Finding an audience

I've been thinking ...

I have remained excessively cautious about submitting my work to fiction journals, agents, and publishers, even though I know that that is the only way to get published.

My original plan for this blog was to address issues on grammar and writing. But taken from a larger perspective, finding an audience is very much an issue of writing.

Therefore, I am going to start posting fiction to this blog, and I invite any reader to give me whatever feedback or critique they would like. Keep in mind that there is a vast difference between criticism and critiques. Criticism often comes from a gut reaction, and though valid, it may not be helpful to a writer (e.g., "I don't like the main character."). Critiques, on the other hand, offer suggestions, observations, and reasons for liking or disliking a piece (e.g., "I don't like the main character because he doesn't act like a normal person would in that situation.").

There are some house rules and explanations:

1. You don't have to like my stuff.
2. Please be civil in your comments.
3. Specific critiques are more useful than generalizations.
4. Have fun.
5. If you like something, tell others about it.

Though I am working to overcome my shyness about submitting to agents, I am fairly thick-skinned when it comes to critiques. Just keep them constructive.

Also, I don't make apologies for my work. If you don't like something I wrote, that's fine. But keep in mind that my desire is to become a better writer, and I work hard to be the writer I currently am, so my choices on plot, characterizations, themes, language are very deliberate. The stories may not be to everyone's taste, so at the top of each posting, I will give fair warning regarding language and content (like a movie rating). If the content looks like it would not appeal to you, read it at your own risk.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to your responses.

Cake Wrecks

Another lesson learned: I cannot read Cakewrecks.com at work because I embarrass myself laughing so hard. A friend forwarded me an article about the website, which features photographs and commentary on professionally-decorated cakes that wind up disasters, embarrassments, examples of poor judgment, etc. Not unexpectedly, the cakes that caught my attention were those with grammatical errors and misspellings. One cake, for example, was meant as a going-away cake, and the purchaser's instructions were to write, "Congratulations Suzanne," underneath that write "We'll miss you." What appeared on the cake was

Congratulations, Suzanne
Underneath that write
We'll Miss You

In my effort to improve my writing, I've learned to focus on what information is conveyed and how. And it is not as easy as it looks. Misplaced modifiers, poor word choices, excessive use of passive verbs -- they all can signal downfalls in clarity. In subsequent drafts, I try to "unpack" my language. This doesn't mean endless rambling, but rather loosening compacted wording that is so spartan the reader is left to fill in too many gaps.

When I edit, I liken it to shaking the page and all the unnecessary words flake off and fall to the floor, and what remains on the page is the stuff that has potential. It also requires the most unpacking. Now that I've honed in on what I want to say, I can pay attention to how I say it.

For me, this is like the literal directions for the congratulations cake. I want to make sure my readers can follow my train of thought. That my storytelling has a logical flow. And in its way, proper grammar and punctuation and common courtesy to your reader is like that icing-written instruction "Underneath that write" ... It's just that readers shouldn't see that in your prose, but maybe it can come out as a pleasant flavor in each bite.

Have I pushed this metaphor too far? And given the nature of blogging, this entire piece could use some editing. Maybe my next posting will be a revision of this one, with proper guidelines, clarity, and brevity.

Now, to enjoy some cake.

Once Upon A Time ...

Once upon a time ...
No, wait -- There once was a ...
No, how about -- It was the best of ...

Starting a story can be difficult for me. Usually once I get the idea for a novel, I let it germinate for a while (i.e., months, years), and not until I come up with the opening scene and sentence do I start writing. Here's the opening of a novel I'm working on:

Tristan came in the door just after his curfew of eleven o'clock. I was in my office reading a magazine on vacations in the Caribbean. The photos were about as close as I'd ever get to being there. I was not trying to catch Tristan sneaking in late; he didn't do that. He was a good kid who generally abided by the rules and maintained good grades, and helped keep the household together.
After his mother died, Tristan could have gone down so many different paths. He could have resorted to rebellion, depression or denial. He could have secretly smoked dope in his room or sniffed glue. He could have skipped school until his GPA was flattened. He could have turned into a morose, moody teenager who only communicated through grunts or grim silence.
But he didn't do any of these. In the two years since Emily's death, Tristan has grown several inches too quickly, which gives his face a gaunt look and his eyes a hollowed lack of hope. I know that teenagers tend to slouch, but Tristan did so as though the loss remained heavy across his shoulders.


The opening image of this father waiting to talk to his 15 year old son, and his son telling him what happened after the movie felt like a great way to start the story. I had a vivid image of Tristan struggling to describe a rather disturbing experience he and his his friends encountered outside the movie theater.

Writing about it, however, was really, really boring. I couldn't get the story moving at all. When that happens, it's best to reconnoiter and plan a fresh new start.

Part of my struggle was that Tristan's dad didn't grab me as a narrator. I couldn't even decide on his name. So, on a whim, I changed the viewpoint to Tristan's. I made him a twenty-something grad student instead of a fifteen year old. Here's how it looks now:


"Don't tell me that movie didn't suck, because it did. It was so way like that other movie with the mutants and the Final Girl, except this one, just to be clever, puts it all in, what was it, Egypt, and makes the mummies like zombies, and that stupid curse, what the hell was that about? Did any of you get it? I thought this was supposed to be scary. It was shit."
Freddie bounced around in front of us. When he wanted to make a point, he dove in close to our faces. Samara pushed him away, and Eun-Jai had no clue what to make of him. Most of us scoffed, which egged him on. He expounded loudly while flailing his arms and jumping up and down. "Come on, come on, you know what I'm saying! It was shit! Admit it, it was shit. Samara, you can't say it wasn't shit."
First she looked at me with a suppressed smile before admitting, "Yes, it was shit."
"Thank you! Thank you!" Freddie hailed his victory at passing cars. He made a few dodges out into traffic like a crazed prophet: "Skip this movie! Don't waste your money! It sucked!" A taxi pulled over, and Freddie charged the driver's door. "Hey, man, don't waste your time on this crap!" The driver avoided Freddie by jolting the car forward a dozen feet to get away from us. When the passenger got out, he just shook his head at us and headed into his hotel.


I can't say why, but the second version feels better to me. More engaging. But why? Apart from starting with some action and dialogue instead of a quick history of the characters, it seemed to work better.

As a writer, I have strong opinions about story and language and tone. But when it comes down to my own work, I have to go by gut reaction. And that's a rough thing to do when your brain wants to be purely logical. So, starting over was probably not a bad thing, but I'm just curious why I had to.

More as things progress.

Diether Haenicke article

Someone told me about this article by a former president of Western Michigan University. It fits right in with my own challenge of working with a living, changing language, and being "polite" to my readers in guiding them through my fiction.

http://www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/04/he_and_him_i_and_me_who_and_wh.html

Genetically Hard-Wired

"Never use a preposition to end a sentence with."

My family is genetically hard-wired to catch grammatical errors. Anytime we are together, we have at least one rant about any current offenses we've encountered. Print ads lacking proper punctuation, spelling errors on signs, slang terms becoming part of our vocabulary. Also, I have yet to find a restaurant menu that does not have at least one typo in it.

Where does this fascination with proofreading, editing, and writing come from? For me, it originated out of a perfectionist righteousness to avoid mistakes. To prove my intellectual superiority by catching other people's errors. Fortunately, all that has lost its appeal. Though I can't not catch typos, I'm less offended by them. Spelling has always been arbitrary. Grammar has gotten more relaxed. Not a bad thing. I think I'm more interested now in a novel's readability; it's ability to engage.

Though this blog is called Grammatically Polite, it has less to do with grammar and more to do with developing a writer's voice. Since I was a teenager I've written novels, short stories, plays. I've unsuccessfully sought an agent. I've successfully seen one of my plays produced. But after all these dozens of years of writing, I still hesitate when I compose. Maybe as I relax into blogging, I'll care less about getting the language perfect. Perfection can be rather sterile. Maybe I can go for flavor.

Or, maybe it's flavor I should go for.

From Point A to Point B

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss suggests that proper punctuation is equivalent to proper manners. Navigating your reader through your writing is an act of courtesy. Providing all the full stops, left turns, warnings, and clear directions helps you bring along your audience so that they aren't distracted trying to figure out what you mean.

I am new to blogging, and my first thoughts are that this will be challenging as a writer to develop, maintain, and improve because it seems that the essence of blogging is a sort of off-the-cuff commentary on a given subject. Random thoughts, specific interests, whatever -- but it does come back to learning how best to communicate. How not to fall into the trap of assuming that anything that comes into my head is worth writing (or worthwhile for someone else to read).

So, with that said, I intend to use this blog as a dialogue on writing. To learn how to improve my writing by making myself write, but also to develop a quicker hand at editing and not bog myself down in endless revisions. To find that balance between too much work and too little. To get myself from my first draft to the final version. Because it seems to me that when we learn to write, we're usually given completed works as our guidelines (e.g., A Tale of Two Cities, A Mid-Summer Night's Dream), but we never get to witness how Dickens or Shakespeare or any other writer muddled through their multiple drafts to reach their final product. I've spent a lot of time at Point A. Next stop needs to be B.