Wednesday, July 5, 2000

Day Twenty-Five

My headache finally dissipated about 2000 hours yesterday and I'm still trying to figure out what I did/am doing to trigger the migraines. The first was when I arrived and I've had some minor headaches since but this one was truly awful. I spend most of yesterday's critiquing praying I could make it through the event without vomitting and I also brought along peanut butter and bread in case it had something to do with not eating.

So what have I eaten? Mostly Owen Cafeteria food and while that might explain vomitting, it doesn't explain headaches. I think it's far more likely the three bags of cinnamon balls and the BIG jar of sweet pickles did me in. Sugar is my enemy. I'm supposed to avoid these indulgences. Okay... right... no more cinnamon balls and no more sweet pickles. Let's see if I can make it through the rest of the workshop without another migraine.

Chris stopped by and gave me a pep talk, telling me I'm far, far too hard on myself. Yeah. I know. I can never be good enough to suit myself.

Thanks, Chris... but you're fighting many, many long years of self-abuse. I just have no self-confidence. I keep looking for it but I must be going to the wrong stores because I can never find it at Meijer or WalMart.

I wrote an awful story that is totally unpublishable and when I finished, I still wasn't certain what the heck it was. It's not traditional. Beyond that, I haven't a clue. I guess it's a bit of an alternate history although there is quite a bit of truth in it. It's only 1,500 words and I haven't decided yet if I should turn it in as another NOT FOR CRITIQUE story or just turn it in. Catherine de'Medici is the one to blame for high heel shoes. It was her idea. No one knows, however, who designed them for her. I stumbled upon a likely suspect and after that, I had to contemplate the possibilities of what could have happened. Next thing I knew, I had to write the story. Leonardo da Vince left 13,000 pages of notes and sketches behind and only 5,000 of them have been located. Francesco Melzi carefully compiled them into volumes and his heirs divided the books, gave away some of the pages, and stored them in attics. It's enough to make one long for a time machine.

I refused to do a time machine story, however. IMHO, the best Leonardo da Vinci story has already been told. In that one, someone discovered another Mona Lisa which was a slightly different pose. Much investigation later, they're at a cave and they discover da Vinci painted MANY of these pictures and put them into slots around a large wheel, when you turned the wheel, you saw an image of a woman look up, expose herself, and then cover herself again and smile. At last, the mystery of Mona Lisa's mysterious smile resolved.

I can't top that one nor can I top any of the time travel stories and I didn't want to write a farce wherein hordes of feminists return to the past to prevent high heels from being invented. I don't know what I've got and I don't know if it's spiffy. OTOH, William Sanders wrote The Undiscovered Country with Shakespeare being stranded among Indians and writing a play. This one's less of a stretch than that one. Shorter, too.

Samuel Delany imparted some wisdom upon us yesterday:

  1. The general form of a good story. First, and foremost, art and craft are inseparable.

  2. Talent is more fragile.

Some of the ways to write a good story versus a competent story follow:

  • Always uses specifics rather than generalities. Example: 85 feet tall rather than tall.
  • Use interesting, lyrical, poetic phrases that requires less words than the ordinary way of saying it.
  • The strongest sentence has the fewest modifiers. Use modifiers only when needed
  • Don't use propositional phrases at the end of sentences when they are unneeded. For example: Once you describe kicking off your shoes and socks, you do not need to say on the floor unless you are in zero gravity and they're going somewhere else. On the floor is a given. If it's implied, remove the prepositional phrase.
  • Do not use extraneous verbage between subject, verb and object.
  • Organize order of complex phrases in chronological order.
  • Sentence-by-sentence, a good story generally contains stuff -- specifics uncluttered by modifiers.
  • Never use received language Example: Do not say, it goes without saying, and then say it.
  • Bad writing is too thin, too clever, and too cliched.
  • If you are going to err, err on the side of putting too much detail into the first draft as it is easier to remove this than to add more later.

    Today we critiqued only the three new stories and rather than work on eliminating the backlog, we tried an exercise. We were given one of four sentences which would be found in a competent story (as opposed to a great story) and challenged to rewrite it (one or more sentences) into a great beginning. I have spent about four hours since then sitting at the keyboard rewriting my own sentences into more specific, detailed sentences. One of the problems I've found thus far is staying in the right voice. For example, I cannot have a crusader-type man say that an Arabian horse has a teacup-sized muzzle. Where the hell would he ever see a teacup? OTOH, I went from him describing his friend as changed, to describing the beard that divided in two, with long locks twisting into points above his upper lips. I think it's overdone... but maybe I need to overdo it for a while in order to reach the point where I can delete easily.

    A group of us went to lunch with Delany and then Karen, Chris, Trey and I went to Meijer. Buck was there as well and we gave him a ride back so he wouldn't need to wait for the bus. I then collapsed and slept until about six and started writing and working on critiques again. I'm still annoyed with myself that I cannot grasp the art of description. I am so very, incredibly annoyed with myself for failing to meet my own standards. It would be so ever much simplier if they just gave us Clarion pills that immediately imparted everything we need to know about writing.

    I am working, off and on, on four stories that I may or may not ever finish but which are proving good opportunities for writing descriptions. One is set on Mercury, one is a fantasy with a horse, one is told from an alien viewpoint (tree-like creatures), and one is far future during Earth's next ice age. [I hate cold weather.] At the very least, this gives me four very different worlds in which to play with descriptive terms. I probably will work on these all week and if a story develops, great. If not, it's no big deal. The goal is improvement, not how many stories can you crank out. Earlier, it was practice with beginning, middle and end. Now, it's write those damn descriptive sentences.

    Linda

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