First Fifty Pages - The Indispensable E's

First, let me start off by saying, I love Mondays and the beginning of a new month. It's like time starts over. Weekly and monthly 'fresh starts'. When they coincide, even better. I have 100 pages left to edit on my code mystery novel before I put it away for a couple of months and then I be starting the next round of edits.

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Second, in an effort to be more aware of my surroundings, I notice two background shots on the latest episode of Chuck. Pic 1: Underpants. etc? I've always wished there were more of these stores. What's the etc? Pic 2: On a shirt. Taken from Battlestar Galactica it's an expletive...sorry 'bout that.

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My next WIP will be a comedy/business novel entitled: Blondie Brilliance vs. The Titans. I've already got a few chapters complete but I want to finish the novel.

The premise? Blondie Brilliance - a brown-haired, not too bright young woman  - receives from her evil in-laws for a wedding gift, a failing furniture company named Titan Furniture. But, to the in-law's chagrin, she goes about trying to make the company work... with some funny situations along the way.

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Okay, now to some writing advice. What to make sure you accomplish with the first fifty pages of your story. Here is a checklist:

1. Establish your heroic character
2. Endear your heroic character 
3. Entrap that heroic character inextricably in central conflict

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Now a command: Enjoy your day!

Funny Writing Contest!

Contest Rules

1) All participants in the "Followers Contest" must be followers of the "All Write With Coffee" blog.

2) One referral point will be awarded per follower referred from February 1st, 2010 up to 12:00am March 1st, 2010.

3) In order to validate a referral, each follower referred by a contest participant must post a comment to the "Followers Contest" article, clearly stating the 'username' of the referring blog follower.

4) No attempt will be made to clarify comments whose referrer cannot be ascertained.

5) A follower cannot be referred by more than one participant.

6) Any attempt to "game the system" by methods such as, but not limited to creating fictitious users or followers will result in immediate disqualification and removal.

7) In the event of a tie between two or more participants, all leading participants will be entered into a random draw for the one prize of a $50 Amazon Gift Card.

8) The $50 Amazon Gift Card will be awarded for Amazon.ca or Amazon.com only.

9) The results of the "Followers Contest" will be tabulated March 1st, 2010 and the winner will be posted on the blog March 2nd, 2010, after which the prize will be awarded.

10) By participating in this contest you agree to abide by the decision of the contest organizer (All Write With Coffee administrators) as to the administration of these rules and the awarding of the prize.

Here's a funny example:

Shakespeare's Sonnet Sunday: Sonnet 4

1) Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
3) Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
5) Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
7) Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
9) For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
11)Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
13) Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

Line one and two:  You wasteful person that spends his wealth or time on yourself rather than on your children. 
Line three: The qualities given you are not yours, you need to repay.
Line four: Nature gives generously to those who are open-hearted, free spirited.
Line five: You beautiful bastard, why are you so wasteful.
Line six: The qualities given you.
Line seven and eight:  You unsuccessful silly-man, why do you use so much now and not be able to carry one in the future.
Line nine and ten: Spending on yourself alone, you rob both your offspring and deceive yourself.
Line eleven and twelve: When you die, what acceptable legacy will you be leaving behind?
Line thirteen: Your beauty will die with you because you never procreated.
Line fourteen: But if you pass on your beauty, it will live in the future as your children.

Amongst these legal and financial metaphors, there is possibly another, slyer, system of imagery. Since the poem’s subject is the beloved refusal to bring his undoubted sexual attractions into the service of reproduction, the contrast between “use” and “abuse” is open to another, cruder, interpretation. Certainly the cluster of terms like “spend/ Upon thyself”, “traffic with thyself” and “abuse” could be read as innuendo of a specifically sexual nature.

Picture: Who they suspect the first four sonnets are about - Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton

Read more at Suite101: Shakespeare's Sonnet No.4

Tirz asked if Shakepeare had children...the answer is yes. Twins, in fact. Though one died at eleven.

Elevate Awareness to Elevate Description Skills

E.yeball
L.isten
E.mbellish
V.isualize
A.bsorb
T.ake Notes
E.xplore Possibilities

The picture is by: Escher (one of my favorites)

If you take notice of your surroundings, you will become a better writer. This sounds obvious. SO how do we go about doing this?

Use the 7 principles listed above:

1. E.yeball - Open your eyes, we may see a setting hundreds of times but now, try and find three things in those settings you've not noticed before. Touch. Taste. Listen. Tone your awareness muscles by exercising them.
2. L.isten - Be a better listener. You may be sitting in a quiet room but is it really? Listen for even the smallest noise. Is your computer fan running? Tap dripping? Dog breathing? Clock ticking? If you're in a loud room, try to distinguish sounds. Loud music - what instruments are playing? Tune in to specific voices and conversations.
3. E.mbellish - Turn your mundane surroundings into prize-winning novels. Don't accept what happens around us as random and unmotivated. For instance, if you encounter a noise or occurrence that is not easily explained, don't dismiss it, try to find an explanation or create one. Noise in the attic? Perhaps a homeless person in the neighborhood has made the attic his home.
4. V.isualize - Shut your eyes to see better. How cold is the air? How hard is the ground? What places on your body aches or itches? Try to locate them.
5. A.bsorb - Look for shapes and patterns in everything. What do the clouds look like? Patterns in he stars, do you see them? Patterns in houses and pages and fields. Deviate from your routine for five minutes. Walk to the store instead of drive. Read a book in the rain. Eat breakfast for dinner.
6. T.ake Notes - Write these ideas down.
   
7. E.xplore Possibilities - Make the above actions a habit. Try it for three weeks. 

Exercises:
1) When watching television, look everywhere on the screen except where the director wants you to look. What do you notice? Do you notice furniture in the backgrounds? What books do they read? What time is it on their clock? How do commercials get you to focus on the products?
2) Keep an awareness journal for a week. Write your observations down.
3) Practice looking. How many tulips did you count this month? Roses? Red colored cars?
4) Make it your goal to be creative all day long.

Taken from the book:
Source: Brainstormer

Bildungsroman - Become Enlightened

REYRGVMJTERY
 

In light of JD Salinger's death, I thought I would touch on the story he wrote - The Catcher In The Rye. It's a Bildungsroman. I had to look that up...so here's what I found out.

A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age kind of novel. It arose during the German Enlightenment. In it, the author presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the personality of a character, usually the protagonist. The term Bildungsroman was coined by Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern.

The bildungsroman generally takes the following course:

• The protagonist grows from child to adult.
• The protagonist has a reason to embark upon his or her journey. A loss or some discontent must, at an early stage, jar him or her away from the home or family setting.
• The process of maturation is long, arduous and gradual, involving repeated clashes between the hero's (protagonist's) needs and desires and the views and judgments enforced by an unbending social order. This conflict bears some similarity to Sigmund Freud's concept of the pleasure principle versus the reality principle.

Within the broader genre, an entwicklungsroman is a story of general growth rather than self-culture; an erziehungsroman focuses on training and formal education; and a künstlerroman is about the development of an artist and shows a growth of the self.

Many genres other than the bildungsroman can include elements of it as prominent parts of their story lines. For example, a military story might show a raw recruit receiving a baptism by fire and becoming a battle-hardened soldier, while a high-fantasy quest story may show a transformation from an adolescent protagonist into an adult who is aware of his or her lineage or powers. Neither of those genres or stories, however, corresponds exactly to the bildungsroman.

This is an incomplete chronological list of Bildungsroman works that are widely acknowledged to be representative of the genre.

• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
• David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens (1850)
• Green Henry, by Gottfried Keller (1855)
• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1860–61)
• Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert (1869)
• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1881-82)
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (1884)
• Captains Courageous, by Rudyard Kipling (1897)
• A Room with a View, by E. M. Forster (1908)
• Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908)
• Martin Eden, by Jack London (1909)
• Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce (1914–15)
• Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham (1915)
• The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather (1915)
• Demian, by Hermann Hesse (1919)
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1920)
• Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse (1922)
• The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann (1924)
• All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque (1928)
• Pather Panchali, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1929)
• Aparajita, by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (1931)
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951)
• Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin (1953)
• Starman Jones by Robert A. Heinlein (1953)
• The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham (1955)
• The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass (1959)
• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles (1959)
• Goodbye, Columbus, by Philip Roth (1959)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
• Davy by Edgar Pangborn (1964)
• Out of the Shelter by David Lodge (1970)
• My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok (1972)
• Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya (1972)
• Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Lanark: A Life in Four Books, by Alasdair Gray (1981)
• Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson (1985)^[12]
• The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay (1989)
• The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi (1990)
• The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson (1995)
• The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd (2002)
• Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell (author) (2006)

 Source: Wikipedia

Magazine and Awards

Besides the wonderful poems and short stories in the February issue of Words Berth Literary Magazine, the editors have decided to add a monthly funny editorial column and a YA poetry section.

If anyone knows a YA that would like to showcase some work, click on the link in the left hand column and go to submissions.

February Issue comes out: Duh! February 1st.


Now, I also won a couple of awards...

First, the Super Scribbler Award, I received this award from this site: Thank you, Emma.

Now, I think I have to give this award to five others...
I picked sites that were new, needed more recognition, and didn't have this award already.
1) Scribbled scraps - her blog is so cute.
2) Distracted Musician
3) Mental Marathon - A woman in the process of editing her book
4) Michele Cozzen's Blog
5) Renee's Reads

Also, I received the Honest Scrap Award...I posted my 7 honest items on the right hand column. I think you're suppose to have 10 but, I could only come up with 7. So...

Who gave me this wonderful award? The Artisan of the Human Spirit. Thank you!

Seven blogs to pass it on to:
1) The Writing Nag
2) Just One More Paragraph
3) From Aardvarks to Zinc
4) from the desk of a writer
5) Helen loves Books
6) Elegantly Bound Books
7) Susan's Site