Better Writing Through Bunnies

Whenever I think of what’s going on inside my own head, it scares me. I mean I literally get frightened at the amount of ADD ideas that go flying about, but what bothers me the most is when I’m not able to institutionalize into something coherent. I’ve been writing for so long, I’ve probably written more this year than any year before. I can’t believe that 2014 has been such a productive year for me, but at the same time, I always get this feeling of grief that I’m not doing enough. I’ve written two books, one novella, which is up online on the Malacast Editorial (mcasteditorial.blogspot.com) and about thirty poems. I’m currently working on a children’s story involving vultures, and I’m getting used to the idea of having people around the world reading my work. So I’ve done nearly a year’s worth of work, in about half a year, and I’ve seen zero dollars of actual income from all that work. It’s fine, I don’t expect to become a writer overnight, I’d actually be a bit worried if it came to me that easily, that means I’d not be able to grow as an artist. I actually want to take a few writing courses soon, I feel it’s always good to have a newer, fresher perspective from someone that teaches writing for a living. Granted, most courses are full of moronic, unaccomplished writers that “settled” with academia, and are being pushed out of their comfy positions on campus with cutting budgets. Yet, how does one learn how to write? I know how to write, but how to improve on that writing is sort of a pain in the ass. I find it very difficult to actually learn something from a professor, or even a teacher’s aide that I haven’t already learned on my own. Amazon’s search engine can save you thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of wasted time that could’ve been handled much more delicately with reading several books on the subject of writing. Yet, one can only read so much, they can only take so much advice, and most of the time, it’s a crapshoot. A very sad, universal crapshoot where the house always wins. So how does one improve writing skills? Even if they are Stephen King, or Dean Koontz? How do guys like that improve on their work? That’s hard to discuss without looking at how they write. Stephen King loves details, so much-so that he’ll go out of his way to describe the inner workings of a household appliance like a toaster to such detail, you’ll know the colors of every single wire inside that chrome-colored toaster shell. I tend to enjoy details, but I much rather work with dialogue, so everything I write does have some story mixed with humanity, but I love the drama of the stage, how great characters, when portrayed with a professional crew, come to life as if they’re so real, albeit, their situations are usually extraordinary. Sometimes a thesaurus is the ticket, because I tend to wear out clichés after the first thirty pages. I tend to lose a whole lot of confidence if I feel I’m writing myself into a corner, not leaving enough room edge-wise to come out with a new word or phrase that’s out of my comfort zone. Granted, I’m quite versed in the English language, a human dictionary, but I tend using a fifty-dollar word like enunciation is only as useful as when it fits the bill. Like the word envenomation, it sounds poetic, cryptic, and it may even come off as a fancy way of saying poisoned. Yet, who would go out of their way to use envenomation in a sentence, in the twenty-first century? Who sees a use for such a word? Even if I was writing a book about the most deadliest, poisonous snakes on Earth, I doubt that I’d even go out of my way to use envenomation even when the subject matter could call for the usage! So the balance of language, the stylization of how a work/project should be written, and the demographic for whom you are writing for, will always dictate the diction of your writing. Or so you hope, because even an altruistic approach to writing, tends to permeate malice in perhaps your most laymen of writers. Maybe you should respect the English language, and usage by simply speaking in your own voice. Think of it this way: even if you don’t feel you’re the least chemically flammable florescent bulb in the box, at least you’ll sound thrifty and cool. My style of writing has always been plastered with a nice satirical glaze, just because I love the use of comic relief. Yes, I just pulled out a high school term, bam! I love comedy, especially misappropriated comedy, like the passing of gas at a high papal mass, or a coffin falling during a funeral. Pretty macabre, but pretty cliché in the world of dark comedy. Writing in my style takes a lot of thought, or spurts of genius, especially when you don’t see it coming. Writing usually takes care of itself, and doesn’t require much though, just do! So for this exercise on writing better without the use of a professor, or with a big budget for Amazon, we are going to explore better writing through the imagery of bunnies. The first bunny’s name is Frank, an everyman’s bunny that couldn’t write his way out of a fourth grade essay. Yet, too much time in the rabbit hole has given him some oxygen-deprivation to his little bunny brain, and his overprotective mother thinks he’s God’s gift to bunny-kind. So now Frank thinks he’s the connoisseur hare on all things script. A Shakespearian jackrabbit of all trades. Frank could represent the uneducated masses of super breeding bunnies out there, but he is not so much dumb, as simple, and that can be in itself a unique genius. Especially in the thought process dear Frank, the white-haired, fidgety bunny who has a brutal honesty about him that really needs to be exercised. Why not through the written word. So let’s see an example of Frank’s writing: “Yo, so check this out! I was walking down the bunny trail yesterday, and that mook Peter Cottontail comes hoping up with this basket of colored eggs! I swear, that guy is hiding something, who the hell colors chicken eggs, and hides them around? He acts like we don’t see this shit, but he knows for damn sure we’re watching him put those eggs all in the bushes. Hell, Farmer John chased him out of the cabbage patch the other day with a shotgun, blasting off like cannon fire on battlefield! I bet its drugs, you have to be on drugs to steal Mrs. Cluck’s eggs, and paint them with squashed blueberries, and mulched grass, then hide them like some friggin’ lunatic! Ma says he’s a bit touched in the ears, and to just ignore him, but I bet this guy’s going to be big trouble come Springtime, that’s when he starts leaving baskets of toys and treats outside everyone’s door! Damn guy is stealing stuff, and leaving the contraband on our doorsteps for the authorities to blame us for his insanity! Something must be done about the Peter Cottontail situation, and it needs to be done soon!” Okay, so Frank the bunny is a bit misinformed, but his ignorance is our jest! This wasn’t written by a scholar, no Ph.D in philosophy, or (God help them) Roman Poetry, but it is still quite entertaining, and mildly loony. I happen to believe that Frank is a sort of writer that comes along only so often, but it proves that even the most daft of us can have a spitfire personality that legates the fact that we all have a smidgen of genius in that grey lump inside our skulls. Let‘s visit Ms. Suzy B. the bunny with brass! This lovely young writer is an intelligent, level-headed, independent bunny with love in her heart, and a pin on her furry lapel. She’s a joy to all who know her, and going far in life. Suzy B. is perhaps the most common writer we find: the overconfident, albeit, self-absorbed, but usually very extroverted do-gooder writer. She wants to change the world through prose, or at the very least spout a bunch of radical nonsense that they’re putting chemicals in the carrots again. She’s the slightly educated, yet out-of-touch with reality bunny. Suzy is always caring about others, although it really is more caring about her own platitudes. Let’s listen to something she wrote about the rising cost of rabbit holes: “For over twenty-five life cycles, the cost of living has become increasingly astronomical, so-much-so that this generation is going to find it much harder to feed their thirty-plus children, and nearly impossible to find a hole to live out their autumn years. Twenty-five life cycles before, a family of sixty could live on two bushels of carrots, and grass a week. Nowadays, a bushel of carrots can barely sustain the lifestyle of a family of forty-five, and in ten life cycles, we are expecting to see so many bunnies, that the cost of living will be so wretched, it would be cheaper to rent a lily pad with the frogs! It is a disgrace that our great society has come to the brink of having to compromise sharing a flat with a frog! My fellow bunnymen, I come to you with a plead that we must find a way to conserve our rations, because the great crash is coming, and your children will be living at home in your rabbit holes until they are three, even four years old! Could you imagine a rabbit living at home past two years old! How disgraceful! I am just one rabbit, I do not have the resources to fix the conundrums that lay at the opening of our rabbit holes, but the future is a bleak, desolate one where only the vultures stand to benefit! They will have you think that you will benefit in this new global community, but in-truth, they will not be happy until they’ve picked each one of our carcasses clean! This is Suzy B., bunny extraordinaire, and feminhare. We need to put our differences aside, and do what I say, or else bunnygeddon will fall upon us all! Thank you for reading this, and remember to support the Bunnycrat nominee for the rabbit-senate seat.” As you can see, politically-infused, and semi-intelligent writing can truly be cross-species stupidity, but people pay for it! Just read the Huffington Post, or Reason magazine. You may not like Suzy B. bunny extraordinaire, or you may think she makes more sense than any other bunny you ever heard. Either way, she’s making mad carrot writing her little bunny paws to the bone. Does this sort of writing necessarily make you a better writer? Not really, but at least it makes you sound important, when in-fact, you’re barely literate. Finally, let’s look at the one bunny we all strive to be: Wilhelm Von Bir-Lappen III. He’s a rabbit with the kind of finesse only your really cool friends have, and he’s read every piece of rabbit poetry, and has it memorized for the sole purpose of reproducing with every eligible little mink out there. Wilhelm has been a prodigy of the pen since he was able to hop. You will never be Wilhelm, because Wilhelm is one, and there is only one Wilhelm. Try as you might, Wilhelm’s worst idea is already better than the best idea you could come up with, and then some! He writes books to pass the weekend, and still has time left over to save the world from utter destruction. Basically, Wilhelm is a beast, and there’s nothing you can do to overtake his genius. If he wasn’t wasting his time writing, he’d have found the cure for rabbit’s foot, tunnel cough, and solved the carrot shortage crisis all within the same hour. The type of bunny Wilhelm is exist only so the tried-and-true bunnies like yourself can never get a leg up on the writing competition. Whenever a Wilhelm decides to write, you might as well wait for the next lifetime, because karma just swatted your chances of writing out of the park. Do I even need to do this example? Even I won’t understand what the hell I wrote: “My constituents, my fellow rabbits! For a score and a half, our ancestral lineage has been but a multitude of heavenly sanction, proliferated underground, away from the rancorous, heathen predators that whilst see our heads broken upon a blimey stone of final catharsis. The antithesis of our subsistence is to be spoiled by the ravenous birds of prey that would gore us with talons, and the pittance of our lives will be no more futile than that of the hellgrammite caught in a coetaneous tide. Ceaselessly traipsing about this hellish world, in concert we drift further away from our once utopian chasm. Eternally searching out remnants of a nostalgic home, we will be left asunder, to nomadically navigate vicious terrains, terrariums of brick and mortar slave shops, in hopes of rekindling the joyous festivities we have come to admire before the vultures turned us to carrion. My associates, we must defeat this rising tide of malice! We must purge the mires of these terror birds clean! We must fight the fiends! Or else perish! We have survived all past extinctions! Rodent-kind shall not be vanquished from this Earth! Fauna shall flourish!” Wilhelm is a pompous ass that I hope gets eaten by a raven. Well, if that little test didn’t help you, then I’m sorry, you’re just like me, and stuck back at square one…which is basically just keep on writing, through the crapshoot, and hope you land that deal. Because there will be bunnies all throughout your life that will be better, quicker, smarter, and even more honest than you could possibly imagine. Yet, they are passing fads, and a great writer will stay the course, and outwork the trends, outlasting the splashes in the pan, and irrevocably outsmarting the dumb. Thank you for humoring me with this little exercise, happy rabbit hunting, and good write, good night! Thank you for reading the Malacast Editorial Twitter.com/mcasteditorial, or @mcasteditorial E-mail: mcasteditorial@yahoo.com Thank you again, and have a wonderful day!