SCREAMING GULLS

Good morning and happy Thanksgiving week! Here are today’s posts:
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Stickler Stuff from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Unsurprisingly, Gertrude Stein was not a fan of the question mark. She said that of all punctuation marks the question mark was “the most completely uninteresting”.

Why did she say that? I think it’s kinda cute, curled up like a sea horse.
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Inspiration from Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life compiled by Carole F. Chase

Whether a story is to be marketed for grownups or for children, the writer writes for himself, out of his own need, otherwise the story will lack reality. There is no topic which is of itself taboo; if it springs from the writer’s need to understand life and all its vagaries and vicissitudes, if it is totally honest and unselfpitying, then it will have the valid ring of truth. If it is written because it is what is at the moment fashionable, and not out of the writer’s need, then it is apt to be unbelievable, and what is unbelievable can often be shocking and even pornographic—and this includes some recent children’s books.

I’m amazed with L’Engle’s comment that we write out of our own need to understand life. It’s tempting to follow the latest trends, but those novels will not have the ring of truth.
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The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

The gulls were up, and screaming. The sound met him, raw on the wind from the sea. Something else was on that wind, a strange smell, and in the gulls’ screaming a high shiver of panic that touched him like the edge of a knife. Smoke? There was usually smoke from the cottage, but this was a different smoke, a sour, chilled and sullen emanation, carrying with it a smell that mocked the good scene of roasting meat on the rare days when Sula had meat in the pot. This was not a good smell; it was sickening, an ugly mockery, making the morning foul.

Stewart foreshadows, with ominous words, the discovery Mordred will soon make that his foster parents’ cottage has burned to the ground with them inside.
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I’ll be back on Wednesday. Thanks for stopping by.

BOWER OF COMFORT

Enjoy this post!

Stickler Stuff from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Increasingly people are (ignorantly) adding question marks to sentences containing indirect questions, which is a bit depressing. Everything ends up becoming a question? I’m talking about statements? It’s getting quite annoying?

I trust we all got the point?
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Inspiration from Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life compiled by Carole F. Chase

Can one be a Christian artist and not know it?

I think that’s the way it always happens, even when one is constantly struggling to be a Christian in daily living. I cannot try, consciously, to write a “Christian” story—even in such a book as Dance in the Desert which (although it is never overtly stated) is about the holy family’s flight into Egypt. When I am working, I move into an area of faith which is beyond the conscious control of my intellect. I do not mean that I discard my intellect, that I am an anti-intellectual, gun-ho for intuition and intuition only. Like it or not, I am an intellectual. The challenge is to let my intellect work for the creative act, not against it. And this means, first of all, that I must have more faith in the work than I have in myself.

This sounds like the advice to get the story down by turning off your editor. We also have to turn off logic and turn on creativity. Prayer doesn’t hurt, either.
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The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

Morgause, that lady of luxury, would have thought herself ill used had she been denied any of the appurtenances of royalty, and she had managed, with her spoils, to make herself a bower of comfort and colour to cushion her exile and enhance her one famous beauty. On all sides the stone walls of the hall were hung with brilliantly dyed cloths. The smooth flagstones of the floor were not, as might have been expected, strewn with rushes and heather, but had been made luxurious with islands of deerskin, brown and fawn and dappled. The heavy benches along the side walls were made of stone, but the chairs and stools standing on the platform at the hall’s end were of fine wood carefully carved and painted, and bright with coloured cushions, while the doors were of strong oak, handsomely ornamented, and smelling of oil and wax.

Description should enable the reader to picture the scene in her mind. Stewart succeeds here.
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I’ll post again on Monday. Have a good weekend?

CREAMY SEA

Happy Wednesday! I hope you enjoy these quotes:

Stickler Stuff from Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

The name “question mark” (which is a rather dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century, and has never caught on universally.

What else is the question mark called?
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Inspiration from Madeleine L’Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life compiled by Carole F. Chase

Your point of view as a human being is going to come over in your work whether you know it or not. There’s no way you can hide it. So if you are a Christian, your work is going to be Christian. There’s no way you can hide that. If you’re not, you can talk about Jesus all you like and it’s not going to be Christian. If you are someone who cares about human beings, that’s going to come over in your work. If you are indifferent to the fate of other people, that’s also going to show.

You cannot hide yourself, and that’s a very scary thing—particularly true, oddly enough, in fiction. Sometimes in nonfiction you can hide yourself behind statistics and facts, but in fiction you are writing story, and story is revelatory. One of the wonderful things that comes out of story is that you not only find out more about your characters, ultimately you are helping to write your own story.

I had a Eureka moment when I realized the anger of one of my characters mirrored my own.
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And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for. Our new (actually returning) author is Mary Stewart in her fourth book of the Merlin trilogy, The Wicked Day.

The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

It was a bright day of early summer. May, in the islands, can be as cruel as any other month, but this was a day of sunshine and mild breezes. The stones of the beach looked grey and turquoise and rosy-red, the sea creamed against them peacefully, and the turf of the ridge behind was thick with sea-pink and primrose and red campion. Every ledge of the cliffs that bounded the bay was crowded with seabirds claiming and disputing their nesting territory, and nearer, on shingle or turf, the pied oystercatchers brooded their eggs or flew, screaming, to and fro along the tide. The air was loud with their cries. Even had there been a listener outside the cottage doorway, he could have heard nothing for the noise of the sea and the birds, but inside the room the furtive hush persisted.

The last line contrasts with the peaceful shore scene, and the reader knows something’s up.
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Thanks for your interest. Come back Friday.