Oregonian

[Oregonian]

I have decided to take the advice of Melanie and Noelle and start posting chapters of The Crofter and the Snake even though the story is not finished yet.  Noelle's observation was good -- that seeing the reader response to the first few chapters can provide good insight as to whether the story is resonating with the readers or not.  After all, my beta readers may not be representative of the readership as a whole.

This will take a while, and I may post the three acts of my screenplay Relics in the meantime, if it's not too much of a logistical hassle.

Edited January 6, 2020 by Oregonian
Auto-Correct strikes again!

[Oregonian]

It has turned out to be a logistical hassle, but I did start to post the three Acts of my screenplay Relics.  The problem is that, although the format of the text document looks fine as a document, with proper spacing for a screenplay, when I paste the document into the text box and hit "Preview", it comes out all wonky.  The dialogue blocks, instead of being centered in the page, are all over next to the left margin, having joined company with the scene headers and descriptors.  I tried several times by various methods to move the dialogue blocks back into their proper central positions, but every time I hit "Preview", there they were back against the left margin again.

Needless to say, this makes it more of a challenge to read Act One, since the reader must sort out in his/her own mind what is dialogue and what is not, using context as a clue.  Too bad.  When I type it up a as document, properly formatted, and then print out a hard copy on paper, it comes out just right.

I'm certain that there is a solution, but so far it eludes me.

[Oregonian]

On a happier note, I did take the advice of @Noelle Zingarella and @RonsGirlFriday and type up the handwritten four opening chapters of my WIP The Crofter and the Snake and send them off to my two Gryffie beta readers Islastorm and Diceman, although  I don't expect instant comments since they are both very busy.  These four chapters comprise 12,723 words.  The wheels of editing grind slowly, so this story will not appear on the archives anytime soon.  But once I post a chapter to the archives, then I feel personally obligated to keep going until it is finished, while at the same time taking enough time to ensure that all my best ideas have an opportunity to bubble forth out of the old brain and get incorporated into the story.

[Oregonian]

On a lighter topic, I saw that there was a writers' group that meets once a week at the public library, so last week I went to it, just to check it out.  Four people were there, a man and three women, and they told me that the leader of the group was not there today, so that's a total of six people, counting me.  They seemed friendly and laid back.

First, one of the women brought a "prop", which she hauled out of a bag.  It turned out to be a miniature Native American teepee, about 14 inches high,  appearing to be made of genuine wooden sticks and thin, lampshade-quality leather.  It had an electric candle inside and an electric cord which, when plugged in, caused the candle light to turn on.  I'm not sure what the function of the item was (a night-light?), but it was kind of cute and old-fashioned.  It reminded me of a baby chick incubator.  We were instructed to write for 10 minutes with this prop as our prompt.  I wanted to tie whatever I wrote into my WIP, The Crofter and the Snake, so I envisioned Howard and Hagrid trying to construct some sort of shelter, using empty wooden trays, to protect the baby strange creatures that had just been born by breaking out of their mother's bodies as a chick breaks out of its shell, and which were busy eating the dead bodies of their mothers.  The other participants wrote about full-size teepees, such as something that had been like a playhouse in their backyard during their childhood.  We all read what we had written.

The second exercise was to write down a statement of some sort of problem we were working on in our life right now, so I wrote "never having enough time to do what I want/need to do."  Then we were instructed to choose a book at random from the shelves (were were in a small room where the Oregon history books are located), open to a random page, read a random paragraph, and write something linking that paragraph and our current problem.  So I picked a book about a wagon train in 1845 that foolishly tried to take a "short cut" across eastern Oregon instead of sticking to the established trail and promptly got lost, with disastrous results.  The paragraph described their described their terrible trouble in trying to traverse this wild, rugged terrain, gaining ten miles a day (if they were lucky), while October was upon them with its dark, cold weather.  I didn't specifically reference my WIP in my written piece, but I saw that the concept could be used: something that Howard desperately has to do, time is running out, and he cannot proceed at more than a snail's pace.

The meeting lasted only an hour, but it was congenial and might be beneficial, so I think that I will go back.

[Oregonian]

In recent days I have been running across advice (in some writers' newsletters and writing textbooks) that say that the first pages or chapters of your story should show your protagonist in his/her everyday home setting, to establish what his/her ordinary life was like before the events occurred which pitched him/her into the adventure that makes up the plot of the book.  The Harry Potter series begins like that.

Maybe it's true because that's what the books and newsletters say, but maybe it's not because I can recall reading some thrilling books that opened up right in the middle of the action and filled in the mundane backstory later, and because a chapter or two of Protagonist washing his car in the driveway and grilling hamburgers in the backyard is, on the whole, boring, even if a tiny hint is dropped in (a guest at the backyard barbecue mentions something that later turns out to be germane to the plot).

I've read lots of fanfic stories involving a student (usually a first year) coming to Hogwarts, and the author begins with the new student getting on the train at Kings Cross Station, and the story spends the first chapter or two describing an ordinary train trip, including the usual onboard high jinks and adolescent chatter that we have read innumerable times, with nothing pertaining to what will be the actual plot of the story.  Sometimes the story begins at an even earlier point, with the prospective student receiving the long-awaited Hogwarts letter (no surprise there) and then an equally routine trip to Diagon Alley to buy the back-to-school supplies (no surprise there either).  I have abandoned countless new fictions after a chapter or two because the opening scenes were so unremarkable; there was nothing to catch my interest.

So it is my preference to skip the normal-life-at-home chapter and start pretty quickly into the meat of the story, thus violating that advice that I quoted in my opening sentence.  The Crofter and the Snake opens at the boat ride scene, with the protagonist showing a hint of his independent streak by standing up in the boat, and the story progresses from there, while the backstory is fed out, over the chapters, a sentence or two at a time.

[Oregonian]

I told my daughter, who is a computer engineer, about my problems with the formatting of my screenplay Relics when I try to post it to the archives, how it goes all wonky on me and, while still readable, Is not formatted correctly at all, though it was perfect in the original document.  We talked about the two ways that an author can post the text of their story on these archives, either by using all the html codes throughout the manuscript (as I did for years on MNFF), or by ticking the little box labeled "tiny MCE" and posting the manuscript as plain text.  The latter method seems easier, and that's how I always post my stories on HPFT.

Well, Elaine told me that, deep down in their guts, all computers run on html codes, and in order to allow us authors to post plain text, programmers have written a 'transformational algorithm' that takes the plain text you entered using tiny MCE, changes it all to html-coded text, and then utilizes these newly-inserted html codes to allow your document to appear on the screen as plain text.  

But many different versions of these 'transformational algorithms'  have been created by programmers over the years, and some of them are distinctly better than others. They can all successfully handle very plain formatting, such as an ordinary story, but when it comes to more complex formatting, such as a screenplay, many of these 'transformational algorithms' don't have the ability to handle it.  So they screw it all up.  That seems to be true of the transformational algorithm in use at this site.

So it's not my fault that my screenplay format is wonky, and there may be no way to fix it.  I jokingly suggested that I could post my screenplay to a Google doc and post a link on my author page, and she said that that would probably work because those Google and Apple document sites have very good transformational algorithms.

It's great to have a daughter who is a computer engineer.   

[juls]

Hey, Vicki, it's me! Juls! Coming to visit your page and you for winning January's Word War in the Slytherin Common Room. 

1. What made you decide you were Slytherin out of all the four Houses?

2. What qualities from the other Houses (Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor) do you display?

3. If you could choose to be invisible or to fly - which would you choose?

[tatapb]

On 1/30/2020 at 9:18 PM, Oregonian said:

In recent days I have been running across advice (in some writers' newsletters and writing textbooks) that say that the first pages or chapters of your story should show your protagonist in his/her everyday home setting, to establish what his/her ordinary life was like before the events occurred which pitched him/her into the adventure that makes up the plot of the book.  The Harry Potter series begins like that.

Maybe it's true because that's what the books and newsletters say, but maybe it's not because I can recall reading some thrilling books that opened up right in the middle of the action and filled in the mundane backstory later, and because a chapter or two of Protagonist washing his car in the driveway and grilling hamburgers in the backyard is, on the whole, boring, even if a tiny hint is dropped in (a guest at the backyard barbecue mentions something that later turns out to be germane to the plot).

I've read lots of fanfic stories involving a student (usually a first year) coming to Hogwarts, and the author begins with the new student getting on the train at Kings Cross Station, and the story spends the first chapter or two describing an ordinary train trip, including the usual onboard high jinks and adolescent chatter that we have read innumerable times, with nothing pertaining to what will be the actual plot of the story.  Sometimes the story begins at an even earlier point, with the prospective student receiving the long-awaited Hogwarts letter (no surprise there) and then an equally routine trip to Diagon Alley to buy the back-to-school supplies (no surprise there either).  I have abandoned countless new fictions after a chapter or two because the opening scenes were so unremarkable; there was nothing to catch my interest.

So it is my preference to skip the normal-life-at-home chapter and start pretty quickly into the meat of the story, thus violating that advice that I quoted in my opening sentence.  The Crofter and the Snake opens at the boat ride scene, with the protagonist showing a hint of his independent streak by standing up in the boat, and the story progresses from there, while the backstory is fed out, over the chapters, a sentence or two at a time.

Hey Vicki!

I read this a couple of days ago and I really wanted to say something but wasn't sure if I could (this looks like a personal thread of sorts and I'm still figuring things out) but since Juls is also here, I wanted to also jump in! 

So this thing you were saying, where the story starts by introducing the characters and showing them in their basic life setting...?

I spent a month (I think it was maybe November) reading up on different story structures and I stumbled upon the concept of Plot Beats. Plot Beats are more commonly used in screenwriting but not so much in literature in general. Literature has its own series of formulaic structure tropes like the monomyth (Hero's Journey), the Three-Act Story Structure, or The Dan Harmon Story Structure that were actually created post-factum, aka, the terms were created by finding the pattern in a series of different works by different authors who somehow all used the same structure.

In computer science, there's this term 'Design Patterns' which came into existence pretty much the same way. People were coding in different places of the earth, with very little to no contact, and they were using the same methods for solving the same problems - probably because it was the most natural, smartest way to solve said problems. What happened then was that they named these methods so that, in regular conversation, people could talk about them more fluidly. Kind of like using first names instead of describing people and saying "Jack" instead of "that guy who works in the cafe, you know, the one with the cap and the beard who always smiles like it's a really great day". When I went to college, Computer Science students got taught these Design Patterns and they're taught as a law... when they're not. They're just names for ways of solving problems that are so commonly used and accepted that they deserved a name.

See where I'm going with this super long detour? 

Anyways, there was this guy, Blake Snyder, who created a similar naming system in which he basically isolated certain common structures in films and literature - Blake Snyder Beat Sheet or the "BS2". He created a series of sheets, which he calls Beat Sheets, which help writers figure out their beats in a longish story or novel, and he actually analyses several books/movies to show how his beats apply to multiple works. For example, I just stumbled into Anne of Green Gables and there are a series of others that follow the exact same structure. In fact, there are a million spreadsheets for these beats so one can actually plan the story to the beat of BS2. The structure wasn't decided because it was the smartest way to write, it was created based on what people were doing - aka, for some people, these beats are just the way that feels more natural to read, tell a story. 

The funniest thing is that there are beat sheets (literally spreadsheets) specific for novels (and even specific to different genres) and you input the novel size (like, 70.000 words) and it tells you the length each beat should be. The other day I was incredibly bored and I started checking the beats of the book I was reading and it matched, almost to the exact page! Harry Potter does as well, which is amusing.

Plenty of exciting novels have the Beat Structure and they're still exciting - the fanfics you read were unremarkable, but even if they had a different structure, odds are they would still have been unremarkable. Starting a story in media res, has the benefit of surprise, but it doesn't fix an inherently unexceptional story. 

I want to point out @Noelle Zingarella's story, Moonlight as an example - I was literally just reading it, so it's really fresh in my mind. Moonlight starts by showing us Severus in his natural habitat. It conveys Snape's loneliness, but also the fact that he's used to it. It presents his current dilemma, the fact that he's smack dab in the middle of a political conflict and playing a dangerous part in it. Noelle's story follows the beat sheet very closely (at least from a very superficial analysis) and that doesn't make her story unexceptional... because her story is juicy, interesting and jam packed with action and nerve wrecking scenes. The structure itself has nothing to do with it. 

Also, the fact that the story starts with a punchy action scene or dialogue doesn't mean it's starting in media res - it could still be showing the protagonist's life that just happens to be jam packed with adventure.

I could go into it, and most of the literature on it is really interesting read, but that's not why I'm here.

I'm here for the in media res start of a story. Plenty of really amazing literary works start that way like Hamlet, The Odyssey and also in cinema. I agree with you that starting in media res is punchy and interesting and perfectly suited for action novels or noir films. In the BS2, it would pretty much mean you skipped an entire act of beats and that you started the story AFTER the conflict has already been presented and, honestly, that's a perfectly legit way of doing things, historically and structurally speaking - it's just not usual, and that's what makes it great. 

I guess what I'm saying is that using a Beat Sheet structure or starting in media res are both historical and perfectly sound ways of doing it.

Maria

Edited February 5, 2020 by tatapb

[Oregonian]

 

4 hours ago, tatapb said:

Hey Vicki!

I read this a couple of days ago and I really wanted to say something but wasn't sure if I could (this looks like a personal thread of sorts and I'm still figuring things out) but since Juls is also here, I wanted to also jump in! 



Hi, Maria @tatapb,

Yes, the Writer's Journals are personal threads, but they also are meant to be conversations with other members, so people write back and forth on these, discussing the topics in the journals as you just did, or asking questions about the person's writing, or just discussing the person's stories.  The people who maintain journals here love to get comments and questions, so don't hesitate to comment away.  On a slow afternoon you can look through all the journals here and comment on anything you find interesting, and you can start your own journal too, if you haven't already.                                                                              

I read and enjoyed your comment this morning, shortly after you posted it, and will respond this evening after I get home from work.

Vicki 

[Oregonian]

On 2/5/2020 at 4:26 AM, juls said:

Hey, Vicki, it's me! Juls! Coming to visit your page and you for winning January's Word War in the Slytherin Common Room. 

1. What made you decide you were Slytherin out of all the four Houses?

2. What qualities from the other Houses (Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor) do you display?

3. If you could choose to be invisible or to fly - which would you choose?

Hi juls,

1.  What made you decide you were Slytherin out of all the four Houses?

Actually I didn't decide at all.  The first forum that I joined was Mugglenet Fan Fiction (MNFF), and on that forum one did not have a choice of Houses.  Like in the canon books, the Sorting Hat decided, and its decision was final.  When joining the site, you sent a PM to 'Sorting Hat', who responded by sending you a Sorting Hat quiz.  You sent your answers back to Sorting Hat and waited for the results.  I studied the quiz questions carefully, trying to see which answers would send a candidate into which Houses (there are lots of sorting quizzes available online, and some of them re pretty obvious), but I just couldn't see any correlations in the MNFF sorting quiz, so I finally gave up trying and just answered the questions honestly.  When I got my answer back from the Sorting Hat, it said, "Congratulations, you have been sorted into...Slytherin ..." and I just stared at it and though O. M. G.  Never had I dreamed that that would happen.  That would have been my last guess.  

Well, I was stuck with it.  All I knew abut Slytherin was what the canon books had showed --  that it contained a lot of jerks and criminals.  So after I had recovered from the shock, I crept into the Slytherin common room and lurked around for a while before starting to participate.  It was all confusing at first, but everyone there was so nice, friendly, and helpful. Later I did some statistical research about the Houses in MNFF and discovered that the other Houses were all triple the size of Slytherin, and I posted my speculations about why that was so.  Perhaps the enigmatic quiz, which one could not 'guy' for the purpose of gaining a certain desired House, really did Sort people according to their qualities.  Perhaps true Slytherin-types really are less common, by a factor of 3 to 1, than the other three types.  Perhaps some people, on being Sorted into Slytherin, dropped out because they did not want to be in the House of jerks and criminals.  Some of my MNFF friends in other Houses expressed their wish to have been Sorted into Slytherin.  (Since Harry asked not to be put into Slytherin and got his wish, I've seen lots of fanfics in which First Years are making special requests, as if the granting of special requests was common.  But I don't think it was.)

Since that day, seeing how nice real-life Slytherins are, I have been a staunch Slytherin, and over the years I can see that I do have some definite Slytherin qualities (but not a jerk or a criminal).  I'm ambitious.  I like to win.  I try to figure out the angles to help my group win.

2.  What qualities from the other Houses (Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, and Gryffindor) do you display?

I'm very Hufflepuff-esh in my loyalty to my group.  When it comes to work, I just keep plugging away, even when the rewards come few and far between.  I do not expect flash-in-the-pan results.  I work well as a member of a team.

When I take other Sorting tests, of which there are many, I usually (almost always) come out as a Ravenclaw.  it's true that I have a large assortment of random knowledge, and I enjoy learning for learning's sake, but I think that that MNFF test tapped something that these other tests don't.  My Head of House at MNFF told me that they had tried very hard to revise their Sorting test so that it could not be manipulated, and I think that they succeeded.

I don't see a lot of Gryffindor in me.  I'm not particularly brave and daring, certainly not rash or impetuous.  I think things through before I act and try to cover all my bases.

3.  If you could choose to be invisible or to fly, which would you choose?

I would choose to be invisible (my Slytherin nature() rather than to fly (my non-existent Gryffindor nature).  If I were invisible, I could go all sorts of places which would be otherwise not allowed (Harry did a lot of this) and learn a lot of stuff I wouldn't otherwise know.  If you combine invisibility with the ability to walk through walls (so that people would not see doors opening and closing by themselves), that would be perfect.  Flying like a bird would be fun, but people would see you, and that would freak them out.  I touched on this in my story Forgive Us Our Trespasses, although in that story the person was falsely accused; no one really saw her fly because she could not.

Thank you for these questions, juls. It was fun to think about them, and to walk down Memory Lane again about how I came to be a Slytherin.

 

[Oregonian]

Hi, Maria @tatapb,

I am getting back to you as I promised yesterday morning.  You're quite right in your concluding sentence, which sums it up nicely. "...using a Beat Structure or starting in media res are both historical and perfectly sound ways of doing it."  And you are spot on when you say "Plenty of exciting novels have the Beat Structure and they're still exciting -- the fanfics you read were unremarkable, but even if they had a different structure, odds are they would still have been unremarkable.  Starting a story in media res has the benefit of surprise, but it doesn't fix an inherently unexceptional story."

I wrote my first story, The Baby in the Closet, back in 2012, before I knew anything formal about story structure, but I immediately started to study the subject because, above all, I didn't want to embarrass myself by writing bad stories.  I vaguely recall that my first stab at an opening chapter was bland, not designed to capture anyone's interest to read further, so I discarded it and replaced it with the scene in which Harry dreams that he has murdered his newborn baby (a dream that I had, decades ago, around the birth of my first child).  I started buying books and CDs about fiction writing and learned about analytic story structure and was pleased to discover that The Baby in the Closet fit pretty well with the structure of The Hero's Journey.  I also read the advice not to begin a story with a dream sequence, but by that time I already knew that my dream sequence was working well for me.

Over the years I've amassed a stack of writing textbooks and completed a two-year academic curriculum in writing fiction, poetry, and screenplays.  (I would never have considered writing a screenplay without taking that curriculum; it's a very different technique from writing prose fiction, but I like it.)  These classes and books have helped a lot. I will confess I was unfamiliar with the name Blake Snyder.

Here's something funny.  I was at the annual Willamette Writers' Conference in Portland, Oregon, a few years back, and during one of the workshop slots I couldn't find any class I wanted to attend.  (You know how it is -- during some time slots there are 2 or 3 lectures you want to attend, and you wish you had Hermione's time turner, and in some other time slots there's nothing offered that appeals to you, and you fret about your expensive conference fee going to waste.)  So in this one time slot, no lecture appealed to me.  I finally ended up in a lecture about writing romance novels, the kind with brooding, dark-eyed heroes and impossibly beautiful heroines, often in period dress, on the book jackets.  I learned that these romance novels are written to obligatory strict standards; each publisher has its own list of requirements for each of the lines they publish.  For example, the young lady who was giving the lecture said, the first sexual encounter between the hero and the heroine must occur on page 79.  One of the writers in the audience said, "Shouldn't that be page 69?"  I had to smile, imagining the ladies who are romance fans going to the bookstore and checking page 79 in the new releases to see if they are satisfied with what they read there.

Vicki  

[Oregonian]

Hi, guys!  I'm feeling all perked up tonight because something good happened.  I received the Spring 2020 Class Schedule for the local college in the mail this afternoon, and I leafed through it per my usual custom, looking for something good.  I checked the course listings for the Writing Department, and lo and behold!  There was a listing for WRITING 246, Advanced Creative Writing -- Editing and Publishing!  This is the last course that I need to take to qualify for the Creative Writing Concentration Award, and it hasn't been offered since at least 2014, which is when I started taking the creative writing curriculum.  I don't even know when it was last offered.  I don't know why it's being offered, all of a sudden.  Maybe it's a matter of finding someone to teach it or of finding enough money in the budget to add this class.   

So now I'm all excited, and I've plotted out all the class dates (it starts on March 30 and runs through June 12).  Some of it will be online, so the only in-person class I will have to miss will be April 22 because I will be in Maryland then.  Each class session is a 40-mile round trip, but in the spring the weather's not bad. The focus is on editing other people's manuscripts, but that cannot fail to help me edit my own manuscripts.  To that end, I've hauled out my Editing and Revisions textbook and will try to read through it again before the class starts.  

So glad that I didn't give up and stop checking the course offerings every term. 

[Oregonian]

I was thinking again about my poem Narcissa in the Forest, which @Noelle Zingarella so kindly nominated for a FROG award, and I noticed that it had two recurring motifs, each of which occurred at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the poem.  These were 'Draco' and 'lies'.  "Forgiveness' was also mentioned.  Then I realized that two of my recent works also focused on lies and forgiveness.  Those would be the short story Forgive Us Our Trespasses  and the screen play Relics.  (What?  You haven't read the final Act of Relics yet?  You gotta do that.)

By coincidence, my book study group at my church has been reading and discussing The Book of Forgiving, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, over the past few months, so the two things, my writing and my reading, have complemented each other.  I think back on my stories in the light of what I have been learning in this discussion group, and it seems to expand or enrich the understanding of the forgiveness.

[Oregonian]

Still thinking about Narcissa.  Some people have remarked that it is surprising that Voldemort, known as an expert Occlumens , did not detect that Narcissa was lying to him in the Forbidden Forest scene when she told him Harry was dead.  (Obviously he didn't know, because that's how JKR wrote it.)  I noted that Voldemort staggered back and fell to the ground after AK-ing Harry, although he had AKed many people previously without suffering such a reaction.  His present reaction may have been caused by the fact that he had just unwittingly AKed a piece of his own soul which he did not know was lodged inside Harry.  Voldemort may have been sufficiently shaken up at this point that he was unable to think clearly at first.  And Harry looked dead, and Voldemort had never known the AK curse not to work in the past, so he had little reason to seriously doubt Harry's death or to entertain the notion that Narcissa could be lying.  She was not one of his active Death Eaters but merely an adjunct to her husband Lucius; Voldemort had never had any interest in probing her mind.

I see a strong parallel with Lily Evans Potter here.  Lily defied Voldemort and willingly put herself in mortal danger to protect the son she loved, paying the ultimate price, but her love protected her son and dealt Voldemort a bitter blow.  Similarly. Narcissa defied Voldemort and willingly put herself in mortal danger (if Voldemort detected her lie) in order to protect the son she loved by keeping both Harry and the Resistance alive.  This ultimately dealt Voldemort the fatal blow.  Unlike Lily, Narcissa did survive.  

In the final duel in the Great Hall, Harry attributes his triumph to the fact that his mother died for him and that he himself was willing to die for all the people (although it turned out that he didn't have to actually die).  I wonder if Narcissi's willingness to risk her life to save Harry and ultimately Draco too counted for something in that final duel.

[grumpy cat]

3 minutes ago, Oregonian said:

 I wonder if Narcissi's willingness to risk her life to save Harry and ultimately Draco too counted for something in that final duel.

i love to imagine that it did. on the topic of occlumency - i headcanon narcissa as being a skilled occlumens because to survive that long with voldy under her roof....it just makes sense. probably/maybe all black sisters learned to defend themselves from legilimency.

[Oregonian]

I just put two poems into the queue.  They are formal poetry, in the forms of a Villanelle and a Sestina, a little tricky to write but fun to do, one serious and one more light-hearted.

 Looking though my documents, I see lots of short (under 1000 words) pieces I wrote in the past, often for assignments in which half a dozen specific words were supposed to be embedded in the text.  They should really be posted, perhaps as chapters in an overall title of "Find The Hidden Words".  They were pretty cute.

Does anybody think that I am procrastinating in working on my WIP The Crofter and the Snake?  Oh, heaven forbid that anyone should think so!

[Guest Noelle Zingarella]

2 hours ago, Oregonian said:

Does anybody think that I am procrastinating in working on my WIP The Crofter and the Snake?  Oh, heaven forbid that anyone should think so!

It's marinading--it'll be all the better when you go back to it

What's your favorite poetry form to write? To read?

[Oregonian]

Thank you for commenting in my writer's journal, Noelle!

My excuses:  I'm writing reviews for the Emerald versus Silver Review Contest in Slytherin House, although Team Emerald has no chance of winning unless all the Silver Team suffer sudden catatonia.  And I'm looking back at my cache of documents and seeing that there's a lot of good stuff there that I could put into the queue.  When I go to the Thursday afternoon writers' gatherings at the library and we do little 10- or 15-minute writing bits inspired by prompts, I always write something, a few paragraphs, that could fit into the world of my WIP.  The other writers recognize that now, and one woman asked me if I actually use these little snippets in my story, and I said that I keep them, to see if there is a moment here or there in the story where they could be slotted in.

The kind of poetry that I like to read most of all would be the long poems, narratives that run to hundred of lines and cover a lot of ground. An example would be "The Deserted Village"(430 lines) by Oliver Goldsmith, published in 1770, described as "...contemporary conditions in the ancient villages of England, where the Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution were in his time swiftly destroying a pattern of life which had endured for more than a thousand years."  (Quote from my husband's old textbook, The College Survey of English Literature [1949].)  These poems  contain a lot of meat and are worth reading.  The long old alliterative poems are often exciting stories, and I love the way they use the language.

By their meter and their alliteration or rhyme they are easy to memorize (something I have done since childhood with shorter poems), so that bards (even if illiterate) can recite them for the enjoyment of the crowds.  My daughter memorized enough of "Morte d'Arthur" by Tennyson that she could recite it for ten minutes while jogging; that must have been about 300 lines.  My longest memorized section, from "The Lay of Leithian," comprised 150 lines, or 5 1/2 minutes. 

I write free verse only rarely, when the subject seems to call for it (such as "The Reinvented Self").  Otherwise it's formal verse, sometimes in a specific form, such as a sonnet or villanelle or sestina, but more often a simple form, rhyming couplets (such as "The Hourglasses") or quatrains with various rhyme schemes (such as "My House Is Empty and My Family Dead").  This is not difficult, perhaps as a result of a lifetime of singing (structured poetry set to music).  It's harder to decide what I want to say than to figure out how to put it into verse.  My daughter (who knows everything; I shake my head in astonishment at having produced such a prodigy, don't ask me how that happened) says that the money these days is not in publishing slim volumes of free verse but in writing song lyrics.  So far, nothing that I have written has been set to music.

 

MNFF had a rich, vigorous poetry forum with some really excellent poets, monthly poetical instruction, and much mutual support.  We each had our own poetry thread, commented on and critiqued each other's work, and put our best efforts into the general archive.  When I started posting my writings on HPFF, I saw that they didn't post poetry, so I was really glad to see that HPFT did.  Maybe there is a gradual growth of poetry focus on this site.  This year we have a specific FROG award for poetry.  I was happy to see that.  

[Oregonian]

Okay, guys, I was a better writer today.  I was working in the hospital gift shop (a volunteer gig that I do for four hours once every week or two), but there's not a lot of traffic in the gift shop on Friday afternoons, so I can also do some reading or writing.  I worked on Chapter 5  of my WIP,  jotting down ideas of what to include, introducing a main character and trying to characterize her, outlining brief sequences of possible dialogue, and trying to think of how to make this chapter have that special sparkle.

I also read an article in a magazine dated last November, in which the author, who teaches creative writing to MFA graduate students, was talking about NaNoRiMo, explaining to the readers what that was.  She spoke of the value of just writing a whole lot of words without paralyzing oneself through anxiety about the perceived imperfections of this first draft.  She spoke of encouraging her MFA students to dare to write longer stuff, say, 20,000 words, because they were stuck on short stories and didn't write anything more lengthy.  

I thought to myself, "My gosh!  None of us are going to be awarded a MFA degree in Creative Writing for the stories we post here on HPFT, but we dare to forge ahead and write plenty of stories that are 20,000 words long, and much, much longer.  We should never sell ourselves short, or think that we're not good enough.  Heck, compared to some people..."

[Oregonian]

Today I got the idea to take the best of the short (under 1,000 words) pieces that I have written over time, some as assigned exercises for HP writing classes, some some that required the use of six specific words to be used in the story, some that I-don't-remember-why-I-wrote-them, and post them all as unconnected chapters under one overall title, a pot pourri of many tiny stories all tied together with a shiny red ribbon bow.

I started opening these documents and reading them -- a wide, wide variety of characters, eras, situations, moods, themes.  By chance I opened the 'least inspired' of them first and began to think This was a bad idea, but the ones I opened later were better, not so cringe-worthy, so I think I will do it.  

Some pieces are unusable because they are early versions of the opening scenes of later stories.  Some lame pieces were written for assignments or prompts where I just didn't have any good ideas.  Some are just bad writing -- plodding, never got off the ground.  

But there are a dozen or so that I would dare to share, ones that might be the germ for a longer story, or a scene within a longer story.  It's hard to write very short stories that are good and satisfying.

[Guest Noelle Zingarella]

19 hours ago, Oregonian said:

I thought to myself, "My gosh!  None of us are going to be awarded a MFA degree in Creative Writing for the stories we post here on HPFT, but we dare to forge ahead and write plenty of stories that are 20,000 words long, and much, much longer.  We should never sell ourselves short, or think that we're not good enough.  Heck, compared to some people..."

I strongly feel that the difference between "Original Fiction" and "Fanfiction" is much more of a legal issue than a creative one. We might not be able to sell our fanfiction for money; but there are for sure stories in these very archives that are of a quality that COULD be sold, were copyright laws not effect. And Fanfiction is almost as old as fiction itself (the Aenied, the corpus of Arthurian Legend, the matter of France, etc). 

Anyway, you're right--we're totally good enough.

27 minutes ago, Oregonian said:

But there are a dozen or so that I would dare to share, ones that might be the germ for a longer story, or a scene within a longer story.  It's hard to write very short stories that are good and satisfying.

I'm so excited to see these!

[Oregonian]

Okay, @Noelle Zingarella, I'll post the little short pieces as unconnected chapters under one title, Tied with a Shiny Red Ribbon, after the FROGs are over, and after I figure out how to fill out the story shell -- I guess it would be "One Shot/Short Story Collection.  That seems about right.  One little story every week or two weeks, to string it out over a few months.

[Oregonian]

I finally finished doing my FROGS reading and voting  today, so now I should turn my attention  to my author page.  Went to the writers' group meeting at the public library on Thursday afternoon, where we do a couple of little spontaneous writes to prompts and then read what we have written.  There is a guy there named Stephen who always writes in verse, and it's really good, -- good meter, rhyme, images, word choices concepts -- and I am envious at how quickly he can produce this stuff, in just ten minutes, say.  Jealous.  I cannot produce satisfactory poetry that fast (most of the time; I did do some fast stuff in Creative Writing Poetry class at the college, but not often).

One of the women at the writers' group mentioned that there was a poetry group that meets once a month at a little cafe in town; people bring their poetry (7 or 8 copies to share) and members give each other on-the-spot critiques.  That sounded interesting,.  It will meet in a couple of days, so I think that I will check it out.

Got a  telephone call from my youngest brother this evening just to chat.  He said that he and my middle brother had so much fun coming down from Washington state last August to help me with my heavy-duty yard work, that they'd like to do it again!  That would be great, both to see them because they're  a lot of fun, and because one thing that slows down my writing during the growing season is the long, long hours that I put in on yard work.  (The past few days I've been doing yard work at my church, to make up for that fact that I completely forgot about the scheduled church yard work day on Saturday, February 29 and failed to show up.  )  Then when I get back from the church I'm all tired out and just vege out on the sofa.

[Oregonian]

It's been while since I wrote anything in my writer's journal.  What a strange year it has been. Shellshocked by the coronavirus pandemic and then the lockdown, swamped with work in my college class which lasted from the first of April to the middle of June, then blindsided when the priest of my church suddenly had to go on extended medical leave, leaving me (the Senior Warden) and my good buddy the Junior Warden to pick up the pieces and keep the church going under the conditions of Zoom meetings and online worship services.  We had another church yard work day on June 27 (our grounds were looking as shaggy as my present hairstyle) and I was blown away by how many people showed up to help (with masks and good social distancing, of course).   But we hear that our priest is doing much better and may be back in mid-August; I certainly hope so. (At least I'm glad it didn't happen in winter.)

Today I made a telephone call to an insurance company having to do with medical bills, and I knew from experience that I would be on hold for at least a half an hour with this turkey company, because that's how it always is with them--they blame it on the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were always a turkey company, even before--so while I was sitting there with the telephone tucked against my ear, listening to classical music (at least it was better than the elevator music they usually play), I spread out the contents of my portfolio where I keep all the papers having to do with The Crofter and the Snake, sorting them into functional piles, and then started reading the pile of plots outlines, possible details and events that might happen in this story, motivations and internal conflicts, and so on.  There was actually a lot more there than I had realized--I've been jotting down pages of ideas and shoving them in this portfolio for a few years--and I was surprised about how much useful stuff was in there.  Still some gaping narrative holes, of course, but a lot of good stuff.  There were ideas for good material that would have gone into the first four chapters (now already written) and which I think I might be able to feed back into the later narratives as comments to later events, or flashback thoughts by my main character.  To my surprise, I ended up being on hold for only seventeen minutes, some kind of record for this insurance company.

Meanwhile, I will dust off my short stories and post them as a collection, as previously promised but never done.  

A wave of the hand to everyone  

Vicki

[Oregonian]

Now I have posted the first chapter of my collection of Harry Potter vignettes, little under-1000-word stories of many different well-loved and also lesser-known characters, all Tied With A Shiny Red Ribbon.

It is sad to have all these things that never see the light of day, so I will post them, one by one as chapters in this single story, one- and two-minute reads, but hopefully amusing or thought-provoking or hinting at a larger story hiding just behind the curtain.