Category: Art & Craft (Page 13 of 17)

off to LA today for the 41st annual Los Angeles SCBWI Conference.  It is always a treat, and I am grateful to be able to go, meet other RA/ARA/IC’s domestic and international. It’s also a time to scout out the editors and agents and published authors and try and convince them that coming to the Carolinas is a good thing. And, it’s not that hard, both Earl and Stephanie conducted business for the region at a very high standard and we have an excellent reputation as a region. Kinda makes it nice.

The best part of this is the fact that it’s like summer writer camp [okay for illustrators it is like summer drawing camp] and there is constant discussion about the art and craft of writing.  When Bayley was a junior at Chatham Hall, she did a month long camp at Duke’s Young Writer’s Camp. When we picked her up she waxed eloquently about the fact that no matter where you went on the campus, there were groups of kids sitting around talking about writing. It didn’t matter if it was before breakfast, at lunch or in the hallways of the dorm at 9:00 at night. Writing was the topic. Newspapers. Essays. Short Stories. Poems. Any type of writing was up for discussion.  LA works the same way, except it’s specifically about children’s literature; short stories, non-fiction, picture books, middle grade and young adult.

Doesn’t matter if you are a kid or an adult, if writing is your passion, writer’s camp is the place to be…

it seems my life is a round robin of administration, writing, solitaire, cooking, cleaning, eating, TV, reading, although certainly not in that order and maybe even not that consistently done. The maintenance stuff, eating, cooking, cleaning,  is done with little or no thought, well, maybe a little thought to get through it. The thought is not always connected to the activity. Power washing the front and backyard walks was a good time to mind-ramble as I stood, waving the wand back and forth, cleaning the dirt off the concrete. But maintenance activities are different from administration, you have to think to administrate.

Administration from the original latin  administrate meaning [according to the University of Notre Dame Latin Language site] giving of help. Seriously? How many of us think of administration as giving of help. Maybe when we use it as a verb, as to administer which comes from the late Middle English: via Old French from Latin administrare, from ad- ‘to’ + ministrare give help or service.

Administration has become a word of burden, onus, mind numbing activity. Negative. Less to do with helping and more to do with the plethora of paperwork and red-tape and regulation, policies and procedures. Okay, self confession, I love policies and procedures. I think there is something hard-wired into some brains and not in others. Bayley and I seem to live with regulation tattooed on our spines. Meghan, I would think, not so much. Tom, hardly at all.

And, it’s sad that administrate is seen in a negative way, sometimes derogatory way. Think of other words that are thought of as negative;  bureaucracy, politics, liberal, conservative, bully. Bureaucracy was simply a system of government where the officials made the decisions. Politic at one time was being judicious under certain circumstances.  Liberal could mean used in generous amounts or broadly understood. Conservative was able to conserve, holding traditional values. And bully, at one time a term of endearment, or approval, i.e., bully for him.

I suppose it is a part of language to evolve. Like Gay now being ascribed to a sexual lifestyle when it used to be a term for ‘carefree, lighthearted, showy, bright. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorcee.  Sometimes I think it’s sad that some words have been turned against themselves.

Regardless, it is time for administration, no not a burden, but a fact.

like the fact that time is finite for me,  I think words that can come out of my brain may be finite as well. So, too many conversations, and yes, I do like to talk, too many postings on FB or too many emails, and I feel like I run out of words. Well. not words really, but the ways to put them together. I mean, I want the words to form ideas, pictures, bring forth emotions, stupefy, amaze. Which is really silly to the point of ridiculous. I mean, not many can put words together to do that. Sometimes I think we give far to many people credit for doing it, and then when you find a sentence, an essay or a story that does just that [the stupefy and amaze thing] well, you think all the good words have been used up. There aren’t many left.

I’m not a huge sports fan. S’matter of fact I rarely read the sports section, of any paper. But I have become a fan of Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal. In a recent article about  Rafe Nadal  he put you right there at the Wimbledon Men’s Finals when he opened with He invited him to a business lunch, and fired him. That’s what it felt like—brisk, efficient and a little ruthless. Rafael Nadal had been reeling Sunday, up two sets to one but drained of momentum when the rain opened up…Nadal scowled at the delay…but overnight in Paris, under a tarp cover, the red-brick dust got drier, and everyone knew what that meant. Nadal would be back in his kitchen, with his knife.  The paragraph builds, the sentences move you forward from one day to the next. Suddenly it’s Monday. Do you not see Nadal dissect Djokovic?

And Novak tries, he works it… Nobody makes reckless look more sensible than Djokovic, and on a muddy court, he began waving his forehand like a flamethrower, taking criminal chances. Yes, that is exactly the way Djokovic plays, and the imagery is extraordinary.

I read two newspapers per day, plus a book or two a week, depending, and I write, and answer emails and think. And, I’m pretty happy when I can read a sentence that forms ideas, pictures, brings forth emotions, supplies and amazes. And then I realize there are a ginormous number of words,  reusable, recyclable, retrievable, able to be reformed and made new. And. I am inspired.

…as a writer you keep building the upside down pyramid. You start with words. The right word. You think of what the word means to you or how it sounds. Words are more than just meaning, they can be picture like beach, or lake or hideaway. They can be memory like mother or father.  They can be fun like onomatopoeia: boom, cuckoo, zap. But they don’t make sense. So, next are phrases, grouping words to make some sort of unit but unable to make sense because they are just a part of a whole. So, clauses, the next level up, the words strung together to express an idea and, more importantly, to put an idea out there that others, those not privy to what’s inside your head, can understand. And, then, once you’ve sequenced the words in the order that makes you feel you have a valid idea, Voila! you have a paragraph. 

Makes you wonder, well, makes me wonder.  Word. ORIGIN Old English , of Germanic origin; related to Dutch woord and German Wort, from an Indo-European root shared by Latin verbum ‘word.’

Then phrase. Apparently, it took us a bit of time to get to the next step. ORIGIN mid 16th cent. (in the sense [style or manner of expression] ): vialate Latin from Greek phrasis, from phrazein ‘declare, tell.’

But a phrase doesn’t declare or tell, it sort of relates, because then we have a clause. ORIGIN Middle English : via Old French clause, based on Latin claus-‘shut, closed,’ from the verb claudere. So, closed? as in done? Or closed as secure, finished?

Paragraphs may be my favorites. ORIGIN late 15th cent.: from French paragraphe, via medieval Latinfrom Greek paragraphos ‘short stroke marking a break in sense,’ from para– ‘beside’ + graphein ‘write.’  LOL, to write beside?  I like the Greek better, making a break in sense. According to the Writing Center at UNC Chapel Hill, the unity and coherence of ideas among sentences is what constitutes a paragraph. That works really well for a non-fiction, essay, scholastic paper, but fiction? Creative fiction?

For me, a paragraph is what takes the words that evoke memory and pictures, put them together in phrases where the words are surrounded other words giving direction, then formed into clauses that are each finished in their own way, grouping into a paragraph that moves your forward into your story. Because story is ALWAYS the end result.

so, no, I didn’t write on Monday. Brain overload, well, no, not that. It’s more like processing. I need to process the information. Sort of like marinating meat, i.e., marinate |ˈmarəˌnāt|verb [ trans. ]soak. Yep. That’s it. Soak. Soak in, through, around and go deep.

One of the best things about the workshop with Cheryl Klein was the opportunity to focus on my own WIP and by that I mean think about what she was saying in relation to my own writing.

What a gift! Made me think that even though there were fifty people in the room, it felt very intimate and personal. This workshop, co-sponsored between SCBWI Carolinas and SCBWI Midsouth,  gave new meaning to plot, both action and emotion.

There were two teaching methods she provided, making this possible. One, via the pre-conference assignments, I worked so intimately and completely with my story that as Ms. Klein made comments about types of plot, or the inciting emotional event of the story, I was able to *know* exactly where that was in mine. And, two, by telling us right up front she would be giving us access to her presentation, all 82 pages, it was not necessary to take notes about anything other that what jumped out in relation to our story.

So. I’m off to marinate some more. Soak, souse, immerse, bathe. And end up with a superior work than I ever imagined.