I'm Published (again)!

I am proud to announce the publication of a guest blog post on TheWritePractice.com website.

Showing, not telling, is the mantra I use with my students in the first months of teaching Writer’s Craft. I tell them they must paint a word picture, using sensory information from all five senses. The trick is in finding balance between when to show and when to tell.

The post’s direct link is http://thewritepractice.com/word-pictures/. Please feel free to visit the site and post in the comments. I will make every effort to get back to you within 24 hours of posting.

I'm Published!

I am proud to announce the publication of my first guest blog post on the WriteToDone.com website.
Modelling expert text is something I learned about in teachers’ college and have used many times over the years, both as a tool with which to develop my own writing voice (as I discuss in the article) as well as with my students as a writing exercise.

The post’s direct link is http://writetodone.com/2013/05/02/develo-your-narrative-voice-by-stealing-from-bestselling-authors/.

Please feel free to visit the site and post in the comments. I will make every effort to get back to you within 24 hours of posting.

Below is the Twitter announcement for the post:

Foreshadowing Rant

When Killian Jones, aka Captain Hook in ABC’s Once Upon A Time vows to get even with “The Crocodile” aka Rumplestiltskin aka Mr. Gold, it’s not foreshadowing. From the moment we meet Hook, he is at odds with Rumple. When Rumple cuts off Hook’s hand and he begins to plan his revenge, it builds suspense as the viewer wonders how he ever could, seeing as Hook stuck in Fairytaleland and Rumple is stuck in Storybrooke. His plan to get even is idle posturing, not foreshadowing. The long shot of The Jolly Roger in Storybrooke harbour however, now that’s foreshadowing, as it hints that Hook will finally get his revenge at some point in the future.

In spite of what SparkNotes may say, when the witches tell Macbeth he will be Thane of Cawdor and King, it is not foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is much more subtle than that. WiseGeek defines it as giving “hints about things to come in later plot developments. It can be very broad and easily understood, or it may be [the] complex use of symbols, that are then connected to later turns in the plot.” To add to that, Buzzle says foreshadowing “can either be done in passing with the help of a comment, or as a thought that one of the characters has, as a symbolic representation through certain symbols, as well as certain other forms.” Going by this definition, the Hook revenge plot is the type of foreshadowing that is broad and easily understood.

I have just finished marking sixty exams in which students are asked to provide an example of literary devices, foreshadowing amongst them, from the works of literature studied in the semester. Invariably, students point to Macbeth and the first set of prophecies he receives from the witches early in the play. Told he will be Thane of Cawdor and king, the witches prophecies are not foreshadowing, any more than a character who states that he is about to go shopping and then leave to go to the store is foreshadowing. Conversely, the second set of prophecies may indeed be considered foreshadowing, as by this time the audience has learned the witches have the power to see the future and the prophecies are cryptic enough that one must have been paying attention to realize how they refer to Macbeth’s demise.

Foreshadowing in Macbeth occurs to predict Lady Macbeth’s death. Throughout the play, Shakespeare describes sleep as a metaphoric death. When Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, she is in a state between life and death. As Macbeth’s reign is about to come to an end with the attack of the English army, the audience knows that Lady’s Macbeth’s life as she knew it is also about to come to an end. Whether she survives or not, she will no longer be queen, which is a kind of death. Seeing how badly Lady Macbeth wanted her title, for her, actual death is probably preferable. If you missed the signs, missed making the connection between sleep and death, Lady Macbeth’s death would no doubt come as a shock.

Another example is in plant and tree imagery. In Act I, before Macbeth succumbs to his ambition, Duncan tells him, “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour to make the full of growing” (iv). Once Macbeth “plants” Duncan in the ground, he grows to be the new king. One of the markers that Macbeth’s end is near is when Birnam Wood advances on Macbeth’s Dunsinane castle. When Macbeth arrives at the witches’ lair before he receives the second set of prophecies, he comments they have, among other things, blown trees down (IV.i). When Macbeth hears the Birnam Wood prophecy, he asks “Who can impress the forest, bid the tree unfix his earth-bound root?” (IV.iii). This is after the witches show Macbeth an apparition of a child with a tree in his hand. Later, after seeing Banquo’s ghost, he admits to Lady Macbeth, “Stones have been known to move and trees to speak”. At this point, anyone that’s been paying attention should get the idea that trees and plants may play an important role in Macbeth’s future. This is how foreshadowing works.

Foreshadowing is difficult to incorporate into a piece of writing as it requires a great deal of planning. In the young adult novel I am currently crafting, I have been dropping breadcrumbs as to the revenant’s origin. That the necromancer responsible for Zulu’s resurrection is Malchus should come as a surprise to a few, but savvy readers will have picked up on this fact earlier in the plot than the reveal. One might ask, what keeps the reader reading if a major revelation is figured out early in the plot? Suspense is the answer. Even if the reader picks up on the clues and puts the puzzle together, he should continue reading to see if his assumption is correct. The reader is kept guessing if his interpretation is correct until the reveal, because foreshadowing done right is implicit in nature.

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Works Cited

Sparknotes. Macbeth Key Facts. 2012. .31 Jan 13.

WiseGeek. What is Foreshadowing. 2013. .31 Jan 13.

Anonymity and the Net

There is an inherent sense of anonymity built in to all modes of social media. This can be a good thing if your aim is to create an online persona in the event you wish to publish under a pseudonym, tweet as a character you have created in your writing, or post under your maiden name to avoid online detection of private status updates by your teenaged students. In most cases, however, the anonymity afforded by many online sites becomes a mask behind which those who disparage others hide. Perhaps the most frequent use of social media to this end is in cyberbullying. When I was a youth, bullying took place face to face, we always knew the identification of our tormentors, and there was a serious threat to our physical well-being in addition to our emotional well-being. Teachers felt free to ignore our reports, and telling us to ignore the bully and s/he would go away was classified as "doing something" about the problem.

Welcome to the new millennium where online bullying runs rampant, partially due to the anonymity factor, but also because it is easy for cruel jests to get sucked into the black hole that is cyberspace where they are lost to all but a select few who know their way around and who have precious time on their hands to uncover those small lumps of coal within the diamond mine that social media can be. Unfortunately, there is more publicity about Amanda Todd stories than positive ones about young people utilizing social media to exact social change. One example of this might be to use these sites to report incidences of cyberbullying rather than LOLing, retweeting or +1ing them. And while zero tolerance for bullying policies now extend beyond the confines of the schoolyard and into physical and online communities, it takes a strong-willed, sensitive principal to follow cyberbreadcrumbs and get to the bottom of reported cases of cyberbullying with as much zeal and sense of responsibility as they do for offline bullying.

Surprisingly, adults are not immune to the effects of online bullying. Teachers have been suffering through it every day of late, as people of all ages and from all walks of life lend their cybervoices to teacherbash with increased frequency. Web sites like RateMyTeacher give students and parents of said students from elementary through post-secondary a forum to lie about their teachers, blaming them as the root cause of all their problems--real or imagined--anonymity guaranteed. Sounds like a sweet deal, until you consider that poor teachers are not given the opportunity to confront their cowardly accusers. Isn't the right to confront one's accusers a basic tenet of some constitution or other?

The problem is, teachers deal with immaturity every day. They battle with children in adult sized bodies who refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions. If they fail, the teacher doesn't like them, or she's a hard marker; it has nothing to do with the fact that they arrive late, talk or tune out during lessons, and leave everything until the last minute when there is no time left to produce any sort of passable work. In their anger at getting into trouble, parents having been notified, or the realization that the month of July will be spent in credit recovery, social media becomes a handy outlet to besmirch the professionalism of the teacher. It is an opportunity to rally friends and family around you in cyberspace for a huge digital "there, there", an opportunity that teachers, in their professional maturity, are not afforded.

Though I don't advocate censorship of the net, I do advocate parental control of children using the net. Parents should make it a condition of their children owning a Twitter, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., account that their parents are a part of their circle of friends, followers, and the like. This might make the children--and let's face it, teenagers are children--think twice before they post. They might not mind if their friends see the posts, they might not believe their teachers are intelligent enough to find their posts, but if they knew their parents (or worse, grandparents) were reading their posts, it's just possible that it might make a difference.