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Nom de Bier – Samuel Smith Yorkshire Stingo by William Shakespeare

August 26, 2015 · by Oliver Gray

This is entry #1 in the series “Nom de Bier” – good beer reviewed by famous authors (as emulated by me). I do not claim to speak for these authors, nor am I an expert scholar in their particular style, so please feel free to correct/admonish as you see fit.

Beer Review – Samuel Smith Yorkshire Stingo (barrel aged)
Style: English Strong Ale
ABV: 8.0%
IBU: 30-35

By: William Shakespeare

Sonnet CLV

From bottom where Eros did spring his Sting,
Through much bubbly affair rose sweet head, O;
But focus nay on bubbles should the tale sing,
Instead in oaken planks dark fruits do grow.
A Smith named Sam, a hero born into
Malten cavalcades proceeding to tun;
Man and Nature together set to brew,
And what yeast embark may ne’er be undone.
An odd thing though this, partly tongues note sour –
By work of raisins and spry, teeming wood –
It dances reliquary, somber, dour;
As if mourning a time long passed, lost good.
A tribute, nay, an homage aged old,
Captured in glass, for you to pour, to hold.

Sonnet CLVI

That god not settled with simple ale bliss
Sought more beyond what tradition limits,
As sailors once set eyes on ambergris,
So too did Smith on the cooper’s habit.
And O! How the amber flowed from slick steel,
Down and round bent staves to beer bellies bound,
And here it stayed, a year, flavor made real:
The hold of a ship, full of beer, run ‘ground.
That year much did swirl for yeast finds sleep rare,
And what once was beer in tree’s brace did find
Notes, smells unfettered now but palate fair,
And bitter music played in time with rind.
If one sought brown or pale or stout sweet woe
For neither, nor, and none, this strong ale show.

Sonnet CLVII

Elements conjured forth through Water pure
A tincture; Fire’s bane and Earth’s lament.
On Air life gulped sweet life shy of demure,
And found in liquid our Spirit’s repent.
Ask one now, she, ‘should imbibe or abstain?’
‘All depends’ answer they, ‘what dost thou seek?’
From life from this place, melodic refrain?
Or days left unfulfilled, the same, so weak?
If the latter, fly now, Smith wants you not;
Much rather he’d have a soul gilded bold.
So into your life cast Gambler’s lot
A chance you should take, on true Yorkshire gold.
But also weigh Eros, mission love born,
And weigh too, ones headache come morrow, come morn.

Grammarian’s note: I went with sonnets over a play for brevity’s sake, and because I prefer rhymed iambic pentameter to blank verse. I started with CLV (155) as Shakespeare’s final sonnet was CLIV (154). The structure for a sonnet is 12 rhyming quatrains (ABAB CDCD EFEF) with a single rhyming (GG) couplet as the closing. For more information, check out the basics of his style: http://www.shakespeare-online.com/faq/writingstyle.html

Beer n’ Books – The Craft Beer Revolution by Steve Hindy

May 13, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Title: The Craft Beer Revolution
Author: Steve Hindy
ISBN: 978-1137278760
Pages: 272
Release date: April 22, 2014
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Genre: Nonfiction/History
Format: Hardcover
Source: Review copy

Growing up in a British expatriate household full of Oxford English Dictionaries and Encyclopedia Britannica, we playfully joked about our public school’s approach to teaching American history. My parents, products of northern England’s primary schools, found the way children were introduced to the political and social pedigree of early America both funny and fascinating. They’d look over homework assignments, amazed at how much detail was afforded to every battle, every colony, every document revision (as compared to British history), impressed at how thorough a retelling of events could be when it only had to cover a few hundred years, not a few thousand. But despite the depth they felt it often lacked applicability, that some of the history seemed forced, bloated to fill time and text book pages, with emphasis put on certain events to artificially inflate, not because of their influence of the founding of the nation.

They may have had similar concerns about Steve Hindy’s fresh release, The Craft Beer Revolution, which chronicles the rise of craft beer (defined as not the stuff from Miller or Coors or Budweiser) starting in 1965 and running up to present day. Forty-nine years isn’t an excessively long period of time to cover in 272 pages. The good news: their concern would have been misplaced. Although faced with the daunting task of sifting through pretty much all of modern America’s brewery, brewer, and beer-soaked history, Hindy manages to use his experience cofounding Brooklyn Brewing to condense and highlight many of the important aspects that led us to our fermented future. This is the journey of craft beer, told by one of its pioneers.

Those into beer know names like Jack McAuliffe, Fritz Maytag, and Ken Grossman, recognize that these men are the spiritual hop-wielding grandfathers of modern brewing. But to the layman, beyond a few photos, and a few too-often-used quotes, these men might seem two dimensional, spectres of a time when small brewing was as rare as organic labels in the grocery store. To the new beer enthusiast, these names might be completely alien.

While there are several other good reads that fall like wild yeast into the open fermentation vessel of “craft beer history” (namely, Ken Grossman’s Beyond the Pale, and Tom Acitelli’s The Audacity of Hops), Hindy gives a strong voice to the people who masterminded our current surge, connects the reader to them with quotes and anecdotes that color them as the decorated, dedicated brewers they were (or are). The strength of the narrative springs from the deep, insider knowledge of someone who was on the front lines of the transition from homebrewing and brewpubs to full-fledged breweries. Through Hindy’s research and interviews, a reader can feel like she’s standing right next to Charlie Papazian as he went from nuclear engineer to the head of the Brewer’s Association, and looking over Sam Calagione’s shoulder as he brewed the first of the beers that would eventually lead to Dogfish Head.

There are moments when my parents fears are realized, and Hindy’s content seems at odds with his structure; like a paragraph shoe-horned into the heel of a chapter solely because it was bristling with such potent information. At times, this gives a feeling of too much foot in too little shoe, description or notes inserted with little introduction or transition, just to round out a chapter. These sections, despite being clunky, do tend to add certain character to the narrative. It’s hard to fault Hindy for having too much good content, but it wouldn’t be a BJCP certified review to suggest I didn’t notice some defects in the body of the narrative.

These issues smooth themselves out by the middle of the book, just in time for the second act to dance onto the revolution stage: the politics of distribution and some infighting between regional competitors who should have, in a perfect beer-filled world, been allies. Some ire seems directed at Jim Koch of Samuel Adams; at one point Hindy calls him the “Harvard MBA-type” who seemed more concerned with marketing than establishing a local brewery, opting to contract brew in his early years, rather than establish physical roots. Later, he offers some admiration for Koch’s rise to commercial fame, but I’d venture that Hindy won’t be sharing a Utopias with Koch any time soon.

Ultimately, Hindy does an admirable job of writing a story that walks delicately between esoteric and approachable, telling the complex story of politics and law in beer in a way that wouldn’t completely turn off someone who didn’t already have a propensity for the bubbly stuff. The closing is cautiously optimistic, with Hindy suggesting (hoping) that Big Beer’s attempts to sneak in and snag market share with things like Blue Moon and Shock Top might actually lead to more business for smaller breweries, once the average consumer’s tastes evolve a bit more. Several jargon laden, industry heavy chapters might be harder reads for people who aren’t into beer, but by the epilogue, the book has done a fine job of capturing the inundation of American beer onto fertile consumer soil, and provides a deep, probing look at just how the river gained enough momentum over the past 50 years to successfully overflow its banks.

Brew Fiction: Black Friday Rules

November 29, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Unsure of the why but well practiced in the how, Liam pulled the straps on his father’s kevlar vest tight, jostling the back plate to make sure it didn’t move and expose any vulnerable vertebrae near his neck. Reminders of past years nicked and slashed the thick canvas, letting the ballistic plastic below smile through as a dozen plaque-stained grins.

His father shrugged forward to test his gear, twisting and bouncing like a sprinter preparing for the one hundred meter. He pointed to the machete lazing on a stool next to the fire. Liam lifted the blade, watching the flipped images of the flames dance on its polished face, careful not to cut himself on the edge so recently honed to skin slitting sharpness.

It was too much ferocity for a ten-year old, too top heavy, too awkward and inelegant to be an effective weapon. But in his father’s hands, rough steelworker’s hands, it snapped through the air, a cobra striking with steel fangs. After three quick flicks he slid it into the scabbard already mounted on his hip with a satisfying shlink, like a key settling into a lock. “Dad, why do you have to go out?” Liam studied the flames, trying to scry the answer before his father responded.

“We won the tickets this year. I have to go. We’ve been waiting for this chance since your little sister was born.” He sank into the ochre couch as he bent to tie his boots, the tension in the room tightening with each pull of the black laces. Liam swallowed the mix of fear and tears that filled his little body to emotional maximum. “But…last year…”

His father didn’t look up from his boots. “Last year was different. I was just part of the mob. I thought maybe I could…but we don’t have to worry about that this year. I got tickets. I’ll be right up front. I probably won’t even have to use this.” He pet the machete like it was his loyal pet, man’s best metallic friend. The boots tied, he stood up. Where his lanky, underfed father had stood twenty minutes ago, a soldier stood now, a man made for war, ready to face or deal death, whichever came first.

From the window, Brooklyn looked split in two: slowly dying fires twinkled down the shadowy streets of the burrough, while those few who could still afford electricity blared prosperity from the top of the skyline like a decadent halo. Liam thought he could see into those impossibly high windows sometimes, catch a glimpse of the people in colorful clothes watching little men dance across digital screens, look into, however briefly, the life his father promised to bring home for them every November.

“Why can’t you just stay home? Me and Jess don’t need a TV. We’re OK, Dad.” His father stopped adjusting the filter on his gas mask and met the boy’s unblinking stare. “It’s not that easy, Liam. I want to give you the chance you deserve, and to do that, we have to fit in. One scan shows that we have no TV, no computer, and that keeps me from even interviewing for a better job.” He dashed a pile of high gloss ads off the kitchen table, casting a rainbow of sales across the sparsity of the ground-floor apartment.”We need this stuff, and today is the only day I can get it.”

A scream shattered the glass serenity of the night, the last cry of some unlucky soul falling early to the violence in the streets. His father knelt and put a hand on his shoulder. “It won’t be like last year, Liam. I promise. This time I’ll be there right when the meal ends. Right next to all the stuff. I’ve got a plan to get there, my whole route home. We’ve got the gear and I’m more prepared than ever. This year might mean we can move to the tenth floor next year.” He slung the empty sack over his shoulder, trusting the strength of his own bag more than the thin white plastic with the blue and yellow logo.

He moved towards the door, heavy boots marching out a funeral dirge on the wooden floors. “By why, Dad? Why does it have to be this way?”

His father turned around to take one last look at his son before he put his life, and his money, in the hands of the corporate machine. “Because it’s always been this way, son. There isn’t any other way to make it in this life. Those are the Black Friday rules.”

“Thousands they grieve as the Black Friday rule” – Flogging Molly

Brew Fiction: Firestone Walker Double Jack

July 2, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

The flames speak.

Each crack a noun, each snap a verb, each sizzling hiss an adjective. All part of a language no person can comprehend, part of an infinite chain of echoes that has been flaring and dying since that first bolt of lightning kissed the trees in the Earth’s infant years.

Interconnected, but not a hive-mind. Sentient, but not sentimental. Alive, but not quite living.

The flames sing.

They repeat every story ever told to them, mimicking the words and waves that thump out a beat for their endless dance. They absorb and become those stories, fueled by the tales and their troubadours, perpetuating the oral tradition with burning lips.

Every campfire a ghost story. Every grease fire a spitting satire. Every bonfire a Homeric odyssey.

The flames rage.

They’ve seen it all, those eyes in the inferno; the wars of steel, the wars of hearts, the wars of gold and greed. They know our history as it is their own, and lash with red-hot whips against the conflagration of our culture.

Unable to stop us. Unable to tell us. Unable to do anything but burn us if we get too close.

The flames die.

Their energy dissipates, leaving only the light of elder embers and the chants of a slow dirge. The heat leaks, and with it the story, warming the air and ground and soul of the planet, sprouting into new fledgling flames somewhere in the unseen distance.

In every flick then lick of fire or flame a word and idea. In every human eye a reflection of the glow. In us all a burning need to tell.

Valar Morghulis – Death in Game of Thrones

June 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I don’t normally write about pop-culture or TV or movies, and that’s mainly because I’m terrible at following trends. But Game of Thrones (or more accurately A Song of Ice and Fire) tickles my love for medieval fantasy, warfare, swords, and magic in all the right spots. I read the books in a post-injury literary-fever several years ago, and George R. R. Martin’s Westeros lore has been a stowaway on the ship of my brain ever since.

Spoiler Alert: The below has some spoilers, but it’s not exactly running for mayor of Spoilertown. If you haven’t read through at least A Storm of Swords or seen last Sunday’s episode of the HBO show, go read/watch, then come back. I don’t want to be that guy.

I think everyone who flipped/is flipping out about The Red Wedding missed the point. Yes, it was shocking. Yes, favorite characters died in horrible, sort of disgusting ways. Yes, it was all very unfair and how dare a major TV network and a famous author do this to poor, unsuspecting viewers. All that.

But why did we all react so viscerally? Why did a single scene – a minute or two out of an entire season – cause a social media explosion and such anguished outcry from fans?

Because we’ve been trained to expect immortality in our protagonists.

Think about it. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas kill what, nine thousand orcs each? And hardly even get a scratch? Aragorn falls off a massive cliff and then basically leads the battle of Helms Deep about 8 hours later. I don’t even think he took a nap in between. The trio fight in some of the largest, deadliest conflicts of the entire series where countless non-character humans and orcs and horses and trolls die, waltzing around all invincible, like they’ve been dipped in the River Styx. Frodo has a few too many dates with blades and giant spider stingers, but ultimately, we know he’s not going to die when things are at their most dire, because he’s still got a ring to destroy.

It’s not just a fantasy trope either. Luke and Han stroll casually through volley after volley of woefully badly stormtrooper aim, countless red-shirts are sacrificed to the Shatnerian gods so that Kirk and Spock can escaped uninjured, and James Bond always manages to roll free from that meticulously designed death-trap just before the laser burns off his crotch. Writers use this near-death tension to further the plot, and our mind fills in the details of the story, letting us pretend the hero is in life threatening peril, even when we know it’s just a surface level conflict. But we know, from all our collective viewing and reading experience, that the hero will get out of the perilous situation, somehow emerge from the underworld, unscathed.

We’ve been taught that if our heroes die, the story will die. It’s hardwired into our brains that we need the protagonists to live. When such an inborn rule is violated, and violated so dramatically, we react badly, because it shakes out entire view of the world.

Traditionally, death in literature is a major plot mover. Major characters are killed with significant purpose, to show the pain of true personal sacrifice or to provide a martyr for other characters to avenge. The placement of death is crucial to the narrative structure, either serving as the vehicle for the story (like The Lovely Bones) or a major turning point/start of a final quest for the protagonist (Obi-wan’s death/Dumbledore’s death). Authors traditionally respect the power of death, the weight and solemnity and gravity it brings to the page.

But not George R. R. Martin. He writes with a bladed pen, killing who you least expect, when you least expect it. His deaths are random, senseless, and often don’t support any blatantly obvious plot point. They are brutal and cruel and make you question everything you know about how stories are told. He doesn’t kill the people who seem to deserve death, and has no problem killing characters his readers are rooting for.

Martin understands non-romanticized death. Understands that death has no morality, no ethical base. It doesn’t choose to kill bad people because they are bad, and spare good people because they are good. Death is the natural end of life, the unplanned yang to our daily yin, and as a result, completely random. How many great people have died young from cancer or car accidents or at the hands of some psychopath with a gun, while evil, cruel people lurch around the Earth until they are old, causing pain and suffering for years and years?

The Red Wedding wasn’t written to simply to shock readers, and HBO didn’t make it so horrendously violent just because they’re into that kind of gore. It was done to support an existential theme, to show what life is like during wartime in a country where even a king, his mother, and his retinue aren’t safe. It was done to show that the main GoT characters are all still human, and can die just as easily and pointlessly as anyone else. Martin slams tradition in the face with a warhammer, forcing the speed and finality of death onto readers without any pomp or flashy shows of mourning. His scenes are so painful because they’re so real.

And that’s why everyone lost their collective shit when Robb hugged some crossbow bolts and Catelyn sang the Rains of Castamere with throat-blood accompaniment. Because the scene was so unsentimental, so honest. Because, extrapolated, it reminds us that all the money and fame and power in the world can’t save you from the grave. Because it was a perfect microcosm of what life – and death – really are.

Remember what Valar Morghulis translates to:

“All men must die.”

Craft and Draft: Writing and White Lightning

April 24, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Some of the Jungian Collective Unconscious must have slithered into my brain on that day, about three years ago, when I was trying to come up with a name for this blog. I like to think I named this blog in the way most people name blogs: I randomly came up with something alliterative, convinced myself it was clever, gloated to myself about how clever it was, and then registered the domain.

But in choosing this name, I inadvertently formed a tributary that emptied into those ancient streams of whiskey, and tapped into a keg of ideas bigger than this little blog. I never really considered its meaning, all the latent unspoken truth in two words and a conjunction, until I’d been writing for a while. I never noticed that connection between writing and drinking that dripped into every post, my running themes, and my entire literary life.

We all know that m any famous writers, historically, drank. Many current writers drink. Many unborn masters of literary prose, still swirling in the cosmic well of zygotes and potential, will drink. Alcohol is as natural as wanting to express and communicate ideas. As long as yeast eats sugar and paper eats ink, writers will drink and drinkers will write.

I drink. Not exactly a shock to anyone who reads this blog or knows me otherwise. In the harsh light of reality I probably drink too much, if you compared my intake to the recommendations of doctors, Surgeon Generals, or Mormons. But I don’t drink to dull any emotional pain, for there is very little pain in my life to dull. I don’t drink to escape an unfair world in which I have no control, for I’ve worked hard to be in control of my life.

I drink because I like the taste of alcohol. Ale, wine, whiskey, rum, et al. I’ve gotten to a point where “beer” is probably my favorite flavor. It really has nothing to do with the alcohol content, but more so with injecting my palette with pleasurable experience. I’d gnaw on beer flavored gum if it was available and wouldn’t get me fired for drinking (or chewing) on the job. I’ve eaten “energy bars” made from spent beer grain. I even pop hops into my mouth while I’m homebrewing, nibbling on pellets or chomping on cones.

But I also drink to experience an ephemeral connection to something older, something external myself. A fleeting glance at the infinite. A forbidden communion with greater truth that we pay for with a hangover. A way throw my brain out into the same world as Joyce and Hemingway and Poe, to see what they saw, to figure out why they were looking in the first place. In the same way many people pray to find their gods, to ascertain certain truths, to understand their lives and the universe, I genuflect at the altar of the nature deity, CH₃CH₂OH.

Glass in One Hand, Pen in the Other

What makes alcohol special? There are many other ways to alter one’s mind if that’s the goal: meditation, prayer, marijuana, mushrooms, opiates, exercise. But all of those things are hard to do while writing. Every tried to write while jogging? Believe me, it doesn’t work like you’d hope. A lot of other drugs require both hands or complete focus for a period of time, during which you can’t write. Alcohol sits and waits for you. It doesn’t mind that you’re neglecting it while typing away. It is your passive, quiet friend at the back of the party who you haven’t talked to for 2 hours, but who will still toss you a beer from the cooler when he sees you heading his way.

In addition to being legal and relatively cheap in most places, alcohol lends itself well to the physical aspects of the writing process. It takes time to form a good paragraph, craft a good metaphor, just like it takes time to tame a good single malt, to savor a good IPA. The glass goes down as the word count goes up. There is a direct connection between an increase in productivity and a decrease in liquid.

When you stop to take a moment to reread or to think of your next transition, you can take a sip, let the beer or wine or spirit lubricate the rusty metal of those mental gears. And then just as quickly as you picked the glass up it is back down, your fingers back on the keyboard, the next step in the delicate waltz of clicking and sipping.

And just like an idea takes time to congeal, to fully form into something effective and readable, the alcohol slowly, methodically creeps into your mind. Opiates and cannaboids hit your brain quickly and unforgivingly; you’ll go from sober to stoned too quickly for even your most energetic ideas to keep up. But alcohol, no, it is patient. It lets your ideas sprout wings as the buzz rolls in. You get drunk on creativity and the booze itself, nearly at the same time, as long as you’re not downing shots and shotgunning beers like a Frat boy during Greek Week.

Two sides, same coin

Those artistic types who drink, who appreciate the craft in equal balance with the crunk, seem to fall into two categories. The writers who drink to drown their demons, hide them from the world, and the writers who drink to let the demons loose, free them from their midnight cages.

The prior are the kinds of people who live on the teetering edge of debilitating stress. The kind who stagger down a fine, fine line between wanting and needing. These people constantly wage a war against their pasts, trying to forget or make sense of those unfair events, using alcohol as a way to quiet the manic buzz of painful history darting around their mind for just a minute so that they can create.

If you are like this, you’re in good company: James Joyce was a ball of neurosis, likening his favorite white wine to the lightning he feared. Tennessee Williams knocked back more than his fair share, trying to confront his sexuality in a time when such things were kept well behind closed closet doors.

But for every head there is a tail. The latter kind of writer embraces the blur, loves the lack of inhibition that comes from the warm and fuzzy ethanol bloat. These writers (including the one you’re reading right now) include the booze-fairy among their muses, letting the scents and bubbles and lacing mingle with and taint their pool of metaphors. These people find inspiration in the bottle and the bottom, often letting their minds wander into unexplored landscapes while firmly holding the hand of inebriation, discovering things they probably wouldn’t have in the harsh burn of a sober morning.

If you’re one of these writers, you’re likely to meet Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Faulker, and a ton of other famous writers who weren’t shy about their drinking habits, whenever you finally make it to that mead-filled greathall in Vallhalla.

Cursed Blessing

Disclaimer! It is not healthy to drink heavily. In fact it’s quite unhealthy if science is to be believed. Excessive drinking also leads to crappy writing, mainly because your fingers hit all the wrong keys and your eyes can’t really see the screen. Alcohol is a power that should be treated with respect, lest it consume you as you consume it. My father passed an adage on to me some years ago, a clever warning about the dangers of that one last beer: “The man takes a drink, the drink takes a drink, and the drink takes the man.”

There is a weird pervasive attitude in the world of art that a person must have a screwed up past or some ravenous personal demons to be successful. It sometimes goes as far as to suggest that the alcohol or drugs or other addictions were the reason for the success. They cite the great artists and authors, point out that some of the most perfect art was created by some of the most broken people. They claim the best memoir is built from a horrible childhood, and the best canvases are covered in just as much blood as paint.

I’m gonna have to go ahead and call bullshit on that. There are any number of successful people who lived either decidedly plain or otherwise happy lives. Like Erik Larson or David Sedaris or David Quammen. They still have plenty to say, wonderfully fresh ideas, and enjoy abundant, well-deserved respect.

Pain isn’t necessary. Helpful? Sure, maybe, for some people. Mandatory? Nah dude.

Alcohol is just another experience out there. One that a lot of creative types turn too, probably out of ease and access and history. One that can be fun or awful, that can enhance or destroy. It’s up to you as a person and an artist to decide how or when or if to use it. But remember to be reasonable. No one writes well hungover.

Remember Hemingway’s immortal words:

Write drunk, edit sober.

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”
-Hunter S. Thompson

Craft and Draft: The Diction Affliction

March 28, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

If I called a very talented but very socially awkward artist a “freak” how would you feel?

What if I called the same person “avant-garde” instead. Do you feel differently about them now?

And if I called them a “savant” or a “prodigy” or “off beat” do you change your opinion of what this person is like?

Our words carry context and power beyond their basic definitions. We’re consciously choosing word after word after word as we write, words that have long, complicated histories and cultural nuance, words that can mean so much or so little based on the context provided.

Enter diction.

The French call it “le mot juste” (translated to “the right word”) but for us unilingual English people, it’s just “word choice.” Diction helps dictate the tone of your writing, informs the reader of your intentions in the piece and your attitude towards the subject and audience. Good diction moves the narrative along naturally and adds meaning through individual words while shitty diction screws with and trips up a reader who is confused over how and why a certain word was used.

Do you see how dropping in the words “shitty,” “screws with,” and “trips up” in that last clause changed the tone of my writing? I suddenly went from relatively proper to lowly colloquial. One word can change a writer’s tone immediately, even throw an entire paragraph off its intended course.

Being a good writer is synonymous with picking the best words to serve your story. Good diction (and good writing) means the intentional and deliberate selection of the right words in the right places, choosing concrete specifics over bland abstracts.

So how can you employ correct, conscientiousness diction?

You have to embrace words, make love to them with your brain, let their timeless beauty overwhelm your emotions, merge with and tickle your soul in all the best spots. You have to find joy and energy in the way certain syllables so delicately roll from your tongue or pole-vault off the page into your eyeballs. You must adore words to the point where your immediate family finds it very, very annoying.

But that’s not weird because we’re writers, right? Right?

Diction-ary Definitions

There are two ways to define a word: denotation and connotation.

Denotation is the dictionary definition of the word. The good old fashioned, “let’s argue over what this word means after 5 glasses of pinot on Thanksgiving” definition. The denotative definition includes all official variations of a word including noun, adjective, or adverb forms, if applicable.

Connotation is any alternate meanings of the word that you won’t find in any dictionary, even the OED. Colloquialisms, cultural references, slang. These are the definitions that people try to use in Scrabble to justify their nonsense 85 point word. These definitions are loaded with meaning and can connote a time period, regional location, or societal bias when used correctly.

The word “pop” is a great example. The denotative definition means “to make a short, quick, explosive sound.” The connotative meaning could be a reference to carbonated sugary beverages in you’re from the Midwest, or a reference to popular trends in music or literature or film.

Connotation also carries with it certain ethical or moral weight, steering your reader in a certain direction based on the words used to express the ideas. Consider the word “unemployed” verses “jobless” verses “vocationally challenged.” Compare “drunken pirate” to ” nautical rum enthusiast.” Word choices can change the ethical impact of writing by letting the reader know what the writer thinks about the topic, and probably where he’s going to take the argument.

Always make sure you know what a word means before you use it. If you’re not sure, look it up! A careful reader will immediately notice a glaring malapropism and you’ll lose valuable writing-cred-points. Make specific word choices, not pacific ones.

Be careful with connotation. Some connotative meanings may seem obvious to you, but may alienate or confuse a reader from another area/country/generation. Some might even offend a reader if you didn’t know that a certain word is used derogatorily in another culture.

High, Medium, Low

Diction can also be measured, sort of.

High diction is sophisticated and erudite, packed with Latin-based words, complicated grammatical structures, many-syllable words, and educated allusions or references. This style of writing lends itself perfectly to academic, medical, or scientific journals, but tends to alienate (and generally piss off) other audiences.

Low diction is conversational. It can be silly, simple, to-the-point, and uses smaller words. This style is good for addressing general audiences but tends to be too casual for intelligent readers who often read to learn and experience new things.

Medium diction is balanced. Zen writing. A Libra’s preferred state. A combination of high and low; enough high to entertain or teach or impress a reader but enough low to keep them comfortable and not overwhelm them with stuffy stuffiness.

It can be very difficult to strike an effective balance in your word choices, but if you can (through lots and lots of practice), it ultimately strengthens your writing in ways you may not have though possible.

A writer like David Quammen couldn’t possibly write the type of science-narrative he does without smacking his high diction over the head with a fish sometimes to bring it low. He find the perfectly smooth travel lane between the fast (of readability and enjoyment) and the slow (of of highly technical science) and takes you for a joy ride you didn’t expect, all because he balanced his diction.

Decidedly Dictative

Words are the Lego bricks of our craft (and grammar is the little colorful instruction pamphlet). It’s up to you to know what each brick looks like, sounds like, smells like, and tastes like. You can forge phenomenal creations if you place the right bricks in the right order at the right time.

Your words are the only way you can connect to your reader, so make sure you’re meaning what you’re saying when you’re saying what you mean. Get to know your favorites. Read about them, study them, discover all their meanings. Add more and more words to your arsenal until you’re overflowing with worldly wordly weapons.

And when you’ve got an impressive collection, use them, often and deliberately to great effect, to create characters and turn phrases and spout silly irreverent witticisms.

You’re going to spend a lot of time alone with words if you’re going to make this writing thing happen. Might as well be BFFs.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!” – Lewis Carroll

How to Read like a Writer

February 6, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Reading is like eating seven-layer dip.

At first salivating glance, you see piles of gorgeous green guacamole. A mountain range of avocado-salsa blend contained between four walls of Pyrex. It is easy to be emotionally overcome by the beauty of the guacamole, thinking that, from this angle, the dip is nothing but guacamole.

But if you maintained this perspective, and someone asked you to recreate the seven-layer dip, you’d be content to mash up 13 avocados, stick them in a bowl, and shove them proudly at your party goers with a grin that says, “I made dip.”

To successfully make seven-layer dip, you have to understand that is has, y’know, seven layers. Beneath the obvious top-guac hides delicious cheese and olives and sour cream and beans. The dip itself is kind of complicated. The flavor comes from a combination of foods, all working together to create a single unified taste.

This is the problem with reading casually, only paying attention to the events of the plot and the overall story. You’re only noticing the top layer of the dip. Sure, you’re learning about story telling and enjoying yourself in the process, but you’re missing out of the other layers of literature that make a story robust and complete.

To recognize the layers, stare through the side of the Pyrex dish. Cross-section, not bird’s-eye. Think of it in a whole bunch of parts and techniques sandwiched together to make an engaging story. Think of it in layers.

Things you’ll need:

-A brain (I’ve found that the one inside your skull is easiest to access)
-A book (preferably something with some literary merit)
-A beer (optional, I guess, if you hate all things that are good)

Step 1: Recognize what you should be recognizing

A lot of scholars have attempted to sum up what makes something “literary” (which usually results in a list of 10/15/18/22/25 “things”). There is a lot of grey area. There is even more debate. Some aspects of literature are forehead smackingly obvious, others…not so much. I covered my take on these a few months ago.

It’s up to your inner Sherlock to decide what tools an author used in writing her book. Which means you need to be paying close attention while you’re reading. Which means you can’t just flop onto a beach chair, plow through a Robert Patterson novel while mutating your melanin, and expect to come out a better writer once you reach the satisfying, bolded, 16 pt, “THE END.”

Therein lies the jerk chicken rub. A lot of us read to relax. It’s our escape from the hellish realities of our grey, damp, corporate dungeons. The last thing we want to do while we read is analyze. I get it, I really do. I’m right there wanting to read for leisure with you.

But I’ll play messenger and deliver the bad message even if it means the king will behead me: you need to turn yourself into an analyst. There’s nothing glamorous about it. If you want to write like the authors you’re reading, you have to study the writing.

Start recognizing when an author like Jennifer Egan uses structure and odd timelines to enhance her narrative. Make notes when you see someone like Erik Larson using dueling narratives and foreshadowing to build tension even when we know how the story ends. Start recognizing that these are deliberate choices made by the authors, not just magic leprechaun luck that innately comes from being born during a significant astrological event.

Good writing is the culmination of a ton of intentional choices that are transposed into words and onto the page. Start learning what those choices are, and why they were made. When you learn them, you can emulate them, and your writing will transcend.

Step 2: Recognize what’s missing in your own writing

Talent is weird. It’s like we’re forced through the water sprinkler of talent as kids. Where the spray of talent-juice hit our brains, we’re awesome. Where it missed, we’re clueless.

Some of us are great at playing with language, turning phrases, being grammatically devastating Others are amazing at building tension through dialogue and scenes. Others can use structure to arrange a story in such a way that it is fresh and unexpected to the point where the reader yells, “no effin’ way!” at the book in disbelief.

It’s good to know what you’re good at.

It’s even better to know what you suck at.

If your stories seem one-dimensional, notice how great authors use back story, probing dialogue, and action within scenes to enhance without being all up in your grill about it. Study the latent symbolism in a work and learn how that helps connect the reader to the story in a more universal, approachable way.

Read authors who are great where you are terrible (also admit that you are terrible at certain things). Learn how they do it. Eat it, process the calories, make that technique part of your physical being. The only way to learn what talent didn’t give you is through mindful application of a stubborn will.

Step 3: Take your time

Unless you’re involved in some sort of underground reading death challenge (and yes, I’m fully aware of what the first rule is), the stakes are pretty low. No one except maybe your book club peeps or that one annoying friend (who really only wants to talk about the book, so her intentions are good) really cares how quickly you read something.

It’s not the Daytona 500 with little paper cars with words on them. You can read at your own pace.

Actually, no. You should read at your own pace. Take as much time with the words as you need to understand them. Reread if you’re really trying to internalize a specific technique, or figure out why something was so effective.

The book or essay or whatever won’t self-destruct after five seconds. You’ve got plenty of time to read. Take it.

Step 4: Take Notes

If you can’t seem to dive deep into the creamy nutrient filled sub-layers of literature, force reading to be more active by gluing writing to it.

If you’re like me, writing in the margins of a book is painful (reading is the closest thing I have to religion, so marking up a book feels sort of like defiling a sacred relic). But sometimes, to remember certain spots, commit the best parts to memory, it is necessary. With the help of our new computer overlords, we can at least do this without taking ink to page.

Open a Word doc or keep a notepad nearby when you read. Write down the stuff you find interesting. Ask questions. Try a certain technique to see how it’s done.

By writing while you read, you’re engaging more than just your eyeballs. You’re introducing your fingers and possibly ears to the dance. The more senses you use, the harder your memory works and the more points of reference it has to build a permanent structure in your brain. It’s science, bitches.

Step 5: Read good shit

Sorry about the “bitches” thing. I got carried away.

None of this fancy advice matters if you’re not reading stuff that is well done. Not that everything you read has to be a timeless classic, but it should at least be worthy of your time.

The old saying is, “You are what you eat.”

In our world, “You write what you read.”

The books and essays and memoirs and news stories and shampoo bottles and billboards and waffle iron instruction manuals will seep into your unconscious. Each one makes up part of the synaptic web of what we understand to be “writing.” Each has it’s place and it’s purpose and teaches us something (even if that thing is what color dye is used in peach-scented Alberto V05).

If you’re going to read, read well. Read up. Spend your time with things that will make you smarter. Challenge yourself and strengthen your writing web.

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” -Sydney J. Harris

Craft and Draft: (October) 4th and Goal

October 4, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

Ermahgerd, thernly verrled NerNerWriMer perst!

Ahem, blech, hrrrruugggg. Cough.

Oh my god! Thinly veiled NaNoWriMo Post!

It’s October and we all know what that means. Pumpkin ale, and raking leaves, and Cinammon Apple Yankee Candles for everyone! Oh, and NaNoWriMo 2012 starts in roughly one month. 27 days to be more accurate, or 26, really, since today halfway over.

Last time, I talked loosely about preparation. What and how and why we’re going to punish our brains throughout November. I even made some new masochistic writing friends! I’ve been spending my off-time (what little there is of it) working on the outlines for my stories and building the structure that I plan to fit them all into. It’s a steaming mess of Word docs right now, but the idea is gestating and hopefully my little bundle of literary joy will be nearly fully formed come December 1.

But today, I’m more concerned about the future. The time beyond NaNo 2012, the cosmic unknown of days and events that have only happened in our dreams. Things like NaNoWriMo are great catalysts for getting shit done, but they beg the much larger questions: why are you writing a novel and what do you plan to do once you’ve written it?

Phil (via Writer’s Codex) got me thinking about why I write, and what that means about the person I am and the person I want to be. I write partly out of catharsis, partly for fun, and partly as a manual “Save As…” function for my brain. I’ve got a lot of potent abstracts bouncing around in there, and writing makes me feel like I’ve got a way to catalog them. A Dewey decimal system for my ideas, emotions, musings, and memories, if you will.

And more importantly, I write because it makes my brain all bubbly with joy, which makes life that little bit sweeter.

The why of writing is a philosophical abstract; it’s the same as asking why some people merely like cookies and some people would commit felonies for a tray of freshly baked chocolate chip wonder. We may never know the answer. You can muse on it all day, but may never find an answer that truly satisfies your self indulgent inquiry.

It’s brain-stretching to think about why I write, but it doesn’t get me very far in terms of my craft. I prefer specifics; concrete ideas with real, undeniable answers. Something with some weight behind it, like a good machete or a loaf of stale french bread.

To that end, I’ve established goals that I constantly remind myself of to keep me on track. They are, as of today:

-Finish my masters by the end of 2013 (slated to write my thesis next fall)
-Publish my first “large work” (this could be a number of things) before I’m 30 (I’m 27 on Oct. 21)
-Update my blog (to keep my writing muscles toned) at least twice a week
-Make writing a priority over other non-mandatory things (as fun as Borderlands 2 is, it isn’t going to satiate that creative thirst)
-Enjoy the act of writing, not just the final product (because, duh)

These have kept me focused and committed, even on the days I just don’t feel like doing the Fingers-Keyboard dance. I’ve found that they work sort of like affirmations; the more I remind myself of these goals, the more I see myself moving towards completing them, and the happier I feel about being a few words closer to achieving a dream.

Our brains are crazy powerful if we let them off the leash.

So to all my fellow NaNo’ers: Beyond why you write, what are your goals for your writing? Do you do it just to keep the legions of brain-demons at a sword’s length, or are you striving for a taste of validation via large-scale publishing? Are you writing to get that mega-huge, sprawling idea into something more tangible, or just for the personal challenge of the whole thing?

Whatever your reasons, setting goals will help. Without a goal, you can never score.

“My goal is to be the first cat to complete a jigsaw puzzle. Or steal all of the pieces and hide them under the bed. Either way.”

Craft and Draft: Literary Smiterary

September 24, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

I had a James Joyce-style epiphany regarding the idea of a “writing vision” while sitting in class this week. It struck me that while I knew why I liked to write, and what I like to write, and even sometimes how I like to write, I was still missing an overarching vision for what kind of writing I wanted to do.

This may seem odd. “Oliver, writing is writing, you silly person”, you might say out loud while reading this, rolling your eyes and mentally noting that I’m not very smart sometimes. And yes, in some capacity, that is true. But what separates Shakespeare from Stephanie Meyer? What makes Hemingway and Hawthorne worth reading, all these years after their time? Why do some authors stand the test of time, while others disappear into the 1$ bargain bin of history?

No one would argue that Dan Brown, Stephen King, James Patterson, and John Grisham are successful authors. They alone account for four of the top ten best selling fiction authors of the past ten years. But will anyone be reading their work 50 years from now? 100 years after they left their mark on the world of writing, and have been long interred in their mounds of dirt or ashen jars? 200 years from now, when paper no longer exists, and we simply ingest data with our minds in place of physically putting our eyes all over the words and reading it?

It’s very difficult to say, but many an academic would say, resoundingly, “no.” While these authors might sell well now, they lack some key nucleobases in the DNA of their work. These books tend to be pulp; something written for entertainment, to tell a generic story, to get a quick rise or reaction from a reader. Very rarely does one ever go back to reread one of these novels because one journey through was all you needed as a reader and no more could be garnered from extensive study.

Look, Frodo, we know you’re upset that your book, “There and Back and Back and Back and Back Again”, only got 2 stars on Amazon, but don’t do anything you’ll regret. Put the massive dragon firework down.

They’re the kind of paperbacks you read on the beach, when your mind needs a vacation just as much as your body.

The elephant taking up all of the space in the room of this blog post is a word we (should) all know well: Literature. Being literary. Literating the shit out of your writing.

The word get tossed around like the smallest kid in a birthday party moon bounce. It’s sort of an “apply to anything” phrase; I’ve heard people call almost anything with words and pages “literary” over the years. “Yea, that GreenPlum Massively Parallel Processing white paper was some great literature.” No, no it wasn’t. It was painful and awful and made you cry and you know it! Stop using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

So what makes something a piece of literature instead of just pointless smatterings of ink? According to my esteemed teachers and some extensive internet research, (arguably) ten things:

1. Multiple levels of meaning: One word: allegory. Swift’s Tale of a Tub is about three brother’s interpreting their father’s last will and testament. Or it’s about three branches of Christianity interpreting the bible in different ways. Lord of the Rings is about a hobbit holding the fate of the world in a tiny ring, but it’s also about the impact of the industrial revolution in England. Literary works speaks longer and deeper and more piercingly about cultural, social, and spiritual topics.
2. Revelation upon multiple meanings: building on the first idea, literature opens itself up for interpretation and inquiry. It asks the reader questions, some which can’t be answered. It also tends to stir a reaction in the reader, whether emotional or logical, making them think (or rethink) their view on a particular topic. This reaction can be completely different from reader to reader, and probably should be.
3. Broader themes or messages: beyond just simple allegory or allusion, literature speaks to social movements, universal truths, and the human condition. Shakespeare remains one of the most read authors of the English language because his plots, characters, and settings are so universally understood. It is relatively easy to adapt Shakespeare to any time period or culture because the things he wrote of are woven into the dense, 2000 thread count Egyptian cotton of our existence.
4. Character interaction and conflict: literature is about us. We. The People. Nos populus. When you finish a literary work, you often remember what a character went through and why, not necessarily where and when. We, as readers, love to see that a characters can win, lose, love, and fear. It’s a reminder that our experience is a shared one. We also read to see that characters can and do change, in hopes that we can change ourselves.
5. Heritage: literature breeds literature, or at least it tries to dry-hump it at a party after too many glasses of boxed wine. Most literary writing includes homages or references to other works of literature, whether those that inspired it, or those that it stands in opposition to. This is partly a respect thing; a literary writer has to appreciate the work done before, otherwise, how can be pretend to write it ourselves?
6. Specific craft techniques, language, and creative innovation: this is my favorite aspect. Literature is art. It is the fanciful weaving of lumps of letters to create magical stories and worlds and talking unicorn-hippos that explode into chocolate covered coffee beans when they laugh. But it is also about understanding the English language, rolling with and then deliberately breaking convention. It is about knowing what and why you are writing, how it works and how it doesn’t, and having some goddamn fun while you’re at it. Remember, if literature is art, literary writers are artists.
7. Timelessness: literature never dies. If it is great writing that speaks quite astutely to your brief time on this spinning rock of oblivion, someone in the course of history will remember it (or find it) and want to study it. This answers my question from above; people still read Hemingway and Hawthorne because they are worth reading. There is something to learn, be it craft, life lessons, or just how crazy life was back then. More importantly, there will always be something to learn from works of literature. Immortality is between the spines of an amazing book.
8. Philosophical thought: literature provokes us to think and learn and reevaluate why we’re here. It isn’t directly philosophy, but it certainly includes a lot of concepts that overlap. It moves people to action, either within themselves or within their community. Don’t believe me? See: The Communist Manifesto, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or – I dunno – On The Origin of Species.
9. Authored: a literary writer, even one penning extensively researched nonfiction, is always apparent in their writing. That isn’t to say that all literature has a bias, but it certainly contains and exposes the emotions and intellectual views of its author. A book that didn’t would be dull and lifeless. Sort of like what technical writing and neutral journalism has become today.
10. Challenge: lastly, literature is hard. No one claimed that reading and understanding Tolstoy was easy. A lot of the “best” writing is also the most difficult to read and digest. But that challenge is what leads a reader to learn something new, look at something from a different angle. No one can argue that Joyce’s Ulysses is incredibly challenging to read, but without his stream of consciousness style the modernist movement would have started much later, and creative writing would still be mired in the rigid rules of classical though. Literature pushes the boundaries of what we accept and shows us that difficult isn’t always bad, and that progress comes through hard work.

I’ll leave you with a question: what is your personal writing vision? Do you want your work to embody these elements of literature and stand as a testament to the fragmented prism of human existence, or to be something more fleeting, a snapshot of our lives from the time it was written, meant more for entertainment than for education?

Whatever you choose, it doesn’t matter. Neither is better than the other, as they both have merits and flaws. The key is to write well and write often. Make your writing an extension of your creative mind and do it the best you can. If you do that, you’ll be successful, but more importantly, you’ll be happy.

And remember: Writers are artists. Go make art. Be it finger-painting or Caravaggio. Oh, and have some fun while you’re at it.

No, no, no; this is all wrong. My beard is more of a “mist grey” not a “sea spray grey.” And red robes? Seriously? Where is that sculptor? He is so fired. Screw this statue, I’ll just go write a book.

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