Author: camsterdam

To NaNoWriMo or Not To NaNoWriMo

camsterdam Leave a comment

The season of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost upon us. What is NaNoWriMo? It’s a non-profit organization that sets up an annual challenge where starting November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 PM on November 30. And sadly, I will not be throwing my gauntlet into the ring.

I took part last year and looked forward to it every night – to get back to the story that was coming to life, film-like, on the computer screen in front of me. I explored the life of three children, growing up in post-Hiroshima Japan, one of the most realist stories I’ve written in quite a while. I found myself caring about these characters more and more, found myself wanting to hear their voices, their fears, to take part in their adventures rather then venture out into the greater world of Ann Arbor and classes and homework.

As senior year in the English and Creative Writing departments draws its cloak over me, I find myself writing so much already that I couldn’t possibly work on a 50,000-word novel right now. I admire all college-age Nano-ers who can find the balance between classes and this writing challenge. But, if Nano-ing is not in your near future, do not fret. It can often be a very brave thing to know your limits and know when to say ‘no.’ The good thing about Nano is that it’s like an annual holiday. It comes every year. If you’re not participating this year, then next year perhaps! No one even has to know if you participate or not. It’s like a secret with yourself. (Though, there is an incredible online community of Nano-ers who are available for support, for ideas, for writing gatherings, etc, for those who enjoy that kind of groupie-ness.)

There has been recent backlash from ignoramuses who think that NaNoWriMo is meant for people to write 50,000 word first-drafts and send it to agents on Dec. 1. This is by no means the purpose of NaNoWriMo. It’s a challenge, a chance to push yourself to write the story that has been cooped in your head, no matter how bad or hyperbolic or boring or flouncy or cheesy or cliche or wonderful the writing. It’s a chance for you to get in touch with your creativity stores, to think through your own beliefs and opinions about society, and project them onto characters who are forced to make decisions and heck, maybe even fight a few ninjas or two. I can’t imagine criticizing anything that encourages storytelling. No matter if you have written a Pulitzer or if you write car manuals, everyone deserves the chance to participate in this challenge.

If you’re lucky, you’ll walk away from NaNo with a “The End” as your words numbered 49,999 and 50,000. But, don’t think of this as “your end.” This is just a draft. The real writing, the revision, hasn’t even begun. And if you want, it doesn’t have to begin. You can write it and on December 1, come out from your writing cave and return to normal life. But, if you believe in your novel, you can make it stronger and keep working on it. To quote Da Vinci, “art is never finished, only abandoned.” But, something abandoned, doesn’t have to stay abandoned. Nor does it only have to be worked on during the month of November. That means that my story, about the three Japanese children, need not fear! I plan to pick it up again and continue the adventuring…just maybe after college settles down.

From one Nano-er to the next, I give this bit of advice to all of you brave writers who I will be living vicariously through this November:

–Don’t delete anything. Even if you can’t stand to look at it, just highlight it in black and keep writing. (It creates this cool “blackout poetry” feel to your piece.)

–If possible, log in the words while you have the time.  Try and get ahead in the first few days, which will give you flexibility as life and reality catches up to you later on in November.

-Make sure to give yourself breaks. Get up, take a walk, go to a museum, do yoga, paint your toenails, learn how to do headstands. Shake up your brainwaves so the ideas have room to breathe.

-Back up your work. Press Save a lot, become best friends with flash drives. Also, you can save to that whimsical of all things, the all-hailed Cloud.

–Take risks. No one else has to see this writing if you don’t want them to. Be daring. Be silly. Add a dragon or two. Write scandalously. Mix the two and include the most scandalous of dragons.

–Let yourself be surprised. 

To all my friends who are Nano-ing this year, I wave flags of encouragement and wish you happy writing and delicious snacks that don’t sticky up your fingers so much that prevent you from typing and I hope that you find yourself on the other side of the month, pleasantly surprised with the strength and courage and productivity that you achieved in just 30 autumnal days.

Write on, folks, write on!

The Language of Feeling

camsterdam 3 Comments
wordstuck.co.vu

 

At this very moment, your heart may be fluttering with anticipation, your stomach might be knotted with nerves, you might have a sudden urge to kiss the person to your right, perhaps you are antsy with iktsuarpok.

Descartes claimed that there are only six basic, universal emotions, which he called the “primitive passions”: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. While I agree that all human beings, no matter their language or culture background, certainly experience these six emotions, should we constrain ourselves to vague generalities, when there is an infinite number of sensory opportunities for us to experience this world? Should foreign languages stop us from exploring the inner workings of our brain?

Words are very telling about cultures; they help define what’s important to a culture’s people. In the same way that the Inuits have over 50 words to describe snow in all its varieties, cultures put into words the emotions and feelings that are the most relevant to their society. Words are efficient, yet words also are practical and purposeful vessels of emotion. We may feel “cozy and warm from being inside with friends on a cold day,” but because we don’t have a word that sums up that particular feeling, we would be more likely to let the feeling go unsaid. The Dutch on the other hand, whose vocabulary includes the word “gezelligheid,” can express in just four syllables their warm-hearted comfort.

Words are fascinating. Especially foreign words. Even when you aren’t sure how to pronounce them, their specific meanings that define a feeling you’ve had before somehow brings the world closer together. We become one culture of feeling beings. We bond over our likenesses rather than the differences between us.

True, you might not ever use one of these words while hanging with your friends or in a school paper. In fact, it might be wholly pretentious if you just said, “As Mr. Rochester stepped out of the shadows, Jane Eyre was overcome with a bout of basorexia and nearly succumbed to it.” But, there is something very comforting knowing that the word exists. That someone on the other side of the globe has expressed a feeling for you. A secret between you and the word.

It’s no coincidence that words and emotional expressions are the two most effective ways that humans communicate with each other. Of course, then, we find people striving to connect the two together. Books such as Tiffany Watts Smith’s “The Book of Human Emotions,” Ella Frances Sanders’ “Lost in Translation,” and Tumblr site “Word-stuck” are increasing the powerful beauty, history and art of this compounding. We are inventing a language of feeling, a language that is ever growing, a language not bound by country borders or regional differences, but a language born out of humans just being human.

From the contents of Tiffany Watt Smith’s book

Books of Curiosity: Why Humans Like Surprises

camsterdam Leave a comment

Publishing is hard. Especially when you distribute your magazine for free. There’s a difficult balance you have to find: include enough talent to make it full of substance and variety, but not to the extent that it is so thick that you can only print three copies. We’d like to think that the time and passion that goes into a literary magazine makes it into a valuable object – in other words, a kind of commodity. And with that comes the need for money. If you want more pages, more physical objects, you need more money.

As Editor-in-Chief of the RC Review, a literary and art annual publication that features Residential College students, I knew that we needed to collect more doubloons for our purse in order to print enough for all of the RC and faculty. Poetry should be free for all, but unfortunately, printing is not. Therefore, the fundraiser was born!

A close friend who had recently graduated from the RC was a vital part of the fundraiser’s idea. She was moving to Ypsilanti and had boxes on boxes of old, hoarded books – at least 50 of them! We gladly took them, without a specific purpose in mind, mostly because they were yellowed and powdered with the ripe smell of love and time – the complete Dawn Treader treatment. Many of the books we had never heard of before, many we judged quickly and added to our Never-Going-to-Read list. The fact that we judged the cover so much, with haste, churned in our heads. True, judging a book by a cover is a thing. It has to be – the colors, the words, the font, it all compounds the aesthetic pleasure of a book. The door that enchants you to step inside.

But, what if that door was covered? What if that book called “Loving Your Child Is Not Enough” was wrapped in a brown Trader Joe Bag, its handle beckoning you to loop your hand through it, an alternative quote taken from deep within its rabbit hole written in big letters across the front? What if we gave that book a second chance? Would someone come to knock on this novel adventure?

So that’s exactly what we did. We covered all of the books, some novels, some historical anthologies, some parenting books, one Spanish novella, with identical Trader Joe’s bags and added quotes or goofy one-line synopses to the cover. And Tuesday afternoon, we laid out our goods on a grassy knoll in front of East Quad, predicting that we would walk away with 49 of the books and about 2 dollars in our pocket.

But, to our surprise, we were a magnet to the curious. Most people walked by with their chins hinged toward us, mouth agape, not quite understanding. And then, the curiosity, the thrill, the NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON, set in and they approached us. Their eyes scanned the quotes, some smiling, others already pulling out their wallets, struggling to make a choice between buying one or ten of them.

We encouraged people to touch them, pick them up, feel their heft, smell them (one book’s cover quote quite literally said, “I smell pretty.”) It was as much of a social experiment as it was a fundraiser. People were so generous, too, often giving up to 5 dollars extra, just because.

Don’t call it deception. Our Blind Date with a Book was instead a meditation of curiosity. Think back to your birthday or a holiday where gifts are exchanged. There’s an inborn pleasure in being surprised, of not quite knowing what is in your hand. In a way, we also did a service to the books themselves. If donated somewhere where they weren’t wrapped, there is quite a good chance that many of those books would never make it off the shelf, spend a lifetime without being opened, perhaps even be thrown away. We’ve breathed life into them again, to show that they are something of value, they are a useful commodity. Even if the story themselves are less than exciting, they help to create a connection between the humans engaging with them. And for that, they are indeed priceless.

Bold Folds: The Art of Origami

camsterdam Leave a comment

Autumn is in the air. In the tap-tapping of boots on pavement; in the crackle of falling leaves; in the rumbling roar of maize-wearing Wolverines. Trees hang heavy with apples, ripe for picking. Coffeehouses waft invitations of pumpkin spice and cinnamon out into the streets. And then, there’s the chill – a blessing and curse at the same time. Some days are energetic. Grab a scarf and a walking companion and the cold disappears. But other days are drizzly, gray, and frankly, a bit seasonally depressing. When days like those hit, why not grab some perfectly patterned square bits of paper and fold away the stress of classes and decorate your room at the same time?

This past summer, while at home rummaging around the craft closet for school supplies, I came across an old packet of Origami paper and felt my childhood flash back. The hours I could spend, practicing patience, dedicating a long-attention span to folding and unfolding paper, to licking and nursing the cuts on my fingers. The pleasure of creating a menagerie of cranes, penguins, dragons, rabbits, fish, foxes, elephants, (but mostly cranes), and set them up on the table before me. Made from my own hand.

I remembered reading the children’s book, “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes” by Eleanor Coerr, for a first grade book report project. An inspirational book, indeed, that makes you want to go out and make something, do something, to put a smile on someone else’s face. My mom and I had toiled away to make a crane for each student in the class, and it was all worth the effort.

With such good memories folded neatly in my brain, I decided to bring the packet of multi-colored pre-cut squares with me to college this year. Every once in a while, I take out a sheet, put on a YouTube tutorial video, and focus on the folds – a great distraction from homework.

The word ‘origami’ comes from the Japanese ‘ori’ meaning folding and ‘kami’ which means paper. The art of paper folding is mostly credited to the sixth-century Japanese monks who created simple, religious designs for Shinto ceremonies. Paper folding spread around the world, to Spain, the Middle East, Britain and the US, and continues to be a flourishing art form today.

One of the great marvels of origami is that all it requires is one piece of square paper. Pre-cut squares, some plain-colored, some patterned, can be bought at craft and stationery shops for $1-4, depending on the paper count. Not too crippling an expense when you consider that no glue, scissors or tape are necessary! Ingenuity and patience is all that’s needed, that and some good, clear instructions.

Most origami packs come with some poorly drawn step-by-step instructions. But, we’re in the digital age and can and should take advantage of YouTube videos (it’s loaded with them!) and dedicated websites like origami-instructions.com and origami.me. The trick is to master a few basic folds (inside and outside reverse, the petal fold, the valley and mountain fold) and a couple of bases (bird base, diamond base, kite base) and then a world of paper folding will, dare I say it, unfold for you. Soon you will be surrounded by ninja stars, hopping frogs and lotus flowers.

The great thing is that origami can be as private as you want it to be. No one has to know if your rabbit looks more like an earless rat. The art is in the doing and the concentration, the manual labor, the effort. Frustration and mistakes may come, but that’s all part of the art process. Of course, once you’ve mastered the crane, you will always have a party trick up your sleeve. A paper napkin can, with a bit of dexterity, be transformed into a thing of wonder! Your friends’ jaws will drop as you crease and sculpt and reveal a creature whose wings flap when they tug its tail.

And who knows? One day, you could be like Florigami founder and origami artist, Floriane Toultou!

Floriane Toultou’s “Silver Unicorn” (via goodstuffhappenedtoday)

So let the scarves, the autumn days, and your stress unfold – and indulge yourself in a little bit of paper magic. You’ll be glad you did!