Category: About Writing

I’m not a great writer — I’ll never win a Pulitzer Prize, and I don’t expect to make a living through my writing. Glancing at this writing blog, you might think that I should slow things down, and post fewer items (of presumably higher quality). I don’t disagree.

But to put things in perspective:

• Most of what I’m now posting was written decades ago when I was young — over the course of many years. So even though I may be posting one or two posts a day, most of them are just old pieces that I’ve recently typed up. I’m not currently cranking out new writings that fast. (The ‘classic’ posts outnumber the ‘new’ posts 5 to 1.)
• Again, most of what I’m posting was written long ago. What I’m now writing shouldn’t be worse quality, and is likely better. (Compare my ‘new poetry‘ to my ‘classic poetry‘.)
• I have little patience. So rather than writing a 5000 word story with sophisticated, descriptive phrasing, I’m more inclined to write a 500 word bare-bones story that gets right to the point, with the knowledge that I may one day come back and expand it.
• I’ll never be a novelist. I’d rather write 100 short pieces (and publish the best 10?), than write one long piece (and possibly never get it published). I see myself as more of a poet and a (very) short story guy.

Every poem and story posted here has a tidy title. WordPress — the blog software for this site — works best when there is a title for each entry to click and link to. However, not all of my older stuff has titles. So sometimes I need to come up with a name for an entry that I may have written 30 years ago and not thought about since.
 
Not surprisingly, it can be difficult — but I’ve been successful so far. Only once or twice have I gone back and adjusted the title that occurred to me just before I clicked ‘publish’. I think part of that comes from reconnecting with the piece as I am typing it up on the computer.

I’ve updated the categories on this writing blog. It’s now easy to pick new or old (‘classic’) poems or stories. Plus unfinished poems and stories have their own categories.

Remember, ‘classic’ stuff was written before my marriage and before I moved to California — about 30 years ago or longer. New stuff was written within the last couple of months (mid-2015 and on) as I’ve gotten back into writing.

I’ve noticed that, now that I’m typing things up, I’ve gravitated away from ending my poem lines with punctuation. I find that the structure of seeing it all cleanly laid out in type on a computer screen seems to reduce the need to separate each line with specific punctuation. In my head, it’s as if each line ends in an implicit comma, and each verse ends in an implicit period.

Is this direction a good thing? I don’t know.

Just counted: I have about 15 completed stories and 30 completed poems posted here — good, healthy numbers. That’s about 10,000 words in stories and 500 lines in poems. Plus I have more than a dozen unfinished pieces posted. I’m happy with my progress.

It’s especially exciting to get some of my old stuff typed up — though I’ll be happy when I get the remainder of the old stuff typed so I can focus on writing new.

I’m a little disturbed — that I’m a little disturbed.

Looking back over my posts — stories and poems — I find that fully half of them include a death, mostly murders. Plus there are contemplations of suicide, and other tragedies like heart attacks, etc.

Am I that horrible of a person? Maybe…

Someday, some terrible crime will happen near me, and investigators will read what I’ve written and convince themselves that I must have been the perpetrator — because my writings are so dark.

I wouldn’t say that I have ‘influences’ — people with work that has shaped my own. I’d like to think I’m fairly original. However, I do have authors and poets that I admire, whose work I wouldn’t mind having written.

Some of them are: Lewis Carroll [Dodgson] (whom I’ve mentioned here multiple times), Edward Lear (whom you might know from The Owl and The Pussycat), and Dr Seuss [Geisel]. No surprises for these, since they are all in a similar direction. I especially admire Dr Seuss’s commercial success. Another author that I admire is Stephen King (who doesn’t?) because he writes ‘dark’ fiction like some of mine. I don’t know Stephen King, but I wonder what he’s like in real life. Is he normal but just writes insane, or is he unsettling to hang out with?

A more-contemporary poet that I feel a kinship with, although I’ll admit I’m pretty unfamiliar with his work, is Shel Silverstein. (I just now googled him and found that he’s been dead for 15 years.) He wrote some kooky poems that would feel at home among some of my stuff. I don’t know whether he wrote books or just poetry. Also, some of his work has distinct artwork — maybe he was also an artist? (Seems I should find out more about him.) What little I’ve read of his work seems nice and even inspirational. I chuckle inwardly because I think of myself as a ‘dark’ Shel Silverstein (in writing tone), but he had dark skin, so the wording of this view of myself makes me laugh. He looks a lot like a guy I currently work with who’s from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean.

---

ADDENDUM: Going through some of my old old stories, written as a teen, I’ve realized that Fredric Brown also figures into the mix. Some of my early stories are short, techy, and ‘clever’ like some of his.

Everything posted in this writing blog falls into categories:

• It’s either ‘New’ (written the day of posting) or ‘Classic’ (written decades ago — pre: wife/marriage/kids). Sometimes (rarely) things fall in between, like if I wrote it a year ago, or if it were written long ago but updated significantly since.
• From a content perspective, things are either Poems, Fiction (stories), or Asides (random thoughts).

You can filter posts by category — to, for example, look only at poetry.

I find that it is easier to produce creatively if the process is constrained. If I look at a blank piece of paper, or computer screen, I’m often paralyzed by the infinite possibilities. But if I limit what I must do — the poem must have this rhyming scheme, the story must use these words — then I’ll get results faster. I often use random words to kick things off — it used to be opening the dictionary and pointing, now it’s helpful web equivalents of that.

I remember a story I wrote where I required myself to incorporate termites, and had the Phoenicians bringing them back from the New World in their boat — but of course, as my stories often do, it ended tragically when the boat broke apart close to shore (from termite damage), and none reached land alive. My poem Brown the Clown (here) is a good example of a constrained rhyming scheme — and it’s one of my favorite poems.

They teach us that poems come in all forms and need not rhyme. But I feel that there are rules.

It’s a little like modern art — you can throw a pile of garbage on the floor, splash blood on it and call it art, but is it? I think there is some minimum level of aesthetic that must be met. Art not intended to evoke pleasure should come with a warning label. There’s a phenomena known as the ‘uncanny valley‘, where a human replica (say, a robot) actually evokes revulsion the closer it looks to human while being recognizably not. I think some modern art lies in that uncanny valley — looks like art but it’s not.

Back to poems — even poems that don’t rhyme have recognizable patterns: line length, verse length, rhythm. It’s hard to argue that a news article or reference passage is poetry. I’m working now on a poem that, by design, doesn’t rhyme — but currently also has varying line length, and even varying line count per verse. I’m struggling with how much I need to bully it into shape to be (recognizable as) poetry (nudging it out of the uncanny valley) while trying not to lose some of the existing wording that I like. I don’t want to waste too much time on it, but I also don’t want to abandon it prematurely.

🙁

---

ADDEMDUM: I finished the problem poem ‘Starlight‘. It came out okay — phew!.