Tag: craft

The Lunacy of Recognition

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I came across this short reflection by Jeff Burton on Medium.  I think he asks questions worth asking, and raises points creative people don’t talk enough about.

There’s a degree to which hoping to find an audience for one’s art feels like lunacy.  The odds are very much against it.  There’s something to doing a thing for the joy of doing it.  I think this goes along with the idea that we can produce great art without the kind of suffering that comes from not taking care of ourselves.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with wanting an audience.  But if you make something beautiful and no one else knows, guess what?  You still made something beautiful.  I have this idea that people in previous eras were better at getting healthy satisfaction and pleasure from doing things well than we are.  We have been taught for the last hundred years that skill and celebrity go hand in hand.  We have been taught that celebrity is the highest validation of skill.

We’ve probably been taught wrong.

 

100 Words at a Time

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

I have always loved to write.  I first started writing creatively as an adult sometime during Divinity School, in my early 20s.  I wrote stories and poems in high school of course, but most of what I wrote in college was more academic. 

Between finishing my Master of Divinity and starting my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, I wrote many small pieces of fiction and prose poems.  I grew fond of writing things that were exactly 100 words.  It was a good practice in rhythm, word choice, and brevity.

This piece, which I rewrote yesterday from an older draft that didn’t go where I had hoped, is 98 words:

There’s nothing to say now to Eugene Victor Debs or William Jennings Bryan.  No spring under iron wheels and no thaw in the concrete borders of compassion.  No dispersing from the lock-step forms of ill-formed fear, fear of self, of other, fear of washing rain, revealing living oneness, fear of drowning in it.  There’s no green in our window-boxes, no stray cats in alleys and nothing left to feed them. Only fat birds always eating and the statues of our past, the ideal likeness of forgotten shapes and forms, fat birds always eating, bleaching white our skin-toned stories.

I have also found that I inevitably tend to write paragraphs of about 100 words in my fiction, especially why I’m attempting a birds-eye view seeking to balance external and internal settings, or when I’m doing an extremely close third-person read. 

After quite of bit of struggle with one story yesterday, I read and took a break.  Later, I revised the poem above.  Then I went about the other things I had to do. Later still, I wrote a post about DH Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson (both very good at the external/internal balance and the shift from mundane to sublime) and Ernest Hemingway (ever a muse for brevity).  Then I returned to another story, one I had been avoiding for personal reasons, and wrote this, which is, not surprisingly, about a hundred words:

On his ten-speed, the new present from his father, Riley arced and waved, his course unfettered and unhinged, free from the attraction of large bodies, the fundamental laws of physics. The nurses crossed the Fairgrounds. Birds roosted in the trees. The Sisters of St. Catherine were called to daily office, everywhere the brides of Christ were moving to the music of the set-in-motion world. In the Market lot, where the families sold their wares, where the men had trained to serve in war, where the Milltown Fair lit August sky with fireworks and neon, on that swath of pavement bordered by the hospital and graveyard, a boy, still small, still boyish, rode his brand-new bike.

I’m sure I’ll revise and refine that, but for now I rather like it.  In the context of the story, it’s a sort of capstone.

For whatever reason, I tend to write more or less 100 words at a time.  There are days when these bursts add up, 1000 or 2000 words.  There are days like yesterday, where I revised 98 and wrote 120 more.

Dialogue is like the 12-point Courier New of daily word goals.  Even in the piece I struggled with yesterday, I managed 300 words of decent dialogue in service of the story. 

Some days net a ton of words you cut down later.  Some days net a ton of words you keep.  Some days are more about the planting, some days about the harvest.

If you’re writing and/or reading today (and I hope you are), happy sewing, watering, reaping.







John Steinbeck on Telling Stories

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Today, around your Thanksgiving table, I hope you’re able to hear and share good stories.  Meaningful stories.  Stories of how it is and was with you and all your people.

John Steinbeck, from this piece in The Paris Review:

“A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. Of course, there are dishonest writers who go on for a little while, but not for long—not for long.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel— “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.” Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends. We do have curtains—in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man, birth, growth and death.

These are curtain rise and curtain fall, but the story goes on and nothing finishes.

To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”

Literary Lexicon: What’s A Dying Metaphor?

~ Chris Cocca ~ 20 Comments

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“A dying metaphor is a derogatory term coined by George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language. Orwell defines a dying metaphor as a metaphor that isn’t dead (dead metaphors are different, as they are treated like ordinary words), but has been worn out and is used because it saves people the trouble of inventing an original phrase for themselves. In short, a cliché. Example: Achilles’ heel. Orwell suggests that writers scan their work for such dying forms that they have ‘seen regularly before in print’ and replace them with alternative language patterns.” (Wikipedia)

We need to say the things we need to say in ways that only we can say them.

Do you find yourself falling in with dying metaphors?  Flee them!  Even if you’re trying to be ironic.  These are the among the things that drive you crazy about bad writing, so make sure you keep earning your right to be bothered: excise all those dated, dying metaphors from your writing.

I understand.  It’s not like we use them on purpose. We all know better already.  But they are tenacious.  They are good ideas at 3 AM.  They are placeholders for better, truer thoughts and more honest and beautiful images.

What are some of the worst overused metaphors (or similes) you’ve come across?