Week 52: Develop Your Persona to Be the Person You Aspire to Be

Many writers, especially newer ones, wonder about ‘voice’—what it is and how to develop it. This chapter gives some insight on that and how our writing not only impacts us, but how we impact our writing.

Wilbers says, “Writing is power. When you write, you assert your concerns, your values, your point of view. … With this power comes both responsibility and freedom.”1

He talks about the assumed identities the ancients called personas. We know it as an avatar, an image of what we want people to think—it might be a close approximation or a gross distortion, but either way, it’s not the real thing.

“Just as your choice of images is key to your persona, your choice of words determines your persona or the impression you create in your reader’s mind. … Natural word choice goes beyond language and techniques of style. Natural word choice shapes the reader’s impression of who you are as a person. … Your word choice should be intentional not accidental … should serve a purpose.”2

We impact our writing, but our writing also impacts us. Our writing journey is an opportunity for self-exploration. Through experimenting with language, styles and techniques that work for us, we can discover who we really are. But what about who you would like to be?

John Steinbeck said this: “I instinctively recognized an opportunity to transcend some of my personal failings—things about myself I didn’t particularly like and wanted to change but didn’t know how.”

I love this insight from Wilbers in writing behind the persona: “Whatever your choice [of persona], I urge you to be a complete person. Reveal not only your thoughts, but also your feelings. Share your insights and humor. Be playful. Write with heart. Above all, be genuine.”

And from Stephen King: “Honesty in story-telling makes up for a great many stylistic faults…”3

Exercises:4

Revise the following using your own voice, making them less stilted.

1.            I am making an attempt to make an improvement in my writing.

2.            Please apprise me of what transpired at the meeting.

3.            We need to fabricate a dike around this building utilizing these sandbags.

4.            Such conditions impede progress in finding a resolution to said problems.

5.            Our team leader deems it imperative that we conduct ourselves ethically.

1. Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 290

2. Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 291

3. Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 293

4. Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg293

Week 51: Eloquence and Grace

Go Beyond Clarity to Eloquence and Grace
by Tamara Passey

Meet my friends, Eloquence and Grace. They've worked hard all year to learn the steps to the dance they need to perform. They've learned periodic sentences, the long-short combo, using an appropriate level of formality. They've covered modifiers, strong verbs, active voice and they've expanded their sentence repertoire. They've mastered metaphors and similes and have avoided cliches (like the plague.) And so much more.  They can dance with clarity. But now is the time to showcase their talent with eloquence and grace.

When you watch a couple like this on the dance floor, do you see power, refinement, and dignity? Can you sense the authority with which they convey the message of their art?

If we want to create beauty through language and share our message with power and refinement, we have to know the rules, understand how to put words on the page, and allow our writing style to shine through.

Here's a few more thoughts on eloquence and grace:

"Elegance cannot be forced. It cannot be purchased and slipped into like fine clothes. Writing with elegance comes naturally and gradually. It comes from making the right assumptions about language and from following certain principles of writing." 1

"Elegance need not be complicated. It can be as simple as E.B. White's sentence in The Elements of Style: "These [questions of style] are high mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly disguised." A simple shift in word order destroys the effect of that sentence: "These are high mysteries, and this chapter is a thinly disguised mystery story." Without the grace notes at the end of the sentence, it becomes ordinary." 2

"Elegance depends more on sound than content. Elegance requires a precise, robust vocabulary. It also requires an ear for language and attention to the cadence, rhythm, and flow of sentence structure."

"More than two centuries ago Samuel Johnson, described the most desirable English style as "familiar but not coarse, elegant but not ostentatious." My, how times don't change." 3

1. Mastering The Craft, Wilbers, p. 286
2. Mastering The Craft, Wilbers, p. 286
3. Mastering The Craft, Wilbers, p 287

WEEK 50: Know Your Options For Comic Effect

Humor is serious work...by Valerie Ipson

So much can be said about humor and its value not just to comedic writing, but to ALL writing. 

Wilbers says it this way, "...to tell a joke is to declare your humanity... To appeal to another person's sense of humor is to affirm a common bond."1 And, "Humor reduces the distance between writer and reader (and between speaker and listener)."2 

Even the writer of drama should employ a bit of humor here and there, not only to give the reader or audience a break, but to offer insights about the realities of life that can best be understand through comedy. Maybe kind of like, 'I can either laugh or cry, and laughing's more fun,' when faced with difficulties in our lives. 

In chapter 50 of Mastering the Craft, ten types (tropes) of humor are discussed. You're probably already using many of them without realizing it... paradox, situational irony, sarcasm, overstatement, wit...pick something new and try it in your current manuscript!

Mastering the Craft, p 278
Mastering the Craft, p 279

Week 49: Add a Light-Hearted Touch to Your Writing

This week's chapter is pretty self-explanatory. 

Wilbers says, "Humor is a matter of perspective..." - oh don't I know this. My husband and I do not share similar senses of humor. I'm pretty funny, but I'm also the only one usually laughing at my jokes. And I think word plays or errors are generally hilarious. Like these things that cracked me up in NYC (just please forgive my obvious lack of photography skills):

  

Look for writing that elicits a 
chuckle from you and then try to 
imitate it. A juxtaposition or 
something unexpected. (like this 
behemoth of a sandwich): 

Wilbers continues his thoughts on humor saying it is, "a bemused awareness of the incongruous, illogical, and sometimes absurd dimensions of our existence. It's also a matter of timing, technique, and detail." I'm a huge fan of both Sarah M. Eden and Janette Rallison's writing because each seems to effortlessly create such scenarios. 

Wilbers offers a paragraph from Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind.

"I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value."1

The incongruity between "seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse" lends to the comic effect. 

So this week in your writing, throw in something unexpected for comic relief.


1 Wilbers, Stephen,  Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 274.

Week 48: Use Your Imagination

Use Your Imagination to Write with Personality and Style

by Tamara Passey

What do you think about when you stare at the stars?

When you see clouds does it make you wonder? 

What about spring flowers?

 

And where exactly is this bench? 

And who could be meeting there? And why? 

This week is all about using your imagination to add personality to your writing. It is adding the unexpected to our pages that can make them come alive. How do you spark your imagination? Wilbers shares an example from the poet Michael Dennis Browne who would sometimes ask his students to write as many outlandish lies as they could think of in the first few minutes of class.

"Don't overthink it," he would say. "Just write whatever comes to mind."

He found that his students were more fanciful, expansive, and creative in their exploration of what was possible in their poetry. 1

"At its deepest level, imagination enables us to associate words and thoughts. If we had no imagination at all, we would lack faith in the value and meaning of words. To varying degrees, every writer (and every reader) possesses imagination. To use language is to enter a symbolic world. Every word uttered, every sentence written, is an act of imagination."

"Without that spark [imagination], a writer's relationship to language becomes superficial and rigid. To write without creativity is to underestimate the potential of language." 2

Take a minute to think about your own imagination. What has fed it and fueled it in the past? What are exercises that help you get to a place where anything can be possible on the page? Some writers set a timer for 10 minutes and write freely, never using that writing for anything other than priming their pump, so to speak. Experiment the next time you sit down to write, spend a few minutes conjuring up some outlandish lies, or simply let your mind wander wherever it wants to go--and then see if your writing reflects some new twists, or even better--new verbs, you weren't expecting.

1. Mastering The Craft, Wilbers, p. 267
2. Mastering The Craft, Wilbers, p. 268, italics and bold added for emphasis

WEEK 47: AVOID VOGUE WORDS AND CLICHES

by Valerie Ipson

By Week 47 we have learned a variety of techniques that can make our words dance and sing on the page. Tired, oft-used cliches, though, have the opposite effect. They can bore the reader, or show our laziness as a writer. 

"According to Donald Hall, relying on the easy choices, on trendy words and cliches, causes us to end our search for more precise language..."1 

Stephen Wilbers says, "The first time it rained cats and dogs was brilliant, now it's a cliche."2

It's not that we have to avoid all cliches. They can be useful because their very commonality means they're easily understood. But a well-crafted phrase, even an old cliche twisted into something new, freshens our writing and delights the reader.  

Like this one: An apple a day still can't beat pizza.

I think we all understand that.


1 Mastering the Craft, p 261
2 Mastering the Craft, p 264

Week 46: Return to Your Metaphors and Similes

This year's posts have been like a mouse nibbling at cheese. Each week, a different lesson on writing, until the whole book has nearly been consumed, one morsel at a time.

This week's lesson, Wilbers has us reconnecting with our metaphors and similes throughout our work, like the mouse returning to his feast. It's something "... every good essayist or storyteller knows" how to do.1

We are warned though that this technique works well when you have three criteria: "they're simple, apt, and novel."2 When they are forced, however, it can be a distraction. Cliche metaphors may even be glossed right over by your readers.

John Mather, senior astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center used this technique giving us insight into the evolution of the formation of galaxies:

"We thought galaxies formed just like they are. But now we think they grew, they assembled themselves from smaller pieces. It might have been like rain on the side of a hill. First you get little rivulets that flow together into a larger stream."3

Or Thoreau's famous passage from Walden:

"A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next to the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows."4

Now that we've had a taste of this concept, try your hand at it:

1. The wind had been through/the valley/ leaving everything cold/ and gleaming/ like bells.

2. The sheer weight of one of these icy leviathans, some of which grew to a thickness of two miles, flattened the crust of the earth.5


1 Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 255.
2 Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 256.
3 Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing, pg 258.
4 Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing,  pg 258.
5 Wilbers, Stephen, Mastering the Craft of Writing,  pg 257.