Missives from the teacher

In case you still don't have a copy of this "little book," here's an online resource that'll do you well to bookmark. Presenting the online edition to Strunk & White: The Elements of Style.

This is required reading for all the writing classes, most specially those people in English 1. Read and learn, people.

If you don't like reading from the computer screen, then buy. If you can't buy, then be a pirate and photocopy. If you still can't, then borrow somebody else's copy. If you can't borrow, then steal. Hola.

This is for the CW10 people. Neil Gaiman, rockstar writer and recent visitor to Manila--rallies and all, on where he gets his ideas.

Backgrounder: He was asked to talk with some first graders about writing, and this is what he told them:

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if...?

(What if you woke up with wings? What if your sister turned into a mouse? What if you all found out that your teacher was planning to eat one of you at the end of term - but you didn't know who?)

Another important question is, If only...

(If only real life was like it is in Hollywood musicals. If only I could shrink myself small as a button. If only a ghost would do my homework.)

And then there are the others: I wonder... ('I wonder what she does when she's alone...') and If This Goes On... ('If this goes on telephones are going to start talking to each other, and cut out the middleman...') and Wouldn't it be interesting if... ('Wouldn't it be interesting if the world used to be ruled by cats?')...

Those questions, and others like them, and the questions they, in their turn, pose ('Well, if cats used to rule the world, why don't they any more? And how do they feel about that?') are one of the places ideas come from.

An idea doesn't have to be a plot notion, just a place to begin creating. Plots often generate themselves when one begins to ask oneself questions about whatever the starting point is.

Sometimes an idea is a person ('There's a boy who wants to know about magic'). Sometimes it's a place ('There's a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is...'). Sometimes it's an image ('A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.')

Often ideas come from two things coming together that haven't come together before. ('If a person bitten by a werewolf turns into a wolf what would happen if a goldfish was bitten by a werewolf? What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?')

All fiction is a process of imagining: whatever you write, in whatever genre or medium, your task is to make things up convincingly and interestingly and new.

And when you've an idea - which is, after all, merely something to hold on to as you begin - what then?

Well, then you write. You put one word after another until it's finished - whatever it is.

Sometimes it won't work, or not in the way you first imagined. Sometimes it doesn't work at all. Sometimes you throw it out and start again.

The New York Times rediscovers a playwright lost to time because she was a woman and American theater is mostly about the guys.

Susan Glaspell, whose one act play "Trifles" was based on a crime she covered for a newspaper about a farmer's wife who was accused of murdering her husband while he slept, was once regarded as one of the most promising figures in American theater. And although "Trifles" is still studied today in colleges and law schools as an example of gender bias, Glaspell remains unpopular as compared to her male contemporaries. One reason perhaps, the NY Times posits, is that her most accomplished play was not a full-length work.

Linda Ben-Zvi, an American-born theater professor at Tel Aviv University, decided to remedy this exclusion by writing "Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times." She portrays Glaspell as an innovator. "She was one of the first American playwrights to use silence," to portray "virtually inarticulate women, women who were moving into new experiences and had not yet found the language to express their situations," Ms. Ben-Zvi said. "Unlike O'Neill, whose characteristic punctuation point was the exclamation mark, Glaspell's is the dash, denoting the silence and the silencing of her women characters. The language breaks down along with the character."

Read Glaspell's "Trifles".