by Joshua "Stressed but Well Dressed" Wayman, Fiction team member
Well, the title to this piece is a bit of a misnomer. Contrary to what plenty of people might tell you, there is no way to teach somebody how to write – at least not in the way that anything else is conventionally taught. There are, of course, classes you can take, and these are classes I have been apart of on more than one occasion. They are immensely helpful, but they do not teach you how to write in the core sense of the idea, nor do they teach you the habits and disciplines you should employ while writing. This is not to disparage these classes – they were invaluable in my growth as a writer and I am immensely grateful to the professors who taught these classes. What they will do is provide you with an environment where you’re able to experiment, offer you criticism and teach you how to take it gracefully, and they will open you up to new perspectives. That being said, if you enter one of these classes without any capacity to write whatsoever, it is nigh impossible that you will leave suddenly able to write well. There are also plenty of “How To Write” lists and tips that have been generated by prolific writers throughout the years. There’s Jack Kerouac’s famous “30 Tips on Writing” that hung on Allen Ginsberg’s wall as he wrote “Howl” (my favorite one from that is “Accept loss forever.”) There’s Vonnegut’s list, there’s Hemingway’s, Faulkner offers advice in interviews, and there’s even one from the notorious ad-man David Ogilvy that was circulated as a memo to all employees (“Wooly people write wooly memos.”) All of these, and more, are hanging on my bedroom wall, but they aren’t there to provide instruction. They’re there to provide perspective. Some, even most of these lists have conflicting suggestions. Hemingway wrote “write drunk; edit sober” and Faulkner said that all he needs to write is some tobacco and scotch, but Fitzgerald said that only a short story could be written on a bottle, and that a novel requires absolute sober focus. Some of these writers encouraged us to use real life experiences as our inspiration, whereas others found it best to invent our stories and characters out of thin air, products of pure imagination. Trying to follow these instructions verbatim is a recipe for disaster, and so is taking anybody at their literal world for how to write. Much in the way I might stand up and take a break from writing to stare out my window, I’ll walk across my room to these typed-up lists and excerpts from interviews for a similar reason – to get out of my own head. What I’m trying to say here is that you cannot learn how to write, how to truly encapsulate that spark – the one that it takes to make any writing worthwhile – from the mouth or pen of anybody else. However you write is however you write. Whether you prefer to work early in the morning or late at night, all at once or spaced out over years (one of Gore Vidal’s novels took decades to finish, and he took multi-year breaks in between), or whether you want to use people you’ve met (or even yourself) as inspiration is entirely up to you. You will save yourself a lot of anguish the sooner you stop looking for somebody to tell you the correct way to do what only you can do. There is no right way to write and there is no wrong way to write, that is, except to never write at all.
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by Claire "The Bee's Knees" Hunt, Creative Nonfiction team and marketing team member
I don’t pretend to know why we all write – mostly because I’m not even sure why I write. It’s just something I’ve felt drawn to doing since I was a kid and it’s something I feel like I need to do. I will, however, pretend to know why we all publish (or try to): writing is putting your most difficult thoughts and emotions (or, possibly, someone else’s thoughts and feelings) into words and, once we have done it, we want other people to experience it. I got my first (and only) piece published last year in the Grub Street Literary Journal – a poem I wrote for an advanced poetry class called “Elegy for a Lost Doll.” It was a poem that, like everything I write, began as something completely different from what it became. This acceptance came under the condition that I omit my last stanza, which the editor felt was telling too much. This acceptance letter came after several rejections but, when it was accepted, those rejections didn’t matter. Having just that one piece accepted meant that I was doing my job as a writer: transcending my own thoughts, feelings, and experiences onto a page, in a way that others identify with. At least, that’s what acceptance meant to me at the time. This year, I worked on the Creative Non-Fiction team for Grub Street, where we were responsible for reading about 200 submitted pieces – we accepted seven. Sure, some pieces were accepted immediately and some were rejected immediately, but, the majority of the time, there was significant debate and discussion. One of the pieces we accepted, was given a “soft no” by the previous team, but a “hard yes” by our team. Several class periods were spent debating pieces that were good, but did not necessarily suit the needs of our journal. We spent weeks debating a story about eating chicken. There were pieces that, like my own, were only accepted because someone made a case for a simple edit that could be made to strengthen the piece. Having worked on the Grub Street staff this year, I have learned that rejection actually means very little – in fact, if it means anything, it means you should keep working and submitting your work for publication. Working on a literary journal has changed my understanding of “rejection.” Rejection does not mean that your writing is poor or that your piece should be disregarded; nor does rejection mean that no one liked your piece or felt that it held value. Instead, rejection might mean that you need to restructure your piece, rethink certain plot points, reconsider what is essential and what is not. Rejection should urge you to keep going – rejection should fuel you to rethink and revise your piece and send it elsewhere. As writers, as college students, or simply as people, we are going to face rejection everywhere – take pride in your rejections, because, chances are, it means you are that much closer to acceptance. The mere act of feeling a piece that you have worked on is ready for publication is rewarding in and of itself. Keep writing, keep submitting, and keep embracing rejection, knowing that acceptance is on its way. by Carly "Boss Lady" Weisengoff, Fiction Editor, among other things
When I was in fourth grade, my teacher had my class create a book. Each of us got one page to write on, and another page to draw on. We were supposed to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up. At the time, I wanted to be a dog breeder, because I loved dogs. Spoiler alert: I did not grow up to be a dog breeder. (Honestly? Thank goodness.) There’s a page in the back of the book, giving kids credit for their work on things like the cover, or the dedication page - pages outside of our allocated spaces. My name is on that list three times. When I proofread the staff list for Grub Street this year, I started to laugh, because my name is somehow listed four times. This isn’t meant to sound braggy - I genuinely don’t understand how this happened. Is it a need for validation? Am I greedy? This wasn’t the original intent for my contribution to this journal. When I joined the staff of Grub Street, I remember telling myself that being a part of the leadership of Grub is not imperative to my enjoyment of the class. It’s okay not to be in charge of something, I said. It’s okay to let other people tell you what to do. I kept telling myself, over and over again, that I didn’t have time in my schedule to try and be leadership. I was the treasurer of Towson’s Equestrian Club at the time, which meant that essentially every moment of my life was surrounded by incorrectly-filled out checks, invoices from other schools, approximately 500 pounds of horse hair, and several weird looks from strangers when I showed up to class wearing breeches and smelling like a barn. But I kept getting a nagging feeling that I would regret it if I didn’t apply for something. So I did. And by some miracle I was allowed to be the Fiction Editor, and by an even greater miracle I was given four other humans to read stories with - all of them sassy, and all of them passionate about the journal. We kept each other accountable through Google Docs, and occasionally 10pm texts from me passively-aggressively telling members to get their shit together and read (please and thank you). My team was great, and I tried to help them get through the semester, especially when we got a mountain of submissions. I always tried to base my decisions on their schedules, and tried my best to help them sift through the influx of 30-page stories we received in November. During the final class period of the fall semester, all of the staff were told to chill out over winter break (no pun intended). Don’t read submissions, don’t obsess over the journal, and wait until spring semester to hit the ground running. Somehow, I set the journal aside for a month, which is something I’ve never been able to do when I’ve loved being a part of something. And then spring semester hit, and I had two new souls to debate the value of submissions with. Liz recruited me to read with her team, as an extra pair of eyes to get through the piles of poetry. We decided on our pieces, and both of our teams were, for the most part, dissolved for other teams. Proofreading, design, sequencing, general sweating over the outcome of the journal. You know. The usual. By this point I had completely thrown out my original intentions for my contributions, and immersed myself in Grub Street’s production. So much for taking a step back. I helped whenever I could, either by answering the editor-in-chief’s 11pm texts about anxiety-inducing late-night thoughts (which were always valid questions, and were almost always questions I had the answer to), creating yet another Google Doc for the class to use, or getting to class 3 hours early and sitting outside the room with Jess, Liz, Marissa, and Nichole in our own version of The Breakfast Club - with occasional visits from James and Rachel, when their 9:30 class became too intolerable to sit through all at once. These people are my friends, and I wanted to help them through their stressors. This turned into attending design meetings with Jess, or helping Nichole with social media. I told people to shut up and compromise during sequencing, and I told people you’re doing great sweetie when proofreading. Mostly, I told people that guys, we made a journal. We did a thing. The many hats that I wore during the making of volume 67 are now hats for others to wear next year. But somehow, I feel like I didn’t do enough. My friends were still stressed, and as much as I tried, I couldn’t help them relax. I know someone will look at the staff list and think wow, okay, someone was an overachiever and couldn’t keep her nose out of everything. I wish there was a way to tell that person that I just wanted to help. by Marissa "The Machine" Burns, fiction team and social media/web design team member
I’ve heard this statement, muttered in a variety of ways, for over ten years now. And while the people uttering this nonsense usually do so with the best intentions to persuade me to be more realistic with my life, it has yet to deter me from my goals. I’ve known I wanted to write in some way, shape, or form since I was ten, after my best friend and I spent a summer playing games of make believe to entertain ourselves. Creating worlds, giving life to characters, and exploring new ideas consumed my days from dawn ‘til dusk. When I was old enough to start thinking about college, I knew I’d major in English and I was set; there was nothing that would change my mind, nothing else I knew I’d be happy spending the rest of my life doing. And yet, as graduation lies in the horizon, I still get asked ‘what are you going to do when writing doesn’t work out?’ My answer? Write more. If an author starts writing a book and halfway through they realize it isn’t working out, they don’t get a new job; they scrap the book and start again. While I realize becoming a best-selling author is an out of reach goal at the moment, that doesn’t mean it is an out of reach goal in general. Writing is the only thing I’ve been sure of in my life. It’s been my constant for years, the one thing that I knew I could do whenever I was stressed, bored, happy, or sad. Maybe writing won’t pay my bills. Maybe I’ll need to work a dead-end, 9 to 5 job and write during my lunch break and in the evenings. It may not be the most glamorous life, but it is the life I’m ready to live. I get asked a lot why I write, and what I write, and what I’ll do if I’m never able to get published. And my answer is a simple one. I write for me. I write because it feels right. Because it helped me find a best friend. Find a community. Find a group of individuals where I felt comfortable enough to express myself. Creating a world, with problems and solutions, making up characters to love and hate, it was my way opening myself up. I write what I want to read. When I’m scanning the shelves at Barnes and Noble or searching for books on Amazon, I try to find new books that will capture my mood in the moment. Often, however, I find something close to what I want to read, but still, it’s not quite what I was looking for. When that happens, I make up my own story line, create my own plot and though finishing a story is always harder than starting one, I find it was exactly what I was looking for. I might never get published. It’s an upsetting thought but a realistic one and over the years I’ve accepted that. And just because that thought looms in the background of my mind, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing. Just because I don’t get published doesn’t mean I don’t have my own story to tell. And that’s what keeps me going, keeps me writing. Because at the end of the day I don’t write for anyone else. I write for me. Three Dots, Four Dots—What’s a Writer to do with Ellipses? A Brief Overview of the Punctuation Mark5/1/2018 by Nathanael "Sassafras" Buckman, Managing Editor
As a member of the editing team, I have noticed a variety of punctuation problems that mar the effect of a piece. To counter these instances of what George Orwell would call “barbarous English,” I have assembled a simple overview of Grub Street’s punctuation guide. In this essay, I will go over some simple techniques to stylize ellipses properly. Our main example will focus on the following sentence: “The child ate a sandwich while sitting on the dark green bench in the park.” If we wanted to omit some of the details of the sentence, we can use ellipses (three dots) to accomplish this feat: “The child ate a sandwich . . . in the park.” Each dot is an ellipsis. Note that there is a space before and after each ellipsis. The ellipses show that we are omitting something. Generally, if the portion we are omitting is less than one sentence, we use the three-dot ellipses; however, this is not always the case. In some cases, you might see four dots. Don’t panic. The fourth dot signifies one of two things: that the sentence is ending (thus serving as terminal punctuation) or that the writer has omitted more than one sentence, such as a paragraph. Now if we were to end the sentence with ellipses, we must also include a terminal mark in addition to the ellipses. For instance, our sentence would look like this: “The child ate a sandwich. . . .” In this example, we have four dots—the first one immediately follows the h and is the terminal mark. It does not have a space before it, but it does have one after it. The ellipses follow the period, with each ellipsis having a space before and after, except for the final ellipsis. We also can use ellipses and terminal punctuation in the middle of a quotation: “The child ate a sandwich. . . . The sky was cloudy.” This example indicates that we are ending the first sentence, omitting information, and introducing a new sentence. The key feature besides the space before and after each ellipsis (except for no space between the h and the terminal mark) is that the final ellipsis has a space after it. Rarely will we find ellipses opening a quotation—doing so is both tacky and messy. Instead, we either incorporate the quotation into our own sentence or use the quotation on its own standing. For example: “As the babysitter was filling a water bottle, ‘[t]he child ate a sandwich while sitting on the dark green bench in the park.’” Here I introduce the quotation as my main sentence using an introductory adverbial clause. I use brackets around the t to indicate that I am changing the sentence from its original form, specifically indicating that I am changing the case form of the letter. I don’t need any ellipses because I have used the entire original sentence, grafting it with my introductory dependent clause. Additionally, ellipses can also signify a speaker’s voice trailing off: “The child ate a sandwich and said, ‘The sky looks cloudy and. . . .’” This stylization heightens the drama of the scene, showing that ellipses affect the piece’s tone. Note the inclusion of the terminal mark. Ellipses are effective tools that add concision to a person’s writing, adding nuance to a sentence and diversifying sentence types. Effective writing needs effective punctuation. Understanding your audience will help you to determine what portion of a sentence is unnecessary and therefore omittable. Let us know what other type of punctuation mark you would like to understand better. For now, rest assured that with the knowledge of how to style ellipses, your writing will be all the stronger. |
Grub StreetGrub Street is Towson University's award-winning literary journal, run by undergraduates enrolled in "Editing the Literary Magazine." |