Now, I assume that everyone has done their homework and brushed up on their grammar, punctuation, and all the other pesky elements of our craft.
Which brings me to the second part of William Strunk’s treatise: style.
What is literary style and how does it play into a writer/editor’s labors? Can we even discuss style or is it like Potter Stewart’s obscenity, we simply know it when we see it? Perhaps it’s a bit of both.
Curiously, over this past week my thoughts veered away from the world of letters and into – for me – the unfamiliar world of haute couture, specifically the wit and wisdom of Ms. Coco Chanel. One does not usually put Strunk and Chanel in the same breath, and yet, when it comes to style, they actually have a great deal in common. Both emphasize simplicity and clean lines, a style which is natural to the wearer, not forced or laden with ornamentation.
In words or cloth, despite publishers’ fads or the vagaries of the marketplace, style is like a little black dress, well-made, beautifully tailored, and right for any occasion.
So, how do we get there? Are there rules to literary style? Nothing as specific or rigid as those of its elements. More aptly, I would say there are principles – some of which I will examine in detail in upcoming weeks. These principles vary slightly with region, culture, and, to a degree, time, but the underlying tenets remain the same. A few things – and only a few – to bear in mind are
• Write naturally. It is high artifice for a 21st century author to write like Brontë or Twain, and has a tendency to wear thin. That said, you also want your style to fit your genre. The language of sword-and-sorcery is not that of noir mystery or gritty YA.
• Fit form to project. For example, few people – Joyce is an exception who springs to mind – would, could, or should spend 500 pages on a tale as intimate and temporally restricted a single day in a man’s life. Most of us would see this as the stuff of a short story, play, or perhaps a narrative poem.
• Chanel said, “A woman is close to being naked when she is well dressed.” So dress your story well. Write with nouns and verbs. The rest is needed, of course; it is the flesh on the skeleton. But without the skeleton, you have only a blob of distracting words.
• Don’t overstate. Few readers want to have everything spelled out, let alone be hit over the head again and again.
• Avoid qualifiers. “Rather,” “around,” “sort of,” et al., only make for fuzzy writing and make the reader wonder if you know what you’re talking about. You are the author. You know that you character is not “about twenty-five years old” but was born on May 20, 1987 and will be turning 26 in seven weeks.
• Don’t get cute or slangy or use fancy or foreign words when simple, native ones work just as well.
• Be clear. A reader will work with a book that deals with difficult subject matter or tells a tale in an unusual way, but don’t make them scratch their head because you didn’t take the time to be clear. Strip away the clutter so you can see your story from A to Z. With dialogue, make sure the reader knows who is speaking when and to whom. (This is not just a matter of dialogue tags, but we’ll get to that another time.)
• Don’t fall in love with the sound of your own voice. It’s something we all do. That exquisite phrase we labored over for hours, days, so hard to let go of it. But sometimes we must learn to say ‘No!’ (“Elegance is refusal,” Coco said.) If it puts you, the author, in the spotlight and your story in the shadows, then it has to be cut. What we do is ultimately not about us writers; we are simply servants to our stories, and serve them best in the background.
In the end, hard-edged as Raymond Chandler or lyrical as Alice Walker, regardless of tone, hue, or voice, style comes down to dressing your story in effortless elegance. Ms Chanel noted, “Dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably and they remember the woman.” We want people to remember our storied women.
***
Simplicity is the keynote of true elegance.
Luxury lies not in the richness of things, but in the absence of vulgarity.
If you were born without wings, do nothing to prevent them from growing.
Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony.
I love to write in childish rhyme. I really do it all the time. A Doctor and a Nana too, 'Tis ontheplumtree that I grew. And this is where I shall be writing, stories that are so exciting, by scribbling scribes ~ those authors who ~ love the child in me and you. But first I want to introduce ~ two books, I hope, will produce ~ excitement and a flitter flurry, of orders that will simply hurry, across the land and open sea, to read to children where they be, to stimulate imagination ~ and create a small sensation!
Love the opening Rhyme @DrNaNaPlum. Brilliantly clever. And the Rhymes in the books are delightful and will tickle a child's tummy causing giggling laughter. I find them brilliant. Do think seriously about discovering DrNaNaPlum's Rhyme Corner and the children's books that she offers there written by Niamh Clune and Illustrated by Marta Pelrine-Bacon. Thank you from Jk the secret keeper
Editor’s Corner: 101.2 Elements of Style: A Guide to Wowing on the Literary Runway
Let us now praise little books.
Well, one particular little book.
I don’t know when I got my first copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. The fluid fiction of memory tells me it was in my distant tweeny past, around the time I decided to be a writer. That original volume, spine-cracked and finger-stained, has been swallowed by the years, replaced and swallowed again. And, no matter how many pages I’ve written myself or edited for others, time after time, I still take EofS’s current, dog-eared incarnation from the shelf and go back to basics.
For, like all art, writing begins as a craft and any craft takes time and work to learn well. Before we graduate to the swish-and-swirl aspects of literary style, to voice and hue, meter and pitch, we need to know our ABCs. Professor William Strunk Jr. was a master at teaching them, first to his charges at Cornell, and then – thanks to a savvy editor at Macmillan and former student E.B.White – to the rest of us.
With economic prose and extensive examples, Strunk lays out simple rules of usage, composition, and, yes, style. These are the elements we should all know inside and out; the foundation upon which we can build our literary/editorial bona fides. Granted, no rules or grammar books – even the best – are a substitute for original storytelling and compelling voice (we’ll get to that in future weeks), and inspiration, I’m afraid, is in the hands of the gods. Elements of Style will not make you a great writer. But it can make you a competent writer, a clean writer, someone who knows how to structure a sentence, to have subjects and objects harmonize, tenses agree, and pronouns cooperate with their antecedents. Someone who can recognize the difference between passive and active voice and knows that using ten-dollar words when fifty-cent ones will do just makes you sound pretentious as hell and pisses people off.
In short, studying EofS is homework for our craft. Do it well, and become a precise writer who can juggle words, sentences, whole paragraphs certain that, when they land on the page, they say exactly what you mean. Show the world that you take pride in your work, and, when you split your next infinitive, do it as conscious choice, not simply because you don’t know better.
So, go to your bookshelf – or favorite bookstore – take down that copy of The Elements of Style and dig in. (It is now available in e-book; you can even get a free version from Amazon’s Kindle Classics, sans E.B.’s lovely addendum.) There are far worse classrooms, I assure you.
Next week, going beyond the elements for a closer look at style.
Importance of Imagination
J.K. Rowling Speaks @ Harvard
Commencement June 2008
Post Created by Jk the secret keeper
Created June 7th 2013
Posted June 9th 2013J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination…”
“I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.”
It is Rowling’s gift to draw universal life lessons from her own discoveries—of personal failure “on an epic scale,” and, from a day job at Amnesty International, “evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power.” And yet, “I also learned more about human goodness…than I had ever known before.” Of those who “prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all,” who “choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience,” Rowling said, “I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do.…I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters.”
Quoting Plutarch, she said, “What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.” In a final challenge, the 42-year-old Rowling—seeming too young and too slight for the weight of her words—told the graduates, “If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
In honoring Rowling for igniting in millions the passion to read, Harvard discovered that it had also welcomed a teacher beyond compare.
So follows the video of the J.K. Rowlings Harvard Commencement Speech from June 2008 followed by the text of the speech.
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement 2008
Text of Commencement Speech June 2008
President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.
So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.
So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives. Thank you very much.
“What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.”— Plutarch
“If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.” — J.K. Rowling
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.” ― Gloria Steinem
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” ― Sylvia Plath
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” ― Maya Angelou
I first met Marta on FaceBook when she joined my Plum Tree Books group. Immediately, I was stunned by the quality of her art ~ so full of whimsy and understatement, a natural sense of design and quirk. I asked her if she would draw the Plum Tree Books logo. We haven't looked back since.
When I decided to venture into the world of children's books, Marta was my fist choice of illustrator.
This post is about a very talented artist and writer who is going through a trial in her life that is taking a great deal of courage and strength to battle. Please return to the origin of this post and read what Niamh Clune has written about this marvelously gifted and talented person. Find out what you are missing and what you will find. Jk the secret keeper
I'm pleased to have artist, author and humanitarian Niamh Clune pop over from across the pond to talk about her new children's books. Niamh is an extraordinary woman with a unique flair to all she creates.
You know I prefer to interview authors and find out the story behind their stories. These books are so unique I decided to turn the blog over to Niamh so she could explain in her own special way.
This is a wonderful post that explains all about the Pa Dug and Rosie Series. Dr. Niamh Clune, Doug and their grand daughter Siofer-Rose make a great combination and these books are beautifully illustrated and the rhyming is so delightfully well written by Niamh Clune. I am going to get them for my great nephew who is not yet one but I feel he will grow into the books as he ages and there are more to add to the series. A wonderfully written post by Niamh Clune. It is inspiring and so knowledgeable. Thank you for hosting her Patricia Sands on your blog. Jk the secret keeper ...a sampling from the post: I am a Doctor of Psychotherapy specialising in The Imaginal Mind, but I have always been a writer. I began writing poetry when I was 12 to escape the horror of my own childhood. I have been writing since ~ everything from novels, Orange Petals in a Storm, to The Coming Of The Feminine Christ, which is about awakening the heart! It isn’t religious, but a spiritual psychology.
As I entered nana land, I was amazed at how delighted I was to be led and guided by my beautiful granddaughter. I ventured back into the world of faeries, magic and the pure delight of minute-by-minute discovery. These days, I write about the magic of very ordinary things ~ wellies, worms, bees, sunshine, rain, emotions!
I have a special relationship with Siolfor-Rose. She is very much like me: strong-willed and determined. My Rosie character is based on her. I wrote the books all in rhyme as it is so much fun. Rhyme helps children develop a freedom with language. It stimulates an enjoyment of words. Children love onomatopoeia...I decided this would be a great combination: rhyme, story-telling about the magic of the ordinary, coupled with beautiful art and basic garden science. What a learning experience for a small child! FOR THE WHOLE POST GO TO PATRICIA SANDS' BLOG TO SEE WHAT OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS NIAMH CLUNE HAS TO SAY. http://patriciasands.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/childrens-books-to-delight-and-inspire/
Letters of Import: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
Last Time This Year 12
Written by Jennifer Kiley
Illustrated & abstract digital art by j. kiley
First Published March 19th 2013
Published Early Tuesday AM
Twelfth Posted June 4th 2013
Tuesday, December 18th 2007
Dear Annie,
This week I want to tell you some serious shit about myself. Letting my guard down almost to naked in these revelations. You know more about me in these letters than anyone does so far. And I haven’t even started filling you in on anything that gets close to the deeper meanings in my life.
I have been reading a great deal lately about bipolar disorder. Nobody has come out and told me straight that it is part of what I am dealing with in all my weirdness and bizarre behaviors. But I am not without analyzing the material and figuring out what seems too familiar to my life. I may not see things accurately from the inside but when I see it in Scottie’s eyes and read it in my writing I know without any real reluctance that bipolar visits me on a regular schedule with its major fluctuations.
I have the speed of someone who mainlines coke. Try having a conversation with me when I am not depressed or suicidal. How often does that occur. My wanting to die. Being obsessed in my mind all the time with thinking of ways to cut open my arms and bleeding out. It seems a gruesome way to die but even though blood usually bothers me, in this state of mind it seems the easiest way to slip away into death. Losing consciousness into a slow comatose state. Pain becomes unnoticeable. It really ends the pain. Suicide does. It’s not death I seek. It’s peace. Pain free and finished. No more memories. No more primal screams inside my mind. No emotions. No tears. Stolen. Robbed. Buried deep within my soul so it bears the suffering I should feel. What I feel is lack of feeling anything when I am deeply depressed. Maybe I am wrong about that. Maybe depression is the strongest of feelings. It may be all of them at once. All the negative emotions ripping out my heart at one time.
Who says bipolar isn’t fun. It can take you higher than a kite. Not a drug high, though that is kind of what you feel. But in this instance I am speaking about real flying high in the sky. Soaring. Catching the up draft. Being your own motor and wings. When I write on bipolar, I am hooked up to the muse and she goes fast. She is one blazing force of nature. Hot waves of energy pass through me. All that she wants is to give freely but you need to accept her terms. Simple really: just create until you can’t see the screen of your laptop. All becomes a blur and even then you must keep moving forward until the last ounce of creativity is used up. You will know when. You just stop. There is nothing left but to end it.
I read a book called “Touched With Fire” by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison. She has become my Goddess. Her words speak to my mind like she lives inside of it. Her theory about creativity and divine madness and the artistic temperament all touch my insides like fire has scorched my body with truth. When I was a teenager, I had the strangest idea that I was going crazy. But why would I even think that. What did it feel like to be crazy? I had no idea but somehow I thought I was headed in that direction. It felt like it would be so easy to just lose your mind. It would break away just like that. Well, reading “Touched With Fire” was actually reassuring. Knowing all these famous and creative people who had bipolar and a divine madness, as I have grown to like it referred to. An artistic temperament that made you delusional, but made you one hell of a creative artist. A poet, a musician, a writer, a painter, from Lord Byron to Beethoven, Lincoln to Churchill, Kurt Cobain to Emily Dickinson. People from all professions that contributed great amounts of creative work to charge up the world with gifts unimaginable.
It does make one grandiose at times. Feeling better about yourself. Going on an ego trip one minute and feeling like death is the only answer the next. It destroys your ability to think clearly or tell the difference between reality and delusions that appear so real and believable. It is so destructive and then so creative and productive. Bipolar enables you to produce feats of creation beyond the bounds of most people. You go for hours and days just creating. Your concentration is unbelievable and so crystal clear and focused. Everything keeps pouring out of you.
It’s balancing the mood swings that make it so difficult. I will not take psych meds. They are poison to me. They have fucked up my health. They’ve caused me to faint. I’ve had seizures. My mind gets so dulled out I can’t think clearly or remember anything. It’s fucked up my short term memory so I am lost at recalling anything someone has just told me. Terrible with names I heard a moment ago. I try to say something and if I don’t get it out in that moment, it is gone. Blue what, I ask myself. Why did I say blue and then forget what if anything did it mean? It is frustrating. When I get into conversations with people, I get so excited that I must speak more words in a minute than anyone speaks in an hour. And topics are like butterflies flitting from flower to flower but in a hurricane wind storm.
The divine madness does allow me to be creative. It frees my mind to release control and let ideas and words and images flow through my mind and out onto paper. Thank the goddess I have a computer so I can almost keep up with my thoughts. My hand would break if I had to write as fast as my thoughts pour out of me. The drawback is the pain I feel going from pure elation to feeling terror and depression and the loneliness I feel when all I want to do is die. There is such a hopelessness. I cannot reach out to anyone. What do I say? I am too frightened or introverted to open up about the depth of my darkness. It is an all-consuming dark that takes over. Blinding me to anyone or anything. I have figured out how to work through the suicidal feelings and the depth of the depression that pulls me into the darkest, deepest of holes. I write. I keep writing. Anything that comes into my mind. I have no shame about speaking the truth. There is no honour in silence. The world must know and understand that there are places the mind can take you that do exist but only some can enter.
This is what you would be working with if you ever became my psychoanalyst. You would hear my stories and live through my mind and delusion and irrational thoughts. I have ruined relationships, I am sure because I had no idea the bipolar was causing me to behave in ways that I did not understand. I have hurt my partner because of what I thought I needed. It fucks you up sexually. Being abused when I was a child screwed me up to have sex with anyone but it also set me up to think or believe that is the only way one can relate to another human being. Everything between myself and another person always became sexual. It wasn’t because I wanted sex. It was because that was the way it was supposed to be. So I was taught by my abusers. If you wanted attention, you spent time with them and when they tried to touch you, you tried to stop them but it never worked. If you didn’t want attention they just raped you and molested you. It taught me that was the way life was. Sick. Demented. Perverted. Cold. Damaging. Surreal. Abusive. Everyone abused me except one. She was someone special. Someday I will tell you all about her.
It seems sex is supposed to be one of the addictions that bipolars have. Would I say I was addicted to sex. Yes. Not in the way you think. It was really fucked up for me. Now I don’t want anyone touching me.
If we work together, I hope you can help me with this. I don’t trust anyone but for an unknown reason I am drawn to you and I believe you are the one who can help me. I have gone to so many shrinks. Some I became really attached to. But most of them fucked me up more than I already was. One even thought because I was obsessed with her that I was going to stalk her. She was the one that was crazy not me. I admit I do get obsessed but that is one of my personalities. That therapist knew that. She also knew that she became obsessed when she lost the only one who loved her. That person died suddenly and it crushed her. Shattered her into pieces. Left her feeling abandoned. Nobody to love her. So when anyone shows her any attention she is drawn to them like a magnet. She is so filled with needs. But the others let her have her needs and accept her. That therapist was a fool and really fucked up that alter to the point where she felt so bad about herself that she just wanted to disappear forever. Instead she just felt guilty about everything she felt and she started to feel that if she felt love that she was being bad. What kind of therapist drives a kid to feel that she is bad for feeling love?
These are issues that need to be worked on. It is an enormous job to take on the responsibility of us as a client. Mr. Xxx was a jackass. He had no idea who we were. He drove everyone underground into the darkest hole. We felt depressed all of the time. All we wanted to do was sleep. So that is exactly what we did. Sleep. All day. All night. Get up because Scottie made us feel we needed to wake up. And we felt guilty leaving her alone by herself. Not that we were great company. All we did once we were awake was to watch TV until it was time to go back to bed. The only time we got up during the day was to go to out therapy appointments or to see the doctor. The world was fucked. We were fucked up. We just wanted to block out everything. We didn’t want to feel anything. Whenever we felt anything we just would fuck things up.
Now we actually have a chance to rejoin part of the human race. We may actually get to see you in therapy. Something might actually start to make us feel better. Right now that is the only hope we have. The hope that someday soon we can tell Mr. Xxx to go fuck himself. With great pleasure I would look forward to that moment. To really, actually, in a state of reality, I would be able to utter those words. “GO FUCK YOURSELF. IT IS OVER. I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.” Exit stage left. Here it comes, the final curtain call with Mr. Xxx. The forceful and intentional slamming of his office door so hard that the reverberations would be felt all the way to the door of my home and Scottie would hear and applaud. That is the day I am waiting ever so patiently for. Do I have the guts to do that? You had better prepare yourself to wear headphones at that very moment. Be sure it will happen. Exactly when, is still to be determined. As a child I was a famous door slammer. I slammed my bedroom door so hard, so many times, that the last time I did it, it fell off its’ hinges and crashed to the floor. The truth. May the goddess strike me with lightning if I am telling a lie. Oh, by the way, I do not lie. I tell the truth. I am too honest for anyone to believe.
So there you have some of it. Do you still have the courage to take me on as your client? The last length of time that it took to write this letter has left me with a blank in my mind as to what exactly I shared with you in the words I wrote. And whether I have the courage to read this over is, at this very moment, an uncertainty. I may just take my chances that you will be able to accept my honesty and to get past it and accept the conditions of my paying you, or rather, my insurance paying you to hire you as my soon to be next psychoanalyst. I do hope this deal goes into effect in as short a time as possible. The waiting and anticipation is, pardon the expression, killing me, literally killing me. I have so little time left to deal with where I am now. I am in desperate need to change the conditions of my life and to rid myself of someone I need to be gone from my consciousness and I need you to help me do it.
I am not an extremely confident person at the moment. Do not let the bipolar or stronger personalities fool you. We are very afraid of change. We fear leaving our home to go anywhere. And now we have finally gotten to a place where it actually might happen. That we will in the real world, fire our psychotherapist, better recognized by the name Mr. Xxx, for all his perversely sick sense of humour and his tasteless innuendos of a sexual nature and the endless telling of his self-promoting and unwanted sharing of his personal life during my therapy time when we are supposed to be working on getting me into a better state of being. And added onto that, his egotistical need to be the smartest person in the room. It is sickening and I really want to see it come to an, unknowing on his part, ending and before the next full moon rising. That gives us some time but not more than I will manage to live through.
This has been exhausting but worth letting go of some truths. I am trying to be open with you and writing these letters is great practice for when the real therapy sessions actually happen in my waking life. You sitting across from me and my either lying down on the couch or sitting up facing you. I don’t know how traditional you will want to play it. We will see. Soon. Please make it soon.
Until next time, I hope things have progressed.
Regards,
MadisonThis note is to assure the strictest of confidence.
To Annie,
At this moment I am not trying to be a coward, but I feel if I hold back now or never send this to you, then I am freeing myself up to write whatever I wish without need of censorship. Maybe someday, when I am feeling more familiar with just who you are and what you might mean to me, this parameter will be altered and a copy of this and future letters will be relayed to you. For now I want to maintain secrecy, to protect you, Annie, and to protect myself from over testing the boundaries between us and to record the development of our relationship.
I want Annie Haskell to trust me. I want you to know I am trying to protect you and also myself from any humiliation. Writing to you in this way frees up my words as I speak them onto the page. Some future date, if I feel trusting enough, I will release to you what I have written in honesty. Right now, I will keep my words confidential. On my honour, no others shall see these pages, I promise you that.
Regards,
Madison Taylor
Madison Tayler’s Fantasy of Annie Haskell’s Office as a Psychoanalyst. Not real.
Maksim — Somewhere In Time — Theme Song #1 For “Letters of Import”This is the poem I would like to include in this letter. I like to leave a poem if I find one that I would like to share with you. Since I am not even sure if I am going to give these letters to you, I felt it is okay if I include a poem in these letters. And if some day, I change my mind and I hand my building collection of letters to you, then I will likely evaluate all that I have written to determine if all of the content feels acceptable to me to share openly with you. I may feel too shy to be so vulnerable. We will proceed as we have for now and see this as a way of recording the experience of getting to know you and in turn get to know how this all effects me as I record this experience in writing.Don’t Lock Me Up
By Madison Taylor
December 16th 2007
Don’t lock me up
Don’t make me sleep
Losing consciousness
Loses part of me
Holding on awake
Needing senses sharp
Safety’s what I seek
Don’t want nightmares
Living inside of me
Roaming my sleep
Dead wanting me
If I’m awake
There’s no way out
To follow me
If I let go
Give in to them
Let sleep take hold
They’ll find me easy
Trap me, bind me
They’ll never ever
Let me go.
the labyrinth called “wandering wonderland.” it is where madison, scottie and their cats loves to escape to
madison’s “woods of imagination” where she takes long walks to reflect. it is starts just past the labyrinth
LE CHATEAU DE ROCHER
le chateau de rocher is the home of madison and scottie & their three cats sparky toker & patrick
madison’s study/library
scottie’s study library
QUOTATIONS from: LETTERS of IMPORT: Private Writings to a Psychoanalyst
“A Dream
The beginning always starts out with a dream.
It is all a dream
And we are all players
In our own nightmares”
— Madison Taylor
“For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
~Michael Drayton~
(1563-1631)
“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
Christopher Marlowe for “Hero and Leander”
“A therapeutic relationship is often more psycho-emotionally intimate than a marriage, or a romantic attachment. I know things about my patients that they would never dream of revealing to their spouses or families. Why is that? One word — trust. If you do not have a connection with a therapist, you cannot trust them. If you do not have trust, you will not expose yourself, and if you do not expose your innermost being, what good is the therapy?” — unknown but ask any great therapist
“Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence…whether much that is glorious–whether all that is profound–does not spring from disease of thought…” — Edgar Allan PoeQUOTATIONS on BIPOLAR:
“Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re “not at all like yourself but will be soon,” but you know you won’t.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against– you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been mildly manic. When I am my present “normal” self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.” ― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own.” ― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
“Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients – bipolar type I – experience both extremes; other – bipolar type II – suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Compared to bipolar’s magic, reality seems a raw deal. It’s not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it’s the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity – the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don’t understand, we say. They just don’t get it. They’ll never be artists.” ― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.” ― Karl Lagerfeld
“Except you cannot outrun insanity, anymore than you can outrun your own shadow.” ― Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
Editor’s Corner: 101.1
Editor’s Corner: 101.1 From the Outside Looking In: Read.
I was recently approached by Niamh Clune over at Plum Tree Books about undertaking a weekly sojourn through all things editing, and I thought, sure, why not! Of course, on second thought, I realized that much of what I do as an editor is informed by my work as a writer – even when I edit others. As such, it is internalized and occasionally idiosyncratic, certainly not the sort of thing I normally ramble on about. So, bear with me; this should be an interesting journey for all of us.
As an activity and a passion, editing, like writing, runs the gamut from macro to micro, from broad strokes on plot and character to the minutia of comma v. semi-colon.
Personally, I think it’s best to start big – so big that you’re not even dealing with your own work. To that end, my advice for today: Read.
Read everything and anything. The classics, the paper, your favorite guilty genre pleasure. Read Chekhov for dialogue, Christie for plot, dictionaries for joy, and Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare! Whatever strikes your fancy. Become a sponge, absorbing what works and wringing out what doesn’t. Internalize the basics of tense agreement, point of view, and active v. passive voice. I assure you, it is a hell of a lot more fun this way than sitting through a grammar class (which may teach you the rules, but not necessarily how to use them, let alone break them).
When you’re read-out, treat yourself to a clear, inspired mind: go to a museum or cafe or wildlife park. Look at art and animals and people, how they shimmer and move and connect. For it is all connected, be it words on a page or life in the world. That is the heart of our storytelling. It is not only good for the spirit, but will help you return to your words with invigorated eyes.
And then, at the end of the day, if you’re not too weary, thumb through Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for good measure.
But more on that next Tuesday.
“There was no twinkle in his eyes.
“Maybe I just love some of you. Maybe not enough.”
Tiger Lily blinked at him, and she didn’t understand how anyone could only love a part. Her greedy heart didn’t work that way.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“To not do what you can to protect someone, that’s cowardly.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“An unspoken rivalry threaded their relationship, in which Tiger Lily thought that if she could keep up with him, she could hold tighter to him. It didn’t occur to her there was anything in which Peter would want her to fail. But sometimes, I could see that, even for him, she was too fast, too sure-footed, and didn’t seem to need him quite enough.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“It was like this sometimes, and I felt I should look away, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be there, having my face touched, defeating a heart like Peter’s, but the next best thing was seeing it for Tiger Lily.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
“I began to see that Wendy had something Tiger Lily hadn’t even known she was supposed to have. Of all the things Tiger Lily had thought she might have to be for Peter-strong, brave; to be big and to keep up-she had never thought that the one thing he wanted most from her was simply to show that she believed in him, always and without fail.” ― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Tiger Lily
¨ Basic science in rhyme with beautiful illustrations for ages 3—6
¨ Easy learning and teaching
¨ Onomatopoeia for fun!
Everything In The Garden Serves A Purpose
I asked 4 yr old Ralph if he thought a story about a worm could be fun. He grinned. Ralph was one of a group of children at the Lechlade Festival participating in the launch of the first two little books in the Pa Dug & Rosie series.
If you are looking for inspiring books for your young charges, the Pa Dug & Rosie Series is where to find them. Great story. Great Rhyming. Written by Niamh Clune. Great Illustrations. Illustrated by Marta Pelrine-Bacon. Something that will help children learn more easily. The books are filled will fun & joy & something a child will find within, a great deal of enthusiasm about books. A good track for any child to discover. Jk the secret keeper.
Now, I assume that everyone has done their homework and brushed up on their grammar, punctuation, and all the other pesky elements of our craft.
