Finding the stillcenter

One month from today, I will be arriving here:

photo by schurch, morguefile.com

As you might guess, planning is making life a bit hectic. It's my fourth trip to the UK, but instead of being in a college program, on a bus tour, or having a romantic getaway with my hubby, I'll be taking a family trip. It's my 10-year-old daughter's first  time off the continent of North America, and we'll be renting a car and driving. On the left side of the road. Yeah. A many of new adventures lie ahead.

My day job tends to get very hectic in late May, when all the college professors get busy with summer writing projects and submissions to scholarly journals like the one I work on.

Promoting my novel and poetry collection continues to take my time in dribs and drabs.

And then there's the new novel, crying for my attention.

It's so easy on days like this to scurry from thing to thing and feel like I never fully engaged with anything.

That, friends, is "attention splatter," a helpful concept in the social media-soaked world. This article by Christine Kane explains it well.

She recommends having fewer priorities a day. Awesome. I'd love that. However, I can't control my agenda to that degree. I can, however, build pockets of focus into my day.

How? Set aside "sprint hours" and "concentration hours." In other words, give yourself pockets of quiet to do focused work, then at set intervals, deal with the small tasks that tend to interrupt: check and respond to e-mail, make a call or two, pop onto Facebook or Twitter.

Then stop.

Breathe.

Get up and walk a little. Drink a glass of water. Say a prayer or hail the muse.

Sit. Sink into your stillcenter.

Dig in to your next concentrated task with your full attention.

Do you have certain times of year that bring more "attention splatter"? How do you cope?

See, place or quote? Using sight, site and cite

In my continuing series Homophone Helps, we'll be looking at three sound-alikes I've frequently seen confused both online and in some self-published books. Getting a handle on which word belongs in which context is so important because, for the most part, your computer's spell check won't catch this sort of error.

Sight

Photo credit: blackbird for morguefile.com

(n.) the power or ability to see; perception; something that is seen; a device that helps the eye aim at or find the direction of an object; aspiration.

(v., trans.) to catch a glimpse of; to aim using a sight; to test the straightness of

(v., intrans) to aim; to look carefully in one direction

Examples
That was a sight for sore eyes!

Jose lost his sight in the accident; now he's learning Braille.

Cullen caught his prey in the rifle sight.

She set her sights on winning the scholarship.

He sighted Melody coming across the field toward him.

That sharpshooter can sight targets a hundred yards away.

Mnemonic
Glasses and goggles protect your sight.

Site

(n.) the location of an actual or planned structure; the scene, point or place of an event or occurrence

photo credit: morguefile.com

(v., trans) to place in position or at a location

Examples
The new building site has marvelous views of the river.

Dr. Hendrix pinpointed the site of the tumor.

Mack sited the fountain a few feet from the path.

Mnemonic
He has a bump on the site where the mite did bite.

Cite

Photo: johninportland; morguefile.com

(v., trans.) to quote as an authority, example or proof; to refer to; to bring to another's attention; to call upon officially or authoritatively to appear

The noun form is citation.

Examples
Gladys frequently cited her yogi's words of wisdom.

If you're going to quote Faulkner in your essay, be sure to correctly cite the source and pages.

Lia was cited for failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.

Mnemonic
Carefully cross-reference what you cite in this composition.


Here's a tough one for you: Do you go to see the sights? or the sites?

Context is everything! If you mean "stuff to be seen," like vistas or exciting venues, it's sights.
If you mean locations for a specific purpose, like where buildings will go up or film will be shot, it's sites.

Which of these trip you up? Any other homophones you'd like me to tackle?

Stolen from poets: "Make it new"

"Make it new" declared Ezra Pound (1885-1972), a statement that became a rallying cry to the generation of early 20th century writers  we now call the Modernists. Nearly 100 years later, we still love a few of their favorite poetics tools to make writing fresh and zingy: neologism and portmanteau.

Don't be alarmed by the highfalutin' names. These two techniques are about breaking the rules. When you can't find the perfect word, you make one up. What could be more fun than that?

Neologism, from the Greek roots neo/new and logos/word, means an invented word. Lewis Carroll popularized the practice with his poem "Jabberwocky" in which he coined a number of terms, from galumphing to slithy. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake contains hundreds, including nebuless,  goddinpotty,bisaacles.

Neologisms can be especially helpful for conveying the thoughts of someone a bit different from the average thinker. In Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon, Charlie's intelligence level is shown to be lacking through his use of not-quite-right terms including rilax, compushishens, telld. It's considerably more effective than simply telling us through a third-person narrator that Charlie has mental retardation.

I'm a fan of using neologisms for sound effect purposes--onomatopoeic neologism, for those of you who like fancy terminology. In my novel Never Gone, footsteps across icy snow "sloosh nearer." Later in the scene, simple, unadorned sound heightens the spookiness of the moment: "Chush. Chush. Chush."  

photo by mzacha, morguefile.com

Portmanteau, or pieced-together words, gets its name from a piece of luggage with two sides that's hinged in the middle. Lewis Carroll was the coiner of this use of the word.

Shakespeare was the king of portmanteau, inventing new words such as madcap and lackluster. Loads of writers since then have been coining these "siamixed" kinds of words (to steal from Joyce): Sylvia Plath gave us "a Meinkampf look" (making an adjective of Hitler's book Mein Kampf); George Orwell gave us "newspeak."

Portmanteau is probably the very best tool for naming some future technology so that it will still be understandable to contemporary readers. In Dune, Frank Herbert called his flying machines "ornithopters," combining the Greek words for bird and wing, giving readers a picture of  how the machines might look in flight.

Our culture has really run with this poetic tool, coining new terms at an unprecedented rate. We are all quick to take up terms like "Frankenfood," "netiquitte," "frappuccino" because they are readily understood and define well the qualities of some new phenomenon.

Portmanteau can also be wonderfully playful, a great way to pump up character voice. You get a very strong sense of someone who finds the new guy "adorkable" or who becomes "aggrannoyed" about the long line at the supermarket.

Your turn:
How might you incorporate some coined terms to jazz up your writing?

Verse averse? Why you should try poetry

I'm over at Tyrean Martinson's blog today, explaining why fiction writers should include poetry reading in their craft-building self-education, in a post titled "Why read poetry?".

Poets have plenty to teach you about how to use words powerfully, how to employ sound and rhythm to undergird the action and emotion in your work, and how to conquer wordiness. You might be surprised to know that even genre-based magazines--romance, fantasty, SciFi, horror--often publish poems. So if form scares you off, perhaps content will make the prospect a bit more enticing.

I hope to speak more specifically about some of these things in an ongoing series "Stolen from Poets." My first post, on using vowel power to ramp up emotion, is HERE.

Are you verse averse? How might you overcome it?

Thankful

April is drawing to a close, and as I look back on the month, I'm thankful for so many things.

~My wonderful hosts for my mini-tour of Muddy-Fingered Midnights.

~National Poetry Month, making it cool to love and write poetry. 

~My critique group, who helped me get unstuck with the WIP.

~My friends who let me badger them with medical questions. (Why in-person research rocks).

~The Irish dance hard shoes given to my daughter for free. Riverdance, here we come!

~My new editing client. Excited to edit poetry! Woot!

~The cool series idea Stina gave me: "Stolen from Poets," in which I explain how to use poetic techniques in fiction. Stay tuned for more!

~The A-Z challenge making my blog slacking acceptable. Congrats to those who persevered with it!

What are you thankful for today?

How to save your life

I'm the featured guest today on "Artist Unleashed" series over at Jessica Bell's blog The Alliterative Allomorph, talking about how to preserve your life experiences patchwork-style. You might be too young to write a memoir, but your life experiences are worth capturing now, before they lose their keen freshness. I suggest why and how in my post "Save Your Life: a Patchwork Approach."

If you ever get writer's block, this post is for you. If you think poetry is impossible to write, this post is for you, too.

Stolen from poets: ramp up emotion with vowel power

I've asserted in previous posts that studying poetry will make you a better writer, no matter what genre you aspire to master. Poetry uses a number of techniques that I believe are quite transferable to other kinds of writing.

Today, I'll begin a short series called "Stolen from poets" that explores some of those techniques and how to use them in your own writing. I'll try to keep these brief and focused, tackling one technique at a time.

Sound devices, part 1: Assonance

The thinking behind sound devices is often onomatopoetic; the sound and meaning are linked.Today I'd like to focus specifically on assonance--repeated vowel sounds--and how they can carry emotions.

morguefile.com

Consider these examples. Say them aloud. How do they make you feel?

1. John groped for his coat in hopes the Tylenol bottle hadn’t dropped through the hole in his pocket.

2. Lisa worried they'd think her rude if she cooed at their cute baby, so she chewed her lip while brooding on his tiny blue shoes.

3. Wading deeper into the creek, Ross felt the coldness seep through his sneakers. Shining eyes seemed to peek through the reeds. A cheeping frog sent a shriek of fear streaking up his spine, but he ground his teeth. Must stay silent. Must not be weak.


In my first example, Can you feel John's inner ache? The repeated oh, oh, aah, ahh,make the passage seem to moan and groan on the page. The repeated O sounds (both short and long) make you verbalize John's pain response.

In my second example, Lisa's entire inner monologue does coo at the cute baby, even if she refuses to do it aloud. The repeated long U sound carries it. This is an excellent, subtle way to add layers of meaning to your character's thoughts. Characters might consciously deny something while the sounds in their words convey a deeper, hidden, unconscious desire for the denied thing.

In my third example, the creepy feeling is reinforced by a series of little shrieks, like one might hear upon having a bug scurry over bare skin: Eeek! Ross is screaming inside, even if he's being tough and silent on the outside.

Your turn:
Chose an emotion you want to convey and think of the most primal sound you associate with it, such as Os for groaning with pain, Es for screaming with fright. Write a sentence, paragraph or scene in which you repeat the sounds.

Hint: a rhyming dictionary will help you identify words with the vowel sounds you need.

How might you use this technique today to improve your writing?