Continuing Education for Writers

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Arizela

When I was a teenager, I once ran away from home. My big day out on the town included hitching a ride from my youth minister to church and then having a friend drop me off at the library (both forbidden places in the home I grew up in).  I know, right?

Since that long ago and far away time, I have come to accept something about myself. I’m a knowledge junkie. Go too long between sweet, sweet hits of learning and I start to get the shakes. After about a week, there’s this glassy look in my shifting eyes and I can’t sit still. My husband pointed out to me a while back that I research constantly – healthcare topics, math, politics, humanitarian issues, trends, history, science, the mating rituals of worms… you name it, I’ve probably looked it up, read about it, cross-referenced the source material, and tried my best to observe the phenomenon in real life.

Now, I realize that not every writer has to get bitten by the knowledge bug to the extent that I have been, but it seems to me that any professional, whether they be writers, nurses, teachers, or bus drivers, ought to spend a little time striving to improve their knowledge of their profession. For writers, this can mean studying literature, reading widely, and discussion the process with other writers. Ah, but it means so much more than that. While a urologist might require deep understanding in a very narrow range of professional knowledge, the writer must be a jack of all trades, with at least some understanding of everything from astrophysics to zoology, from social policy to weather systems.

If you happen to be a knowledge junkie like I am, you might have obtained roughly twice the number of credits required for your degree in college *cough-ahem*, but taking and even auditing courses in a wide range outside your major (or outside of a degree-seeking process) is an expense that most writers can’t justify. That’s where schools of higher learning like Yale and Oxford fill the breech. The real Yale and Oxford.

Yale offers a number of courses for free online, with video lectures, course materials, and syllabuses available at a click. Just a few of the topics writers might really get a kick to the muse from include:

Oxford, on the other hand, took a different approach to making learning accessible. Through the Oxford iTunes U, the school provides video and audio lectures, course material, and interviews available to download through iTunes. They have more than 1800 podcasts available free of charge.

And finally, an old favorite that never runs out of new material on every subject imaginable: TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. This site is hosted by a non-profit organization that brings together notable speakers from diverse fields to share their expertise with the world through TED talks that typically range from 5-20 minutes and are presented as streaming video. TED also hosts longer video talks from such talents as the late Douglas Adams.

As a knowledge junkie, I have finally caught the dragon. Hope you find it, too. However you choose to seek out your next fix, keep in mind that creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Having an understanding of a diverse array of topics will serve you well both in creating your worlds and finding inspiration for starting them.

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Compromise, but Never Surrender

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Arizela

So life has been throwing all kinds of torpid feces at my fans this last week. Mostly in the form of a resurgence of fatigue from my heart, still having a baby and her parents in the house, and dealing with the back-to-school stuff for my son.

And it doesn’t look to be letting up anytime soon. Next week is all about dental visits, neutered puppies, more driving the niece’s boyfriend back and forth to work, meeting with school officials, buying clothes that are too big for my son so that they’ll fit by the first day of school on Thursday, and errands, errands, errands. I’m tired just thinking about it.

But!

Here at casa del Ari, we do not believe in surrender, oh no. I’m pulling up my big girl britches, making a color-coded schedule for the next two weeks, and buckling down to work (in between unavoidable, exhaustion prompted naps which defy prediction, so there’s your compromise).That said, I’ve got a lot of things on the table that I want to do along with all the things that I must do. Like, oh, I dunno… writing. Maybe blogging. A little research. Reading this fabulous writing advice book I just found.

Wait… what?

I can’t remember how many times I’ve turned my nose up at writing advice books, not because I’m perfect (by any means) or because I disdain help with the long slow slog to writing competently, but rather because almost every writing advice book I’ve put my grubby little hands on prior to this week has been some combination of trite, condescending, shallow, vague, or seizure-inducingly boring. There are definitely exceptions to the rule, and the little gem I picked up for Kindle this week is one of them.

This book has it all – profound, useful advice on writing, publishing, social networking, and living life as a penmonkey, side-splitting humor, ducks up asses, and a seriously foul-mouth. The creative use of profanity alone shoves this book out of the ranks of other writing advice tomes and into entertainment with added value.

If you aren’t a Pen-Muggle and you don’t take the vapors when someone says the word fart, I highly recommend this book and the author’s blog terribleminds.

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Baby Blues

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Arizela

I have house guests. Lots of them. Actually, there are three households currently residing in my single-family home.

  • Hubby, son, 3 puppies, cat, and me
  • Sister and her German Shepherd
  • Niece, niece’s boyfriend, and daughter

That’s a lot of bodies. All that said, the house doesn’t feel over-crowded. Aside from barely getting any sleep, I have enjoyed the week with the new baby Lily and her parents in the house. Hopefully, they’ll all be feeling better and ready to go home in another couple of days, but I’m happy to have them in the meantime.

That said, my writing, and blogging, have suffered from the lack of time, energy, and sleep. I do have a new question to post about on Muse Medicine, but it probably won’t go live until Wednesday. Check back next week for some of the gory details of field amputation and cautery.

To tide you over until next time, ninja baby cute attack!

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Circling Back: Resurrecting the Past

Posted on August 5, 2011 by Arizela

My blog has gone through a half dozen iterations in the last couple of years, and as I get closer to publishing my own fiction, it’s likely going to take even bigger changes in the months and years to come, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten my roots. My first blog was dedicated to informing my fellow writers about how to inject a little realism into their treatment of human bodies and psyches. I posted researched articles there about everything from broken bones to zoonotic transmission of disease, and it was good. It was genuinely lovely to read the comments and answer follow-up questions. I missed it.

So today I did something I haven’t done in almost a year – I created a post for Muse Medicine, my original blog. You’ll find the permanent link at the top of my main blog, and I hope that those of you who read here and are interested in writing (or just knowing a little more about disease processes, pregnancy, childbirth, psychological issues, poisons, healing, and just about anything else to do with the human condition) will take a moment to add Muse Medicine to your feeds or bookmark it for future reference. There are occasionally graphic photos and depictions of disease processes and other things that some folks might find disturbing, though, so tread with caution if you’re faint of heart or stomach.

As always, Muse Medicine is open to questions or topic suggestions. You can contact me directly by reading the “Ask Your Questions” page.

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Reflecting Theme

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Arizela

I recently had the privilege of helping my niece through a very difficult birth. There were a number of fairly major (life threatening) complications and my training as a doula (professional childbirth assistant) and a nurse came in handy pretty much the whole time. Momma and baby are both doing fine now, and Miss Evelyn Lily is beautiful! See for yourself:

I’ve attended 10 births now in a professional capacity, and I still find the whole experience rather amazing, but there was a very different component to this birth, and it got me thinking about the power of reflection and subtle repetition.

In February, I spent 10 days at a distant hospital because my eldest sister, Kate, was dying. She became ill very suddenly and my entire family went on an emotional roller coaster. We were told at one point that she was dying – say goodbye. The next day, we were told she was recovering and would probably live. Two days later, she went into a comma and slipped away from us. During that period, my family relied on me as the resident medical expert to help interpret what was going on, to communicate concerns to the medical team, for emotional support, and to help guide decisions about end of life care and resuscitation.

As different as those two experiences seem from the outside – a death and a birth, a tragedy and a joyful arrival – for me, they were eerily similar. Both my niece and my sister complained of severe thirst and were fed ice chips by spoon. The moments when complications arose and everybody in the room froze for just an instant were the same. The trips out to the waiting room to update everybody on the not-so-good news, the same. The pain and suffering from a baby getting stuck in the pelvis or from a dying bowel have a lot in common. The lies you tell when things are going really, really wrong so that the person who is going into shock doesn’t panic… yeah.

The overlapping of those moments from an emotional standpoint had a profound impact on me that I will likely not fully realize for a long time. Obviously, life doesn’t have a theme, but those two very important moments in my personal “story” both reflected certain ideas – the power of family, the fragility of life, etc..

Just like in fiction, it was the repetition and reinterpretation of those ideas that allowed me to understand and accept them in a very powerful way. A lone incident in a story might be about anything or nothing at all, but when elements and implied messages are repeated, theme emerges from the subtext, and often the most effective use of theme arises from reflecting similar ideas in very different scenarios.

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Do you look for opportunities to reinforce themes in your work? Have you ever tried to use fundamentally different but eerily similar situations to highlight an idea in your work?

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