Here's Where I've Been Writing

This year, I've been participating in a 52 week writing challenge as part of The Writing Cooperative on Medium.com.  Weekly, I'll be writing here https://medium.com/@karenthompkins

Here's a summary of what I've written as part of the challenge for the last 5 weeks:

Arriving to the Present is based on a book that I've been reading about meditative walking and how walking can bring us back to the present.

Failure Set Me Free - A life without comparison is about how I learned not to compare myself to others through the experience of failure.

52 Weeks and Counting are my thoughts on participating in a year-long writing challenge.

Slow Down and Live Better is about how our lives can be better if we just slow down...even in a 21st century contemporary world.

Rituals and Writing is about my writing process and the ritualistic nature of writing.

Listening, Reading & Writing

After meeting a friend for lunch last weekend, I visited Second Story Books.  It’s a used and rare bookstore in Dupont Circle that I like to check out when I’m in the area.  About two years ago, I decided to collect books written by or about James Baldwin.   I had a few already and thought I could build a collection.  While at Second Story Books, I was able to pick up my 11^th Baldwin book, Notes of a Native Son.

While perusing the aisles, I discovered a lovely little book by Eudora Welty, One Writer’s Beginnings.  Published in 1983, the memoir was developed from lectures Welty gave at Harvard University. Welty won the Pulitzer Prize for the Optimist’s Daughter.  After I purchased the $3 book, it occurred to me that I was also building a collection of books about writing and publishing.

I love the style of the book and decided to include an excerpt from the book from the chapter on Listening.  I read this passage over many times, as it resonated with my experience as a reader and as a writer.

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn’t hear.   As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me.  It isn’t my mother’s voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own.  It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it.  It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself.  The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader-voice.  I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers – to read as listeners -  and with all writers, to write as listeners.  It may be part of the desire to write.  The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing it for truth, for me.  Whether I am right to trust so far I don’t know.  By now I don’t know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books.  When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes.  I have always trusted this voice.

Eudora Welty

One Writer's Beginnings

Goodbye Summer
Miami 2009

Gene and I Agree

In my last post, I made a comment about how often I observe bad writing.  I saw this article by Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post Magazine about bad writing.  I've included the article after my post in case the link should stop working one day.  I was glad to see that Gene agrees with me.

Obviously, some are more aware of bad writing than others.  They probably have some type of relationship with the construction of words by way of profession or passion.  I liken it to a good friend who is serious about his body and working out.  He often notices imperfections in other’s bodies.   He points out things that I would never notice. 

Just like working out and having a nice body requires a commitment of time and effort, so does good writing. I often look up the definition of words that I think I know.  I religiously use the spelling and grammar check. The exception to this is Facebook.  Communication on Facebook means breaking every rule of grammar and a proliferation of abbreviations and acronyms.  If I don’t like the flow of a sentence, I keep looking at it – often rearranging the position of words, deleting or adding them.  I flee from clichés in search of my own voice. Then, I step back like an artist and stare at my creation.  Still not satisfied, I go through this tortuous process again and again.   Weirdly, I enjoy this. 

Here's Gene's article Gene defiantly recommends that you watch your language 
By Gene Weingarten, Published: January 3 in Washington Post Magazine

As the world’s leading connoisseur and curator of Bad Writing on the Internet, I often get letters from people about some common misuse of language that happens to annoy them. Most of these complaints are pedestrian. (Yes, I know “ATM machine” is redundant. Zzzz.) But reader Amity Horowitz just wrote in with an eye-opener. Coyly, Amity invited me to Google the peculiar expression “defiantly recommend.”

“Defiantly recommend” has been used 1.5 million times! While one might occasionally recommend something defiantly, at the risk of censure or ridicule — say, the ritual eating of one’s placenta — how often would that sort of thing happen? Not a million-odd times. So I investigated.

“Defiantly recommend” turns out to be a classic example of Internet-induced idiocy, an elegant collision of incompetence and indifference:  A person wants to write “I definitely recommend,” in, say, a product review but spells it “definately,” which is the illiterate’s go-to version of the word. Spellcheck (and its co-conspirator, autocorrect) realizes something is wrong and suggests “defiantly.” The incompetent writer doesn’t know this is wrong or doesn’t care or doesn’t notice. And so “defiantly recommend” gets published a million-plus times. A similar thing happens when inept spellers write “alot,” meaning “a lot,” but spellcheck turns it into “allot,” which explains the hemorrhage of Google hits for expressions like “I have allot of weapons.” This phenomenon has happened more than 2.2 million times, which is allot.

We will call this sort of thing The Law of Incorrect Corrections, and it leads indirectly to:

The Law of Uninformed Uniformity
Before the Web, to be published as a writer, you pretty much had to be a professional. Professionals are unafraid of words and know a lot of them and take pains to use them in entertaining, unexpected combinations. This is not so with many amateurs of the Web, who have much they wish to say but lack the professional’s confidence and extensive arsenal of words. They are to writing as I am to fashion: I know I have to put something on every day, but I have no confidence in my ability to mix and match with style or taste. And so I tend to dress in “uniforms”: safe combinations of familiar things, such as khaki pants with blue shirts. The modern Web-sters are like that with words. With words, they are … woefully inadequate.

Consider that very expression, a staple of the Internet. A Google search confirms that 80 percent of the time the word “woefully” is used, it is modifying the word “inadequate.” It’s difficult to explain how preposterous this is, but I’ll try: It’s as though 80 percent of the time people use salt, it’s on scrambled eggs. Think of all the missed opportunities for flavor.

Finally, The Principle of Trite & Wrong
Cliche is easy — it pops into the mind in an instant and often sounds profound or at least comfortingly familiar. Therefore, cliche infests the Internet, even when it is completely inappropriate to the point being made.

Consider “nothing could be further from the truth.” This expression is always a lie. Repeat: This expression is always a lie. If we scan the Web, however, we find it has been used 13 million times, generally in pompous defense of oneself or of another against allegedly scurrilous allegations. Charles Colson, for example, once decried the popular image of Martin Luther King Jr. as “a liberal firebrand, waging war on traditional values.” Says Colson: “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Really, now! I think I can refute this without getting into a tedious discussion of a dead man’s politics. Here is one statement, for example, that is palpably further from the truth: “Martin Luther King Jr. was a subspecies of avocado.” See?

I could go on and on, but whatever I said about the absurdity of the situation would be woefully inadequate.

Latest Reads

All fiction is true.  I read that somewhere.  I wanted to attribute that to Chinua Achebe but when I did a quick internet search I couldn’t find it.  I really held my quick search to about 15 minutes.  I’ve tried “quick” searches before in an effort to find material to support my writing only to emerge a couple of hours later with absolutely nothing. Along the way I would find myself about to purchase shoes online, listening to music and then to facebook and somehow I find myself on a website about people that look like their pets.   

So forget Chinua Achebe and what he might have said.  Instead, I found this quote by Emerson which was on brainyquote.com: Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.

I thought about this as I finished my latest read The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah.  I had mentioned in a previous post that I discovered that I could get in a lot of reading while riding the metro to and from work.  I was able to get through this book in three weeks.  Sister Souljah really took me on a wild ride with this fictional tale although I believe that all of these characters are recreated from her experiences. These characters live in some form in everyone.  To see it, most would have to get past the obvious - a black, drug dealing family in Brooklyn.   You can go to work every day and encounter people who are schemers and do not hesitate to stomp out other people for their own advancement.  Let’s not forget all of the functional alcoholics and those with drug problems in the workplace.  Our experiences may just be more sanitized and politically correct.

I was very impressed with the book because of the development of the characters.  Souljah provided a lot of different angles to consider regarding these characters.  The characters were multidimensional and had depth which isn’t how black characters are often portrayed.  She handled them sympathetically. 

Prior to this, I had read Amy Tan’s book The Opposite of Faith which is about her writing life.   It was interesting reading a work of fiction following a book about a writer of fiction.  In Tan’s book I read about her writing process.  In Souljah’s book, I often thought about her writing process and the choices that she made in her storytelling.  I think this was also her first work of fiction so I gotta give the sistah a break and hey, it was a national best seller.  But I wonder about choices made in writing in almost everything that I read.  I think that most people are this way.

For my next read, instead of purchasing something new, I think that I will go to my bookshelf and pull out something that has been waiting to be read.  I’m contemplating picking up ‘Tis again by Frank McCourt. ‘Tis is a memoir about his life in the U.S.   I read some of it many years ago.  It did not grab me like Angela’s Ashes which was about McCourt’s life in Ireland.  That’s kinda unfair to expect the same thing again when it is a different book.   I’m sure that he was a different person when he was writing it.    I find McCourt fascinating because he didn’t write Angela’s Ashes until after he had retired from 30 years of teaching.  Anyone worried about their dreams deferred can look to McCourt for inspiration.

An Uninvited Guest

For several months, I’ve been working on revamping a draft manuscript that I completed about 10 years ago.  It’s called Bits of Wisdom for the Real World because Life Doesn’t Come with Instructions.   I’ve been told that the title is very long.  Uhhhh….this I know.  The title may change.   As of now, it captures the overall theme of the manuscript.  I use the term theme because it is very hard for me to describe exactly what it is in a sentence or two. 

I would say that it is more of a perspective of how to approach life that goes beyond tips.  For example, I’m currently working on a chapter about the work environment.  Everyone knows that they are going to encounter challenges at work.  A tip would be to follow office policies and procedures when presented with a problem at work like communicating your concerns to your manager.   While following policies and procedures, there is also a perspective that we can have to make the most of the experience.  We can be more than a victim when experiencing unfair treatment at work.  We don’t have to be stuck at the place of describing what happened to us over and over again with no real resolve.  Regardless of the outcome, the experience can teach us many things, cause us to grow, and strengthen us in ways we could not imagine or design on our own. 

I had this mid-February date for completion of the final draft.  I’ve scrapped that date and have not set a new one.  Sometimes we think that if we set a date that it will cause things to be completed by that date.   Deadlines are important.  However, I realized that for me it will be done when it is done.  My goal is to continue to work on it.  Just keep at it, as they say.  I needed to set a new goal that wasn't so intimidating or consuming. 

What I did not expect was that another manuscript, a compilation of essays, would begin to emerge once I decided to pick up Bits of Wisdom.  I found this to be quite disturbing.  I prefer order, process and structure.  I don’t like a whole lot of shenanigans.  In my mind, you don’t start something new without completing something else - especially when performing the same function.  I’m committed to writing so it made sense for me to just focus on one manuscript at a time.   Not to mention, I’m also blogging and I'm not just going to post any ole thing.  In summary, I didn’t need another writing project – especially one that was uninvited.  So, initially I rejected this other project that kept surfacing.  I just assumed that the only reason that this other stuff kept showing up was to distract me away from Bits of Wisdom. 

Then I decided to open the door and welcome the intruder.  She was knocking and making so much noise that I wasn't making much progress on Bits of Wisdom.    I say she because we women can be  so persistent and strong and known to keep up a fuss until we get what we want.  I realized that she wasn't going anywhere so when she appeared, I decided to take the time to write down what she has to say.   Because of the advancements in technology, there are places for me to post all of my creative work.  I mostly post my work on my blog and also on wattpad.   Wattpad is an online community of writers where I can post my work and receive feedback while it is in development.  I have 2 works on Wattpad, Bits of Wisdom and Book of Essays.  I couldn't think of a title for the collection of essays so I oh-so-cleverly called it Book of Essays.   So not only has she been welcomed but she has her own friggin room.  Once I gave in to her, miraculously, I’ve been able to continue my work on Bits of Wisdom.   This, I cannot explain.