Writer, Editor, Stand-Up Comedian

Writers are still readers

Posted: September 10th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Books, Column, Editorial | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Maybe it’s the weather or the time of year, but I’ve had two requests for writing advice in the past two days. Here, once again, is my best advice.

 

When asked what advice I would give to writers, I usually say these two things:

1. WRITE

2. READ.

The first bit of advice sounds so simple but is so hard to do. WRITE. It means making a conscious effort to write, if not every day, on some regular schedule. Turn off the TV, close the MSN chat window, get off Facebook and write. Life is so full of distractions and responsibilities that it’s not uncommon to hear writers complain that they can’t find time to write. I, too, am guilty of doing it. Even though one of the things you’ll find when you Google my name is this post on discipline in writing, lately I’ve been making plenty excuses for not buckling down to the half-finished manuscript I began last year. Granted, the book is depressing as hell and drags me back into a personal memory I’d rather ignore–it’s a novel about possible consequences of child sexual abuse–but I have made a committment and I need to attend to it. Plus, it’s a really good story. 🙂 I think the world, especially Trinidad & Tobago, needs this story so people stop ignoring a problem that is right under their noses.

But writing is hard work in some ways, especially writing fiction. I have no publisher yet so there’s no deadline to whip me, and it’s my own project so there’s no editor to nag me. I started the book with Wayne Brown as my writing coach and he would give me weekly deadlines to meet, but he has since passed away and my subsequent attempt to work with the brilliant writer Monique Roffey flopped because I just couldn’t write at the time.

When I’m writing it’s great. There are times when the words fly onto the computer screen all by themselves, the characters sing and dance and take lovers and licks as if they were real people and I were just a cameraman recording the action. There are other times when each word is a struggle. Because it’s set in multiple times, I have to keep other windows open with calendars and research about clothes, food, news events and other stuff that fill out the story. And you can imagine that I sometimes get distracted by children, housekeeping (VERY RARELY! Ha!), hustling and the rest of my life. Sleep is the biggest culprit, though. Why write when you can sleep? Sleep usually wins, even though I know those last eight chapters won’t write themselves.

Maybe I should do like Mystie Thongs and blog on the struggle to get back on my (literary) feet. If I had written a page a day over the last year when I didn’t write anything at all, the book would be done and in third revision by now!

My only consolation is that at least I’m taking my own advice on the other thing writers should do: READ.

I am, as my Facebook friend Adrian Charles called it, an obligate bibliovore. I have to read, and I’m usually reading at least one book. In the last couple months I’ve read Sun Dog, by Monique Roffey, Falling Angels, by Tracy Chevalier, and Dog-Heart, by Diana McCaulay, among others.

Reading increases your vocabulary, improves your technique and widens your repertoir. I have read hundreds of romance novels and–as much as literary types would turn up their noses at the genre–I owe my relatively good grammar to them, and my vocabulary in part to them, too.

Those long-time Mills & Boon books were great for words like “maelstrom” and “ingenue” and so on, and they were written in the strictest Standard English. I read other things, too… sci-fi, poetry, plays, murder mysteries, text books… and everything I read somehow creeps out into my writing, not in direct ways but you can see threads of them if you know what you’re looking for. Plus, reading is fun!

What do you writers do to keep writing?


The Allen Prize opens!

Posted: September 6th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Editorial | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

So after years of planning, praying, hoping and organising, The Allen Prize for Young Writers is finally open!

You can read about it and get submissions forms here.

It has been a long haul and we still have far to go. We are still waiting for funding, and still in the process of planning our inaugural seminar. Two very impressive regional writers have already signed up to talk at the seminar–but you’ll have to wait for the official release to get more info on that.

We have lined up a great head judge of The Allen Prize competition in Judy Raymond. Judy was my editor for many years, at the Trinidad Express and the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian. In a way she has always been my role model, because I remember reading her hysterically funny column with my brother when I was a teenager and she always epitomised for me the best combination of witty, erudite and accessible writing. As an editor she was exacting, sometimes scarily so, and pushed me to being the best journalist I could be. In short, I am well chuffed that she has agreed to head the judges for the prize competition.

This whole experience has been very humbling and I’m grateful to Judy and all the other people who have contributed so far, and those who will contribute in the future. And as Judy said in the press release about the opening of the competition, I can’t wait to read the results!


Up next…

Posted: August 18th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Editorial | Tags: , , | No Comments »

I can’t believe it’s almost September. It’s been months since I started plotting the rollout of The Allen Prize for Young Writers and incredibly here it is! In September we open the first prize competition, and in October, all things being equal, we stage our first seminar.

We’ve been a busy little beavers for the past few months, trying to put things in place for this. First was the writing of the strategic plan and getting it approved by the board. Then was the drafting of the competition submission guidelines and the seminar and workshop plans, done by the hardworking committees. Then we had to contact the Ministry of Education to get their endorsement. Then we had to write to different international agencies to get them to support the organisation with their money. We had to seek out corporate sponsors, too, and we had to meet with the associations and NGOS who work in literature and youth… it’s an ongoing process.

Now we’re in the process of planning the first seminar and the media launch, and starting the prize competition. Newsflash: We have judges!

I didn’t do all this by myself–madness to even try! My board, prize committee, finance committee, family and friends were all behind The Allen Prize, giving encouragement, advice and very practical support. One friend of mine is doing the Allen Prize web site. Another friend (a couple of friends, actually, and my brother) helps with artwork–artwork that’s going to be placed in a sponsored ad in The Student Press… And on, and on.

As the actual date of the competition and the seminar draws nearer, I hope the support continues. The Allen Prize for Young Writers will not work without it.


Fighting fat

Posted: July 14th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Editorial | Tags: , , , | 1 Comment »

George Monbiot, whose blog I enjoy in spite of the criticisms of his detractors, this week blogs about the UK government’s planned deregulation of the food industry, in the context of the government’s seeming tendency toward deregulation generally. This, he says, is a bad idea, because it unduly penalises the poor and the rich don’t feel the brunt of it. As he writes about deregulation, “The referee is government. It is always biased and often bought, but in principle in a democratic society it exists to prevent us from being fouled. More precisely, it is supposed to prevent those who have agency – the rich and powerful – from planting their studs in the chests of those who don’t. When the government walks away from the game the rich can foul the poor with impunity. Deregulation is a transfer of power from the trodden to the treading.”

In the case of food and obesity, he says, “Last week the health secretary Andrew Lansley sought to shift responsibility for improving diets and preventing obesity from the state to society. He blamed the problem on low self-esteem and deplored what he called ‘a witch hunt against saturated fats, salt and sugars’. In future poor diets would be countered by ‘social responsibility, not state regulation.’ From now on, he announced, communities will be left to find their own solutions. The companies which make their money from selling junk food and alcohol will be put in charge of ensuring that people consume less of them. I hope you have spotted the problem.”

Indeed. Speaking as a consumer, I can tell you the cheap fix is always much more enticing than the healthy diet; to eat healthily on a consistent basis requires dedication and dosh in equal measure. In my mother’s generation it was cheaper to cook your own food than to eat out; that may be true in the wider sense because it still costs $8 for a bundle of bhaji and $23 for a box of KFC, but you have to cook the bhaji (with other ingredients, naturally), and the KFC is right there in the box, eat it and go.

We have had some campaigns in Trinidad & Tobago encouraging people to eat well. Not enough. And the price of fresh fruit and veg seems to me prohibitively expensive, even taking into account seasonal fluctuations with drought, flood, etc. It’s now $15-22/lb for tomatoes. Tomatoes? I kid you not. Same thing for sweet peppers.

This fluctuation and the generally high prices speak to a national agriculture policy failure, in my mind. There is a need for subsidies (all the cool countries are doing it!), for better infrastructure for farmers, and for help with getting them to develop their markets. Farmers is folks too and if they aren’t feeling the love, so to speak, is we to catch–and pay through the nose for their produce.

As for encouraging people to eat well, there must be some way to do it; whether through increasing the already present attempts of the School Nutrition Co to educate children on diet; through pumping up the Health & Family Life Education curriculum in the area of diet and nutrition; or through a tax on fast foods. I sure don’t want to have to pay more for fast foods but if you’re taxing cigarettes and alcohol you  might as well tax them too; obesity is linked to enough lifestyle diseases that it should warrant about as much attention as a fag or a beer, not so?


Time for local music quotas

Posted: July 7th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Editorial | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

Saw this report in the Trinidad & Tobago Guardian, in which PanTrinbago makes a call for radio stations to have quotas for local music. Lots and lots of people have made this request before. Maybe this time, new government and all, we’ll get what we want?

And while they’re at it, make some local TV quotas too! It’s insane for a TV producer to spend thousands of dollars on a programme only to have to BUY airtime from TV stations to air that show. TV stations should pay to air local shows. I feel stupid even having to say that. This back-to-front system helps nobody. Why do they air rubbish like The Cougar when perfectly good local TV languishes?