Poetic Alliteration

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com
Read this article on my Resources for Writers: Craft webpage here.

As of this year the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. 

POETIC ALLITERATION

Poetic alliteration is one of the many techniques you can use to make your writing more vivid and powerful. The definiton of alliteration: "The occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words."

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From (of all things) a movie review by Desson Howe in the Washington Post:

"There he is, in all his glory, Brad Pitt, that beautiful, chiseled chunk of celebrity manhood. You want him? Go see Fight Club. You want action, muscle, and atmosphere? You want boys bashing boys in bloody, living color? Fight Club is your flick, dude." 

To start with, we have "chiseled chunk" -- ch and then ch

In the fourth sentence we have "action, muscle, and atmosphere"-- ah and ah

Then "boys bashing boys in bloody, living color"-- b, b, b, and b

Then "Fight Club is your flick, dude" -- f and f

The point: the sound of the words-- alliteration-- reinforces the meaning.


Here are some more examples:

"...hold on with a bull-dog grip and chew and choke as much as possible"-- Letter, President Lincoln to General Grant

"When somebody threatens me, he says, I usually tell them to pack a picnic and stand in line." -- Mikey Weinstein quoted in Marching As to War by Alan Cooperman

"A competitor once described [mining engineer Frank Holmes] as 'a man of considerable personal charm, with a bluff, breezy, blustering, buccaneering way about him' -- Daniel Yergin,  The Prize

"Small heart had Harriet for visiting" -- Jane Austen, Emma

As I cannot repeat often enough, as a writer, your best teachers are the books you have already read and truly loved-- the books that made you want to write your own. (These books or may not get the Seal of Approval from your English professor-- but never mind. Some academics may be artists, and some artists academics, but in general they are creatures as different from one another as a coyote and a horse.)

To repeat: As a writer, your best teachers are the books you have already read and truly loved. Pull one of those beloved books off your bookshelf, have a read-through, see where and how the author uses alliteration. Or not?

Once you recognize a technique you can often spot it in, say, a newspaper article, a biography, or an advertisement. More about reading as a writer here.

Help yourself to more resources for writers on my Resources for Writers page.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Poetic Listing

Poetic Repetition

Diction Drops & Spikes

Poetic Repetition

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.


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Unintentional repetition of a word or phrase in your writing is rather like going out the door with another sweater clinging to the back of your sweater -- uh, dorky. Or smiling wide-- with a piece of spinach stuck between your front teeth. It's the sort of thing we all do on occasion, and that is why we need to revise, revise, revise.

Intentional repetition on the other hand, can bring in the bongo-drums of musicality! Here are some examples of this powerful poetic technique:

"Man lives in the flicker, Man lives in the flicker."

-- Mark Slade, "The New Metamorphosis" Mosaic 8 (1975), quoted in Marshal McLuhan, "Man and Media," transcript of a talk delivered in 1979, in Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews (MIT Press, 2005).

wanting, wanting...

"Wanting to be read, wanting the recognition, whether its Jacqueline Susan-style, all glitz and limos, or sweeping the gland slam of literary events, is not a crime."

-- Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

book my only book...

"You have also never said one word about my poor little Highland book my only book. I had hoped that you and Fritz would have liked it."

-- Queen Victoria (letter to her daughter, 23/12/1865)

money, money, money, money....

"Tancredi, he considered, had a great future; he would be the standard-bearer of a counter-attack which the nobility, under new trappings, could launch against the social State. To do this he lacked only one thing: money; this Tancredi did not have; none at all. And to get on in politics, now that a name counted less, would require a lot of money: money to buy votes, money to do the electors favors, money for a dazzling style of living..."

-- Guiseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

In a previous post I talked about reading as a writer. One thing to notice as you read is where the author repeats a word or phrase-- if you judge it effective.

P.S. Oodles of free resources for creative writers on my workshop page, including "Giant Golden Buddha" & 364 more free 5 minute writing exercises.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

 Diction Drops & Spikes

Blast Past Easy: A Permutation Exercise with Clichés

"For the Vivid Dreamer": Notes on My Travel Writing Workshop 

in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park

Diction Drops & Spikes

As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.

Thanks to the Battle of Hastings of 1066! Because it is a blend of languages, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, English offers unusual facility for diction drops and spikes, and you, dear writerly reader, if you care to dare, can employ these for a richly dazzling array of effects. Irony, comedy, sarcasm, intimacy, poignancy, revelation, poetry, punch, sass, shock... it's a long list and I'm sure that you can make it longer.

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Here, taken from a few favorite books and blogs, are some examples of diction spikes-- that is, a sudden rise in the level of formality of vocabulary and syntax (wherein it all gets very elliptically Latinate)-- and drops-- gettin' funky with the grammar and using short, sharp words.

See if you can spot the spikes and drops. I separate them out for you below the quotes.

"What then, does one do with one's justified anger? Miss Manners' meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose. They generally work. When they fail, she has the ability to dismiss inferior behavior from her mind as coming from inferior people. You will perhaps points out that she will never know the joy of delivering a well-deserved sock in the chops. True-- but she will never inspire one, either."

-- Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

SPIKE: "What then, does one do with one's justified anger? Miss Manners' meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose."
DROP : "sock in the chops"

"Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals' surface. The regional maintentance engineer didn't think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination. Though maybe, he admitted, he was unenlightened. The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone that they weren't treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama."

-- Philip Garrison, "La Reconquisita of the Inland Empire"

SPIKE: "Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals' surface."
DROP:  "...didn't think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination..."
SPIKE:  "The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone..."
DROP: "...they weren't treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama."

"As I thought about composing a new blog post over the past couple of weeks, I resisted the idea of writing about wildfire, even as the topic claimed a growing share of mind day after day. For one thing, I've touched the subject before. For another, yet another blog bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome. Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer."

-- Andrea Jones, "Out of the Background" in "Between Urban and Wild" blog, July 4, 2018

SPIKE:  "...bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome."
DROP: "Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer."

"When I was a young man in the 1970s, New York was on its ass. Bankrupt. President Gerald Ford told panhandling Mayor Abe Beame to "drop dead." Nothing was being cared for. The subway cars were so grafitti-splattered you could hardly find the doors or see out the windows. Times Square was like the place Pinocchio grew donkey ears. Muggers lurked in the shadows of Bonwit Teller on 57th and Fifth. These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate 'risk oblivious' cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind. New York seemed done for."

-- James Howard Kunstler, "The Future of the City"

DROP: "...New York was on its ass."
DROP: "drop dead."
SPIKE: "These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate 'risk oblivious' cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind."
DROP: "New York seemed done for."


P.S. More resources for writers on my workshop page, including "Giant Golden Buddha" and 364 More Five Minute Writing Exercises.


> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Grokking Plot: The Elegant Example of Bread and Jam for Frances

Writing Loglines and the Concept of the "Eyespan"

The StandStand: One Highly Recommended Way 

to Keep on Writing While Standing

Virginia Tufte's ARTFUL SENTENCES: SYNTAX AS STYLE

As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.

While I increasingly rely on the Internet for reference—I’ll more likely type a word into my on-line dictionary or thesaurus than pull a wrist-breaker of an old tome off its shelf—there is still no substitute for a writer’s reference library—real books on a real shelf, at-hand. And among the most useful works in my own reference library is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. 

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From the catalog copy:

“... Tufte presents—and comments on—more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language. 

“The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept—short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.”

But Artful Sentences is not only for aspiring writers. Having written more books than I’ll bother to count, I still find that an occasional review consistently yields inspirations.

Where, and for what effect, can I limber up my writing? Perhaps I need to work in shorter sentences. (p. 9) Bright little ones! 

Or perhaps, I could play a bit with what Tufte terms “Catalogs of modifiers” (p.100)-- basically, a bunch, a spew, an avalanche of adjectives. 

Or perhaps, I might try an adjective as an opener.” (p.160) Open doors, don’t they seem more inviting?

Artful Sentences elucidiates the immense range of possibilities we have in the English language to arrange our sentences, and within them, the sounds and rhythms of words, the better to sharpen and strengthen what we mean to say. And that, my dear writerly reader, is power.

P.S. You will find more recommended reading on my workshop page. 

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Blast Past Easy: A Permutation Exercise with Cliches

Dispatch from Palo Alto: A Joy in this Multivariate World: 

Edward Tufte's Presenting Data and Information

A Visit to the Casa de la Primera Imprenta de las Américas

in Mexico City

Blast Past Easy: A Permutation Exercise with Clichés

By C.M. Mayo www.cmmayo.com

As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.

YE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND
Yes, this was on my bookshelf and
yes, I actually used to consult it

I've previously posted on my favorite exercises for a fast-acting manuscript Rx, what I call "emulation" or "permutation" exercises, here. (Which one is it, emulation or permutation? Depends. That would be another post.)

The basic idea is to take a phrase or perhaps as many as a few sentences from another writer's work or from your own manuscript, and play with it in some predetermined way. Sometimes the exercise might prompt a new piece; othertimes it might give you just what you need to brighten up the blah or smooth a rough patch in a draft. Moreover, for my wampum, permutation exercises beat crossword puzzles by a Texas section. (Yowie, that was an orangutang's tea party of imagery!)

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Yes, I am being silly. To play, you have to be willing to be silly! Tell your ego to just take a long cool breath. You, dear writerly reader, do not have to use the results of your writing exercises in your manuscript, never mind show them to anyone else.

Simply, for any given permutation exercise, come up with a bunch of things! Maybe elegant, maybe dorky. Maybe even dorksterly dorkikins dorky. Then circle the one or two results that, for whatever reason, strike your fancy and/or seem apt for your purposes.

In my experience, and that of many of my writing students, doing these exercises is a tiny investment for a mega-payoff. The more often you do these little exercises, the easier they get, and this ease will greatly serve you in your endeavors to write, and in particular, to write more vividly. You will also get practice in generating material you are able to, la de da, discard. And discarding unworthy bits and pieces of a draft, and even whole novels, without attachment, that's a vital skill for a writer, too.

"IT'S LIKE DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN"

There are as many permutation exercises as you can dream up. This one, what I call "Blast Past Easy," plays with cliché.

How can you spot a cliché? If a phrase sounds familiar and/ or it came to you too easily, it's probably a cliché.

What's wrong with cliché? For more discerning readers, whom presumably you would want to have, cliché signals a lack of originality and/or naiveté and/or sloppiness. In sum: mediocrity. There are exceptions-- for example, a fictional character or the subject of biography might use cliché (and if they do, that tells us somehing about them, does it not?) And some essayists use cliché for comic effect. (I'll be posting about intentional diction drops anon.)

"Like deja vu all over again"-- well, you can debate me, but I'm going to call that a cliché, except  as used by Yogi Berra, because he's the one who came up with it.

Here are a few clichés I happened upon in recent weeks' reading, and my permutations-- four each. If you feel so moved, a good exercise could be to add more permutations of your own.

"Talk does not boil the rice"
Talk does not shampoo the pooch
Talk does not slice the pepperoni
Talk does not iron the shirts
Talk does not roast the turkey
(You might try a permutation of the noun, "talk," e.g., art; violin playing; texting

"Shoveling smoke"
Shoveling soap bubbles
Shoveling Koolaid
Shoveling fog
Shoveling thunder
Shoveling granola
Shoveling marshmallows

"Bet you dollars for donuts"
Bet you deutschmarks for Dingdongs
Bet you dinars for dinos
Bet you dollars for diddlysquat
Bet you pounds for peanuts

(Part of what makes "dollars for donuts" such an appealing cliché is the alliteration, that is, the repeating "d"s of "dollars" and "donuts." You might try varying the sound, e.g., silver for Skittles, or, pesos for pips, etc.)

"Let the cat out of the bag"
Let the cockroach out of the bag
Let the bedbug out of the backpack
Let the tarantula out of the pickle jar
Let the troll out of the compost pile
(Another permutation could be to switch the verb, e.g, Put the cat in the bag; stuff the cat in the bag; drown the cat in the bag; swing the cat in the bag, etc.)

"The bee's knees"
The snail's tail
The donkey's ankle
The sloth's toenail (doesn't rhyme but, oh well, I like it)
The kitten's mittens (is that a cliché?)

"A fish out of water"
A mole out of its hole
A horse out of its pasture
A sheep out of its herd
A credit card nowhere near a department store

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P.S. Visit my workshop page here. For more exercises, help yourself to "Giant Golden Buddha & 364 More Free Five Minute Writing Exercises."

Today's exercise is

May 14 "Barrel, Mirror, Telephone"

In three sentences or less describe the barrel. In three sentences or less describe the mirror. Where is the telephone? Describe what happens.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

What the Muse Sent Me About the Tenth Muse, 

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

For the Vivid Dreamer:

Notes on my Workshop on Nature and Travel Writing 

in the Glorious Gudalaupe Mountains

Writing Loglines and the Concept of the "Eyespan"

For the Writing Workshop: John Oliver Simon and Nicanor Parra; Margaret Dulaney's "The Child Door"; Latest Stance on Twitter; Ten Hands

This year I continue to post on Mondays, the second Monday of the month being dedicated to a post for my writing workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. 

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REMEMBERING TWO POETS

John Oliver Simon has passed away, a great loss to the translation and poetry community in California and abroad, especially Mexico. Read his obituary here.

Back in 2008, for Tameme, I published John Oliver Simon's translation of a chapbook by Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados, Los fantasmas del Palacio de los Azulejos / Ghosts of the Palace of the Blue Tiles. Read an interview with him about that here.

And over at her blog, Holding the Light, poet and translator Patricia Dubrava remembers Chilean poet Nicanor Parra.

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Some questions for you, dear creative writer:

How would you want your obituary to read?
What creative works would you be most proud of, and why?
Which ones would you not want to leave unfinished, no matter what?

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MARGARET DULANEY'S PODCAST, BOOK, AND LATEST OFFERING, "THE CHILD DOOR"

Playwright, essayist and mystic Margaret Dulaney's monthly podcast, Listen Well, offers her beautifully written and beautifully read personal essays. (Check out her book, To Hear the Forest Sing: Musings on the Divine.) Dulaney's latest offering, "The Child Door," should be of special interest for anyone who might need a nudge for their creative process.

> Click here to listen to Margaret Dulaney's essay, "The Child Door."

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JANE FRIEDMAN KNOWS ALL, TELLS ALL

For those looking to publish, I warmly recommend signing up for Jane Friedman's free and choc-packed-with-valuable information newsletter, Electric Speed.

You can follow her blog, too.

Her new book, The Business of Being a Writer, will be published this month by University of Chicago Press.




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MY CURRENT, CRINGING-IN-THE-FAR-CORNER STANCE ON TWITTER

See "Twitter Is" by C.M. Mayo

As I slog through the backlog of email and, concurrently, contemplate the transcendent role of technology in Far West Texas and American and Mexican culture and my life (e.g., last week's post, Notes on Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute), I've been noodling about social media, Twitter in particular.

Back in 2009 when it was sparkly new, I wrote a celebratory essay about Twitter for Literal. I stand by what I said; Twitter has its creative possibilities. But then as now, to quote myself:

Fster than a wlnut cn roll dwn t roof of a hen house, were gng 2 see t nd of cvlizatn

It has become increasingly clear to me that, considering Twitter's attention-fracturing, addictive qualities, and general yuckiness (hashtag mobs, trolls, etc), on balance, it's not for me.

In fact, I sincerely wish that I had never bothered setting up an account with Twitter in the first place.

But I have not deleted my account, cmmayo1, because, after all, I have a goodly number of followers and therefore, when I run a guest blog, book review, or Q & A, I will tweet the URL to that post as a courtesy to the author. And I know that there are still a few thoughtful, readerly and writerly souls out there, checking in on their Twitter feed, now and then, who may see such tweets and find them of interest and value. You know who you are.

[UPDATE JANUARY 2018: I dislike Twitter's attention-fracking mobdom intensely, however I have decided to keep the account @cmmayo1 to tweet as a courtesy to those writers who have given me a Q & A; as a courtesy to their publishers; and, when the occasion calls for it, which is very rare indeed, I'll tweet as a courtesy to my publishers. That's it. I prefer to invest what I think of as my "communication writing energy" in this blog, email and, yeah verily, snail mail.]

P.S. Everything I have to say about Facebook I said here.

P.P. S. Nicholas Carr has two extra-extra-crunchily crunchy pieces on Twitter in Politico, this one in 2015 and this one in January 2018.

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TEN HANDS

Today's 5 minute writing exercise is "Ten Hands":

Describe five different pairs of hands. (Some things to consider might be color; texture; shape; symmetry; condition; scars; tattoos; jewelry; etc.) For each pair of hands assign a name and a profession.

> Help yourself to 364 more free five minute writing exercises on my workshop page here.

P.S. As ever, you can find many more resources for writers here, and recommended reading on the creative process here.


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> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Q & A with Leslie Pietrzyk 

On the Siren Song of the Online World and on Writing Silver Girl

On Seeing as an Artist

Tulpa Max, or Notes on the Afterlife of a Resurrection