Writing, Editing & Journalism

Growing as an Author: A Reflection

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Picture it: Sicily, 1942. Marne, 1992. As a student half-way through my high-school years, I indulged the fantasy of being a writer. Much of what I wrote in those days was, believe it or not, snail-mail correspondence, primary to my aunt who at the time dwelt in Oregon. But I did other writing, too. Mostly flash fiction about powerful wizards, as I recall, inspired by the Lord of the Rings, with my content consisting mostly of scene descriptions and almost zero dialogue. That summer of ’92, as the calendar inched toward September and the resulting issuance of my driver’s license, was my final big rural summer-vacation hurrah before I started working and thinking about what happened after I graduated. It was the last time I experimented with creative writing for more than a quarter century.
In the early ’90s I wrote on a then-innovative Brother word-processing system, the WP-3400, the kind with a daisy-wheel electronic typewriter attached to an amber CRT monitor, supported by a 3.5-inch drive for storing documents. The unit is long gone, but I still have the little cube I bought to store my disks, complete with a description of which of the dozen floppies contained specific types of files: On the back, in pencil, I noted which slots held my disks dedicated to correspondence, school papers, mail merges, “author stuff,” and my diary. The Brother unit was the successor to my first typewriter, a 1930s-era Royal KMM, the kind that so enchanted me that last year I bought a replacement KMM on eBay that now sits on my living-room desk and occasionally gets pressed into service for envelopes and checks.
In college, I didn’t spend much time doing creative writing. Much of my work as a writer either focused on Latin translations (if you’ve never studied a foreign language deeply, you’d be surprised at how translating original works to and from a different tongue sharpens your sense of syntax) or journalism. By the time I resigned my editorship at the Herald, I could write an 800-word editorial in about 20 minutes, with the resulting product solid enough to go directly on the page with very little editing on its journey.
Corporate life after grad school and newspapering led to corporate documents, rendered in corporate prose using corporate fonts. Then I experienced a brief period wherein I feared that corporate life might prematurely cut me loose, so my evenings pivoted to freelancing for online service journalism websites, mostly generating short-form how-to content related to finance, technology or careers. When you write, and then later edit, 400-word freelance articles in sufficient volume, you learn even more about what does or doesn’t work with English usage.
But non-fiction and fiction are wholly separate beasts. I recall — still with a sense of wide-eyed astonishment at my own inflated sense of self — the way I dived into my first experience with National Novel Writing Month in 2011. I remember Duane telling me the details of NaNoWriMo on Oct. 30. On Nov. 1, I began to write a detective story I only sort-of thought through. But I had believed that because I could churn out near-perfect non-fic prose in large quantities in short periods of time, it couldn’t be all that hard to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days.
I fell short of my 50k goal that year by roughly 48k words. Try as I might, I couldn’t wrap my head around the right way to tell my story. The following year, I tried again, with no creative writing exercises between events to hone my craft. Again, I fell short, but by only roughly 30k words. The year after that, after dabbling with different short stories, I eked out a “win.” Last year, same deal.
None of my NaNo novels are truly complete. Sanctuary — my 2013 victory– is fundamentally solid, but Chapter 4 vexes me still and fixing it will requires a stem-to-stern rewrite. Last year’s Aiden’s Wager stands around 60k words and is targeted for 85k when it’s done. I know how to finish it because the blanks have been fully plotted, and I think the story has real legs, but I also need to strip a lot of the graphic depictions of what amounts to torture porn from the middle chapters before it’ll be safe for polite audiences.
And I’ve been published as a fiction writer, with this year’s Providence, a novelette included in the Brewed Awakenings anthology.
Now I labor as a publisher, receiving queries from authors and editing selected works. I find I’m writing more things — fiction, non-fiction — but also thinking more carefully about how those pieces are presented. I also recently perused my own writing archives to uncover various trends. Such as:

  • My personal blog has moved away from short essays on a given cultural or political topic, to more occasional but longer essays interspersed with factual updates about what I’ve been up to. The trajectory points to longer, more substantive pieces submitted less regularly.
  • I’ve grown more precise about English style even in my informal work, mostly as a reaction to the frequently committed style errors I’ve seen in some of the service-journalism editing I’ve done over the last few years. Many English constructions are common enough that most people don’t think about them, but which still get a “substandard” label by the guardians of linguistic orthodoxy. Increasingly, I default to more conservative usage.
  • I’m more acutely aware of the mechanics of long-form fiction than I used to be, and such knowledge colors how I approach a new fiction story of any length.

Let me share my evolution specifically related to the production of long-form fiction.
At first, I did what so many writers do: I sat down and started typing, tabula rasa, into Microsoft Word. Admittedly, for my first NaNo try, I did possess a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish, but it was a back-of-the-cover blurb instead of a fully fleshed plan. I had some names and a sentence of two of demographics for my characters, but that was about it. I started the first chapter with no sense whatsoever about who the murderer was or why he (or she) did it, despite that the first chapter opened with the murder. My core learning is that I’m not good at turning on a spigot, transcribing the result and arriving at a product that looks like a coherent novel. Some writers can do it, but I’m not among their number.
With my second stab, I tried writing with Scrivener, to rely on its additional bells and whistles to keep my writing notes organized. I had a much better sense of the story arc; I knew, chapter by chapter, what the main plot sequences entailed. I also had some more fleshed-out character descriptions before I started the work of writing. What derailed me, though, were two problems. First, I aimed too high; I planned the first volume of a sci-fi trilogy instead of a stand-alone story, so when I filled in the chapters, I had to think about not just one work, but two other works that weren’t even well-considered skeletons yet. Second, I obsessed about little things far too much for a first draft. I spent a week on my opening chapter (which, I still think, was awesome, but too polished for the early drafting phase) and I spent several hours researching minor details, e.g. the physics of what happens when a grain of sand hits a person in a space suit at half the speed of light. In short: I mostly fixed the planning problem from the year before, but I got tripped up in trying to be too perfect the first time around.
With Sanctuary, I got the formula right. I planned the plot in detail, with scene-by-scene descriptions of the major plot movements or points I had to cover to keep the story straight. I walked into the story with a clear sense of who my main characters were, and I included a major subplot specifically to advance one character’s emotional development despite that the story was developed as a crime thriller. By Nov. 30, I had a complete novel in hand. And because I didn’t obsess about the details, I left myself occasional notes to fix things on a second read. One big fix requires a subplot rewrite, but … that’s the point of writing. You never let it go after a first draft, ever.
By last year, Aiden’s Wager built on my previous improvements and I fell into the rhythm much more quickly. I thought less about plot and character from a big-picture perspective, and more about nuance. It mattered to me that I got point-of-view consistent and appropriate for certain scenes. I cared that some characters changed as the story unfolded and others didn’t, and that certain characters demonstrated specific mannerisms or verbal tics. Instead of focusing on an event-driven plot, the story revolved around the main character’s rapid slip into Stockholm Syndrome and how he couldn’t quite break himself out of it without help from the family he rejected. So telling the story of the main character as he progressed from cocky rich boy to angry rape victim to willing submissive — and how he found the path back to wholeness — required more character development than plot twisting, and much more dialogue both internal and external than I was accustomed to writing. In particular, I had to write the main character’s girlfriend very carefully so that her demeanor in the early book hinted at, but didn’t telegraph, her later betrayal and then remorse.
I still have a long way to go as a writer. My “novelist voice” is solidifying, I think, and that’s an exciting place to be. I’ve already thought about what my next novel will cover — no spoilers! — and with the notes I’ve committed, I’m confident this one will be my best one yet.
Rare is the author whose very first novel gets published. Many successful writers admit to having drawers of early manuscripts gathering dust in a corner, because the craft of novel writing comes with practice. Every new manuscript that gets put into the drawer is stronger than its predecessor. Every new manuscript teaches the author a lesson about what does or doesn’t work for how he, as an artist, executes on his craft.
I know I’m a planner. I write only when the entire plot is graphed, the characters are fully fleshed and each scene has a purpose. So I have largely mastered the basics as they relate to a writer with my procedural biases. Now I’m working on more complicated things: Voice. Consistent and appropriate POV. Nailing a scene description with verbal economy. Obscuring didacticism with skillfully rendered dialogue.
I think writing is much like building a house. If you’ve never done it before, you stress over pouring the basement walls, framing the studs, running the plumbing — the basic stuff that’s second nature to a typical contractor. The more you grok the foundations, though, the more you stop thinking about the basic infrastructure that you’ve already mastered and jump ahead to the detail of the cabinetry or the shape of the marble on the countertops. The best architects looking at a field during a groundbreaking ceremony don’t think about drywall or concrete; they think about what vase will perfectly complement the leather sectional they’ve planned for the living room. So also should good authors progress so the fundamentals become instinct and they spend their creative time on the ornamentation that elevates a craftsman-like story into a work of transcendent art.
Writing coaches scold their charges: “Just write every day,” on the theory that habituation leads to success. It doesn’t. Learning from your mistakes to grow your skill matters much more than mere volume even will.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Recent Writing/Publishing Posts of Note

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I’ve been doing a bit of blogging to flesh out the content on the Caffeinated Press site, mostly about writing/editing and the business of publishing. Synopses of my recent posts follow.

  • How Much Scene-Setting Is Too Much … Or Too Little? – Scene-setting isn’t easy. There’s no magical paint-by-numbers approach for getting it right. When done well, a perfectly described scene can make a story; when done poorly, the story collapses.
  • 21 Books That Moved Me – The world benefits when authors tell their stories. But the stories that move us the most are informed by a deep understanding of the trends and ideas that undergird them. This understanding comes from reading or otherwise experiencing each individual plank on the scaffold of our story.
  • On the Effective Attribution of Speech in Fiction – Balancing diction and tone and rhythm to generate a character’s authentic voice makes for tough work for any author. But perhaps even more important than a character’s voice is the structural framework into which that narration sits.
  • Points of View – One of the most common structural reasons a person’s manuscript may receive the cold shoulder from an agent or publisher follows from the apparently random admixture of narrative points of view within a story.
  • Reflections on Fusion Genres – The technical term for a novel that blends more than one genre or sub-genre into a single story is fusion genre. Very many fusion books are good. But because there’s a higher barrier to market than with straight-genre work, very few publishers are willing to take them on, and in the crowded self-publishing world, the sheer volume of available works means that any one story almost assuredly will be lost in the crowd.
  • Every Voice Matters – Few would deny the truism, but the underlying lesson is observed more often in the breach: That every voice matters and deserves a chance to be heard.
  • Handling Feedback with Grace – Good writers know that the trial-by-fire from beta readers or professional editors is what brings our newborn manuscript through its long, painful adolescence known as “rewrites” until we finally have a mature product ready for the market.
  • How to Query Like a Pro – To find a publisher, you’ll need to perfect your query package.
  • Tips for Robust Self-Editing – Before you submit your work for a peer critique, give yourself a robust self-edit. Look for common punctuation or grammar challenges that often burden less experienced authors.
  • The One Mistake That Thwarts Aspiring Writers – Before you submit your work for a peer critique, give yourself a robust self-edit. Look for common punctuation or grammar challenges that often burden less experienced authors.

Send me your ideas for post topics related to writing, editing and publishing — I’d be happy to draft something that answers your questions!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Better Person, or a Happy Person?

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While working this morning on a blog post for Caffeinated Press, I had included a throw-away line (since deleted) about how the breadth, not necessarily depth, of someone’s reading history made for a more well-rounded writer.
That segment and its implications have been percolating ‘twixt my earholes for the last few hours. I think I originally intended the idea to mean that exposure to many different genres makes for a better author, insofar as writers benefit from engagement with different rhetorical devices, modes of writing and standards of literary excellence. In short: “Diversity makes you stronger.”
But I’m not sure I really believe the diversity argument. After all, it’s not exactly rare for the D-word to get tossed out as some sort of MacGuffin, a trinket to be prized for its own sake, when really, what we’re talking about with D-word euphemisms is some other subject we’d prefer to avoid discussing plainly.
When I visited prison inmates during my time volunteering for the Catholic diocese and the Michigan Department of Corrections, one of the slogans I frequently heard was: “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” The inmates believed, based on their own experiences, that life’s a hard teacher, but if you pay attention and at least get a passing grade, you’ll survive. Put differently, it’s not the exposure, but the engagement that counts; you can’t just drive past 8 Mile, you need to walk the block, too.
In a literary sense, a stronger writer is one who engaged in the struggle rather than merely observed it. For example, an author’s voice and rhetorical approach for a story about a young woman contemplating abortion will differ significantly depending on whether the author has had an abortion, protests against them, or is utterly ambivalent to the issue. Your depth of experience (laying on the table waiting for a surgical D&C, vs. studying the laws and stats and joining prayer chains, vs. not caring a whit but writing anyway on a work-for-hire assignment) matters more than how widely studied you are about the procedure. Right?
Maybe. But maybe not. The activist knows the subject, but not necessarily all the context on the margins that lead to a more sound interpretation of that subject. Perhaps an ethicist or a physician can speak more soundly about abortion, in toto, than the activist who undergoes the procedure or the cleric who wages spiritual warfare against it.
The better question is: From the perspective of a writer, is it more advantageous to master the niche but forego context, or to have lots of context but no real depth? There’s no good answer to that one, I’m afraid, but it’s a valuable paradigm for assessing how well a given story works.
In the context of an author’s reading habits, though, I think “the struggle” manifests itself in tackling hard material simply for the pleasure and the challenge of doing so. Too many writers of my acquaintance content themselves to reading the things they like while avoiding the things they dislike. Although at first blush such a sentiment may elicit a self-evident “Duh,” the problem lies in the Venn diagram of what I like vs. everything else. A sci-fi author who only reads sci-fi will have a solid heartbeat on the genre, but he hamstrings himself from the perspective of the totality of his art as a penmonkey.
Distilled, I think it’s a comfort question. We read what we like and we like what we read because it’s more enjoyable to read for entertainment than to read for self-improvement. The fantasy fan who consumes nothing but fantasy surely profits in her own mental world. Yet can we not say that the person who reads challenging things — histories, the classics, autobiographies — encounters new things in new ways that leaves her better off than if she had played it safe?
A recent re-read of The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius reinforced for me the value of using every action as a learning moment, even actions intended as leisure. So perhaps a different way of phrasing the “reading for fun” question is, Is it preferable to read to become a better person, or to read to become a happier person? For the two prospects, although they occasionally overlap, aren’t exactly synonymous.
Do I read The Brothers Karamazov because I should, knowing that I’d gain new insight about the human condition but also dreading the book’s length and density? Do I grab the latest Nicholas Sparks throw-away pulp just to pass the time?
These are tough questions. It’s hard to begrudge a reader the right of escape. But for an author? I think an author’s reading list needs to be less comfortable, more challenging. We owe our readers that much.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Like to Read? Then Have I Got a Book for You ….

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We’re launching Brewed Awakenings, the house anthology of Caffeinated Press, on March 1. The inaugural volume of the anthology features eight novelettes written by West Michigan writers.
Not only did I write a story, but I edited the volume and managed the production of the title. Buttload of work, not all of which is completely wrapped up as of this post.
Copies are now available for order; they’ll ship on March 2. But why wait? BUY NOW. BUY, I SAY.

Personal, Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Writing, Editing & Journalism

What a Month!

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January is already a memory. Wow. Let’s recap some highlights.
Auto-Mania
Around Thanksgiving, I started my GMC Jimmy one morning and heard a bit of a squeal and smelled an odd aroma reminiscent of a mix of oil, burning rubber and ozone. It came, it went, life went on. But Jimmy started to act a little funny — eventually, I’d experience intermittent periods where the charging system would fail. Then it would come back to life, as if by magic.
Over my Christmas vacation, I vowed to fix the problem myself, if I could. I popped the hood and voila! — it was immediately obvious that the pulley on the belt tensioner was broken. As in, chewed to pieces. The entire serpentine belt was chafing and parts, like the alternator, weren’t being properly driven.
“I can fix that!” I said to the cats. So I did. I bought a replacement pulley from AutoZone (1.04 miles from my house by foot) and replaced the damaged part. In single-digit temperatures. Outdoors. Without gloves. Woohoo. So I got that part replaced and what happened? You guessed it — sitting for a few days, in the cold, after having had intermittent charging, left the already worn battery too weak to soldier on. So on one of the snowiest days of early January, I trudged to AutoZone on foot, bought a replacement battery, carried it home through drifts as high as two feet — and, after I installed it, thought, “Geez, why didn’t I just call a cab?”
Battery worked. But still no charge. Damn it.
So back to AutoZone for a replacement alternator. When the weather got a little nicer — as in, the upper 20s — I swapped alternators. Only hard part about that process was getting the bolts aligned on the new unit. So I fired up the ol’ girl and watched the voltmeter go from 11 volts to about 14 over the course of a minute. Then I flipped on the defroster and the system immediately dialed to 11, never to recover.
By that point, any other fixes would be guesses, because I lacked the tools and expertise to diagnose what might have been an odd fault somewhere. I took Jimmy to Community Automotive, whereupon I was informed that the problem was that the alternator wasn’t putting out a charge. Translation: They said AutoZone sold me a defective replacement part.
They also told me that the tensioner was screwed up and the serpentine belt was super worn. So I said, “Fine. Replace the entire tensioner assembly and the belt. I’ll deal with AutoZone on my own.”
I picked up Jimmy from the shop — and lo and behold, the charging system works. I’ve been driving it for a week and my voltmeter is fine and I’m clearly not driving on the battery alone.
My guess? Community Automotive determined a bad charge on the alternator with a misaligned belt. After the belt was replaced and the tensioner re-aligned, the alternator was good to go. But I’m still keeping my eyes peeled for a while for signs of charging-system faults.
Food Deserts, Public Transportation and Good Health
While Jimmy was undergoing repairs, I opted to play it safe and keep it parked until I knew the problems were fixed. That left me to find alternative transportation to work. Daily cab fare runs $50 between my house downtown and the office on the far northeast side of the city. But, I live near a bus stop, and there’s a stop about an eighth of a mile from the office. So, problem solved — for $3/day, I can just Ride the Rapid.
I don’t mind the bus. The Rapid buses are clean and run mostly on time. My biggest gripe with the system is that the metro area consists of an urban core surrounded by inner-ring suburbs that aren’t well connected to each other. The transit system uses a hub-and-spoke model that routes most buses through the downtown Central Station; there are just a handful of crosstown routes that don’t connect through Central. In a practical sense, then, getting most places takes longer than it needs to. My drive from home to office is about 15 minutes; my bus commute, door to door, takes a full hour. We really need more ring routes and crosstown routes to connect disparate parts of the metro area without having to head downtown so frequently.
(I think a shuttle service between Standale Meijer and the Grandville Library is essential, as is a park-and-ride lot at Plainfield and the Beltline where Route 11 extends all the way to the Beltline, then a crosstown route connects that lot with Knapps Corner, Meijer Gardens and then Woodland Mall. If the Rapid folks were super clever, they’d run a two-way square ring route starting at Leonard and Alpine, proceeding on Leonard to Plymouth, south to Franklin, west to Godfrey/Market, then follow Wealthy to Straight, Seward and back to Alpine — thus crossing a whopping 19 routes without actually putting in at Central Station, a potential time-saver for folks who just want to get from one part of the periphery to another. But I digress.)
My location, in the South Hill neighborhood, puts me within reasonable walking distance of a small Family Dollar and the small Wealthy Market. Neither establishment stocks an assortment of healthful foods. Family Dollar, for example, offers no fresh fruits or vegetables and the freezer section consists of pizzas, burritos, ice cream and such. Were I to aim for healthy eating, my only real option is to trudge a few blocks to a bus stop, head to the Kalamazoo Ave. Meijer, buy groceries, then trudge back. That’s a lot of time and effort — moreso than most would undertake.
I’m not a huge activist for Michelle Obama’s “food desert” propaganda, but I do note in passing that if I were permanently confined to public transportation, I’d either need to radically re-think my daily routines or acquiesce to less healthful foods. Puts the “chronic co-morbidities” question into a different lens, methinks.
Caffeinated Press
I’ve mentioned it before, but perhaps not in adequate detail. So here goes.
In mid 2014, a group of colleagues and I established Caffeinated Press, Inc., a for-profit S corporation organized in Michigan. Our mission as a small independent publisher is to connect authors and readers in the West Michigan market. I serve as chairman of the board and chief executive officer; in that capacity, I also oversee the acquisitions and editorial processes. The company includes five board members and several outstanding associates who are working hard to build the company.
I’m putting the final touches on Brewed Awakenings, the first of what we intend to be an annual house anthology. Production has been labor-intensive. I’ve had to proofread roughly 85k words, manage layout, design the cover, develop the front matter, etc. Takes a lot of time — indeed, the bulk of my month has been spent on anthology production. Eight local authors contributed novelettes to the anthology; I’m in it too, with “Providence,” a story set on Lake Michigan. Our very loose theme was “all goes dark,” but the work we’re publishing includes some humor, some gore, some romance, some speculative fiction. Good stuff. We’re producing the anthology in both paper and e-book formats; the paper version will appear in the Ingram catalog and the e-book versions on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Overdrive, etc.
The board recently authorized the production of a quarterly literary journal, called The 3288 Review. More details on that, later.
Health Data Analytics; State Leaders Team
I’ve wrapped up most of my work on the Health Data Analytics project for the National Association for Healthcare Quality. With my colleague Tricia, executive director of outcomes for an Illinois hospital, we led a team of health quality practitioners from across the country on an exercise to define the emerging competencies necessary for the next generation of practitioners. Our charge focused on health data analytics — i.e., Quality pros who specialize in analytics. Interesting work. Our report goes next to the NAHQ board of directors.
And on the subject of NAHQ, this year’s president asked me to move my cheese a bit. Instead of rotating into the second-year lead role for the Special Interest Group team, she asked me to begin a new two-year cycle as co-lead of the State Leaders team. That puts me and my new colleague, Andrew, in front of the presidents and presidents-elect of the various state-level health care quality associations across the country. Andrew is a top-notch fellow and our assigned staffer at NAHQ and our board liaison are very easy to work with. Looking forward to this new opportunity.
Surgical Site Infections
With one of our physician medical directors, I recently authored an internal white paper about the costs associated with surgical site infections for patients who are fully embraced within a particular accountable-care organization. The numbers were low — but we recognized that part of the problem was identifying SSIs correctly amid a paucity of accurate physician documentation that works its way into an administrative claim record. Looks like this early report will fuel a broader review of how healthcare acquired infections are managed within our ACO. Potentially publishable research!
Texas, Ho!
Still on track, in a few weeks, for a brief excursion to Texas. My plan is to drive from Grand Rapids to Shreveport, LA, and spend the night at a casino there. Then, drop of my friend Duane’s stuff in East Texas, then push through to the Dallas Metroplex to catch some of the Thinline Film Festival shenanigans. I’ll head back to The Mitten by means of Oklahoma City, so I can catch some prominent casinos along the way. Basically, killing three birds with one minivan.
Miscellaneous Updates
Some other tidbits of interest —

  • Enjoyed a lovely podcasting marathon yesterday with Tony. We had sushi at Maru, enjoyed some Japanese whiskey and cigars at Grand River Cigar, and then retreated to my dining room to push out four episodes. The cigars came to us courtesy of Famous Smoke Shop, an online retailer, that’s partnering with our podcast.
  • I get to hire a new intern and a new senior analyst this fiscal year. Yay!
  • One of my contract clients had a change of leadership in my area; the upshot is that I’m being invited to do more management stuff, as a contractor, that had formerly been the sole domain of company personnel.
  • We’ve got a severe winter warning right now. As I write this, I see heavy, blowing snow creating white-out conditions at a quarter mile. Beautiful. If only I had thought to buy firewood so I could have a fire tonight.
  • Looking forward to the county convention next week, in anticipation of the 2015 Michigan Republican state convention.
  • My next writing project might be a textbook about health care quality.
  • Fleshing out my author page on Goodreads reminds me of how little time I have to actually read. That said, I’m about 60 percent done with Francis Fukuyama’s Political Order and Political Decay, the second of two volumes dedicated to revisiting and extending the groundbreaking research of Samuel Huntington into the origin and evolution of political institutions.
  • I cut the cord. After paying Comcast $220 per month for years for TV I rarely watched, a phone I never used and Internet that sometimes crawled to a halt, I gave them the boot and now rely on AT&T DSL for $40 per month. I still have Netflix and Hulu Plus, and Skype and my cell phone, so … yeah.

Hoist Upon Chait’s Petard
Some concluding thoughts about this week’s pundit nerdfight over Jonathan Chait’s essay, “Not a Very P.C. Thing to Say.”
The back-and-forth over whether Chait makes a good point or whether he is some sort of hypocrite or whether he is locked in his own view of privilege — well, it’s all already been said. The most fitting coda, I think, is merely to observe that the dour puritanism of today’s Left will, perhaps inevitably, engender a systemic backlash from within the Left itself.
The human mind enjoys a finite capability to accept cognitive dissonance, let alone the doublethink that lets people hold mutually inconsistent assertions to be true without it even triggering that dissonance. Indeed, the New Soviet Man was a creature of this doublethink. But even with relentless propaganda, nuclear missiles and Kalashnikovs, the spark of truth couldn’t ever really be repressed. The events of 1989 bore that out. Yet the Left today is increasingly reliant on authoritarian systems of psychosocial control that require doublethink to avoid cognitive dissonance. At some point, the average Man of the Left will ask: Is this really what I believe? And when that happens, the bottom will fall out.
There’s something odd, for example, in holding that the concept of a gender construct is sufficient to change reality. Were I to announce that I identify as female and henceforth want to be known as Jane, most on the Left will applaud my bravery, call me Jane and use “she” as a pronoun. All that, despite inconvenient reality of my XX chromosomes (and sexual organs). One would think the “science is settled” about biological sex at least as strongly as it’s allegedly settled about climate change, but ….
So, again — the mind’s ability to square the cognitively dissonant circle isn’t without limit. Regardless what you think of Chait, or his arguments, the Thermidor he points to may dawn more swiftly than some expect.

Philosophy, Writing, Editing & Journalism

What Would Impel You to Murder?

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Statutes recognize several distinct grades of legal culpability when one human kills another. Deaths resulting from the acts of a perpetrator who didn’t intend to kill and had no ill will for the decedents — i.e., the crime lacked intent and malice — may end up with a manslaughter charge, whereas a death arising from the perpetrator’s failure to exercise due care might be charged as a negligent homicide. When a death occurs because of the willful act of the perpetrator, then the charge becomes murder and falls into one of three degrees. Many crimes of passion get charged as second-degree murder. Premeditated killings earn a first-degree murder charge. Layered into the mix are a host of defenses — insanity, self-defense, accident, impairment, victim retaliation, etc. — that attempt to minimize the mix of intent and malice that lead to specific charges and specific sentences.
The law’s judgment, however, imperfectly squares with moral judgment. To many ethicists, killing in reasonable self-defense — including during combat — and killing that follows from an unforeseeable accident, both carry minimal moral culpability. A person’s moral burden increases when a death results from an avoidable set of circumstances, like intoxication or reckless driving. It increases further when a killing that might legally be justified nevertheless could have been avoided with non-lethal approaches to conflict resolution. It increases still further when the perpetrator put himself into an environment where there was a known and avoidable risk of violence, like when an angry husband returns home to confront a cheating wife. When you cross into the threshold of first-degree murder, an ethical distinction follows from the reason for the crime; this reason may appear in sentencing memoranda but usually not in the charge. In general, the more the act of murder depersonalizes the victim, the higher the level of ethical censure.
Let’s shift gears. I’ve been doing a lot of editing of short stories for the Brewed Awakenings anthology. As part of my prep, I’ve visited libraries and bookstores to browse recently published novels and anthologies, to get a better feel for how certain plot devices unfold or how other authors manage the flow of dialogue and contextual information within a scene. What I’ve taken away from that exercise is that for many writers — although, to my satisfaction, none in our anthology — killing is something that just seems to happen, often without malice or intent. Murder becomes a plot device that’s divorced from any real grasp of what the crime actually entails in the real world. (It’s curious how many contemporary novels rely on killing and rape as staple plot conventions, despite near-universal condemnation of the practices. Perhaps there’s something significant in that.)
For an average person, the innate prohibition against murder is so strong that the only realistic way he’d kill another is by accident or through avoidable impairment. So when authors craft tales about premeditated murder, the killer rarely works when he’s an archetype of Joe Sixpack. Premeditated murder by a psychologically competent offender occurs for only a small number of reasons:

  • Financial or reputational gain (contract hit men, insurance windfalls, gang violence, failed drug deals, prison murders)
  • Revenge (grudges and other personal animosities against a known victim, honor killings, failed marriages)
  • Jealousy (knocking off a rival for someone’s affections, envy over the good fortune of another, killing a scorning lover)
  • Service to a cause (ideology, religion, sociocultural tribal codes)
  • To avoid exposure (cover up other crimes, silence whistleblowers)
  • To gain exposure (school shootings, serial killing, police-assisted suicide)
  • Bias (hatred of known or unknown others who exhibit a disfavored characteristic, tribal initiations, out-of-control bullying)
  • Thrill (killing for fun by a person not psychologically compromised, BDSM snuff activity)

Of course, reasons for premeditated murder by the psychologically incompetent run the gamut — “the voices made me do it,” etc. — but that class of perpetrator is less interesting because they’re acting out on disordered compulsions, so their actions are rarely voluntary in the sense they rationally consider their motive, means and opportunity to kill another absent any legal justification for doing so. In this sense, although some serial killers are impaired, certain diagnoses within the DSM-V don’t rise to the level of acute psychological disorder that removes moral culpability. A person with antisocial personality disorder, for example, has a diagnosis that may well be admissible at trial, but all but the most severely afflicted can still function normally and make rational choices about first-degree murder.
All of the above having been established, the question for authors is straightforward: Can you explain why a rational person willingly ended the life of another? The cultural and even instinctive taboo against unjustified homicide runs deep. A person rarely just wakes up one day and snaps into Murder One (that’s what Murder Two is for); the sequence of events leading to the pulling of the trigger or the wielding of the knife take weeks, months or years to develop. Introducing a premeditated murder at random makes for a thin plot.
But the larger question rolls beyond authors and includes everyone. What stops us from killing? For some, it’s that pre-rational inhibition rooted in culture, religion or instinct. For others, it flows from a panhumanist love for all living things. And don’t forget the fear of arrest, trial and incarceration and the deep loss of friends, family and freedom that follow. Or about the physical difficulty that comes from subduing another and the exposure to blood and internal organs that may dissuade the squeamish. Authors rarely seek recourse to the rich literature on ethical paradigms; if they did, they’d realize that certain ethical frameworks justify the don’t-murder injunction using starkly different logic models. (Consequentialists, I think, have the hardest time with this problem.)
There’s no such thing as a random killing. Each murder has a reason for its commission that outweighs the relative risk of its consequences. For authors, there’s probably some wisdom in avoiding the rape-and-murder trope unless you can paint a compelling character sketch of the perpetrator — why did he do it, and why didn’t the fear of consequences deter him?
For everyone else, it’s a useful exercise to consider the circumstances that could lead you to cold-blooded murder. And if you find that you cannot list any, then follow up with the question: Am I deceiving myself?

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Reflection on Winning #NaNoWriMo

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Remember, remember the First of December — hangovers, and burned by your plot.
I see no reason why this writing season, should ever be forgot.

The stroke of midnight on this, the glorious first day of December, A.D. 2014, ended my fourth straight year of participating in the orgy of nerdtastic masochism known formally as National Novel Writing Month. It also marks my second, and consecutive, win; I clocked in mid-day Sunday with 50,004 words — a whopping four more than I needed to thwart the validation algorithm’s “you must be this tall to win” rule. And all that, with the entire third act left to write.

NaNoWriMo is a hobby for some and a kick in the pants for others. Despite bold proclamations that participants can write a 50k-word novel in a month, the truth is, NaNoWriMo is intended to get the bulk of a “zero draft” written by aspiring writers who may not otherwise have the time or the focus to do it on their own. The promise of the November wordslinger scramble is that if you get a bunch of work done in one massive flurry of drunken and/or caffeinated activity, you can augment and edit later, instead of eyeballing a blank paper with zero words and thereupon becoming the literary equivalent of a cheese-eating surrender monkey.

My first attempt, and my second, ended in Boris-and-Natasha levels of failure. Neither broke 10k and neither was organized in a logical way. Last year’s was better, and although I got the story to about 56k, there was one problem — that damned fourth chapter — that I couldn’t quite work around. One of the hardest lessons for this former journalist to internalize was the difference between fiction and non-fiction writing. Give me a word count and a deadline within the newsroom, and I’ll deliver page-ready copy every time, on time. I became quite adept, when I ran the opinion desk at a small community newspaper, at writing 800-word staff editorials in 20 minutes or so. But fiction? I thought I’d breeze into it. How hard could it be to make shit up? Karma spied my arrogance and rewarded me with humiliatingly low word counts until, having caught that good, old-time fiction religion, I repented of my sins and treated my novels like the precious works of art they truly are.

Writing is like sexual metaphors: The less you practice, the more you’ll embarrass yourself when you finally pull out and fumble sheepishly for your pants. Over the last few years of doing NaNoWriMo as well as branching into short stories, I’ve learned a few things about my style and my craft:

  1. I do better when I detail my plot and main characters before I write. This year, like last year, I used Scrivener for Windows. That program brilliantly organizes prose and supporting information into one clean interface. I detailed every chapter and every scene, setting 50-word scene summaries for each and even specifying target word counts, points to make, quotes to include and whatnot. Some folks forego planning and just write. I don’t know why they’re not alcoholics.
  2. I start at the beginning and finish at the end; I rarely jump around the story.
  3. I self-edit as I write. During word wars at our write-ins — i.e., when we writers peek out from the shadows and count how many words we can write during a specific period of time — I average about 360 words in 15 minutes, with a standard deviation of 103 words. At the write-in I hosted on every Saturday in November, I logged the results of every war, covering 17 different writers. I had the narrowest SD of anyone as well as the lowest mean; I also had the second-lowest maximum. But my prose is clean, so there’s that. (Point of pride: My write-in incurred a whopping 221,481 logged words in 2014, with a max spurt of 1,317 words over 20 minutes, a grand per-writer mean of 522 words in 15.25 minutes and an average standard deviation of 169 words.)
  4. I tend to write dialogue-heavy, with episodic short scene descriptions. When I relate a series of actions, I tend to use a lot of “after” and “then” — a stylistic affliction I can only really fix on a later cold read. Initial character descriptions focus on physical attributes and wardrobes; mannerisms only get pulled in to break up long passages of dialogue.

This year’s effort was … precious. Having been waylaid by sundry crises in the first half of the month, I arrived at Day 25 (of 30!) with a whopping 17,195 words complete. But, mirable dictu, I had a five-day vacation for the last five days of the month. You want to know what that kind of progress looks like?

All the words.
All the words.

It basically looks like 6,562 words per day. Remember how I said I write at about 360 words per quarter-hour? That tally doesn’t include frequent breaks for peeing, getting more wine, waiting until the cat re-positions himself on my lap, re-reading and editing what I just wrote, checking email, peeing again, looking up bondage equipment on Wikipedia and eating candy. I wrote for eight to ten hours per day, each of those last few days, to eke out the narrowest of wins.

And I’m good with that workflow, because I learned that it’s easier to keep your story straight when you’re plowing through it, instead of dabbling with a disconnected scene here and there every couple of weeks. I got inside my characters’ heads, and actually changed a core part of the story based in large part to how I wrapped up one important, but sad, scene. That scene, by the way, marked the first time I’ve ever teared up over what happened to my characters.

All of the above notwithstanding, let me share with you the gist of Aiden’s Wager. I’ll begin by asserting my surprise at discovering that this was really the novel I intended to write last year. My 2013 effort — a detective story — followed a fairly typical, plot-heavy structure with a few one-off scenes added for color. In the end, though, the plot got in the way of the characters. That incongruity between story and structure was my ultimate problem with the fourth chapter: It tried to fix the plot holes through careful foreshadowing, but the real story by the end wasn’t the mystery, it was the way the main character evolved over a particularly challenging case.

Aiden’s Wager is different. I billed it, on the NaNoWriMo site, as “literary fiction.” Which it is, insofar as the real story eschews an event-driven paradigm in favor of a narrative showing how the main characters progress or regress over three weeks in late autumn. In a nutshell, the protagonist — a 22-year-old named Aiden, first-class-prick scion of an exceptionally wealthy family — gets disowned and disinherited after a brief jail stint, by his reputation-conscious father. Aiden hails from a “Rich Kids of Instagram” kind of social circle of cut-throat young people vying for power and dominance within their tribe of fellow hundredth-of-one-percenters. Aiden maintains his swagger and assumes he’ll come out of his newly diminished circumstances like a boss, but one of his rivals sets him up, blackmails him and treats him like a trophy to solidify his own status within the tribe. Aiden must therefore think about the purpose of his life, the source of moral authority and the way that power dynamics corrupts people and relationships.

It’s not a light-hearted story. The entire middle third of the book deals with the blackmail — its origination, and how the main antagonist deliberately isolates, dehumanizes and subjugates Aiden. That middle third is, in places, vividly pornographic. I try to show how a cocky rich kid gets the rug pulled out from underneath him, and in the emotional chaos that ensues, he becomes a victim who succumbs to Stockholm syndrome and becomes willfully subservient to, even worshipful of, his abuser. The final third covers Aiden’s attempt to repair the damage he caused to himself and his family after forcible intervention by his disgusted older brother. A big chunk of that recovery entails an exploration of moral authority, aided in part by a visiting Catholic priest.

I’m happy with this story. I think it has legs. At the outset, I wanted to write about moral authority in general in the guise of a questioning young man crossing paths with different people. In this story, I accomplished that goal — but concepts like power, coercion, consent, faith, control and teleology also recur. I tried to mainstream bisexuality, present the clergy favorably, touch on the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder among the elite and emphasize the emptiness of a life devoid of meaning beyond one’s own ego. I may have to edit out some content in the middle third; some audiences may not want to read extended and explicit passages of gay torture porn with a strong D&S overtone.

But then again, in a Fifty Shades of Gray world, maybe they might.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Life after #NaNoWriMo 2013

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I crossed the 2013 National Novel Writing Month finish line with just above 50,100 words, with 13 hours to spare. This was my third year participating, but my first “win.” Herewith some lessons:

  1. I do best when I have an outline of the work in mind before I begin, including scene synopses and character sketches. I use Scrivener for Windows, so all of this info is readily at hand. Before Halloween, I plotted out 25 scenes over 12 chapters (with a prologue) with a goal of putting a minimum of 2,000 words in each scene, one scene per day, with five days off in the month. I didn’t stick exactly to that schedule, but getting slightly ahead of target early in the month gave me some slack later in the month. All I really had to do was treat each scene like a module; it’s less daunting to write a 2,000-word scene than to write “a novel” in exactly the same way it’s easier to eat calamari instead of a giant squid.
  2. The more I finished, the easier it was to write. After about the 30k mark, the words flowed easier because I better understood the nuances of the story and the personalities of the characters. By the end, I had so much stuff I wanted to stick in that I had to discipline myself to stick to the original plan of getting all 25 of the originally planned scenes done.
  3. Syncing my novel files to SkyDrive (and removing the Office Document Uploader, the bane of my existence) means I can seamlessly pick up the work on my Surface Pro or on my desktop PC. No worries about not backing up, losing a hard drive, breaking a USB stick, yadda, yadda ….
  4. Writing with a group means you’re disciplined about it. I give credit to my friends Julie and Roux for their consistent encouragement, as well as my whole chain-gang of WriteOn! colleagues who made things more palatable and certainly more pastry-filled. I hosted a Saturday-morning write-in that, over the month, logged almost 95,000 words among our motley cast of characters. Plus, I won the “Word War Benevolent Leader” award at the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids regional TGIO party and the “Most Likely to Carry a Sub in His Car” award from Jessica’s Kentwood Library write-in. W00t.
  5. I’m a reviser. I write fairly slowly, perhaps 1,000 words per hour if I’m focused, because I write fairly clean prose on the first pass. It’s easier to reach the end if you resist the urge to re-revise already written work and instead just get things on paper.
  6. The folks who conduct the annual event remind us that, really, NaNoWriMo isn’t about writing a novel. It’s about getting the first 50k words of a novel’s “zero draft” down. The real work comes with subsequent addition, revision, editing, etc. I agree with this sentiment: I “won” but I haven’t yet written a novel. But I’ve got enough of a novel done now that to decline to finish would be a tremendous waste. The 50k mark gets you not to the end, but to the point of no return: You’re committed, so use December and the months following to wrap things up.

So what’s next? Well, I’m taking two weeks off for the end-of-December holiday season. I have sundry tasks planned for myself, but chief among them is to bring the novel up to roughly 85,000 words, plus or minus five grand. And there’s plenty of opportunity to augment it — I have some notes about scenes I need to beef up, one whole scene I need to add for context, some holes to plug … and I must straighten one of the two subplots so it’s got a stronger element of interpersonal struggle about it.
Beyond that, I’ve got a few folks who have volunteered to read the draft. I intend to give it to them so they can hack it to pieces (I don’t want nice reviews, I want mean ones — the mean ones help improve the quality of the final draft).
The novel is straight genre: It’s a detective fiction, set in modern-day Grand Rapids, with a not-entirely-loveable main character who, I think, grows a bit by the end. Sex and violence are present but muted and not at all graphic — this is probably a PG-13 book — and expletives are reserved for occasional bits of dialogue for certain characters. I’ve left the door open for this concept and the primary cast of characters to turn into a series. Maybe volume No. 2 comes with 2014 NaNo?
I think I can get this into a form ready for release to an agent. Assuming I win the 1-percent-chance lottery of finding one. If late spring rolls around and I have no bites on the manuscript, off to Amazon it goes at $2.99 a pop.
One of my bucket-list items was “Write a novel.” The draft of Sanctuary is rough, but in good shape. I’m happy with it. I crossed the NaNoWriMo finish line, now I need to bring November’s work product past the finish line, too.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

Another Quick Recap

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Time flies when you’re noveling.
So my participation in National Novel Writing Month is proceeding  better than I expected. I’m actually above my target word count for this point in the month, coming in somewhere just north of 27,000 words. I like my story: It’s mainstream detective fiction, set in Grand Rapids, about a murder and a neo-pagan cult that’s not what it seems. My main character is a private investigator whose primary subplot revolves around his dating foibles, with some color commentary on bisexuality in West Michigan.
With the time off I intend to take around the December holidays, I plan to get the novel to roughly 80,000 words and streamline the prose well enough to admit to editing by others, with a goal of pitching it to an agent or self-publishing on Amazon. The choice of straight genre and localization were deliberately planned to improve potential commercial prospects for the final manuscript.
Because of the writing, I’ve had little time for much else. I’m behind on emails and I’ve effectively shut down the Jason Help Line this month. The only things other than writing that I’ve continued to handle are the podcast and some very light contract work. Oh, and setting up a Facebook group for my 20-year high school reunion. Lord a’mercy, I’m getting old. Graduation day is closer to my date of birth than to today.
One of the big time-sinks from NaNoWriMo isn’t necessarily the writing, but the community of writing. Every day but Friday and Sunday I have a November writers’ event — and the one on Saturdays, I host. It’s great for camaraderie and for bolstering word count, but it’s time not spent on the myriad other things that would normally occupy my time in any month other than November. Last week’s Day of Knockout Noveling was fun (but given the high sugar content, not super productive). I do try to write from home, but Fiona d’Cat has taken to laying on my forearms and chest whenever I recline in my office chair.
On the bright side, I’ll have some focused time the week after next. With the Thanksgiving holiday approaching, I’ll have some catch-up time (if I need it) and because I’m making classroom visits to the east side of the state for the International Year of Statistics that week, I’ll have some time at Detroit-area cigar bars to write, enjoy a premium cigar and possible a dram of Scotch or five.
Progress!

Writing, Editing & Journalism

The Writing Bug

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My friend Duane has been working on a new novel. I’m quite happy for him — he does best when the Muse has granted him some attention.
I’m somewhat in the same boat. I’m on a four-day holiday right now, but because I don’t have my tablet (dropped it, cracked the screen, and it’s currently being swapped for a replacement), I’m kinda stuck at my desk. Which is a challenge when the cats decide that Desk Time = Petting Time and I’m too much of a softie to shoo them away.
Anyway, I’ve had a growing sentiment that the time is nigh to get more serious about book-length writing. In the past, it’s been a bit of a fancy. Now, I’m seeing it more as an essential part of who I am. Much of that focus comes from my monthly writer’s group; we don’t do much writing together but being with like-minded souls of varying degrees of experience helps considerably.
It occurred to me, retrospectively, that my thinking has transitioned away from “quit the job and be a writer” to just “write.” Like it’s not a career strategy but a creative impulse. My experience with NaNoWriMo last year helped. And my various plotting sessions for my next attempt serve like bike rides without training wheels.
Duane once told me that he gets an idea. Then it percolates. He thinks he should do something, but doesn’t. Then he gets more ideas, and soon they come in a flood. Then he just has to write. And he does.
I’m feeling a flood.

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