Blogs

Last week Steve, CEO at the ecentre http://www.ecentre.org.nz/contactus.cfm encouraged me to test the Style Guide™ on ESL (English as a Second Language) users.

We have friends who are Fijian Indian and who speak English when they need to at work and to people like us and then Hindi whenever they are with family and Indian friends.

The wonderful news has just hit the media – Eleanor Catton has won the Man Booker award for her novel, The Luminaries.

There was a time when self-published books made readers lips curl with derision. Not any more.

Self publishing has earned its right to be taken seriously simply by the sheer volumes making their way onto ebook readers.

This is a reference for users of The Style Guide. The type of language we use determines the style of a piece of writing.

Fact and argument will always have a higher proportion of nouns and adjectives to verbs and adverbs. Persuasive and emotional writing will tend to havea higher proportion of erbs and adverbs.

Nouns describe things and places like a bridge, road, things like house, hut and give people and places names like Taj Mahal, George.

Once there were times when I faced a deadline without taking time to think about what I wanted to say, or how I would say it, I started writing. It’s a natural reflex when under pressure. I remember a journalist friend saying of another, ‘He interviews his typewriter then records its words of wisdom.’

He was, of course, being sarcastic. I had to work with the other journalist as well and I must say I agreed with my friend who always researched his articles thoroughly and interviewed the right people to get both sides of the story . . . comment and counter-comment.

There’s an interesting discussion underway at our place around The Story Mint’s logo. I have discovered no one likes the existing one, despite the fact that we went through a rigorous consultative process before settling on it. Back then, over two years ago we were determined to settle on a brand that represented who we are.

However, since then we have found it is extremely difficult to work with on the website and for making videos. It is complicated and I now think, it is trying to say too much.

This week I have been writing a script for a video. The development of the script has called on my time as a director for Television New Zealand in the Children’s department. Back then, we shot short clips for insertion into the daily half-hour programme called Play School. I directed the short films - and they were shot on film - then I directed the studio based programme when it was recorded.

I loved the experience and was sorry when it ended.

I was once told by a writing instructor that the last thing you want a reader to say as he or she reads is, ‘so what’? I then began paying attention to every sentence I wrote and I found that a lot of the material I wrote fell into the ‘so what’ category. It appeared not to be relevant to the story. Often they were asides giving my opinion.

I admire entrepreneurs because they fill their minds with interesting thoughts. They are too busy to see fault in others. They have no time to idly chat about the weather (that is unless it affects their project) and other humdrum matters. They have no room in their emotional lives for despondency or self-pity. They have no time to waste. So they get on with using each waking minute to pursue their dreams.

My personal writing journey is one of shelves.

It began when I was 8 and I wrote a story about two monkeys, Banana and Peanut. They had escaped from the zoo and got up to all sorts of mischief. When I read it to him, my father laughed out loud and said, ‘we should try to get that published.’

Then the routine of farm life got in the way and launching my writing career was shelved.

That became my life’s theme. I would get some space in my ‘real’ life and write a novel and it would get shelved when the business of earning money became a priority.