branta

What if all that junk in your head came out? You don’t have to have “mental issues” to know that there are rules in conversation, things that can be said and things that should remain hidden or reserved. I always seem to have Edgar’s caveat at the end of King Lear in my head: “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say,” that next-to-impossible ideal that is supposed to keep tragedy at bay.
Jeffrey Donaldson via Poetry Daily

I never ever start with a full-fledged idea of the story in its entirety. I start with language. Not even a whole sentence. It’s as if the writing literally flows out of my fingertips as much as out of my brain. I am wildly envious of people who are able to plan out their stories and then when they can catch a moment, they pour the whole thing onto paper in one shot.

Okay Booknet, you can stop throwing things anytime you want. I don’t really know if you can vilify them, or not, but I know they have Google alert because I’ve written about them before. Fine, I get it, agents scour Booknet to see how crappy my sales are and then sign some canoe paddling Canadian forest ranger who stubbed their toe in Manitoba and was lost in the woods for four hours. I get it. I’m not anti-Booknet, I just thought I’d be relevant.

First, is art merely a hobby? For some, probably. But for those who take it seriously, it is not. Art takes tremendous determination, practice and time for it to evolve. I can only speak of writing because that is the artistic discipline I practice: much study needs to be undertaken to learn elements of craft (style, metaphor, prosody, etc.) and then much time needs to be spent to develop. A hobby is something done in spare time; art is, in many ways, an employment.

“I thought to myself, ‘If I picked up this knife and stabbed the person across from me in the heart, for good or for bad it would just open this trap door and I would drop through it and never look at the same world again.’ ”
John Barber/Globe and Mail

The first psychologist-novelist we have asked to write for us is Elaine Hatfield, a noted social psychologist whose best known work is on love and its social implications. Her first novel was Rosie, about a young psychologist, Rosie St Giles, who has a temporary teaching job at the University of Hawaii.

[T]he teaching of creative writing is dominated by the workshop method in which students give feedback to each other on pieces they have written. [Cate Bush] was skeptical about the value of this method, and said that teaching writing can’t really be done except by teaching reading. There’s a need to create a culture of readers.

Jane Friedman, executive director of Writer’s Digest, lists several tools from social media, word processing, blogging, organizing and so on that might keep you on the right path towards productivity. Or at least creative ways to waste your time while you’re not being productive.

I spoke with Sharon McCartney about her recently published collection of poetry For and Against. She read three poems from the book, we discussed the duality of the title and listened to her tea carafe serenade us in the kitchen. Click through to find the podcast.

BookCamp Halifax is a user-generated unconference designed to bring print publishers, educators, community builders, and the tech community together – for free! BookCamp Halifax is an opportunity to explore the present and future of books and book-like technologies. It’s open to anyone interested in the publishing industry and the potential dynamics of the reader/creator/publisher relationship. Join us for a day of sharing new ideas, radical notions and engaging conversation! We’ll consider the future of the book as an object; examine its ongoing role as a delivery mechanism for stories, information and entertainment; and examine how publishers can leverage themselves for success in the digital age.