Tag Archives: writing

Wordsmithing

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

Writing. Something I am doing almost all the time. Even in my dreams. I may not be physically committing words to paper but, in my head, stories are being created, or poems, or current events noted. At some time during the day, I try to find a space to scribe those thought forms with the symbols we call words.  

Every year a new list of words is published by a variety of sources including Oxford House and Webster. Last year ‘staycation’, ‘metaverse’, and ‘shrinkflation’ were offered in the listing of new terms. They were words I understood and may use. I’m particularly fond of ‘badassery’. Other words like ‘finfluencer’ (a financial influencer), ‘crunk’ (full of energy), and ‘ASMR’ (autonomous sensory meridian response) will probably never enter my lexicon of jargon.

I love to play with words, so welcome the expansion. However, I’ve noticed that some old words are being abandoned or profoundly changed. Some very nice old words at that. As our culture changes so do the words to describe it. One prime example is ‘gay’ used today to indicate a homosexual male and in the past to describe a happy, carefree feeling. ‘Literally’ used to mean something actually happening now but has been converted to a word of emphasis such as a ‘literal’ smash hit.

I believe the world is a sadder place without ‘nizzled’ (slightly intoxicated), ‘chuffy’ (haughty, puffed up), and ‘quixotic’ (absurdly romantic). I made myself a promise to discover some great old words and apply them in my next story.

A book I discovered last year is Dreyer’s English, an Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer. Great word ‘utterly’. Mr. Dreyer has taken Strunk and White, the absolute bible of English grammar, to a whole new level. While the little tome of Misters Strunk and White is in my portable writing folder at all times, I prefer to look things up in Dreyer’s bigger book that sits on my desk. He always has a good story to go along with the lesson. Anytime I can laugh as I learn, I learn much better.

Happy wordsmithing to all.

And so it goes…

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Originally posted on A Way with Words Blog

It is almost like I’ve written this before. Maybe I have, maybe not. My stacks of journals are witness but I haven’t the patience to cruise them all – it would take hours, days, months, etc. The story as old as the ages. What age does. I’m seventy-seven. It is a startling revelation each time I say it aloud. I remember thinking sixty was the end game when I was thirty. What is seventy-seven? I know many people in my generation, my age group. Some are old, some not.  I put myself in the latter category. I certainly don’t feel old. My body does occasionally, but I disabuse it of that notion as quickly as it complains. ‘No, it’s not age, it’s what you ate-drank-did yesterday that is the cause of complaint,’ I tell the federation of bone, fat, and muscle that contains my spirit.  ‘Be more thoughtful in your choices’.

I read some time ago, old is ten years older than whatever age you are. When I was ten, twenty was freedom. When I was twenty, thirty was unimaginably far in the distance with countries like marriage, continents like parenting to explore. In my thirties, there were career challenges. There was so much to do between ten and twenty and between twenty and thirty and beyond.  Seeming lifetimes of choice were encapsulated in each decade. What did I know at fifty, that I didn’t know at forty? The blurrrrr of years, forties, fifties, sixties and now seventies, whizzed by. Here I am looking ten years down the road. What will eighty-seven bring? How will I evolve in that space of time? Who will I meet? What questions will be answered? What fresh questions will arise? What different territories will open? I am ever curious. Each day brings something new. Nothing is static when you are alive. Change is the only constant and change brings opportunity. Embrace each day for the treasure that comes with it. Even difficult days reveal nuggets of discovery, maybe more so.

Painting by Sally Rosenbaum
Painting by Sally Rosenbaum

It is never too late for surprises in life. Not in a million years would I have thought I’d be a published author. A writer, yes, but not published. My stories and poems have always been for my own amusement. Yet here I am in league with two other writers having a published book, Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets, a journey of friendship through words. Published at age seventy-seven! It is a book I believe in because it is meant as an encouragement to those solitary writers who want to be heard by the world at large or those who want to have their voices heard in a smaller way. Writers’ groups can be a support for both.

A Place to Contemplate

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

I recently came across a blog that I enjoyed immensely called Seams Like a Story, https://debravandeventer.com/. The author, Debra VanDeventer, is a writer in my hometown of Oro Valley. In fact, as it turns out, she is a neighbor. We met at the Oro Valley Writers’ Forum at our local library. I’m passing this along to our readers because I think you will like Deb’s take on life. She is a writer, seamstress, and grandmotherly adventurer among all the other titles accrued by a woman during a lifetime. She retired from teaching, but it is clear she is and always will be a teacher who looks at life as a learning opportunity. Her most recent blog is about a thing called Hygge – a Danish word that means “courage, comfort, joy.” In our tumultuous times, it is good to have a place to retreat, to contemplate and be comforted. That is what Deb promotes in her latest blog post. Give it a try.

I have commented on my love of writing and what my writing “place” means to me. It is my hygge place where I can retreat to write, read, and contemplate; where hours seem like seconds. I am surrounded by books, music, photos of my people, and pictures that speak to me of places I’ve been either in life or in spirit. It is also a place I share with three cats, my muses. It has taken a lifetime to curate the exact items that give my space that feeling of contentment. Everything in here has a meaning and a memory.  

Stories are born of imagination and experience. Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets is a collaborative memoir of our writers’ group as well as an anthology of the stories we three accumulated through our time together. Most of the writing and editing that I contributed to our book was done in this room at my desk. When we three could not be together in person, we met through Zoom to keep the project alive. Have a blessed day and enjoy your own hygge place.

A Weekend Project

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

I recently read a poem by Tom Chester titled Sedimentology (Sedimentology – TURN-STONE) in which he more or less describes my writing room. I don’t know about all writers but some I know have a similar problem – collections of words that pile up in various forms to make hillocks and eventually mountains of paper, bound and unbound. I looked around my room and decided that this weekend would be dedicated to moving those mountains. Books were replaced on shelves where they belonged – the easiest task. It took the better part of two days, but I excised a Hefty bag full of detritus that has been collecting for weeks and months; piles on every horizontal surface including the floor. The remaining notes, papers, letters, and clippings were properly classified and tucked into labeled file folders, then housed in one of three file cabinets according to their category: business, personal, or writing references. I also have a small box of mementos that don’t fit in files but will reside on a shelf in a closet until I forget why I kept them.

These pictures are not MY writing room but a close proximity to what it looked like. I didn’t take a photo of my room in its disarray.

The file labeled Bits and Pieces is the thickest. It contains jagged pieces of envelopes and napkins, published thought-provoking articles, and scribbled lined-pages of half thought out ideas that didn’t make it into one of my notebook/journals. The journals, themselves, take up a couple of shelves in a bookcase. Much of the time spent in this exercise was rereading those precious scraps of writing, so urgently recorded that, at one time, seemed quite brilliant; tossing most. The saved ones are worthy of becoming a short story, a poem, or a blog post. I rediscovered letters from friends that need to be answered – better late than never. Of course, my three cat-comrades, Nunny Catch, Oliver, and Sadie, assisted by roaming among the sorted piles, and across my lap insisting on head rubs while I sat on the floor where they could easily reach me. It was labor, long overdue, and totally worth the effort. A cleansing of sorts. Now I can enter my tidy room and get right to my desk without moving or avoiding piles. Ahh, that feels good. The sad reality is that those mountains will rebuild over the next year – despite the best of intentions.

Why I Write

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First posted on A Way with Words December 5, 2022

It’s about Power.

As a writer of fiction, I can create a city, a village, a country, a world. I can fill it with characters that I love or love to hate. I can imbue them with a certain amount of free will and, if I don’t like how they use it, I have the power of the eraser or delete key. The characters I create may be human or they may be animals, even mechanical beings, or a combination of these.  I can ride down a country road feeling the fluid strength of the steed beneath me, enjoying the bucolic scene of field and meadow, knowing that around the next bend there is a plot twist that will change my story, transform the world. I can change the weather from stormy to sunny and back again. In short, I am god.  I can wander through forests of words and chop down the one I want to take to a sentence I’m constructing. I can plunge into oceans of emotions to catch the one that will give my character motivation to propel the story forward.

Similarly, when I write memoir or creative non-fiction, I take an event from the headlines or from memory and, while sticking to the reality of it, invent or reimagine dialogue I did not hear or do not remember. I give the incident a spin to emphasize the part I think is important or transformative. It is my story told my way. This kind of writing does require research to authenticate it. I enjoy research because it opens the discovery of things I did not know and enriches knowledge that I then mine for other stories.  I prefer fiction and poetry because I am not bounded by facts, annoying facts that constrict my imagination.

Writing is an inexpensive form of entertainment and also therapy. The cost of a pencil and paper can set me up for hours and hours of diversion. I disappear into a world I create. Sometimes it is hard for me to resurface, to attend to my daily tasks and the real-life characters, human and animal, who live with me. I am glassy-eyed and slightly incoherent for a time when I leave my writing desk depending on how long I have been immersed in writing. My dear husband can attest to the state of suspended animation that surrounds me. I gave up the idea of writing the great American novel by the time I was thirty. I write for myself because I love to play god.

Hemingway and Me

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Originally published on A Way with Words blog

I have always enjoyed writing. My first novel, written when I was seven, was called The Girlfriends. It was a mystery printed on ten wide-lined pages in pencil. I cannot remember the plot details because, alas, it was lost sometime in the last seventy years. These things happen in life. I know how Hemingway felt when his first unpublished masterpiece was lost in 1922 by his wife on a train in Europe. Did I just compare myself to Hemingway? Yes. Not that our significance to literary posterity is similar but because we both are scribblers, people who love words and live in them. That’s what this blog and our book, Telling Lies and Sharing Secrets, is all about – sharing our enchantment with words and the worlds they conjure.

Being a lover of words I have, at hand, books about words and grammar. My new favorite is Dreyer’s English, An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer. Does that sound boring? I dare you to read more than a few pages without chuckling and eventually belly-rocking. Toss away your Strunk and White. Dreyer’s book is vastly more entertaining and equally edifying. It is a laugh-out-loud book of passion for the English language. I do not exaggerate. I read passages to several friends, non-literary types, and elicited the same response. Who knew a comma or an apostrophe, not to mention a preposition, could be so much fun? Just as Mary Poppins sang, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way.”

Happy writing everyone. We hope you find your journey in writing is loaded with ah-ha moments you can share with a group of similarly minded friends, just as we have.

And So It Begins

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Originally posted on A Way with Words blog

This was my first post on our blog A Way with Words as we anticipated the publication of our book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets.

Welcome to our blog and thank you for stopping by. This is our dialogue with readers as well as writers.

Stories are as old as humankind. We all have them, we live stories. The oral tradition of storytelling is essentially extinct in modern cultures. Since the advent of alphabets, people have chosen to preserve their tales in writing.  As a writers’ group, we support and encourage individual flights of fantasy, rockets of remembrance, and paeans of poetry, that lead us on voyages of discovery into ourselves and the world at large. We writers thrive on words. We gobble them up, we inhale them, we cherish and revere them. They are the building blocks of our understanding. As an equation is to a mathematician, a word is to a writer. All the scribblers of the world understand why writers write. It is not necessary to earn your living by penning symbols on a page to be a WRITER. A very select few can do that. The rest of us use the written word as a pilot through our past, a magnifying glass in our present, and a crystal ball into our futures. Notes jotted on napkins, letters to friends, journals, and diaries are all ways of preserving stories. Life is Story. Write on.

Our book Telling Tales and Sharing Secrets is a memoir of our writers’ group over two decades and a guide for other groups to learn, write and stay together. With this blog, we will continue our story. We invite you to share your comments and experiences with us.