Tag Archives: writing

But face it. You’re a neo maxi zoom dweebie, what would you be doing if you weren’t out making yourself a better citizen?

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**Take a quote from your favorite movie — there’s the title of your post. Now, write!**

john hughes

If I am cut, do I not bleed? I bleed nerd blood.

I noticed a picture on facebook of my first grade class a while ago, I was not tagged as I was not facebook friends with the person who had posed the picture. I remember the girl and remember her name, I actually remember a bunch of the people tagged in that photograph. I thought about friend-requesting them, but I just do not know what I would say or talk to them about. How do you nutshell 25 years? One girl I remember best because she and I were always seated next to each other when classrooms were organized alphabetically. We went kindergarten through senior year together and even went to each other’s birthday parties in grade school.

I know, you are waiting for it, so here is where the story turns. Since we were alphabetically connected, at least at the beginning of the year, we sat next to each other most of the time for twelve years. I mean, whenever we had a class together. In junior high social studies class, she called me by my whole name, first and last, then turned to another girl and said “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?” It hurt, I won’t lie. We had been friends all through grade school, our mothers knew each other, we had history.

In her defense, I was a nerd, a short, skinny, awkward nerd. At the same time, the cruelty of children is absolutely bottomless. She didn’t need to call me a nerd, I knew I was a nerd, I heard it from every single guy in my P.E. class, well, actually I heard much worse.

We, along with most of the kids from grade school, got into this familiarity-thing where they sort of acknowledged my existence, but didn’t acknowledge our history. So, they would see that I was standing there, taking up air space, but would not do anything more than that. This started in junior high and continued through high school. It was fine, I made new friends with the other outcasts and misfits, we wrote alternative newspapers, dyed our hair, had dog weddings, and befriended the foreign exchange students. Yes, that was my crowd.

To this day, my mother will say she saw so-and-so-from-grade-school’s mother at the grocery store and I just don’t have the heart to tell her they basically ignored me for the last six years of school.

Basically, at my school, groups of kids were friends almost solely based on the radio station they listened to. I am not sure if those were simpler times and the dynamics are much more complex now with the internet and such, but ours was a gentile time where you either listened to butt rock, top 40, or new wave. I, as well as my clan, all listened to New Wave, C89.5 to be exact. This is when C89.5 went off at 11:00 PM. There was a subset of us that listened to KCMU, also. The radio station influenced everything: the clothes you wore, your haircut, the car you drove, and the friends you made.
I guess in some ways, even though we had our own insulated group, we still felt like outcasts and maybe looked up to the popular kids that listened to top 40. I did not look up to the butt rock kids, they were frightening to me. But the popular kids still had the impression of charmed lives. John Hughes was spot on and we knew it.

It is curious how even today, when someone says my first and last name, I instantly think of “Isn’t it funny how we always call nerds by their whole name?”

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Daily Prompt: The Clock | The Daily Post

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The Daily Prompt is a writing exercise/challenge executed by the creative people over at WordPress with the hope to inspire daily writing.  This exercise is:  Write about anything you’d like. Somewhere in your post, include the sentence, “I heard the car door slam, and immediately looked a the clock.”  Here is mine.  I will tag a bunch of other people’s submissions as well.  I hope you enjoy.

All I had to do was stand across the street next to the two trees and watch the front door of his house.  How hard could that really be?  It was a warm night and I had a full pack of cigarettes.  They told me that nothing would happen until at least 9:30, so I showed up at ten minutes after nine, just to make sure I didn’t miss them.

I could see movement in the house, shadows passing from room to room behind drawn curtains, the flicker of a TV.

A notification came through on my phone, I had a new Words With Friends game and the first word my opponent played was ‘SPECIAL.’  Getting a bingo on the first move is pretty, well, special, so I immediately played ‘SMASHED’ off the S.  They played ‘DELVE’ off the D and I turned it into ‘DELVED’ with ‘DROUGHT’.

The game went on, fast and furious, double and triple word scores, solid blocks of letters making words in all directions filling up entire corners, adding a hundred points at each turn.

I heard the car door slam, and immediately looked at the clock.

It was 10:45, the lights of the house were dark, it’s occupants long gone.  I had no idea when they left, what direction they were headed, or what I was going to tell my bosses.

Daily Prompt: The Clock | The Daily Post.

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Than vs Then – Self Help

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Many times people misuse the words “than” and “then.” Whether it’s because the words are pronounced similarly in some areas or because people simply don’t know the difference between them, it is important to know in which situations to choose each word. Follow this guide below, and then you’ll be using these words better than anyone you know!

1. Use than as a word indicating comparison. When you are talking about a noun (thing, person, place or concept) being more, less, better, cooler, dumber, etc. in relation to another noun, the word than is necessary.

There are more onions than scallions in your fridge.
Scott was sicker than a dog last week.

2. Use then as a word indicating time. Use then as a word indicating time. When you want to tell about a sequence of events or are giving instructions in a step-by-step order, the word then is necessary.

First there were four, and then there were two.
Wash the clothes, then put them in the dryer.

3. Pronounce the words differently. Pronounce the words differently. Both words contain one gliding vowel, and they are similar. Phonetically speaking, native speakers of English use the schwa (ǝ, kind of like a soft “eh” sound) because it’s more efficient and allows words to be slurred together quickly in daily conversations. Consequently, lots of “a”s and “e”s are not pronounced distinctly.

Than is said with the mouth opened widely and the tongue pressed down toward the teeth. The vowel sounds from the back of the mouth and the throat is somewhat constricted.
Then is more said with the mouth partially opened. The vowel rises from a relaxed throat and the tongue rests.

4. Test your usage. Test your usage. Ask yourself these questions when you’re writing a sentence:

If I write the word next instead of then, will the sentence still make sense?

I will go to the store next makes sense, so here we would say I will go to the store then.

I like apples better next papayas makes no sense. So we must be looking for I like apples better than papayas.

If I write the phrase in comparison to instead of than, will the sentence still make sense?

It costs more in comparison to a new car makes sense, so you’d want to say It costs more than a new car.

You’ll never guess what happened to me in comparison to does not make sense at all. Now you’ll know you want to say You’ll never guess what happened to me then!

5. Recognize incorrect examples and learn from the mistakes. Recognize incorrect examples and learn from the mistakes.

Wrong: I’m a better speller then you!
Wrong: I feel that astrophysics is less interesting then horticulture.
Wrong: She is going to stop to get snacks, than we’ll go to the library together.
Wrong: Our parents used to go out to eat every now and than.
Right: Learn grammar rules. Then you will be smarter than your average bear.

6. Practice frequently. Practice frequently. Pay attention when you write essays or letters. Use instant messages, e-mails and text messages to practice your good spelling skills (rather than as an opportunity to neglect them). You never know when you’ll have to use one of those communication methods for something important!

Tips:

  • People tend to misuse then more than than.Than mistakes listed above may look strange or grossly incorrect; however, the then mistakes may seem more acceptable. Pay special attention to then and its uses.
  • The simplest mnemonic is that “then” is a time word equivalent to “when,” so they are both spelled with an “e.”
  • Another possible mnemonic aid is is that “then” and “time” both have the letter “e” but not the letter “a,” and “than” and “comparison” both have the letter “a,” but not the letter “e.”
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12th (Self Help) Day of Xmas – Don’t Worry

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I swear, I cannot get though a week without some sort of Fitzgerald.  I feel like this is advice he is giving his daughter, but it is almost trying to tell her to take a different path than her parents.

fitzgerald scottie

In 1933, renowned author F. Scott Fitzgerald ended a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Scottie, with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and simply think about. It read as follows.

(Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters; Image: F. Scott Fitzgerald with his daughter, Scottie, in 1924.)

Things to worry about:

  • Worry about courage
  • Worry about cleanliness
  • Worry about efficiency
  • Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about:

  • Don’t worry about popular opinion
  • Don’t worry about dolls
  • Don’t worry about the past
  • Don’t worry about the future
  • Don’t worry about growing up
  • Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
  • Don’t worry about triumph
  • Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
  • Don’t worry about mosquitoes
  • Don’t worry about flies
  • Don’t worry about insects in general
  • Don’t worry about parents
  • Don’t worry about boys
  • Don’t worry about disappointments
  • Don’t worry about pleasures
  • Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about:

  • What am I really aiming at?
  • How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
  • (a) Scholarship
  • (b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
  • (c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

via Lists of Note.

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5th (Self Help) Day of Xmas – Know Jack

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It is easy to say, difficult to try, and very hard to recognize in others, but it can be done, horizons can expand, thoughts can evolve, as long as there is life, there is potential for growth.

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” – Jack Kerouac

ᔥ Advice on Advice from Literary Greats | Brain Pickings.

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Daily Prompt: Last Words (of Advice)

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Daily Prompt: Last Words

by michelle w. on November 21, 2012

You have the chance to write one last post on your blog before you stop blogging forever. Write it.

I rarely have the chance to participate in the “Daily Prompt” because I only have a few minutes in the morning to post and the thought of crafting an entire entry before my very first sip of coffee is terrifying.  But this one, I got.  Sort of.

I worked with a man who had a dear friend in the last days of his losing fight with AIDS.  On their last visit to his apartment before he was moved to hospice, my coworker commented on his large collections of things.  The dying man related that you buy one because it’s cute and figure it needs a friend to hang out with on the shelf, so you buy one or two more.  Your friends and family visit, see that you have a few of them and decide that it must be your passion, so you get them as gifts and the collection grows and grows.  Before you know it, your apartment is literally choked with the stuff.  He leaned over, as if telling a well-guarded secret, and half-whispered to my coworker:

“Never tell anyone you collect frogs.”

Daily Prompt: Last Words | The Daily Post.

You’ve Got to Sell Your Heart

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Today is the Birthday of F. Scott Fitzgerald.  He is an oft-chronicled obsession here at waldina.com and for good reason:  his writing is crisp and style makes you feel glamorous and witty while you read it.  I have read everything by and about him that I can find, I even loved “Midnight in Paris” because of him.  I noticed recently that NetFlix has the 1973 “The Great Gatsby” on streaming, I will watch it tonight.
There are a few authors wh0se writing people will connect with, I think it is lucky to have “found” him early and have been able to think of his novels as close personal friends.
Raise a glass of champagne everyone, Happy Birthday, old sport.
Late-1938, eager to gain some feedback on her work, aspiring young author and Radcliffe sophomore Frances Turnbull sent a copy of her latest story to celebrated novelist and friend of the family, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Before long the feedback arrived, in the form of the somewhat harsh but admirably honest reply seen below.

November 9, 1938

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories “In Our Time” went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In “This Side of Paradise” I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming—the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it or, whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is “nice” is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that wants the “works.” You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worth while to analyze why this story isn’t saleable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than,

Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent—which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

via Letters of Note: You’ve got to sell your heart.

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Ernest Hemingway – Style Icon

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Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899), the Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such books as The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He started his writing life as a journalist, but when he was in Paris after World War I, working as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, he was encouraged to take a more literary turn by other American writers like Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein. His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, was published in 1925.

Both U.S. presidential candidates of 2008 cited Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) as one of their favorite books. It’s about an American teacher, Robert Jordan, who volunteers to go fight in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s Fascists. Robert Jordan is wounded in battle and contemplates shooting himself with his submachine gun to end the intense pain, but when the enemy comes into sight, Jordan does his duty and delays the approaching Fascist soldiers so that his own comrades can escape to safety. And then he dies.

“Grace under pressure” - Hemingway’s famous phrase in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (20 April 1926), published in Ernest Hemingway : Selected Letters 1917-1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker. In the letter, he wrote that he was “not referring to guts but to something else.” The phrase was later used by Dorothy Parker in a profile of Hemingway, “The Artist’s Reward,” in the New Yorker (30 November 1929)

Hemingway committed suicide in 1961, shooting himself in the head with a double-barreled, 12-gauge shotgun, while wearing a robe and pajamas in the foyer of his Blaine County house.

He had a turbulent personal life. He told people that he despised his mother. He had been married four times and involved with many other women. He was often unkind to other writers whom he knew, and wrote vicious portraits of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, which were published in his memoir A Moveable Feast.

“I’ve been in love (truly) with five women, the Spanish Republic and the 4th Infantry Division.” – Letter to Marlene Dietrich (1 July 1930)

His memoir was actually published posthumously by his widow, Mary Hemingway, in 1964. She edited extensively the memoir manuscript, patching stuff together from various sources. She included things he’d explicitly stated that he didn’t want published, and excluded other parts of his unfinished memoir manuscript.

This month, July 2009, Scribner is releasing a “restored edition” of Hemingway’s memoir. The new edition is edited by Sean Hemingway, the grandson of Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, a woman who was much maligned in the edition of the memoir edited by Mary, the fourth wife.

Sean Hemingway is a curator at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has edited other anthologies of Hemingway’s writing. He is including parts of the original manuscript that Mary had cut out, passages that he says show his grandfather’s “remorse and some of the happiness he felt and his very conflicted views he had about the end of his marriage” to Pauline. The new edition, he says, is more inclusive and portrays his grandmother in a more sympathetic manner. Sixteen thousand copies of the new edition of A Moveable Feast are being printed in the first run, and Scribner is also releasing new editions of all of Hemingway’s novels with redesigned covers.

Hemingway said, “The writer’s job is to tell the truth.” In A Moveable Feast, he wrote: “I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, `Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”

There’s a legend that Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to create a six-word story, and he said, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Inspired by this, an online magazine invited readers to submit their own six-word memoirs, a collection of which was published by Harper Collins in 2008 as Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. Six-word memoirs include: “All I ever wanted was more” and “Moments of transcendence, intervals of yearning” and “They called. I answered. Wrong number.”

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I do not like scolding people

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Letters of Note: I do not like scolding people.

In March of 1921, Katherine Mansfield wrote the following stern letter to fellow author Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, a woman who for some time had been having an affair with Mansfield’s husband of three years, the critic John Murry. Their marriage had been a turbulent one, and she had to some degree come to terms with the infidelity. What she couldn’t stand, however, were the love letters.

(Source: Katherine Mansfield: Selected Letters; Image: Katherine Mansfield, via.)

24 March, 1921

Dear Princess Bibesco,

I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world.

You are very young. Won’t you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation.

Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.

Yours sincerely,

Katherine Mansfield

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I Believe in Nothing

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So this is how it is:  the innocent suffer, the guilty go free, and truth and fiction are pretty much interchangeable. There is neither a Santa Claus nor an Easter Bunny, and there are no angels watching over us. Things just happen for no reason. And nothing makes any sense.