived at a place of new mystery." In the afternoon we went off to write, and then we returned to the group to read our new poem aloud. We discussed each poem and possible ways to improve it, and Quinn encouraged us to go deeper, to follow it until we arrived at a place of new mystery. Quinn described this as tapping away at a wall until you find the secret passage, the hidden tunnel--until a trap door falls open for you. Sunday I met with Quinn for a one-on-one discussion about a few of my poems. I was specifically concerned with the form of the poems. He had me read one of my prose poems and helped me realize that I didn't read it as a prose poem, but one with specific line breaks that I wasn't paying attention to. My voice interpreted the words and the silences. We looked at other poems to see how I broke the lines, which words I ended and began lines with, and the values I'd given to commas, periods, line and stanza breaks. Aside from the chance to meet and participate in a workshop alongside Li-Young Lee, this workshop was unique, unexpected, and worthwhile. It turned some of what I thought I knew about poetry upside down, and caused me to consider the lyricism of poetry, how I want the poem to sound as well as how it appears on the page. The September/October 20ll issue of Poets and Writers contains an article about Quinn's poetry workshops, where he advises a poet to hear his own voice, so that he can translate that voice onto the page in a way that is uniquely his own. Besides Chicago, the workshops are also held in New York City and Indianapolis. For more information, visit their website.
An Interview with Novelist Lynn Cullen by Tonya Mitchell Last year at Books by the Banks, I unashamedly befriended (some would say stalked) an author who was doing a book signing there. Her name was Lynn Cullen. While she signed her book for me, I bemoaned the slow work of completing the first draft of my own novel. Lynn took pity on me, and she was kind enough to take me under her wing. Last year, she Skyped with my book club, discussing her newest book, The Creation of Eve (named among the best fiction books of 2010 by The Atlanta Journal- Constitution and an April 2010 Indie Next selection). The book was an absolute pleasure. It tells the story of the first female artist to train under Michelangelo, Sofonisba Angissola, and what happens when she's sent to Spain to become painting instructor to the young wife of King Felipe II. I was delighted when her book, Reign of Madness (Putnam), hit the shelves last month. It was another historical page-turner and like Eve, beautifully and evocatively told. The story surrounds Queen Juana of Castile, a woman known throughout history as "Juana the Mad" and the notion that Juana may not have been insane, but a victim of a smear campaign launched by her husband, Philippe the Handsome, so that he could take the throne. I asked Lynn if she'd be willing to be interviewed for Rough Draft. She kindly obliged. Following is an excerpt of our discussion. RD: What's a "typical" writing day like for you? How many hours do you work? LC: Typical day? I spend at least 6 hours trying to write. About 3 of them are actually fruitful. The other three I'm just trying to get into the story. If I'm lucky, I write a page a day. Sad, isn't it? I should add that I often work more than 8 hours a day. Still don't produce more than a couple pages even on the best days. RD: How complete is your research when you begin to write? LC: If I've been to the place where my scenes are set, I'll start writing just a few weeks after I've started reading about my subject. I don't have the whole book in mind, just an ending. I keep reading as I write, and when the first draft is nearly done, will go on location to see if I'm getting things right. The research doesn't end until the book is in print. RD: Do you write with an outline or is it more nebulous than that? LC: Much more nebulous! I write with Post-it Notes stuck to my desks, my books, my nightstand, etc. How about you when you write? "I have writer's block from time to time. It means that something is wrong with the story." RD: Me? I'm hardly an expert, unless "fly by the seat of your pants" is some form of expertise, in which case I excel at that. In which case, I have a PhD in "fly by the seat of your pants." LC: I went to the same school. RD: Do you ever have to overcome writer's block? If so, how? LC: I have writer's block from time to time. It means that something is wrong with the story. I read other authors I adore, like Ian McEwan and Penelope Lively, just to hear my idea of a perfect storyteller's voice, and go back to my research books. Then I go back to the last point where the story was working and try to start from there again. RD: Your research was extensive for Reign of Madness. What is your process? LC: I buy tons of books, not just about my characters, but about the history of the country, customs, wildlife, artists from the period, etc., and then buy tons of books that I've found in the bibliographies of those books. Travel to the scenes is really important. Before I go, I comb through travel books. I love the travel books that combine history with travel like those by Rick Steves and Lonely Planet. RD: Writing fiction based on history must be a slippery slope. How do you decide when to take creative license? Is it a matter of filling in the gaps or re-working events to make the story more compelling? LC: Filling in the gaps, for sure! It's my game to write a story that fits within the known historical events. Everything that happens in my books could have happened. RD: If you had just one pearl of wisdom for an aspiring author, what would it be? LC: Don't ever stop listening and learning. Writing is not a craft that can be learned overnight, so one should be prepared to work and to be in it for the long haul. You have to love the work. But having those magic moments when everything comes together on the page are definitely worth the effort. For the full interview Go Here. For more on Lynn Cullen and her books, see Lynn's website.
Gems of Conversation Overheard at CWP (and elsewhere) "I'm a novelist, therefore I'm a predator. I eat whatever comes my way." -Overheard by Marcia on the radio, during an interview with Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) Irish noir and prose poem writer [Site Map] [Latest News] [History of CWP] [Writing Group Protocol] [Rough Draft] [Our Mission] [Officers] [Who's Published] [Join CWP] [Critique Groups] [Opportunities] [Writing Tips] [Links] Yep, we're under construction. But give us a break. We're writers not web monkeys. Stop back, or shoot us an email if you're interested in learning more. Last updated by Tgroh, October 20, 2011 |
