I dunno how to create bullets any more than Matthew does (most of the stuff I create falls into the category of another word beginning with the same first four letters), so I’ll just say that as a short story writer who has never wanted, ever, to write a novel, I’m glad to see The Washington Post write about a widening appreciation for the short story.
Month / May 2007
For My First Post: I’m going to cheat
Hey guys, I’ve posted this piece a couple of places, but I wanted to see what reaction it would get from a different audience. Originally I posted this at my blog and over at Crimespace, so if you’ve seen this post there, my apologies for the cross post. More original work to follow in the coming days.
There’s a conversation going on on Crimespace about pet peeves of incorrect grammar. Everybody has one. Mine is people saying “I could care less” when they mean “I couldn’t care less.” But I have another argument as well.
Grammar is not important.
Well, I’ll back off of that… simple grammar is something everyone should learn young and grasp. But after that, who really cares?
What is important, and what I stress when I teach, is meaning. A student has to be able to put together an argument or a storyline or a sentence that has meaning. They have to learn how to put together a logical progression and THEN you can go back and fix grammar.
Hell, look at a lot of writing in books these days. People break grammar rules all the time, whether to sound colloquial or to create effect. I understand that you have to understand grammar to break the rules, but grammar should still not be the end all be all of writing.
It should be the least important thing.
National tests these days do not grade on grammar and spelling. They let most errors go as long as it does not affect meaning. Hence, meaning is where we should focus. That’s what I work on.
If a story starts:
“Me and you went to the store. Your a giraffe and heads spilld across the road.”
I am not going to sit there and help fix the “me and you” and the correct “your” first. I’m going to ask why is there a giraffe in this story, why were there head’s spilling across the road, and what does that have to do with the store you went to.
I want to get to the point where someone will write “Me and you went to the store. You bought skittles and I bought a soda.”
Then we can go back and fix grammar.
I think people worry about grammar because it’s easy to fix. You can–when you edit someone’s piece–say well this is wrong and this is wrong and it’s easier than saying, but there’s a plot hole here on page 202 and I don’t know how you can fix it. That involves a back and forth and a conversation.
I’m always willing to talk about writing, be it with students or with other writers. I’m always willing to brainstorm plot ideas and why a paragraph works as a thought. But folks, what it comes down to is this: Whether you are in 8th grade or writing for ten years, most grammatical errors can be fixed by just reading your sentence out loud.
Meaning, however, takes work.
What do you think?
FOR THE RECORD: This is in no way an attempt to trash teachers. I am a teacher and I believe in teachers. All teachers want to make students smarter and more well rounded young men and woman.
However, I think there is an old fashioned thinking vs. a new type of thinking among all citizens of the United States on whether or not grammar should be the key to good writing.
Roundup?
Until we guest-bloggers pool our collective blogginess and figure out how to keep together Ed’s excellent Roundups, I offer you some reading from elsewhere. Consider it a bite-sized roundup. Particularly as I don’t know how to make WordPress do bullets, or pretty much anything useful. Ed: WordPress?
Bullet!: Books are not sweaters. This post made me sweat until I bled.
Bullet!: Harry Matthews goodstuff.
Bullet!: A good review for Chuck P’s Rant.
Bullet!: Your online writing hideaway.
Bullet!: Books we want and books we need.
Bullet!: A good place to go, every day. Well, go with your browser. You know what I mean.
Some young writers I admired in 1979: part one
Assembling was an annual compendium of “otherwise unpublishable” avant-garde art and literature compiled by Richard Kostelanetz and others between 1970 and 1982. Contributors were invited to send in up to four pages of 1,000 copies of 8 ½ x 11 pages, which were assembled alphabetically and bound into books.
I can recall taking my contributions to several editions of Assembling to Hanging Loose Press’s Bob Hershon at downtown Brooklyn’s Print Center, used by many artists and writers in those days before cheap copying.
My first few were prose experiments, but for 1979’s A Critical (Ninth) Assembling, I wrote a piece called “Some Young Writers I Admire” about ten people, several of whom were friends.
Three of the ten I lost touch with; I’m pretty sure they’ve stopped writing. There are a lot of casualties in literature.
I’d like to post about some of the others in the coming days, people still around, writing and publishing, like me, after more than 30 years.
The one pick you’ve probably heard of was then a poet. I praised his chapbooks Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978) and Idols (The SeaHorse Press, 1979) and the little magazine he edited, Little Caesar, which I subscribed to. At the time I wrote the piece, he was the director of programming at Venice’s Beyond Baroque center, which had published several of my stories in their literary magazine.
I did not mention that once he had sent me a folded-over piece of paper on the outside of which he’d scrawled: Prepare to meet thy God. Inside, when I opened it, I found a rare colored Xerox photo of Leif Garrett.
The poet and editor I admired is famous today as a novelist: Dennis Cooper.
More of my admired no-longer-young writers in coming days.
The rooster has left the coop.
My name is Matt. I’m from Condalmo, a website at which I have thrown multiple rockin’ literary parties. Ed has, apparently, left the building. He’s left the place to some guest bloggers; I’m one of them. Allow me to lay my first egg (so to speak)…
The Modern Letter Project is a site I stumbled on the other night. I shudder at the inclusion of the instant-turn-off term pen pals, but here’s the deal:
The Modern Letter Project is a collaboration between Corie Trancho-Robie and Youngna Park that seeks to revive the lost art of snail mail pen pals. Beginning in March 2007, 140 people joined with us on this journey of letter writing, eager to connect with others the old fashioned way and engage in the fun of new stationery and decorated envelopes, the slowness of postal services and mostly, the thrill of real mail once a month that wasn’t a credit card offer.
Here is how it works:
Each participant receives one address per month for twelve months. For each of those months, they write a total of at least two letters:
1. To the address sent to them
2. A response to the person who has written to themIt is our hope that, at end of the year we will have a network of new pen pals, friends, and a collection of letters to treasure.
I feel it worth sharing because letter writing is a drum I beat from time to time at my site. Like you, I am somewhat chained to my e-mail – kind of difficult to run a blog without it, and easy to use, fast, “free” – wonderful for what it does. But listen: you know it’s different when you need to pay forty-whatever cents to send a letter, and when you’re writing it you want it to be worthwhile, thoughtful, not just something dashed off (as in “dude, I picked up the new Wilco, what’s on for next weekend, signed matty”) – email is to letter as instant message is to e-mail. Shorter and shorter, cramming it in.
With a letter, you’re putting something physical out there, something that can be held, saved. I have a letter from my grandfather. His handwriting was shaky, unsure. His thoughts were unsure. You won’t get that same feeling through an e-mail. Who wants to leave behind no trace for their offspring, no sense of their thoughts and ideas and actual physical presence, save electrons (or whatever) in Google’s massive mainframe? And who is going to weed through your thirty thousand e-mails to find that one important thing you wrote?
E-mail has recused people from letter writing, but I’m here to tell you it’s worth the time. Check this out, and get signed up at the LWP.
(oh, and why does WordPress have to completely suck? Gave me such a hard time with the image, the formatting, etc. Does it always suck this much? I can’t figure out how to add a “guest blogging” category for us, and am done trying, so this one gets filed under Erin O’Brien’s “Breasts”)