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There aren’t really any unbreakable “rules” for writing—or for that matter, for life. But this is a good one:
Intend every word you write.
Its corollary for life-in-general, of course, would be intend every thing you do.
Harder than it sounds.
The blog post by Eric Cummings on intentionality (yes, there really is such a word) in writing that got me started thinking about this is here, on one of my favorite blogs, Write to Done.
To every thing there is a season,
And a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
…He has made every thing beautiful in his time.
—from Ecclesiastes 3
Yes, here I am again, after a month not only away from blogging but mostly away from being online at all. A lot’s been happening, some of it good, some of it sad and stressful, and nothing is really resolved. But then life is never really resolved, and I certainly can’t hide away in my hermitage forever.
Today is All Saints’ Day (which is, of course, why Halloween is called Halloween—it’s “All Hallows’ Eve,” or the Eve of All Saints), and one of my very favorite hymns is sung as the processional on All Saints Sunday. For All The Saints is rousing and wonderful and I usually cry while I’m singing it, especially when the sopranos soar into the descant on the final verse. It also has a rich 150-year history. Part of the lyrics:
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long,
Steals on the ear the distant triumph song,
And hearts are brave, again, and arms are strong…
All I can do, is all I can do. I need that brave heart and those strong arms. And here and there, a little time for writing.
This is quite a bit more modern than my beloved sixteenth century, but I ran across it while researching other documents and couldn’t resist sharing it. After all, how often does one come across:
“A full and particular Account of the Sale of a Woman named Mary MacKintosh, which took place on Wednesday Evening, the 16th of July, 1828, in the Grass Market of Edinburgh, accused by her Husband of being a notorious Drunkard; with the particulars of the bloody Battle which took place afterwards.”
You must read the full transcription, if nothing else for its vivid nineteenth-century slang. One of the fighters (and yes, a huge fistfight between women and men broke out, with the women pretty much carrying the day) is described as being “as drunk as 50 cats in a wallet.” I can’t wait to use that one. Heh.
The Scottish broadside, ladies and gentlemen—the TMZ-crossed-with-Craigslist of its day!
From Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene ii:
CAESAR:
What say’st thou to me now? Speak once again.
SOOTHSAYER:
Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR:
He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass.
Fortunately there were no soothsayers around on the Ides of March some years ago, and my mother made it safely to the hospital to bring me into the world. Is the Ides of March a cool birthday or what?
My mother had a way with birthdays. My sister’s is April Fool’s Day. Really. And my brother’s is more or less on Thanksgiving (depending on the year). At least they’re all easy to remember!
A terribly sick doggie over the weekend. This morning at last he seems to be better. Not sure if it was some kind of bacterial or viral thing, or just some contraband delicacy he came across in the back yard—the vet seemed to be leaning toward a dietary indiscretion because sick as he was, Mr. Boo had no fever. In any case, about six-thirty last night he suddenly got up, stretched, ate food, drank water, and looked around as if to say “What’s all the fuss?” He slept normally through the night with no emergencies. Life chez Loupas can now carry on as usual, I hope.
I’d like to say I’ve been happily reading, but the truth is I’ve been struggling to fight off the cold/flu plague that seems to be spreading magically through the Internet. I guess I need to rub some Purell on our router. Or something.
Not fair that I get sick when I’m supposed to be on vacation!
Tonight I had yummy Szechuan chicken with vegetables and brown rice. And a fortune cookie. The fortune read:
“A romantic mystery will soon add interest to your life.”
I have tacked it to my bulletin board and decided that I believe fervently in fortune cookie fortunes.
I love Walden. When I had to read it for a high school class I hated it. The war between the ants? Oh, please. But later, at my own pace and for my own pleasure, I read it again—and again and again and again—and the intensity of Thoreau’s transcendentalism and love of solitude always delights and refreshes me.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
A (wo)man thinking or working is always alone.
Tagged again! This time, it’s Bryn Greenwood’s doing. I really have to learn to run faster. Heh.
All right. Six things that make me happy.
Oh wait. That’s eight. And I haven’t even gotten to chocolate.
After two holiday weeks (and I do love the holidays, but still) of not knowing for certain what day it was at any given moment, I am now firmly anchored again. It’s Monday. As Pippa sings in Mr. Browning’s famous poem/play Pippa Passes, “God’s in his heaven—all’s right with the world.”
I think I need to put together a fantasy writers group of men, too. Robert Browning, of course. Algernon Charles Swinburne (swoon). E.F. Benson, author of the glorious Lucia books. Who else?
Some people have fantasy football. I have a fantasy writers’ group—writing sages who have touched me deeply and who I look to as mentors and models. I’ve never met any of these women in the flesh, but I have met their hearts and minds through the words they put down on paper, and each one inspires me in a unique way. Here they are:
A list like this is revealing—clearly I am a romantic, a bit of an Anglophile, a devotée of history and a lover of nature. If you could choose from every writer since the beginning of time, who would be in your imaginary writers’ group?
I am working on intensifying the emotion in my story—giving it more fire and concentration and a more satisfying emotional resolution (there, see? I worked the word “resolution” into my post even though I’m not telling anybody my real resolutions, no sirreebob) in the end. It’s an interesting exercise. I’m finding that one way to show emotion is to show a contradiction between what a character says and what he does.
Perhaps he is shelling an almond at the end of a meal. A simple enough action. But he does it with the greatest of care, making sure the shell breaks into perfectly even pieces. While he does that, he is responding to another character’s conversation in an apparently casual manner. But the way he shells the almond is anything but casual, and the disconnect between what he is saying and what he is doing, to me at least, creates emotion. Conflict. Suspense. Yesterday at the party I was watching people, watching for disconnects. They can be astonishingly revealing.
Is there anything in the world more fascinating and—well, just plain fun—than writing stories? Well, possibly one or two things. Sometimes. Heh. But storytelling is definitely top-three.
On New Year’s Day we have an open house from noonish to whenever people stop dropping by. It always features mimosas, one of the Broadcasting Legend™’s justly famed baked hams, and plates and plates of home-baked cookies. People bring family members, children (from grown-up college students home on break to heart-melting six-month-old twins) and pets to play with Cressie and Boo. The men play with the traditional toy train (a toy train will have all adult males down on the floor in five seconds flat—try it). A good time is had by all.
Today was no exception.
Kalo Podariko, or Happy First-Foot!
The Broadcasting Legend™ occasionally teaches me snippets of Greek, and this is a traditional greeting for New Year’s Eve. As in other countries around the world (notably Scotland, which figures in my own heritage), the first person to set foot in one’s house in a new year can bring either good or bad luck.
The custom goes that immediately after the stroke of midnight, all the lights in the house are turned off and everyone goes outside. Then a particularly lucky person, often the youngest child, steps back into the house. Right foot first, please! All other family members then follow, also entering with the right foot, and all the lights are re-lighted for the new year.
May we all be blessed by good luck in 2009!
One of the things I always do at the end of December is re-read my daily personal journal for the year just past. It’s surprising and a little daunting to realize how much one forgets, even in the course of a year. The annual retrospective reading keeps me honest with myself.
I’ve been keeping a daily journal since 1983. Yes, there’s a lot of minutiae there—but I like to record the everyday things I do, well, every day. Walks, shopping lists, lunches, pleasures, griefs, dreams, success, failures. I can read a journal entry from any day at random and it brings back the shape and taste and experience of the day itself.
It’s remarkable and revealing to connect with my younger self, and I only wish I’d begun my journal earlier. Queen Victoria began keeping her famous diaries when she was thirteen! How I would love to be able to go back and read the truth about my own teenage years—I suspect it would not be anything like how I remember it today.
Here we are in the dark of winter, and on my desk I have the 2009 Burpee seed catalog. I am paging through gorgeous scarlet tomatoes (“slicers,” as my father used to call them), crisp green lettuce and cucumbers, berries and melons bursting with juice. And then there are the flowers—pansies with teddy-bear faces, dazzling marigolds, ruffled pink begonias and old-fashioned truly blue bachelor’s-buttons. More and more of my garden is being given over to herbs, too, partly for cooking, partly for scent, and partly just for pleasure—basil and dill, oregano and Italian flat-leaf parsley, lavender and peppermint and rosemary and rue.
I love reading the seed catalog in the middle of winter and dreaming of summer gardens. What better expression of faith could there be? As with all versions of scripture, however, the seed catalog can be contradictory: this year’s cover veggie is a “seedless” tomato, which one grows by purchasing (very expensive) seeds.
Recently I’ve become enamored of what are called “hidden-object” games. Remember when you were little, those black-and-white puzzle-pictures you’d look at and try to find the carrot or the cupcake camouflaged in the lines of the drawing? These games operate on the same principal, although they’re much more sophisticated and much more gorgeous.
Sometimes the hidden objects are actually camouflaged. Sometimes there is just such a rich and crazy profusion of objects within the scene and one must go over it slowly and carefully to sort out what’s what and what one is really looking for.
It occurs to me that life is like that.
