Ben Crowder

Today I’ve been going through a dozen or two of the diaries in Special Collections. Most of them are from early Latter-day Saints, since that is of course our special interest. For example, there’s one of William Clayton’s journals (written in pencil, very small, very hard to read), one of Parley P. Pratt’s (which his wife also wrote in, when they were on a mission), Emmeline B. Wells’s (I read her entry from the day when President Joseph F. Smith died, in 1918), and several others. Very cool.

One that piqued my interest was John Doyle Lee’s. He was the guy executed for the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The journal itself was from 1840, so nowhere near the time of his death, but it was still fascinating — doodles all over the margins. Now, he was born almost two hundred years before me, but when I saw those doodles, I felt a connection, a mildly electrifying arc that leapt across time and space and brought us both into some kind of interworld where those differences melt away. Only for an instant, though.

Anyway, it got me thinking about my own journals. I began mine in 1990, but I didn’t start writing every day until 1994. (Every day since then is accounted for, however.) I’ve alternated between writing them on the computer and writing them in notebooks; of the notebooks, half of them have been cheapo spiral-bound and half have been hardback (mostly my mission journals, and now I’m writing in a large-size Moleskine).

The main goal when I write, I’ve noticed, is to get the facts down. Occasionally I’ll write my thoughts and feelings as well, but even then my object isn’t to write beautiful prose; it’s to record the essentials so that I can go back later and heave the skeletons out of the closet, draping flesh on the bones until I’ve got enough for a story, and then I sew on some skin and utter the magic words (got them from wishing upon a star) and let it come to life. But I don’t store the flesh — there’s no point to it, it’d go bad. But bones last a long time. And so bones are what I store.

A word to the wise: don’t write your journal in pencil. These pencilled journals are so hard to read, it really isn’t fair to posterity. Ink is the way to go. (Preferably the kind that doesn’t leak through the pages. I use a Pilot Precise V5 Rolling Ball, Extra Fine, and it’s served me well.)

In other Special Collections news, today I got to see the Orson Scott Card shelves. It’s a shrine. There are five or six shelves per section, and about 10 sections. We’re talking twenty to thirty feet long. It’s insane. And very cool. :) (Speaking of which, last night I was talking with one of the counselors in our stake presidency in between interviews, and it turns out that he was actually mission companions with Card. Small world.)

I also got to see an original handwritten letter by Abraham Lincoln. And yesterday I saw an original daguerrotype of Brigham Young. I love my job. :)

[tags]LDS, BYU, Orson Scott Card, journals[/tags]

It’s one of those days where I’m not really sure what to write. I have a running list of dozens upon dozens of post ideas, of course, but usually one or two topics will push their way to the surface, begging for attention. Today, there’s nothing. Nothing sticks out as I skim over my list. Nothing is sitting on the edge of my mind, dangling its feet, growing heavier and heavier until I finally blog about it and free it to fly away to wherever ideas go once they’re born.

Instead, I stand on the rim of a void, a hungry abyss, and I have nothing to feed it. The lights are still out. No flicker, no candle, no flashlight to point me in the right direction, or even in the wrong direction. And so I crawl about in the tunnels of my mind, clawing out clods of sentences and hucking them up to the surface, distractedly hoping they make sense, imagining that someone panning them might find gold.

Deeper and deeper I go. I stopped by the botany pond on my way up to campus, sat on a bench, pulled out an Agatha Christie. It’s been over a decade since I last read one of her books. As soon as I began, however, a mental switch flipped: where before I had peace, now I knew there was something wrong, off-kilter, not quite right. That’s the assumption when you read a mystery, after all. It billowed out of the book and enveloped my real life, making me wonder when the thing — the ghastly, horribly wrong thing — would emerge and make itself visible. Dire possibility teetered on my mind.

And now I think I’m just tired and hungry. Luckily nothing bizarre has happened…yet. ;) I’ve come up with an idea for Script Frenzy, though, and I’ll be outlining it this week. And then come Friday, the frenzy will begin.

The other day I got to peek inside my soul and see why I rank some days good and others not. I’d thought it would be dependent on how good that day’s events were, but that’s only part of it. Turns out that the prime factor is, instead, how many events there were. In other words, how many discrete things I need to mention in my journal entry that evening. :)

You see, even if a string of superstitiously unlucky events happens, that in itself is worthy of record in my journal, and so I subconsciously revel in that day even though the events themselves were misfortunes and not boons. The more things happen, the happier I am. (I don’t think there’s any etymological connection between those two words, by the way. ;))

Of course I do appreciate good things that happen, and I prefer them, but I now begin to see why I often don’t get so unsettled by the bad things that happen in my life. Everything is fodder for the journal machine. And you know what? I think that’s a good thing. If we’re able to get outside of our trials (as much as possible) and see them from a historical perspective, so to speak, it’s a lot easier to deal with them. I for one know that whenever I’m going through something difficult, thinking about it that way somehow gives me the strength to endure without being blasted to bits. And I can’t think of any real disadvantages to it; can any of you?

By “events” I don’t necessarily mean big things — I mean talking to someone I hadn’t talked to in a while, someone’s kind words, a funny observation, a good e-mail or letter, reading a good book, working on something creative, etc. In fact, I think the events that make a day worthwhile are the ones that I enjoy reading about. When I write something I’d like to read, I call it good. Writing about stuff I wouldn’t really care to read is hard for me, and the lack of interest almost always shows through.

Speaking of journal writing, Connor’s blogged about his new Moleskine notebook. You can see my Moleskine-lovin’ posts by searching for “moleskine” at the top of the sidebar. I heart heart heart Moleskines. Seriously. (Oh, and in my comment on his post I said I converted eight or nine months ago, but in looking through my previous Moleskine posts I found that it was eleven months. Not a big difference, to be sure, but I don’t want to miss my one-year anniversary. ;))

[tags]Moleskine[/tags]

Following on the success of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the same team has created Script Frenzy:

Script Frenzy is an international writing event in which participants attempt the creatively daring feat of writing an original, full-length screenplay—or stage play—in a single month. Spurred by a wild deadline and buoyed by a community of countless other writers, Script Frenzy participants can’t be bothered with self-doubt—or editing. They’re too busy writing by the seat of their pants, typing out beautiful, flawed stories that no one else could have dreamt up. As part of a donation-funded nonprofit, Script Frenzy charges no fee to participate; there are also no valuable prizes awarded or “best” scripts singled out. Every writer who completes the goal of 20,000 words is victorious and awe-inspiring and will get a Script Frenzy Winner’s Certificate and web icon proclaiming this fact. Even those who fall short of the word goal will be applauded for making a heroic attempt. Really, you have nothing to lose—except that nagging feeling that there’s a script inside you that may never get out.

It’s the month of June, and it looks like a lot of fun. Not to mention that it’s only 20,000 words instead of 50,000. ;) I’ve wanted to write a play for a while; here’s my chance. From the website, these are the five basic rules:

1) To be crowned an official Script Frenzy winner, you must write a script of at least 20,000 words and verify this word count on ScriptFrenzy.org. 2) You may write individually or in teams of two. Writer teams will have a 20,000 total word goal for their single co-written script. 3) Script writing may begin no earlier than 12:00:01 AM on June 1 and must cease no later than 11:59:59 PM on June 30, local time. 4) You may write either a screenplay or a stage play. 5) You must, at some point, have ridiculous amounts of fun.

If you end up signing on as well, leave a comment saying so. I wonder what kind of a play I’m going to write… (The agonizing thing is that I can’t start writing till June 1, but I guess I can read up on playwriting until then.)

[tags]Script Frenzy, NaNoWriMo, writing, playwriting[/tags]

This’ll be short, because I somehow keep running out of time (this isn’t supposed to happen! I was supposed to have gobs and gobs of free time after graduating, but I’m busier now than I was during crunch time! Something has gone horribly awry in the universe — somebody might want to see if anything’s been stirred up at Area 51…).

I’ve been using Backpack to keep track of my to-do lists, and recently I ran across RememberTheMilk.com, which has a nice interface, but today I came across what I think will end up being the best solution, at least for me: a wiki.

Now, I really ought to have thought of this before, and I did in a genealogy research context (see my Beyond blog, which I really need to get around to updating…), but not in a general productivity sense. Backpack has been good to me, but (1) it can get kind of slow sometimes at updating the to-do items and (2) I need unlimited pages. :)

Wikis are perfect for this, because they’re pretty much lightning fast (it’s just text — I don’t use the fancy GUI editors, but instead prefer to go under the skin), and you usually get unlimited pages, and you can add in other stuff (images, for example) as necessary. True, you no longer get clickable to-do items — instead using bullets in a list — but that’s okay.

So, I started up a new wiki for myself at PBwiki.com, and it’s going well so far. Eventually I think I’ll install one on my own server (I have two for other purposes, using MediaWiki) so I can control everything that I need to, but for now this’ll do. It’s quite exciting — I can pull in all my writings, for example, and link directly to them with minimum effort and maximum speed. (I had thought about doing that in Google Docs, but it’s slower and linking is harder.)

In fact, “quite exciting” doesn’t do it justice. I’ve been daydreaming about this all day, getting goosebumps as I contemplate organizing my whole life into a wiki. I’ll have to come up with a name for it, of course — something good, something that’ll make me tingle every time I say it to myself. And edit it religiously. And…and…and…

Yes, I have wiki fever. And it’ll probably only get worse. ;)

I wonder as I wander out under the sky, How Jesus the Savior did come for to die, For poor orn’ry people like you and like I, I wonder as I wander, … out under the sky.

I love this song, but there’s one word that bothers me: the “I” in “like I.” Now, I try not to be a grammar cop, especially since being trained as a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist) in my English Language (linguistics of English) major. I don’t care if you say “less people” or “to boldly go” or whatever.

But “like I”? That’s just painful.

Granted, it had to fit the rhyme, I know. But like is a preposition here, and so it needs to take a pronoun in what’s called the accusative case by the Latinists, and the objective case by the non-Latinists. I is in the nominative/subjective case, which means it’s the form used as the subject of a verb. (“I love books.”) Me, on the other hand, is accusative/objective, and is used as the object of the verb, or in this case, as the object of the preposition like. You’d never say, “Bobby hit I,” for example. (And I don’t know why linguists always tend to use violent examples. ~sigh~) Or this: “He is going with I.”

But nowadays people are saying things like, “Me and Sally went to the store.” In a way it’s an abomination, wreaking all sorts of havoc on our case system, but then again we haven’t got much of one left and so I try not to cringe too much. Heck, I find myself saying it often enough.

So, what the song ought to say is, “like me.” Now, you could make a case that like is more of a conjunction here, and that it’s a contracted form of “like you are and like I am.” That’s the reasoning behind saying things like, “She’s taller than I.” (Than can be both a conjunction and a preposition.) There’s also the now-infamous “between you and I.” Same deal here: I should be in the accusative case — “between you and me” — since it’s the object of the preposition between. But people get caught up on the “x than I” and end up overcompensating in other areas of the language. It’s not such a big deal, I suppose.

In this case, however, “like I” sticks out like a shard of stained glass. I guess my training in Latin and Old English has made me rather sensitive to case usage, so perhaps in this area I’m not quite the descriptivist I’d like to be. :)

The Utah Arts Council Writing Contest rules are up:

Each year since 1958, the annual Utah Original Writing Competition has awarded recognition and cash prizes to some of Utah’s finest writers. These winners attract the attention of the wider literary world to our state and our literary community. Often these winners go on to win national prizes, acclaim and publication. With funds provided by the Utah State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council Literature Program has worked to provide the best possible judges for the competition and the largest possible prizes to the winners. In this, its 49th year, the Utah Original Writing Competition continues to honor those Utah writers who, through their literary excellence, bring recognition and prestige to our state.

The categories include novel, biography/autobiography, collection of stories, YA book, poetry, short story, and personal essay. The deadline’s June 29, which might not be enough time to write a 60,000 word book (unless you’ve done NaNoWriMo and/or have lots of free time :P), but the others are definitely doable. If any of you submit, let me know. (Just out of curiosity, that’s all.)

[tags]Utah Arts Council, NaNoWriMo[/tags]

Back in June I mentioned an idea I had for a novel, about the war in heaven. It’s been bubbling around in the back of my head since then, but nothing happened. Until tonight. Two things, actually — first, I made a cover:

Second, I started writing the first chapter. I’m having a devil of a time with it, really, and it took four tries to get something I could even remotely work with. At the moment I’m running into all sorts of questions that I have to answer before I can paint a convincing picture of heaven — where do people live? Do they sleep? Do they eat? What kind of landscape is it? How do people get around? And so on.

Anyway, I’m going to try to write roughly a chapter a week, so we’ll see how things go. (Some of you have already volunteered to read the chapters and give feedback; if any of the rest of you would like to do likewise, just send me an e-mail.)

[tags]writing, LDS, Mormon, war in heaven[/tags]

Came across an interesting post on if:book about A Million Penguins, which is Penguin’s attempt to write a novel collaboratively through a wiki.

So is the novel immune from being swept up into the fashion for collaborative activity? Well, this is what we are going to try and discover with A Million Penguins, a collaborative, wiki-based creative writing exercise. We should go into this with the best spirit of scientific endeavour – the experiment is going live, the lab is under construction, the subjects are out there. And the results? We’ll see in a couple of months. (From the about page.)

While I suspect strongly that it’s going to end up as a mess (though the understory will be quite interesting, as Ben Vershbow on if:book points out), I am very interested to see what happens. It’s about time somebody did this. :)

[tags]Penguin, A Million Penguins, writing, wiki, collaboration[/tags]

I was tempted for a moment to inflict upon y’all a poem which I wrote today during sacrament meeting, but I’ve successfully resisted. :) (This is the first time I’ve tried doing anything in sacrament meeting other than listen to the talks. The interesting thing was the interplay between the talk and my poem, with parts of the one getting interwoven among the strands of the other.) At any rate, writing poetry is now an outlet for me which had lain undiscovered until a couple weeks ago. I’ve always used journal writing as therapy, to figure out what I’m thinking and feeling and how to cope with the various trials (and successes) I’ve encountered in life, and I still feel drawn to writing in my journal several times a day, but poetry gives me a way to distill the emotion into images, something potent and strong. Yes, I love writing. :)

So, trying to find a wife is hard. (Yes, yes, that’s right, it was a complete change of topic. :)) I’m not sure why it’s so hard for me, but it’s aggravatingly, mind-numbingly, soul-piercingly hard. But that’s not really what I want to talk about, since this is a slightly…erm…uncomfortable topic to be broadcasting to the world. :) Anyway, there’s been a lot of pent-up emotion waiting to get out, and this morning an idea came to me that promised a solution. (And it delivered.)

It was this: write letters to my future wife. I don’t know who she is, but I can imagine her as the recipient of these letters, and so I spent twenty minutes writing to her this evening. It was so therapeutic I didn’t want to stop. It’s really nice being able to say things like “I love you” without being worried the girl will be scared away. :) (In this case I know she won’t be scared off because she’ll already be married to me when she reads them — I’m going to give them all to her on our wedding day.) I admittedly feel slightly silly doing this, but the romantic in me keeps telling me how great an idea it is, especially when I give her the letters. But even in the meantime, it’s a newfound source of strength and hope and perseverance for me. And I’ll keep writing letters to my future bride each week until future becomes present.

“Ben, do you really want to post this? It’s not too late to stop,” says the little voice in my head. But I have a really hard time throwing away posts after I’ve written them. ~sigh~ (Good thing I don’t go back and re-read very often, huh. :P)