Creating from Within workshop

This annual workshop on Haiku is scheduled for mid August at Anam Cara.

Due to the demand for an shortened format this year, the “Creating from Within” workshop 2010, led by Kim Richardson and Maeve O'Sullivan (Poetry Diva), will run from Thursday 18th to Sunday 21st August 2011 as a long weekend workshop at the Anam Cara Retreat on the Beara peninsula in West Cork. That format has worked well for us in previous years.

Combining the haiku work with mindfulness practices, the outstanding natural beauty of Ireland's Béara Peninsula and the peace and quiet of Anam Cara Writer's and Artist's Retreat and gardens, our aim is to heighten our levels of awareness, finding a path to the "principle within," which is the true source of our inspiration.

The Workshop Fee of €450 includes:

Workshop (haiku tuition and mindfulness exercises)
Room and full board with your own room and en suite (either at Anam Cara or a nearby B&B; transport to & from B&Bs to Anam Cara provided if needed)
Access to all the amenities at Anam Cara including the common working areas, the movie and music loft, the conservatory, the hot tub overlooking Coulagh Bay, the sauna, and the five acres of garden and riverbank grove with 32+ quiet nooks and crannies
For further information and bookings, e-mail Sue at anamcararetreat@gmail.com or call Anam Chara on 027-74441. More details on http://anamcarawritersandartistsretreat.blogspot.com/

Please note that "Creating from Within" is limited to a minimum of six and a maximum of twelve participants, with booking on a first-come, first-served basis.

No previous experience of haiku or mindfulness is required to participate in the workshop.

Dialogue

1. Dialogue is not like real speech. Try and transcribe a real conversation and it will be full of inconsistencies, incomplete sentences, bad grammar, interruptions, noisewords, often quite boring and be completely unreadable on the page.
But don't use it to tell the whole story.

2. Make your talkers distinguishable.
An old shop assistant doesn't have the same vocabulary as a teenage shoplifter.
A teacher talks differently to a pupil than to a parent than to the school bus driver.

3. People don't always answer the questions they were asked (look at politicians!) Evasion is interesting.
People keep secrets. Much more interesting. Leave some work for the reader to do.

4. Please, please, please don't (over)use replacement verbs for 'said.'I'm thinking here of joked (we should know from the words) replied, stuttered, exclaimed, ejaculated, yelled, stated, shouted, declared and my personal bugbear quipped.

Same goes for adverb. Use sparingly. Think Marmite. Said quietly, hopefully, tentatively, despairingly. It should be obvious from the words, the response and perhaps a bit of description of the conversationalists.

Mind you

I was still standing. He glared at me. "Sit down," he yelled

is different from "Sit down," he whispered or hissed. More menacing.

5. Also, leave out the boring bits, the how are you, the nice weather, the shall I pour your tea?.

Hi Anne. How are you?
Fine. And you?
Fine. That's a nice jacket.
Thanks
Where d'you get it?
It was a present
Nice. Who from?
Jerry
Did I miss your birthday?
No.

Hi, Anne. I love your jacket. Is it new?
No, Jerry gave it to me, out of the blue.

6. Also, try and make the speech even. So there isn't one character who does a big long lot of speech and then a one liner from someone else and another bit long lot of speech. Equally, having one line per speaker line after line can grate too.

7. Anyway, read these two articles. Here and here and again here.

Happy Days!

Check out the photos on this website
How to speak Norn Iron.
You have to read this. How to be understood in Belfast. I have to practise myself as I'm planning to go there in February for the first time ever (the shame, the shame)

Editing/Cutting - Learn From The Best

There was a fascinating article in Saturday's Guardian (unmissable reading for anyone interested in the arts) on editing in relation to Raymond Carver.
This American short story writer and poet died in 1988. His writing is wonderful, sharp, pignant and sparse and again unmissable reading. And it's the sparseness that's under discussion here.

His widow, the poet Tess Gallagher who spends a lot of time in Ireland, has brought out a new version of his collection "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" published in 1981. The difference being, similar the director's cuts of Blade Runner amongst others, Raymond Carver's writing was heavily edited by his editor Gordon Lish. This publication is the stories as written before Gordon Lish worked on them.

Lish, an editor at Esquire magazine and Alfred Knopf as well as a novelist in his own right, made major changes to many of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, cutting about half of Carver's original words and changing more than half of the endings. Gallagher, who was closely involved with Carver's later work, plans to reverse many of Lish's changes. Her plan is publish the results under a title Carver originally gave to one of the stores, Beginners.

Carver wrote to Lish in 1980, before the collection was published, and after he had met Gallagher, asking him to do everything in his power to stop the book from being published.

"If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form," he wrote, "I may never write another story, that's how closely, God forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being."

Lish ignored Carver and the changes he suggested. The book went on to cement Carver's reputation as the poet of American suburban despair.

According to William L Stull, who has edited several posthumous Carver collections, Lish cut some of Carver's stories by half (others say up to 70 per cent), removing flashbacks and interior reflections.

So here is the end of "One More Thing" from "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" L. D. is a drunk. Maxine, his wife, is obsessed with people's star signs. The story is largely dialogue, pointed up by "L. D. said", "Rae said", "Maxine said". Anything more expressive is seldom permitted to reach the page. Eventually, L. D. is making his way "out of this nuthouse". The final three paragraphs of "One More Thing" - and of the collection itself - read like this:

"L. D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.

He said, 'I just want to say one more thing.'

But then he could not think what it could possibly be."

The original manuscript of the story that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish has several comparatively long-winded paragraphs ending with

"It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn't place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.

'Maxine!' he cried. 'Maxine!'

'Is this what love is, L. D.?' she said, fixing her eyes on him. Her eyes were terrible and deep, and he held them as long as he could."

Which do you prefer?