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Archive for the 'On Writing' Category

For fuck or fuck’s sake?

Posted in On Writing on August 4th, 2010

Steven Beattie uses the term ‘for fuck’s sake’ in a recent Facebook remark about Justin Bieber’s starring in and producing a movie about his own life. Quite appropriate this.  The take away lesson however is: I’ve always said ‘for fuck sake.’  Googling around a bit for ‘fuck’, this came up from Rhetorical Device , the personal website of Jack Rusher:

"Fuck — such a boogeyman in English that it didn’t appear in a single dictionary from 1795 to 1965 — is a word of great antiquity. It has cognates in many Germanic languages, including German (ficken, to copulate), Dutch (fokken, to breed), dialectical Norwegian (fukka, to copulate), and dialectical Swedish (focka, to strike/copulate) and fock (penis), but does not carry the weight of profanity in many of them4

The OED cites the earliest clear use of fuck as William Dunbar’s 1503 poem Brash of Wowing, which includes the couplet “Yit be his feiris he wald haue fukkit: / Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane” (ll. 13–14). The first appearance of the current spelling is the phrase “Bischops … may fuck thair fill and be unmaryit” from a 1535 poem by Sir David Lyndsay.

 4. It appears to have once been fairly inoffensive in English; up until the late seventeenth century, the common Kestrel was called a “windfucker” in the English of the time."
 
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Michael Joseph’s advice to young writers

Posted in On Writing on July 8th, 2010

From Monika Dickens’s prologue to Michael Joseph, Master of Words:

Michael’s guidance was not editorial, but from one author to another. When I got bogged down in beautiful formal phrases, as new writers do, he gave me a superb piece of advice, which I’ve passed on to many new young writers. "Don’t try so hard," he said. "Just imagine you’re bursting into a room full of people you know quite well, and you’re saying, "Listen to what happened to me!."

 
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Fifth Annual Write By The Lake Writers Retreat July 25-29, 2010

Posted in On Writing on May 20th, 2010

Jumpstart and Develop short stories, novels, poetry, travel and memoir writing at Rick Taylor’s annual Write by the Lake writers retreat, located on a quiet lake in Val des Monts, Quebec, thirty minutes from downtown Ottawa. I did several years ago, and highly recommend the experience!

While participants work alone each day, much of the time is devoted to writing exercises; learning how to balance inspiration and discipline; finding a personal voice; choosing a subject and developing a sense of structure. There is a focus on group critiques of works-in-progress, and creative acts of revision and self editing. The workshop consists of a comfortable blend of beginner, intermediate and advanced writers. Expect suggestions and advice about how to discover the hidden stories within the stories you think you are writing. Look forward to a guest writer, and other literary surprises.

Visuals more your thing? Check out Art by the Lake, led by Rick’s talented wife Dale.

 
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Huxley on Snails and Writers

Posted in On Writing on November 23rd, 2009
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"Slugs go through life leaving only a fading trail of slime; the snail bequeaths to the world an elaborately convoluted shell. The writer is a snail in the midst of slugs…Snails make excellent fossils; slugs tend to disappear without leaving a trace. Literary fame is a function of fossilizability. Unlike his biological counterpart, the writer-snail can become a fossil, even a series of fossils, while his is still alive. For the aging writer this fact is often a source of considerable embarrassment and annoyance."

Aldous Huxley in the Foreword to Eschelbach and Shober’s Aldous Huxley A Bibliopgraphy 1916-1959
 

 
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Who Cares How You Write a Great Novel…

Posted in On Writing on November 9th, 2009
I was going to write a great post berating this Wall Street Journal article as completely annoying; a self congratulatory waste-of-time. With characteristic aplomb, Bookninja George Murray saves me the trouble:

The WSJ asks a bunch of bigtime authors how to write a great novel. I think we all know the answer to that. Be a man. Or don’t. But be something. Or don’t. Sit with your hand up in the air. Bend paperclips into talismans from demonic cults. Use notecards, computers, typewriters, biros. Write in the early morning, late at night, in the basement, garret, at the kitchen table. Use folders, dividers, colour-coded pencils. Eat burritos before you write and then hold it in to create a sense of urgency. Get out the scissors, glue and paste. What the fuck? How about this one: stop fetishizing the process and get ‘er done.

 
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Thomas Bernhard and NPRs Three Minute Fiction

Posted in On Writing on September 28th, 2009
http://www.thomasbernhard.org/

My former classmate who emigrated to Australia eleven years ago and returned to his Styrian homeland two years ago emigrated to Australia again six months ago, although he knows he will return to Styria again and will continue to emigrate to Australia and return to Styria as often as it takes him to find peace either in Australia or Styria. His father before him, a journeyman baker from the Molltal who went to school with my father,emigrated from Carinthia to Styria at least twenty times and each time returned to Carinthia from Styria until he finally found peace in Carinthia, in Arndorf near St. Veit-on-the-Glan, where in the old smithy – his final lodgings- he hanged himelf on an iron hook because he was homesick for Styria, without, and he was reproached for this at the time and long after his death, thinking of his wife and children.

I choose this story for how it illustrates, how it humourously exaggerates, Bernhard’s tendencies toward repetition, precision, morbidity, parenthetical comment, and sonnet-like endings.

 
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Enter The Walrus’s writing contest: Deadline July 31, 2009

Posted in On Writing on July 30th, 2009

Hurry, Hurry: To celebrate The Walruss annual summer reading issue—featuring stories by Lee Henderson, Rivka Galchen (listen to our conversation here), Stephen Marche & 2008 Giller Prize winner Joseph Boyden (ditto here) — the mag is pleased to announce The Walrus Guilty Pleasures Writing Contest!

To enter, write the first paragraph of a novel in one of the following genres: Science Fiction, Romance, Western, Ghost Story/Gothic.

"Make it the most gripping, titilating, and action-packed read of the summer!" Send submissions to guiltypleasures@walrusmagazine.com by July 31, and you could win a prize package from Fairmont Hotels & Resorts or a Walrus prize package, and have your work published at walrusmagazine.com!

 
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Mitchelmore’s Fear of reading

Posted in On Writing on July 29th, 2009

Steve Mitchelmore delivers a post worthy of Beckett, about epiphany, and impossibility, during recovery from a serious bicycling accident. From which:

"Akhenaten had ordered that the capital city be moved from Thebes into the desert 200 miles away. The documentary featured new archeological discoveries that revealed the disastrous consequences for his subjects. What stirred me was not these human facts but the glorious and terrifying absurdity of Akhenaten’s project. It demonstrates the same impressive or horrendous folly as those in fictional works: William Golding’s The Spire for example, and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and, more familiar to me, those of the many characters created by Bernhard: Roithamer who builds a cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest, Reger who studies every masterpiece in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna until he finds a flaw, even Bernhard himself aged eight deciding to cycle to his aunt’s house in Salzburg, twenty-two miles away. A creative writer may respond by sketching a novel idea based on the crazy plans of an individual – perhaps Naguib Mahfouz’s Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth is it as far as the pharaoh is concerned – but, in my sedated condition, I imagined a writing project that would itself be the absurdity, something itself animated by impossibility."

Read and relish the rest here.

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Hail, Haul or Hale? Common Errors in English

Posted in On Writing on July 28th, 2009
"One old meaning of the word “hale” is “to drag,” especially by force. In modern usage it has been replaced with “haul” except in the standard phrase “hale into court.” People who can’t make sense of this form often misspell the phrase as “hail into court.” To be hailed is to be greeted enthusiastically, with praise. People haled into court normally go reluctantly, not expecting any such warm reception."

Check out this fun site for more corrections to common errors in English. More? Go here. And/or here.

 
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Virginia Woolf on Writing and Architecting

Posted in On Writing on July 24th, 2009

Diary entry for April 28, 1935:

"All desire to practice the art of a writer has completely left me. I cannot imagine what it would be like: that is, more accurately, I cannot curve my mind to the line of a book: no, nor of an article. Its not the writing but the architecting that strains. If I write this paragraph, then there is the next & then the next. But after a months holiday I shall be as tough & springy as – say heather root; & the arches and the domes will spring into the air as firm as steel & light as cloud – but all these words miss the mark. ‘

from The Faber Book of Diaries, edited by Simon Bret. (1987)

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