Storytelling Twitter Challenge

If we presume that “twitter” must be the collective noun for “tweets” then we took on a great freight of twitter over the past few days in our latest challenge.  Timed to appear with my new novel, The Last Storyteller,  I asked you all to complete the world’s most wonderful sentence, “Once upon a time.”  I expected – I hoped for – imagination, wit, thoughtfulness, originality, even perhaps a flash of magic.  When it’s in the hands of a magician, the phrase “Once upon a time”  exists, doesn’t it, to generate excited anticipation? At least that was the basis on which your entries were always going to be judged and I’ve chosen, as promised, and in no particular order of merit, these five winners earn a copy of The Last Storyteller;

@BearNecessitude Once upon a time a man came to take me to a different life.
@LaurenBaratzLogsted Once upon a time, the vampire was the least of our worries.
@BenHeyes Once upon a time there was distance and derision.
@semivivum Once upon a time, we were content.
@LordEnzi Once upon a time, time stopped once. 

However,since consistency is the natural enemy of imagination, I’ve broken my own rules and added a sixth prize, which I’ve awarded on the basis of the entrant observing the medium with humor – here it is:

@earlystages Once upon a time, only birds tweeted. Now we can all tweet happily ever after. 

Thank you all; you are such good sports and so generous with your efforts –your entries seem to increase in number with each challenge, and were I a demographic profiler I would have the most fascinating time determining the shape and tastes of my followers on Twitter!

Introducing A Reader’s Life

For the last two years, under the banner of A Writer’s Life, I’ve been tweeting daily writing tips - gleaned from all over: interviews, biographies, personal experience. We’ll shortly publish the first collection, 365 Writing Tips, on the Internet. Time for a change – actually more of an addition - and since reading is half of a writer’s job, I’m next putting up daily tweets under the banner, A Reader’s Life (while not abandoning the tone and direction of what I’ve been doing).  It might as easily be called Pot Luck or Pot Pourri or Bran Tub because I’m dipping my hand into whatever material of any kind - cultural, political, sporting, current news, old newspapers - in which I’ve been immersed, or of which I’m fond, or by which I’m stimulated. Or simply want to share. Books, and any art form; discoveries and happy returns; new or favorite writers, poems, music, paintings - all will have one thing in common: a capacity to ignite in me the desire to get back to the desk and work, work, work. 

I’ve always had a rag-bag mind, like the drawer in every kitchen where we keep bits of string, old postcards, interesting bottle-tops, screws that have fallen out of something but we don’t know what – everyday miscellanea. Recently, to try and organize that mental drawer, I attempted the exercise of trying to write down – as it came to me – any quotation, reading memory, word origin, movie scene, painting or painting detail, music playing in my mind – in any one day. Failed. Then I tried any one hour. Failed again! I couldn't even count the number of sound-tracks rolling through my brain – was it a 16-track desk, a 32, a 64? Don’t know, still can’t count because new ones come in as I’m counting. I suppose I’m just not Zen enough!

What I think I’m trying to say here is – I have no idea what will appear every day in A Reader’s Life/A Writer’s Life until I write it. It could be anything from anywhere – a useless fact (if there is such a thing), a recollection, a quotation, a bygone day, a snatch of a song. When I have written it, I hope you’ll enjoy it, and maybe find in it the vibe that caused me to send it out from my Twitter page in the first place. And please share yours with me on Twitter or make comments here. Have a wonderful 2012!

 

The Writer's Life: Among modern novelists, few have as many gifts as Martha McPhee.

Her prose even splits the difference between the novel and the screenplay. Read the opening paragraph of Dear Money (I also devoured L’America): The story begins, of course, with real estate. The heady days of 2003. Pond Point, the old Victorian cottage tied together, it seemed, with twine, standing as it does before the dunes with a swath of sea grass like a moat, sweet pea shoots, their blue flowers dancing in a late afternoon breeze blowing offshore. The beach. Miles of sand, flanked by rivers, one large, one small, spilling into the Atlantic. Little islands floating just offshore, connected at low tide by sandbars that reach to them like arms.

The Writer's Life: Dept. of “Now Read on” openings: L’Étranger or The Stranger/Outsider by Albert Camus:

Ever in print since it was published in 1942, L’Étranger has been repeatedly listed among the top books of all time by those who make such lists - newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, etc. Here’s the alluring first sentence: "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the Home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday."

The Writer's Life: Great Remarks Dept.: John Updike on the reader at whom he aims.

Updike said, When I write, I aim my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a country-ish, teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him.

The Writer's Life: How to write the opening of a novel: Here’s an excellent example – from Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend.” Note how he tells us what a man is by telling us what he isn’t.

How to write the opening of a novel: Here’s an excellent example – from Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend.” Note how he tells us what a man is by telling us what he isn’t.

“In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in.

The figures in this boat were those of a strong man with ragged grizzled hair and a sun-browned face, and a dark girl of nineteen or twenty, sufficiently like him to be recognizable as his daughter. The girl rowed, pulling a pair of sculls very easily; the man, with the rudder-lines slack in his hands, and his hands loose in his waistband, kept an eager look out. He had no net, hook, or line, and he could not be a fisherman; his boat had no cushion for a sitter, no paint, no inscription, no appliance beyond a rusty boathook and a coil of rope, and he could not be a waterman; his boat was too crazy and too small to take in cargo for delivery, and he could not be a lighterman or river-carrier; there was no clue to what he looked for, but he looked for something, with a most intent and searching gaze. The tide, which had turned an hour before, was running down, and his eyes watched every little race and eddy in its broad sweep, as the boat made slight head-way against it, or drove stern foremost before it, according as he directed his daughter by a movement of his head. She watched his face as earnestly as he watched the river. But, in the intensity of her look there was a touch of dread or horror. “

The Writer's Life: “Tolstoy” by Henri Troyat; here’s a compelling extract:

“He labored away at his manuscript, full of mistrust, anger and weariness. He made revision after revision. He felt that he was taking two steps backward for one step ahead. ‘There are days when one gets up feeling refreshed and clearheaded,’ he said. ‘One begins to write; everything is fine, it all comes naturally. The next day one reads itover, it all has to go because the heart isn’t there. No imagination, no talent. That quelque chose is lacking without which our intelligence is worthless. Other days one gets up, hating the world, nerves completely on edge; nevertheless, one hopes to be able to get something done. And indeed it doesn’t go too badly; it’s vivid, thereis imagination by the carload. Again, one reads it over: meaningless, stupid; the brains weren’t there. Imagination and intelligence have to work together. As soon as one or the other gets the upper hand, all is lost. There is nothing to do but throw away what you’ve done and start over.”

The Writer's Life: What has Jell-O got to do with writing? Or coat hangers? Hilma Wolitzer, a remarkably fine writer of novels and writing advice, had this to say in her thoughtful and oh-so-useful book, “The Company of Writers.”

“I used to compare writing stories with cleaning out my closets. In both instances I was trying to make order out of chaos – in one, by discovering and organizing what was in the back of my mind, and in the other, by discovering and organizing what was on the backs of my shelves. Editing a manuscript to trim its excesses was not unlike plucking out those stray wire hangers and single socks. I confess that now I’m a lot less preoccupied by household chores [or analogies]. I haven’t made Jell-O in decades, not since a spectacular pink-and-green arrangement I was unmolding for dinner guests slithered down the kitchen drain. Like Dorothy Parker, I decided not to eat anything more nervous than I am. But Jell-O appears in every one of my books, as an homage to my domestic past. And because it’s colorful, shimmery, and layered with surprises, it makes a perfect all-purpose metaphor. Whatever you do in your “real” life may also be distilled into fictional material. Despite Hardy’s edict about the “uncommon” in fiction, I now believe that all experience is extraordinary in some ways. It’s just a matter of recognizing its literary potential.”

The Writer's Life: How do you package, in very beautiful writing, a hard moral point that’s important to you? Read this –

“Spring” by Gerard Manley Hopkins; he wrote it in May, 1877, and it’s very famous. The rhyming structure takes you along the familiar path of ABBA ABBA, i.e., first and fourth lines rhyme, as do second and third in the first, eight-line segment;and CD CD CD in the last six lines, i.e., every alternate line rhyming. But all that’s as nothing compared to the beauty of the language – savor this poem, even if you know it well; read it aloud to yourself. As to his moral hope/ despair at the end – bear in mind that he was a Jesuit priest of the Catholic Church and he felt his beliefs as others feel pain.

SPRING

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,

Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

The Writer's Life: Who wrote: “The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future anybody’s guess”?

Answer: The great New York humorist, James Thurber. This is Thurber on genius, from his letters: “One of the things I most resent is the idiotic use of the word ‘genius’ for me, and when it came up… the other day I said I was a reporter with not enough genius to get off newspapers and make more than forty a week until I was thirty-two. Anybody with the slightest critical ability knows that a genius would not have to slave over his prose so long, or over his drawings so little.… First drafts of my pieces sound twelve years old and only get going on the fourth rewrite. I have never cut off an ear or stuck my hand in a fire…”