Sunday, February 25, 2007
Beyond The Elements of Style has Moved!
Thank you for coming here to read Beyond The Elements of Style!
The blog is still alive and well ... it's just moved to another location.
Beyond The Elements of Style can now be found at Jeannette Cézanne's website. Be sure to head on over and visit it there. New posts every Sunday!
Thank you so much for visiting, and for your continued interest. For articles and essays on writing and the writing life, be sure to come to Beyond The Elements of Style's new home.
And then you'll surely be ... beyond the elements of style!
Monday, February 12, 2007
Pre-Writing
I just finished editing one of the books for DreamTime Publishing's Open Your Heart series, specifically Open Your Heart with Writing, which will be coming out in August. (Hint: Watch for it! Buy it!)
The author, Neil Rosen, talks at some length about what could best be called "pre-writing" -- he says that by the time he sits down at his computer (what we used to call "putting pen to paper"), he already has a sense of where his story or essay is going. It's been happening in his mind for a long time before he feels that it's time to capture it.
It's an interesting concept.
I remember that in college we were encouraged to prewrite as well. "Know what you have to say before you say it," was the adage, which actually isn't bad advice for all of life -- have an idea of what you're going to say before you open your mouth. It might save us all some embarrassing moments.
It also helps you, as a writer, have a sense of what your props need to be. If you're thinking about writing a novel set during the Second World War, for example, it behooves you to do a little research on daily life during that time period, hopefully before you make a gaffe in your writing and bring something anachronistic into the picture.
Knowing ahead of time what you're going to say can make your own first edit of your work a great deal less painful, as you'll have already organized your thoughts, background, characters and so on around the theme or plot that you've devised.
This doesn't mean that you won't still write yourself into a corner sometimes -- we all do. And it doesn't mean that you can't listen to your characters as they guide you in a direction that may be different from what you'd planned. But for a good overall sense of what you're doing, pre-writing can be a great tool. And then you'll be ... beyond the elements of style!
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware, Inc.
The author, Neil Rosen, talks at some length about what could best be called "pre-writing" -- he says that by the time he sits down at his computer (what we used to call "putting pen to paper"), he already has a sense of where his story or essay is going. It's been happening in his mind for a long time before he feels that it's time to capture it.
It's an interesting concept.
I remember that in college we were encouraged to prewrite as well. "Know what you have to say before you say it," was the adage, which actually isn't bad advice for all of life -- have an idea of what you're going to say before you open your mouth. It might save us all some embarrassing moments.
It also helps you, as a writer, have a sense of what your props need to be. If you're thinking about writing a novel set during the Second World War, for example, it behooves you to do a little research on daily life during that time period, hopefully before you make a gaffe in your writing and bring something anachronistic into the picture.
Knowing ahead of time what you're going to say can make your own first edit of your work a great deal less painful, as you'll have already organized your thoughts, background, characters and so on around the theme or plot that you've devised.
This doesn't mean that you won't still write yourself into a corner sometimes -- we all do. And it doesn't mean that you can't listen to your characters as they guide you in a direction that may be different from what you'd planned. But for a good overall sense of what you're doing, pre-writing can be a great tool. And then you'll be ... beyond the elements of style!
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware, Inc.
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Looking Failure in the Face
"My greatest good fortune was that I didn't know that I was doing everything wrong. If I'd have done a single right thing I probably would have failed. If I'd known how hard - statistically speaking - it is to get a first novel published, I might have given up. What success means is really looking failure in the face and tossing the dice anyway. You may be the only person who knows the dice came up, but in that knowledge you have something that millions of people will never have - because they were afraid to try." (Tom Clancy)
I've never been an avid reader of Tom Clancy books, generally preferring character development to plot, but my friend Carem loves his stories and has urged me to just try "one more time."
Well, the verdict is in: I'm still not nuts about Tom Clancy books, but it's another indication that you can not like one part of a person (or of their oeuvre) and still find wisdom in other things they have to say. Thomas Aquinas once said something to the effect of, "Remember the good you hear, and forget who it is that said it." And I'm all for that.
I actually wrote a long paragraph expanding upon the Clancy quote, above, and then erased it. He said it well. Persevere, persevere, persevere.
Jeannette Cézanne
Customline Wordware Inc.
