Handwritten

07 Saturday Jun 2014

Tags

Alexandre Dumas, Flavorwire, handwriting, joseph conrad, Manuscript

Joseph Conrad’s manuscript of Typhoon.

Do you write by hand?

I do – that is, I type my stories, plays and blog posts, but for notes, lists and brainstorming I use the good old method: pen and notebook. It makes for a good deal of scribbling – which I quite like, but you won’t find me ranting against word-processors.

Indeed, whenever I find myself moving around whole chunks of writing on an electronic page, or copying and pasting, or shuffling paragraphs, or trying out different versions of a sentence with a flick of a finger on a touchpad, I can’t help thinking in some awe of all the wonderful novels, plays and poems that were written by hand – and in many cases, largely by candlelight…

Ah well, it was another time, another world – on which it is easy to open windows. For instance, by perusing these images of manuscript pages from twenty-five famous novels, collected by Flavorwire.

Quite lovely to see, aren’t they? And I like to play guessing games on what can be gleaned of each author’s method and personality…

Always remembering that Dumas Père’s precise and very neat quasi-secretary hand, covering endless large, pale-blue pages – with no punctuation at all, to save time – is rather hard to reconcile with his exuberant personality and colourful writing style.

Guessing games work only so far, but they are great fun – or else, they are great fun, but only work so far.

Handwriting (andrewhutchinson.com.au)
The Original Handwritten Manuscript of an Early Version of ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (laughingsquid.com)

Netless

05 Thursday Jun 2014

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Internet, Procrastination

For nearly a month. With the scarce comfort of a friend’s wireless once a week or so. It’s been a long, long near-month – and yes, I guess I’ll give in and buy myself a smartphone, one of these days.

Still, I didn’t go mad as I thought I would at first. Why, the day I was back online I even caught myself… well, not exactly missing my netless state, but still. Because the fact is, after the first week or so of frantic despair, I adjusted rather well. No email to check every other minute, no blogs, no Pinterest, no Facebook, no Twitter, no chats, no forums, no way to google this, and that, and that again… Was it inconvenient? Very. Was it unpleasant? Well, no. In some ways it was rather… restful.

Not that it was a restful month in a broad sense – quite the contrary, in fact.

I designed lights for two different plays in three weeks, I helped launch a new association, I had two meetings of my not-quite-reading group, I struggled with two commissioned works, I shirked the commissioned works for the time it took to write the first draft a short story that wouldn’t leave me alone, I made second place in a contest (with a monologue), I prepared and gave a talk in Milan… Quite the busy month.

And so I have to wonder. Was being offline conducive to getting more things done? I can’t take it on myself to say it wasn’t. I have known for some time that the Web is my Well of Lost Hours… and not exactly “lost”, if you like, because yes, there are lots of useful things I do there – research, work, reading, studying, keeping contacts, and so on – but still.

But still.

I’m not saying I should or could do without the Internet – help and deliver us! I’d never survive, because of the kind of work I do, because of the place I live – a tiny village in the middle of nothing much – and for a number of reasons. But perhaps I could give myself the occasional offline time. A week a month, perhaps? But no, that’s both too much and too little. What about a month each year? unplug1

Which month should I choose, if I did? How exactly would I go about it? Because I know myself, and my non-existent ability to resist temptations… Nothing short of spending the month in some entirely internet-free place would hold me to it. Or perhaps I might just unhook my modem and give it to someone else to keep. To keep and hide. To keep and hide very well.

Anyway, this is something I need to think through, because I couldn’t live offline, but with some organised netlessness now and then, I could really do.

Paris Stamps

10 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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Tags

journaling, Paris, Shakespeare & Company

“Suppose you keep a journal,” I was told once. “And suppose you have, for each day, just the back of a postage stamp. A largish one, if you like, but all you can jot down is one sentence. One place, one person, one image, one impression – it doesn’t matter. One single, vivid thing you want to remember for that day.”

I have always liked the notion, in that vague, airy way you do with pretty ideas. I even tried it once or two, and enjoyed the extreme distillation, the quest for vividness and effectiveness… But every time I tried it for a few days, a week, even a month, then dropped the habit and forgot about it.

For some reason, it came back to me the first night in Paris, last week, and proposed it to my friends, and they agreed to make a game of it. Every night, over dinner, we shared and discussed our stamps.

At times they were huge, like viewing the Tour Eiffel from the Trocadero against a grey and windy sky. At times they were as tiny as a cocotte of moules marinières. They might have music in them, like entering Saint-Germain-des-Prés to find a choir rehearsing Renaissance motets, or they might be full of people, like the very multi-ethnic population of the underground, or it might be anything from Shakespeare & Company on the Rive Gauche to art students in Notre Dame, to the slanting sunlight in the morning, to the scent of coffee…

It was fun, it was interesting, it said much about each stamp-maker, it made us think and search, and observe – and, come evening, we were all eager to play.

So I’m beginning to think I might try it again. Finding The One Thing every day, trimming it down to one sentence without losing its texture, even choosing amongst possibilities.. it must be good writing practice, mustn’t it?

No Title At All (Yet)

22 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Short story

Finishing the first/third draft.

Very late last night.

And no title at all – yet.

Leaving it sit ths morning (also because I’m having eight people over for lunch…)

Going through it one last time this afternoon, then handing it to my Readers Three.

And what about the title?

Pestering the Readers Three until they’ve told me what they think.

Polishing it up.

Going through one last How Could I Write This How Could I Ever Think I Can Write crisis.

Finding a dratted title.

Sending it away in the nick of time.

Sounds like a plan, doesn’t it?

The Sci-Fictional Serendipity of Scribblings

20 Thursday Mar 2014

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Scribbling

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

Connie Willis, Galaxy Quest, Lyon Sprague de Camp, New England Science Fiction Association, Science fiction, Scribblings

Science fiction and I, now… Well, it’s slightly awkward.

The short version is, I was accidentally exposed to several dangerous quantities of ugly and/or distressing science fiction as a child, and had nightmares for years, and remained very, very wary of the whole genre, barely able to watch Star Wars without getting uneasy. Yes, Star Wars. Like the dog of the story, scalded with hot water, I was sure I hated all that had to do with sci-fi.

Then, in recent years, the startling fact was brought to my attention that time travel is indeed science fiction – and I have a cautious liking for time travel stories, provided the destination is the past, and not some dystopian, or apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, or pre-apocalyptic future, thank you very much. So I ventured to read Connie Willis‘ To Say Nothing of the Dog – and loved it, but I remain a sci-fictional wimp, and will likely die so.

So, tempting as it is to pretend I did it on purpose, I may as well confess that it was not only a surprise, but also something of an irony to find out that my new blog shares a name with a collection of works by L. Sprague de Camp. And yes, I know, LSdC was not exclusively a science fiction author, but it happens that Scribblings, the book, was first published by the New England Science Fiction Association for one of its conventions* – so, honestly, how un-sciencefictional can it be?

I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll even try to procure and read Scribblings, the book. Even before I consider the chance, I’d need detailed certainty there is nothing I don’t want to read in it. For instance, where (or rather, when) does the Drinkwhiskey Institute travel to? Or do I even want to know what fate awaits the Elephant in the poem of the same name? All else apart, it wouldn’t be terribly smart to give myself nightmares for the sake of my blog’s namesake book, would it?

So far, the only part of Scribblings, the book, I clapped eyes on is the table of contents – and I must say I like it. It sounds quirky and intriguing, and that’s one (however unintended) kinship I will claim. Who knows, some day I might read past the table and face the contents – but until then, I’ll hold Scribblings, the book, as a reminder to keep Scribblings, the blog, as quirky and intriguing as I can.

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* And say what you will, I cannot read or hear “science-fiction convention” without thinking of Galaxy Quest.

“Time Traveler’s Almanac” features sci-fi heavyweights and acclaimed Colorado authors (denverpost.com)

What’s In A Name

21 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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character naming, revision, shakespeare

I beg to differ from the Bard on this: I’m not all that sure a rose would smell as sweet if it were called, say, benzopyrene. Or, even if it did, would you really smell it to make sure?

Names matter. Names are not all the same.

And yes, I confess: I’m the sort who will stay after the film is ended, to read the names in the end credits. The sort who will sift through obituaries, other people’s old class lists and spam mail for names. The sort who, when playing D&D at sixteen, could agonize for weeks over the name of a Level 1 elf…

When I start writing something new, names are all important. I can spend hours poring over name lists in dictionaries, seeking The Right Name. And it’s hardly ever a matter of meaning. Mostly, it’s the sound. And of course, when writing historicals, other considerations weight in the choice, such as time period, custom and social suitability – but all the same, the name must sound right for the character.

Oddly enough, I don’t always choose first names I like. I’ve foisted on beloved characters names I’d frankly hate to bear, while some names I love never proved right for any character of mine. Odder still, last names work differently: they must not only sound well with the character’s first name – for some reason, I want to like them.

All this to say that there is this novel I’m slowly revising, in which two main characters bore names starting with A, and three different beta readers suggested that I should change at least one. It seems it’s not a good idea to have different characters’ name begin with the same letter. Readers might get confused.

Yes, yes – I know: I think I’d take offence too if anyone implied that I can mix up two very different characters just because they share an initial. And yet… what if someone got confused? What if they had to check again and again to make sure who’s who? What if they threw the book away before page thirty – because they can’t tell characters apart? Not good, is it?

So in the end I decided to give up one of my oh-so-carefully chose names, and I’m not enormously happy, because one I like, and the other is perfect for the character, and no amount of list sifting has yet produced a good alternative for either…

And no: my characters don’t smell as sweet by any other name. Why, one of them has even changed face in my mind – all because of the name I’m not sure I’ll keep… I dare say that, for once and as far as I’m concerned, Shakespeare just might be wrong.

Naming Characters… and why I’d be a bad parent (rickywilkswriting.wordpress.com)

Writing In December

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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Tags

Christmas, Short Stories, Short story, writing time

Would you believe it is December again?

Yes well, by now it is the middle of December again, but the fact remains.

And I love December – I really do, but all the same I must admit that writing-wise it is a downright dreadful time. You know how it is. Work crowds, because it seems They cannot live unless you give them one more translation, one more piece of editing, one more whatsit before Christmas. And then there are Christmas preparations – which we take very seriously – and shopping trips to town, and Christmas concerts, and Dickens and Tchaikowskij, and then guests begin to arrive…

And yes, it is partly my fault for embarking every year on ludicrously intricate decorating projects, stubbornly baking my own lebkucken cookies and Christmas pudding, trimming two large trees… but the thing is, writing time is in short supply.

And if the shortage weren’t enough, Christmassy ideas keep hitting me smack in the eye: it’s not as if I hadn’t plenty of projects going and deadlines looming, and yet, what do you think I do when I can snatch an hour? Work on my new play? Tweak my almost-completed three-act thing? Make up lines for my opera libretto?

But no – not on my life: there is this little new play set around Christmas Eve, and then, late at night, while I cut and pasted cardboard ornaments for the tree, a notion for a short story blossomed out of an old play, and how can one disregard a new notion for a short story?

And last night, while dining out with friends, a casual piece of conversation sparked off something like a very wintery ghost story – and I just had to sit up very, very late jotting down at least a shadow of an outline…

Which is why I’m hard put not to laugh whenever someone wonders where I find ideas to write, and why I have learned, over the years, to give up December writing-wise, and roll with the cinnamon-scented current. December is December, after all, and another January will be here all too soon.

Christmassy-ness: A definition (laurajmichael.wordpress.com)
A Writers Gift (tracykauffman.wordpress.com)
Review: A Christmas Carol in the Dark (getreading.co.uk)

Post Office Poetry

02 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by la Clarina in Scribbling

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Tags

getting unstuck, Opera, Post Office, writing

(Photo credit: Pascal Maramis)

Well, not exactly, perhaps – but still.

I was working hard, the other day, on this opera libretto – or trying to. Actually, to say that I was frowning at the computer screen, and crossing out five words for every three I wrote, would be a more accurate description. It didn’t help that my neck and head were giving me grief, but let us not mince matters: the fact is, I felt more than a little stuck.

So, after a torturous couple of hours of this, the thought of the papers I had to mail flashed through my mind, very much like a glimpse of salvation. By then I was desperate enough that I would have clutched at anything, but a deadline was involved, and I really, really had to go.

Of course, as I might have expected, it was salvation of the most dubious kind: at the Post Office, I found myself at the tail end of the longest, slowest queue on record. I could only stand in line, fume to myself, wish I had brought something to read, and fume some more…

And then it happened.

I was busy devising inventive names for the giggling, chatty, messy, oh-so-slow clerk, when the first line popped up in my mind. And then another. And then another… Dig for a notebook (I always, but always have one with me), dig for a pen, scribble, scribble, scribble… For the next twenty minutes I happily counted syllables and jotted down line after line, and by the time it was my turn at the counter, I had a complete scene and a good chunk of the next one – far from perfect, of course, but still more and better than I had managed in two hours at home.

So, it would seem it is true. And yes, I know it is, but it always takes me by surprise: a little walk, a notebook at hand, something to take one’s mind from what doesn’t work – and may be a little fury – will go a long way towards unsticking what is stuck.

Will I remember it next time?