Category: Writing

Book Review: Creating Character Arcs, by K.M. Weiland

by K.M. Weiland

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Fantastic!

The arc is the story, and it is worth any writer’s time to learn or refresh their understanding of character arcs. I am an English major with a concentration in creative writing. However, I am close to graduating (this winter), and only one course of mine went over, in detail, character arcs—it was a screenwriting course. As assignments and exercises in my major are understandably smaller stories, —single scenes or single chapters (imagine grading fifty students novellas in a week, lol)—it is refreshing for me to have a road map to writing a larger story.

I think Weiland did a great job with this book, and she uses a plethora of examples to drive her point home. This book is a great tool for the writer’s toolbox. As such, I recommend it!

Happy Reading,
www.w-alexander.com

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The Miraculous Rise of Phillis Wheatley

Photo Credit: Poetry Foundation

The second half of eighteenth-century America, witnessed the miraculous rise of Phillis Wheatley: An African-born slave-woman, who used the power of poetry along with her respectable connections to challenge and reverse many of the prejudices that plagued her sex and race, and, later, her genius helped inspire the abolitionist long campaign to abolish slavery. 

Wheatley, at only seven years old, found herself chained aboard a slave-trading vessel headed to Boston. When she arrived, she was sold to John and Susanna Wheatley, “The Wheatley’s were prosperous people with a wide circle of friends and active members of the New South Congregational Church” (Belasco and Johnson 599). However, her childhood was quite different than the plight of other slaves: she was taught to read and write, and was raised firmly entrenched in Boston’s Puritan religion, “she lived mostly as a member of the family and had considerable freedom to study… and received a good education, especially for a young girl of the time” (Belasco and Johnson 599). As a teenager, she discovered a passion for what would soon become the miraculous vehicle for her rise: she began to write poetry. 

Wheatley wrote in the style of the eighteenth-century English poets all her life, but like any poetic-genius, she left her own mark on literature, “while she closely followed the poetic conventions of the period, Wheatley was also an innovator…she was the founder not only of African American literary tradition but also of the tradition of black women’s writing in the United States” (Belasco and Johnson 600). Wheatley’s poetry concerned itself with the major issues that surrounded her life: politics, religion, and slavery. 

However, wonderful her poetry was, Boston proved difficult to find the funding needed to get her book published. Colonists were unwilling to support an African’s written work. This prompted the Wheatley’s to look across the Atlantic and travel to London, “…Wheatley traveled to London with the Wheatley’s son [Nathaniel] to publish her first collection of poems, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral—the first book written by a black woman in America” (par III). In London, Wheatley was an adored sensation—England showed little racial bias. This was in contrast with, at the time, the American colonies. Yet, even after she returned to America, her talents were undeniably exceptional, and her circle of influencers and connections soon extended beyond New England and into the admirations of the most famous and powerful man in the colonies: his excellency, General of the Continental Army, and later first President of the new United States of America, George Washington. 

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Wheatley’s beginnings were humble: she came to Boston a small girl forced from her homeland, enslaved, restricted by the disadvantages of her sex, and the plight of racial prejudices concerning her race all stood in her way. However, despite her obstacles, she achieved remarkable, miraculous heights. Her poem, To His Excellency General Washington is a prime example of her poetic talents, her admiration for General Washington, and her patriotic sensibilities, “Proceed great chief, with virtue on thy side. They ev’ry action let the goddess guide. A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine. With gold unfading Washington! be thine” (Wheatley 609). Wheatley’s rise from a small slave girl to being in correspondence with Mr. Washington was certainly no small feat. Such an accomplishment was certain to stick out in history. 

Of course, Wheatley’s poetry, like all great works of art, challenged the norms of her times both religiously and civilly. The country being built around her, that she so loved, was fast losing its religious zeal (of which she was devout), and the institution of slavery, was, naturally, an idea she would never advocate, “Wheatley recognized the contradiction between the institution of slavery in the American colonies and their struggle for “liberty,” a struggle she implicitly sought to align with the cause of freedom for the slaves” (Belasco and Johnson 601). Wheatley, certainly, showed a society built on control by the patriarchy, and a contradictory perception of superiority between the races (racial bias) that a woman, a black-woman, an African-born woman could rise to soaring heights in this new world the colonists were building. Her poetry was used by abolitionists as proof for the equality between the races. Wheatley’s legacy and popularity, especially, in New England continues to dazzle and inspire all those who learn of her miraculous rise. 

Eighteenth-century America, witnessed Phillis Wheatley overcome her humble beginnings and the challenges, at-the-time, that prejudiced her sex and race; her star ascended out of Boston and would eventually emanate its light throughout American literary history. Her poetry revealed a deep trust in God, yet it also revealed a break with political conventions— opposition to slavery, and her love for her new country. George Washington received her letters and poetry with adoration and gave testimony to her genius. Dunford 4 

Wheatley achieved the miraculous, the impossible, the unthought of: she a black-African-born-woman did not peel at the edges of prejudice, she slashed it, and all were forced to recognize her gift and confront their misplaced assumptions on the place of women and slavery.  

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Works Cited 

Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, editors. “Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784).” The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1.,2nd ed., Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014, pp. 599- 601. E-Textbook Liberty University English 201. 

Michals, Debra. “Phillis Wheatley.” National Women’s History Museum. National Women’s History Museum, 2015. Accessed: 20 February 2021. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/phillis-wheatley 

Wheatley, Phillis. “To His Excellency General Washington.” The Bedford Anthology of American Literature, edited by Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson, 2nd., vol.1., Bedford St. Martin’s, 2014, pp. 608-609. E- Textbook Liberty University English 201. 


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A New Novella

If you follow me on twitter, you know I am busy writing a novella. This, when completed, will be my second short story. The goal is forty-thousand words, and is a historical fiction piece. The setting and plot? I’m not sharing.

I am trying my version of the Stephen King-method on writing. The first draft will be written with the door closed (no readers), and then I will take a break from the piece. King recommends a few weeks. After that I begin to revise, and once the second draft is completed, I will seek editing opinions from trusted readers. Unlike my first short story, I intend this novella to be published, and trust me, I think I have a great idea. Of course, these rules could fluctuate a bit—I have never been a fan of systems.

So far, I have written the midpoint, and I am in the process of plotting—story mapping for you muggles. Of course, I have been writing solo scenes to help flesh out my characters, and short bios. Most importantly, I do believe I have my protagonist’s big lie down—the story’s arc.

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Beat the Boy; Destroy the Man 

W. Alexander Dunford  I will never forget the television’s blue light that night fifteen years ago. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Blood Diamond played. Outside, beneath black skies, rain pelted our windows and the house’s bones braced against high winds. Thunder shook the walls.  It was Father’s idea to watch the movie. He loved violence, and I loved…

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by Alexander Dunford

This is exciting stuff!

Using my blog to hold myself accountable for this project is critical. My last short story was twenty-five thousand words, and I wrote it for, believe it or not, a class on novellas last year, and it took me eight weeks. So, dearest followers, buckle up and enjoy the ride; I will be showing you an inside look of the writing process; you get to join me on an ambitious but fulfilling project.

I have to do this around school, and taking care of the kids. My goal is to be done by my son’s second birthday—late July.

Book Review: On Writing, by Stephen King

Photo: Goodreads

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I will start by saying I am not, and I have never been a fan of Stephen King. Not for any other reason than I do not enjoy horror. However, the craft is the craft, and his take on writing was just too appealing to place back on the shelf.

The first one-hundred pages are about how he developed as a writer. This memoir is not a waste of time, and any reviews that suggest otherwise are your C- dreamers. I gained a deeper respect for Mr. King, and his work ethic—which is why he is a success; he simply sacrificed all he could to write.

Like, King, I too read seventy-five plus books a year, and because of this book, I have now spent several weeks waking up at 5:30am to write a specific word count before I do anything else. Not only is this an empowering—I waltz around the house all day feeling accomplished—strategy, but, I am writing. Yes, that’s right, nothing gets in my way. I have this book to thank for the kick-in-the-butt.

I, also, believe his craft-advice for the words on page are well thought out. I am an English major, and his advice pretty much falls on the same lines—cut adverbs, write actively, etcetera. What makes his approach different, is his strategy of writing with the door closed (first draft). Get the story on the page without critics, without advice, without help, without anyone knowing anything—don’t even tell your partner what is on the page. He even shares excerpts of his own crappy first draft writing, and then his revising strategy—second drafts are shown to his most trusted readers, and they can give their thoughts. It is refreshing to see his first draft is just like the rest of ours: blatantly not ready for anyone’s eyes but the writer’s. It turns out, he is just a regular Joe after all; this is wonderful!

King thrashes the ‘literary elite,’ and their postulations of theory and theme, and shares how efficient and clear prose gets the job done. However, King, like me, was too an English major, and, like me, has a deep love for the language; he loves several different genres, and at one-point shares how much he enjoys Harry Potter—bonus points. I don’t share his anti-elite sentiments, but to each-their-own.

What I took from this book? Stephen King is not superman, and neither does the aspiring writer need to be. King makes it clear, writers are made in the trenches, and those who put their nose to the grindstone, and never let anything stop their writing, succeed.

Of course, I disagree with him on his anti-plotting mentality, but, hey, what works for him (writing situationally), and what works for other artists will be different. He understands, and says as much.

It’s a great kick-in-the-ass book for writers. Buy it, read it, love, read it again, and follow his advice.

*P.S. get up at 5:30am and write till you hit your word count. Who cares if it is garbage? Just write. If you want it enough, you will do it!

—W. Alexander

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The Choice to Write: A Reflection, Part 1

            We’re turning the corner, finally, with this pandemic. Soon, within the year, most of us will begin dining out, vacationing, throwing backyard parties, etcetera. I cannot wait. A sense of renewal, of regeneration emanates through the atmosphere. Not unlike, being on the other side of an awful illness; you feel the life, the vitality spreading throughout your body. However, let’s not discount the reality that danger continues to lurk around every corner.

One thing I have done the last few years is journal. I use, like all millennials, an app—Day One. Every night I write a short prayer, something I’m grateful for, add photos, and bullet the key events of my day. And every night, when I open my app—Day One—I can view my entries that I wrote last year, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, etcetera.

            The memories I read, right now, consist of entries from Covid’s first days. I archived news clips of Trump telling us it will all be-over-with by spring (2020). I have my take on folks emptying the shelves of toilet paper, paper towels, and other (never before conceived) essentials. I even saved articles into my diary from the, Washington Post of folks buying up all the hand sanitizer and then selling it on e-bay. I looked ahead a few days and saw where my wife and I purchased a roll of toilet paper from China for $60.00 because there was none left, at all, at the time. This was all in the final days of March. Can you believe it?

            Like most of you, covid killed my work; I was a brand-new realtor, and well, I’m not anymore—I think. I just didn’t have the comfort of walking into other homes, nor did I have the connections needed to survive, and I, most important, didn’t have the time; I was needed at home. I decided, like many, with death looming around, and the fear of catching this virus striking my borderline hypochondria (a joke, but I fear sickness), to reprioritize what matters. My wife played a critic role in this.

I transformed.

            Before Covid, I was the poster-boy of preppy, healthy, and hard-working. I was raised in Appalachia (southwestern Virginia), pronounced apple-at-cha, and I spent my entire adult life trying to separate myself from those early days. I never thought myself better than another, but I certainly didn’t want to live on the bottom. So, I worked, and I became whatever people needed me to be. It was not long, sometime after my father died, my early twenties, that I noticed I pretended so much for everyone else, I didn’t know who I was anymore.

            As the years passed, and I obsessed over saving money (a good thing), and pleasing others, I began to take a much more comfortable route to life, one where getting honest with myself wasn’t required, and, so, I wore a mask, I wore all masks.

            See, I had always wanted to do one thing: write. Well, besides that short season, when I was a kid, that I wanted to be a biologist—I’m obsessed with Darwin and evolution. One of the things I always loved was historical fiction, and if I’m being honest, and I am, I wanted to write and publish historical research. I love that stuff!

            Like many people, I never got the chance to be who I truly was. It wasn’t just that I lacked the courage or the support-system, it is the fact that I never had the chance. I have worked a full-time job since I was fifteen years old.

            When I was in high school, I worked five days a week, 4pm to midnight at a Sonic-Drive-In (I still don’t eat at Sonic, lol). In college, I worked the night shift, 10pm-6am stocking groceries for a couple years (going to class at 8am and sleeping in my car between gaps), and after dropping out, I worked at a factory, 50-55 hours a week for three-and-a-half years, and was a waiter at Applebee’s in the evenings. I’m not complaining, I just had to do what needed to be done: bills have to get paid.

            In short, when I moved to Michigan, interned for Google, and then became a general manager for The UPS Store (a job I held for five years). Money was tight, and I saved what I could, and I struggled, and that’s when the pain that I was throwing my life away really sat in. If I was going to struggle, couldn’t I at least be happy doing it? Having a good job didn’t matter to me. I woke up every day doing something I know I wouldn’t choose to do, if I had the choice (don’t we all?). And only people of privilege say folks have a choice. They don’t know what it’s like to push one bill out, so you can eat. Not the kind of environment where a dream is ideally fought for, or hell, America’s poor would all become success stories.

            Either way, I met my wife in Michigan, and my faith flourished there. But the identity crises began emerging toward the end. I left my job, and took a break, I had a significant amount of money saved, and could live years without working—if I played it right. A friend and I traveled all over America, we went to forty states, and I spent that summer hoping, just like in the movies, under desert stars I would rediscover who I really was. After that, my future wife and I went to Europe, got engaged there and I entered a blissful season, where my identity crises was band-aided—I tied my self-worth to her vision. After all, I had no honest vision of my own; I did not even know who I was anymore.

            I decided money was the common denominator to a peaceful life. I knew it wasn’t everything, but I knew without it, personally, one lives a miserable life. So, I went to Wall Street, and became a MLO at a huge financing conglomerate. My entire time there, training months included, I never worked a week under 60 hours. Not a single one. I made BIG money, but didn’t even have the time to do anything with it. Everyone around me wore Rolex’s and drove black luxury sedan’s, and, although I tried, because I always become what people think is the best version of someone is, I couldn’t sustain pretending that I wanted those things too. I found, I wanted to just save again so much money, I could spend the rest of my life writing. I use to need a few drinks every night to settle these demons down.

            The thought came in one night, my hand under my pillow, my suit still on, four or five whiskey’s drowned, so randomly that I thought I snapped. I remember thinking I was having a nervous breakdown. I hadn’t truly thought of getting serious about my writing in years, though, I did from time-to-time start, but never finish, projects.

            I decided then and there, I would find away, but, again, it never happened. A few months later, I was bogged down, it had been 31 days since I had a full-day off, and my fiancée reveals she had enough with her job, too. She was the envy of everyone around her, but she couldn’t go on pretending either. We decided to move to Boston, a shared dream of ours and look for jobs. She found one first, I quit a couple weeks before we moved, and found, believe it or not, another job as a General Manager of The UPS Store franchise in Beacon Hill. Though I quickly took to operating within five different stores at once. I have always, and I mean always, had a strange knack for leadership. I even like it, but, again, that is just a mask I am great at wearing. Hell, I would have become a stripper before going back into finance. You couldn’t pay me $500,000 a year to do that again (which realistically, is what I would make if I was still there). So, I didn’t mind making less, and having time to see my fiancée again.

            We lived downtown, got married, went off to Paris and Bordeaux, and lived our happy, well-off, healthy young body’s life. Then we got pregnant.

            We wrestled with staying in the city. The cost of daycare was close to 3,000 a month per child, our apartment was 2500 per month, and we would absolutely need to go bigger, but we were unwilling to live outside of Back Bay or Beacon Hill. So, we wrestled and wrestled and wrestled some more with what to do.

            We decided to make another move. You know, get the big house. We loved the city, but we didn’t want to work ourselves to death just to live in a certain zip code. People really put themselves in awful situations over keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s—we are not those people.

            We moved to New Hampshire—closer to her family, and she transferred offices. We got the big house, and a nice spread on our personal P&L sheet—budget. I became a realtor. That was something I had always been interested in doing. My wife told me, “if you do that, you can get pretty flexible with your schedule and write. You’ve always wanted to write. Maybe this will help.” And so, it did.

            However, the winter after our first child was born, Covid hit. Pow! I hadn’t been successful yet in real estate, but it imploded. The day care closed its door to us, we weren’t essential, and we worked from home. Pretty soon, I was daddy-day care.

            Well, I saw the real estate experiment coming to an end long before I allowed myself to think that way. I tried riding that dead horse for months after. I hate failing, and I took it pretty hard. I started drinking for the first time really heavy. My father was an alcoholic, and that scared me, so it only lasted a couple of months before I reigned it in. I was taking some writing classes, because I never went too far away from it, just far enough to not get serious about it, and I decided I would finish my degree. After all, the pandemic was a great opportunity to recenter one’s life.

            And that’s what I have been doing since Covid hit, working on my degree and raising my kids all day. I don’t have ulcers from the stress of pretending anymore. I did struggle pretty hard with telling my in-laws about school. But at some point, I figure they will see that I won’t be much good as a father if I’m miserable. I can’t exactly raise my children by example, if, well, I didn’t pull myself up by the bootstraps and get honest with myself. Sometimes the only way to move forward is to walk all the way back to your biggest regret and strike a new path from there.

            I decided to pursue my dreams and write, finally. And let me tell you, for the first time in my life, I never think about money, and I have learned to write some pretty elegant, at times, prose. I already have two pieces submitted to publishers. This is not a pipe-dream. Somehow, I just know I have it. That this is the path, and I know many fail here, but I don’t worry about that (I honestly don’t). I don’t do it for approval, I do it because it is the most natural thing in the world to me.

To be continued…

The Day God Died: Chapters 1 &2

“…in that moment my fear retreated. I discovered I hated him and his kind. I hated his affluence, his expensive clothes, his chiseled looks, and the arrogance he was born to. But most of all, I hated the power he held over me, his assumption of authority, and the truth of his superiority.”

by Alexander Dunford

The Power of Clarity

"Words, Words, Words"—Shakespeare.

I am compelled as a writer to weave words together, and to connect my readers to the beating-pulse and rhythm of language. Like a perfectly executed waltz, the right word executes without missing a step; a reader trusts me to take their hand and lead them; if I write ambiguous, doubt creates a misstep—a break in attention—which the reader, now, out of rhythm, might misunderstand my intention, and our dance with language threatens to end in catastrophe; I never want the reader to think I am going to spin, when I intend to let go. Word choice is vital.

W. Alexander

To use clear, engaging language, we writers must know the meaning of each word we choose to communicate with, and the careful writer thinks about each word’s meaning and seeks the best choice. If I want to be a great writer—a dance master of language—I must commit to clarity, and that means no Janus words—words with contradictory meanings. Clarity is the highest of ideals! 

To my readers: I have over the last weeks plunged into another bout of depression. Like anyone who struggles with depression, you know there is no battle I can fight, no war I can win, no place I can hide; I can only wait-it-out and hold on to my blessings. I don’t ask for prayers or good vibes, and I certainly don’t want advice on how to fight my own demons. So, if my content appears light, knowing my plight, you might understand why. I love you all.

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