#writing
nibbler copyright
the cable threaded, before those word’s were rewritten, after the incline of originality, those wordy feeds don’t repeat. If a cabled thread of luxurious words said, the nocturnal yearnings bled deep in digestive thought, i sound to have their reclaim, if pen and ink, stale and bread, shone beauty for subordinate understudies, making descriptive a statue. Compared the infinitesimal replication, the measures have to present the compelling extraction, thought were all we are attuned too, it reads well enough in defining those words. Where have you thought them from, from where are you standing on the existence to ground out harsher temporal extractions, the reader has a right to know my compilation, shown to the world, what is shone deeply in my thought. Then you’re with acceptance, nocturnal for tomorrow is resemblance, the earth you walk, buries those words to read a infamy, upheld are they if supplied with faction, then retort to the deed, players of instrumental sheets, those nearer the words, reader of examination, fodder the thought gifting those representing crust, trust nutritional words, namely the wishful spirit cultivating the presentation of words.
Oscillation ~copyright~
The rotors came, instant by instant, they evaporated, first to anew the levy, cold as those whispers, bought into those foreign quilts, what was i too do, the conductors trail was his only thread. Its lonely being you, suppression the third hand on an on the, sediment had chanced, my failure, salts they are you where, discrimination is saying the retaining words aloud. New lasts the residing liberty, placed anew rose, by the vocal, texture nubs ever the mentions. Afford every dream my round of nomenclature; bias as they we are; i accept no more then you have, cultivating a withdrawal has your inversion placed to mind, knowledge is what you don’t renew, laid the rose imposing to bring you thought. She saved before, you aged her solitude, those implementing advice, he cannot bring you grief, it’s skewered by a living that teaches us not to last with machinations, the dread of surpassing the misplaced. Defining true love in replacing affirmations, building cellular rotations, the needer you apply to have anew shawl, the exposure you cause, isolates those years of indoctrinated representing blame.
There was no denying that the sorceress was beautiful. Her long, dark hair glistened in the sun. Her blue dress swirled as she walked, and the stone set in the silver ring on her finger reflected the green in her eyes. Even when lifting a terrible curse, as she had just done for the miller's family, even when casting a spell to drive away monsters that attacked in the night, her graceful movements never wavered. She was admired, envied, feared and resented in almost equal measure by the townspeople. But they needed her, of that there was now doubt.
Returning home, the sorceress stepped out of the dress and out of the young body. Now people would need consoling. She put on the body of the kindly old wise woman, known locally as the sorceress’s grandmother. She took a deep breath, tested the old voice, and stepped out the back door.
Remembering Alison
A writer who relished the extremes in life and found humor in the darkest regions
Pattiann Rogers on the Scientific Underpinnings of Poetry
“Poets judge their own reactions to the words and the forms they have chosen.”
When I first began to write poetry seriously, years ago, I came across essays published in magazines and journals written by people who were not poets but whose thoughts have stayed with me and influenced me.
One of these essays appeared in The Atlantic in 1992 and was titled “The Case for Human Beings,” by Thomas Palmer. In a portion of this essay, the author wrote a short summary of evolution in simple, colloquial language, ending with this sentence: “It was as if Nature, after wearing out several billion years tossing off new creatures like nutshells, looked up to see that one had come back and was eyeing her strangely.”
That was the beginning of humanity as a wondering, curious, questioning creature; maybe even the first question, a uniquely human invention. Scientists and poets, each in their own ways, still continue asking, exploring, and discovering. Who are we? Where are we? How did we get here? What are our limits? What are our obligations? What does it mean to be human? What is nature?
https://lithub.com/pattiann-rogers-on-the-scientific-underpinnings-of-poetry/
A quotation from Vonnegut, Kurt
The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American novelist, journalist
“Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists,” New York Times (1999-05-24)
#quote #quotes #quotation #art #creation #growth #soul #writing
Sourcing / notes: https://wist.info/vonnegut-kurt-jr/60172/
...one of my favorite pieces of writing advice, from Aristotle’s Poetics: “Action is not plot,” wrote Aristotle, “but merely the result of pathos.”
"This is not just advice about writing, but about life itself, the whole megillah, the human catastrophe. If you have people, you will have pathos. We are incited by our feelings — by the love, rage, envy, sorrow, joy, longing, fear, passion — that lead us to action. Plot is really just a fancy word for whatever happens, and structure is a fancy word for how it happens."
https://link.lithub.com/view/602ea77d180f243d6532f731ii1sh.kpa/17a266d4
THE CRAFT OF WRITING
Grant Faulkner on capturing the essence of a story.
March 29, 2023
Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata was obsessed by capturing the essence of a story. Essence as the intrinsic, indispensable quality that characterizes something, an extract that holds the fundamental properties of something in a concentrated form, a perfume, a scent.
Perfume comes from the Latin “per,” meaning “through,” and “fumum,” or “smoke.” Perfumes have been traditionally made by extracting natural oils from plants through pressing or steaming. In steam distillation, steam is passed through plant material, turning the plant’s oil into gas, and then the gas goes through tubes, where it is cooled and liquified. The oils are collected, then they’re blended together by a master, called a “nose,” who creates a scent with other ingredients and mixes it with alcohol. It’s a meticulous process that requires an intense patience and attunement to nuance to find the rare redolence that exists in quintessence.
In his most strenuous effort to capture the essence of a story, Kawabata turned his acclaimed novel Snow Country, for which he received the 1968 Nobel Prize, into an 11-page story, “Gleanings from Snow Country.” Kawabata completed the story just three months before his suicide in 1972. “Gleanings” pulls scenes almost intact from the novel, but Kawabata does not offer a condensed retelling, as one might expect; instead he becomes more suggestive. “Gleanings” moves without backstory, without the context of the novel, which centers on a story of two people meeting on a train in a doomed love affair. “Gleanings” defines these characters as being more like particles floating through space, unattached, not moored in a particular world or pulled forward by a particular trajectory or fate. In his spare style, Kawabata intensifies images and excavates new facets of his novel.
Why did he rewrite Snow Country as a short story? Did he suddenly realize that the novel, all of those pages, all of those words, didn’t serve the story — that the truth of the story required a smaller space, to be passed through smoke like a perfume? The novel was already written with brevity, focused around essence. In fact, Fred Chappell describes the novel as full of haiku in prose form. Did Kawabata realize at that point in his life, when his eventual suicide must have been on his mind, that we carry only a handful of essential images with us?
The title is interesting to me because “Gleanings from Snow Country” isn’t a new title but hearkens back to the novel. He could have recast the images as an entirely new story, except he wasn’t interested in a new story. I wonder if Kawabata was telling us that the “gleanings” matter more — that the gleanings are the essence we need to pay attention to. His miniaturization intensifies the isolated images. He works with understatement and ambiguity as if they are part of his color palette. He writes behind a veil. Elusiveness permeates. Ambiguity and suggestiveness are tools to capture essence, he seems to say.
The word essence carries the connotation of mystery because it’s often viewed as something that’s hidden. One must pay acute attention to realize the quiddity of something. Or, perhaps essences don’t lurk within things so much as we move through essences in life as we move through air, breathing oxygen without even thinking about our need to breath oxygen. When I look up from my computer, I see my dog sleeping on the couch, I see an oak tree outside my window, I smell a beef stew simmering on the stove. I’m taking in the world through its essences, as if detecting essences is a sense unto itself, my senses and my consciousness and my memories determining that the tree is an oak tree and not a palm tree or a cherry tree and that my little dog is not a cat. Essences belong to the “flesh of the world,” as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty said.
We search for essences. It’s the writer’s job to capture essences in words. The senses come into play in a new, more intense, more nuanced way. A smell combines with the angle of light, which combines with a car door slamming outside, which combines with a memory that creates a mood, a moment on the page. The music of language is a concentrating force as well. It creates intimacy with the rhythms of a writer’s imagination, its cadences communicating hints of irony or sincerity, humor or distress. The sounds give shape to the story. As you read you feel the story’s weights and measures, taste its consonants, absorb the essence of it in ways you might not even be able to name.
The search for the essence of the essence drove Kawabata. He also wrote miniatures, “palm-of-the-hand stories,” which he said “flowed from my pen naturally, of their own accord.” It was the form he felt encapsulated his art, the one where “the poetic spirit of my young days lives on.” One might, in fact, say that his novels are essentially linked miniatures. Miniatures allowed Kawabata to focus on ambiguity as a narrative tool. The ambiguity creates different contours, curves that are spacious and deep because they open into deeper meaning rather than weaving connections and explanations. The irresolution of Kawabata’s stories speaks to the epic nature of our interior lives.
https://link.lithub.com/view/602ea77d180f243d6532f731ige23.czk/77bb1705
Mineral
They maintain i have a stave, produce a scepter, relieved him of his world, produced him a craft, bound a trail of berries and biscuits, fondly knotted to have gathered their leave, nobodies entry by commuter, a dissociate familiar in conversions. They obliviate our returning sail, the river funded them a crown, we bind to paling yards, are known in slight regard: told them not to remain late, we’re streets taking to road, salvaging them doc yards. Conduits of foreseeable quietude, the rivers force, meandering limpid sails, broaches their mediation, foreshores a fathomless stave of scepter, they banked their biscuit, to walk a discarded evening. Comely to trail and store, a collection fond of the reflection, shone through overt the branching nibbles, diversions the minding narrows of time, the actress requested in appeal, he held the leading moon. The hours have us saved, the narrower the speeder an agender, knots or ceding to gather the distance of your strength, should last the upheld sail, we step one leg held to the forceful balance. Ran through chasing his alibi, crumbs drying him in a returned fashion, the dessert featuring crumpled shake, laced up Yorkshire burns, plated with an extra share of cinnamon scrolls.
Atoms
Patterns are impersonate to keep a drop of dew, the ashen return a overture, played spectrum in await, danced to placate their fauna in suspension, fulcrum overtures a social waiter by the glistening atoms. Conversation be told, the ready breezes motivated exchanging tones, many or few the cover of reappearing notations rounding the full sight, fool to numerate the falling overture a belligerent flew non captive a staple bough. Residing open to realm in gleaming spectrum the basic grass, dreamt a sound not heard, burnt umber collaborated with her myopic repeater, foliage danced to have hymns the words interpretate the feathered sky, anew with radiant drips, a neutral cord of major cacophony, baritone tracks a demising way. They wound the words heard least to the sound of enterprising buds, our rain is the sound of sun, fun with a word of tectonic splash, smashing the ashen day to a incomplete intraverse, cacophony of atoms believed to long the grainy gray, teary sabers a flotsam of an intuitively heady swelling grounding the dewdrop fall.
As post for somebody on my spectrum. <3<3<3
Mealy
Withstood the very carriage, tutorial opulence, their niche of pillar, jumble through inlays of fortification, bellows to roam a sounding location, skirts or velvet violas, hybrid sorrows locating. Distant shores had incisive green, that had decisive realms of pearly dreams, exporting umbrellas to the inbox, locks the viola derisive of fasting memiors, strings that attach and condemns a reposit.
The pillars tutelage open to the abandoned chatter bots, never haste the coffee, the hallows opulent vaporous eyes, needles unlashes the mascara, they freed velvet skies, inlays a violas resting. Churchill glass windows welcomed the house, studs and boots, hours incline the lazy shadows, forecast to a stadiums last light.
Those amending pavers, shouts and whispers are the defining latches, misplaced them tall, signature sketches a rising star, audience to screenshot then inbox, exporters of forecasts. Hamlet play last night, they cared not to embellish the old, tender charters the carriage, injustice compels pride, mealy chide, coffee and studs would be place as knight.
#FeedbackFriday @Geoffrey Gevalt #writing
Last month I wrote a short story called Forgive Me. I submitted it to a collection called Jewish Futures. It wasn't accepted, and sadly I got no feedback. I've since posted in on my wordpress blog, and I've gotten positive feedback from friends and family, who said it was interesting and thought provoking.
I'm wondering whether to edit and submit elsewhere. Your thoughts welcome, especially what you think could be improved. Thanks.
The Fabulist in the Woods In Northampton with Kelly Link and her community of like-minded writers.
https://www.vulture.com/article/kelly-link-white-cat-black-dog-profile.html
Story Prize
The annual award night for The Story Prize is this Wednesday, March 15. Watch the event live HERE, starting at 7:30 p.m.
https://mailchi.mp/f45c68d7a027/snorjcmvyz-6226528?e=106c5109e0
Finalists:
Touting
Those nocturnal pangs, numb sluices, the dissolvent hours smitten to accord, queue jumpers, celestial spires and indie the sovereign sphere. Locality to burrow sublime matter, the showers of scope, dope attire and indie recovery, button designer starters, credit keys tabulator and mock finery.
Northern stars plaintive lips, indigo dresses to a balsamic setting, king tides pink salmon mittens, frailly baritones redress to indigo blue, knee deep nets adored; moonlit shimmery spires, couplets to a brinny overture, thoughts fittingly ambrosia and indie tears tapering resolute combustion.
Spontaneity heresy embellished, ordered from Neptune’s past time, knee deep without teary frets, solutions the moon and her captive wake, tremulous fonts pose the artificial light, silhouettes her dreaming. Carnivorous mastery envelops the devote shadows, extraordinary she wear ill tight mittens, scenery that troubles the departing gossamer. ©
‘You must cleanse yourselves in the three springs before entering the temple,’ said the priest.
We went to the first spring and washed ourselves in the warm water, a pleasant scent of jasmine in the air.
The waters of the second spring were fast-flowing, ice-cold and salty. We only stayed in briefly.
The third spring gurgled out of the mud, and we sank almost to our knees. We playfully daubed each other in dark browns.
We returned to the priest, salty and mud-encrusted. ‘We have cleansed,’ I said.
The priest stared at us open-mouthed, then laughed as they opened the door to the temple.
‘I suppose you have. People usually go in the springs in the reverse order.’