• The Quote Corner (Writing)
• Uncommon Words
• Smile Awhile
• Odds and Ends
• The Last Word

For years, I’ve been passing along to writers and wannabees the best writing advice I’ve ever heard. It was at a writers’ workshop more than 30 years ago, where the leader said: “Read your copy aloud; better still, have someone else read it to you while your eyes are closed.” I do it regularly and it’s amazing what the ear will catch that the eye may have missed.

Now, thanks to The Writer’s Almanac (December 5, 2010), I learned a variation of that technique, used by author John Berendt. "When I'm writing,” he says, “I like to gain distance from my work so I can tell how it will strike a reader who is seeing it for the first time.”

To do that, he calls his home phone from another phone and when his answering machine picks up, he reads what he’s written and hangs up. Then, he calls back and listens to the “message” he’s just recorded. “Hearing my own voice reading the page over the phone,” he says, “gave me just the detached perspective I needed."

In this month’s Quote Corner, we feature a dozen additional bits of advice about writing. You’ll find even more quotes on that topic in The KellyGram archives on our website, www.wordcrafters.info. Check out the issues dated February 2003, and July, August and October 2005.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you're working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success — but only if you persist.
    Isaac Asimov

Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.
    Ray Bradbury

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
    Anton Chekhov

Don't write about what you know — write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself — you aren't as interesting as you think.
    Tracy Chevalier

Try to write SOMETHING every day — a description, a captured emotion, a simile, a metaphor. Read, for crying out loud! A writer must read the way a ball player must go to the ballfield every day to practice.
    Robert Cormier

Paragraphing is ... a matter of the eye. A reader will address himself more readily to his task if he sees from the start that he will have breathing-spaces from time to time than if what is before him looks like a marathon course.
    H.W. Fowler

Rhythm is really important. All the great writers have it. Somewhere, in the inner ear, there has to be some music when you're writing.
    James Magnuson

Readers do not have all the time in the world for your priceless prose. Get to the point. Quickly.
    James W. Michaels

Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don’t join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee, reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it.
    Jerry Pournelle

Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.
    Joseph Pulitzer

I really like lean prose, stuff that just does what it's supposed to do and gets out of there.
    George Saunders

Keep your paragraphs short.  Writing is visual — it catches they eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.
    William Zinsser

(Note: These quotations are from our collection of more than 450 published volumes of quotations and 1.6 million entries. If you're looking for quotes on virtually any subject, send us an email at bob@kellygram.com, or call us at 480-895-7617. Or, if you have a quote topic you'd like us to feature in an upcoming issue, email it to us and we'll get it on the schedule.)

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UNCOMMON WORDS

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I’ve recently come across a couple of words I hadn’t seen or heard in many, many years. Have you heard or read “ambulating,” or “wizened” recently? Or ever?

One normally doesn’t find anything funny in a set of instructions from a doctor. However, I couldn’t help laughing when I read one after a recent epidural injection. In it, I was told to “be careful when ambulating...” It brought back memories of a couple of old songs: “You’ll Never Ambulate Alone,” and “Ambulatin’ My Baby Back Home.”

My doctor’s a young guy, and the last time I heard “ambulating” was probably before he was born. Maybe he learned it in medical school.

The other word appeared in a recent column by Charles Krauthammer, a superb writer and one of my all-time favorite columnists. In my view, his column about the guy who told an airport security guard, “Don’t touch my junk,” is a masterpiece of writing and worthy of a Pulitzer Prize. I say that, not because of his political bent, but because of how he expresses himself, as he paints so many great word pictures.

I first read this column on the Internet and laughed as he described the ordeal of airline passengers as they endure the pre-boarding ritual at the hands (literally) of the TSA. One sentence begins: “Wizened seniors strain to untie their shoes...”

Wizened! Most of us probably haven’t a clue how to pronounce it, spell it or define it. It means: “have become dry, shrunken and wrinkled, often as a result of aging or of failing vitality.” What a great picture that paints.

Soon after reading it, I ambulated out to my driveway to retrieve my daily newspaper, The Arizona Repugnant. (Oops! I guess my spellchecker missed that last one; it should be Republic.) Guess what? The PC Police were at it again. The word “wizened” had been deleted. Apparently, some editor feared offending those of us who have entered or are nearing wizenedhood. What a shame! I think it’s a great word.

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SMILE AWHILE

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A 10-year-old girl to a classmate: “I’ve never going to have kids. I hear they take nine months to download.”

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ODDS AND ENDS

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THE LAST WORD

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“Christmas is when God came down the stairs of Heaven with a Baby in His arms.”
(R. Eugene Sterner)

May you have a Merry and Blessed Christmas and a healthy, happy and bountiful New Year.

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© 2010 by Bob Kelly. All rights reserved.