Eneh Akpan Writes: reading

Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Grounds to 'Read With a Pencil Close By'

Here are a handful of grounds to “Read with a pencil close by.” I found out it is still one of the best advices ever given to writers or students of the printed text.

Mark Phrases/Sentences & Paragraphs

When a phrase or paragraph catches my eye and sparks up a desire for complemental musing, I mark it using a colored pen/pencil or highlighter. I feel much better having a textual landmark around it, knowing it will arouse zeal whenever I spot it.

A Sign of Commitment

I pick up a fiction/nonfiction text then grab for a colored pencil or highlighter and I feel a sense of commitment. The pen/pencil informs every nerve in my body that I mean business. I aint just doing this for fun, I intend to come off the reading project with a lesson and some learned.

Recall Entire Textual Matter

It’s a lot more easy to call up words from memory if you underline/mark them when you read. I do that often and when my mind coughs up those peculiar sentences they usually appear on the wall of my subconscious as images. I visualize the interesting set of words hemmed in by my scrawls before the title of the book essentially floats to the surface.

Spot Peculiar Phrases/Sentences/Paragraphs

I find I can navigate the text with ease when I circle or box words that chase my fancy. For me, it’s become less stressful identifying a line or box in the middle of a page, to find the sentence or phrase it guards. I can pick out these phrases during my research period. The lines and symbols seem to beg for my attention.

Lookout for Peculiar Twists

Having a highlighter close by where I can reach it and tag a phrase keeps my faculty amped up and on the lookout for expressions full of shades of meaning. The search for inspired language morphs into a conscious, energetic process and for somebody out to learn a new thing that’s a lot.

That’s all folks. I guess you know what you need for your next reading exercise besides the text, that is.

Keep your pen bleeding.

Akpan

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Reading Poems: Fodder For Poetry

Read scores of poetry = Write scores of poetry. Reading poems discharges a creative brand of influence that fosters the seed of the craft inside of you. A well-written verse is catching especially, when you read one that warms into your private spot.

Pick up a poetry collection, the type that appeals fiercely to your taste, crawl in between a complex web work of metaphors and put thoughts of you out of your mind for a minute. Live in the moment. You’ll experience the crush of inspiration pushing up through your blood vessels, the deeper you dig beneath the flesh for the bones, the greater the pressure that engulfs you.

Courtesy: poetryfoundation.org

“None of us ever wants to write a poem in the first place unless we have read a poem that truly takes us.” — Robert Wallace.

Our appreciation of poetry—admiration for poetic vernacular—is sharpened by the poems we read. By the by, it is the magic pumped into our souls by these poems we take a crack at reinventing at what time we recollect personal emotions in tranquility. The metric flow we conjure up are modeled after the poems we read and the multiverse created by those poets boil over into our own craft generating a rich and textured commonwealth of the imaginative variety.

Ultimately, “the undisguised admiration ‘I can do that’ is the seed from which every poet sprouts and grows. — Robert Wallace.

Most great poems are made up of honey-sweet and simple vocabulary that surprises phrases like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” out of us. And the answer is just as simple, we haven’t been doing too much reading.

Immerse yourself in poems. There is no other approach to navigate an ocean of words with the skill of a master.

Akpan

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Compelling Dialogue: It Takes the Human Voice

Quit hitting on you if you can’t give your dialogue the luster it needs and it keeps looking like something invented. You got what it takes to make your dialogue flow naturally: it’s your voice!

The human voice is the best possible medium for capturing the tone, mood and nuances within a line of dialogue. If the lines of dialogue are read aloud with a pinch of sincerity, the writer hears firsthand how his characters sound and can appropriately adjust their speeches to measure up with the convention of real conversation.

Photo Credit: northcoastpsychotherapy.com.au

The bottom line of the whole deal is the attempt to absorb a real life feel into the lines. Speaking out your written dialogues will drag the truth out of the closet so you can correctly evaluate whether your characters’ conversations are realistic or just plain vague and lifeless.

It is also an undisputed fact that hearing our write ups read out loud boosts our egos as writers. We learn the music in our words and are presented access in-between the rhythm and the sound of language to better judge and weed out the superficiality in our dialogue.

The human voice touches a chord within us all, and commands a lovely timbre of fearless daring. This is an achievement the written word can never aspire to. The more regularly we “hear” our art, the more easily we encounter opportunities to embroider our writer's voice with an authoritative edge. We know how close our dialogue is to life. But we are also led to notice the loose needlework–these are the termites that destroy the woodwork. Moreover, we can accurately tie up the loose ends and erase high-sounding phrases, which do not truly represent conventional mode of speaking.

Take a moment and reflect on the wide array of books you have read which have been adapted to movies. You are awakened to a deeper sense of understanding as your favorite characters come to life on television, you see it all in 3D; it is indeed flesh and blood. You no longer have to try and imagine how the dialogues sound. Seeing becomes believing with TV. God bless Philo Taylor Farnsworth!

By the way, Farnsworth invented television.

Maybe, I just gave another tip on giving life to dialogue. Purchase some really good book-to-movies and listen to the flow of dialogue. Then, go through the book all over again and see if you figured out the dialogue the first time you read it.

Words mean more than is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning.

– Maya Angelou

So, how about it? Are you prepared to make your voice an instrument for enriching your dialogue?

Keep your pen bleeding!

Akpan

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Twenty Tools for Fiction Writing (Part Two)

Here we go with the second and last part of this great adventure. I hope you had a terrific moment the last time, cause I sure did. Sometimes, you don’t need people to hit you upside your bingo with a hammer. Often a word or two of advice is enough to set you off reproducing literary children like a geyser in full swing.

That’s precisely why I'm doing this. Twenty successful writers digging into their pretty-stocked archives of experience and sharing their finds in succinct and well thought-out manner.

May we thread in their footsteps!

1. The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

– Maya Angelou

2. The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

– Thomas Harris

3. A writer is someone who has written something today.

– J. A. Jance

4. Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.

– Stephenie Meyer

5. When I write I pretend I'm telling a story to someone in the room and I don't want them to get up until I'm finished.

– James Patterson

6. There isn’t time to talk about someday writing that short story or poem or novel. Slow down now, touch what is around you, and out of care and compassion for each moment and detail, put pen to paper and begin to write.

— Natalie Goldberg

7. Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.

– Dean Koontz

8. Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

– Mark Twain

9. Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

– Michael Crichton

10. Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge and the occult turns funny. But once you know how, you can write in any area.

– John D. MacDonald

Keep that pen of yours bleeding.

Akpan