Sharp Words

I haven’t posted any poetry for a while - since the middle of National Poetry Writing Month in April, in fact - probably because I haven’t actually written any since my muse went to hide under the bed around about April 17th.

Here’s one from early on in April though. I don’t remember what inspired it exactly - possibly the children’s rainbow song which goes ‘Red and yellow and pink and green…’  But for whatever reason, I also decided to try and set myself a rule to follow for each stanza. Can you spot it?

Childhood Colours

Pink: my favourite party dress all faded
and grown too short; strawberry ice cream;
the plastic skin of dolls; bubblegum bubbles.

Red: the velvet-covered seats of the
concert hall where I sang on oblivious
as the scenery tumbled all around me.

Orange: too-sweet squash after Sunday school;
sweets after school in a packet decorated
with dinosaurs; space-hoppers; satsumas at Christmas.

Yellow: my own private sandbar at the
bottom of the bathtub after a day
playing in golden sands and shimmering sea.

Green: duckweed; pondweed; seaweed; vivid grass stains
on my shorts on sports day; the
silvery leaves of my grandad’s willow tree.

Blue: sky; sea; turquoise goop painted
on our little boat’s hull; the knitted
teddy bear I swapped with my brother.

Purple: the peeling paint in my primary
school playground on the shed doors and
the metal pole we tried to climb.

Brown: my floppy dog of flowered corduroy;
horse chestnuts in autumn; chocolate Easter eggs;
new-turned damp earth in Dad’s allotment.

White: bread cut by my grandmother for
my sandwiches and the laundry drying outside
which I sat beneath when eating them.

Black: the rubber ring we’d float with;
wet oily tarmac on diesel-drizzle days;
words on the pages of new books.

© 2008 C Sharp

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This week’s guest blog comes from Tam of Fighting With Writing. I’m hoping that the reason for his infrequent posts at the moment are because he’s winning his fight and is too busy actually writing to blog about it (although I do rather miss his blogging) but either way, I’m delighted he’s taken time to contribute here.

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The other day, Catherine wrote a post entitled Finding the time, where she shared her frustration with the difficulty in mustering the motivation required to complete her various writing projects.

Today I’m going to write a lengthy comment that follows on from that post, but I’m going to leave it here so that I can pretend it’s a guest blog.

From what I’ve seen in my travels around the blogosphere, and indeed from a quick inspection of the back of my own filing cabinet, I know that Catherine’s problem is fairly common.

It reminds me of the old cliché that every man has at least a half dozen DIY projects on the go at any one time, most of which will be left incomplete indefinitely. The man’s wife may wage a campaign or two that employs the use of tactical nagging, but still those shelves will be left on the shelf.

We can write when we need to, we can write when we want to, yet we can’t write just because we feel we ought to.
No matter how much we nag ourselves, if the proper motivation isn’t there, then work shall never proceed any faster than a Spanish motorway maintenance crew at midday.

Catherine’s post had me thinking about how many people out there are struggling with multiple noves. (A nove is a piece of writing that needs a little more work before it becomes a proper novel.) I began wondering how people might get on if they started to swap their noves with one another.

You might have hacked away at your nove for weeks, months and years. Even the thought of picking up where you left off makes you both nauseous and guilty.
To the other person though, your washed-up, burnt-out and tired old nove will be a completely clean slate. They can look it over with a fresh mind, become excited about it, and take it to the places the nove needs to go.

It’s also easier to write for another person than it is to write for yourself. Take this blog entry for example. I’m tired at the moment, and if this were my own blog, I might down tools and grab some shut eye.
As it is for Catherine though, and because I told her that I would have it finished two days ago, I guess I’ll just have to stick on the kettle.

Now I know this nove swapping idea is fraught with potential problems. Not least of them being that the style of the prose changing half-way through the book will frustrate the reader.

Or how about situations whereby one person puts a lot of effort on their side, and secretly resents the other party for not reciprocating similar levels of graft. Maybe such resentment would not remain secret, maybe accusations such as “you couldn’t even write a cheque” will start to fly.

I would hope that such an endeavour would yield positive results though, helping to turn two dusty noves into a pair of shiny novels.

A more realistic, but still positive outcome, would be that someone else massacring your vision will motivate you to get in there and fix it yourself.

A big thanks once again to Catherine for letting me sit in her blogging chair. Now pass the shoe horn please, I appear to be stuck. 

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No Technical Writing Tuesday today, because I was due to have a guest post from Tam of Fighting With Writing - I think that’ll be going up tomorrow instead.

So, at this late hour, I thought I’d waffle about nothing much instead - actually, no, I just wanted to proclaim my love for some random things.

The book I am currently reading, The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway (his promotional MySpace). I have an advanced reading copy and I’ll be posting a review next week once I’ve finished reading. So far, so very good, particularly the bit about sheep in minefields which made me laugh my socks off at the black humour.
I’ve been getting a few search hits already looking for reviews of it, so I will post one soon. For once though, it’s taking me quite a while to read something new - I haven’t really been in the mood this week to read unfamiliar books despite having a stack of them waiting for me.

Which leads me onto my second thing: BookMooch. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before or not, but I was put onto it by Ken, and you may have noticed my widget in the top left showing some of the books I’ve made available for mooching.
Basically, it’s a way of swapping books around the world. So far I’ve got rid sent off about 7 books, and so far received 3 (which are the ones forming my to-read pile). There do seem to be waiting lists for some of the popular stuff, but you can create a wish-list of books and be automatically emailed when they become available if you want. Best of all, it’s free - you just pay for posting things out.

Thing three on this list is the blog BritishSpeak. Billed as one American’s quest to understand British English, it’s branched off into all sorts of discussions about British, Australian, South African and Canadian language and life (to name just a few of its directions). Its humor (and its proprietor) can get quite crude sometimes, but it makes me laugh, and makes me think, and it’s generally a very friendly blog to hang out on. I’ve been mulling over a piece about Northern Ireland slang to contribute, but we shall have to see whether that makes it to print or not at some point.

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Here are some more of the words and phrases which produce my blog when people search for them:

• why, commas are important (or in the case of Google search, why commas make no difference, since this term brought up a post of mine entitled Why commas are important)
• weasel phrases (no, I have no idea either unless they were looking for that well-known quote about eagles soaring but weasels not getting sucked into jet engines)
• thank you for reviewing the documentation (no, thank you)
• tautology word processor (and I have no idea on this one either, but it sounds like something I’d like to have)
• sharp go to sleep (if you insist…)

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I decided to do something different with this review. I knew that one of my frequent commenters, Ken Armstrong, had read The Book Thief too, and since I was having trouble writing a review but did want to write one, I asked him to collaborate.

By the way, if anyone else wants to collaborate on a book review like this, let me know which book you’d like to have a go at, and I’ll see what can be done! (No Harlequin/Mills & Boon, please, but most other stuff is far game.)

Catherine’s rating:  8 out of 10
Ken’s rating: 7 out of 10

It’s January 1939 in Nazi Germany, eight months before the outbreak of World War Two. Liesel Meminger is travelling to Mölking, a town near Munich, to be fostered by Rosa and Hans Hubberman. During the train journey that she’s making with her mother and younger brother, her brother dies; during his funeral, Liesel steals her first book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesl over the next five years: her new parents, wardrobe-shaped, bad-tempered Rosa and calm, accordion-playing Hans who teaches her to read her first stolen book; her best friend Rudy; the poverty-stricken life she leads in wartime Germany; and perhaps most importantly, the books she steals and the Jew in the basement and the words he shares with her.

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A lot of the suggestions in this article will depend on how well you know your reviewers.  If it’s their first time reviewing your documents, or you have a professional relationship with them rather than a friendly one, then you may need to compromise on more of the less important matters. Stick to your guns on the ones that you really care about though!

If your reviews have been done properly, you should receive two types: a technical review and a peer review.  Let’s discuss the technical review first, as it’s easier to deal with.

Technical Review Comments
In general, you won’t be the technical expert; whoever has reviewed your document should be. So, it’s a simple matter - take their suggestions for changes and updates, and apply them.

Of course, you might have described behaviour you yourself observed, or you might have conflicting comments from two or more technical reviewers. In these cases, you need to make sure that the corrections are, well, correct. Talk to your subject matter experts (SMEs) again; show them what you did and make sure that the software or hardware really is supposed to work like that - if it isn’t, someone may need to raise a bug!

Peer Review Comments
These can be harder to deal with as they apply to your writing itself. If it’s a spelling error or a formatting correction, go ahead and fix the problem. But if your reviewer has suggested changes to the wording or structure of the information in the document, you may need to think about them.

And it’s all too easy to think ‘well, I’m right’… and even if you can see their point, it’s easy to take this kind of review personally. Don’t. As discussed in the guest post by Roberto Villegas, Taking Bad Reviews Like a Pro, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and what you think might be grammatically correct and structurally sound, another reader might not. It’s also very easy to get too close to your own work. Take a step back and assess it as your reviewer might have.

Sometimes, of course, your reviewer will just be wrong. Ignore their comments if you want, but bear in mind that if you submit the document to them for review again, they’ll just flag up the same stuff.

It’s far better to discuss the review comments with the reviewer where there is possible conflict - and this also applies if, as I mentioned can happen with technical reviews, you’ve had conflicting comments from reviewers. Be polite. Ask why they wanted something changed - good reviewers will have already said why in their review comments, but most won’t. If you think your way is better, be prepared to explain yourself. And be prepared to compromise.

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If you have any questions or comments about this article, or any suggestions for future posts, please comment on this post or email me via my contact form.
Technical Writing Tuesdays: index of posts

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