EXERCISE: and the words will be better for this?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original Posting 13 May 2009

The other day I woke up playing with an ambiguous phrase. It's actually hard to write, because the two words are both homophones -- they have different spellings which are pronounced almost identically? What I woke up thinking about was just plain missed, or maybe just plane mist?

I think plain/plane has several meanings no matter which of the spellings you look at. There's the plain that means ordinary, and the plain that means prairies and such flat land. And then the plane might be an airplane, it might be a mathematical plane, or it might be the woodworker's plane flattening everything.

I haven't actually sat down with the dictionary to look up the multiple meanings. Yet. But I thought while I was playing with it, I would suggest to you that combining a couple of ambiguities makes more. Is there a plain and fancy missed? What about plain and fancy mist? And then we might have plain, Rocky Mountain, and hilly mists? Or perhaps...

Go ahead. Pick out some ambiguities or words with multiple meanings, and try some of the combinations that most people discard. Who knows what meaning you may find playing in the cracks between words?

Write? It was a plain mist morning that October in Dallas.

TECH: 101 Tips (10)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 13 May 2009

Writers' Digest, October 2004, pages 26 to 33, has a collection of short "nuggets of wisdom" related to getting published. Maria Schneider is the author of the compilation. Take a deep breath, and here we go:

"Learn to accept feedback -- not because you should always do what others suggest, but because you learn to be less defensive and neurotic about what you're trying to accomplish." Elizabeth Maguire

Comments, critique, feedback -- getting the dialogue going and listening, paying attention to what the other person is saying both explicitly and implicitly. It's hard. It can be scary, and too often there is a tendency to see that comment as some sort of an attack. Learning to be thankful for any response, and to look beyond the initial reaction of protection... assume that what the other person is saying is their honest opinion. Try to understand it, to think why they would have said that. And remember that your work, once it's out there in public to look at, is not you. Pull back on the ego involvement, and admit that sure enough, there are misspellings, there's a section missing, some parts aren't as clear as they seemed when you were writing them -- it can be amazing what we miss until someone else points it out.

It's a gift. Someone took the time to read it, and to try to tell you how they reacted, what they saw. You don't have to agree with them, but thank them for that gift of time and effort. Learn what you can from it, consider what if anything you want to do with that piece, and take a deep breath.

Then write some more!

(Hum? That's ten of these little missives? I wonder if... do you suppose anyone is reading them?)