Category Archives: Writing

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Critiquing his poetry at the bookstore bistro

. Poetry, Writing . . Leave a comment

“One or two per day of his,
  is about all I can stomach.”
Says White Chocolate Mocha
  lady in Icewear sweats.

“His words are like wall plaster;
  outdated — dry — & toxic.”
Says Expresso Octogenarian,
  guy in a sand-colored cardigan.

“Like reading doom squared;
  unworthy of the serious reader.”
Says the Seasonal Latte Sipper,
  in green turtleneck and red hi-tops.

“His lines remind me of malnourished children,
  weak – and searching for acceptance.”
Says the Decaf Goatee, with an unlit clove cigarette
  loosely held between thumb & forefinger.

“His words are stacked like cord wood,
   in search of a fire. Pure chimney fodder.”
Says Java Bean Frappuccino with,
  an air of extreme condescension.

“His net worth must be in pennies,
   if he survives on book sales.”
Says Caramel Macchiato, in a
  fine Brooks Brothers Suit.

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Richard has been banned from the club

. Poetry, Writing . Leave a comment

They removed his hole-in-one ball from display,
even before the salad fork had been pried from the wall.
Now, only stained upholstery and warped wall board
mark the spot–where Walker and Beem came to blows.
The waitress waits patiently to provide her statement.
A nine iron rests upon the mahogany bar, bent: Exhibit A.
Elaine—her face, the color of her bright tennis skirt,
refuses treatment. “I must have slipped,” she says.
“Dear Dickie wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Then, with a gasp, “Good God, the shards of glass!”
The poor valet, quakes in his white shorts and red vest.
The exit still vivid. Black streaks of rubber,
scorched — into painted concrete, evidence of retreat in haste.
Richard has been banned from the club.

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Rules for writers, Tom Hanks and the Pomodoros Technique

. Writing . Leave a comment

I enjoy reading what successful authors have to say about the writing process. I like to know what time of day they like to write – what they drink while writing – what music they listen to, or don’t listen to. Do they write longhand or on a keyboard?  I have long been interested in writing as a craft. Sometimes I care more for reading about famous writers than I enjoy reading their work.

And I also enjoy collecting writers ‘rules. Writers’ rules are bits of advice that successful writers hand down to the rest of us ‘wanna be’ writers to help us develop and grow as writers.

Today, I am reading a set of rules compiled by novelist, Jonathan Franzen. I think they are so good that I keep them bookmarked so I can read them periodically.

I find Rule 8 on Franzen’s list especially interesting:

“It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”

This is a bombshell rule. Since I am thinking that most fiction today is written at workplaces (computers), it makes me wonder if Franzen is correct. Do successful authors have to work offline? Is Stephen King sitting in his writing shed tapping away at an IBM Selectric typewriter (full disclaimer, I just checked the internet to make certain that I spelled Selectric correctly). So there, the internet is already distracting me from my writing.

After spending some time working on a novel, I have concluded that the internet is a fact checking rabbit hole, down which it’s easy to disappear and difficult to re-emerge. What begins as a Google search into the earliest month daffodils bloom in Minnesota is likely to end in a descent into social media hell. In short, fifteen minutes of productive writing often ends in three minutes of research, followed by thirty minutes of non-productive web surfing.

So, do I need a fountain pen and yellow legal pad to write my novel? Do I need to get my 70’s era Olivetti manual typewriter out of storage? Or is there any in between?

Which brings me to Tom Hanks.

I read an interview with Tom Hanks earlier this year. As if being an Oscar winning movie star wasn’t enough, Hanks decided to become a best-selling novelist as well, and recently completed a 448-page novel titled “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”. Early in the project, Hanks discovered that he needed help focusing on the task. To this end, Hanks used the much-touted ‘Pomodoro Technique’ to help him write his novel.

The Pomodoro Technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo, owner of a Berlin, Germany based consulting firm. Cirillo is credited with inventing the Pomodoro Technique, while he was a university student. Cirillo used a tomato shaped kitchen timer to time designated work intervals. The Italian word for tomato being Pomodoro, hence the name of the technique came into being.  

So, in practice it goes like this. Work periods are broken into 25-minute intervals, called pomodoros, after which you can take a 5-minute break. After four Pomodoros (about two hours), you are allowed a 20 – 30-minute break. Here we go:

  1. With your work open in front of you and ready to go, set a timer for 25 minutes. You can use a kitchen timer like Cirillo used, use one of a multitude of free online pomodoros timers, or just use your cell phone.
  2. NOW focus, focus, focus on the task.
  3. When the timer goes off at the end of the pomodoros, take a 5-minute break. Stretch, take a short walk, pour a cup of coffee etc. Just leave the work area.
  4. Repeat steps 1 through 3, three more times.
  5. Now take the big break. Go for a quick run, take a power nap, or pour a cocktail. You’ve done it.

According to the extremely focused folks at Harvard Business Review, the Pomodoro Technique not only helps users to turn off external time sucks like social media, but the real distractions that occur within our own heads.

I don’t know about you, but I’m up for trying the Pomodoros Technique.

I shall close with a quote from Tom Hanks regarding writing: “I write because I’ve got too many f—ing stories in my head. And it’s fun.”

Good for you Tom.

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My latest poetry book now available on Amazon

. What I'm Writing, Writing . , , , . 2 Comments

Few creative endeavors are as unlikely to bear fruit as publishing a poetry book. Paint a painting and you can at least hang it somewhere, and someone will look at it and say, “well, that’s a fine painting” or they will say “I wouldn’t hang that in my garage”. But in the end, they will look at the painting and it will receive the reviews that it deserves. Songs are much the same. Write a song and push it to YouTube and you will get plenty of input, good and bad.

But poetry books can fall into that proverbial crack of obscurity.

Poetry books are largely a labor of love, so getting reviews can be difficult. While putting together my second poetry book (which I am going to discuss shortly), I found that there are some truly great poets out there doing some impressive work. In upcoming blogs, I would like to talk about them. But today I want to announce that I have published my second poetry collection.

My latest collection of poems is titled “downed lines” and it is available on Amazon.com. You can search for it there, or you can simply click the link at the top of the page under “Books by W.E. Patterson”.  

So, what would a book launch be unless I give something away? That’s why I am giving away copies of my book to the first five or six people who ask. I might even give more away, I don’t know. Poetry is an inexact science, so the give-away will end when it feels right. I will even fork out the dough for the postage.

Thanks to all!

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Longhand: thoughts on cursive writing

. Uncategorized, Writing . Leave a comment

Lately on this blog, I have been talking a lot about time, and how we spend it, and which things are worth spending time on and which are not. In keeping with that flow,  I came across this topic on a social media platform regarding whether or not it is a good idea to teach ‘cursive’ writing to kids, or whether it is a waste of valuable classroom time.

I soon discovered that few topics raise the hackles of my fellow baby boomers faster than the suggestion cursive writing be removed from school curriculum. (If you don’t know what ‘hackles’ are, they are the short, erectile hairs on the back of a dog’s neck that rise when the dog is angered. So yeah, people really get worked up over it.)

The hoopla seems to surround the fact that what most of us learned in elementary school penmanship class, a style known as the “Palmer Method”,  is now deemed out of date. The Palmer Method being the ornamental handwriting technique developed by Austin Palmer back in the late 19th century. Today, 41 states have declared that schools are under no obligation to teach ‘cursive writing’, saying it is a waste of time. A handful of states, California, and Tennessee among them (go figure that), have said no way. Kids have to learn penmanship. So, do they, or don’t they? Mr. Palmer’s method involves exercises that teach kids to write a highly stylized form of scripting that probably has little (maybe no) value in today’s keyboard driven world. Or so they say.

So maybe that makes it a waste of time. I don’t know. I do know that few of us follow the rigid composition structure that we learned in school, and develop instead, a bastardized form of longhand writing that pulls from both printed lettering and a cursive script, into a style that we make our own.

To illustrate, see the photo below of my own handwriting as I began work on this blog post a few days ago:

So maybe writing from my beach chair did not afford me the opportunity to construct my script in accordance with Mr. Palmer’s instructions regarding method and execution:

… the movement of the muscles of the arm from the shoulder to the wrist, while keeping the fleshy portion of the arm just forward of the elbow [held] stationery on the desk. This movement should be used in all capitals and in all small letters, except the extended stem and loop, where a slight extension and contraction of the fingers holding the pen is permissible.”

Whew…

Proponents of teaching cursive cite brain stimulation and teaching focus as two primary reasons for keeping such training in place.

My personal feeling is that longhand writing of some sort (not necessarily Mr. Palmer’s brand), is vital in connecting words, word patterns and sentence structure in the writer’s brain.

It is an often-told story that the late Hunter S. Thompson, who was a huge fan of Hemingway, once transcribed Hemingway’s classic, “A Farewell to Arms“, in its entirety, in longhand, on yellow legal pads. He wanted to capture Hemingway’s pace, structure, and style so that he could bring the technique to his own writing.

I am not sure if Thompson succeeded in emulating Hemingway. But I do know, that as a reader, the first chapter of “A Farewell to Arms” and the last chapter of HST’s “Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs” are still, to date, my favorite first and last chapters of any books I have ever read.

Now back to work on a book I am writing.

Thankfully, I will be typing.

Thanks for reading.

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Thoughts from the road

. Florida travel, Uncategorized, Writing . . 2 Comments

Yesterday, I took a break from my day job as a technical writer for a large corporation, a corporation with many technical writers on three continents, so I am really just a small cog in a large technical writing wheel. But I took a day off to drive for two and a half hours down the Florida peninsula to visit my dentist in the leafy, family-friendly (their words, not mine), Ft. Lauderdale bedroom community of Coral Springs. I have always been averse to the term ‘bedroom community’ as it infers that little else happens in those communities, other than that which occurs in the bedroom, and I find that very restrictive and narrow. I have never heard of a community described as a ‘kitchen community’ or a ‘garage community’, or God forbid ‘bathroom community’. So, I cosign ‘bedroom community’ to the list of words and phrases that I dislike (‘bucket list’ being another that comes immediately to mind, but that’s another blog).

But I digress, and it’s not the trip to Coral Springs, Florida, nor the expensive dental work that I will soon require that I am thinking about today, but rather the journey on the highway, Interstate 95, an especially neutered stretch of road that strays just far enough from both the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and Florida’s Everglades on the other, so as to give the traveler a taste of neither. The great New York to Miami artery pumps commerce in both directions (north and south); there are big trucks, little trucks, Lexus, Hyundai, Fords, Silverado trucks, and ninja bikes all on their way to everywhere, and to nowhere.

There are no named rest areas on I-95 either, just numbers – MM 302 St. Augustine; MM225 Mims; MM133 Ft. Pierce. No need for snack bars or fuel. Take care of yourself fellow traveler. This is America, learn to fend for yourself. Look for your bootstraps cowboy, they’re right where you left them. Check the names of the missing teenagers on the bulletin board by the restroom and move along. Do your business. Say your piece and get out. South Beach waits at the end of the road. The mouse is an hour to the west.  A couple of  hours past that, sultry Tampa Bay hoists a subtle middle finger, asking us not so politely to  stay away.

The particular journey that I was on yesterday was only a couple of hundred miles, but it was enough to remind me of longer road trips I have taken, and the therapeutic benefits that I have achieved while on such journeys. And there is therapeutic value, believe me. Try driving from Spokane to St. Paul and you’ll see what I mean. Nothing can connect you with the voice inside your head like the high desert. The current buzzword, ‘mindfulness’, or being extremely aware of the moment and focusing on it and living in it is a close description but does not do the experience justice. Hearing yourself can be achieved through use of a number of relaxation techniques, but actually paying attention to what you are hearing is quite another matter and becoming excited about what you are hearing is still another.

Frederic Will, in his classic 1992 book, “Big Rig Souls” explores this phenomenon among America’s long-haul truck drivers. In this book, which is a short, but scholarly look at the American truck driver, Will strips away the media conjured myth of the truck driver as the last American cowboy and explores their relationship with their jobs, their families, their machines, the trucking industry, and more importantly, their personal journey both in and out of the trucking world.

In one chapter, Will interviews a driver who says that it is not unusual for drivers to stop at a coffee shop after a long run on the road and begin to unload with a plethora of ideas to anyone who will listen. ‘Foolishness’, this talk is described as being, and the driver will often continue to unload his thoughts for several minutes until realizing he has made no sense at all.

But what if this phenomenon is not nearly as foolish as it first appears. Maybe these long-haul drivers have simply tapped into a source of creativity that is lying just beneath the surface ready to be revealed. Maybe this type of mental brainstorming is not detrimental at all and may in fact be more transformative than it first appears?

I have always found writing and long-distance driving to be compatible partners and I have felt some of my greatest bursts of creativity while ‘on the road’. So, don’t go out and push yourself on a nonstop Seattle to Atlanta cannonball run just to finish the last chapter of your novel, but if you have had similar experiences with this type of focus and clarity coming to you while driving, I would like to hear from you. Disclaimer: Of course, obey all traffic laws, don’t drive when you are too tired, buckle up and most importantly — no drinking (until you are safely back at the keyboard).

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Does doggerel poetry matter?

. Bonnie Parker, dogerrel poetry, Poetry, Writing . 2 Comments

“doggerel” Merriam-Webster.com. 2021. https://www.merriam-webster.com (4 June 2021)
dog-ger-el: loosely styled and irregular in measure especially for burlesque or comic effect
also: marked by triviality or inferiority.

I have to confess, I had not heard the term ‘doggerel’, or more specifically, of ‘doggerel poetry’ until a couple of years ago. Strangely, I came across the term while reading an online article about Bonnie Parker. Bonnie Parker, if you recall, was one half of the infamous Bonnie and Clyde crime duo. Bonnie and Clyde, or to be more inclusive, the Barrow gang. The Barrow gang cut a wide swath across America’s heartland back in the 1930s, robbing small businesses and a couple of banks (contrary to popular belief they were not ‘Robin Hood-esqe’ bank robbers of popular culture and myth). They killed anyone who got in their way and managed to elude the law for over two years before they were gunned down in a roadside ambush in Louisiana in May of 1934.

In any case, prior to dying in a hail of bullets, Bonnie had been jailed on a number of other miscellaneous charges. During her time in the slammer, Bonnie busied herself by writing poetry. More specifically, the article reported that Bonnie spent her time in jail smoking Camel cigarettes and writing doggerel poetry. So, of course I jotted that down in my blog-book so that someday I could write a bit about it here on EEOTPB. And of course, that day has arrived.

There are numerous examples of Bonnie’s poetry on the internet, so it’s no secret she liked to write. But I will not link to any of her doggerel poetry here. The Barrow gang are believed to be responsible for thirteen murders, nine of them police officers, so I will end my personal introduction to ‘doggerel poetry’ at this point.

But doggerel poetry has a long history, tracing its roots to Geoffrey Chaucer, who coined the term  ‘rym doggerel’ for the Tale of Thopas. Since then, doggerel poetry has been written by both the infamous (see Bonnie Parker, above) and the famous: think Shakespeare, think Ogden Nash, think Doctor Seuss.

One of my favorite examples of doggerel poetry was written by Edward Lear and William Monkhouse. I note it here:

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
—attributed to Edward Lear and William Cosmo Monkhouse

And so you ask, do I have any doggerel poetry that I have written? Let me see…

Here is a short one that I wrote while searching for seashells on a beach near my home only a couple of weeks ago:

TITLE: Gathering Shells and other Events

How many shells wash in from the sea
a million and one? A million and three?
how many grains of sand to fill your pail
how much wind to hoist a sail
how much fire to burn a forest
how much cash to lift the poorest
how much time till it’s all over
how many bees in a field of clover
how many answers fall on deaf ears
how many prayers end in our tears

Thank you for reading.

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Hurricane season – 2021

. Poetry, Writing . Leave a comment

As I write this blog today, storm clouds are gathering over Florida’s Indian River just a hundred yards from my office window. My digital weather station reads a cool 84 degrees with 78 percent humidity. There is thunder in the distance. I glance at my calendar – it’s Thursday, June 3rd.  How the hell did the frigging season sneak up on me, I say to myself. It’s hurricane season and I’d damn near forgotten about it. We are 3 days in now. I haven’t even read a report from the folks out in Colorado predicting how many storms we’ll have this year.

So, I ask Alexa to play “Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season” by Jimmy Buffett just to commemorate the occasion. Halfway through the rendition I realize the absurdity of it. As much of a JB fan that I am, it occurs to me that no one reasons with hurricane season – hurricane season reasons with you. If you live near the coast you know there is no reasoning with a natural phenomenon that can easily expend the energy over ten thousand nuclear bombs in the course of its life span. I’m not reasoning with something like that. I am evacuating.

The central Florida coast where we live has been relatively untouched by hurricanes over the past few decades.

Knock on wood.

Locals like to downplay storms. When my wife and I bought our house here a couple of years ago our realtor assured us that “they usually go the other way”. Neighbors scoffed. “They get them down south” they said. But they assured us we were safe here on the central Florida coast. Being from South Florida, we weren’t so sure. We’d been through many of these storms. We knew how to prepare. We knew when to stay (sometimes) and when to evacuate (sometimes).  We recall the storms of 2005. We recall Katrina (which did touch part of South Florida before devastating the Gulf Coast), Rita, and Wilma. My wife and I  have T-shirts that say we survived Hurricane Irma in 2017 (we evacuated) . We aren’t strangers to these monsters. We’ve dodged them, out run them, and ridden them out.

Hurricane poems.

So, after all this time in the Sunshine State, you’d think I would have written a poem about hurricanes, wouldn’t you? I knew I did, but I had to go digging for it and I finally found it back in my poem archives from 2011. I am not going to rewrite it; I will leave it alone unedited and let the chips fall where they might:

Named storms and hurricanes

I’m on my porch
waiting for the end.
I am drinking a bourbon, because it is made
from corn, from the Midwest where I was born.


where the hurricanes were far away and we
listened to the radio for storm reports of
downed barns and bridges washed out
no hurricanes in North Platte or Scotts Bluff
just empty plains stretching away for
a couple of hundred miles toward Wyoming
and Billings, Montana.

No thought of a
storm with a name – what would you
name it? Cody, or Laramie?

Would you
board up the chicken shed,

Put away the
tools?

So we wait for 45 more storms here
in my home in the tropics.

It is
hot here

there are disturbances off
of Africa – across the Atlantic Ocean.
We can bury the dead where they fall,
we can prepare and fear, we can
wait for September where there is
a lot of lead time. Such a big ocean

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Civil unrest in America

. Poetry, Uncategorized, Writing . . 2 Comments

Depending upon the time I am allowed,
I will try to work through it,
I will try my best
to uncover the inner workings of
my heart – your heart – I will try
to make the day last a little longer
to live in it – as best I can.
I will savor the daylight
and respect the night.
I will take solace in evening shadows and
morning coffee and afternoon port wine
and conversation about social unrest
and urban decay.
Together we can decry the lost
art of penmanship and civility
on the freeway.
So come sit with me on the porch.
No shoes allowed.
We can leave the dishes in the sink
and the bed unmade.
To hell with the cellular phone…
turn it off and leave it in the oven.

And there’s no need to
do the laundry just because
it’s Tuesday.
We can file for a waiver – this is
after all
America.

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Summer/Palm Beach, FL

. Poetry, Writing . , , . 4 Comments

Summer nights in Palm Beach
you can almost wear
the heat around your neck
on a multi-colored lanyard
smell the night air drifting up from the
Boca ghetto 20 miles to the south
watch the bejeweled sky light up
like the gems in the shops on Worth Avenue
expect everything – you can afford it can’t you?
don’t drink the water
was it worth the hangover?
was it worth the Jacques Selosse?
that you’d ordered – spilled
for that special occasion
Don’t ask the waiter who couldn’t wait
to steal your Lana Marks bag,
don’t count on him,
he’s a traitor who’s fled West.

Keep up appearances
and don’t forget the dogs,
you’ll need them to keep you company
at the Breakers
after the politicians have left the room.

SO
talk the talk and enjoy the ride.

It ends in West Palm at the dog track.
It ends in a seedy poker room
with half a dozen guys smoking cigars
and talking legalized pot.
It ends in a sunset you will never see.