Villanelle -- Writing to a Specific Form

Most of you have probably never heard of a villanelle. It is a 19-line poem composed of five tercets and a concluding quatrain. It is a rhymed poem with only two rhymes and two lines that repeat alternately throughout the poem. Sound intimidating? I assure you, it is.

 I know that the bulk of you reading this are never going to write a villanelle, or even poetry for that matter. I am just using this as an example for how your writing -- or anything else creative you do -- can actually be enhanced by having to work within  rigid structure once in a while.

Back in my poetry days I was faced with writing one (ultimately several) and I was a bit taken aback. How was I going to do this?

Having to write to a prescribed form is always difficult. You must take your creative genius, which is vast and wild, and cram a bunch of  into a little box that it doesn't seem to fit inside. It is kind of like learning to pack a suitcase with a maximum of stuff -- you have to learn a new way to fit everything together.

I struggled a lot with this. First of all was coming up with a topic. So I thought about my favorite things. I love rocks and once wanted to be a geologist. So I took that as my subject. Two rhymes only is tricky because you want to choose rhymes that will give you a lot to choose from if you can. So "rocks" was obvious for one and "stones" worked for the other.

This being settled upon I took a sheet of notebook paper and laid out the rhyme scheme I needed to follow:

A1
B
A2

A
B
A1

A
B
A2

and so forth. This helped a great deal -- like having a road map to where I was heading. It turned out that once I created the first tercet I realized that I had finished a good share of the poem because of the repeating lines.

I wriggled uncomfortably and twisted and turned many a word to get the lines just right. At times I felt like I was sweating blood. In the end I was amazed at what I had before me on the paper. It was far better than what I had hoped for.

Mother Ship (a Villanelle)

Here on our great starship of stones,

We oft forget the importance of rocks,

These are the mother earth’s skeletal bones.

The desert wind of the Sahara moans,

Blowing sands that scour pyramid blocks,

Here on our great starship of stones.

Boulders huddled like ancient, hunchbacked crones,

Gathered for one of their gossipy talks,

These are the mother earth’s skeletal bones.

Elegant towers of wind-carved sandstones,

That rise above shepherds tending their flocks,

Here on our great starship of stones.

Down charming streets paved with smooth cobblestones,

Up lichen-covered stairway walks,

These are the mother earth’s skeletal bones.

From the gold and lapis on royal thrones,

To pebbles lining the gullets of hens and cocks,

Here on our great starship of stones –

These are the mother earth’s skeletal bones.

This was my first time writing a villanelle. I entered it into the contest and won first place. When it was read out loud to the members of the Poetry Society of Colorado at the annual awards luncheon there was an audible "wow!" at the end. It made of the struggle worth it. 

By having to follow a tight framework I had had to amp up my creativity to a new level. I had to dig deeper, reach further. I found there the writer I was working to be, the writer I wanted to be. 

Gems and jewels are made from high amounts of heat and pressure. So don't be afraid  of the pressure and constraint. It is good for the writer's soul -- and you never know when you will strike gold.

W -- Word Worries

These days it seems that we need to exercise increasing vigilance in the word choices we make. Certain words and phrases seem to have taken on offensive meanings as though they have taken on a life of their own and purposely vilified their own meanings. I am here today to argue that this has become an out-of-control and ridiculous trend.

Let me start by acknowledging that there ARE words, terms, and phrases that are offensive and should not be used. The exception to this would be the creation of a character who embodies offensive characteristics. Even then I would advise caution in how this is presented.

The recent debacle with Alaska Rep. Don Young (R) and his statement about "wetbacks" falls into this category of terms. Referring to illegal Mexican immigrants with this term IS offensive. This is because the term was born out of bigotry and meant to demean. It grew to be meant to demean anyone of Hispanic descent. This covers most racial and ethnic words that are intended as slurs.

There is a gray area for me when it comes to choosing between "Indian" and "Native American," and "Black" and "African American."

I have consciously chosen to go with the term Native American to refer to the indigenous populations of the United States and Canada even though it is a term created by the white man to re-frame any negative connotations surrounding Indian. I have chosen this even though the Native Americans themselves are not bothered by being called Indians. It has nothing to do with race or ethnicity, or any bow to political correctness. I have made this choice because there is this little, insignificant country (note sarcasm here) called India whose inhabitants are also called Indians and owned the right to the word first. I was also starting to feel like a complete idiot having to clarify by saying "India Indians" whenever I had a conversation that included this particular demographic.

Likewise, I have chosen to stick with Black rather than African American unless there is a specific need to imply African origins in what I am saying or writing. While all African Americans are Black, not all Black people are African Americans. Huh? People from islands in the Caribbean do not consider themselves African, so I defer to their wisdom. I have also heard Whoopie Goldberg speaking about her belief that she is an American, not an African American. I agree with her wholeheartedly. After all people don't walk around calling me a Scandinavian American. Since I describe my characters rather than label them when I write, this is rarely an issue. In speaking I don't usually differentiate people other than male or female, unless the conversation is specifically about race.

Political correctness has gone wild in this country. There are too many people out there too willing to be offended. It is like they are purposely working on being offended. I believe that many of the words and terms that they are being offended by are completely benign.

These additional negative nuances of meaning are in the mind of the listener. While it can be communicated with certain inflection or attitude to back up that impression, the word itself is harmless.

For me disabled people are still disabled. It is such a broad and general term that it refers to no failing on the part of the individual. It is a generalization, not a slur. This does mean that a great number of people can be clumped facelessly together. The real problem is attaching negative meaning to the word (like handicapped). We then change to a different word (disabled) to alleviate this negative connotation only to have the new word take on the negative as well. Now people are proposing calling these individuals differently-abled. The problem is not the word it is the attitude and THAT is where the true change must be made.

Likewise, the term retarded became contaminated by rude individuals to take the term and use it to insult anyone they considered to be of lesser intelligence. This was added to through the speaking the term with anger and derision. So now we use mentally handicapped or mentally challenged.

As a culture we have found some humor in this phenomenon. It has led to such jokes as short people really being vertically challenged, or people baldness or thinning hair being "follically" challenged. 

To be fair, I will turn this particular microscope on myself.

I am fat. No varnish. I have survived decades of people like me trying to skirt the issue with chubby, plump, big-boned, and other such terms to avoid being called fat and flabby. The point is that IT IS fat. The problem is that many people add a value judgement to the word that those of us who are horizontally challenged are somehow worthless and compromised beings with no redeeming qualities. We all really know that this is not true. We are intelligent, stupid, talented, ordinary, extraordinary, funny, boring, loving, hateful -- we are just like anyone else, we just happen to be fat too.

To be honest, thanks to comedian Gabriel Iglesias, I now consider myself "fluffy." The man himself his unapologetically fat and as a part of his wonderful comedy he has defined the "Six Levels of Fatness." These are Big, Healthy, Husky, Fluffy, Damn! and Oh, Hell No!

So now I consider myself fluffy. Not just fat, but a specific level of fatness. And this level is imbued with humor. I don't use this as an excuse to just give up and eat. I would love to get down to husky and work hard to stay away from damn! I am just accepting this fact about myself without allowing it to injure my self-esteem. This fact is not a personal failure. It just is.

After all, fat is just a word. Anything more is what you bring to it.

E -- Evolution and Etymology

I believe in evolution. Now, I'm not going to argue about being descended from apes, but we do not

live in stasis. We and all of the things around us are in a constant state of change. That is a good thing. Otherwise we might still be wearing togas and speaking Hebrew.  We wouldn't have such delights in life as corn on the cob and seedless watermelon. We would still be cooking over open fires. Not only that, we would still be walking because no one would have thought to hop on a horse.

The English language is forever evolving. If it didn't we would be speaking in thees and thous, and wishing a pox upon one another when vexed. We would be going hither and anon. We would wander in the gloaming.

Words, like clothing, go in and out of style. Back in the early 20th century things went from being "bully" to being the bees knees or the cat's pajamas. By the 60s things were groovy and in the 80s they were totally tubular.

The changes in English are not limited to slang. When I was a child there were no cell phones, compact discs, or microwave ovens. We didn't have couch potatoes or parking vultures. Okay, we HAD them but we didn't call them that.

As the world has become more mobile our language has been regularly incorporating words and phrases from other languages to enhance our own. English is especially known for this. Did you know that the Spanish word for fiesta is fiesta? Okay, bad joke, but that is an example of a Spanish word that is now in regular use in English. Crayon comes from French. Much of our language is derived from German and Latin. The evidence is ubiquitous (Latin).

Just as we create new words, we also drop others. What are bees knees anyway? Lots of slang drops away just about as quickly as it came. Then there are those that were in common use at one time and have just died out, such as "snoutfair" (handsome) or "jirble" (to pour with an unsteady hand). For more of these words, click here.

For writers this evolution provides a vast additional language resource. Archaic language allows us to add a touch of authenticity to period pieces, or extrapolate these words and phrases into some fantasy world or future eon.

English is perhaps the richest language on the planet being over-burdened with different words that mean the same thing or shift with subtle meaning. We craft both poetry and prose by selecting the words that sound just right for the situation and how they work together, whether sibilant sounds or crackling cacophony.

This is also why English is reputed to be the most difficult language to learn. So as writers we seek to become masters of the words past, present, and future, and often in more than one language.

Happy wordsmithing!

The Magic of Words

Words are amazing things. Though intangible they have substance and texture. They can flow, gush, and trickle like water. They have the power to give and take life. They come in different flavors from English to Urdu. They require chemistry to be used properly. They can take you down the rabbit hole and back again. And we, the writers, we are the wizards who create the magic.

We range in ability from a neophyte Ron Weasley to a seasoned Dumbledore. Life is our Hogwarts and we study relentlessly. We sort ourselves into different genres instead of houses. Our magic wands have keyboards and hard drives.

Words are our natural obsession. Most of you know what I am talking about. We place them, rearrange them, and fiddle with them, looking for an impossible level of perfection. We know that perfect combination is out there because every now and then we manage to herd a few of them together in just the right combination to dazzle even our own inner critic.

Sometimes the obsession gets the better of us and some of those magic words start circling in our heads the same way that annoying song gets stuck in your head. I once spent an entire day stuck on the word "shoe." It seemed to be such an on word on that day. I couldn't get over the sound of the word and how strange it seemed. I know that there is an evolution to the word that came to represent our most common form of footwear. I know that as English speakers we have tacitly agreed that this is what the word refers to for all of us. It was just at that particular time the word struck me as odd.

Then there are the words that just feel good tripping off the tongue. For me it tends to be certain scientific and medical terms. My two favorite are caulerpa taxifolia (a form of seaweed), and necrotizing fasciitis (a flesh-eating disease). There is a certain poetry to these words in their rhythm and flow. They can get stuck in my head worse than the two weeks I couldn't get "What Do You Do with a Drunken Sailor" out of my head.

I have a friend who loves to read and so she reads really fast so that she can get through each book as quickly as possible. She calls me a slow reader. I remind her that I'm not a slow reader, but someone who has chosen to take the time when reading to savor the words like a fine wine. I observe the way the writer puts the words together, how they fit, and whether or not I would have written it differently. I take the time to be amazed at someone else's skill with the magic.

The strangest question in the world is "What's the magic word?" It is not "please." It is not "abracadabra."  It is a strange question because the only right answer is "All of them!"

Avoiding Thesaurus Abuse

In one episode of M*A*S*H, Radar, the company clerk, has decided to improve himself by becoming a writer. He signs up for a highly questionable writing course by mail and proceeds to try his hand at writing. When he starts to attempt to exercise his new vocabulary he met with disastrous results. He offends someone by saying "provocative anecdote." In his daily reports he writes that Corporal Klinger was going about his crepuscular rounds. Later Klinger took off with a nifty nonchalance, only to return with his "nonchalantness" not so nifty. Colonel Potter advised Radar to write what he knows. Always good advice -- well, sort of.

What was really at issue here was not so much writing what you know, but writing as yourself. People just don't use words like "crepuscular" in ordinary conversation. Guys like Radar do not discuss provocative anecdotes. There are times when you might use such verbiage, such as when you are writing a television script about a simple guy trying too hard to not be quite so simple. But for the most part you don't want to go there.

Writing the way you speak is far more accessible to your audience. That is unless people tend to nod off whenever you open your mouth.  The way you speak is contemporary and designed to communicate thoughts and ideas easily to the listener. You may need to change the contemporary part somewhat for historical pieces, but you don't want to vary too far off modern speech or you may lose your audience.

Putting distracting words into your work detracts from it. Did anyone hesitate, even briefly at my use of verbiage above? You should have. I could have just used "words" and done just as well. Anything that stops your reader in the flow of the story is a bit of bad writing. You want the reader to stay totally engaged. I used to love reading Judith Krantz novels, for which she was paid many millions of dollars. The one thing about her writing that drove me absolutely nuts was her insistence on placing smatterings of French into her dialog. Without translating it or alluding to the meaning somewhere nearby. This always pulled me out of the story since I don't speak French much beyond "oui," "non," and "merci." I can usually manage better with German and Spanish, but, not being fluent, I still have to stop and translate.

It can be difficult to find just the right word, and a thesaurus is a great tool to have handy for any writer. The problem is giving into the temptation to indulge in flashy language. It is so easy to want to make yourself smart. That alternate word may seem so cool. You can find yourself going to the thesaurus more and more often to keep it up. This is thesaurus abuse.

When I wrote for the Colorado Daily I was limited on the size of my articles by character count, not by word count, since the articles had to fit into a certain amount of space. I would write my article, check the character count, and then go over my work with a fine tooth comb to carve down the number of characters without losing the meaning of the story. The fancier words had to go, for they tended to be much longer. Anecdote has eight characters where story is only five. It was one of many ways that writing for print news helped sharpen my writing skills immeasurably. To save characters I would also end up rearranging sentences to make them more compact.

Don't write a provocative anecdote, write a great story. If people have too much trouble understanding you, they aren't going to bother reading your work. Save the flowery language for that one particular character that no one is supposed to understand -- the pompous scientist, for example. You don't want the best of your work to get lost in translation.