Pride and Prejudice

It was the Academy Awards that got me started thinking about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Colin Firth won (as expected) for best actor in The King’s Speech, but I kept thinking about him as the definitive Mr. Darcy in the 5-hour BBC television mini-series of the book.

The newer, shorter Keira Knightley version is frequently on television, and I’ve seen it several times. I think Keira Knightley made a sparkling Elizabeth and I loved Donald Sutherland as her father and Dame Judi Desch as the imperious Lady Catherine de Bourg. But Matthew Macfadyen just didn’t cut it as Darcy. No smolder, no inner turmoil. And the movie moved too fast. The viewer doesn’t get the same feeling of suppressed desire and frustration, wondering when Lizzie and Darcy will finally get together.

In short, it doesn’t have Colin Firth.

I ordered the BBC series from the library and spent most of Saturday watching it. It didn’t disappoint. I fell in love with CF all over again. When the series was over, I wanted to watch it again. Instead, on Sunday, I watched Becoming Jane starring Anne Hathaway as the wildly popular author.

Soon, I will want to reread the original book, but until then, I’m filling in with Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, an audio download from my library. This “sequel” to P&P tells of life at Pemberly after the wedding.

Next, I’m planning to dive into one of the Austen biographies. Obsessed? Not me. I could probably spend the rest of my life studying Austen, but there are too many other books I want to read, too. So many books, so little time.

Can You Say Thank You?

The assignment for my business communications students was to write a thank you note. One man turned in a standard rejection letter sent by his Human Resources department to unsuccessful job applicants. I gave it back to him with the explanation that it wasn’t a thank you note. He looked at me as if I were incredibly stupid and smugly pointed to the first line: “Thank you for applying . . . “

Lesson number one. Using the words, thank you, doesn’t make it a thank you note. The purpose of a thank you note is to show gratitude. The purpose of his letter was to tell people they didn’t get a job. See the difference?

Penmanship is no longer taught in school and according to a CBS Sunday Morning story, some people think schools should stop teaching students how to write by hand at all because the prevalence and ease of using keyboards render handwriting unnecessary. I hope they’re wrong. Even as I struggle sometimes to decipher the gorgeous but sometimes illegible writing of my one friend who still prefers letters to email, it means something that she made the effort to handwrite a letter. Finding one of her missives in my mailbox makes my day.

Make somebody else’s day today. Write a thank you note and add some positive energy in the universe. Whom would you like to thank? It could be:

Authors of books you enjoyed

Doctors or other medical personnel who treat you like a human being

Anyone who makes your day more pleasant

Gardener whose yard pleases you on your daily walk

Call center technician who actually helped you.

Anyone who gives you a gift

Write it by hand on a pretty card, handmade paper, or a picture postcard (remember those?) and send it through the mail! A thank you by email is better than no thank you at all, but part of the fun is imagining the nice surprise when your benefactor finds your note among the usual bills, catalogs, and credit card solicitations in the mail.

Computer + Wild West + library = a very good day

I didn’t have much time to spare today. Thirty papers came through for me to review. This is my “day” job, although I can do the work day or night, whenever I feel like it. Anyway, it was a full load and I knew I didn’t have all day to do it.

That’s because today was the day for my birthday lunch with my brother and sister-in-law. We went to the Buckhorn Exchange, Denver’s oldest restaurant and bar featuring over 500 mounted animal heads plus historic artifacts of the wild west. It isn’t exactly politically correct. This time of year, when the National Western Stock Show is in town, the animals sport Santa hats, which strikes me as wildly funny. It’s the kind of place to take out of town visitors. My brother, who’s lived in Denver all his life, had never been there, so I thought it was time for him to go. I think he was pleasantly surprised because the food is quite good (you don’t have to eat Rocky Mountain oysters) and the ambience can’t be beat.

My old writing group met there every other Tuesday for a couple of years and I miss that–the people, the writing, the place. Since I learned that I have diabetes, there are many restaurants that just don’t serve food I can eat any more. Luckily, I can eat the food at the Buckhorn Exchange. I may have to become a regular there again.

After lunch, I had to get to the library to return some books that were due today. Amazingly, I still managed to get all my papers reviewed. It was a good day–the kind that makes me look forward to whatever tomorrow brings.

Be a Cartoonist Even if You Can’t Draw

Now you can create your own comic strip even if you can’t draw. At Make Beliefs Comix, you can select a character, determine his or her emotion and fill in the talk or thought balloon. And you can do it in seven languages—English, Spanish, French, Italian, German Portuguese and Latin. Latin? Yup, Latin.

Used as a teaching aid with autistic children or just to make reading and writing fun, the site was named one of the most innovative sites by Google’s Literacy Project, UNESCO, and the International Reading Association. Started by Bill Zimmerman after his retirement in 2006 at age 65, the site allows students a way to “tap into their creativity and tell their own graphic stories.” It is supported by contributions.

Step Lively

“Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way you’re a mile away, and you have their shoes too.” Anonymous

I started walking for exercise, but quickly learned that the benefits went far beyond the physical. Walkers have less incidence of cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and other killer diseases. As a result, they live longer. Because walking increases the blood flow to the brain, it also alleviates depression and hones thinking skills. Walking, of course, is one of Julia Cameron’s basic tools for improving creativity in her classic book, The Artist’s Way. The others are morning pages and artist’s dates.

When I get stuck in a writing project or wrestling with some other problem, walking helps. Some speculate that the rhythmic and repetitive movement of walking balances the brain. I’ll buy that, and I will also argue for walking outside. Walking in nature activates the senses as I feel the wind and sun on my face, smell the roses or the river, see the changing seasons and listen to the birds. You don’t get that from using a treadmill and listening to your iPod.

It’s raining this morning, so I have to delay my walk until later. I will go out, however. Last winter, when a huge early snowstorm clogged our streets and sidewalks for weeks and made walking treacherous, I went more than a little stir crazy. No less a scholar than Soren Kierkegaard advised, “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Maybe your best thoughts are just a few steps away.

© Copyright 2007 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

New Media

“Most good (neat, innovative, wild, woolly) ‘stuff,’ large and small, happens in the boondocks, far, far from corporate headquarters, corporate politics, and corporate toadying.” Tom Peters

Last week I went to the monthly luncheon of the Colorado Authors’ League to hear local author, Justin Matott speak about how he took his first book from self-published to a major publisher. I’ve heard so many stories about big publishers picking up self-published books that I believe that this is the new process for getting published. Not everyone agrees.

At the same luncheon, I sat next to an older woman who has published several books the traditional way and clearly turns her nose up at the very idea of self-publishing. She writes a local column reviewing fiction and, I learned later, had refused to review my friend Irv’s wonderful mystery novel, No Laughing Matter, when she learned he had self-published it. She had been very interested in the same book when she thought it was published the traditional way.

Some people just can’t seem to accept that change happens, even in the stodgiest of industries. While it’s true that many self-published books are iffy or downright BAD in both content and presentation, it is also true that some really wonderful books have been published by the author first, including the original writings of William Blake, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman, William Morris, and James Joyce. Here’s a short list of other books you may be familiar with that started as self-published books:

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield

The Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer

What Color is Your Parachute by Richard Nelson Bolles

In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters

Eragon by Christopher Paolini

The Christmas Box by Richard Paul Evans

If you only do things the way they’ve always been done, you’ll never get a new result.

©2007 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Tell Me a Story

Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever. Italian Proverb

The way we communicate with and learn from one another is by telling stories. When we get together with friends, we swap stories. Daniel H. Pink points out in A Whole New Mind that the way we get trained on the job is through stories. The veteran will tell the newbie, “Once I did that and got in a lot of trouble. Mr. Hanks had to call the fire department…” and so on.

One way to improve your communications skills is to learn how to tell stories better. Lucky for you, there are tons of information available to help you do just that. Here are a few of my favorites:

Maybe the best book ever written on crafting stories is Story by Robert McKee, which is actually about screenwriting. His analysis of the minute details that go into putting together a good solid story will also work for writers, speakers, and teachers.

WikiHow, a website filled with free short tutorials on a mind numbing number of topics, offers How to Write a Short Story. Its sister site, eHow, offers advice on How to Generate Short Story Ideas.

Professional storyteller Chris King publishes a free enewsletter and articles about storytelling. If you get interested enough to immerse yourself, check out the Society of the Muse of the Southwest, which offers a storytelling festival in Taos, New Mexico, every fall.

Spend one day writing down all the stories you hear throughout the day and you agree with poet Muriel Rukeyser, who said, “The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved

Telling Stories

“There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

Ursula K. LeGuin

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the art of telling stories. At the urging of my writers’ group, I started writing short stories. It isn’t as easy as it looks. Because I couldn’t seem to think up story ideas from my own imagination, I found myself listening more carefully to the stories other people told me about their lives. These became fodder for my attempts at writing fiction.

On Palm Sunday I participated in a performance of the Gospel of Mark at my church. We broke the book into 1-3 minute chunks and more than a dozen of us took turns telling the story of Jesus’ ministry in the oral tradition, much as it must have been told and preserved in the first decades after his crucifixion before it was written down.

In the summer, I took a class in storytelling offered for United Methodist lay speakers. The book we used, Dancing with Words by Ray Buckley, focused on the legacy of storytelling in the Lakota tradition. “Storytelling affirms for us the memory of our people,” he writes. “We are people of the story, and we seek to identify and tell our stories in nearly everything we do.”

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink lists telling stories as one of the six competencies we need in the conceptual age, because computers can’t do it for us. This book was so full of good ideas that I had to buy my own copy after I returned the library book.

When I started teaching a course in cultural diversity, I had my students share their culture by telling stories to one another, a very popular activity. Whenever we get together in groups, the way we communicate is by telling stories. Start paying attention to the stories you hear and those you tell. What do they tell about you?

More on stories tomorrow.

©2006 Dixie Darr. All rights reserved