Powerful Words

I've been given this handsome award from two generous fellow bloggers, Angelique, aka The Quoibler, and Danette, aka Summer Friend. Since both of them passed this on to me within a few days of each other, I consider myself well and truly awarded, though I had to go back to see what I wrote that was so powerful, and damned if I could find it. Still, this makes up for the fact that I've had a streaming cold for the past week, a couple of rejections, a not particularly wonderful Christmas, and a dodgy porch roof that has developed new, worryingly extensive and productive leaks. I'm almost pathetically grateful for the honor, and happy to supply the requisite three writing tips for making writing good and powerful.

1) Have a fire of indignation kindling within. This is one of my favorite expressions and one which I borrowed from Thomas Clarkson, one of the men who was instrumental in helping to abolish the slave trade in the U.K. Largely indifferent to the issue of slavery himself, Clarkson entered a Latin essay competition on the subject of the slave trade purely for the honor he hoped to receive, but after winning first prize he found that he was his own first convert. The cruelty and injustice of slavery had come to obsess him and he realized that he had to write about it in English and that the more eloquently and compellingly he expressed himself, the more converts he might win to the cause. Having a point to make fires you up and makes the process of writing feel almost effortless. What you choose to write about doesn't have to be political or controversial; as long as it is something you truly want to say, it will carry you along with it.

2) Steel yourself to look at your work rationally and objectively and kill it dead, if necessary. I'm impatient and impulsive, and this is my own personal Waterloo. Whenever I've finished writing something, I am always so thrilled with what I've accomplished that I'm tempted to send it off right away instead of coming back to the manuscript after the recommended cooling-off period, going over it with a jeweler's eye and cutting out all the redundancies along with grammatical and lexical infelicities and misspellings. I won a literary review in a writing competition a while back, and one of the best pieces of advice my reviewer gave me was the following: Aim to comb through every line of your prose with a view to cutting anything that doesn't make the grade. She then gave me a few examples of where I had overwritten passages, and when I subsequently trimmed these down I was stunned by how much more effective they read. When I finally finished the novel I was working on, I was desperate to send it off, but remembering my past failures, put it away. Two weeks later, I looked at it again and could hardly believe all the problems I found even though I had already combed it over ad nauseam. Good, honest beta readers have since given me some shrewd advice on this manuscript, and no doubt I will make quite a few more alterations before I am finally ready to call it finished and send it off to do whatever it will do. I am convinced that if I had done this to begin with, I would be published by now.

3) See your rejections as useful scar tissue that are helping you build muscle. It really helps if you're able to do this at least some of the time. If you claim you're able to do it all the time, you're making me nervous -- and skeptical. Come talk to me and I'll give you a little of my pessimism and negativity in exchange for your boundless optimism and worryingly sunny attitude. I can afford to talk like this: right now, I'm the would-be writer equivalent of the Governator of California.

I now have to pass the award on to five more bloggers, and this is the difficult part. How do I pick only five? I took the easy way out: I chose randomly, putting all the names of deserving fellow writer-bloggers onto little pieces of paper turned upside down, then weeding out anyone who already had this award. Here are the people I came up with and my reasons for choosing them:

1) Merry Jelinek at Mom and More

Merry is another writer-mother whose blog is filled with interesting tips and resources for her fellow writers. I love the fact that her blog is also interactive; she always comes back to comment on what others have written, and her comments are always useful and pertinent, too. Merry's the sister everyone wishes they had or could have been themselves: fun, kind, with a great store of interesting anecdotes. She also once unwittingly drove a car that had a tree protruding from the roof. Top that.

2) Charlie Callahan at Hounded

You can see from Charlie's blog address that he has a sense of humor and a good ear (if the word testicles doesn't sound like it comes straight from the Old Testament, then I really don't know what does) and you can take it from me that he's a fine writer. Charlie doesn't post as much as I wish he would due to ill health, but fortunately he has written a memoir that I've been lucky enough to sample. His writing is a wonderful mixture of humor and nostalgia, and his words are truly powerful if even a cheapskate like me can't wait to buy his book.

3) Kanani Fong at Easy Writer

Kanani does more to promote the work of others writers than almost any other blogger I can think of. I first came across her on a literary agent's blog, when something she wrote made me laugh out loud. A fellow native-Californian, appreciater of cats, inspired cook, and writer- mother, Kanani also writes an interactive blog filled with writing tips, exercises and ideas. She also gave me an award: The Quality Time Wasting Prolific Blogging Award. I am very proud of this: sure I'll waste your time, but my time-wasting is quality wasting and don't you forget it.

4) Paul Curd at Paul's Writing Blog

Paul and I were two of ninety-nine runners up who won a literary critique in the A&C Black Writers and Artists Yearbook Novel Competition this year. His blog has a lot of useful links, such as the regularly updated Deal Writers' list of writing competitions, and although Paul doesn't post as much as I wish he would, I suspect that is because, as a published author, he is far too busy with the actual business of writing. An example for us all: a writer who spends most of his time writing. Paul is also a committed runner, so my envy of him is complete.

5) Eryl Shields at The Kitchen Bitch Ponders

Despite Eryl's interesting blog title, I have met her and must report that she is not a bitch unless she's very good at keeping it under wraps. Her name is Eryl ( pronounced as 'Beryl' but without the B) and she is, in fact, a philosopher with a tidy kitchen. Imagine someone who is both articulate and sensitive, and with a fine eye for detail and character. Imagine that you are sitting in her kitchen, drinking a cup of tea and chatting. That is what reading one of Eryl's blog posts is like.

Those are my five recommendations, but I could easily come up with ten more. There really are far too many talented writers out there, don't you agree? Wouldn't this writing lark be a lot easier if 99.9% of the other writers were a lot of uninspired, shallow idiots who were only into it for the money and the glory? S i g h.

Wishing everyone out there a lot of powerful words in 2008!