Sharp Words

It’s been a bit of a mixed month for me, as far as my writing goes.

I’ve completed four poems and written several bits of others. These include an unfinished sonnet which came to me during my drive home the other night, and which I recorded onto my MP3 player while driving – and I’m glad I did, else I would have lost it completely.

I revised an old poem and an even older short story, and entered them for competition – which was a new thing for me. Next, I want to finish up another short story or two, and pick out some poems to submit to magazines.

I wrote barely anything of the novel-in-progress:  a mere 378 words, most of which were done today! Although I did do some serious thinking about it, and made some plot and character notes. I’m reducing my goal for next month from 8,000 words to 5,000. That’s barely a weekend’s work in NaNoWriMo terms – if I can’t manage that, then I don’t deserve to be trying to write a novel.

I got a lot of lengthy, content-full blog posts written, including a trilogy for My love affair with poetry. I hit my goals of 2 book reviews and 2 Tech Writing Tuesday posts.

I was nominated for an Irish Blog Award – I don’t expect to make it even as far as the long list, never mind the short one, but it’s nice to have that logo up in my sidebar anyway. (Thanks Susan!)

All in all, I’m not dissatisfied with my writing progress this month. I’ve had frequent mad random bursts of creativity, and lots and lots of ideas. And importantly, I wrote most of them down for future use!

And as usual, if I hadn’t read so many novels, I might have done better…

So my main goal for February is going to be to keep up my momentum, and to make use of what I’ve written so far. I’m headed off home to Wales for a few days, from the middle of next week, so I might get some writing done while I’m away. We’ll have to see.

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Catherine’s rating: 9 out of 10
Ken’s rating: 10 out of 10

This is a very timely review, because The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman’s latest novel for children of all ages, won the Newbery Medal on Monday. (Neil’s reaction by Twitter was very funny, though his blog post about it thankfully has less swearing).

The Graveyard Book is the tale of Nobody (Bod) Owens. When he’s 18 months old, the rest of his family is assassinated by the mysterious Jack, but the little boy hides in the old graveyard nearby. The ghosts who live there decide to look after him, with the help of Silas – a personage who is not-dead but not-alive, and wears a lot of black. (It’s not hard to guess what he actually is; there are plenty of clues.) Given the Freedom of the Graveyard, Bod grows up able to see in the dark, to touch the ghosts, to Fade and to send the Fear. But he has very little contact with living persons, and that which he has often ends in trouble. Naturally enough, Bod wants to find out who kills his family, and in the best story-telling traditions, he does so – with consequences.

Catherine: So that’s the brief synopsis; now onto our review. And I’ll let Ken have the first proper words.

Ken: I had such fun with our Book Thief joint-review, it’s great to have a go at a second one. It’s got the word book in the title too, which proves we don’t just throw this stuff together.

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As per the subject, this post is just a reminder about my Group Writing Project – Writing that we love.

Comment on that post (or this one) with the link to your own blog post contributing to this group project! (And please do it even if I read your blog – I might not have realised it was related to this project.)

The deadline is January 31st (this Saturday), and I’ll post a synopsis next week.

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In Writing for the right audience, one of my golden rules was Don’t use clever-sounding language just for the sake of it. As I’ve recently been revising some documents written by software professionals who aren’t technical writers, I’ve come across lots of examples of this – in some cases, long words are used in slightly the wrong way, or terms are used because they’re seen as being more polite.
A friend of mine who’s also a tech writer works a lot with documents that have been translated into English, and has given me some examples as well (thanks Voolly!) – of course, translation errors are more excusable, but the same errors are often made by speakers of English as a first language.

Here are some of my favourite (or should that be least favourite?) examples.

Utilise/Utilize
Often used in place of use. However, it has a subtly different meaning – ‘to make use of’ or ‘to turn to practical use’.
The software is utilized to perform calculations. (Not wrong, but not good either.)
This software is used to perform calculations. (OK.)
This software performs calculations. (Best!)

In order to / If you want to
Just use to by itself, please!

Within
Used instead of in. Within means inside, generally inside a physical object, which in most uses isn’t quite the word needed.

As to whether
The as to can be dropped.

In the case that
Just if will do nicely here.

Wish and Desire
Use want or require, as appropriate. Both are politer than necessary when giving technical instructions.
If you wish to -> If you want to
The desired option -> The required option

Need
You need to enter a value and A value needs to be entered are common misconstructions (the second one more in translations). Both can be replaced by Enter a value.

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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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Time for a round-up of things that caught my attention recently.

• “Wearing the Many Hats of a Freelancer” – WordWebbing.com – juggling the different roles of a freelance writer
• “Writing in the Age of Distraction“  – Locus Online – a piece by the excellent Cory Doctorow about staying focussed despite all distractions
• and on a similar note: “How to Make Friends with Procrastination” – One Night Stanzas
• “Surviving Tough Times as a User-Assistance Writer” – UXmatters – how to make it through these uncertain economic times as a technical writer; has some great advice about cutting costs without damaging quality too much
• the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks – photos of examples of very unnecessary quotation marks
• 1000 novels everyone must read, as suggested by the Guardian – I’ve read a paltry 136 (39 of which were on the SF/fantasy list),  so there are now some new things on my to-read list..

And finally (I’m starting to feel like the Two Ronnies, doing this bit each time), the kind of editor you really don’t want to have:

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My creativity didn’t so much dry up in my late twenties as get redirected. From about 1995 onwards, I wrote very little fiction or poetry and even gave up on my journals. It wasn’t until the start of this century (doesn’t that sound grand?) that I started to write again, soon after moving to Northern Ireland. Everything around me was new – experiences and sights and people – and that sparked a couple of years of writing again. A couple of weeks ago, I found one of my notebooks from 2001/2002 – and it had a couple of poems I’d completely forgotten about! But I think my favourite poem from that time is probably this one (October 17th 2002).

Winter’s First Touch
Ice on the windshield for the first time today,
and my car’s reluctant to start.
The hills are sunk into mist
as thick as a feather duvet.
The river is placid,
the glowing reflections of the buildings
disturbed only by the tiny ripples of wind against tide.

Blue sky, bright sun
and winter’s wolf-bite in the air.
(© 2002 C Sharp)

I had another few dry years, but I’ve had a good 18 months now of being enthused about poetry again as well as novel- and story-writing. The evidence is on this blog!

One of my aims this year is to read more poetry, and with that in mind, I picked up some Penguin anthologies of 20th century poetry (from the charity shop, I admit it, despite Jim’s encouragement that we should buy new). These books were put together in the 60s, and fit nicely with the copy of The Penguin Book of English Verse that I stole years ago from my Mum (it was one of her English literature texts at college).

Before flicking through the poems themselves, I read the introductions. And by the time I was halfway through the introduction to The Georgians (a particular school of poetry in the early 20th century), I was baffled. Although I can completely understand that people can prefer certain styles of poetry over others, I was surprised to realise that there were those who dismissed and denigrated whole schools of poetry – in the same way as happens with schools of art, I suppose.

I freely admit that my reaction was a very naïve one. But it made me think. Because I’d been so exposed to poetry of all sorts as a child, I really couldn’t care less in what style a poem is written. Old or modern; rhyme or blank verse; short or long; flowery or matter-of-fact. I like strong imagery and clever uses of words, and I definitely like poems that pose some sort of question or contain a mystery. But on the whole, I take each poem I read on its own merits regardless of when, how or why it was written.

And I’m pretty sure that doing that means I get to read and enjoy an awful lot more poetry! It also means that I get to use a whole lot of different styles in my own work. Perhaps it’s better for a poet to have a particular voice, and I do think there are certain consistencies in how my poems are formed, but I like to experiment too. (Maybe that way I’ll gather more admirers?!)

Anyway, time for a conclusion of sorts. I don’t think my love of poetry has ever waned, although my enthusiasm for writing it certainly has at times. Or perhaps it’s more true to say that I simply forgot about writing poetry for long years at a time.

However, at the moment, my poetry-writing-enthusiasm is at a peak. Every day, I have ideas that I know could become poems, and I’ve got pretty good at making sure I write down even a few words as a prompt for later (for when I run out of ideas, in other words). Of course, I’m still not as disciplined as I should be; I had some great ideas before falling asleep last night, didn’t take the time to write them down, and now of course I’ve forgotten them already.

I’ve also developed more of a critical eye, even just over the past year. I remember posting something a few months ago, and afterwards seeing places I could have edited it – but being reluctant to do so. Now, I’m unlikely to post something unless it’s had at least a few days to one side and then a revision or two. And that has to be progress – doesn’t it?

So I’ll keep on writing poetry while I’m still keen on doing so… and more importantly, I’m going to start tossing it out to magazines and competitions, to try and get some pieces published somewhere other than this blog. And who knows?

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