Writing, Editing & Journalism

What It Means To Be "A Writer"

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Yesterday my friend Duane launched an inaugural podcast dedicated to the craft and business of writing. He did a great job with it, sharing some of his own experiences and then riffing, briefly, on what it means to be a writer.
Prompted some thought.
From my vantage point, a writer is someone who:

  • Consistently pushes out work product, even if it’s not intended for widespread readership
  • Writes for compensation but nevertheless aims to release polished and useful prose
  • Loves the craft

You know who isn’t a writer? Someone who merely intends to write, or someone who pushes out paid work product with no regard for the feel of the prose (i.e, a hack).
To be a writer means more than just putting words to paper. The concept requires something more — a desire, deep down, to either tell a story, or to relay information with elegance and with an ear for the ebbs and flows of the language.
I know a lot of people who’ve never been published, but still put in the time. They’re writers. I also know a lot of people who get paid to write but don’t much care about what the final product looks like — these people aren’t really writers. They’re more like hired guns.
As a writer, I’ve seen my fair share of successes ($200 articles for 30 minutes of work, woohoo). I’ve seen my share of failures, too. Like rejections by editors who clearly didn’t understand the subject matter. No worries. I keep plugging away, just like Duane does.
Writing isn’t a glorious profession. Nor is it a functional description. Rather, it’s an avocation, a way of thinking and acting that recognizes that words mean things and that stringing them together requires inspiration, not just perspiration or aspiration. It requires a willingness to grow your craft, to learn and to advance and to experiment. It requires you to write.
Don’t let the bastards get you down. Then again, don’t let the bastards within stop you from starting in the first place.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

NaNoWriMo ’12 — A Reflection

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This marked the second consecutive year I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month. The event — a 30-day voyage of creative writing — prods people to try long-form fiction. You “win” if you hit 50,000 words by 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 30.

Last year, I failed miserably; I may have hit 5,000 words in the month. The problem then was hubris: I figured long-form fiction couldn’t be that hard. So I arrived at a hybrid plot with no planning that, the more I thought about it, felt horribly confused. The artifice of a genre template obscured what ended up being the interesting kernel of a human-relationship story.

This year, I still didn’t “win” in the sense of hitting 50k — December rolled onto the calendar when I was at but 25k — but I am quite satisfied with how the month turned out. I approached the task with a bit more humility and did more pre-NaNo planning than last year, so I have a product that I can keep working on throughout the year.

Some highlights:

  • I plotted out a script that targeted at 90k words. The structure included 15 different chapters, each planned for about 6,000 words, with well-defined scenes in each and detailed notes about characters, scenes and even science associated with the plot. The goal was “modular writing” — I could have hit my private target if I did one 3,000-word scene per day.
  • I put this work entirely within Scrivener for Windows. I don’t think I could have even gotten close if I had tried a different platform like Word or even my beloved OneNote.
  • I actually stayed on track for the first week or so. Then the netbook passed on, and I tried using my tablet as a remote interface for Scrivener on my desktop at home, but that plan was much better in theory than in execution. I lost a week of progress fiddling with computers and ended up just buying a new laptop. I planned to get a Win 8 Pro tablet but … alas, nothing was on the market at the time.
  • I did lose 4,000-ish words at one point mid-month. I didn’t reset Scrivener’s aut0-save from 2 seconds to 120 seconds, thus creating version conflicts with SkyDrive. My own darn fault, because I did know better.
  • Writing with a group is great when the group is great. When the group is filled with adolescents off their Ritalin, progress correspondingly slows down. Thus, although I tried attending four write-ins per week, I skipped a few on occasion because of the dynamics of that group. The best one was probably the last one I attended, at Literary Life — just me, Brittany and the fireplace. Lots of progress.
  • Because this was a sci-fi novel, I spent a fair amount of time working through getting the science right. That included, for example, spending an hour going down the bunny hole of correctly calculating the force-of-impact of a grain of sand moving at 45 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum — and thus, indirectly, proving the residual value of high-school physics. Regardless, the slog through the first few chapters, when I had to carefully intersperse data about the universe without it sounding like a travelogue, proved more challenging than I hoped. Once I got past that introductory material, the pace of writing sped up and became much more fluid and fun.

I am going to keep going with this novel. I like the premise, and I’m growing fond of the characters. I’d like to hit my 90k marker. I’ve thought of this as the first installment of a trilogy, so we shall see. I’d like a completed novel that I can at the least circulate to agents for review and rejection.

NaNo sometimes gets grief from self-appointed literary types for giving people the impression that novel writing is easy and can be done in just 30 days. I think these critics miss the boat. The real value is that the process forces a writer to get a “zero draft” at least half-way complete, providing a framework for later enhancement and editing.

So. Will I participate next year? As Sarah Palin would say: “You betcha!”

Writing, Editing & Journalism

NaNoWriMo '12 — A Reflection

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This marked the second consecutive year I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month. The event — a 30-day voyage of creative writing — prods people to try long-form fiction. You “win” if you hit 50,000 words by 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 30.
Last year, I failed miserably; I may have hit 5,000 words in the month. The problem then was hubris: I figured long-form fiction couldn’t be that hard. So I arrived at a hybrid plot with no planning that, the more I thought about it, felt horribly confused. The artifice of a genre template obscured what ended up being the interesting kernel of a human-relationship story.
This year, I still didn’t “win” in the sense of hitting 50k — December rolled onto the calendar when I was at but 25k — but I am quite satisfied with how the month turned out. I approached the task with a bit more humility and did more pre-NaNo planning than last year, so I have a product that I can keep working on throughout the year.
Some highlights:

  • I plotted out a script that targeted at 90k words. The structure included 15 different chapters, each planned for about 6,000 words, with well-defined scenes in each and detailed notes about characters, scenes and even science associated with the plot. The goal was “modular writing” — I could have hit my private target if I did one 3,000-word scene per day.
  • I put this work entirely within Scrivener for Windows. I don’t think I could have even gotten close if I had tried a different platform like Word or even my beloved OneNote.
  • I actually stayed on track for the first week or so. Then the netbook passed on, and I tried using my tablet as a remote interface for Scrivener on my desktop at home, but that plan was much better in theory than in execution. I lost a week of progress fiddling with computers and ended up just buying a new laptop. I planned to get a Win 8 Pro tablet but … alas, nothing was on the market at the time.
  • I did lose 4,000-ish words at one point mid-month. I didn’t reset Scrivener’s aut0-save from 2 seconds to 120 seconds, thus creating version conflicts with SkyDrive. My own darn fault, because I did know better.
  • Writing with a group is great when the group is great. When the group is filled with adolescents off their Ritalin, progress correspondingly slows down. Thus, although I tried attending four write-ins per week, I skipped a few on occasion because of the dynamics of that group. The best one was probably the last one I attended, at Literary Life — just me, Brittany and the fireplace. Lots of progress.
  • Because this was a sci-fi novel, I spent a fair amount of time working through getting the science right. That included, for example, spending an hour going down the bunny hole of correctly calculating the force-of-impact of a grain of sand moving at 45 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum — and thus, indirectly, proving the residual value of high-school physics. Regardless, the slog through the first few chapters, when I had to carefully intersperse data about the universe without it sounding like a travelogue, proved more challenging than I hoped. Once I got past that introductory material, the pace of writing sped up and became much more fluid and fun.

I am going to keep going with this novel. I like the premise, and I’m growing fond of the characters. I’d like to hit my 90k marker. I’ve thought of this as the first installment of a trilogy, so we shall see. I’d like a completed novel that I can at the least circulate to agents for review and rejection.
NaNo sometimes gets grief from self-appointed literary types for giving people the impression that novel writing is easy and can be done in just 30 days. I think these critics miss the boat. The real value is that the process forces a writer to get a “zero draft” at least half-way complete, providing a framework for later enhancement and editing.
So. Will I participate next year? As Sarah Palin would say: “You betcha!”

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Linguistic “Issue” with “Community”

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The “While We’re At It” section of last month’s issue of First Things contained an interesting paragraph about the word community. Specifically: That the word is losing it’s meaning, shifting in emphasis from a defined group of people to something more abstract. Other, choicer terms must then be introduced to cover the former and more specific purpose of community.

I’ve noticed a similar trend with words like issue. Writers sometimes use this term as an all-purpose, no-fingers-pointed surrogate for more precise terms like problem or disagreement. It seems that computers don’t break anymore, they “have issues” — just like people coping with emotional difficulties are “dealing with issues.”

The meanings of many words fluctuate over time. Some words trend more specific; others become more general. Yet I cannot help but wonder sometimes if the general tendency in contemporary language is for everyone to speak like some sort of ESL student, using a conversational style not unlike the Roman copia verborum that flourished after the Silver Age of Latin literature. In the Roman Republic, sentences remained compact and speakers elected for a single precise term, even if the word were relatively rare. In the later Empire, especially as more and more non-native speakers started picking up Latin, the linguistic tendency was to use shorter, simpler words — requiring, therefore, more subordinate clauses and adjective phrases to convey meanings that could have been rendered with one well-picked but relatively rare word.

Is English undergoing a similar transformation? As the language settles as a lingua franca for international trade and as technologies like Internet-enabled messaging emphasize speed over style, it probably ought not shock anyone to see a sentence like “You can pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees in order to get it ready for baking your cookies” when “Heat your oven to 400 degrees before baking your cookies” is more concise. Yet how many would really see anything wrong with the first sentence? In fact, it’s not really wrong at all in any but the most pedantic analysis. Just inelegant. We’ve grown tolerant of simplistic prose, unnecessary over-use of the passive voice and sentences written with twice as many words as they require. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Beats me.

But it’s an interesting question to think about sometimes.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

A Linguistic "Issue" with "Community"

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The “While We’re At It” section of last month’s issue of First Things contained an interesting paragraph about the word community. Specifically: That the word is losing it’s meaning, shifting in emphasis from a defined group of people to something more abstract. Other, choicer terms must then be introduced to cover the former and more specific purpose of community.
I’ve noticed a similar trend with words like issue. Writers sometimes use this term as an all-purpose, no-fingers-pointed surrogate for more precise terms like problem or disagreement. It seems that computers don’t break anymore, they “have issues” — just like people coping with emotional difficulties are “dealing with issues.”
The meanings of many words fluctuate over time. Some words trend more specific; others become more general. Yet I cannot help but wonder sometimes if the general tendency in contemporary language is for everyone to speak like some sort of ESL student, using a conversational style not unlike the Roman copia verborum that flourished after the Silver Age of Latin literature. In the Roman Republic, sentences remained compact and speakers elected for a single precise term, even if the word were relatively rare. In the later Empire, especially as more and more non-native speakers started picking up Latin, the linguistic tendency was to use shorter, simpler words — requiring, therefore, more subordinate clauses and adjective phrases to convey meanings that could have been rendered with one well-picked but relatively rare word.
Is English undergoing a similar transformation? As the language settles as a lingua franca for international trade and as technologies like Internet-enabled messaging emphasize speed over style, it probably ought not shock anyone to see a sentence like “You can pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees in order to get it ready for baking your cookies” when “Heat your oven to 400 degrees before baking your cookies” is more concise. Yet how many would really see anything wrong with the first sentence? In fact, it’s not really wrong at all in any but the most pedantic analysis. Just inelegant. We’ve grown tolerant of simplistic prose, unnecessary over-use of the passive voice and sentences written with twice as many words as they require. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Beats me.
But it’s an interesting question to think about sometimes.

Personal

The Last Few Weeks ….

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Caught in a titanic struggle between “busy” and “sick,” the last few weeks have been somewhat less than enjoyable. Nevertheless, a few items of note are worth passing along.

  • Malaise.  Last weekend was unhappy; by Friday afternoon I got clobbered by some sort of stomach ailment that didn’t clear up until Sunday night, although it came back for a mini-encore on Wednesday. I ended up missing Mega 80s and the TGIO party last weekend (sadness) and scrubbed a planned site visit to Zeeland on Wednesday.
  • Cigar Night. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I hosted another monthly cigar night. Tony, Rob and Brad attended. We shared Tony-supplied Gispert robustos and I made bison grass martinis. A pleasant way to unwind before Turkey Day madness, even if Tony’s intervention led to a few of the martinis being more olive than alcohol. Next event is planned for this coming Tuesday, at Chop House.
  • Thanksgiving. This year’s holiday was fun … the festivities started the Friday prior, with an office potluck. My sausage jambalaya went over well — cutting back on cayenne and adding more red curry and chili powder led to a more flavorful but less intense spice profile. On Thursday, the family assembled at my mom’s house. Brian, grandma, and Sue/Robert/kids attended for a lovely meal.
  • NaNoWriMo. I didn’t “win” but I learned a ton about novel-writing, and had a blast at the twice-weekly write-ins. Kudos to everyone who made it so enjoyable, especially Duane, Jennifer, Adrianne, Liz, Nicole and Mary. This year, I discovered that it’s a bad idea to try to force-fit a character story on top of a genre template. Next year, I’ll be more ready. At Duane’s suggestion, I bought a Kindle copy of Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The book is a largely unstructured and informal reflection by this popular Japanese novelist about his lifelong loves of running and writing, and how the two intertwine throughout his career. I’m up to the third chapter.
  • Interface Rejections. My team at the hospital grew by one member and one huge pile of work. We are now cleaning up all the daily rejections between two of the hospital’s primary systems — the facility clinical environment, and the facility billing system. Yay us.
  • Walking. I’ve driven along Butterworth Avenue often enough that I decided it was time to start exploring all the trails in Millennium Park. From the trail head near the Coke plant at Butterworth and O’Brien, I walked along the trail that hugged Butterworth, crossed the new elevated pedestrian bridge over Maynard and then skirted the lake along the park proper before looping back to the trail head by means of the Grand River path. It turned out to be a nearly 6 mile circuit — quite refreshing. I’ll have to walk (or cycle) this more often.
  • TV. I don’t watch too much television, but based on Sondra’s recommendation, I watched both seasons of Better Off Ted on Netflix. The show featured a deliciously sociopathic Portia de Rossi and the suave Jay Harrington as two of the main characters. If you seek a TV show that mixes over-the-top satire with wickedly funny dialog, you’ll love this program. It’s what The Office should have been.
  • Phone.  This week I managed to drop my phone into a sink full of hot soapy water. Although it took a few days to completely dry out, the HTC HD7 survived with no apparent problems. Yay. And even better — last week I received a Windows Phone upgrade that, inter alia, included a new Wi-Fi hotspot feature. Which works really well, although it is a bit of a battery drain.

All for now.

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Past, Present, Future

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Feels like I’ve been living my own little version of A Christmas Carol lately. To wit:

Past. Last weekend I took the scenic route home. Drove through eastern Ottawa County, and passed by the haunts of my childhood — the beautiful river views from Lamont, the rolling farmland in Marne, the dirt roads on the periphery of northwest Grand Rapids. Cruised by the three houses in which I lived in as a child (the two on Lincoln, and one at Leonard and 14th). Interesting to see what’s changed, and what has stayed the same. Prompted fond memories of my youth, but also a reflection on what “home” means; I’ve lived in five different places in the last five years, and eight places in the last 15. That’s a lot of impermanence. Although I’m delighted with my current abode, it’s hard to find a place that feels like “home” when you move around a lot, even when you move around the same metro area.

Present. In the process of moving some task-oriented stuff from OneNote to Outlook (hooray for the new Office365 subscription, and the tight integration across desktop/laptop/WP7 devices), I noticed that I’ve made substantially more progress on some of my goals than I expected. This makes me happy. The major “hard work” part remaining is the challenge from Tony, to be prepared to appear in public in a swimsuit for the water park experience during his birthday celebration in June. Last time I was shirtless in public was, oh, September 2008, when Andrew and I decided to spend the day lazing around at Oval Beach. I have the lead time to get into the kind of physical shape I’d prefer for such an excursion. Fun part will be thinking through the upper-body program. I’ve always had a slender chest/shoulder/arm profile (when not covered in blubber) so I’m thinking that a weightlifting program may be in my future. On the bright side, the June trip provides ample opportunity to prepare.

Future. As I continue to work through my novel, it occurred to me that although it’s hard work, chunking out the aspects of novel-writing into into a series of discrete steps, with deadlines, helps to sort through the work. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to “win” NaNoWriMo this year, but I’ve learned a heck of a lot already about how to write a novel, and if I can get this MS done by the end of the year, I think I could be in good shape … to write more novels. If I could find an agent — yay. If not, I’m enjoying the craft of writing, and I think that Duane’s model of putting them up on Amazon will work, too. He gets monthly royalty checks that somtimes cross into the triple digits for some of his old, early novels.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

NaNoWriMo: Taking the Plunge

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Aided by the counsel of my good friend Duane, I’ve decided to take the leap into actually writing a novel instead of merely intending to write one. The National Novel Writing Month — conveniently contemporaneous with “November” on the calendar — provides aspiring novelists a loosely structured environment for pulling together a work of fiction of 50,000 or more words.

So far, so good. I’ve registered an account and posted my introductory message in the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids local forum. Yay. I’ve done a bit of initial planning, but still have some work to go before I’m ready to actually put prose to e-paper.

It helps to have a firm plot concept in mind. The narrative, the major characters, the setting — it’s all in my mind’s eye, which marks a point of departure from my previous tinkering with fiction work.

Next steps include finishing my plot grid and character studies. I figure I’ll be ready to actually write on Thursday. I’m excited. Even if I’m not successful, I’m glad for the opportunity to hone my craft of writing.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

On the Ineffective Teaching of Writing

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I’ve been helping both my mom and Ryan with some of their coursework. Mom is currently studying at Grand Rapids Community College, where inter alia she is taking a sociology course. Ryan, at Davenport University, is enrolled in several courses with substantial writing requirements. Across the board, the work they’re being asked to do seems irrational and counterproductive.

First, mom. She has been assigned a 10-page research paper by a professor who has announced that he will not respond to emails unless he is called “Dr.” — a sign of first-rate jackassery if ever there was one. The paper he assigned is a literature review, but bizarrely, he’s limited the scope of permissible sources to only academic sociology journals, irrespective of the student’s chosen subject matter.

Next, Ryan. In one course, he needs to submit weekly two-page papers formatted in precise APA style complete with a minimum of three sources and running heads. In another, he must ape law-school conventions to mix ethics and compliance questions in a single, major term paper; this same professor marked him down because, on an informal handout to the class, he put his optional list of sources on the same page as the last set of his bullet points.

All of this leads inescapably to a single, vexing point — these students are being forced to write unnecessary assignments, allegedly mimicking real-life situations, using formats and templates that are nowhere to be seen in the working world. This forced obedience to outdated templates does not serve these students well; instead of teaching them how to think, these faculty are teaching students to blindly follow unnecessary structural patterns — and worse, they are falsely suggesting that this approach is common in the workplace.

Except in fairly rare circumstances, the overwhelming number of graduates from GRCC and DU will not routinely write papers using APA, MLA or Chicago style. They will not obsess over reference citations or cover sheets or running heads.

What they will do, however, is need to write well. And it seems, based on the assignments that they’re receiving, that instruction in persuasive writing is lacking. It’s not “writing coaching” to mark people down for obscure violations of APA style when elementary errors of reasoning or bloated, passive prose permeate the homework. In fact, one professor even told Ryan to prefer passive voice because it’s less confrontational! Egads.

The state of writing education in our local colleges remains subpar. Faculty who demand honorifics and conformance to minor trivia while allowing sophomoric prose to pass unremarked, violates the promise of higher education for thousands of aspiring graduates.

Personal, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Update: Early August Edition

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The last few weeks have been more interesting than usual.

  • Last weekend, I purchased a Ford Ranger XLT from a guy in Grandville. The truck runs great and is in excellent condition (although it could use a new paint job). I am quite pleased with it, and since I paid cash I now own it outright with no ugly monthly payments except for insurance and fuel. And it gets excellent gas mileage — roughly 25 mpg for combined city/highway driving.
  • On the social scene: Friday before last, I had a lovely dinner and drinks with Charlie at the Red Jet Cafe on Plainfield … this past Monday, I had dinner with Duane at the Woodland Mall food court … Tuesday I brought dinner to Ryan … Friday I enjoyed the seventh annual Evening of Fine Cinema, hosted by Sondra and Aaron at Sondra/Rick’s condo — the theme of the three movies was “Bad Romance” and the event was quite well executed … Saturday I went to Lansing for a lovely seafood dinner and adult beverages with Tony, Jen, Jon and Emilie; it was nice seeing them all again and I SWEAR it will not be two years before I see my favorite Novi couple again. I simply cannot bear PPQ’s ongoing disapproval.
  • On the work scene: Things are rolling along. We are making decent progress at the hospital on Informatics development, which is good. And I’ve been doing a bit more writing than usual — a fair number of my recent articles (about 50 so far over the last two months, at $20 per article) are now live at the Small Business section of the Houston Chronicle’s chron.com site.  Here’s an example piece: Advantages & Disadvantages of a Divisional Organization Structure.
  • On the physical scene: Weight continues to sloooooly come down. This week, I will start making regular trips to the gym again to run. The extra calorie burn from the aerobics will help, in addition to the slow decrease from diet alone. If I can get back into my 2005-2007 routine, I will be back at the 160-165 range I was at through most of 2006, by the end of December. That’s the goal; vitamin D may have kicked my ass, but my ass need not remain flabby now that the vitamin deficiency has been corrected.

All for now.