All posts tagged rhymes

Caught out by my own ‘efficiency’

By my calculation this is my 48th successive daily post; that’s quite something for me – it’s four dozen, or a day short of seven weeks and 13% of the way towards the 365 day target.

Although I have called this blog ‘Reading and Writing’, ‘rithmatic is never far from my mind.

Give or take a bit, each post is about 500 words long, which gives me a year to date tally of getting on for 24,000 words.  In the context of the speed at which I produce words for my fiction, that is a lot.

Not such blue sky thinking

As a neophyte blogger, to complete the challenge to post something daily, at a reasonably regular time each day to satisfy an early request of one of my readers, I have had to develop a system.

Rule 1 is that every viable idea has to be used; some are better than others, but it is vital to the process not to be too self critical, and not to spend too much time agonising about each one.

Rule 2 is that I always have a completed post ready the night before, so that I do not have a panic in the morning.  I have become adept at using the facility to ’schedule’ ‘publication’ for a particular date and time.

The combination of Rules 1 and 2 operating in harmony is that, recently, I have had at least a couple of posts all ready in my back pocket at any given time.

I have upped my pace this last week as I was going to be away from home with no guarantee of access to the internet, visiting friends and family, and hopefully will have too many other things to do.  To ensure continuity of service I have ‘banked’ a number of posts in advance.

I found a problem with this approach today.

The amusing thing I found on the internet on Tuesday, and which I wrote about then for the post for Saturday, was published in, of all places, the Daily Mail, on Thursday.  So when I thought I was sharing a minority amusement with you, you may have already read about in the outraged columns of the bastion of the reactionary.

It is a reflection of how quickly information flows around the internet, and that I was not the only person whose attention was caught by the wit of Lydia Leith’s idea; and I hope that the report that she has already sold out of her ‘Throne Up’ sick bags is true.

But I have learnt that if I want to be first-ish then I have to work smartly and efficiently as the latter alone may not always be enough.

5 Comments
by rowena on February 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Writing and life, Writing as a commodity
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Posted by rowena on February 21, 2011

http://rowenadunn.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/caught-out-by-my-own-efficiency/

Cross fertilisation

Academics call it ‘intertextuality’  (see The Art of Fiction, David Lodge, Penguin Books, 1992).  It’s the idea that a writer makes links both obvious and invisible to other piecess of art in the creation of their own work.

Trust academia to come up with a special long word to describe the blindingly obvious.

Of course we absorb things we see and experience in the real world as well as other works of art of all kinds that we encounter.  It’s not always clear what influence each has on us, but they all go into the creative cauldron to be brewed up together to produce something new.

I watched a documentary about Mark Knopfler (A Life in Songs on BBC4)  yesterday, in which, among other things, he discussed the inspiration for some of his most famous songs.

He spoke about keeping life’s observations and ideas ‘in the junk yard’ until he found a use for them.  Sometimes he found an immediate use.  He recounted a tale of hearing a delivery man at an electrical goods store mouthing off about the useless rabble on MTV and sitting down and recording the man’s words to write Money for Nothing. He called this ‘a situational song’, almost like ‘found art’.

I liked his comment that ‘a creative act engenders other creative acts’ when he explained that his song If this is Goodbye had been inspired by a newspaper article by Ian McEwan about the telephone messages left by people on the planes about to crash on September 11.

Sometimes other people’s work simply presents itself to me and I absorb it, other times I go out and look for it.  I go to the cinema and theatre, I visit exhibitions and concerts.  I read; and more recently I have been exploring what is available online.

There is a truism that the best readers make the best writers, but I do sometimes feel overwhelmed by words, their shape on the page, the particular attention that is required to make sense of them.

I recall some very useful advice given to me by Louise Doughty when she suggested, that when writing becomes difficult, or during periods when words provide no relaxation, then seeking out visual art can replenish the well.

I try not to give in to that potential writing avoidance strategy too frequently, but when I do, I tend to head towards those art works into and out of which I can weave a story.

The ideal is to be inspired with many ideas from which I can choose the best, or the one that develops its own momentum.

In a programme about the history of the guitar, I was struck by a joke made by a craftsman maker.  Asked how to make a guitar, he replied that you take a piece of wood and cut away everything that doesn’t look like a guitar.

I think the same may be true of making a story; take a pile of words and delete those that don’t fit your tale.

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by rowena on January 31, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Finding inspiration
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Posted by rowena on January 31, 2011

http://rowenadunn.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/cross-fertilisation/

Tripping off the Tongue?

I have been reading ‘Finish the Hat’ (Virgin Books, 2010) by Stephen Sondheim, a collection of his lyrics from 1954 to 1981, ‘with attendant Comments, Principals, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes’.  It’s a fascinating insight into the experience, thought process, expertise and humour of the man.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not read all of the lyrics, it’s the anecdotes and the ‘grudges’ and ‘heresies’ that I’ve lapped up; those, and the clear eyed analysis he has applied to his own early work.  He is not afraid to point out his own failures and things he wishes he’d done better.  It’s that honesty that makes me trust him when he writes about those things he believes are successful.

He’s a lyricist, and I’m not, but he has things to say which resonated with me in my own approach to writing.  He identifies three principals:

‘Content dictates  form

Less is more

God is in the details

all in the service of Clarity’

It’s in that precarious balance between the ‘less’ of Principal 2 and the ‘details’ of Principal 3 where the craft of writing  produces something worth reading (or singing).

Sondheim berates himself and others where they have padded lines with superfluities  in order to make them scan or fit the music, he acknowledges where he has written things so sparely that audiences didn’t get it.  And then, usually, he tells a tale of how, based on feedback from others or his own observations, he went away and improved it, or threw it away and wrote something new.

Musical theatre production is a far more collaborative process than novel writing, but even for the solitary novelist there are plenty of people prepared to offer an opinion as soon as you send a piece of writing out into the world on its own.  It’s the knowing when to listen to them that’s the tricky thing.  What I’ve taken from Sondheim is that you should listen to comment, but then you are free to respond to it in your own way (which can include ignoring it entirely).

He loves rhyme, which he uses as the building block of his lyrics.  One of my particular favourites is in ‘Follies’:

‘In the depths of her interior

Were fears she was inferior

And something even eerier,

But no-one dared to query her

Superior

Exterior’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gRy25bgETM&feature=fvw for Diana Rigg singing the whole song

He has interesting things to say about how pronunciation will affect rhyme.  Leaving aside the disparities between American and UK accents, he tells a tale of differences between himself (from NYC) and Leonard Bernstein (from near Boston) while collaborating on ‘West Side Story’.  (Does ‘gone’ rhyme with ‘lawn’?  Yes in Boston; No in NYC)  But in a story about gangs in NYC, Sondheim’s view had to prevail.  Another lesson in the importance  of  using consistency and care when using  ’dialogue’ to paint and create character.

He also rails against the sin of mis-stressing, of the mismatch between the normal stress of the words and the accented note of the music.  While having no direct impact on a short story or a novel, I can see parallels.  It often helps me to edit a piece by reading it aloud.  If I stumble over a phrase it is usually a sign that the sentence isn’t working and needs attention.

So I do have something in common with the great man, AND we agree that ‘Adelaide’s Lament’ in ‘Guys and Dolls’  (by Frank Loesser) is  one of the best songs in musical comedy. (Sorry, I’ve looked for a link on Youtube for you, but they’re all awful, so I recommend against.  Vivian Blaine in the Original Broadway Cast recording is the one to find.)

2 Comments
by rowena on January 9, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Writing as a commodity
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by rowena on January 9, 2011

http://rowenadunn.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/tripping-off-the-tongue/

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