Tag: writers

Why Memoirs are Special

equipeng95“…it is difficult for those who publish their own memoirs to escape the imputation of vanity. Nor is this the only disadvantage under which they labor: it is also their misfortune, that whatever is uncommon is rarely, if ever, believed, and from what is obvious we are apt to turn away in disgust, and to charge the writer of it with impertinence.” – Gustavus Vass (Olaudah Equiano)

So, why do I want to tell my story? Why has the itch to spill the beans of my background always been with me? Some may call it a dream, but I call it a challenge. Of all the books I’ve written, writing my life story is one of my greatest challenges and I hope to conquer it real soon. I feel like I have not completely exhausted my writing endeavors until I have written a story of my life. I’ve danced with the idea off and on since childhood. Funny thing is before I was even finished living I knew I wanted to share my testimony. I’ve even gone as far as writing chapters and chapters, only to rip it up and start all over again. Truth is I am still learning all that goes into writing a memoir. I love the way

Maya Angelou for example, fictionalized herself in “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”. Not in the sense of creating a false image, but by fictionalized I mean she was able to present a real-life story that reads like fiction. To recreate real-life experiences that jump from the page with all of the excitement that comes from reading a good novel. Here, Angelou lends us her eyes and we are able to see her world in the most real, yet entertaining way possible. While there are various ways to which individuals have gone to write their stories, I imagine there is still an art to it; an art I am still learning to master and I hope to begin this journey real soon. (I’ll be 28 this year, maybe I should wait till I’m like 30 …yea, that’s a nice medium number….lol j/k, I know the next day’s not promised, let alone the next two years, even though it may just take that long, but I digress)

Primarily, I want to share my story because I am a person of a deep passion for helping people in the spirit of teaching. Not teaching in the organized setting of things, teaching the basic principle of acquiring and passing on information. Teaching in the sense of taking what I’ve learned and passing it on. I love sharing information and I believe information exists to be shared. And if it’s the right kind of information, it can be a positive influence in someone else’s life. Have you ever been in a room of darkness and found that after searching for some time someone turned on the light? And then you laugh at yourself for seeing the switch was right there? That’s how it is when someone has taught me something. I love advice because I love to learn. And I love to learn because I love discipline. If ever I’m hard on you, know it’s because I expect double from myself. As I tell my students, “Mediocrity is not an option. If you’re going to do something, do it well or don’t do it at all.”

In addition, I want to share my story because we live in a world that teaches us to fear our past transgressions, mistakes, experiences, trials, etc. The world tells us to keep our “skeletons in the closet” and to wear the impenetrable mask of pretentiousness. Not only have I never had the ability to not show my true feelings, but being transparent in my opinion is what helps build strong relationships, which is what the writing process is all about. There are ups and downs but the struggle itself is what helps to build character. It helps us to create a bridge of commonality between those who are still lost in whatever capacity and those who have found the strength to endure.

While we can write post after post about inspiration, nothing is more inspiring than truth. To see that someone is going through, or has gone through, what you yourself are going through and to witness their strength is more powerful than any quote I could ever give you. Our past, our burdens, and our moments of pain are not weaknesses. They are instead a showcase of humility; like a collection of light in a cistern of water that illuminates. It illustrates that the fruit of sorrow is unmistakably esteem and deliverance. And this is what I wish to share with my readers. Eventually.

Self-Publishing: Do Your Research!

When a writer sits down to write, he does not fully understand the capacity of that in which he seeks to embark. When he runs his fingers across the keyboard, or scribbles his heart into ink, he does not fully realize the power of his actions. Who would have thought a single chapter could change the world? The life of a Self-Publisher does not fully evolve until after the book is done. He does not see the many hats that must be worn in order writerwalksintothat the world may feel his voice, or sniff out his vision. What Self-Publishers are doing today is very powerful. Just by writing one book we are becoming professionals in fields that people have gone years studying in schools. People have invested in years of schooling in that they may understand how to properly market, promote, and format documents and here you understand this thing just by publishing a book alone. If that is not power, I do not know what is.

writers-block21The first book I published was a collection of essays that none of you would probably read. It started as an assignment from my English Professor in College “Does Racism in America Still Exist?” I wrote so much I could not stop writing. I wrote and read, and wrote and read, until the paper became a book, a 3 part  book to be exact. Then I had a brilliant idea: “I’m going to publish it!” When this thought entered my mental space it wasn’t occupied with much else. I didn’t even see it as Self-Publishing in particular. I did not say to myself, “Self, we’re going to Self-Publish a book.” For me it was simply, “I’m going to publish these papers.” And that was the extent of my brilliant idea. I had no intention of sharing it and no other ambition beyond that. In the end, I gave copies to some family members and college buddies but that was it. I was not interested at the time in Self-Publishing nor did I even know what it was. I always wanted to be a published author, but Self-Publishing in particular was not part of the plan. It would be years later before I actually took the concept  seriously and before I understood what it was in it’s full capacity.

selfpublishingWhen I first started out, The Self-Publishing Industry was not like it is today. In fact, it wasn’t really an industry at all. Of course, in 2007 Self-Publishing existed, but there was not the same amount of information available to Self-Publishers that there is now. We are in the age of information and in just a few short years Self-Publishing ballooned into a plethora of opportunity for authors. Self-Publishing blogs are going viral and men and women alike are making thousands, some millions, of dollars from the expertise they are able to provide on the topic. Regular, ordinary people are making something of themselves by being a part of what they were told only those with Master Degrees and PhD’s could do. But, to aspiring writers who wish to Self-Publish, I beg of you, please, do your research!

relaxed-writer_1I know we do not live in a fair world, but nothing is more unfair to me than a teenager who decides he or she will write a book and publish it and yet have no idea what is necessary to do this. There is nothing more aggravating than for me to hear a young person say that they are publishing a book, and when I ask them what POD company they are going to choose, or if they are going to purchase their own ISBN number, or their marketing plan, they have no idea what I am asking of them. All of this work, and someone’s kid is just going to write a book because its fun. How can you write a book and not understand the basics of print book formatting? Do you even know what that is? Do you even know what POD stands for? Most importantly, do you know there are tons of resources available to help you to find the answers to these questions? I am not talking about places that require hundreds of dollars of investment; I am talking about places that require only pennies. And if you do not have the penny, there are tons of free resources as well. In fact, you need to make sure that Self-Publishing is even a route you want to take. Self-Publishing is hated enough as is because big publishing houses are not making as much money. People are not forced to Self-Publish, people are choosing  to Self-Publish. The problem however, is that people are not researching this industry and making sure they understand what it means to be a part of it. Mediocrity in Self-Published books is not just because of poor editing, book cover design, etc. No, mediocrity is rooted in writers who do not research their field. This is how poor cover design and poor editing is even born.

But times are changing and the industry is not like it was in 2007. No longer can Self-Publishing be stigmatized as a field of nonprofessionals. With the amount of information out today, a nonprofessional product can only be the fault of the author and the author alone, not the industry in general. Being a Self-Publisher alone does not automatically degrade the quality of work, but the lazy work of the Self-Publisher can. I am not saying I have it all together but please research what you want to be apart of. Today, there is a host of information available to help us to get started or to sharpen our skills. So to those who are currently writing books and are seeking to be a part of the Self-Publishing field for the first time, stay encouraged. And please, I cannot stress this enough, do your research. You’ll be thankful for it in the end. You can start off with something as simple as a Google Search. And because blogs are doing so well these days, a lot of the information you’re looking for can be found right here in the blogosphere. One blogger who is always on her game with research for Self-Publishing is my good friend Colleen Chesebro. Colleen is writing her first book and is always on point with her research. She is a great example of what to do as you are writing. You don’t wait until you are about to publish a book to find out how to do it. Ttake some time out of your day and walk around the neighborhood. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll find.

Book Review Shipments: April 30th – May 4th

closed-sign

Good Evening Everyone,

This blog is usually inactive on the weekend, but this is a special notice for Book Review Recipients:

In a couple of weeks my husband and I will be doing some traveling. As a result, this blog will be inactive, closed, for the following dates:

Thursday, April 30th – Monday, May 4th

Part 3 of the Stella series will be the last post published on Thursday morning (12am) April 30th for that weekend.

If you have undergone the questionnaire for Book Reviews and are planning to ship your book between these dates, please note:

The time frame for books sent in for Book Reviews that arrive right before or during my travels does not officially begin until after May 4, 2015, when I come home and have received your book in the mail. Please email me for any questions, comments, or concerns during or before this time per Book Reviews, current or new inquires. I am always locked into my email so I will still be able to address your concerns. Thank you for your patience.

– EC

email: ahouseofpoetry@gmail.com

Writing Poetry

7716writerSo I was thinking about poetry a lot this week. I’m in the midst of this like wondering moment if you will; a pondering of thoughts concerning poetry. I noticed that the inspiration I have to write poetry is different than the inspiration to write in general. It’s not like just sitting down and just writing but more like a wanting to express myself in a deeper way I suppose. To be more detailed, and filled with expression. For me writing poetry specifically cannot be forced. I don’t know if I could be asked and then write on the spot. It doesn’t come to me that way. For me it has to flow naturally, almost like breathing, it has to be inside of me and then I can let the words exhale from within me. Not to just write but to do so creatively, metaphorically, symbolically, lyrically. When I started writing poetry it was for reasons many start to write. I wrote what I could not speak, and what I could not speak I wrote down. Finding compassion and solace in the spaces between the words. And often going back to read what I felt and to see if I could still relate to those feelings or if I’d grown some.

Does the writing of poetry for you involve a similar process as writing in general or is there a different method involved?

Guest Feature – Top Five Reasons You Should Be Reading Poetry

by Nickole Brown

(Found this on BookPage, excellent piece on Poetry)

nickolebrown

5. Because it’s unnecessary.

Yes, unnecessary, absolutely so, but only in the way that beauty and truth are unnecessary. Like an elegant armful of cut tulips brought home dripping from the store among all your pragmatic sundries, like my grandmother’s false lashes glued on every morning to her come-sit-your-handsome-ass-down-here wink, like that baked-bread smell of a newborn’s crown.

Poetry may bear witness, but it is rarely the hardy mule carrying news or facts. No, its burden is unquantifiable, and similar to a penny tossed into a fountain, its worth is in the wishing. As William Carlos William wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Put another way, C.S. Lewis said, “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . . It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

4. Because it’s a throat full of word music.

 
For the poet Patricia Smith, the word was anemone. She was nine years old when her fourth-grade teacher asked her to pronounce it. She writes that she “took a stab and caught it, and / and that one word was uncanny butter on my new tongue.” For the poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar, she loves it when plethora, indolence, damask, or lasciviousness work, in her words, “to stain my tongue, / thicken my saliva.” For me, some days, it’s the word fricative. Other days, it’s ardor, aubade, hydrangea; I’ve held each of those words like a private little bubble of air popping around inside my mouth. Donald Hall calls this “milktongue” and names it as the “deep and primitive pleasure of vowels in the mouth, of assonance and of holds on adjacent long vowels; of consonance, mmmm, and alliteration.”

3. Because it fosters community.

 
Robert Pinsky knew this when he started the Favorite Poem Project when he was U.S. Poet Laureate—people love to share poems that speak to them. And not just poets, either, but postal workers and dental technicians and racecar enthusiasts, too. Almost everyone carries a poem with them, even if only a scratch of a line or two deep in memory, and reading poetry can place you squarely in the chorus of people hungry to share those lines. Consider, for example, a casual late-night post I made on Facebook last February, making a request of the Internet for poems of joy and happiness. Within hours, over sixty comments magically arrived in my feed, recommending poem after poem. . . poems by Naomi Shihab Nye and William Loran Smith and Robert Hass, among many others. I read them all, and suddenly, I was much less alone; my dreary winter was flooded bright.

2. Because it welcomes what’s inexpressible.

 
I’ll confess: it was fiction I studied in graduate school. But when I finished my program, I found the cohesiveness required of a novel to be false and hardly conducive to the fragmented, often discontinuous memories I carried. When I wrote my first book, Sister, I needed the white space between poems to hold the silence between the remaining shards of my childhood. With Fanny Says, I needed a form that would allow me to mosaic together a portrait of my grandmother with only the miscellaneous bits of truth I had without having to fudge the connective tissue between them. You see, poetry doesn’t demand explanations. In fact, most poems avoid them, often reaching for questions over answers. Now, this doesn’t mean poetry is necessarily difficult to understand, no. It means that it simply makes room for things that are difficult to understand. John Keats called this negative capability, as poetry is “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” To me, this acceptance of what cannot be explained is one of the best reasons to read poetry.

1. Because it calls for a life of awareness.

 
People often assume poetry exists in the realm of thought, lost in philosophical inquiry and romantic meanderings. And most early attempts at writing poetry fail because of this, or worse, because beginning writers travel those easy, hard-wired paths in the brain geared towards survival, which are inundated with years of advertisements, televised plots, and habitual speech. But poetry demands awareness, a raw, muscular devotion to paying attention. You have to live in your body, you have to listen hard to the quiet ticking of both your life and those around you. Like an anthropologist, you have to take down good notes. Poems require a writer to write from all the senses. As Eudora Welty said, “Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way, all over again.” To me, poetry can make even the most quotidian of things—a tomato on the counter, a housefly batting against the window, your bent reflection in a steel mixing bowl—something extraordinary. Poetry notices things. It scrubs your life free of clichés and easy answers, and the best poems make everyday life strange and new. Poetry requires you to be awake to write it, and reading effective poetry is a second kind of awakening.

Writer’s Quote Wednesday – Derek Walcott

Today’s quote for Writer’s Quote Wednesday is from Poet and Playwright Derek Walcott:

Bucknell University. (Photos by Timothy D. and Nicole M. Sofranko)

“… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element….” – Derek Walcott

I think this is such a great motivational quote for writers. It has a way about it that can be explained in much more detail than what I can give but in short, it reminds me of the living attribute of words. Just the power of words and how breathing language is. I think that when we seek to create vision for the reader it’s much more than the language aspect in the literal form. It is not merely collaborating strings of words together for English sake, but it is feeling. Experiencing the moment and then putting that moment into words. Personally, I think some of my best writing has occurred during times where I did not purposely set out to write, but the language itself was so moving, and so feeling, that I simply had to.

About the Author (from Poets.org)

derek-walcott-3-sized

“The recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23, 1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he was fourteen years old, and consisted of 44 lines of blank verse. By the age of nineteen, Walcott had self published two volumes, 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949), exhibiting a wide range of influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

He later attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951 published the volume Poems.

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott has also written several plays produced throughout the United States, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights’ Theater at Boston University in 1981.

About his work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said, “For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.”

He currently divides his time between his home in St. Lucia and New York City.

 ***************************

And that’s it for Writer’s Quote Wednesday!

writers-quote-wednesday

Don’t forget to check out Colleen on Silver Threading to see how you can join the fun.

http://silverthreading.com/category/writers-quote-wednesday/