Crafting the personal essay

I read Dinty W. Moore's Crafting the Personal Essay immediately after mailing my honours thesis in last year. Academic writing had wrung me out and left me unable to write anything less than formal prose. Dinty Moore soon turned me around and whet my appetite for more learning and writing. 
Crafting the Personal Essay is a very readable and motivating book on writing the personal essay. Moore covers the nuts and bolts of writing the humorous, nature, travel, lyric, spiritual and food essay, providing numerous examples and tips. This is the first time I have heard essay writing defined as chasing "mental rabbits' but that is exactly what it is: a "hunt, a chase, a ramble through thickets of thought, in pursuit of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth". He exactly describes the essay-writing process, how to work through ideas and feelings and nail them to paper. 
There are plenty of exercises to get the writer's pen to paper and build a fund of ideas and starters. Highly recommended! 

Frost and other wonders

Our first frost for the winter this morning - the merest dusting over the valley.

""Just a minute," said a voice in the weeds.

So I stood still

in the day's exquisite early morning light..."

from Mary Oliver's wonder-full collection, Why I Wake Early

So the dogs and I stood still, let the chill settle on our noses and ears and listened to the birds sing up the day. 

Now the sky is clear and the sun mellow on my face. How I love winter in my part of the world! I suspect I would not be so enthusiastic if I lived in harsher climes. Here frost and snow are a surprise, an unexpected gift; for others they are a trial, something they barricade their houses and minds against.
A friend of mine who spent a couple of winters in Germany finished many cross stitch masterpieces despite bearing two babies in that time. Perhaps I should adopt the mental state of being snowbound, stay still at my keyboard and write a masterpiece or two...
I have a full day ahead to fill my mind with beauty and translate it into words, or better, sentences (thank you Stanley Fish for drawing to my attention that words mean nothing unless ordered into sentences and related to other words!).

More wisdom from Annie Dillard

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days."
Annie Dillard from The Writing Life

Beauty Itself

"What if the man could see Beauty Itself, pure, unalloyed, stripped of mortality and all its pollution, stains, and vanities, unchanging, divine, ... the man becoming in that communion, the friend of God, himself immortal; ... would that be a life to disregard?"
Plato


Recognising beauty brings us close to God, close to that that is untainted by decay, and gives us a taste of immortality, of what is precious and eternal, of a life worth living.
As I copied out this quote that I discovered in Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, I uncovered words that I hadn't noticed on first reading. When people (not just men!) recognise beauty they come close to God (the perfect, the eternal) too. When writers see and share something beautiful or, amazingly, write something that takes a reader's breath away with its beauty, then their lives and works are surely worth respect, honour and attention.
So read to find that beauty; pay attention to the environment;  notice and perhaps communicate that rare thing or moment of beauty; come close to the eternal.

Thoughts for writers...

Observation, conscious attention to detail and delight fuel my writing. I find I only understand what is in my life when I crystallise it in words. Paying attention is critical to my writing, thinking and to living my life well.
Mary Oliver so neatly captures the precious in the ordinary, the sacred nature of the everyday, the joy we should grasp in our short time in the world.  

"Every day

  I see or I hear

    something

      that more or less

kills me with delight,

  that leaves me

    like a needle

in the haystack of light.

   It is what I was born for -"

Mary Oliver Mindful

Time to do what we love

On her wonderful blog about the writing life (and other things) Miss Good on Paper quotes John Dufresne who says that we always find time to do what we love - and they are probably right. However, I find that I need to moodle around at my desk for a while before I finally settle to what really gives me a lot of pleasure: writing tanka or haiku, adding to my novel or tinkering away on here. I need to settle in like a hen scratching the straw around, fluffing out her feathers, calling her chicks and flopping into exactly the right spot.
A quiet and clean house helps. Barring myself from Gmail and Facebook is mandatory. A good night's sleep and a gritty coffee put me on fast forward. Today has been a good day for writing. My story for The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is well on its way. I gathered a few haiku for Creatrix, the WA Poets online poetry mag and I even worked out how to do web links on this blog!
The Limestone Tanka poets met at the National Botanic Gardens in Canberra on Sunday and discussed our writing processes. Although we all carry scruffy notebooks we each use them differently. One composes on one page and writes the finished tanka in a fair hand on the opposite page. Another scribbles phrases, words or skeleton ideas in a spiral bound pad. Some showed A4 pages full of crossings out, part poems, full ones, pressed flowers, crumpled newspaper articles and theatre programmes.
After the talk we wandered up the mountain or down onto the lawns among the eucalypts and penned a few ideas and tanka. My mind erupted with ideas and connections. Today I captured them and worked an hour or so on them. Tomorrow I work a 10 hour shift and will sink into bed without a backward glance at pen or computer, much as I love them.
I agree with Miss Good on Paper but sometimes doing things we love is not as easy as it sounds. I aim to keep my eye on the goal and work towards it without despairing of reaching it. Goethe sums my writing life up: "Do not hurry; do not rest."

Writing sentences

Stanley Fish argues that sentences rather than words are the material that writers work with. Piles of words mean nothing until they slide into their ordained places, until they relate to each other in particular and logical ways, until they combine with other words to make meaning. If we want to write well and clearly then he insists we must focus on forms. Fortunately for most younger Australians he doesn't mean old fashioned grammatical forms but a logical sequence of linkages between actor, action and the object of the action.
He gives some wonderful examples from the greats of what he calls the subordinating style, the additive style and the satiric style and encourages us to copy them by substituting words that perform the same function within a sentence. His comments on the function and importance of first and final sentences cut straight to the marrow and made me reconsider the economy and efficiency of my leading sentences.
In the final pages he turns his attention to the actual content of sentences - and this is where he comes unstuck. In the earlier chapters he uses modern and contemporary examples. The last chapter dwells on examples from centuries well past, alluding to ancient and biblical knowledge and using archaic language that many readers might struggle with.
Although I read the early chapters hungrily I became bogged down towards the end and found it difficult to finish. However I have added to my armoury of knowledge about writing and now have a better understanding of how words function within sentences without having to revise all the grammatical jargon of my school days.