I is for . . .

Irony. It's not that interesting, but go here if you want to know more; I'm going fishing.

H is for . . .

“Hello Country Bumpkin,” which miraculously made it to #1 on the country music charts in 1974 . . . and which tops my list of baa-a-d country songs! Here’s a sample of the lyrics for those of you fortunate enough to miss it:

He walked into the bar and placed his lanky frame upon a tall bar stool

and with a long soft southern drawl he said I’ll take a glass of anything

that’s cool

A bar-room girl with wise and knowing eyes slowly looked him up and down

And she thought I wonder how on earth this country bumpkin found his way

to town

She said “Hello, Country Bumpkin. How’s the frost out on the pumpkin?

I’ve seen some sights but man you’re somethin’

Where’d you come from country bumpkin?

Questions:

Is there another word in any language that rhymes with “bumpkin” and “pumpkin”? Oh yeah, I forgot—there’s “somethin’”!

How often have you heard someone step up to the bar and order “anything that’s cool”? (Wouldn’t it be funny if the bartender brought him a mug of Freon ®?)

Could the fact that “cool” happens to rhyme with “stool” explain this line?

And then, on the opposite side of the country music spectrum (and it’s a wide, wide one, folks), there’s . . . Hank. 

“No matter how you struggle and strive, you’ll never get out of this world alive.”

So, tell me. What tops your bad song list?

G is for . . .

Good grief, Charlie Brown! I can’t decide.

There’s God, the original eye in the sky and the author of everything.

There’s green, my favorite color. My back yard is so vividly green right now, I must squint to take it in. 

Soon, I shall plow up the stony ground and plant a green (organic) garden, while Google Earth passes by on its spy route, snapping pictures as I weed or sunbathe. (The pervert.) 

And then there’s Grace. A lovely word—it’s onomatopoeic, don’t you think? 

Grace is doing something difficult and making it look easy. Graceful prose is a virtuoso performance, usually achieved only after years of apprenticeship and practice.

And yet, while prose certainly should be graceful—its workings should be as invisible as possible to the reader—it shouldn’t always sound graceful. 

Short, staccato sentences make for tension, suspense, or melodrama. “He drew his gun and pointed it at her. She froze.” Tick. “The door swung open. He wheeled and fired.” Tock. 

Long sentences, full of clauses and commas, slow the flow and make the reader pay attention—or lose interest. Prose like this may sound scholarly and wise—or obtuse and mincing, depending upon such things as vocabulary and tone. 

Use passive voice (yes, you have my permission) and the presence of the actor-subject is protectively hidden from view. “The photos were taken in the heat of the day.” This is the perfect ploy for spies, politicians, puppet-masters, and magicians. (And aren’t writers a bit like all four?)

What prose devices do you use and to what effect?

Attempting a graceful exit, I’ll just say, ’til Monday . . .

Goodbye!

F is for . . .

Faith. It’s one of those things we have whether we’re aware of it or not. It’s not a question of “if” but “what” we believe. 

On the relationship between faith and reason, some agree with Aquinas, who wrote that faith isn’t opposed to reason but is its corollary. Reason establishes that which is logical (reasonable) to believe and faith begins there. 

But others (Bahnsen, for one) disagree. They contend that reason doesn’t begin to function until faith is operational. To try and use logic on “ultimate” questions, such as human purpose in creation, is like trying to measure celestial music with a teaspoon!

Whether you believe in a Creator God, the Big Bang theory or both/neither, you probably agree that writing requires some measure of faith. The successful writer must believe that she has: 

1) some talent to begin with (a gift)
2) something important to say
3) the ability to work out the difficulties of craft—plot, characterization, theme, etc.—in a satisfactory and engaging way

4) the possibility of eventually reaching at least one reader—preferably an editor.

And then? That she’ll be able to do it again.

E is for . . .

E is for Exaggerate, which is something I always do. Well . . . almost always.

E is for edit, which is something I can’t not do.

E is also for Endings.

Since right now I know more about beginning a novel than ending one, I’m having a mild emotional meltdown. Will I ever make it to the middle, much less the end of a novel? 

E is for excuses. “The sun was in my eyes,” is the classic Little Leaguer’s excuse for missing the pop fly.  I probably have as many variations on this classic whine as there are freckles on a redhead.

Finally, E is for Easter. My savior Christ suffered as I do—though he was innocent and I am not—but then He defeated death, rose from the tomb, and yet lives. 

The Son is in my eyes! I see; therefore, I write.

D is for . . .

Dialogue—or should I say dragon?

When I first set myself the goal of learning to write, I avoided dialogue as if it were a fire-breathing dragon. Gabriel Garcia Marquez managed to write Love in the Time of Cholera without a single word of dialogue, his narrative voice ancient-sounding and epic. 

But yours truly? Not quite there yet. My prose without dialogue was just an abandoned stage set.

 “What’d you do?” you ask.

“I faced my fear. I listened  to people talk and wrote lots and lots of dialogue.”

“Did it work?”

“Sure did. In a formal critique an editor complimented my dialogue.” (It was the only thing she complimented.)

I know there are other dragons out there waiting to blast me into dust and ashes, but as long as I can face them one at a time?

“Bring ’em on!” I say.

C is for . . .

Conflict. 

As much as we hate it in our personal lives, writers eventually realize that without conflict, fiction is b-o-r-i-n-g! Character growth only occurs in the crucible of conflict. That’s true in the real world as well as in the worlds we create. 

So shouldn’t we welcome conflict into our lives? 

Okay, but you go first!

B is for . . .

Beginnings. With writing as with most things, it doesn't so much matter where you begin, as that you do. In my experience writing is about 80% editing; however, you must have something to edit!

"Leave it lay for just one day and, oh brother, gonna come back and find it gone."--from Queen of Hearts, by Gregg Allman

A is for ...

Alliteration is like a long leg that allows you to slide safely into home plate.

Assonance is the angry reaction of the fans as the ump stabs the air and shouts, “You're out!”

I'll be participating in the A-to-Z Challenge beginning Sunday, April 1st. After that, I'll be blogging every day of the month except Sundays. Successive letters of the alphabet will be my themes. Twenty-six letters. Twenty six days. Of course, all my posts will have something to do with writing.

Then on April 23, I will begin the 10-Week Writer's Challenge. This one doesn't necessarily involve blogging. Participants get to set their own challenge and make their own rules. (I like that!) My tentative goal is to have more than half a novel written by the end of the 10-week period.

Feeding Wonder

Since I’m attempting to write my own middle grade novel, I’m reading a lot of kid fiction these days, but I also devour nonfiction. It’s great food for wonder, which my husband says I have a pretty big appetite for. 

One book I loved so much I read it twice is A History of the Circle by Ernest Zebrowski (1999). It is about the limits of mathematical reasoning, which takes us deep into philosophical nowhere land, but paradoxically allows us to do functional things in the physical world, like build buildings and explore outer and inner space. The math here is accessible even to those, like me, who aren't particularly mathematically minded.

Another nonfiction book that awed me was Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water by Philip Ball (2000). Water has importance far beyond what we ordinarily consider—and we ordinarily consider it to be pretty important! 

Water is a sort of lone wolf, doing its own thing. One of its unique properties is its stability in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms. If it were otherwise, human and biological life would be impossible for reasons that don’t have anything to do with cell hydration. Earth, for instance, was/is hospitable to life because water played/plays its idiosyncratic role in geology, climatology, and oceanography. 

I read this book, coincidentally, right after I’d read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, in which one molecule of ice-nine eventually crystallizes every molecule of water in all the oceans. Yikes! There is indeed an Ice IX—and ice of even higher numbers—created by subjecting water to pressure as it freezes, but it doesn’t do anything as fantastic as ice-nine did in Vonnegut’s novel. Thank goodness. 

I'd love to hear of the nonfiction that feeds your wonder.

Some Like It Hot

One reason I live in and love the South? I dislike cold weather. I have wonderful childhood memories of playing outside on Christmas Day with toys I got from Santa Claus. And adult memories of grocery shopping in December in shorts. On the other hand, I remember the blizzard of March 1993. A real fluke. Thunder snow in drifts of a foot or more through central Alabama that year. The most snow I'd seen before that—other than on Christmas cards—was four inches.

Of course, whenever snow is forecast, everyone panics and the supermarkets run out of milk and bread. If you don't have four-wheel-drive, you'd best just stay home and have peanut butter sandwiches and milk for several meals. We're not the best drivers in winter weather down here.

One February I spoke by phone to a friend, a native Southerner who relocated near Chicago. It was another mild winter in Dixie and, knowing his dislike of cold, I couldn't resist a jab. "Have you plowed your garden spot yet?" I asked him, smirking. 

"Oh, what a cruel beast you are!" The mercury, he said, had not risen above 20 degrees there for days.

This year I think the thaw has come early everywhere. Our peach trees and crab apples have finished blooming. Our birch tree has leafed. Our blueberry bushes are loaded—if a late frost doesn't get them.

It's sunny and 77! What's it like where you are?