From the
March 2010 Murphy Writing Newsletter
I
lead lots of workshops and classes for poets and
writers each year. It's usually a pleasure,
especially in extended courses when I can see
each writer grow over a period of time.
One thing I tell my students is to make believe
they must pay their reader one dollar a word to
read their story or other prose. This shakes
them up. Then I tell them to make believe they
must pay their reader five dollars a word to
read their poem. That freaks them out, but it
also helps them compress their writing so that
they say more with fewer words. It teaches them
to be harder on themselves and to look at their
writing from the point of view of a reader who
doesn't know or love them.
When students ask me what I look for when I read
a work in progress, I tell them I want to forget
that I am a teacher, and instead become a reader
who is enjoying the experience. If you can do
that, I say, you've got me.
Do you know what your readers are thinking? Try
my "Reader Test" to see your work in progress as
an intelligent, interested stranger might.
Murphy's
Reader Test
Check your writing for the following:
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Make sure you're clear.
If I want to do a puzzle, I'll reach for the Suduko in the daily
paper. When I read a poem or story, I want to be mentally
engaged and stimulated. I want to think, but I can't get into
your head unless you give me words and images that lead the way.
"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most
people."
~ Adrian Mitchell |
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"You talkin' to me?"
If you're only speaking to yourself, why should I care? If
you're not speaking to me, I'm only a spectator. That said, I
don't mind listening to an interesting conversation which you
are having with yourself. Engage me.
"Out of our quarrels with others we make rhetoric. Out of our
quarrels with ourselves we make poetry."
~ Yeats |
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What do you have to say for yourself?
There are few original ideas, but good writing conveys your ideas
and feelings in a unique way. That's called style. The more you
do this, the more successful your writing will be.
"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."
~ T. S. Eliot |
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Have "crafted" your language?
or, using Pulitzer Prize winning poet Stephen Dunn's word,
that your poem or prose is "written," not just spoken.
"You wouldn't hand in a lot of sticks and boards bunched
together with string and call it a table. It's no better to
hand in a detached bundle of statements, starting nowhere in
particular, training along for a while and then fade out, and
call it a ...(poem)."
~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher |
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Surprise me.
If you are writing merely to express yourself, you will bore
your reader immediately and bore yourself in due time. If you
are writing to discover and reveal what you may or may not know,
what you may have forgotten or what you never suspected, then
you will be interesting to us all.
"Poetry is the language in which man explores his own
amazement."
~ Christopher Fry |
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Make a little music.
There are poems that, when I read them aloud, make my mouth
happy. Prose too, like Kafka on the Shore, a translation,
no less! Try to write like that.
"Poetry is the music of the soul, and, above all, of great and
feeling souls."
~ Voltaire |
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Don't overdo it.
You want your writing to connect with a reader; you want to
create a sense of intimacy, but you don't want to cheapen your
work by being sentimental. Give your reader credit for being at
least as smart as you are.
"All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."
~ Oscar Wilde
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© 2010 Murphy Writing Seminars, LLC ●
May be reprinted for instructional use..
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