Many people in different places believe writing is a nothing to do thing.

To some it may well be.

But to millions of people like me who write and work at it every day is a work of art.

For a disable person such as myself writing keeps me working.

Writing keeps my mind active and happy which makes for a great medium from depression and loneliness.

I really marvel at a lot of people who turn their noses up and laugh at people like me who write.

Writing comes in some many different forms and no two people are alike in their art.

Writing is my own oasis.

As for being published in the world of writing it takes more to actually be published and make good money.

Most people think when you have published something you should be rich.

These people know nothing about the publishing business and should not even go there without looking into it more closely.

Myself I have done much publishing of my works alone.

Many cost me nothing as my work is well liked in many circles of the business.

Of course I have made very little as well in Royalties as well.

I was approached several times by Lucille Ball’s publisher “Dorrance Publishing”.

I was found by them in the Library of Congress where I had filed my copyrights and, each time I filed a new works they were e-mailing me and calling me and so on and so forth.

But to get signed up with them you had to be ready to really put out an expense that many people like you and I cannot afford.

In fact if we could have we would have been a Best Seller tomorrow with our works .Mine alone would have maybe paid off and maybe not.

Writing is a hard job, but to get into the publishing business is much harder on just your credentials only.

I told one publisher if I had the money they wanted to publish me with I would not be seeking their money but watch mine and invest it more wisely.

Many writers live a poor but good life.

Writing makes the world go around for us in writing.

A bad review is sometimes a good review and should not deter anyone from writing on with their works.

You will find criticism everywhere.

You will also find people who will threaten you as well thinking your work means nothing for anyone anywhere as well.

Writing has changed from the “Dark Ages” and well it should have long ago.

In taking my Poet Laureate classes I found that the “Greats” would write Poetry and stories and then you had to place yourself in their minds eye and see all that they saw when they wrote something and it had to be correct or you were wrong and knew nothing about the arts.

Today it is more a free thing for a writer to write what ever takes their fancy at the moment.

I would not like everyone to see and view my Poetry as the same reading, but to expand and see and hear and feel what they wish to see , feel ,and hear ,

That is why I write in so many different ways to get all my works that I enjoy writing out there as there is a market for my works and it makes me feel great when I have succeeded at my works in one way or another. Many people write and tell me they like my works and wish more of it and I keep right on writing and give my one hundred percent to my works so they may enjoy or grasp something that works with their life no matter if it is heartache, sorrow, death, life, love or pleasure.

Rich is not always where life is about.

Yes money is good, but so is the Love of the Arts and making it sometimes poor and doing a good thing.

To many, yes I am poor, but to myself I am rich in my own soul and laugh many do, but only a fool laughs at nothing they know or cannot understand.

So write on everyone and seek your own pleasures and never let anyone put you down for being a person whom works and thinks and writes every day.

We are the rich one’s at heart

“Happiness is one who follows their own path and finds joy in all they do.”

We are speaking here not of words by themselves but of whole texts. While agreeing with Derrida that the words are repeatable and can be cited in many different contexts, our concentration here is on particular texts as a whole. The context of a single word can shape meaning and the meaning can be re-contetextualized. We understand that the word is not anchored and can be moved elsewhere into infinite contexts but does the same hold true for an entire text?

A text is produced to convey an idea. Finding the context of the text can narrow all of the meanings of that central idea down. The context of a text limits and shapes its meaning. However, it is not possible to find every context and therefore every meaning. In a sense, the context is going to interrupt the meaning. Meaning is always being ruptured by one form of context or another. Here we will explore three distinct forms of context: the historicity and cultural backgrounds of a text, the intention of the author and of the reader, and finally, the background noise surrounding a text.

Bronislaw Malinowski in his essay “The Role of Myth in Life” says that “The text, of course, is extremely important, but without the context it remains lifeless” (Malinowski 201). The contexts here are the cultural and sociological components that surround a text. This context, consisting of the understanding of the culture in which the text extends from, is essential to effective communication of the text. This is especially important when approaching a text in which the present day reader is not the reader that was the intended audience. This present day reader is far distanced from the text’s creation.

Literature Professor John Lye of Brock University offers this observation, “Reading is thus tied to the text and its historicity; every reading is only an interpretation, an engagement of the historicity of the reader with the historicity of the text. There is no stable reading, only historical reading…meaning as it emerges through the historical reader’s understanding of the historical text” (Lye).

If Lye’s statements are valid, then this statement shows the importance of understanding the historicity and culture of a text. Using the example set forth in the first paragraph of this essay, the historicity of the year 5055 reader and the historicity of the text he is reading are far removed from one another and therefore the validity of the text is vulnerable to misinterpretation because its context has vanished.

William Faulkner writes, “The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important…” (Faulkner Quotes). Faulkner speaks of the author as invisible, of the unimportance of who wrote the words, of the “death of the author”. But this is simply not the case. The historicity of the author very often is of utmost importance. The authors of the Bible are dead, are invisible but without searching out the historicity of the culture of these authors, the reader of the text will be falling through an abyss of endless meaning. Scholars and lay readers alike must delve deeply into the historicity of the Bible text in order to establish, at the very least, an approachable context for finding meaning.

Without this knowledge of historical context behind the writing it is not possible for the reader to understand the text validly. As stated in the above example using Philip Dick’s novel as a model, without knowing the historicity and cultural background of the period in which the novel was written can lead to error in interpreting the text itself. Without knowledge of the author and the author’s background can a reader begin to interpret the text in the manner that the author intended? The 5055 reader may very well take as historical fact the apocalyptic world that Dick has created. The reader may not even possess the background to understand what science fiction or satire is.

This leads us to the question of intention on the author’s part. Intention of the author does not have complete control over what something means. Serres says, “…it (the text) is understood only if the receptor possesses the key to the drawing”. While the text is readable even without knowing intention, it would seem of paramount importance to know the context in which the text was written, to “possess the key to the drawing.

Toni Morrison is sometimes shocked at the response that her novels generate concerning meaning. Morrison’s intentions when writing each novel quite often do not match up with the meanings culled from her reader’s. Morrison’s latest novel, Love, seems to be largely about miscommunication, skewed meaning, and misread intentions. The author has no choice but to release his text to the world and let context, let meaning, be drawn by the individual reader.

All of the characters in the novel are finding meaning in their own ways and largely finding skewed meaning. The picture of Cosey that hangs over Heed’s bed is a perfect example of intention and meaning. The characters looking at the picture all bring their own meanings to it. “Vida believed a powerful, generous friend gazed out from the portrait hanging behind the reception desk” (45). The picture, in itself a representation of the character of Cosey, becomes a text itself that is open to interpretation (or misinterpretation). The next line reminds us that possibly this is not the correct assumption. “That was because she didn’t know who he was looking at” (45).

The readers never do discover who Cosey was looking at, although he can make a few guesses. Cosey’s character is left to individual interpretation and the reader can never quite decide whether to like him or hate him. The picture of Cosey is readable without knowing intention but the reader finds himself yearning to know the intention. He doesn’t know who Cosey was looking at, and therefore he doesn’t know who he is looking at. Even if the reader did know it doesn’t mean he would know who Cosey really is.

When Junior meets Heed for the first time, she is looking for “the face behind the face” (28) and she is listening “for the words hiding behind talk” (28). Here again is the possibility of hidden meaning in the text itself. The entire novel consists of a search for “the face behind the face”. The characters are introduced backwards, with their meanings coming only at the end of the novel, and even then they are left fairly open to interpretation. Morrison is talking to us through her characters and we are frantically searching for the hidden words that will reveal all to us. The line on page 28 “Junior fixed on the hands more than on what occupied them” made me think of words and meaning, with the hands being the vehicle of transport for the text and “what occupied them” being the meaning. The reader’s job in searching for meaning is to pry those hands open and reveal what occupies them.

Perhaps this Morrison’s novel is meant to address the very issue of how readers are misconstruing her words. She lays out an intricate web of gossip, lies, and miscommunication so that we as reader’s can see how bringing meaning to a text does not make that meaning valid. There are so many readers who bring their own history and backgrounds to the text and therefore there are an infinite number of ways for the text to be read. Nietzsche said “facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations”. (Bennett and Royle 113). The reader can never simply validate a text and move on because there is no validation. The world of words is a place “Where all is known and nothing is understood” (4).

If the reader is unaware of the author intentions, then the text is subject to miscommunication. “In such a typology, the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and system of utterance” (Derrida 18). While intention is certainly beneficial to a valid reading of the text, it is not essential. The author of the text can only do so much. The intention of the author does not have control over what the text means to the reader once the text enters “the essential drift” (Derrida 8).

Additionally, what expectations does the reader bring to the reading of a text? Without knowing context, the reader writes the text they read. The reader, in a sense is constructing the author. In positioning the reader within the reading of a text, does the author then become simply a byproduct of the text? Bennett & Royle say that “…factors such as the life of the author and his/her intentions, or the historical and ideological context in which the text was produced” are inconsequential (Bennett & Royle 11). If this were the case, then how would one be expected to read the text without noting the position of the author as he/she wrote it?

Is the text created through the process of reading (Bennett & Royle 12)? If so, this would make the reader the authority of the validity of the text and therefore of the experience itself. Should the reader be responsible for validating the text when the experience was not theirs to begin with? In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, psychologists Michael White and David Epston say, “Since we cannot know objective reality, all knowing requires an act of interpretation” (White/Epston 2). Therefore, the text is open to the interpretation of the reader.

A deconstructionist reader might respond that “while any text demands a ‘faithful’ reading, it also demands an individual response” (Bennett and Royle 17). If an individual is reading a text, then the position of individual can be thought of as being moot because the reading of the text usually carries with it the knowledge that one is reading of someone else’s experience. Therefore, can the reader be excused from reading into the text their own experience?

All acts of interpretation are fraught with human subjectivism. While the reader understands that they are reading someone else’s experience, it is often difficult, if not impossible, for that reader not to read into the text his own experience. So, which comes first – the text or the reader? Derrida says that the text may be understood as fundamentally incomplete, to be constructed in the act of reading – the reader makes the text and the text makes the reader.

Another issue surrounding finding meaning in context is that of background noise. The distinctive dialect, the regional accents, the cultural backgrounds, the historicity, the intention of the author, and the intention of the reader all constitute background noise that provides the reader with clues to the context in which it was written. At the very least, these background noises afford the reader a chance to narrow down the infinite number of contexts to choose from. The text is altered depending upon this background noise. This makes knowing the context advantageous to a valid reading of the text. As Lengis says, “…background noise is essential to communication” (Lengis). Without applying these contexts that make up the background noise the validity of the text can be at stake.

The background noise makes up the Constitutive Outside, the outside makes the inside. The noise – the context, in this case - create the meaning of the words. There can be no pure message without this noise because there must be differentiation. But the distinction between the inside and outside is unstable. There is the historicity surrounding the text, the intention of the author framing the text, and the interpretation of the reader narrowing down the context even closer. The trick is to differentiate where each context begins and where each context ends – if that is even possible to do.

The background noise pulls the other contexts into even more focus by providing the reader with other tools for discovering meaning. In uncovering dialect, sentence structure, even errors in the text, the reader pulls the frame of the text even tighter. On reading Morrison’s novel, Love, the reader encounters the background noise of dialect – a distinctive southern African American dialect. This noise situates the text in a certain time and place and enables the reader to focus on closer meaning.

To summarize, three forms of context are important to a valid reading of an entire text. Historicity provides the reader with a base from which to build meaning. Intention of the author and interpretation of the reader provide the reader with a frame in which to narrow context even more. Finally, background noise adds an even more focused context from which the reader can draw valid meaning. All of these contexts searched out and applied make for the validity of meaning within a text.

I was walking along the street, with my friend when he suddenly shouted “Hey look over their!” I looked and I saw a dog fighting another dog. We walked over to it and joined the gathering group, “hey look there tearing into each other!” I shouted, as if hearing me the dogs stopped and ran away in opposite direction, I ran to try and catch up with one of them, I got to the corner and I couldn't see what was happened but luckily someone did “they were fighting over who had most control over they're bone!” I caught up with the dog and luckily it was ok.

Ok then that was a little passage which I just made up, but there are grammar mistakes in them, so lets have a look:

So the first one was:

“Hey look over their!” - So the correction should be “hey look over there!”

The second mistake:

“Hey look there tearing into each other!” - The correction - “Hey look they're tearing into each other!”

Finally the third mistake:

“They were fighting over who had most control over they're bone!” The correction - “They were fighting over who had most control over their bone!”

So what do we need to remember?

Well we need to remember that:

“Their” is for saying that something is belonging to someone,

“There” is for saying that something is somewhere and finally

“They're” is short for they are so they're is saying something is somewhere

(They is meaning for 2 or more people)

Well I hope you have learnt the uses of the words and how to use them in a sentence.

If the agent didn’t love your work, then he or she was not the person to champion your novel. Always remember a bad agent is much worse than no agent. Move forward until you find the right one.

And quit looking for meaning in those form rejections. There is none.

Is the hero responsible of for his crimes or he is he a victim of fate? Was Macbeth to blame for his ambition and lust, or was he manipulated by supernatural forces? Today I will show you how ambition, supernatural forces and fate in Macbeth convey a message that for every action there will be consequences.

Macbeth is the story of Macbeth and his Lady's attempt to attain the throne of Scotland. Macbeth is a gifted leader and a fierce warrior, but he wants to be king, even if it requires doing something drastic. His wife, Lady Macbeth, has an even stronger lust for power that pushes her relentlessly toward both glory and tragedy.

Macbeth's murder of Duncan in Act II represents the point of no return, after which Macbeth feels he is forced to continue murdering his subjects to avoid the consequences of his crime. Our attention is held by Macbeth's anguish and wickedness, until his wife commits suicide, and he transcends into the dramatic, brutal tyranny which gets him murdered.

Shakespeare concludes his tragedy on a hopeful note, for as corruptive as the evil is in Macbeth, it is only temporary; order is restored through time.

Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble! Supernatural forces are present throughout the entirety of the play. The supernatural element is used to highlight dramatic, emotional and poetic concerns in the play Macbeth.

The dark sense that comes with enchantments, potions, apparitions and ghosts intensify the audience's experience, and also increases pressure on Macbeth. The three witches are evil characters, whose main objective is to wreak havoc.

Macbeth's first experience with the witches is when he's coming home from the battle, as the hero. The witches stop him and predict that he is going to become Thane of Cawdor, even though the old Thane still held his position. The witches also predict that Macbeth will become king.

Macbeth is an easily manipulated character, and is excited at the witches' predictions. He is not sure wether to believe them or not, until the Thane of Cawdor is put to death and Macbeth is crowned the Thane. Being crowned Thane, Macbeth thinks about the other predictions that the witches had made, and realised that he could become King.

Throughout the course of the play, many elements of the supernatural other than the witches are presented, such as apparitions and ghosts, which all play a part to make the play seem scarier.

Macbeth begins as a courageous Scottish general who does not want to commit evil deeds, though he deeply desires power and this ambition causes a transformation for the worse. He kills his King, Duncan, against his better judgment and afterwards is guilty and paranoid. This progresses toward the end of the play as he descends into a frantic, boastful madness.

Lady Macbeth is quite different to Macbeth in this respect. She pursues her goals with a larger determination, but she is less capable of surviving the consequences of her acts. As the strongest female character in Macbeth, she encourages her husband mercilessly to kill Duncan and urges him to be strong afterwards. She eventually breaks under the pressure when Macbeth kills more and more people. In each case, ambition is what drives them to more terrible killing.

Was Macbeth at blame for his murder? How much control did Macbeth have over his own actions? You could say that he wouldn't have killed the king if the witches hadn't put the thought into his head. You could also say that Macbeth wouldn't have had the courage to kill the king if it wasn't for his wife pushing him.

Macbeth is seen as a "free agent", a man who uses his ability to choose and therefore suffers the consequences of that choice. He is his own destruction: the terror of the tragedy is in his decision to perform his crime even though he is knows its implications.

I think that Shakespeare was trying to convey a message though his play. Macbeth was bombarded with pressure from supernatural forces, from his wife, and even is own ambition. He takes advantage of free will by using it for the worst. Macbeth followed selfish ambitions, and killed many people. He became so arrogant and egotistical, that he thought he was immortal, but died because of his actions.

I think that Shakespeare is trying to convey the message that you should make your choices rationally and carefully because for every action there will be consequences.

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With prose fiction and poetry, on the other hand, the situation is quite other. These are creative works, made on the understanding that what the reader finds beneath the surface, what is suggested or implied, has been deliberately put there by the author. There is a complementary aspect to this in that the more the reader brings to the experience, the deeper will the work appear; it is a question of reading into what is written. As two thousand years of interpretation of the Bible have shown, there is no limit to what can be found in such works, no way of knowing how much was deliberately put there and how much has been “read into” it by succeeding generations. This is the genius of human creativity. “You feel him to be a poet, inasmuch as for a time he has made you one - an active creative being”, says Coleridge. Thus there is a sense in which the reader is creating the poem, or at least re-creating it, in terms of his opinions, assumptions, level of understanding, general education, and orientation in life. The final criterion of the validity of what one “finds” in such a work is its usefulness for life.

So the encounter with creative writing, poetry in particular, is synergistic, reciprocal. The question of what the poet intended is not to be answered in the same unequivocal manner as the question “What is two plus two?”. We can get some insight into the poet’s intention by considering the spirit of the age in which he lived, the general pattern of the poet’s whole body of work, her non-poetical works, and biography. But having identified the poet’s intention doesn’t provide us with the “meaning” of the poem; we have still to identify its significance for us, irrespective of what the poet is saying, for poetry is not information but experience; we don’t try merely to “understand” what the poet is saying, we expect to realize some truth about the nature of life. It is not a question of fact but of orientation; not of what we can learn, but of who we can be. In the last analysis poetry is an encounter with ourselves, the revelation of our own minds – surely a thing useful to know.

Poetry, like philosophy, exists in order to enable us to experience thought. Yet poetry is distinguished from philosophy, obviously, by the use of verse and rhyme and, in addition, by the tendency to use metaphor, image and symbol, drawn from the human experience of the natural world and of the human artifact. (In this way poetry reminds us that we are implicated in the whole of creation, do not stand outside it, and are intimately connected with, and related to, all that we see and experience outside our minds, including our own bodies.) Moreover, the use of concrete images in poetry is an aspect of its suggestive nature for an image is fraught with connotation while the abstract concept can, and should be, reduced to its denotative aspect. Thus the poem is, by nature, ambiguous and multivalent. This is intentional because poetry requires us to deliberate, to contemplate and meditate on what is being read.

When poets say that the object of their work is to render the beautiful, they do not mean merely a quality but an intense effect, a participation, an influence upon the mood, the state of mind, of the listener or reader. To experience a poem is to be changed, to be rapt away to another, higher realm, one to which we are entitled as a way to approach to heaven. To achieve this result, poets are advised neither to describe nor to teach for these are left-brained activities while poetry is right-brained, a more holistic way of thinking inasmuch as it presents the sensual and emotional aspects of the human experience, in addition to ideas. Poetry, more than any other verbal-mental activity, draws upon the full resources of mind, i.e., all of the ways in which we can be aware.

It is a truism that poetry has fallen on hard times. We are at the opposite pole from the period when poetry was revelation of universal truth and the poet its prophet. As a thoroughly modern, practical and down-to-earth people, we are not even called upon to consider the universal as it applies to our daily lives; it is entirely too speculative. In fact, it is not uncommon to hear that there is no order to life, that it is the result of a series of random accidents without meaning.

The juxtaposition of these two observations, the desuetude of poetry and the notion that life is meaningless can, if taken from the point of view of poetic tradition, be seen to be a situation of cause and effect. The failure to find meaning in life is the failure of poetry. For characteristic of poetry is its concern with value, with meaning. Typically this meaning is of universal harmony, of order, i.e. cosmos. Poetry has ever concerned itself with revealing this cosmos or, when identifying human failings, showing how we become disordered.

Poetry set to music becomes song, the singing of which lightens the burden of being, raises one’s spirits, an experience which, like romantic love, is nowadays considered to be impractical and unrealistic and, therefore, of little value. But the attitude, the mood, which such experience brings into life, can positively affect other aspects of living, making them easier to bear – surely a constructive use of spiritual experience. Practitioners of such disciplines as yoga and meditation aver that such a lightened attitude is a reality to which we can aspire and can achieve, and that it is our birthright to enjoy such experience.

The arts of poetry, song, yoga and meditation, being non-material, spiritual, are the reason religion has so often inveighed against the human capacity for materialistic orientation to life; religion counsels that these spiritual activities bring a more effective, joyous, attitude to bear on the living of life. And it is in the words of the poets that the deepest religious feelings of mankind survive.

When attempting to learn a manual skill we make mistakes. We reflect on the way we made our attempt, see the error and endeavor to correct it. Poetry exists to enable us to reflect on the way we live our lives overall, and on the meaning and purpose of life itself, with the expectation that, by means of such reflection, we can improve the quality of our experience and make the living of our lives more satisfactory, however we define satisfaction.

The Greek tragedies were written in verse. They were studies in the effect of character on events. The flawed character could undermine institutions, overthrow custom and render null tradition. It was in these that tragedy consisted. Epic poetry is an account of historical events and, like tragedy, exists for the purpose of reflection. We are to criticize the characters, their motives and their actions, and hold them to our own standards. Another response to epic poetry is to regard it as an account of heroism and to draw inspiration from it, to regard the heroes’ behavior as exemplary, models to be emulated.

If ever the quality of human behavior is to improve, we must learn to appraise our own behavior critically with a view to renovation. Poetry is a significant source for examples of this critical analysis, giving, as it does, living images of the method. It is in this way that poetry becomes an experience in one’s life.

The reading we do today is, most often, for the purpose of acquiring information; the writing is denotative. Poetry, on the other hand, is intended to be interpreted, penetrated; the language is used connotatively, permitting any and all associations brought to mind by the words. We can rely on the poet to have intended as many associations as we are likely or able to experience. Thus the question is not what the poet intended but what we make of the poem; what it says to us, and why. For the poem is meant for our use in understanding life or in coping with our own individual ones.