A Week in the Writing Life, 12 August 2023
Went back to my hometown, saw the folks, and wrote.
Hi, everyone. With the beginning of the Iowa State Fair and high school and college football practices, everyone in Iowa is sensing the end of the summer season is upon us. And I’ll be back to the hustle of another 180 or so days in school with students. And despite all that, I’m still planning on making time for writing.
A Quick Request (EDIT: Haha)
I want to make sure what I am writing here has relevance to all of you who have taken the chance on subscribing to me. I want to believe I’m providing value to all my readers, whether you are a free or a paid subscriber.
I am absolutely open to new ideas and ways to expand and improve this newsletter. I think I’m trying to make it unique and something reflecting my personality. However, I’m also wanting it to be useful to you, something that you can get something out of it.
My vision is to provide something to those who are interested in the craft of writing and who might be interested in someone from Iowa who is practicing the art of fiction. I want to share my fiction with you, as well as any nonfiction writing related to this. I would like to promote this work here, whether it involves my novels or original short fiction here, although I don’t just want to turn this into a tiresome promotional vehicle, either.
With my Substack and its older sister website on Wordpress, I have been working to try and come up with a unique site people could get something from. On my first full-blown post on my Wordpress blog Liegois Media several years ago, I declared I wanted my blog to be centered on “writing, my work, and the writing craft.” I think I simplified it later to “writing and the writing life.” Specifically, my writing life, because I wanted to share that journey here and also hope to use what I’ve experienced and learned during my time as a writer. Frankly, however, I’ve also used this site as my own tool to help process what I’ve done as a writer, what I’ve struggled with, to try and see how I can overcome it. If I tried to teach any visitors to this site something about writing, I hope my primary student has been myself.
All that said, I want to keep moving forward and refining this newsletter, and trying to give readers a better idea of what I mean by writing and the writing life. In all honesty, I have been reading many different writers, especially on Substack, and have been blown away by what they have produced.
I think what I plan on doing over at least the next few newsletters I’ll be trying to continue reexamining what the specific voice and purpose of the blog is. However, I also want to get feedback from you. What are you getting out of this newsletter? As someone interested in writing, what would you like to see more of here you are not seeing? What am I doing pretty well?
I’m going to drop the first two polls I’ve posted on here to see if I get any feedback on it. Go ahead and respond to it, or leave a comment below, or email me at jasonliegois@liegois.media. I do want to hear from you soon, however. Otherwise, I’m going to start emailing subscribers individually and get their feedback1.
Home Front Stuff
I had a relaxing couple of days back in my hometown of Muscatine, Iowa. I always appreciate the chance to spend time with my parents, especially since the school year is coming up.
One of the things I have missed most about living in Chariton, Iowa, is not living next to the Mississippi River. I have lived alongside this river for forty-two years of my life and I have to say it is part of who I am. Some of the most peaceful times of my life have been on summers where I’d accompany some family out on a boat to some of the sandbars or islands in the river channel like you see above and spend a whole afternoon watching and feeling the waters ramble downstream2.
Many of the pieces of poetry I’ve written over the past decade have been centered on the Mississippi and life alongside it. I have posted a couple of these previously here, but in the spirit of advice I’ve received regarding the usefulness of reusing much older material, I think I will repost some of them soon.
When I was a kid back in Muscatine, I lived in an area of the town where they had a number of steep, wooded ravines and little creeks emptying out in the Mississippi basin. When we first arrived in town back in the late 1970’s, the area wasn’t totally built up, but over the years more plots of land ended up with houses on them. However, those same neighborhoods were dotted with these ravines that couldn’t be developed and built onto. I always treasured having these areas near my home, these little patches of wild space preserved for the living things.
I might be able to get a few poems out of the subject of ravines.
What I’ve Been Writing
I’ve been getting some writing done on the site and in some of this fan fiction, but I have not been getting enough done with The Yank Striker 2, in all fairness.
Have you ever had a situation where you’ve gone back to a scene multiple times over the course of several weeks or longer, then look back on it after a certain point and realize you’ve spent way too long on a certain scene? By this, I don’t mean you have spent too much time writing the scene, but the scene has gone on for far too long.
The scene I’m writing happens to be a debut soccer match, so I have to include the scene in there. However, I’ve realized I’ve spent far too much time on some of the buildup to the game itself. I now know I’ll have to significantly cut and revise this scene when the time comes.
However, I can’t let perfection stand in the way of production. My plan now is to write an account of the game itself, as well as an after-party scene I have in mind. After this, I want to start putting together some other ideas of scenes I absolutely think are necessary to have in the story. Once I add in these scenes (leaving out the very last scene3), I might go back to that scene and start cutting.
I’m trying to be hopeful I will have made more progress on the rough draft by the time I post again next week. We’ll see.
Also, I promise I’ll also post at least another paid subscriber exclusive here next weekend as well. It’ll be either a sneak peek at some of the fiction I’m working on or some of my poetry.
What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing
This will be a bit short.
No get-togethers or in-person appearances planned for this month, although if that changes, you’ll hear about it here first.
I’ll post an updated list of appearances for the fall here next week.
I need to get back on here and update my site and do a few more recommended pages, etc. I also need to get to some more work as club secretary for the Iowa Writers Corner. It turns out writing is not the only thing I procrastinate about.
What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations
I’ve decided I’m going to set aside Sunday afternoons as the date I scan my Substack and Wordpress feeds for examples of good writing I find out there. Especially considering I’ll be back at work by next week, it’s probably the most opportune time for me to take a few minutes out of my life to do this.
For today, however, I wanted to acknowledge
as a fellow Substack writer. During my years as a news reporter, I had the distinct pleasure of working with more than a few great photographers, but Joe was definitely among the top ones I ever saw in action. Since those years, he’s gone on to work in the communications world wearing various hats, but he’s still producing great images. This is a recent post of his about the Iowa State Fair, and his photography really does bring this event to life4.
Writing Advice for This Week
Once again, I’m taking a look at pieces of writing advice I find in various places on the Internet and discuss how much, if at all, I agree with them. If you remember from some of the previous weeks’ posts, I’m more of a fan of writing guidelines rather than writing rules. I’m going to briefly illustrate my point about these rules, and why guidelines seem to be a more sensible thing to believe in.
To be fair, there are some writing rules given in various articles and textbooks that seem to be ironclad; that is, they should be followed under all circumstances. For example, I ran across an article from 2020, “Writing Rules: How to Improve Your Writing,” on the website selfpublishing.com, written by author (and school librarian) Brenda Dehaan.
This article gives 13 different pieces of advice on the art of writing. Do not worry, I don’t plan to go over all 13 of them here, but I do want to review a few of those items. Some I would characterize as writing “rules,” while there’s a couple others I would classify as writing guidelines.
The first three rules mentioned in the list are: watch out for using words commonly confused with other similar sounding ones, keep the subjects and verbs of your sentences in agreement with each other, and don’t use “wishy-washy” words, or words that water down or clutter up your writing. Under almost all circumstances, I would say those are excellent guidelines to follow.
However, especially in the world of fiction, there are instances when we have to violate these rules. For example, people don’t always speak in grammatically correct ways. They often don’t write in grammatically correct ways. And there are many instances where we as authors wish to show this language to help learn about the characters using it and how they think.
There are even rarer instances, of course, where authors break the rules of grammar for artistic effect, or to communicate unique writing voices or moods. The careers of the American poet and novelist e.e. cummings and the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce are just the most obvious examples of this.
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death- e.e. cummings, “Buffalo Bill” (1920)
So, there are writing “rules” to be observed in almost all situations, but not every instance.
However, Dehaan also clearly frames some of these rules as more like guidelines. Two good examples of this are the ninth and tenth rules on the list: The use of sentence fragments and using a variety of sentence structures. In the first instance, she points out while educators concentrate on ensuring their students use complete sentences, there are several instances where using sentence fragments are not only allowed, but sometimes advisable. Authors just need to make sure they can identify fragments and explain why they are used in a given circumstance. In the second instance, the author agrees using a variety of sentence structures “invites interest and keeps people reading,” but not before qualifying that statement with another noting the authors of children’s bedtime stories use a repetitive sentence structure to help lull kids to sleep.
As always, read up on the guidelines, but know when you have to travel outside them for the sake of the writing.
Writing Quote of the Week
I never considered writing to be as much of an ordeal as George Orwell claims here, but I do agree very much with one part of it - writing and creating has become a compulsion for me.
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
― George Orwell
Final Thoughts
As I mentioned up above5, if you have any questions, concerns, advice, let me know in the comments or email me. Any feedback you have would be valued, especially all of you fellow writers on Substack.
And that’s a wrap. As always, check the sidebar and author page links for my work, and I’d love you to leave a review of my books as well wherever you get them. Thanks.
– 30 –
LOL.
I’m taking a moment here to rage slightly about either the inability of Substack to accept HEIC photos or the fact I have way too many photos on my phone, forcing said phone to convert files to a format that is a pain in the rear to modify. Oh, well.
As some readers might be aware of, I have in recent years begun to write rough drafts out of sequence and assembling them based on outlines I think up before I get started. This is intended to help reduce instances where I get hung up on some sections of the book because, for example, I might think I need to write the second section of a story before moving on to the first. However, I always make sure to write the final scene of my book as my last act of completing the rough draft.
I’ve yet to attend the Iowa State Fair in person. And yes, I acknowledge this makes me not quite a proper Iowan.
Pleaded for, actually.
Hi Jason! Thank you for the shoutout. I enjoy reading your substack and look forward to your writing tips and tricks. This old photographer will never be a proper writer but I try to impersonate one regularly. Cheers!