Dec 08
AndrewRelationships author, Love, Writing
Try writing about your sex life. Not the torrid details,1 but just try describing the romantic entanglements of…say the last two years. Start the beginning of the time period and describe the person you were with then. Talk about how you two spent time together, about the frustrations of your relationship (if you even called it a relationship) and the joys of spending time together. Describe the parts of his personality that turned you on, or the parts of his body (er, ahem, proceed gently). How long did it last? Is it still going on? How did you meet? In a bar, through friends, online? Who came next? How long were you alone? And when you move on to the next person, start again.
For whatever reason,2 I went through this process with my friend and the final output was a book we wrote together, to be published at the end of January. Partly the reason relationships dominated the book is because we already talked about them all the time. The first tenet of any good author is to write about what you know. And in looking back over that two year period of our lives, we discovered we had some interesting insights on the matter to share.
The history of my dating life3 has been largely a laundry list of unsuccessful relationships, and for better or worse, that theme is evident in the retelling. The whys of it I won’t even hazard an explanation, assuming you could identify common themes running across each one. Perhaps just a combination of circumstances or a natural gift for making things complicated or (I suspect) trying to fit every relationship into a standard mold. They come that way for some people, just not me.
But writing about it, and focusing on it particularly in the last six months has made me somewhat of an expert, albeit after the fact, on my own love life. It’s a weird perspective to gain, and notwithstanding the final steps of editing and proofing, probably horribly unhealthy to focus on it for such an extended time. It’s made acutely aware of my own mismanagement, past and present, and perhaps the inevitability of the outcome. I think it’s easier to blame yourself, though, because otherwise, you presume to understand the motivations of the other half.
So why did I suggest you do it too?
What struck me most in the process of fleshing out a story was that there was a story to tell. Self-expression is a strange beast, people find ways to get it out (paint, words, sculpture, humor, etc.) For me, of course, it’s putting words on the paper and hoping that in the doing so, I am conveying the context that I’m aiming for. But the act of self-reflection, explicitly expressed or not, is a useful enterprise. There’s a story there, maybe you have to make a flip book to tell it, or maybe tell it out loud, or act it out. And if your story isn’t for public consumption, don’t deny yourself the telling anyway. Find your story, for whatever it’s worth, because the trick of it is, you’ll find it’s quite valuable.
My story, well the part I’m publishing anyway, is called What Do You Say to the DJ? It will be on sale in late January. For more details, visit saytothedj.com.
1 Unless you’re into that kind of stuff it’s not a porn novel we’re aiming for here.
2 Actually for some very good reasons.
3 Since it won’t be much of a secret in about a month, I feel confident revealing some insider information here -- and if you have in any way been following this site for the last few years, you already know more about my love life than you ever need to.
Sep 14
AndrewA Writer's Blog Plagiarism, Writing
I giggle like a school girl every time I read about someone who plagiarized whole chunks of prose and then got caught. The motivations for plagiarism continue to confound and amuse me; I can’t imagine a way to rationalize it. It can’t be a timesaver because it takes way more time to piece together someone else’s words than just write your own. And it can’t be because you’re a bad writer. I mean, yeah, sure, maybe you are a bad writer, but the reality is, taking blatant credit for someone else’s prose isn’t really making you a better writer, right? No, there is really only one way to justify the fact that people still plagiarize.
We have run out of new ways to express ourselves in writing.
My theory is not as grossly out of line as you initially think. It’s well determined that Shakespeare published every last original story known to man. You can fully credit that guy, Chaucer and the Brothers Grimm for ruining it for the rest of us. Between them, we have a template for every tale told in fiction and other written medium ever since. But what always sustained the newness and originality of our remodeled tales was the style in which they were told. Modern writing continues to update classic themes while rarely coming up with anything original and previously untapped. That’s true for science fiction, and children’s books and spy novels. It’s rehash, and it’s here to stay.
Technology has exacerbated our inability to create from scratch. Concepts simply no longer exist that haven’t been hashed and rehashed by generations before us, and with the advent of the internet (and for that matter, the document scanner,) it’s all out there for everyone to access. The internet has also boosted self-publishing. Anyone with a blog can chime in on the Patriots stealing the Jets’ signals or Senator Larry Craig’s tawdry toilet scandal. It’s as simple as writing your opinion and hitting that button that says ‘publish.’ There’s nothing original in what you have to say, whether you are violently disappointed in Commissioner Goodell’s punishment or whether you say of Senator Craig, “What’s the big deal? We all think about having sex with a stranger…in a public place. Hell, I tapped my foot in that very stall just last year and no one arrested me for it.” But as soon as the words come out of your brain, they were already written by somebody, published somewhere on the internet probably. And that means before you’ve written one word, it’s all been read before.
I came across the case of Bonita Boni and laughed and laughed and laughed. Poor Bonita, a former junior writer of the Daily Dispatch in East London, South Africa, borrowed verbatim lines of text for a review she was writing, of all things, for a local theatrical production of Clue. After poor Bonita’s version was published on September 10, the director of the production pointed out that her words seemed pieced together from other reviews that had already been published.
Ms. Boni’s excuse was that she didn’t have time to properly research the review before she wrote it (those pesky deadlines) and therefore “borrowed” key sentences for her piece. Come on, I cannot be the only person who thinks that hysterical that she couldn’t research a review of a play she had seen. This is a review: “It sucked.” This is a plagiarized review: “There is no dramatically shaped story lines here. It is basically a stream of monologues presented by the six would-be murderers; all done in the style of high comedy with a smattering of double entendres in the best Carry On tradition.” Credit Tony Layton of the British Theatre Guide (by the way, Tony, I totally disagree with you, but whatever.)
I feel for poor Bonita, I do because it’s not her fault that we, the human race, have run out of things to say and original ways to frame them.
She is not the only individual to make the news recently because of poor decisions. More understandable is the case of Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard whose dissertation may contain plagiarized content. Hey, those things are long and you want to a take some short cuts, it makes total sense to me. (Though at least with academic works, which by their nature invite scrutiny, you would think there would be some trepidation. Though between you and me, Mr. Ware, academic reputation is overrated.) Mr. Poshard’s much publicized and much ridiculed excuse for plagiarizing? His teachers both in his master’s and doctoral program never taught him the proper way to annotate citations.
Robert Bruce Ware, a professor at SIU, wrote a stellar editorial that I am going to quote here because it perfectly suits my point and, well, let’s face it, he already wrote it. “Cut-and-paste technology was not available when our president did his writing. In those days, writing was an act of letter-by-letter deliberation. And, how can anyone be too busy to type a quotation mark when it is just another stroke?” Exactly.
The problem is, I sympathize far greater with the Bonita Boni’s and the Glenn Poshard’s of the world, whether they did their research last weekend by cutting and pasting sentences from other reviews or whether they got caught on a dissertation they wrote thirty-some years ago and claiming the words purely as their own. It’s hard to find new and different ways to write and publish in a world so oversaturated with prose written by professionals and amateurs alike. We are exposed to so many styles of thought and varieties of opinion (unless you happen to live in China) that everything becomes source material.
And when you look at it that way, plagiarism isn’t so funny. The boundaries of intellectual property are rapidly evaporating in the face of technology that both makes it easy to cut and paste someone else’s writing as it does easier to catch the people doing it. And let’s call it the YouTube mentality which is training the next generation to think it’s perfectly permissible to share and benefit from anything you can find online. If it’s out there, it’s for the posting.
I still think it’s a little crazy that given a writing assignment, paid or scholarly or personal, you wouldn’t give it a go yourself before resorting to taking someone else’s word for it. Hey, what you write may not be good. In fact, it may be sadly uninspiring and even inexcusably wretched. But at least it’s a piece you can call your own. While you still can.
Apr 12
AndrewPeople Kurt Vonnegut, Writing
Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday at 84 years old. As one of the authors that molded my literary perspective as a teenager -- and at the top of that list no less -- I feel the need to honor his impact.
Vonnegut had a vision and more than anything, I think that is what people respond to when they read Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle. He also had an enemy (culture, history, society -- take your pick.) People empathize when there is someone to punch, and in his novels, no matter how twisted and non-linear they could be, there was always someone to punch. And Vonnegut had an agenda, that could probably best be described as “how soon are humans going to destroy the world?”
All of those elements made his stories superb even though Vonnegut the author danced to a decidedly different drummer. He wasn’t a particularly prolific novelist. He only wrote a handful of books each decade, and later in his career focused mostly on essays and public speaking. His best known work, the aforementioned Slaughterhouse-Five, was a synthesis of his time spent in Dresden during World War II. When they firebombed Dresden, Vonnegut and other POWs hid inside an underground meat locker called slaughterhouse-five.
I was too young to really appreciate Slaughterhouse-Five when I first read it, and I read Cat’s Cradle at 14 and it scared me shitless. Basically, the world ends because of an invention called ice-nine. I failed to see the humor in it. So it goes that the two novels of his I liked the most as a teenager just happened to be the two published while I was a teenager, Hocus Pocus and Timequake. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that part of the reason I didn’t connect with the other novels early on was because I had never lived through a world war -- the closest I got in my teens was the Gulf War, which wasn’t so much a war as the United Nations deciding to beat on Iraq.
As Vonnegut tells us, Hocus Pocus was written on scraps of paper and pieced together by Vonnegut to make a somewhat cohesive narrative. The book asks the question, how much of what happens to us is by our own initiative, and how much of our lives is a random sequence of events leading up the inexorable moment when it finally forms a coherent sum? As Vonnegut suggests it, the answer is self-evident.
He used humor in his novels to shield some of us, those who don’t want to face the truth, from the reality of war, and the repercussions of science, and our own damning lifestyle. He had no doubt we were going to destroy ourselves, it was only a matter of how it happened. Humor in his novels wasn’t meant to soften the blow -- it was more of a nervous reflex.
All of which makes his works as important today as they were in the era he wrote them. American society reflects all of the foibles that Vonnegut was pointing out in the sixties on politics, science and society. If anything, his themes of self-delusion and self-interest are more poignant today. Society is inordinately occupied with the minutiae of every day distractions and egotistical celebrity at the expense of seeing a bigger picture. And that applies as much in politics and war as it does in entertainment. Vonnegut was a visionary, and he wasn’t afraid to speak up about it.
I did a presentation on Kurt Vonnegut in college. I don’t remember much of the specifics, but it is easy to see now that I only engaged his works on a very surface level even then. Now, as I read his writing, I can see a depth to his works that startles me. I’m still scared shitless, but now I can respond to his vision and maybe there is hope that I do have some impact on what happens in the future. Maybe that was his message all along?
Mar 16
AndrewA Writer's Blog Writer's block, Writing
The empty page. Writer’s block. Call it what you will, but when your will and your writing are out of sync, what you have is a stalemate.
Whether or not you are writing for income, or to fulfill a class assignment, or just for pleasure, the end result is that you have to break the stalemate somehow. You need to submit the article to your editor, you need to turn in that research paper, or you just need to stop drawing fancy bubble letters on an otherwise blank notepad.
Stalemates in the writing process occur for lots of different reasons. For myself, the worst culprit is the television. Something about the visual element of TV is acutely distracting in a way no other thing is. But there are other offenders. If I haven’t slept long or well, my writing suffers. When I do not have a clear focus on the topic, when I have too many other things on my mind, or when I am distracted by other things going on around me, any of those elements can affect my ability to write.
It unsurprisingly all boils down to mental state. No matter what you want to blame the stalemate on, the reason you are stuck is because your brain is focused anywhere but on the piece you have to write. The seasoned writer knows that breaking the stalemate is as simple as doing something else for a while and coming back to the paper when you are refreshed. We have to engage our brain in a different way before we can move on with our writing.
The technique that works best for me is to read the news. That might seem odd to you because news is pretty dry, but in fact, I find that the some very unusual stories become newsworthy. This works for me partly because there are a lot of things I know only a little about, and so any chance to learn more is a welcome stretch for my brain. And oftentimes, news represents situations and individuals that are uniquely outside my day-to-day experiences. That dynamic can spark the creative part of my mind in the same way a piece of fiction can.
I don’t expect that method to work for everyone. If you find yourself facing a writer’s stalemate, the first thing you should do is assess the situation. Start with these three questions and spend as much time on each one as you need to help yourself.
What’s your topic?
Whether or not you are writing for a publication, or for a school assignment, or for fun, there is always a focal point, the heart of what you are writing about. If you aren’t sure what this is, then how can you possibly begin?
If a topic hasn’t been assigned, or you have a range of choices, this is the time to brainstorm. Set a time limit on brainstorming and then simply jot down ideas for the entire time. It can be keywords or complete sentences, written on every corner of the page running every direction, or in an orderly fashion respecting the lines on the page. The point is not how you organize your thoughts, only that you get all of your ideas down on paper.
What’s your inspiration?
Maybe this should really be “what’s your motivation?” but regardless of whether or not your writing is income-driven, something is sparking you to write. When you reach a stalemate with your writing, return to your inspiration.
What does that mean?
It can mean calling up a person who believes in and enjoys your writing.
It can mean reading a chapter of a book written by your favorite author.
It can mean pulling out your research on the topic and reviewing your notes.
It can even mean pulling out your checkbook and reviewing your recent deposits, if money is your motivation.
The only caution here is that there is a difference between seeking inspiration (a process of renewal) and simply putting off the inevitable (procrastinating.) If it turns into procrastination with a twinge of guilt, then ask yourself this last question.
What’s your distraction?
Whatever it is you are doing instead of writing, stop it. Turn the television off, close the door to your office, turn your cell phone on silent. Just do it. In a lot of cases, just by relieving yourself of the distraction, the writer in you will find a way to focus on the task.
For all writers, a stalemate is inevitable, but not irreversible. But if you find yourself staring at an empty page and nothing seems to work to relieve writer’s block, then that is the point where you really need to just walk away. Literally, take a long walk around the neighborhood. Set the project aside for a while.
Here’s the trick, though. Set a time limit for yourself to not write. Say to yourself, I am going to not write for four hours and then I will sit right back down at this desk and start writing again. Give yourself permission to be distracted, but set a time limit so that it does not become procrastination. And make it long enough to really refresh yourself. When the time comes, the writer in you will know what to do.
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Dec 23
AndrewA Writer's Blog editing, Writing
The toughest part of writing is being an objective editor. The standard trick is to give yourself (at least) 24 hours to let the article sit before you publish it. You write the draft and then set the entire project aside. When you come back to it, the next day or a week later, you get a fresh perspective. It helps the editing process because it removes your expectation of what is supposed to be written on the page and helps you see what is actually there.
But we do not always have the luxury of sitting on an article for another day. Whether it is a term paper for class, an article you are submitting for publication, or a self-imposed deadline, sometimes the piece is just due now. In those cases, here are some tips for digging into your own writing and editing it into a better work.
Stick to the Topic
Regardless of whether you are writing a news brief, a term paper or a myspace blog post, you need to keep every paragraph focused on your overall point. Diversions from the main topic should be purposeful. Before you begin to edit your piece, write down the overarching topic for the entire document. Then as you read each paragraph ask yourself, “Does this paragraph have anything to do with my topic?” If the answer is ‘no’ then you better have a good reason for keeping it there.
Write For Your Industry
It is important to remember what type of publication you are writing for. It determines style, tone, and the use of abbreviations and shorthand. Blogs, in general, are written the way you talk, but most professional writing is absolutely not. Term papers follow the MLA Formatting and Style Guide and occasionally, classes use the APA Formatting and Style Guide.
News writing has its own style, and news writing for websites has even more strict editorial standards. Not only do you need to be familiar with the editorial guidelines for your industry before you write, you have to make sure you are consistent throughout the piece.
Use Your References
The dictionary and thesaurus are still invaluable tools. So are Britannica or Wikipedia, depending on your preference for encyclopedia. If you doubt spelling, grammar, word choice or facts, you need to do the research. Don’t be afraid to pick a different word or phrase to say the same thing. The beauty of language is that there are myriad of ways to say something without losing the effectiveness of your writing. Trust your instincts on this one and apply the use of references books judiciously.
Check for Tense Changes
For the most part, you should keep an entire piece in one tense or the other. When you write in present tense, you switch to past tense only for events that happen in the past. But in most other circumstances, tense changes are a red flag.
Use Spell Checker
Use spell checker on your document. There is just no excuse. It is one thing to make a conscious decision to use a non-standard word, or modify the spelling of a word. It is quite another to not realize you made the mistake to begin with.
Eliminate Contractions
I am not suggesting you remove contractions from your piece completely, but it can be useful to undo them for the purposes of editing. If you get confused by their, they’re and there, its and it’s, by eliminating the contraction and making it ‘they are’ and ‘it is,’ you are giving yourself a much better chance of using the correct spelling. That holds true for any of the contractions, not just the possessives.
Take out the contraction and see if the sentence still makes sense. If you need to, you can always put the contraction back in after you know it is the right usage. After you know it’s the right usage.
Read it Out Loud
When it doubt, read the sentence or paragraph out loud, and then make a judgment call on whether it needs fixing. Make sure you read the words on the page, and not the words that are supposed to be there. If you have written two when it should be too, you might just visually see the correct spelling if you skim. Reading it out loud and focusing on each word in the sentence will highlight the worst offenses.
This list of editing tips is a good starting point for self-editing your work. There are a ton of grammar and spelling rules that just take practice to recognize. But when you are under a deadline and do not have the luxury of waiting for fresh eyes, check down through this list of editing tips and you will have a better piece in no time.
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Nov 30
AndrewA Writer's Blog Writing
Like most writers raised on television with an attention span that lasts no more than thirty minutes, and that is with commercials, I had a novel somewhere deep inside me. My first attempt at writing a novel was actually writing a screenplay. Think about it. It is almost all dialogue. Your characters are two dimensional. And anything that you cannot accomplish with stunt doubles and camera angles can be grafted in with special effects.
I finished the screenplay and invited all my friends to come by and do a reading with me. Two of them showed up and I got generous compliments on my accomplishment.
The novel still stayed deep inside me, like the feeling you get eating too many carbs and having them combine in your stomach into a brick. Dissatisfied with my screenplay, I took a crack at the great American novel I had hidden away in my belly. It took several months and the result was a lot like tiramisu; tempting and sugary but insubstantial and kind of watery.
Needless to say, I was embarrassed to share the dreck with my family, much less foist such garbage on anyone else. Other partial novels came and went, stories unfinished, characters unrealized and climaxes undiscovered. Before the thirtieth of November 2006, I had never in my entire writer’s life finished a piece of full-length fiction.
So what made me decide to write a novel now? Was it time? Was it luck? Was it inspiration? It was, in fact, none of those things. It was random. I noticed a link for National Novel Writing Month, which just happened to be November. The goal was 50,000 words in thirty days or less. No excessive obsessive rewriting, just write, each day, every day as much time as there was to write.
I set my personal goal at 2,000 words a day, which for the record takes no less than two hours a day, depending on how focused I am. My goal gave me some leeway because I knew the Thanksgiving holiday was going to play the spoiler if I was too far behind by the last week. And what do you know? The first week’s worth of my novel was actually pretty good, and the process of putting the words on paper went smoothly.
Then things started to get tricky. For one, it took a lot of discipline to write that much and that often, especially because I did not have a lot of time to consider what I was writing. But I also had to write three news briefs a day, four full-length feature articles a week, and there was that thing called full-time employment which keeps me enraptured from 8am to 5pm twenty days out of the month. To balance all these responsibilities, it helped that I had no social life. But by far the thing that was the biggest obstacle was my own damn thirty-minute attention span. I played a lot of FreeCell in my moments of weakness.
But the whole structure of NaNoWriMo played to my advantage. Here I was, instructed to write obsessively, ignore quality, abandon the editing process, and just produce. Lacking any editorial constraints was actually very freeing. And after the first week, I can say quite unequivocally that some of it was dreck.
On the other side of it, though, even without having a plan, I managed to produce a story from start to finish. The last week or so was me writing a lot of exposition that will either be inserted into key points of the story or discarded completely. It was where I defined my central themes and revealed a little bit more about my characters now that I had watched them develop.
As I wrote, I made notes on plot points and descriptions that were skimpy. The further along in the month I got, the more notes I made because I started racing through every sequence of events just to get to the next moment in the novel. I was fighting the November 30th deadline and my own exhaustion. Great American novel, it was not. But a solid foundation for something great? Yeah, maybe so.
I highly recommend this writing process for any amateur writer. Just take a month out of your life and squeeze in 50,000 words that you only suspected were there. If you need some structure and support, wait until next November and sign up at nanowrimo.org. When you are done, you get a little web icon and the sense of accomplishment that comes with finally getting the first draft of that novel down on paper that you have been chewing on for so long.
Here is my proudly displayed little web icon:
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