Life in California went topsy-turvy on Marth 19th, 2020, when Governor Gavin Newsom issued a stay at home order to protect the health and well-being of all Californians. Quite suddenly, the world shifted on its access. The ominous sense of dread finally had a definition: Pandemic. From the ground, there was confusion. The city shut down. Those of us who had day jobs, found ourselves confined to our houses. For me, editorial meetings and teaching yoga took place on Zoom. As a writer, nothing changed. Before Covid-19, writing meant entering a fantasy world of my own making, and after Covid-19, my inner landscape remained exactly the same. To write is to step into another dimension. But the real world is something altogether different. Life got tricky. As the deaths mounted and the grim reaper laid body bags down at the steps of the capital, the highest levels of government denied reality. Toxic tribal affiliations had gripped the nation. A simmering distrust of science caused a bizarre slide into disinformation and denial of a very real virus. As a devotee of both … [Read more...] about Life during Plague Time.
Write Like You Mean it.
Writing is a calling. People write for different reasons and there is no better time in history to be a writer. Sure, the publishing world has been shaken by technology and the old system is slowly dying. Yes, the midlist is nonexistent. Of course, the gatekeepers continue to do what gatekeepers do, create exclusivity and a system where they maintain control. But the upshot is power and freedom to the writer. First of all, if you write fiction and you keep doing it, you're a special breed. As the columnist, Red Smith once said when asked whether writing a daily column was difficult, “Why no, you simply sit down at your typewriter, open a vein and bleed.” Writing has always been difficult, since the first moment a chisel was placed on a stone. Storytelling is as old as language. Stories are told, retold, and transformed into other stories; Cupid and Psyche became Beauty and the Beast became Twilight. Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John are the same story from different points of view. Socrates warned that writing stories down would lead to memory loss and a lack of wisdom. Little did … [Read more...] about Write Like You Mean it.
The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”
I am a word nerd. I love to geek out on weird and wonderful applications like Scrivener, Microsoft Word, Grammarly and the Hemingway Editor. These programs are innovative and can do some of the heavy-lifting for writers, especially in commercial writing, social media and journalism, catching spelling mistakes and proofing for small errors. But for novelists, poets and short story writers, editing programs are like talking to your drunken roommate from college; they don't always make a lot of sense. Allowing an editing program to decide how you should write is a critical mistake. Writing software has certain weaknesses, just check out the infamous spell check poem which proves conclusively that spellcheck is not the boss of you. Editing programs cannot detect rhythm or poetic metaphor or choose when the passive voice is more powerful than the active voice. Complex sentence structure baffles the algorithms of these applications. One day maybe, but not now. Editing and spelling software cannot replace education or instinct. Writers need to learn the rules in order to make … [Read more...] about The Corrections: Hemingway Editor scores Nobel Prize winning author’s prose as “poor”
Writing in the Age of Insanity
I flipped on the news early Monday morning, and there was a linguist analyzing what had emerged from Trump's mouth at a rally. The newscaster, Joy Reid, was earnest as she read a series of words that made no sense. Like a jazz singer scatting, Trump had tossed up a word salad of epic proportions. "He says he has the best words.... but he seems to be using all the words, regardless of whether they make sense or not," she said. The woman is a writer so she was experiencing the same thing I was—pain. She repeated various sections of his speech, searching for the secret message underlying the words. Was there any? The linguist, John McWhorter, broke it down for her. "When you're processing language, the first thing that comes into your brain is the tone, the music, then the content." Like animals in a forest, the strange noises emerging from Trump's mouth carried an emotional code, though the string of nonsense was utterly lacking in any coherent meaning. For a writer, this can be crazy making. Sure, we deal in the musicality of language, but writers spend an inordinate amount of … [Read more...] about Writing in the Age of Insanity
Raymond Chandler on What Haunts the Reader.
“A long time ago when I was writing for pulps, I put into a story a line like ‘he got out of the car and walked across the sun drenched sidewalk until the shadow of the awning over the entrance fell across his face like the touch of cool water.’ They took it out when they published the story. Their readers didn’t appreciate this sort of thing: it just held up the action. And I set out to prove them wrong. My theory was they just thought they cared nothing about anything but the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. … [Read more...] about Raymond Chandler on What Haunts the Reader.
Election 2016: Things are going to get Weird.
Writers and artists, by their nature, are sensitive. We spend years building up feathery radar as delicate as moth antennae in order to observe the nuances of human behavior. So when something happens that blows your mind and makes you question the reality you're living in, it can make you feel woozy and lost at sea without a compass. Whatever politics you subscribe to, the 2016 election revealed a divide so vast it can only be called shocking. The pollsters were not able to measure reality. The dark desires of the collective unconscious tossed up strange, seemingly unnatural, even horrifying events and players. We saw racism, misogyny, xenophobia and hatred, the dark flower of a baser, deeper emotion— fear. Right now, that fear is rushing across the land like a wave. Our first instinct may be to fight events, even try and change the outcome, but nothing we do can stop how weird things are going to get. No matter how civilized and decent you believe President Obama to be, half the country saw this president as a frightening boogieman. And no matter how obvious Trump's … [Read more...] about Election 2016: Things are going to get Weird.
Prince: The Essential Reading List
The first time I saw Prince was on an album cover for Dirty Mind in the 80's. The image of his raw, sexuality is still seared in my brain. Then there was the masterful, pop majesty of his rule-breaking music. The methodology of artists always fascinates me and Prince was extremely prolific. He vowed to write a song a day and not only had a beautiful voice, but often played every instrument on his albums. If that wasn't enough, he wrote hit songs for other artists such as Sinead O'Conner and The Bangles. Over his three-decade-long career, Prince rarely granted interviews, but when he did we glimpsed an intriguing man and a highly disciplined artist. Here is a list at W Magazine at some of his best journalistic moments. Source: Prince Dead at 57: The Essential Reading List … [Read more...] about Prince: The Essential Reading List