Happy Halloween

Since today is Halloween, I thought I would list some of the most common scary or creepy words and their synonyms for those of you with a penchant for writing about the grotesque or the occult.

• dark - shadowy, dim, gloomy, murky, bleak, pitch black, obsidian, ebony, impenetrable
  
• spooky - sinister, mysterious, threatening, evil, depressing, chilling, insidious, spine-chilling, unsettling, unearthly
  
• gross - repellent, disgusting, sickening, coarse, foul, nasty, awful, dreadful, uncouth, repugnant
  
• kill - assassinate, annihilate, slay, murder, slaughter, execute, destroy, exterminate, eradicate
  
• scream - yell, shout, shriek, cry, screech
  
• mean - evil, vicious, nasty, cruel, callous, malicious, despicable, shameful
  
• weird - strange, bizarre, cryptic, odd, peculiar, uncanny, eerie
  
• scared - terrified, horrified, frightened, afraid, petrified, anxious, timorous
  
• pain - anguish, agony, torture, suffering, distress, misery, woe, torment, angst
  

Everything I Need to Know About Writing I Learned in Third Grade

1. "i" before "e" except after "c" and when sounding like "a" as in "neighbor" and "weigh"
2. A poem means "Roses are red, violets are blue. Sugar is sweet, and so are you."
3. To get a good grade, write about a dog saving a baby or me and my sister learning not to fight.
4. "I" and "me" do not come first--put others first.
5. Not only do I have to color in the lines, but I have to write on the lines too.
6. Spelling counts--and I always thought it was math that counted.
7. "Their cat was there and now they're going to the store." Did I get that right?
8. I have to do more than fill up a page with words--they have to mean something.
9. Reading helps me write.
10. I'm going to have to write for the rest of my life.

Editor's Curse

My first editing teacher warned me from the beginning this would happen. The symptoms showed up slowly in the beginning. One day I was in the lounge of a hotel, waiting for my family to finish packing so we could check out, and I snagged a pamphlet advertising a Six Flags theme park. It had a fun, flashy front page and I idly flipped it open and began reading. After a minute, I noticed the way the headlines were formatted was inconsistent. I gave the offending elements a death glare for a long minute, then shrugged and turned to the right leaf. Next, however, I caught a misplaced semicolon. For some reason, that semicolon seemed entirely inexcusable to me. With one free hand, I groped around until I found a pen on the hotel's front desk, ignoring a puzzled glance from the receptionist, and with a swift swipe of my hand, crossed out the semicolon and substituted a comma. Satisfied, I replaced the pen and tucked the pamphlet back into the pile from whence it came.

The symptoms only got worse from there, though. Suddenly, no written word was safe from my wandering eye. Driving in the car, I found myself scrutinizing the tag line of every billboard. When reading magazines or the newspaper, I would come across an interesting sentence and start doodling a diagram of it in the margin. Before long I would check to be sure I had a red pen in my purse before leaving the house. I had begun waging a one-woman war on the writing of the world. It didn't take me long, however, to decide that there was no way I could win this war alone. There were just too many grammatical mistakes in the world for one person to effectively combat. That's when I finally remembered my editing teacher's advice from back in my freshman year of college. He'd explained to us back then about the Editor's Curse and described the symptoms. That's then I realized that I was tight in the grip of this dread disease and there was only one way to treat it: become desensitized. It sounds like a heartless, awful thing to say, but it is the cross we professional writers have to bear. We may try to educate the seething masses and do our part to change what we can, but I have long come to terms with the fact that we can't change the world all at once. It has to go slowly; one semicolon at a time.

Pay Attention

Today I decided to try out one of Nicole Mazzarella's suggestions for getting your writing off the ground; namely, pay attention to conversations, people, locations, and random facts and you'll soon find yourself with the start of a great story or an idea for a character. In each of my classes or even in conversations with my friends, when something they said appealed to me, I wrote it down and kept a running free writing log. During class (when I perhaps should have been taking notes on the lecture) I wrote down short profiles of my classmates based on what I saw in a two second window. Here are just a few of the quotes and scenes I came up with:

• "I've kissed 31 boys. Usually about one a week."
• "He was 4'10", talked with a voice like a parrot, and when he wasn't talking he was singing Michael Jackson songs."
• He grabbed a golf club and prepared to swing as the masked figures ran down the hall.
• "My mom is deaf but my grandma worked with her really hard so she could learn English. Being deaf has made her a very visual person."
• Gold leaves flapped wearily against a cold, iron sky.
• "It's all about the gold. 20 karat gold."
• "I used to tell my students we in the U.S. had the safest food supply in the world."
• Professor Lammons left work early on Friday to drive the sewing machine down to Salt Lake City.
• "They had to go to the hospital with $700 to pick up their baby."
• He was smiling and laughing right up until the moment his toe caught on the last step of the stairs and he tripped forward, sprawling, his books, papers, and even one of his shoes flying up into the air.
• "He bruised his thigh right down to the bone and now he walks like a bowlegged penguin."
• When she took the bandage off, there was a maroon, "v" shape left where the blood had pooled beneath her skin around the metal fastener.
• Her bottom lip was always slightly protruding and today that was accentuated by the forward thrust of her head, her hunched shoulders, though the view of her face was obscured by the short, brunette locks falling softly across her face.
• "Seventeen percent of school children are obese."
• She leaned down and pressed her lips to his broken hand, whispering, "There, I kissed it better."
• She walked into class snapping her fingers and bobbing her head, sending her chocolate curls bouncing like dozens of loose slinkies down her back.

See? It's not hard. All you really have to do is LOOK.

To read, or not to read?

If you truly want to write well, you must also want to read well. Reading can help you create new ideas, broaden your vocabulary, and expose you to a vast amount of information. Reading "well," however, means more than just reading the newspaper or a magazine; it means you consciously seek out world-renowned literature that has been analyzed by scholars or other experts and is generally agreed to be "cultured" or "classic." Here's a list of my personal favorites. I have read each of the following books and have purposely chosen a wide variety of topics to include. The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the more you can write about.

• The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• 
• White Fang by Jack London
• Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
• The Giver by Lois Lowery
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Princess Bride by William Goldman

I'm sorry to say that after reading these books you most likely won't suddenly turn into a fabulous writer. But you will have gained perspective of numerous types of characters, settings, and time periods and your writing will improve because of it. Every little bit helps.

Technical Writing

A lot of times, people forget that there are more venues for writing than just creatively. Technical and professional writing may not get as much fanfare, but they definitely offer more reliable employment and a steady source of income. Recently, I hosted a panel of Technical Writers who participated in a Question and Answer discussion. Although my major is English and my emphasis is professional writing, I still learned a lot that I didn't know before and I'm sure a majority of the public doesn't know either.

For instance, did you know that a professional writer can get employment doing anything from formatting pamphlets, to proofreading brochures, to working with a team on the copy editing of manuals or novels, to acting as a language consultant for start-up or long-established companies? Specifically, one of the members of the panel has a job as a senior professional writer for the LDS church doing graphic design and java scripting for websites. His name is Tom Johnson and he maintains a blog called: www.idratherbewriting.com Another member works with a team of other technical writers on updating user's manuals for the military. One of my professors worked for the navy doing the same type of thing. If it's variety and spice you want, the possibilities in professional writing are endless.

Flexibility is another great advantage of professional and technical writing. You may be hired full-time permanently with benefits with a large company or corporation to keep all of their literature and instruction material correct and up-to-date. Another option is to work on a contract basis on one project. The length to complete a project might last between a few weeks to several months and occasionally may lead to long-term employment. Contract work pays more per hour, however, and allows you to decide when you want to work. The third option is free-lancing. This is the most flexible type of work, but it means you do a lot of marketing for yourself. This is ideal for social people who are good at networking and creating friendships. Free lance work might include applying for grants for libraries or proofreading newsletters or calendars. But no matter what line of technical or professional writing you end up in, work can be guaranteed. While sadly not all of us can become the next "Great American Author," all people with a degree in English (be it Bachelor's or Doctorate) can be assured of a chance to find stable, gainful employment.

Tips on Writing from the Experts

One of the many advantages to attending college is my opportunity to rub shoulders with many great authors and professionals who have experience in the field I'm interested in and are perfectly willing to share some good advice. Today was the BYU-I Pre-Professional Conference for the College of Language and Letters. Two authors were flown in for the event: James Richardson, a poet and a professor of creative writing at Princeton, and Nicole Mazzarella, a novelist and a professor of creative writing at Wheaton College.

James Richardson was the Keynote Speaker and he entitled his address, "All Work is the Avoidance of Harder Work." As he spoke to the congregation of students, it was clear to all by the glowing expression of his face and the delighted chuckle that occasionally bubbled into the microphone that he loved the subject of creative writing. His remarks were mainly addressed to aspiring poets, telling us that poets have the job of "thinking about stuff" and he warned that no one gets rich off of it. When he calculated all the days and months and years he'd put into his writing and compared that to how much money he's made, his paycheck came to about eleven cents an hour. But this was alright with him because he didn't do it for the money, he did it for the pleasure of it. Besides poetry, he is also the author of over 800 aphorisms--shorter even than a poem, these are one-liners that proclaim a profound message. Two of his own that he shared with us were, "Despair says, 'I cannot lift that weight.' Happiness says, 'I don't have to.'" and "No one ever writes a novel by accident."

Nicole Mazzarella expounded in her remarks on the latter aphorism of the above. Her talk was so chalk-full of incredible advice, I had a hard time writing it all down. Included below are some of the choicest tidbits for those of us who aspire to be writers but have not had a lot of official training and do not have a lot of extra time:

• Pay attention. Characters can emerge from people around you, random questions, and even stray comments. She gave an example of a friend's father who kept a box in the attic titled: "String too short to use." This immediately got her wondering what sort of person would keep a box like this--what life experiences would have prompted him to create such a box in the first place? These are the sorts of questions we must ask ourselves; the creative juices will take care of the rest.
• Create Space. You will never have more time to write than you have right now. Each season of life will have its demands and will always provide you with excuses not to write. This means that you must make the conscious decision to write today and then make time for it--whether that means staying up later or getting up earlier. Nicole told a story of a surgeon who said, "I'm going to write a book when I retire," to which an author replied, "Oh sure, and I'm going to become a surgeon when I retire."
  
• Be prepared. Keep notecards in your pocket and a notepad by the bed. You never know when inspiration will strike.
• Free Write. This means writing about the background of your characters--What is an average day in their lives like? What kinds of preferences do they have? You might do a lot of free writing that never goes into your story but it will help you realize that the character lives a fuller life than the moment we've stepped into.
• Commit. Develop a habit of regularly writing with and without a deadline and finish your book or other piece of work even if you feel it's not that great. You may fail a lot, but it will be good practice and that's the only way to improve.
  

When Nicole sat down to enthusiastic applause, I glanced back through my notes and realized that I had a lot of work to do before I'd ever even get close to becoming a great writer--where could I even begin? But Professor Mazzarella had some advice for those of us who feel that way too: "You cannot stare at a blank page and say, 'I'm going to write a novel.' You must begin one scene and one moment at a time."