Reading for Writers

Cute Cat Picture.  Cats can't read.

There are two things that budding writers hear all the time: (1) Write what you know;* and (2) You have to do a lot of reading.  To most of us, reading is enjoyable.  There are, however, ways to make reading even more fun than it already is.  Here are some suggestions.

1.    Start a drinking game:  one swallow of beer for every cliché you come across.  It is considered cheating if you are unsure if a phrase or sentence is a cliché or not and you take a swallow, anyway, without looking it up.  You have to raise your glass or the bottle/can of beer and shout, “Shame!” before you take a sip.

 
2.       Make a list of every cliché that causes you to take a sip of beer.  When your list is long enough, write a short story or a novella, incorporating every one of those clichés.  See if you can get it published – under a pseudonym, of course.  You don’t want to be blamed for that one.
 
3.       Put 50 cents into a jar every time you read the latest bestselling novel before you start reading the work of your unknown author friends.  When the jar is full, use the funds to throw a party.
 
4.       Get up and do a victory dance whenever you come across something that you KNOW you could have written better.
 
5.       Count the number of old “New Yorker” magazines on your bookshelves in which you have been reading nothing but “Shouts and Murmurs,” and the cartoons, with the intention of reading the Fiction sections someday.
 
6.       Challenge yourself to read a book that has been turned into a popular movie without automatically picturing the stars of the movie in their respective parts. 
 
7.       Read a book that has been turned into a movie that you have seen, and eat a cookie every time you want to say, “The movie was better” or “That wasn’t in the movie.”
 
8.       Go around talking like one of the characters in a book you are reading and watch the looks that people give you.  Give yourself extra points if people step away from you.
 

9.       Go through all the books in your house.  Classify them into (A) Real Literature - Boring, (B) Real Literature – Fun, (C) Trashy Airplane Reading, and (D) Toss.  Donate the “Toss” books to your local thrift shop or church flea market.  Marvel at how neat your bookcases look and how much space you now have on them.  Buy new books to fill up the space (and maybe some nice knickknacks or real-looking silk plants, or whatever).
 
10.   Make up new lyrics to a familiar song using nothing but the names of famous authors.  Example:  To the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot,” sing “Stephen King Jane Austen Danielle Steele, Shakespeare Dan Brown George Eliot ….”
 
11.   Reward yourself with chocolate every time you are able to sit in a recliner chair and read anything without falling asleep.

If anyone has any other suggestions, please feel free to post them in the Comments section below.

 

Writer Reading

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*This is either good advice or a crock of shit, depending on the situation.

For more of my humor, go to Humor Outcasts.

Writing a Perfect Funny Piece if You Are a Slow Writer with ADD

Writers are ALWAYS publishing essays, and even books, about how to write.  I’m not going to do that – well, at least not this time.  I don’t know what I might do tomorrow, let alone a year or two from now.

Instead, I would like to share with you my own personal habits when writing a short piece, such as a humor essay or a short-short story.  I am not about to advise anyone else to do things this way.  You see, I am not what you would call a naturally prolific writer.  I write the same way I read – slowly.  And oh yes, I have a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder, in addition to genetically inherited long-term low-grade Depression.  These things make trying to do anything complicated even more complicated, if you know what I mean.  So please don’t use me as a literary role model.

This is what usually happens with me when I’m trying to write a short piece, in more or less this order.  By the way, I love to exaggerate when I write humor.  Just saying.

My Ideal Reader

Get a good idea

Decide the idea is stupid.  Try to think of another idea.

Go out for a walk and pay attention to everything around you, hoping something interesting will happen and that it will be something you can write about.

Surf the Internet for ideas.

Give up for now, sit down, put your feet up on an ottoman and close your eyes.

A brilliant idea pops into your head.

Spend the next hour thinking of ways to make that idea really funny, while watching TV at the same time.

The next day, think about it again several times and come up with more funny stuff.

Sit down at the computer.  Start to write.  After a few paragraphs, stop and think up a title.  Try a few titles.  Find one that would attract YOU if you were a reader.  Use it.

Write some more.

Read what you have written.  Yuck!  It’s awful.  So is the title, which you immediately scrap, even though you have saved the piece on your computer under that title.

Do some severe cutting, pasting, adding and editing.  Take a couple of hours to do this, even though the piece is only supposed to be about 500 words long.  Make up a new, much funnier title.

Get tired of doing this.  Save your work and set it aside.

The next day, read it again.  It’s better than it was, but still not the Thurber Prize material you hoped for.

Do some more cutting, pasting, adding and editing.

Read it again.  Decide that’s as good as it’s going to get.

Look in the ever growing stash of stock photos on your portable hard drive.  Choose one that more or less illustrates the masterpiece you have just written, or that at least would be a funny addition.

Post your masterpiece, with the illustration, online.  Post links on Facebook, Twitter and every other place you can think of, and hope you get some readers.  If anyone likes your work, feel flattered.  If it doesn’t get much attention, threaten your computer with a fist, mutter a few words your mother never taught you and eat two double-chocolate muffins.

8 Things I Will Not Do Today

1    I will not poke fun of Donald Trump.  It’s too easy to poke fun of a vain, vulgar, stupid, racist narcissist whose mental and emotional development probably ended in the fifth grade and who has all the physical attractiveness of a slug.  When it’s too easy, it isn’t fun.  Besides, he isn’t funny.  He’s America’s worst nightmare.

Worse than this one!  (I think that's him on the right.)

2.     I will not complain about having Writer’s Block.  I’m sitting down right now and I’m writing.  Words are coming out of my head and onto my computer.  Therefore, I will shut up and write something and stop whining.

3.     I will not sell my apartment and move to the farthest reaches of Outer Mongolia.  Donald Trump has not yet been elected President.  (Sorry.  I couldn’t pass that one up.)

4.     I will not go ice skating.  It isn’t that I don’t think it would be fun.  I think it would be great fun.  I just can’t ice skate.  That’s pretty important if you plan to go ice skating.

5.      I won’t win a Pulitzer Prize for my fiction.  I’ll wait a couple of years for that one.  I have to write a novel first.[*]

6.     I will not walk to Boston.  I will walk to the supermarket and back.  That’s all.  The only reason I will walk to the supermarket is that I live in New York City, where almost everybody walks because operating a car in this city is like trying to steer an ice cube through a glacier.

7.     I will not do my laundry.  I haven’t done it for a couple of weeks.  Why should today be different?

8.     I will not make Donald Trump jokes … OOPS!  I already said that.  Sorry.

Kathy Minicozzi is the author of Opera for People Who Don't Like It, available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle.

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[*] And it has to be a good one.  That might be a problem.

So Write, Already!

For most of the past week, I have been stuck at home, courtesy of a big arthritis flare-up in my right knee that turned me into a temporary cripple.  A great chance to sit down and write, right?

It would be if I knew what to write about and how to write it.  But I don’t.  I have a disease called Writer’s Block.  It attacks the brain cells.  The patient becomes terminally bored with every single possible topic and unable to come up with an opening sentence.  As the disease progresses, the brain becomes more and more paralyzed, until all the patient can do is try to hold a ballpoint pen with his nose and toss crumpled paper at the cat.

Two Writers

The only thing I have written all week is this thing..

Words come and go, in no particular order.  Amanuensis.  I haven’t thought of that word in months!  Serial.  Horticulture. Hairy.  Hairy horticulture.  Meravigliosa.  Voleva una vita meravigliosa!  Sheeeeesh!  I can put together a halfway decent opening sentence in Italian, but not in English!  What’s wrong with me?

I need a subject.  What do they always say?  “Write what you know.”  I can’t do that.  My life is boring, even to me, and I’m the one living it.

I could make stuff up and write a fantasy.  I did that recently, and got more hits on that short-short story than on any of my others.  On the other hand, that story wasn’t completely made up, because I was envisioning my own apartment, I made myself the narrator and I used an old legend that I had already read about.  In other words, I took elements of my life and exaggerated them to the point where they were unrecognizable as anything human.  If I keep doing that, people will think I’m batshit crazy.

Actually, I am batshit crazy.  That’s why I became a writer.  It shouldn’t matter if people think I am batshit crazy when I AM batshit crazy, because something like that is bound to show, anyway, right?

I know.  I’ll write something about what it’s like to have Writer’s Block!

Problem solved.