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All people have routines of some kind, and writers are no different. Routines can be elaborate, superstitious, or just plain odd. That’s allowable.

Contracted reading preferences can become as much a routine as the genres that keep a writer comfortable. During my teen years I concentrated on literary genre and classics. When I hit twenty, I moved on to—dare I say it?—romance novels. Okay, I was a normal young woman.

For decades after I left young adulthood, I read science fiction/fantasy almost exclusively. I had an entire library, floor to ceiling, filled with the genre. During the last several years most of that library was donated to larger lending libraries in my area.

Expanded reading can have a profound effect. On a whim, before getting rid of my personal library, I went to the local library and borrowed several books from the mystery genre and a few in non-fiction science. That whim led to a feeding frenzy of reading. A new world had opened up before me, showing authors, writing possibilities, etc. that I’d not anticipated.

I tried to read everything. Non-fiction came in so many forms that I almost glutted myself trying to sample all the entrees. I revisited ancient history—pre-Biblical–and philosophy, along with world history from 500A.D. to 1700A.D. History became a friend that could keep me fascinated for hours with its tales of intrigue.

“Salt” held me in thrall for days as I discovered its particular journey through civilization and the part it played in developing the world. “The Tao of Physics” left me speechless and questioning about the very nature of reality. Volumes on theology piled up beside the bed.

There was something wondrous and invigorating about expanding one’s book bag.

My personal expansion had come and I’d reveled in it. The groaning board of literature presented itself to my every desire. That’s when writing took over and contraction began.

Writing has its own form of contraction. For me, it was children’s literature. I studied it, wrote it, and enjoyed its delights. I still do.

After a couple of years my enthusiasm faltered. When I used my own style, stories didn’t work well. I couldn’t find the groove that would send me into the genre full-time. I’d never had problems writing fiction for children, until I started studying it and working with it constantly.

Ideas surfaced from everywhere. Short or long, stories moved inside my head. Fiction or non-fiction, it didn’t seem to matter. I was told that I expected children to read at level higher than standard. It was true. I expected kids now to be like kids when I was in school, and they’re not. The standardized language levels used now seem more elementary than those used in the 50’s and 60’s.

Once again, expansion would

All people have routines of some kind, and writers are no different. Routines can be elaborate, superstitious, or just plain odd. That’s allowable.

Contracted reading preferences can become as much a routine as the genres that keep a writer comfortable. During my teen years I concentrated on literary genre and classics. When I hit twenty, I moved on to—dare I say it?—romance novels. Okay, I was a normal young woman.

For decades after I left young adulthood, I read science fiction/fantasy almost exclusively. I had an entire library, floor to ceiling, filled with the genre. During the last several years most of that library was donated to larger lending libraries in my area.

Expanded reading can have a profound effect. On a whim, before getting rid of my personal library, I went to the local library and borrowed several books from the mystery genre and a few in non-fiction science. That whim led to a feeding frenzy of reading. A new world had opened up before me, showing authors, writing possibilities, etc. that I’d not anticipated.

I tried to read everything. Non-fiction came in so many forms that I almost glutted myself trying to sample all the entrees. I revisited ancient history—pre-Biblical–and philosophy, along with world history from 500A.D. to 1700A.D. History became a friend that could keep me fascinated for hours with its tales of intrigue.

“Salt” held me in thrall for days as I discovered its particular journey through civilization and the part it played in developing the world. “The Tao of Physics” left me speechless and questioning about the very nature of reality. Volumes on theology piled up beside the bed.

There was something wondrous and invigorating about expanding one’s book bag.

My personal expansion had come and I’d reveled in it. The groaning board of literature presented itself to my every desire. That’s when writing took over and contraction began.

Writing has its own form of contraction. For me, it was children’s literature. I studied it, wrote it, and enjoyed its delights. I still do.

After a couple of years my enthusiasm faltered. When I used my own style, stories didn’t work well. I couldn’t find the groove that would send me into the genre full-time. I’d never had problems writing fiction for children, until I started studying it and working with it constantly.

Ideas surfaced from everywhere. Short or long, stories moved inside my head. Fiction or non-fiction, it didn’t seem to matter. I was told that I expected children to read at level higher than standard. It was true. I expected kids now to be like kids when I was in school, and they’re not. The standardized language levels used now seem more elementary than those used in the 50’s and 60’s.

Once again, expansion would

Does every writer, regardless of genre, have an urge to dabble in poetry? Does the ebb and flow of syllabic rhythm entice the essayist to pay more attention to the lyricism of her own work? Is there a true difference between the cadence of a lovely line of poetry and a well-crafted sentence that leads the reader into the first paragraph of a novel?

Brooks Landon, non-fiction writer and professor at the University of Iowa, believes that all writing can benefit from understanding how sentences operate. He says:

“Sentences are shaped by specific context and driven by specific purpose, so no rules or mechanical protocols can prepare us for the infinite number of tasks our sentences must accomplish.”

By the time I got through half of his course, I understood his meaning. I could no longer look at something written and see only the story that the words conveyed. Suddenly I noticed the length of sentences, the patterns used in assembling them, and the syntax of each segment comprising them.

I also understood that poetry, for all of its forms and eccentricities, was no different from prose in its syntax and overall structure. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, I wrote a small piece of creative non-fiction for specific audience. I then translated that piece into poetry, just to see if the piece suffered any ill-effects. You tell me whether I succeeded in making both versions work.

The creative non-fiction piece goes like this:

THE MOONLIGHT DANCE

Moonlight flows across the lawn’s clear center, chasing larger shadows and forming a stage with spotlight. Rustling sounds emerge from the right, loud enough to grab the attention of a watcher. Into the spotlight amble four ebony bodies. Each sports a broad white stripe.

The largest of the troupe leads the single line of dancers into position. They pause. Noses rise to sniff the cool night air. Tongues flick in and out to taste that same air.

Faint chattering escapes young throats.

Chorus dancers, small and new, follow the lead of the diva, their mother. One faint command releases them for movement. Slow revolutions begin counter-clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

Each nose rises to sniff the air. Tongues flick out to taste. Another faint command comes from the leader.

Again they move.

The diva pivots in place to face the line. Each small dancer echoes the movement. Slow revolutions clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

The command voice changes to a more enticing note. The ritual is repeated by the troupe. Counter-clockwise followed by clockwise. After three full ritual dances, the troupe stops as precisely as it began.

A low crooning issues from the diva to her dancers, and they amble off into the shadows to disappear into the night. The watcher stands entranced and questioning. Why did they dance? Had anyone else ever seen such skunk behavior?

The poetic form came out as follows:

MOONLIGH

Does every writer, regardless of genre, have an urge to dabble in poetry? Does the ebb and flow of syllabic rhythm entice the essayist to pay more attention to the lyricism of her own work? Is there a true difference between the cadence of a lovely line of poetry and a well-crafted sentence that leads the reader into the first paragraph of a novel?

Brooks Landon, non-fiction writer and professor at the University of Iowa, believes that all writing can benefit from understanding how sentences operate. He says:

“Sentences are shaped by specific context and driven by specific purpose, so no rules or mechanical protocols can prepare us for the infinite number of tasks our sentences must accomplish.”

By the time I got through half of his course, I understood his meaning. I could no longer look at something written and see only the story that the words conveyed. Suddenly I noticed the length of sentences, the patterns used in assembling them, and the syntax of each segment comprising them.

I also understood that poetry, for all of its forms and eccentricities, was no different from prose in its syntax and overall structure. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, I wrote a small piece of creative non-fiction for specific audience. I then translated that piece into poetry, just to see if the piece suffered any ill-effects. You tell me whether I succeeded in making both versions work.

The creative non-fiction piece goes like this:

THE MOONLIGHT DANCE

Moonlight flows across the lawn’s clear center, chasing larger shadows and forming a stage with spotlight. Rustling sounds emerge from the right, loud enough to grab the attention of a watcher. Into the spotlight amble four ebony bodies. Each sports a broad white stripe.

The largest of the troupe leads the single line of dancers into position. They pause. Noses rise to sniff the cool night air. Tongues flick in and out to taste that same air.

Faint chattering escapes young throats.

Chorus dancers, small and new, follow the lead of the diva, their mother. One faint command releases them for movement. Slow revolutions begin counter-clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

Each nose rises to sniff the air. Tongues flick out to taste. Another faint command comes from the leader.

Again they move.

The diva pivots in place to face the line. Each small dancer echoes the movement. Slow revolutions clockwise.

One. Two. Three. The line pauses.

The command voice changes to a more enticing note. The ritual is repeated by the troupe. Counter-clockwise followed by clockwise. After three full ritual dances, the troupe stops as precisely as it began.

A low crooning issues from the diva to her dancers, and they amble off into the shadows to disappear into the night. The watcher stands entranced and questioning. Why did they dance? Had anyone else ever seen such skunk behavior?

The poetic form came out as follows:

MOONLIGH

Writers are forever looking for material to use for a journal article or magazine, characters or plot fragments for stories, workable settings for novels that don’t require major research, and a niche to market their work.

During this past month’s blogging challenge, those writers who’ve managed to follow-through each day have also upped their A-game in material. Some of the challenged writers kept their posts closely related to those subjects that they’d already fostered on their blogs.

Others looked at the “relative” nature of their ordinarily chosen subjects, and either expanded on them or moved to relate them to additional topics that weren’t usually equated with them.

Either strategy was legitimate. Also, such strategies created new perspectives and approaches toward future writing projects. Any time a writer can pull that off is a good day.

Since I took the challenge literally, I came away with material for memoir, essays, poetry, stories, books, and the list goes on. The constant reliving of details and personal responses allowed me to find new characters that had stories to tell. Poetry flowed within each memory, whether as a retelling of it or simply as a visceral impression and emotional recapping of it.

It hadn’t occurred to me at the beginning of this assignment that I would have such a strong emotional reaction to those recollections from so long ago; recollections that were incomplete and, sometimes, beyond vague.

This learning experience has opened up areas of writing that I hadn’t seriously considered before. I might have toyed with an idea here and there, but I hadn’t pinned down those ideas with any certainty.

Suddenly, I was seeing plots, twists, character development and settings that had never occurred to me before. And if I wasn’t seeing fiction, the brain was in overdrive about poetry or non-fiction pieces that could go to this market or that one.

Some days I felt like a voyeur as I took note of how I approached a subject differently than I would have two months before, and how my style shifted with each person I chose to write about. Some style elements remained fairly constant, while others wavered or developed new execution phases.

Prior to this, I had only foggy understanding of how my style shifted and when. That’s cleared up for me now.

I finally set my future writing projects and knew what I would tackle in the months ahead. The projects haven’t changed, but how I handle them will change. I’ve already come to that conclusion.

This challenge has given me more than its creators could ever imagine. It gave me a closer look at myself and why I choose to write what I do and how. It gave me a clearer picture of what my future will look like and my place in it. And if gave me the ability to focus on one aspect of a project (each day’s post) to the exclusion of everything else around me for the time I was working on it.

All of these things have come from a simple writing challenge. In some ways it doesn’t matter what the prompt was. It could have been anything, as long as I could relate to it enough to accept the challenge and stay focused on it.

In other respects, because I chose to deal with personal family members and issues, I came away a winner, regardless of who finishes first or who writes the most, etc. I came away with intangible bits of myself that I didn’t kno

Well, my friends, we’ve come to another holiday season. There are those looking back to count accomplishments. Others are making goals for the coming year. Lists are popping up everywhere.

Since that’s the case, I’ve decided to make a list of my own, or more. Why should I stand back and let everyone else have all the fun?

List 1: 2011 Accomplishments

1. Visited with family and friends across the country during the winter and saw things totally new to me.
2. Arrived back in Montana with all fingers and toes from the research trip from Hell. Sanity somewhat dented but still workable.
3. Procured livable apartment and had money to pay for it and the food to keep us going throughout the rest of the year.
4. Managed to have many submissions accepted for magazines and newsletters
5. Reinvested in my craft through university coursework
6. Got through another rewrite on The Moon Sees All and began what is hopefully the last rewrite before being submitted.
7. Came to a point where I can see the blessings that grew from this past year’s trials on the road.

List 2: 2011 Blessings–The Short List

1. Repeat List 1 for emphasis
2. Can still say that I’m healthier than many I could name
3. Learned more than I ever thought possible about too many things to mention
4. Watched the struggles and accomplishments of friends and family, knowing that they came through whole, if dented, and I can still enjoy them
5. I have a home, food on the table, clothes to wear, work to do that makes my heart sing most days, friends everywhere, family that I love, and I’m moderately warm for a snowy day.
6. My country hasn’t imploded yet, even if it is shaky in some quarters
7. I’ve lived long enough to appreciate the simple things of life

List 3: 2012 Goals

1. Repeat List 1, numbers 1 and 4 through 7
2. Get everything that’s already on my computer—stories, essays, poetry, children’s books, etc.—submitted somewhere
3. Finish travel book and get submitted
4. Finish women’s mystery novel and get it submitted
5. Finish YA fantasy novel and get it submitted
6. Finish “Failures to Blessings: Finding the Silver Lining” and, you guessed it, get it submitted
7. Survive to write another day

Assuming I accomplish the items on this last list, I will be satisfied with life for another year. I say that because I plan 2013 to be busier than ever in the writing department, and I’m going to need all the energy I can get to deal with it.

There you have my obligatory lists for this year. I hope you have a satisfying time doing your own lists, whatever they contain. Let me know if you’re ready to either celebrate or need commiseration. I can accommodate either situation and will do so happily.

A bientot,

Claudsy