Beyond the Elements of Style

Google Alerts

In the Tools for Writers category, I want to make sure that everyone out there knows about Google Alerts. Indeed, as Google moves forward in its plan for world domination, there are quite a few helpful applications it offers its willing subjects (I love Google Earth, for example), and one of them, Google Alerts, is almost indispensable as a marketing tool, a research tool, and a general find-out-what’s-going-on tool.

Google Alerts––still, surprisingly, in beta––sends you notices any time the keywords you’ve chosen get mentioned on the web. You can input your name as a Google Alert, your book title, or your general topic. I have a Google Alert for the word “stepmother,” for example, since I am one and hope someday to write something about it; it’s a great way to do research and accumulate resources.

If you have something specific you’re looking for, no problem. You can put the title of an article, for example, in quotation marks, and that brings in more results.

And it’s a marvelous marketing tool. When you’re sending out articles or press releases, Google Alerts will tell you where they’re being picked up. You can set up alerts for your name, for clients’ names, for various topics, etc., and it helps you see how successful you marketing efforts are. One other way to use Google Alerts in terms of marketing is to respond to reporters who are writing on topics similar to your own. Often if they just did a story on a topic, they might be willing to do a follow-up. It doesn’t always work, but it’s been fairly effective for me.

There are no limits on the number of Google Alerts you can set up, and they’re fairly easy to terminate at the end of a project or when your interest in a given topic wanes.

To try out Google Alerts for yourself, go here and fill in the form. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Poetry Can Save Your Life

If you’ve ever wondered what poetry can mean to those who don’t always have the chance to be heard, here’s a video to open your eyes…. last year, Bill Moyers interviewed the American poet Martin Espada, a nominee for the Pulitzer prize.

Please do listen to the whole thing, because voice is perhaps more important in poetry than in any other kind of writing. But I’ll still share a couple of excerpts:

We’re talking about a young Latina. A young Dominican from the inner city. There are millions of people in this country who have all kinds of prejudices and mistaken assumptions about such an individual. Among other things, they believe she doesn’t belong here. Among other things, they believe she represents a threat both economic and cultural to the fabric of this society. There are all kinds of invisible pressures upon this person to prove them wrong. And I believe it’s absolutely essential for somebody like that to write poetry. Because poetry humanizes.

That was Martin Espada speaking. One of his own poems, Return says:

245 Whitman Avenue, east New York, Brooklyn. Forty years ago, I bled in this hallway. Half-light dimmed the brick like the angel of public housing. That night, I called and listened at every door: In 1966, there was a war on television.

Blood leaked on the floor like oil from the engine of me. Blood rushed through a crack in my scalp; blood foamed in both hands; blood ruined my shoes. The boy who fired the can off my head in the street pumped what blood he could into his fleeing legs. I banged on every door for help, spreading a plague of bloody fingerprints all the way home to Apartment 14F.

Forty years later, I stand in the hallway. The dim angel of public housing is too exhausted to welcome me. My hand presses against the door at Apartment 14F like an octopus stuck to aquarium glass; blood drums behind my ears. Listen to every door. There is a war on television.

My writing group includes two poets, and I am constantly amazed by the way poetry can cut through all the unnecessary stuff––not just words, but thoughts, feelings, all the accoutrements that we think need to be part of writing. They’re not, necessarily: stripping down to the bone, to the bare necessity of what needs to be communicated, can be a liberating thing.

Poetry, Espada says, is a political tool:

Both involve advocacy. Speaking on behalf of those without an opportunity to be heard. Not that they couldn’t speak for themselves given the chance. They just don’t get the chance. And to me, there’s no contradiction between being an advocate as a lawyer and being an advocate as a poet. I mean, to me, it was all in the same spectrum.

And that understanding will bring anybody … beyond the elements of style!

Try Something New

Feeling stagnant? Need to try something new? One possibility you may wish to check out is WEbook.com, a project-based system that encourages small contributions with a one-thousand-word limit per piece. You can use it as a project system for building a novel or nonfiction book, open it up for comments, even allow multiple contributors to write pieces of the project.

I spoke with one WEbook user who noted that the idea of being able to contribute small chunks encourages the act of writing, “and it is dead easy to just bash out 500 words or so in Word and then just paste it into the editor.”

From the site:

WEbook is a revolutionary online book publishing company, which does for the industry what American Idol did for music. (Modestly speaking, of course.) Welcome to the home of groundbreaking User-Generated Books. WEbook is the vision of a few occasionally erudite people who believe there are millions of talented writers whose work is ignored by the staid and exclusive world of book publishing. It just makes logical sense that if you create a dynamic, irreverent, and open place for writers and people who like reading to meet, write, react, and think together, the results are bound to be extraordinary. Cue WEbook.com, an online publishing platform that allows writers, editors, reviewers, illustrators and others to join forces to create great works of fiction and non-fiction, thrillers and essays, short stories, children’s books and more.

There’s also a lively community with discussion groups, message boards, and more. Check it out, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

What’s an Author To Do?

A colleague remarked to me the other day that he sees publishing going the way of the music business, with more and more “indies” appearing. He predicted that eventually there will be no conglomerates, no large publishing houses.

It’s a question being debated long and hard in a lot of venues, that’s for sure. I disagree with my colleague to some extent — what we’re seeing is more and more consolidation of the book industry (like many others — Beatrice Foods owns just about everything these days, doesn’t it?) and right now there are only really about seven publishers out there that matter. Oh, there are tons of other ways of getting one’s book out, and I think that that’s what my colleague is talking about. But there are some real differences between the music industry and the book industry that stand in the way of our doing what they did:

1. More and more musicians are finding that they do better just “giving” away their music: creating buzz on the net, making downloads easy, that sort of thing. Music and viral marketing were made for each other. It’s much harder to get that kind of buzz going about an author: you can’t hear two minutes of their work and decide that it’s cool.
2. Those same musicians are finding that the money is coming in in different ways, now that they’re giving away the downloads. Two major places where they’re generating income is in swag (shirts, posters, hats, jewelry, etc.) and concert tours. Neither of these is a viable money-maker even for a major author, much less anybody else.

So I don’t see that as a model. Things will change, mind you; people will hack the ebook readers and get books for free, no question about that, and we need to be ready for it (and not many really are, so many authors I know are crying that the sky is falling but not looking for creative solutions for shelter); but I think we need to find another model for it all.

And until then, the only way to get an endcap at Borders or Barnes & Noble is to pay for it, and only the Big Publishers can do that. Being in a period of transition is uncomfortable, but there’s part of me that’s hopeful: the world was never changed by people living in their comfort zones, and it seems to me that the future holds a lot of opportunities for authors — we just have to figure out how to seize them.

And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Don’t Let The Spammers Stop You

I wrote in a previous article about subject lines, and how spammers are making it more and more difficult to find one that works.

And now we have Second Life, with which I’m intimately acquainted, as I co-author a site, SecondSeeker.com, that reviews places in Second Life that new (and not-so-new) residents might wish to visit. And as I move about that particular virtual world, I’m struck again and again by the names that people acquire.

I should digress to say that one has a limited choice of both first and surnames in Second Life, unless one wishes to pay a significant amount of money to keep or choose one’s own. Otherwise, it’s pretty much mix-and-match with what’s available, and with millions of residents, fewer and fewer “good” names are available.

The fact is that most of them sound like the friendly bots who bring you your daily serving of spam: Hammond Gillnose, Tarteru Higglebottom, Sally Tennyfeathers, Brice Haiku.

Creative … or confusing?

Remember Lewis Carroll? In The Hunting of the Snark, he writes,

His intimate friends called him “Candle-ends,” And his enemies “Toasted-cheese.”

The Internet has changed the way that we look at a lot of things, and we’d do well to learn its lessons. But let’s not let that keep us from being creative – with subject lines, names, or indeed anything else in which we engage.

And then we’ll all be … beyond the elements of style!

The Sky Still Isn’t Falling

The appearance of Amazon’s new ebook reader, Kindle, has rekindled online debates about The End of Literature As We Know It and the probability that piracy will shortly reduce all writers to starving in garrets (if they’re not already doing so). One particularly strident member of one of my Internet discussion groups is predicting that all content will now be up for grabs to whomever wants it and that online content is merely another way to spell “screw the writer.”

And while some of these concerns are real and justified, the reality is that technology is at the helm these days. If it can be done, it will be done, and instead of complaining we’d all perhaps do best to adapt. The Navajo talk about being in harmony with one’s environment, including change in that environment; and the Darwininan notion of adaptation or extinction is very much relevant here. Reading is no longer confined to peering at words written on dead trees, and the faster we incorporate that notion into our thinking, the better we’ll all be able to weather some of the storms ahead.

For there will be storms. No birth occurs without pain, and in many ways we’re still enduring the pangs of the naiscent Technology Age. Computer use and the Internet have changed nearly everything about everything we do, and so it’s no small surprise that reading and writing are affected as well.

Many people still prefer to hold physical books in their hands. Many others happily read from laptop or ebook reader screens or even mobile devices. There’s no question of which is better, either from a quality or a moral standpoint; there’s simply a question of how we’re going to adapt.

In a recent New York Times articles entitled “Crossover Dreams,” Motoko Rich notes the number of books that appeared first online (either as blogs or in fact as serialized or full ebook offerings, all of them free) and that were later sold as print books, in some cases for very impressive advances. While they are not necessarily the norm, they do exist, one of many ways that new technologies and subsequent reader habits are changing the way books are published.

Will there be theft? Of course there will be: it’s apparently part of human nature to want something for nothing. Will those thefts overwhelm the system and destroy content creators? Of course they won’t: the majority of people do still pay for what they receive and will continue to do so, whether the format is traditional or electronic.

The sky isn’t falling yet. But it will for those who believe that they can control the way the world is moving. For the rest of us, keeping up is keeping us … beyond the elements of style!

If Content is King in SEO, it Rules the Universe in SMM!

I often talk about content being king. I even have a monthly newsletter titled Limitless Content (sign up for it at http://www.customline.com), and for good reason: content is the point of the web. People go online to do a great many things – make purchases, meet friends, look up information, learn a language, sell an heirloom – and every one of those actions is predicated on there being some content on the site where they ultimately do whatever it is that they’re doing.

Every time Google dances and other SEO experts go swooning over page ranks and links and so on, I order another latte. I don’t care. Page rank is so 2005, folks, and links can be manipulated more than golf scores. But content – good, solid, reliable, authoritative, changing content – that’s what will bring visitors (and customers!) to a site.

The social media sites, no matter which one you choose to consider (and new ones spring up, literally, daily), are all about content. They’re frequented by people who are generally less educated but far more web-saavy than those who are attracted to pre-web 2.0 sites, and these users know all about links – and aren’t about to play that game. You can’t ask for links in this world, and you can’t buy links, either; you have to earn them.

And you earn them through great content. I’m starting to sense a theme here.

The social media world focuses on experience rather than on destinations. It focuses on connections rather than on sales pitches. And it values creativity above anything else. The best way to get noticed is to do something new, something cool, something insanely great – and tell somebody about it. Tell everybody about it.

Who do you tell? Ah, that’s the other catch. To market to these communities, you have to be part of the community. You cannot communicate to web 2.0 denizens unless you’re one of them, unless you’ve spent the time and taken the effort to be there. You have to grow a bit of a thick skin, for social media sites can feature some very mean individuals (read Digg for a few pages and you’ll see what I’m talking about); as is true everywhere, it is generally the people who know the least who attack the most. So you’re going to get some slingshots. You need to have humor and a sense of balance out here – it’s not for the faint of heart.

Let’s get back to content, though. Because social media has changed the way content is presented: even though it must be even better than ever in terms of quality, the quantity rules have changed:

• First, your content has to be bite-sized. Say what you have to say, say it well, remind people of what you just said, and get out. If you can’t do this well, hire someone who can (maybe even a copywriter like me!): it’s essential.
• Secondly, your bites need to be in a lot of different places. Study the sites. (I’m not going to list them here; those lists are available elsewhere – check out SEOMoz’s fine articles on social media marketing, as an example.) Everyone wants something a little different. Modify your bite-sized bits of content to suit the specific audience.
• Finally, and this is where all your old creaky SEO skills come in: change content. All the time. Follow up your bite-sized nuggets with other ones. Experiment with doing a series of such nuggets on a given site. Keep creating this great content and tossing the articles, lenses, and tidbits out into the social media you select. They won’t all stick; but some will.

Remember that you’re not going to make any sales out here: social media sites aren’t going to buy anything from you. But put out content that is creative, dynamic, and intriguing, and if you’re any kind of decent marketer, you’ll draw people in to where you want them to be … and encourage them to do what you want them to do.

Do that, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Thoughts on First Drafts

One of the individuals who works at a Customline Wordware client company is doing an undergraduate degree right now, and this past week he interviewed me for one of his classes.

Here’s what he wrote: “I have a writing assignment for my Advanced Composition class where I need to ask several people about their approach to writing a first draft, then summarize my findings.”

While I think that summarizing such findings may be more of a challenge than amassing the interviews — for if anyone is idiosyncratic, it’s writers — it’s still interesting to see the focus on first drafts. So, for what it’s worth, I’ll share my answers to his questions here:

Approaches to writing a first draft

1. Do you do a great deal of planning before you begin a draft?
I do a great deal of *thinking*, which isn’t necessarily the same as planning. I find that I work best when I’m actually engaged with the material I’m writing, and that it’s then that I assess whether or not I need additional information, research, etc. The best writing advice I ever received was, “Keep your butt in the chair. Just write!” It serves me well.

2. Do you prefer to draft in one sitting or several sessions?
First draft is one sitting. Always: I just want to get the material *down,* see what it is that I have to work with, then go away from it and think about it and come back to it. But a first draft is always all at once (which explains why I’m often awake and working *far* past my bedtime!).

3. What do you do when you get stuck?
Pace. I’m an expert pacer. That’s when I need to follow the “keep your butt in the chair” advice, because it’s a good time to just walk away … and that *never* works.

But what really works best is trying to take a fresh look at the material. And what works best for *me* is imagining explaining it — and my dilemma — to another person. Usually I’m halfway through when I come unstuck — the solution to the problem that got me stuck in the first place is there when I take a step back and think about how I’d present it to someone else.

4. How do you feel when you are drafting?
It depends a lot on what it is I’m writing. If it’s something that’s been stewing in my head for a while, I feel exhilirated when I finally have the opportunity to get it down. If it’s an assignment (from a client, for example) I often feel anxious at first — Will I do it “right”? — though that usually goes away as I write; the act of writing is very empowering, very confidence-building.

*********

What about you? How do you approach a first draft? With trepidation? With confidence? Either approach (and everything between them) is perfectly acceptable; it’s knowing your own style that will put you … beyond the elements of style!

Everyone is Acting Like Everything is Okay

The power of words and the power of art are fused in the work of Camille Rose Garcia, a Los Angeles-based artist whose “narrative art” captivated me last week when I was in San Jose speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference. I took a couple of hours off from the conference to visit the San Jose Museum of Art and was, as the expression would have it, blown away by Garcia’s work.

Each painting or series of paintings is preceded by Garcia’s own take on it, whether she was inspired by her own thoughts, as in Plan B (“I was already deep into thinking about the collapse of society, the degradation of the environment, and military catastrophe”), or what she observes, as in Operation Opticon (“I wanted to do a group of works that specifically addressed the war machine and all of its evil agendas”).

Garcia creates dreamlike landscapes through which charming beings sleepwalk, relying on antidepressants and the joys of 500-thread sheets to keep them from seeing where they are and what they are doing. Her colors are vivid and supplemented with bits of mica and glitter to make the destruction in them seem even more removed, magical, inevitable. Garcia grew up near Disneyland and contrasts that so-called perfect world in denial with the real world that surrounds it in ways that simply jump off the wall at the onlooker. I fervently hope that The Tragic Kingdom will be exhibited elsewhere, so that others can get a glimpse of Garcia’s genius, which unfortunately is not well captured on paper or on the web.

So what does this have to do with words? Plenty. There’s the narrative art dimension to her work that appeals to me, as a writer and someone who generally absorbs meaning through words; but there’s something deeper here, too, a fusion of the different arts to communicate a vision to the world.

And that puts her way … beyond the elements of style!

Poetry in Motion

Like every published writer, I torture myself. I check my books’ online ranking chez Amazon and B&N. I anxiously scan the shelves of bookshops to see whether or not they’re stocking me, in any of my incarnations.

It’s an occupational hazard, but one that takes us further from the center: from the real reason why we write.

And then in the midst of my fretting, I received the foreword to my upcoming book. The book is about reading, about books, and about stories, and I had asked (with some trepidation) a brilliant poet with whom I had once shared a reading whether he’d be willing to write it. To my delight (and astonishment), he said yes.

He did not disappoint: “Reading is more than fundamental—it is elemental,” he writes. “Books are essential to our self-perception, and not to have them limits our access to beauty and dream (imagine the world of Fahrenheit 451!). Conversely, when we have unfettered passage to the worlds great books contain, that is, the stories of our species, we begin to ’shuffle off th[e] mortal coil’ and are renewed.”

His name is Regie Gibson, and the late Kurt Vonnegut thought rather a lot about him: “When you perform, you are supersonic and in the stratosphere … you sign and chant for all of us. Nobody gets left out.” He is a National Poetry Slam Individual Champion and has been featured numerous times on National Public Radio, on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and on the WGBH-2 program, “Art Close-Up.” His first collection of poems, Storms Beneath the Skin, received the Golden Pen Award. He is currently working on two manuscripts and recently completed a MFA in poetry from New England College.

My husband–who for reasons beyond my understanding abhors poetry–was captivated by Regie. He performed a poem about Jimi Hendrix, and afterward, all that Paul could say was, “He sounded like him! He sounded like his guitar! How does a person do that?”

You can find Regie on the web in any number of places, but you would do best to listen to his words in his own voice. Please do. and if you’re ever in the Boston area, come and hear him in person at one of the many performance venues in the area. I’m honored that he’s a part of my project and look forward to what he’ll be doing next.

Regie Gibson is way … beyond the elements of style!