New Year's Resolution

The year 2009 means a fresh start, which means new resolutions to follow through on. This year, I've decided to actually make a resolution, unlike past years where I've just passed it up, knowing that the odds of my following through on it are slim to none. For the year of 2009 I am determined to finish the things I've started.

While this is a general resolution, this resolution mainly applies to my writing. For over a month now I have started numerous stories, probably upwards of ten, but have not gotten past page ten on hardly any of them. It's frustrating to have all of these ideas bouncing around in my head without being able to put them down on paper somewhere. For this reason, I want to finish what I start before moving onto another story, because I know that if I leave one task, I'll never go back to it. This is why I want to follow through on this resolution.

Saying I'm going to do something and actually doing it are two completely different things; this I know. Therefore, this year, I have a very simple plan of action for accomplishing my goal. I will simply just not let myself move onto something new. In essence, I will force myself to follow through, rather than just accepting that giving up once in a while is okay. For me, it will just not be okay. If I start to cook something, I will not leave the kitchen until I'm finished; I won't just put it in the fridge and tell myself I'll finish it tomorrow. If I start to write something, I will not start writing another story until I have at least stuck it out for a while and decided that I do not like it and that is why I'm quitting, rather than just because I want to move onto something else. If I start a project, I will continue working on it in regular intervals, rather than just give up for a few weeks and come back to it at the last minute.

New year's resolutions can be considered silly and a bad idea, and I have thought this in the past. However, I know that I will follow through on this one, one way or another, no matter how hard it is, thus making it a good idea to have promised it to myself in the first place. So, here is to 2009 with new beginnings and a clean slate. Here's to promises that will not go left undone.

Winter Poem

Hoar Frost

Branches were dipped in frosting this morn

and the sun cast a fairyland spell;

Each fragile twig looked feathered and white

and beckoned a heart to  swell.

A winter treasure - a sight to behold -

while silence augmented the scene;

I wanted to talk through an open gate

to find the artist, supreme

No gate could I see, the artist unseen,

awe captured my soul;

The canvas would change, as nature intended,

but I'd witnessed her morning's goal.

-- by Joan Adams Burchell

Good Authors

"What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers." - Logan Pearsall Smith

I agree with what Logan Pearsall Smith is saying, but only to a degree. I took this quote as that he loves all of the underlying themes and hidden meanings behind a text more than he loves the actual blatant spoken story line. All of those hidden secrets lying beneath the surface of the text are intriguing and wonderful to ponder, but at some point it gets more annoying than interesting. At this point, I prefer just the plain text to the obscure themes and symbols found in a novel. However, before this point, I love feeling the gratification of deciphering the "codes" beneath the words in a story.

A good author is able to convey those things that are "between the lines" while still having them be mysterious. It is essential.

Memorable Fairy Tale

"And because these daft and dewey-eyed dopes keep building up impossible hopes impossible things are happening everyday." - The Fairy God Mother

For as long as I can remember the sweet but captivating story of Cinderella, whether it be in the form of the old Greek folklore, the cartoon Disney adaptation or the live stage adaptations, has always captured me more so than any other story. I've always rooted for the underdog in every aspect of life and Cinderella is the true underdog. She is the "plain country bumpkin" with a broken past who finds herself caught up in a whirlwind romance with a prince who doesn't know her true identity.

I don't think that as a young girl I've ever been more on the edge of my seat than I was when the Prince slipped the glass slipper onto Cinderella's dainty foot. And I don't think I've ever fallen more in love with a Broadway song than I did with "Impossible" from the stage version of Cinderella or "Ten Minutes Ago" from Rodger's and Hammerstein's live action made-for-TV movie version.

The story has stuck through me for all of my life, making me remind myself that no matter how low down the underdog is, everyone can get a happy ending- all you need is some faith and a dash of magic and with a quick bippity-boppity-boo anything can happen. In truth, there is no magic and there are no fairy god mothers to tell you to spin around so they can fix you a beautiful dress out of thin air, but that doesn't make the story any less "real." It is a metaphor or sorts, telling little girls everywhere that every girl can find her prince, no matter how worthless she might think she is.

Thousands of years ago when this story was first told, I'm sure no one would have imagined how important the message it held would be in society in the future. However, it is that important. Every girl has a chance to shine and she should never forget that.

Not to mention, aside from all of the "after school special" morals in the story, it's a rather entertaining tale. I have to admit, that more than fifteen years after the first time I saw this movie, I still love popping in the DVD on a snow day and letting it take me back to the days when I was five or six years old, telling my daddy that I could be anyone I wanted to be when I was in my own little corner in my own little chair, or telling my mom not to worry about mice in the basement because with just a touch of magic they could be beautiful horses. It is the one story that I have carried with me through my whole life, without any of the details fuzzing themselves around the edges even the slightest bit.

Valuing Education

Do you think young people today value their education as much as Sara Smolinksky does? Why or why not?

I don't think people today value their education as much as Sara does in The Bread Givers. This is probably because an education these days is a given for everyone, at least everyone around here. School becomes more of a chore than a privilege and therefore we wind up hating it rather than valuing it. We resent our teachers for giving so much work because we haven't lived the alternative- a job. To us, time where there is no school is a time for just relaxing rather than working a job, or at least not working at a job filled with physical labor for 12 hours a day in a sweat shop. Education is a wide-spread thing, rather than a rare privilege and thus it has become less and less valuable as it becomes more and more common.

As this follows, a high school education has become nearly worthless in society, while it was once something that people rarely obtained. Even just graduating from college isn't revered as genius in society, not unless you get your masters degree along with your diploma. It is not just to the young people that education has become less valuable, but lower forms of education have become less valuable to society as a whole.

Walter "Red" Smith

"There is nothing hard about writing. All you have to do is sit down and open up a vein." - Walter "Red" Smith

Walter Smith is absolutely right in what he is saying, in more ways than one. Writing, in a sense, is extremely easy. Writing well, on the other hand, is an entirely different story. Anyone can sit down and throw words on a page and then call them art. To create a masterpiece, a mirror image of yourself that you would be glad to claim ownership to, is infinitely harder.

Being a writer, though, admittedly, an extremely amateur one, I understand where he is coming from. Writing with inspiration can be easy, as well. When writing is your job, something that you are, in fact, required to do, it becomes a grueling task. To sit down and make yourself write is similar to sitting down and opening up a vein. You sit there and bleed openly onto the pages, pouring your heart and soul into them hoping that, maybe, one day someone will appreciate the words you slaved over. This is another sense in which he is correct.

The third, and final sense, is the process of criticism. With writing comes reviewing and with reviewing comes criticism. When you hand someone a piece of your own writing, a piece of your heart, a piece of your mind, it is inevitable that there is something that they will find wrong with it. Perhaps they find your characters, the ones that you carved from hard marble to be the warm creatures they transformed into, to be flat and boring. Perhaps they hate your plot, the one that you tossed and turned in your hand a thousand times over, trying to make it just right. Perhaps they actually just hate your writing. Your writing is a part of you, a direct reflection of you, in most cases. This means that they might as well just hate you. In writing, you open yourself to this criticism, and thus you open up your veins, letting the crimson flow in pain as you watch what you have created be torn to pieces by the hands of a stranger.

Yes, Mr. Walter Reed, you have hit the nail on the head. Writing is letting yourself flow onto the very pages that you work on. Writing is the deceivingly simple task of throwing yourself into the black and white world of words and phrases. Writing... can be pain.

Reaction to Bread Givers Ch 1-6

The Bread Givers is a mildly interesting story about a girl whose opinions differ from those of her tyrannic, sexist father. It is appalling how her father goes through his days, sitting around like a lazy sloth, while he throws his young daughters out into the harsh world to work all day to make money and earn the food that he eats, but in fact denies them of. I was one "fatherly" tirade about how useless the girls in the family are away from throwing my book into the open fire burning away on the first floor of my house. Granted, this book is supposed to take place in the 1920s, not exactly a modern time, but it is no excuse. Women were granted the full right to vote in 1919, meaning they were considered working parts of society, not tokens to be used and then thrown away when their value depreciates. How any of the women in that household could put up with him, I will never be sure.

In chapters three-six we watch as Bessie, Mashah and Fania fall in love and are denied their heart's wishes by their greedy father. Bessie brings home Berel Bernstein, a perfectly worthy suitor for his daughter- rich and kind. He denies her her wishes because Berel is unwilling to support Bessie as well as the family. This was where my true rage at the father began. It was upon reading how Mashah had fallen madly in love with Jacob, only to have ripped away from her, that the real contemplation of a book burning began. Mashah became a new person when she was in love with Jacob, and her adoration of him made me adore him, too. He left her and she was broken hearted, making my heart break for her too. In the end, when he came back to her, valiant and loving, to tell her that he cared not what his father thought and that he just wanted to be with her, her father denied her of her wishes. He told her never to speak to Jacob again, and she obeyed. This was the last straw. It was the last tyrannic raid I would take sitting down, in silence.