This will be an ever so brief blog post. I had planned on a meatier offering, until yesterday’s ice storm, which left us without electricity, thereby throwing a major monkey wrench into my planned activity. (Cleaning, decluttering, painting, and creating.) Say what you will, electricity is not just a modern convenience, it’s a modern necessity. After taking several long trips to charge my iPhone in the car, I thought, “Wait a minute! I have a house for sale!” Which has electricity! So I am sitting in this nearly vacant, “for sale” house charging up my devices. (This also makes for a great warming hut!)
Lately I’ve been playing with the idea of bad writing, good writing, and GREAT writing as a writing exercise. I know, I know. I always (usually) try to do my best at my writing. Sometimes the muse is unwilling, or likely on a trip to Cancun, which is where I wish I were today. (Spring? What’s that?)
Bad Writing
This week I thought I would mix it up a little and PURPOSEFULLY engage in bad writing. No story line, terrible grammar, very little arc, and throw in every broken rule I could think of. I limited myself to one handwritten page. (I didn’t want to make this a habit.)
I don’t know if it was successful (I’m not showing any of this to anyone), but it felt oddly freeing. Like I would imagine it would feel to shoplift a lipstick from Walgreen’s. (Believe me, I have no previous experience. These lips and lipstick are not a combination.) I immediately went from my intentionally bad writing to editing a few pages of my manuscript. Wow. What a feeling.
Good Writing
My next exercise was to take awful writing and turn it into good writing.
To do this, take a known quantity, like a New York Times bestselling author (with questionable skills but a massive following). Take a random paragraph or page and rework the words from terrible (or even mediocre) and turn it into something better. Tighten up the sentences. Remove the adverbs. Take out the dangly participles. Think of better adjectives.
I won’t reveal here which writer and which paragraph I chose, but you may be able to squeeze it out of me at a cocktail party. 🙂
Great Writing
If you cannot produce great writing, at least concentrate on someone else’s great writing.
This weekend (before power outage), I decided to deep clean my kitchen. Don’t laugh, I’ve been chipping away at this for weeks. There’s mystery food, and then there’s MY mystery food, some of which are school age now, but let’s not get into that.
As I clean, I turn on YouTube and listen to the hits of the 1970’s. GREAT music, and the lyrics are poetic. I’d almost forgotten how poetic until I loaded up early Emmylou Harris.
“Pancho and Lefty” (written by Townes Van Zandt) was not one of my favorite tunes on this album, but damned if this guy couldn’t turn a phrase.
Take the first four lines:
Was gonna keep you free and clean
And now you wear your skin like iron,
And your breath as hard as kerosene
How evocative are those words? Listen to the rest of the song. He takes very few words and paints a picture so vivid, you are there.
Of course, then I fell into the black hole of great lyrics. Think early Neil Young (Like a Hurricane), Gram Parsons (Grievous Angel), and anything Bob Dylan. And that’s just a fingernail scrape across the surface. Listening to great oldies is motivational for me.
And then the neighborhood transformer blew up – or a tree fell on it…oh well.
OK, time’s up. Back to the frozen house. Stay warm, peeps, and keep writing.
