Character Rhythms

Samshasa mana mana Samshasa mana mana
Samshasa mana mana Samshasa mana mana
Doomdukuh toodle Leedoo doomdukuh thud
Doomdukuh toodle Leedoo doomdukuh thump

Writing Tips 101

Okay some writing tips here.  Give up on exclamation points and adverbs.  Cull the excessive multiplicity of redundancies, give it to the reader straight. Get to the point.  Remember the narrative flow. Don't get lost down the river of deceit. I don't know, it's tough. A lot of us write in superconducive bursts of varying intensity, and are as likely spending too much time on tangential lines as not spending enough time on basics.   So what are the basics.   Less is more.

Notice the most stripped down stories are merely a transcription of dialogue. Everything the characters say to each other conveys the story. This is story telling in its purest form. Where expository description reverts to null. With the barest of observations or commentary, a dialogue rich narrative then achieves both characterization and ideal storytelling, what else is there? Indeed.

I can say nothing else on the matter at this time for I am supposed to be working on my story now.

I have no idea what I'm writing about.  That's the way it should be.  Just let your fingers fly. Later spiders you ate can normally squeeze blood in or out of a rock in a lot of hard other places stuffed up in there so it gets flat different.   Don't ask the haters.  Direct your questions at the sky. Empty them from your mind. The answer always arrives within the dawning by the following morning.


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Wrestle with your desire to write the best story. Let your desire win.  The first version, re-read it in disgust and shred it. Start over in desperation writing anything that comes to mind, later read that and realize half of it works. Honestly it has to do with the oldest rule in the book, show don't tell.  That's what good fiction comes down to.  The best prose describes something in such detail it's rendered in the reader's mind's eye in resplendence. Simply the act of reading itself becomes the sought after experience.  That's my goal as a writer that I'm focused on. Describing something so fascinating it holds the reader's attention right through the story, as if having experienced a fully realized dream or something. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it has to do with showing and not telling.  As soon as you go into telling mode, you are no longer in the realm of novel. I think the best novel will describe what's going on in the scene with sufficient brush strokes to highlight the sensations in the reader's mind of almost being transported to another time and place.  We should admit to ourselves what a powerful time machine such a story would spell out for those with ears to listen.  As for time itself, this is the essential quality of life, for me.  Time being of the essence.  Time is the medium we slipped into. When our galaxy is viewed in terms of time alone, one views it as it really is. This starry spectacle we've photographed and captured in pixels isn't it.

  

SAVED AS WE GO

by   shaun lawton 

                                                  photo    by shasta lawton

We're all works in progress, no one disputes that.
What few seem to understand, we're saved as we go.
Like documents in a computer program just in case
the whole thing crashes down around us, it's alright.
We are the back-up copies, ourselves, it's just that
a long time ago one of our ancestors made a choice.
They chose to break away and declare themselves
as being unique and in their own right a new breed.
This meant the backup system was working well.
For you see, what's copied is only the originality.

Qualyromicus Olympianics

In an arbitrary universe, the thought of us makes sense.

Leaf Course

by Shaun Lawton

I had no idea what I was seeing. Staring through the surface of the still pond created a refractive illusion. I scrutinized the veneer of warped leaves submerged beneath the bracken. Stray beams of sunlight illuminated spores slowly drifting across them. On closer inspection the spores were swimming in unison. I thought of sea monkeys I'd ordered from comic books as a child while I leaned in to get a closer look. Then I realized they featured softly glowing spicules along the sides of their bodies. They resembled mutated infusoria or something. I reached through the surface of the pond water with my left hand and scooped one elm leaf out to study it closer. As the now clear looking water drained off the edges of the leaf and around my fingers to drip back into the pond, I noted the little invertebrates were sliding along just beneath the exterior of the epidermal layer itself. I could see the leaf's split veins amid the vivid green contours, yet these minuscule creatures appeared to be sealed within the upper epidermis layer. I observed in astonishment the tiny denizens of this leaf world.  

Setting this peculiar leaf next to me on the grass, I reached forward and scooped out more fallen leaves. None of them exhibited this remarkable feature. Somehow this startled me even more. It was getting later in the afternoon, and I could hear the sounds of children playing in the distance. I peered back at the first rescued leaf and could still plainly discern the movement of these protozoa-like colonies playing about on the surface, scintillating in the sunlight.  What the hell? All the other leaves seemed normal. I decided to take the strange leaf home, taking care to bring a few of its companions to showcase the difference between them.  I stuffed the normal leaves in my jean's back pocket. They were leaves fallen from a nearby elm tree which looked as if it must've been a thousand years old. I turned my head to the left to examine it. The tree appeared to be kneeling alongside the pond for an eternal drink. 

I never did make it back to the house that day. Somehow on the way I got lost wandering through a section of the park I hadn't really noticed before. There was a foot trail leading away from the pond which I followed until some time later I realized that wasn't the route I normally took to get home. Knowing that direction to be slightly northeast, I didn't worry about the new course, figuring I could re-correct as I emerged from the other side of this grove. Only there wasn't another side. There was just the pathway leading deeper into the woods, which grew thicker and wilder the further I advanced. The familiar sounds of children at play were nowhere to be heard. Starting to get a strange feeling of unease, I decided to turn around and retrace my route back to the pond, and head to my apartment complex the normal way. When I turned about there was no longer a trail leading back.  

This stopped me short for a minute while I pondered how bizarre that was. I was literally standing at the end of the well-worn footpath and gazing into darkly overgrown woods. What the hell? I whipped my head around back toward the direction I had been heading, fearing the path may have vanished in that area as well, but it was still there, leading with gentle curves around and deeper into the forest. Should I force my way through this new growth behind me anyhow and try to get back to the pond? I stared down at the strange leaf in my left hand as if to check for an answer to my dilemma. The leaf was radiating a new green barely brighter than before, and the miniature stream of eerie microorganisms I had perceived were still there, describing a pattern reminiscent of the tracks left by wood worms in bark.  

I observed the flow of these organisms or whatever they were was now synced up to form a closed loop flowing counter-clockwise. "Widdershins..." I thought to myself while listening to the growing quiet settling in around me amid this unexplored portion of the city park near my apartment. Only I felt as if I were as far away from my familiar lodgings as I had ever been, and the thought raised the hairs on my forearms with goosebumps. The twisting course ahead of me seemed to indicate I should follow, so I did. The shining leaf in my hand suddenly appeared to be a weird form of compass. I noticed the cycling protozoa were doing so more rapidly as I walked, and other times they slowed down. Then it dawned on me that it happened every time I took a turn in the pathway. When I veered right, the circling organisms trapped within the leaf's epidermal layer would speed up slightly, and when I began following the foot trail to the left, they slowed down to a crawl. I thought that was very odd.  

I decided to test something. I stepped off the path to the right and the flowing organisms in the luminescent leaf's infrastructure began speeding up remarkably, enough to scare me back onto the trail for some reason I couldn't begin to fathom. The hairs on my arms were raised back up again. I took a deep breath of the musky air, then I stepped off the path to the left, and sure enough those weirdly colored microscopic cultures slowed down to a sluggish pace. I took another couple of steps and they stopped entirely. This made me feel much better. I smiled in the growing shadows of the woods. I glanced over to my right at the path but it was gone. I had finally found my way home.