writing

The Jewel in the Sentence

By Ellen Blum Barish
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IMG_1534Photograph by Ellen Blum Barish

When I’m looking for inspiration, I frequently turn to the craft essays in Brevity, an online literary publication with great essays as well as process pieces. This one, called “Not Every Sentence Can Be Great But Every Sentence Must Be Good,” written by Cynthia Newberry Martin, offers up tangible ways to brighten up our sentences with some spit and shine. I’m taking the liberty to share the second half of her piece which is filled with tips. Click here for the complete essay.

Perhaps good is best defined by what a sentence is not: indifferent, slack, utilitarian, boring, Since it’s more effective to work toward a positive than away from a negative, let’s look at seven ways to revise a sentence – seven ways to take a sentence from boring to good.

1. Add detail.

a. An unusual detail and/or a detail that is personal to the narrator.

May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude: There is nothing to be done but go ahead with life moment by moment and hour by hour—put out birdseed, tidy the rooms, try to create order and peace around me even if I cannot achieve it inside me (33).

Note: The detail of “putting out birdseed” emerges as unusual and specific in this list of tasks. Readers of May Sarton will recognize it as characteristic of her.

b. Framing details plus a dash of vagueness.

Neil Young in Waging Heavy Peace: Crosby had recently gotten straight, was recovering from his addiction to freebase, had just completed jail time he got for something having to do with a loaded weapon in Texas, and was still prone to taking naps between takes (3).

Note: Adding details to just one of the clauses brings this sentence to life. The details plus the spot of vagueness cause our minds to go to work imagining what might have happened in Texas.

2.    Add unusual repetition.

a.  Different forms of the same word.

Anne Enright in The Gathering: I close my eyes against the warm sunlight and doze beside the dozing stranger on the Brighton train (55).

Note: Enright repeats doze in the adjective form of dozing.

Pam Houston in Contents May Have Shifted: Henry is the only man I’ve ever known in my life that I knew how to love well, and as luck would have it, we were never lovers (6).

Note: Houston repeats love in the noun form of lovers. And notice the rhythm of the sentence.

b.  The same word as different parts of speech.

Anne Enright in The Gathering: I was back to school runs and hovering and ringing other-mothers for other-mother things, like play dates, and where to buy Rebecca’s Irish dancing shoes (133).

Note: Enright uses other-mother both as a noun and as an adjective, where it supplies a frame for the vagueness of things, which she then frames even more by using examples.

3.  Incorporate a character’s voice.

David Foster Wallace in “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s”  from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays: People keep asking Mrs. T’s permission until she tells them to knock it off and for heaven’s sake just use the phone already (138).

4.  Add a surprising or unusual perspective.

Anne Enright in The Gathering: The Hegartys didn’t start kissing until the late eighties and even then we stuck to Christmas (53).

Note: Enright enlarges the time frame: instead of referencing an event, she references an entire decade.

5.  Use sentence fragments.

Brian Doyle in “Joyas Voladoras” from The Best American Essays 2005: So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment (30).

Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander: How the valley awakes (117).

Cheryl Strayed in Wild: Planet Heroin (53).

6.  Use compression—combine sentences to create density.

Pam Houston in Contents May Have Shifted: We were each locked inside our individual sorrows, didn’t know each other well enough to share, but we agreed, out loud, that like moose, pelicans were surely put on earth to act as suicide preventers, agreed we’d never kill ourselves within the sight of one (8).

Note: Multiple could-have-been-single sentences are contained in one sentence; notice how the compression creates a lovely rhythm.

7.  Delete a sentence.

From my novel-in-progress:

Original: Angelina went straight from Lucy’s to the gym. In the face of matching clothes, mirrors, strutting, she could feel her body regressing—curling in instead of opening out—and she reminded herself to breathe.

Improved: But at the gym, in the face of matching clothes, mirrors, strutting, Angelina could feel her body regressing—curling in instead of opening out—and she reminded herself to breathe.

 

Seeing Up Close and Far Away

By Ellen Blum Barish
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Our near vision blurs as we age. From what I’ve read it’s because our lenses thicken

and become less flexible. The less elastic the lens, the harder for the eye to focus up close which either leads to fuzzy vision or …. bifocals.

I’ve tried bifocals, twice – being able to see up close and far away so clearly does lure – but I just can’t bear them. The vision lines are too confining. I’d rather see less distinctly but have the ability to move between close up and far away more swiftly and with more fluidly than have to keep my field of vision within a tiny, prescripted space.

I think that’s what draws me toward photography which has taught me about three-layered seeing.

1) There’s what my naked eye sees.

2) There’s what my camera captures.

3) And finally, the resulting image that may contain elements I didn’t see at first.

Since late last year, I’ve been revising a series of older personal essays. I’ve been reframing and restructuring them and it’s very powerful work. It’s been grounding to be taking pictures (generating new work) during this process of taking what’s already written (working with what’s been captured) and then, in the revising, discovering a new layer or making something wholly new. What I’m learning is that the pieces that feel complete are doing what the eye was made to do: they allow us to see close up and far away at the same time.

I urge you to try out this three-tiered approach to your creative process. Create something new. Revise something old. Blend them together to make something entirely different or to highlight something you didn’t see before.

Dig out those old essays or stories that call to you, dust them off and enter them again to see what they have to tell you. Turn one into a poem. Or find that poem and write it as an essay. Take your short story to write it as a personal essay. Find a photograph you took and write what comes to you as you look at it.

Mix, match and make your mark!

Photograph by Ellen Blum Barish, 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spiraling Toward a Creative Goal

By Ellen Blum Barish
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the creative process, it’s that it’s so not linear.

Certainly the process can be broken down into steps. And those steps can be taken one at a time. At your own pace. In a very organized way, if you so choose.

But that’s about it, as far as planning goes. Those steps aren’t the mere up and down variety. More like the spiral staircase. Once in, the process takes over and your best bet is to try not to look down or up – you may get dizzy – and simply go with it.

The piece you thought you were writing somehow goes in another direction. You put it aside, go for a walk or see a movie, and a connective thread comes to you, maybe a theme. You decide to try a different approach. And it feels better, sounds better. You read it out loud and you don’t like it. You put it aside again and pick it up later to read it and you see something in it you didn’t before. Perhaps it’s in there already or there’s a space for it, calling to you to fill it.

The process is so unlike the rest of what we do in a day. Or is it? We may be washing breakfast dishes but then get distracted by a phone call or something on TV. Or we may move from one room to another completely forgetting what we left for.

I think that day-to-day life is very much like the spiral of creative process. Some days it may feel more like non-connecting circles, which may feel repetitious and not very meaningful. But imagine what a bunch of balloons might look like in the sky. Now there’s a bunch of non-connecting circles! Lovely, right? Even, maybe artful.

 

Writers with whom I have worked, or whose work I have reviewed have had their essays or memoir pieces published in The Sun, More magazine, Shambhala Sun, North Shore Magazine, Blood Orange Review and have aired on WBEZ/Chicago Public Radio. Many have also had pieces  published in essay anthologies or self-published books. 

Photograph by Ellen Blum Barish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From Plan to Page

By Ellen Blum Barish
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IMG_2449Photo by Ellen Blum Barish

I hear it a lot in varying forms.

“I have a great idea for an essay but I just haven’t found the time to sit down and write it.”

“I’ve started an essay but I can’t find the end.”

“I’ve written an essay, in fact I’ve written several, but I just can’t bring myself to send them out for publication.”

Plans that never quite got there. Ideas that remain in the head, essays that remain under construction, pieces that never fully hatched.

So it’s something special to witness plans that pan out. Especially to have observed it at close range as I have with two students.

Trudi Goodman registered for my very first workshop at New Trier Extension in the summer of 2010. Up until then, her creative energies had gone to abstract painting. But she warmed to the work, never missing a class in almost five years. She kept at it and when we’d urge her to read her work aloud, she had us in stitches. Turns out we had a humorist in our midst, with an authentic and honest voice. She’s also sneaky. She didn’t tell anyone when she sent her essay “Who’s Looking Anyway?” for review at WomensMemoirs.com and that essay is now part of an anthology of women’s essays titled Seasons of Our Lives: Spring, edited by Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett. You can read more about it, and order it, here.

And then there’s Judy Panko Reis. I’ve worked with Judy privately, and she was also a student in my New Trier Extension workshop last year. Her ultimate goal was to get her essay published in Shambhala Sun. We worked together a bit, and then she workshopped the piece in our class and I can’t tell you how delighted I am to offer a link to a PDF of her essay, “Under the Volcano,” which will appear in the  March 2014 issue of Shambhala Sun.  Judy’s story is unforgettable, and she writes it with poetry and insight. Proof positive that plans for publication can indeed find their way to the page.

Way to go, Trudi and Judy!

This month marks the one-year anniversary of this blog in revised form and I feel like there are so many reasons to celebrate!  I’m a cheerleader for the creative process, which we all know can be slow, lonely, surprising and magnificent — often at the same time. My mission is to inspire you to open your window and urge us both to the page. Feel free to click back to past blog posts for inspiration on the writing process, writing prompts and tools to bring your stories into the light. The best part is how we all ignite one another.

And if you are curious to see what I’ve been writing lately, here are links to some of my recent essays. Perhaps they will set you in search of paper and pen or get your fingers tapping. Or maybe you’ll come join us on February 12 for the start of my 10-week workshop at New Trier Extension,  “Writing the Personal Essay.” 

Go to page 52 of the catalogue or email me at ellen@ellenblumbarish.com for details.

Tablet, January 2014

“The Power of a Circle: Standing Hand-in-Hand to Overcome Discrimination”

Literary Mama, November 2012

“Exposed”

To a year filled with more than just plans for writing!

 

 

Writing Wishes Can Come True

By Ellen Blum Barish
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heavysnow 2Photograph by Ellen Blum Barish

Is the prospect of a long, cold winter weighing you down?

Revise that old script you have for winter.  It’s a great time to get back to your writing!

If you’ve been thinking about working with a writing coach, but the price has kept you from giving it a try, this is the time!

Until December 31st, 2013, I’m offering  a 25% discount for a one-hour coaching session and a 30% discount for three or more sessions. So if you are working on a personal essay for publication or pleasure, a memoir, a family history, dissertation, academic paper or essay for college or graduate school applications, take advantage of this first-time-ever fee!

If you were thinking about purchasing coaching time for a friend, consider a gift certificate at this greatly reduced price. Certificates are good for 2014 but must be purchased before December 31, 2013.

For more information about this holiday purchase price or gift certificates, email me at ellen@ellenblumbarish.com.

All the best for this holiday season. Hope to see you in 2014!

Warm wishes,

Ellen