If you haven’t heard me screaming it from the rooftops lately, I have some news. But I’m a writer, so let me set the scene.
In the summer of 2012, I wanted to rethink the blog I had been dabbling with on my website, and after some experimentation on social media, my “Wednesday Writing Tips” began with a discussion of the differences between “farther” and “further” as well as a shout-out to the James River Writers Conference that was about to happen that year.
If anyone has ever told you that blogging is a waste of time for a writer, I’m here to prove you wrong.More
As writers, so often we talk about our success stories (publication!) and our laments (rejections, pesky punctuation, the bottom of a good bottle of wine…); I love the idea of taking a moment to talk process. Thanks so much to Ellen Boyers Kwatnoski for inviting me to join the #mywritingprocess blog tour. You can see Ellen’s blog here.
John Updike once wrote, “We’re past the age of heroes and hero kings… Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it’s up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.”
It’s up to the writers. It’s up to us. And there are so many possibilities.
What am I working on?
Isn’t it odd that passionate American politicians of the early 20th century fought for the legal sterilization of certain “lesser” individuals employing the same morality language that politicians of the early 21st century use about prohibiting abortions? This dichotomy of social thought drives my novel Sterile, where neither my protagonist’s past nor her paint brushes have kept her hands clean. She may have lost her baby, but she has to fight not to lose her life.
No offense to Faulkner, but I think he got one of his most famous titles wrong – then again, “While I Lay Dying” doesn’t really have the same ring to it. The question came up last week: what’s the difference between “while” and “as”? It’s a great query because there is a little-known, subtle change in meaning.
As you know, both words denote simultaneous action, but do you know the difference in the following two sentences?
“As Erin petted her cat, she wondered about word choice.”
“While Erin petted her cat, she wondered about word choice.”
At first glance, they seem to say the same thing; however, one of these is a brief action and one is longer. Erin either patted her cat on the head and walked away, or she cuddled up on her couch with her cat for the evening, continually stroking its fur while reading a good book. Word usage tells us the difference.
To be specific, “as” is used for a short action, and “while” is used for a longer one.
“As Faulkner picked up his pen, he debated his title.”
“While Faulkner wrote his book, he debated a grammatical rebellion.”
It doesn’t take long to pick up a pen. It does, however, take a long time to write a book. See the difference?
In As I Lay Dying, Addie’s death is a slow one, not immediate; therefore, “while” should be the appropriate word choice. But we can chalk this one up to artistic license. We can give Faulkner that.
As a closing note, here, I like to believe that the usage of “Lay” in this title is simply the past tense of “Lie.” If it’s present tense, we have a whole other lay/lie debate. (Oh the dramas of word choice!)
These two words aren’t actually interchangeable, although a lot of people use them as if they were. “Since” refers to time. “Because” refers to causation.
For example: Since I gave birth to my second child, keeping up with my writing tips is a whole new challenge. Because I gave birth to my second child, I didn’t have time for NaNoWriMo. Do you see the difference? In the first sentence, we’re talking about a time period – between then and now; in the second, we’re talking about cause and effect.
Yes, we’re celebrating the arrival of the newest intern on the K. S. Writing team. She’s already supportive of her mommy’s writing career, waiting to arrive until I finished a major manuscript rewrite. (Manuscript rewrite? Yes, it’s true. If you want to see the latest opening, check it out here.)
***My interview with Deborah Grosvenor originally appeared onjamesriverwriters.orgahead of the 2013 James River Writers Conference***
Want to pitch to the literary agent who discovered Tom Clancy? Deborah Grosvenor saw The Hunt forRed October long before it hit the bookstores shelves. Maybe she’s destined to find her next big client at the James River Writers Conference when she joins us this October. Deborah will be taking pitches and sitting on panels throughout the two-day conference. We were honored when she took a moment to chat with us about the publishing world.More
You’ve got to love confusing homonyms – or perhaps near homonyms in this case. So often we know what we mean but then we just spell the first thing that comes to our mind. Spell-check doesn’t help in these cases, does it? Maybe Microsoft has someone working on that. Or they have enough to worry about at present. Maybe there’s hope in Google.
Either way, until a tech giant saves the spelling impaired, here are some simple reminders. “Defuse” means “to make less dangerous, tense, or embarrassing.” Its simplest use is “to remove the fuse from” – as in a bomb. With a pocket knife and duct tape. While doing work for the Phoenix Foundation. (Okay, perhaps the MacGyver piece is unnecessary for the exact definition, but you get the idea.) “Diffuse,” on the other hand means “to spread or scatter widely; to disseminate.” For the physics buffs out there, its simplest definition is “to spread by diffusion.” For those of us for whom this means nothing, think about “diffused light” – sunlight breaking through the morning fog as it lifts off the river. Illuminating a chase of one of Murdock’s lackeys by a spy in aviator sunglasses and a bomber jacket. A spy who’s rigged up an explosion downstream with a shoe lace, a pocket watch, and a potato. (Too much?)
If a pathological liar tells stories, are they fictional or fictitious? If those stories are then published, does the word choice need to change?
Here’s a subtle one for you. Both “fictional” and “fictitious” share a common root, but there is a difference in their definitions. Fiction, of course, is imaginary or fabricated, but something is described as “fictional” when it relates to a work of art, such as a book, a film, or a painting. When something is fabricated in real life (a la “Liar, Liar, pants on fire”), it is considered “fictitious.”
My question here concerns Pinocchio’s nose. Is the nose fictional, but it grows when he tells something fictitious? Linguistic mysteries of the universe, my friends.More
We all have them. They attached themselves to our curious minds and tucked into brain winkles with their slippers and PJs on. For young readers today, maybe they’re wearing Snuggies.
Think back to your childhood, to that moment you marveled, you wondered, your tear ducts opened, or you held your breathe in suspense. We all have that one book that did it for us, that one book that made us view the force of words in an entirely new way.
For me, in 4th grade, Where the Red Fern Grows was the first book to make me cry. I honestly thought something was wrong with me. I was reading in bed, comfortable and warm. I could hear my family talking downstairs. My world was just fine, but I was bawling over my homework reading. This couldn’t be normal.
In 6th grade, Lois Lowry’s The Giver agitated my vision of the world. I closed that book curious, wanting to know more, wanting to figure out all of the ‘what if’s, wanting to know what was possible… Lois Lowry made me want to be an author.
All grown up now, I suppose, I look at myself as a writer. How much did these books affect what I write today? If not in style, how did they affect my purpose? Can books read in adulthood shake you to the core like they could when you were a child?
I’d like to create a list of great titles here. Please help my cause. These are the books that made you want to write, that showed you the power of literature. These are the books that we should share with our children and the ones we should explore further ourselves.
I’ll add two more to my list:
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist
Now I will sadly admit that a hectic year hasn’t allowed me to read many 2010 book releases. I’m still catching up on 2008 and 2009, as well as working on the biggest release of 2012 (a writer can dream, right?).
But for those of us always adding to our reading list of books we just have to read, I thought the following lists were pretty interesting:
Cold breezes have begun along with those wet nights that make you want to just stay home and curl up on the couch, a cup of tea, and a cozy blanket. Winter is coming soon. After the holiday madness that ensues every year, there are those months of cold, of tucking away from the world with a good book.
I know it’s only November, and I suppose those slow winter days are still far in the future, but after a year of busy, the idea of me, my couch, and some of the above titles just sounds a bit glorious, doesn’t it?
And just in case you, like me, have those aspirations to be on these lists in a few years, check out James River Writers’ Best Unpublished Manuscript Contest:
When I find myself thinking about writers–about why so many of us are here–I find myself asking why is it that we write? Answering this question is simultaneously simple and impossible, personal and universal.
We write because words make us simultaneously giggle and blubber; we write because we have tiny beings called characters in our heads pounding their miniature fists against our brains as they beg to have their voices heard; we write because when we find words that work well together, we want to marry them on a riverbank on a sunny June afternoon; we write because if we didn’t, we would be pathological liars; we write because we have an odd habit of twisting words like licorice, tweaking, cajoling, poeticizing, intensifying, and making simple sentence structures shine like new; we write because the Muse is calling; we write because a book we read in 3rd or 6th or 11th grade revolutionized the existence of literature in the world; we write because we want to be bestsellers; we write because the world needs to know what we have to say; we write because we have to.
Now, maybe when you find yourself in the midst of accomplished authors, you have a desire to pick their brains like monkeys searching for nits of lice. Maybe with Scarlett O’Hara as your witness, you will never be rejected again, or perhaps you do not want to go gentle into that good write. Curiouser and Curiouser, indeed, I know, but again, it’s a curious journey we embark upon.
Hello world, I have something to say, and you know what? I bet you do too. I, for one, cannot wait to hear what comes out.