On Writing Well →
Book to buy. I should start a list.
Book to buy. I should start a list.
Another book for the growing “to buy” list.
“Bad writing is imprecise writing, and for all the skill Ludwigsen demonstrates with pacing, with voice, with narrative, he fails to demonstrate the most important skill that his story needs: precision. Specificity. Detail.”
Fiction, and its relationship to the workaday world (and all the bland office spaces and corporatespeak thereby entailed).
“Whether you choose 60 days, 30 days or 6 months as your goal, all that matters is that you commit to it and implement a schedule that will get you there. Choose a realistic time frame that you can stick to. A little bit every day is better than trying to do too much and then giving up.”
Does removing all forms of “to be” from the English language improve writing or worsen it?
Facebook might be hurting the already tiny circulation numbers of the campus weekly at my small liberal arts alma mater, but it sure did streamline one thing: getting in touch with people. Before Facebook (dark ages for colleges, I’m sure), contacting a source meant calling a dorm phone line that often wasn’t even hooked up to a phone or sending email to an email address that might not be checked more than once a week. It was awful.
These days — after Facebook — connecting to a source means sending a Facebook message. Finding out club officers means a quick look at a group page. Even obtaining photographs is streamlined — just go see if anyone’s posted any, then ask for permission to reprint them. Bang. Boom.
Of course this doesn’t scale well outside the walled garden of academia, but it is a sign of the usefulness of these social networking sites. They take all kinds of information that used to be spread out and hard to find and make it easy and accessible and centralized. The Google of people? You bet. Of course, it doesn’t help with the real work of interviewing and digging and writing, but it helps to automate some of the mindless chores of finding contact info and setting up interviews.
Case in point: I’m doing a story package for my alma mater’s alumni mag on a film an alum wrote and produced with a bunch of current students and other alumni. Before Facebook, tracking down contact info for all involved and then calling them would have been a chore. Today, I just joined the film’s discussion group and Facebooked them. Easy as pie.
I often remind my students that, despite their belief that they have important knowledge to communicate to the world at large through their poetry, their status as poets already suggests that they have failed to make any momentous discovery that might have otherwise contributed to the history of knowledge; otherwise, the students might have exploited this insight in far more lucrative vocations, like the sciences or even business. I remind my students that they are probably taking my class in poetry because “math is hard” — and since they have no other worthy skills, they have chosen to accept their demotion to a lowly caste of literate nobodies. I get a few nervous giggles from the students after these waggish tirades — but then I underline my argument by saying that, if students really do believe that they are communicating, heretofore undiscovered, revelations to the public, then the proper genre for transmitting such a discovery is definitely not a poem, but a press conference….
Ouch. I had this conversation the other day while interviewing a theatre critic who also writes plays. I asked him if it was true that those who can’t write about those who can. He told me he didn’t believe that at all. I guess I could be back in theatre if I wanted to — in a different interview last week, someone tried to rope me into submitted the one play I’ve written to a playwriting competition. (via The Mumpsimus)
Orwell lists four “great motives for writing”: sheer egoism—the desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood (“It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one”)—aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. “By nature — taking your “nature” to be the state you have attained when you are first adult “, he writes, “I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth.”
— dailymeh
Here’s a great article about how the publishing industry has changed, becoming increasingly professionalized.
Writers, young and old, might still come to New York, but today the city is a place you visit to have lunch with an agent, talk to a publisher, attend a conference. You don’t need to live in Greenwich Village and drink at the White Horse to be a writer. Instead, if you’re lucky, you teach in a college, and, if you’re just starting out, you might be enrolled in a “low residency” writing program or taking courses in the summer. These days, after all, writing is seriously organized, almost a business, with schools, grants, fellowships, trade magazines, workshops, and programs of every sort.
Certainly explains why self-publishing companies are proliferating.
Muphry’s Law (via jstn)
A cool little bit of JavaScript that shows how much a little copy editing and concision can change a piece of writing. (via matthewb)
