natalia ilyin

One thousand dollars. Want it?
The Winterhouse Writing Awards deadline is June 1.
That's four days from now! You've got pleeeeeenty of time. Blow the dust off of something and get it in.

Here's the url:
http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/writing-awards

Remember to check your work against Natalia's Writing Tips/Errors of Death:

Writing tips:

1. SPELLCHECK and then re-read for inappropriate words that spellcheck may have substituted in eros.

2. Even if you think you are way past this, make sure your sentences all have a subject and a verb. Not texting here.

3. If you use more than five words in succession that someone put on Wikipedia or that you overheard in a cafe, credit that person, book or site. Credit everything. This makes you look intelligent and thorough and willing to play in the writing playpen. Stealing is an end to your career as a writer. We have to trust you. (Unless you're an old Postmodernist but nobody remembers the "untrustworthy narrator" at this point, so forget I said it.)

4. Read your writing aloud to your partner or to the dog. Don't let either critique your work--particularly the dog--but listen to yourself. Where there are pauses, there should be commas. Where you get bored with the drone of your own voice, take out those words. Where you are tempted to say "yadda, yadda," eliminate that idea. Real writing flows like spoken language. So turn on the tap.

5. Trash your thesaurus and promise to never use it again. Thesaurus-writing is obvious to a real reader, often featuring words in places where their exact meaning is a shade off and doesn't fit. Trust yourself and use the words that come to your mind.

6. Avoid cliches, stuffers, boring extra words, acronyms, text-lingo and dumb pseudo-words that mean nothing in a sentence. Oscar Wilde said, "If you've ever heard a word, don't use it."

7. Don't pretend you and your reader are just lying around in robes watching TV and eating caramel corn. Sit up straight and act like your intelligent Aunt Josephine is visiting. Too sloppy, too familiar writing is unappealing: It is a pose.

8. Avoid using the verb "to be:" He was, I am, she is, they were. Instead, substitute an active verb: she saw, he ate, we sniffled.

9. Chances are you are not a Doctor of Philosophy. Chances are you are not a big-time liberal arts academic. So do not feel that you must puff up and prance around with big words and phrases. The smartest things are said in the fewest words. It takes guts to write short.

10. Every time you make an assertion back it up with a fact. "The landscapers in my neighborhood are tri-lingual. Florence Dosono, my gardener, speaks Japanese, English and Spanish every day." Back up assertions with facts every time, don't just float on and on asserting yourself into the clouds. That's what my Russian grandfather called "heavenly biscuits." Including examples gives the reader a toe on the ground.

11. Don't try to figure out what you are trying to say while you are trying to say it. Don't have a couple beers and suddenly decide you are Dylan Thomas and let it all out on the page. You are not Dylan Thomas or any other Dylan so stick with sobriety. No one wants to read along as you chase around with a butterfly net hoping you'll find an idea. Find the idea. Write the idea. Go on to the next idea. Build them all up to a nice little idea-pile in which they all relate, and then let the reader go home for lunch. It is juvenile to expect your readers to keep reading to sort out your nonexistent thinking for you. They'll just stop reading and go on to the next entry.

Natalia'a Errors of Death:

1. Being boring. Difficult ideas need to be presented in short, clear ways that do not sound like the drone of a diggery-do. No one has the time. Watch your pacing.

2. Being too clever. You are not a leprechaun. No need to prance. A good funny moment is valuable, but pace them. Use them to open up your reader's heart, and make him want to keep reading. Don't act like you're auditioning to be a late-night stand-up comic. Being too funny will undercut your thinking with a design audience, which is basically a sober, steeped-in-the-Bauhaus bunch of INFPs. Ask how I know.

3. It's and its. It's a real problem. Because every word uses an apostrophe in its possessive EXCEPT "ITS." It's= it is. Its= "something belonging to IT."
Never forget this. Write it on your head.

4. Everyone does not have "their" baseball. Everyone has his baseball or everyone has her baseball. "Their" still catches in many throats, so avoid it if you're trying to win an award. If you get yourself into an "everyone" tangle, either make everything plural, (we all have our) or go back and forth between his and hers in your piece for the next ten years or until this grammatical problem ceases to be one.

5. Lay and lie. These are two separate, completely different verbs, but they look alike in some declensions and so there's a lot of confusion about them. The quickest way to show you cannot write is to use lay or lie incorrectly. This is the deal:

I lie down, I lay down, I have lain down.
I lay the book on the table, I laid the book on the table, I have laid the book on the table.
When do you use "lay" and when "lie?" You lay an object down. (That's where "getting laid" comes from, it's about objects, not lovers.) But a person lies down--anything that has control over his or her own body lies down. When you are in control of something, you lay it down.

The words ,"Now I lay me down to sleep" seem confusing. But in them, the person speaking is treating himself as an object, and for this reason he uses "lay" instead of saying, "Now I'm lying down to sleep." Using "lay me" is archaic usage, so don't use it.

Again: You lay an object down. A person lies down. So does a dog.
When you command your dog, teach him to "lie down." (Lay down is grammatically incorrect and lord knows we can't have dogs responding to ungrammatical commands.)

6. Never say you are passionate about anything or I will kill you in a sudden fit of rage. It's a horrible cliche.

I can't think of anything else. But if you do, please add it to these tips and errors.

And get that piece in to Winterhouse Awards pronto. You could do a lot with 1000 dollars.

Much of what my grandmother knew instinctively-- and taught us all instinctively--our culture suddenly realizes it must rediscover. She was not a naturalist or a flower-child, just a normal person, a normal woman of her era who understood where she fit in. Everything was a part of everything else. The compost fed the rose. She treated Nature in the same way that she treated people. They had their ups and downs, just like relationships with people do, but it was a relationship based on respect. That's just the way she thought, and how the people who had reared her had thought. Was she radical? No. Just measured--just related to her surroundings.

I recently came upon the work of Murray Bookchin, a wild-eyed eco-revolutionary of the Rachel Carson era. “The plundering of the human spirit by the market place is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital," said Bookchin. His argument was that most of the activities that consume energy and destroy the environment are senseless because they contribute little to quality of life and well being. Is this radical? Thought to be. So radical that these ideas split the American Green Movement right in half.

But the plunder of the spirit being tied to the plunder of the earth was completely obvious--wordlessly obvious-- to my grandmother, whose own grandfather (now we're going back to before the American Civil War) was known around Gaffney for letting a third of his land lie fallow every growing season. He didn't believe in using the new fertilizers, he didn't believe in beating the soil into submission and for this reason he missed out on a third more revenue every summer. Radically stick-in-the-mud? Or forward thinking?

Bookchin, the radical Marxist, said that the function of work is to legitimize, even create, hierarchy. He believed that understanding the transformation of organic into hierarchical societies is crucial to finding a way forward. I'd say that understanding that transformation is crucial to finding our way backward--back to the cyclic rather than the one-off, back to the sustainable rather than the pillaged-- back to the dreams of the lover rather than those of the rapist.