Ken Stange

The Real Writing Comes After The Writing

I’ve always felt the real work involved in good writing isn’t in managing to write something of potential interest; it is in applying one’s critical skills to brutally prune and shape it. Certainly what I initially write is just the raw material for the finished work—and often very raw. Maybe some other more talented writers may have brains that do this for them before they put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. But there is no question that most really bad writing has never had the writer move beyond just managing to string some words together—and being quite content with the product.

And all the talk about our brains being divided into a creative half and a critical half is largely poppycock. Still, if one were to dichotomize the act of creation, the most crucial and difficult stage in in creating something worthwhile is not the initial generation of the raw material. (Even a computer can do that.) It is applying one’s critical faculties to discern what has potential worth, so one can refine it, while discarding what is worthless.

Last year I gave a TEDx talk about this topic, presumptuously entitled “Redefining Creativity”.

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Teaching Creative Writing

Many writers supplement their income by taking short-term jobs ‘teaching’ creative writing. And I’m sure most of them don’t take this gig just for the money—which, frankly, isn’t anything to crow about. It is intrinsically rewarding to encourage and help others in learning the art and craft of stringing words together.

I’ve done it, but when doing it, I’ve always been troubled by doubts that it is really possible to ‘teach’ creative writing. As with all the arts, as with all skills, one can teach someone how to use the tools, but showing someone how to apply watercolours isn’t going to teach them to how to enter into competition with Turner or Blake. So yes, you can teach some of the tricks of the writing trade, and that is important, but I’m not at all sure that is the same thing as teaching creative writing. For one thing, motivation is incredibly important for success at any endeavour, and every teacher of anything knows how hard that is to teach.

Nevertheless, encouraging others to share your enthusiasm is rewarding. Unfortunately, too often it seems the only interest in writing that many students have is in their own writing. How little so many of them have read amazes me. There are so many would-be poets who never read poetry.

I could never do this, but a writer friend of mine told me that when students proudly show him their efforts for evaluation, he always tells them that it is total shit. He claims that the writers with real potential will be motivated to prove him wrong. And it’ll toughen them up for dealing with the rejection slips that litter almost all writers’ paths to eventual publication. 

I don’t know. Maybe sometimes, but I think most people who succeed at anything will recall someone special who encouraged them at that critical junction where they have to decide whether or not to persevere, someone who convinced them the effort was worth it all.

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Your Man Friday’s Ideas: The End: Fire Or Ice Or Us

Ideas abound regarding how the world will end. Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” begins with the lines, “Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice.”

Man Friday links here: http://kenstange.com/yourmanfriday/?p=1509

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Why Poetry Isn’t Read: Misunderstanding What It Is?

People who don’t read poetry have strange ideas about what poetry actually is. They may associate it with those dead poets they had to read in school and so assume what makes something a poem is the use of accentual/syllabic meter and the regular pattern of end rhyme that was common in English poetry from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. This, of course, means they’ll consider Hallmark card doggerel to be poetry, but not most of the good poetry written since the beginning of the twentieth century. And they probably didn’t get enough enjoyment from reading those poems they were assigned in high school to want to seek out poetry as an adult reader.

The common use of the adjectival form gets closer to the real meaning of poetry. We are recognizing the essence of poetry when we say something is “poetic”, meaning an expression of something that rises high above the mundane. My preferred definition, which I believe to be shared by most poets, is that poetry is simply the most effective and efficient use of language. It uses every appropriate tool available in the language to accomplish this: the sound of the words, their cadence, even their appearance on the page. But it has nothing to do with mandatory unjustified margins and line breaks—or a regular meter and rhyme scheme. Those are tools that may or may not be used depending on whether or not they are judged to be the best means to the end. This is why prose can justifiably be called poetic, why ‘prose poem’ isn’t an oxymoron.

So don’t ever recommend a book as poetry. Recommend a book by simply saying it is poetic.

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Why Poetry Isn’t Read: False Expectations

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” ― T.S. Eliot

Too often poems are approached as if they were puzzles, something written in code that needs to be deciphered. (And too often that is how teachers introduce poetry to students.) It is no wonder many people see no point in solving a puzzle when the solution is just a mundane statement.

But poems aren’t word puzzles. Poetry is an attempt to express something that cannot be paraphrased, translated, into unambiguous declarative sentences. Ambiguity is at the heart of it. It is about connotation, not denotation.

To ask what a poem really ‘means’, is to approach it with the false expectation that it can accurately be paraphrased into more easily ‘understood’ language. It means approaching the poem as if it were like some recipe from a cookbook where only metric measures are given, and one needs to convert grams to ounces because those are the only units on your kitchen scale.

Wallace Stevens said that a poem doesn’t mean, it just is. His point is well taken, but a poem’s very existence can certainly mean something personally to the reader who doesn’t just view it as a mere means to an end. We don’t ask what a Beethoven sonata or a Rembrandt portrait means, for their ‘meaning’ is their existence in our experience of them. Poems, too, should simply be experienced.

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Why Poetry Isn’t Read: Need For Narrative?

Poetry was once actually popular. As recently as the Nineteenth Century the publication of a book of poetry could catapult the poet to the status of famous author. When in 1812 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (a story of the travels of rebellious, disillusioned young man searching for meaning to his life) was published, it became an immediate best seller. The poet Lord Byron wrote “I awoke one morning and found myself famous."

But poetry was already facing serious competition from the new kid on the block who had moved into the literary neighbourhood about a hundred years earlier. The first English novel is often said to be Robinson Crusoe published in 1719. The literacy rate had doubled since Shakespeare’s time, and more and more people were reading books. And what had always been central to ‘literature’, whether as theatre or even oral storytelling, was narrative. People wanted characters and plots. People wanted stories. Even in the 1800’s poems were still predominately narrative, but the prose of a novel was more flexible and, importantly, more accessible to the average reader.

So poets moved out of what had become a commercial centre and built their own community—and concentrated on doing what poems do best: expressing concisely what seems inexpressible. So most poetry since has been lyric, rather than narrative.

Nevertheless, many poems still contain a narrative component. And, arguably, poetry really is better equipped to probe deeply into character than is the novel.

And then of course it has to be said that many novels, or parts of them, really are poetry.

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Christmas Presents

I’d like to make a suggestion. My newest book is out just in time for last minute shoppers: Embracing The Moon: 25 Little Worlds. And if I do say so myself, it looks great, and the art printed beautifully.

http://www.kenstange.com/EmbracingTheMoon/

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Finding An Editor

I believe it is the writer’s responsibility to act as editor of his own writing and always has to be the final judge as to when it is as good as it’s going to get before stamping it “DONE”. Nevertheless, it unavoidable that real objectivity about one’s own work is impossible. Also, when reading your own writing you know what you thought you were saying, so you read too fast and miss obvious typos or missing words. Personally, I’m particularly terrible at proofing my own writing, partially because I read very fast, as well as being a very impatient fellow.

This is why writers need editors and proof-readers. Very few people are likely to volunteer for the latter chore, because it is tedious, boring, and requires solid knowledge of grammatical and spelling conventions. Even more difficult is finding a good editor. It’s hard enough to find someone who’ll find time to carefully read your latest masterpiece, but finding someone who understands and relates to what you’re trying express is even more difficult.

Writers and even their best editors are often engaged in more or less acrimonious dispute. No writer likes being told to cut something or that some part of what they’ve written desperately needs revising or that they’ve fallen off the deep end with some bit of florid or overblown phrasing. I know my ego is more bruised by that kind of criticism (no matter how justified) than if someone insulted me personally.

I’m fortunate. My wife, Ursula, is kind enough to take on these chores. And she is extremely competent at both.

She taught English composition at university, and I’ll admit she knows more about grammar conventions than I do. (I call them conventions, and she calls them rules, which is at the bottom of many disagreements.) We may have heated battles about the placement and use of various punctuation marks, but so far none has resulted in divorce proceedings.

And probably no one knows my writing (and me) better than she does, so she is ideally suited to editing my stuff. Naturally her criticisms and suggestions in this role I take more personally, but I always appreciate them and take them under far more serious consideration than I would from anyone else.

So let me end this posting with a public acknowledgement of my smart, kind wife. (And, incidentally, not wanting to press my luck, I’ve been trying to proof and edit these blog postings without her assistance. So blame me for any screw-ups.)

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Your Man Friday’s Ideas: Criminal Business Models

Many people think that big business is criminal, for as Bertolt Brecht remarked, “It is easier to rob by setting up a bank than by holding up a bank clerk.” But organized crime may be the ultimate big business. And often we are their customers.  Here are three TED talks that analyse the effective economics of established criminal enterprises. Draw your own conclusions about how similar they are to successful, ‘legitimate’ businesses.

Man Friday links here: http://kenstange.com/yourmanfriday/?p=1515

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