Eneh Akpan Writes: Emotion

Showing posts with label Emotion. Show all posts

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Is Your Blog Dressed For the Occasion?

If your blog could talk, what would it have to say for itself? How would your blog express itself in its author bio, if granted the qualities of consciousness, for a few minutes?

The blogger has got to regard his blog the way a reader approaches a book. Sometimes, (and much of the time you’ll find this is true) the book in question might lead off the trail to explore strange routes by the standards of a real book. But I guess that's alright if it keeps the blogger’s nose to the grind; keeps him doing what he set out to do in the first place that is, keeps him blogging.

The issue is not how much you ramble in your posts, but there’s got to be a way, a term, if you please, that breaks up the rich brew into distinctive parts. And the good thing about this is it doesn’t have to be summed up in one word. A phrase might do it, maybe a sentence or better yet, a paragraph.

Theme is the apparel your blog wears. You see a guy kitted up in a soccer jersey, feet spotting spiked footgear standing in the middle of a pitch and your mind yells ‘game on!’ You see a form in swim trunks bouncing on a board and you know what’s about to go down even without spotting the pool. That same form in a different garb say, a three piece suit, for instance, bending over on that same board and you scream suicide! Having a theme ensures your viewers are aware what your blog is about.

Back in ’09, my writing instructor had said, “start a blog. Write whatever comes to mind—concentrate especially, on your personal experiences.” You could say my blog theme at the time was as long as it was broad because my instructor had thrown the door too wide open. But I had something going for me and it was the fact I had been keeping a journal ever before I knew there was a thing called a blog. And much of the stuff in my personal journal was ‘personal.’ I had written up some poetry, stuff on writing, and short personal essays. In a sense, I had a foretaste of blogging before I went online. It somehow drew a fine line between ‘whatever comes to mind’ and ramble on.

You’ve got to create a ledge to cushion the effect when you hit bottom; when the ideas quit flowing and it seems you’re only passing time on the www. Having a theme gives you focus—a sense of place when your mind is fogged up about what you were really after scribbling all those words in the first place. Another subject worth considering when making a choice of theme is your readers.

Who’s your target audience?—what sort of folks do you want swarming over your blog? And I don’t mean in terms of locality unless of course, your posts are localized. (This is the internet after all.) What’s their story? What’s the reaction you intend to get? How important is it to you to get your message across to them?

Theme is probably, the most significant topic to consider when setting up a blog besides the fact that you got what it takes to keep the pump gushing. If you’re new to blogging or maybe you’ve been around a while but your blog didn’t pan out, maybe, it’s not your theme; maybe, it’s the way you present your theme. That’s definitely, a topic for another post but meanwhile, is your blog dressed for the occasion?

Keep your pens bleeding.

Akpan

Sunday, August 26, 2012

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Writing A Story

Story is about story. And no character is indispensable.

If you can remember these two rules, you will hurt fewer people in your art of story writing. Writing a story sometimes, is like telling on people. However, how the writer handles sensitive situations and, on the other hand, delivers a wonderful story into our bosom is an attestation to the storyteller’s mastery of human emotions.

For every writer, at some point, the bulk of the worry shifts from how to write a story to how to write a story and not hurt people. I think what I have here is a fair bargain if the only thing you yield is your time.

1. Randomly Selecting Names for Your Characters –

For the love of God, do not pick names associated with your locale. In deference to people’s feelings and if you honor your integrity as a writer. Nobody would like to read about their obituaries or scenes describing their termination in the hands of some monstrosity in your story.

If you write horror like I do, do not slaughter your neighbors in your story if you want to live to tell another story.

2. Duplicating Sexual Characteristics –

I started typing How to Write a Story and not Worry about Hurting People as the title of this post and then opted for the one you now have, instead. The basic idea the former title represented is still the bottom line of this post.

Injecting the personal experience into your stories means you can’t not talk about people you meet each day. In the special cases where your story involves embarrassing scenes, which you can’t afford to toss out because it is relevant to the flow of story, here’s one positive step you should take: change the gender of the real people when adding them into the story. It’s one sure-fire method of loosening the impact of discomfort on the real people recreated in your story.

3. Using the Original Setting –

Unless you’re writing a personal essay or a memoir (which, in any case demands that every rambling around other people’s private business be severely curtailed), you don’t have to reproduce the original setting of incidence as your fictional geography.

The month of June had me buried up to my elbows in a writing challenge I set up for myself. I called it NaShoWriMo and challenged myself to write 30 short fiction in 30 days. I think I came off with about 30,000 words in all. Much of what came out was crap but I guess I can live with that. The stories were all drafts, anyway. Now, here’s the real whopper; I can tick off the fingers of my left hand those occasions I mentioned Nigeria in those whacky thirtysome short stories (and I assure you those fingers are not more than five).

I write speculative fiction with emphasis on horror. And since I couldn’t predict how my fellow countrymen would buy into the idea if I murdered them over and over again in my stories, I improvised. If that sounds loco to you, I won’t argue.

Nevertheless, keep in mind that where you choose as the setting for your stories matter. People who live in those places might react. For better or worse. The accent is on worse.

4. Tinkering with Peculiar Personality Traits –

Everybody in the neighborhood knows Papa Jones loves fingering his prick after five or six beers. And here you are a young fine writer, writing a pretty good short story about an aged protagonist who exhibits traits similar to Papa Jones’. The irony of the whole business is that Papa Jones’ son is the local law.

If you’re lucky, you might end up with a broken jaw. On other hand . . . they don’t exactly build those lock-up cells for nothing, do they?

It’s best to focus on story. Leave off any explicit description that might earn deserved chastisement. And ‘thou shalt not get paid for your stories in cuffs and blows.’ That’s in the Bible, Egyptians, chapter ten.

5. Choice of Genre –

You really have to take special care when you pick a genre to write in. Many people don’t care if the story gets a happy ending or not. The genre you select can make the difference between like or dislike for your work.

Writing for yourself is still the best approach to writing terrific stories. The story is always your story whether people accept it or not.

Write for yourself!

Let your pen bleed.

Akpan

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Wordsworth's Criterion

Poetry Workshop (Photo credit: Steel Wool)

Okay, let’s talk poetry. I’m not interested in the fundamentals – form, structure, or metric fluidity, right now. I’m more at home with unwinding the spool of mystic which wounds around the craft like a shawl; the touch of poetry on the soul and the spontaneous ignition that accompanies the reaction.

I’ve heard people argue that the human emotion has no business meddling with the heartstrings of poetry. This school of thought points out that far too much research and constructing goes into the making of a poem. And so, they stress, to fling the craft at the mercy of a thousand nameless emotions is, stating it mildly . . . flimsy. I disagree, though. Well, I’ll give them due fairness and add that these school does not deny entirely the relevance of our feelings to the flow of cadence. Actually, they view them as mere poetical attachés and nothing more. They assert that sensations are fickle and lacking in depth to be a route to the core of poetry.

Well, I don’t know about that one. What I do know is I’m out to understand the essence of poems and I’m taking into consideration the pick-and-choose nature of the craft. The selectiveness of verse, its choice of delicate words differentiates it from prose. I like explaining it to myself like this, if narrating in non-fiction is telling, if in story writing it’s showing, then in poetry above all, it is feeling.

Of course, I speak in defense of poetry; the emotion is an indispensable ingredient in every form of writing created to have a personal edge. Maybe, just maybe news reporting might be excused from what Stephen King calls Wordsworth’s Criterion.

The poet feels his way through each word applied to each line of verse, skillfully selecting, streamlining, and fine-tuning them to sync with the emotive flow of the entire tapestry. Poetic language is attentive to meaning, nuances, and sound patterns of words a poet repairs to in creating his art. This is something readily overlooked in any other form of literature, (Like I stated above, only writing that does not call attention to feelings maybe exempted.) except of course, music which at its finest is characterized by elements of poetics. By the way, writing which appeals to human emotion always always is the offshoot of poetics.

Aristotle said, ‘The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor’. You would easily agree that without metaphors poetry would be one first class piece of dead meat. The metaphor is the evocative force of poetry which paints mental pictures of sweet delights within a reader.

Robert Frost was thinking the same thing when he remarked, ‘There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor . . .’ Poetry is the vehicle of emotion just the same way the emotion is the writer, the driver of poetics.

Robert Wallace puts a ring of finality to it when he says, ‘The metaphors virtually stand for or present the emotion.’ Remember, William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry; Emotion recollected in tranquility?

The metaphors are visible passions which lend their charm to the poem. In other words, they ain’t just the thrust of feelings in the verse but the seen aspect of emotions recollected.

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan