Tuesdays with Story

Writer’s Mail
September 10, 2014

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” – Maya Angelou

2nd Tuesday in September. . .
Deb read her children’s story “The Red Bear.”
Katelin suggested changing the last stanza to four lines. Ruth suggested making the seal is small and the lemming large, because a large seal might be too big for a baby polar bear to take down alone. How did the polar bear dye his fur red? Did he roll in blood from his prey? Find dye in a ship wreck? Stole it from a village?

Ruth shared some notes from the writing seminars she attended at Gen Con.
From the seminar “Writing 101:” Some tips on submitting your novel to publishers. Don’t submit until you’ve finished the novel. For traditional publishing, you don’t need to have it edited before submitting. For self-publishing, you need an editor. Submit to one publisher at a time and wait to hear back before submitting to another.

From the seminar “Finding Your Voice:” – Practice, and tap into the emotional wellspring that living your life creates. If you don’t feel a little uncomfortable with what you are writing, you are probably not writing in your voice. Don’t worry about things you’ve read influencing your writing – everything has been done before. Be confident that who you are will come out on the page. Your voice is unique.

From a seminar on mysteries: Place the scene so the reader can solve the crime. Structure is important – kill someone right away. There needs to be a specific problem with a specific answer, and you as the writer need to know the answer when you are writing the story. We need to know why the killer did it. Keep track of what happens in the story hour by hour and make sure it’s possible. Your reader will look things up.

From a seminar on finding your story: Some examples of story recipes, like “the bug hunt.” Step 1: the characters learn about the bug. Step 2 – they figure out how to destroy the bug. Step 3: two or three scenes where the characters develop skills to kill the bug. Step 4: kill the bug or fail and go back to steps 2-3 to make a new plan. Harry Potter is an example of a story using this recipe.

Research the genre you are writing in. Find current popular authors in the genre and read their last two books to research the genre.

Who’s up Next. . .
September 16: Lisa McDougal (chapter, Tebow Family Secret), Andy Brown (chapter, Man Before the Fall), Cindi Dyke (chapter, North Road), Pat Edwards (???), Amber Boudreau (chapters, Stone), and Judith McNeil (chapter 16 My Mother, Savior of Men).

September 23: Ruth (revised chapter 1, Motto of the Hound), Liam (end of chapter 1, Prisoner of the Gods), Jack (???)

September 30: Fifth Tuesday

October 7: Amber Boudreau (chapters, Stone), Andy Pfeiffer (chapters, The Void), Millie Mader (chapter 58, Life on Hold), Kashmira Sheth & Amit Trivedi (chapter, novel), Bob Kralapp (???), and Jerry Peterson (short story).

Happy Birthday, Mary Oliver: The Beloved Poet on the Magic of Punctuation
In this recording from an event held by the Lannan Foundation in 2001, Oliver shares an entertaining thought about punctuation as a control mechanism and reads her intentionally punctuation-less prose poem “Seven White Butterflies,” found in the altogether enchanting volume West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems.
https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/seven-white-butterflies-mary-oliver-on-punctuation
One of our great assistances is, of course, punctuation. But it occurred to me that, perhaps, each of us writers has only perhaps a finite amount of it for our use, and we should use it judiciously — lest we hear a voice, suddenly, when we need, saying, “No more semicolons!” “You’re finished with your dashes!” — and, also, that passive-aggressive comma, with which we so carefully set off what is nice, so it won’t be missed — don’t we?
So I thought of, for fun — and I’ve done that a few times — I would write a poem that uses no punctuation (and this particular one has a question mark, which is quite apparent, at the end) and see what I could do simply with the line break and the cadence of the line and so forth. And it is a little breathless to read, and perhaps to listen to, but here goes: it’s called “Seven White Butterflies.”
Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages
of their wings as they fly
to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity
is in the moment this is what
Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven
dancers floating
even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise
to the trees flutter
lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing
to deliver themselves unto
the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
grassy stem now
all seven are rapidly sipping
from the golden towers who
would have thought it could be so easy?
That cost me one question mark.

Great phrase . . .
virtual mobbing
pp. Using online media and technologies to attack or gang up on a person.
– virtual mob n.

Example Citations:
“He uses his book to describe how one can die by Twitter. He calls his experience a virtual mobbing.”
– Tim Harper, Tom Flanagan clawing back from a virtual mobbing, The Toronto Star, April 27, 2014

“The background against which the inquiry took place was an increasing number of situations in which people were committing criminal offences using social networks – particularly Facebook and Twitter. The committee examined instances of cyber bullying, revenge porn, trolling and virtual mobbing to try and determine whether or not they were criminal offences and if they were, whether new legislation was required to deal with them.”
– Katie Collins, Crime on social media covered by existing UK law, Lords conclude,’” Wired UK, July 29, 2014

Earliest Citation:
– John W. Daly, Germany blacklists cybermobbing site: Virtual mobbing turns to real life bullying, TechEYE.net, March 25, 2011

Notes:
The synonym cybermobbing (or cyber-mobbing) dates to at least 2009 and is likely a few years older than that.