Beyond the Elements of Style

May Fitzgerald Be Your Inspiration, too!

Today’s guest blogger is Michael Sean Morris, a writer I know from a historical fiction email list and the words and energy behind the informative and delightful Pop Culture Institute:

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Here is where I have no legitimate experience (i.e., getting published) but have the theory down. Besides, the only reason I haven’t been published is a) insecurity, and b) I never send anything out. Once I get those licked I’ll be set.

My God in all things literary, F. Scott Fitzgerald (hallowed be thy name), used to take two, and no more than three, days to write a single short story. In his opinion they could easily be overwritten. Once you have the idea, sketch it out in one go, then flesh it out the same way, either the same day or the following. Put it away for 24 hours, final draft and send, before you get cold feet.

Whether it was innate talent, the speed involved, or simply the massive number of submissions, he managed to publish regularly enough that by the 1930s Scribner’s and the Saturday Evening Post were asking him for stories. He used the short stories to explore themes in his novels, as a quick form of currency, and, I suspect, preferred short fiction because it was easier to focus on as his brain was pickling from bootleg hooch.

Having tried his techniques (minus the booze) I find there’s something in them. If it’s not your thing, don’t force it, but consider this. Many literary journals publish short stories. The pay isn’t great, but it’s a credit with terrific cachet, and often the stories in them are excerpts from a novel in process, a testing of the waters, if you will. In fact, I’ve decided to market my own Chapter One in this way, as it may lend the entire project a momentum and credibility it doesn’t currently have (since I’m one of those loser know-nothings without a paper for my education .”

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I’ve always believed that writing short stories is excellent exercise for novelists: the form foces the writer to think about word choices, characterizations, descriptions, and flow in ways that longer works (which, let’s face it, allow us to become a little sloppy) simply don’t. Even reading a lot of short stories is a good mental exercise: it keeps the focus clear.

Whatever your inspiration, try something challenging in your writing today. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Simultaneous Submissions

There’s an ongoing and probably never-ending discussion on the Net about simultaneous submissions—sending your work to more than one publisher at a time. Should you wait the painfully long time it often takes to be rejected, or fling your submission out to the four winds and hope that someone, somewhere, will want it? But what if two “someones” should want it at once? Dilemmas, dilemmas, dilemmas.

When it’s a book, the line is pretty clear: send out multiple query letters, but once someone has asked for the full proposal (um, you do have a full proposal, right?), then give that editor the courtesy of not sending it out all over the place. Tell the publication that it has three months to decide, after which you’ll feel free to submit the proposal elsewhere. That’s pretty simple.

The complications come in when you’re talking about sending out articles, short stories, op-ed pieces, and so on.

Frankly, sending your work to multiple publications is absolutely fair and reasonable. Editors receive an incredible volume of submissions, do what they do more for love than money, and are absolutely unable to respond at the speed of light. That shouldn’t keep you from carrying on with your agenda.

Common courtesy applies. If your work is accepted somewhere, immediately notify the other publications with a simple note saying, “Please withdraw my story entitled ______. I apologize for any inconvenience.”

Do you tell them? That’s another gray area. Personally, I never mention that I’m sending multiple submissions; if something is accepted, I follow the procedure outlined above. Chances are, with the few slots available and the thousands of submissions the journal receives, it’s not as if there were going to be a bidding war on my bit of flash fiction!

The bottom line? Follow the golden rule, in this and all things, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Watching a Story?

Sounds odd, perhaps, but if you have a few minutes, take the time and this opportunity to watch an author (and Pulitzer Prize winner) doing revisions.

I love how he starts with a postcard (and isn’t it true that many amazing stories come from such tiny moments of inspiration?), and it’s interesting to watch the story morph.

Learn from others, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Lists? Let Me Count The Ways

Some time ago there was an article in the New York Times about the popularity of life lists. The article was constructed to reflect the list, and it was an interesting conceptualization of form following function.

More recently, both friends on Facebook and fellow members of various email communities have challenged others to create lists. Some are odd, some require reflection, and all encourage one to summarize a part of one’s life in short numbered sentences. Talk about being concise!

I live with lists. I am never as happy as I am when I have a list by my side. Things to do on Monday. People with whom I need to communicate this week. Grocery list, hardware store list, trip-to-Orleans list. There’s a sense of being in control that comes with making a list, consulting a list, crossing accomplishments off a list.

It’s an illusion, of course; the fact that none of us is really in control is demonstated to us daily. But maybe an illusion is better than giving in to the dark side of that lack of control: panic, anxiety, depression.

So what does this have to do with words? As writers, we can also serve the same function as lists. We can remind readers to dream, encourage them to accomplish what they’ve been putting off, challenge them to become great. Words are far more inspirational than lists; we just need to remember why we’re writing them. And then we’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Whither Publishing?

As the new year begins and people in publishing begin to take stock of the fallout from last month’s Black Wednesday, a few scenarios are beginning to emerge. There are, of course, the doomsayers who argue that publishing as we know it is over—and that, in fact, it may be over altogether, in any shape or form. Others press on.

A Salon article from the end of December posits one of the (unexpected) benefits of the crash: the reemergence of the small publisher.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, Open Letter Books, a small press based at the University of Rochester, illustrated how a more nimble firm can benefit from the freeze. The publisher bid on the English translation of Mathias Enard’s novel, “Zone” — a single sentence that stretches for 500 pages. An influential translator had called the work the “book of the decade,” and Open Letter director Chad Post expected tight competition for the rights. But no one topped his offer, and he hopes to publish the translation in 2010.

“There’s not much to cut at smaller presses, so they are going to stay the same — they will have an identity coming into the recession, and they will be the same when they come out,” Post says. “It will open up opportunities for the smaller, more stable presses. The bigger houses like Knopf and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are going through an identity shift. It will become very murky what kinds of books they produce.”

(for the full story, click here)

Years ago in this column I wrote that, in essence, the mills are closing. When the economy forced the closure of New England’s textile mills, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a lot of people—a whole lot of people—found themselves without work, without help, without hope. An entire industry had changed. Those who survived were those able to take their skill sets and refashion them for other opportunities.

Sound familiar?

The mills are closing—most of the big ones are having fire sales as we speak—and the production of literature is changing, too. We too need to refashion our skill sets as well as our expectations of how we will continue to read. Reading isn’t going away any more than the wearing of textiles has. You’ll still be buying (and, some of you, writing) books ten years from now. Will they be different? Probably. But isn’t the essence of literature—communicating ideas, enabling readers to fly away on a magic carpet of fantasy—more important than how it’s delivered?

Just trying to keep things in perspective, which keeps me … beyond the elements of style!

It Isn’t What You Read, It’s How You Read It

The history of world includes the history of ideas; and ideas require communication in order to flourish. How does that communication happen?

People talk, and people write. Talking hasn’t changed much over the years; but reading and writing certainly have.

I like this brief history, neatly summarized by David Usborne last year in The Independent:

The first “manuscripts” are thought to have been produced around the seventh to 13th centuries, with largely religious texts produced by hand. A well-known example is the Book of Kells, a Latin collection of the Gospels lavishly decorated with an eight-circle cross. From the 13th century, with the “secularisation” of book production, books changed from being objects of worship to descriptive works. This expansion – though limited, given the lack of printing presses – was driven by the Rennaisance (sic.), and with it the rise of European universities and the return in the 13th century of Crusaders, who brought texts from Byzantium – books from ancient Greek and Roman times about world affairs.
The first printed – religious – books emerged in the 15th century but books as we know them took off in the 17th century. In the 1600s Gutenberg printing presses were invented in Germany. By 1424, the Cambridge University library owned 122 books. Woodblock printing and paper arrived from the Far East and in 1800.

I’ve finally taken my own first steps into the future of the manuscript: last week I bought my first ebook reader in the form of Amazon’s Kindle. And it’s certainly an interesting experience.

I bought it mostly because, as a writer myself, I feel I need to experience what is clearly the future of books, at least for many people. I also am enormously attracted by the ability to carry a whole library with me when I travel, and (with the easy ability to order more books) no more panic when I’m on a trip and run out of things to read.

So while it’s early days, for what it’s worth, here are my impressions so far:

• The screen is terrific. It’s really easy to read and the font size can be changed quickly if necessary.
• I have not yet gotten used to the page forward and page back buttons, which are all aligned on either side of the screen — the places where I’m most likely to grasp the “book” and therefore inadvertantly flip around. I expect that ease will come with practice, but right now it’s damned annoying.
• Also annoying is the fact that the spiffy jacket fits loosely and falls off easily.
• I thought I’d be mostly reading books, but it’s absolutely marvelous for magazine reading. So you don’t get the pictures (and obviously Smithsonian and National Geographic aren’t therefore good candidates); but I get to read articles in one of my favorites, the Atlantic Monthly at a fraction of the offline subscription price, and don’t use dead trees to do it. That pretty much rocks my world right there.
• I haven’t yet got the process down, but a deal-breaker for me had always been that I was confined to buying books from Amazon to read via the Kindle. This is not the case: other ebooks and even pdfs can be sent to the Kindle from my very own MacBook. It’s trickier to do than to simply buy from Amazon, but it’s feasible, and some rainy Saturday afternoon soon I shall learn how to do it.
• The looks aren’t as bad as I’d feared, Yeah, it looks like a clunky version of some medical device that would be used in sick bay on the starship Enterprise, but it grows on you. I have dreams, still, of what Apple’s eventual ebook reader will look like, but for now I’m willing to settle for this one.
• The first three days I had the Kindle I was in Boston taking the subway all over the place and it’s absolutely terrific for reading in small crowded spaces. It remembers what page you were on and gets you admiring glances from people around you.

I don’t yet have any gradiose conclusions about the future of printed books or how we’ll communicate our ideas in the next century. But I’m having a lot of fun in this one dipping my toe into the waters of the future.

As long as there are words, I’ll survive … beyond the elements of style!

Looking For A Few Good Writers

… or aspiring ones, anyway!

My local writing group recently lost a member, and we’d been wanting to expand anyway, so the need to incorporate new members has become quite pressing. And it’s brought up a lot of questions that are probably good to consider: who are we? What are the group’s goals? Who exactly is the person we want to have join us? Is there an ideal candidate? What can we offer that person? What do we need from him or her?

And can the group come to a consensus around any of these issues?

These are valid questions, I think, to ask of any writing group, local or virtual, large or small. We happen to be asking them because we want to have some new members join us; but you might want to consider asking them even if your group isn’t looking to expand. It’s easy to lose focus, to forget the original (or even evolving) mandate, to lose track of what you’re doing. Questions like these bring you back to the center.

One of my clients is a marketing firm that recently engaged me to write an operations manual for the company. An operations manual sets out everything about the company, from where the paper for the copier is located to the policy around sick days, from the specific steps entailed in everything the company does to how it hires new employees. It forces a company to review in minute detail every aspect of its business, much of which has never been articulated or was articulated so long ago that it’s been forgotten. In essence, the operations manual tells the company’s story.

Staying in touch with one’s story isn’t just important in the corporate world: it’s important for any group. The story allows for group members to bond, to recall common goals, to feel part of something larger than any individual member. Losing a sense of history means losing part of ourselves. And any group needs that backstory, the communal equivalent of “how I met your mother.”

Groups also need the ongoing part of the story: this is what we do, this is how we do it, this is why we do it. My writing group decided early on, for example, to break with the common genre-specific considerations: we are fiction writers and poets, and have discovered that having a good mind and a willingness to take risks compensates for not being as schooled in each others’ genres. It’s a decision that has worked for us, and certainly would not work for others. It’s part of our story, and it needs to be articulated.

Think of the groups to which you belong (and if you don’t belong to a writing group, seriously consider joining or starting one). What are their stories? Is your story still aligned with theirs? A periodic refresh of this process can be enormously helpful. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Is Freelancing For You?

I was going through some old bookmarks in my web browser and came across an article published last year in HR World, a super compilation of why it makes sense to do what some of us do: 101 Reasons to Freelance.

Freelancing isn’t for everyone. If you need some sort of external discipline and structure in order to get things done efficiently, then it’s probably not a good thing to consider. If you’re just starting out as a writer or editor, it’s probably not a good idea, either: there’s something to be said for an apprenticeship, for learning one’s craft in a place where there are others to consult, to guide you, to show you how it’s done.

But if you read the article and it seems attractive, then it’s perhaps something you might want to explore. There are a number of books and websites available to help you with the nuts and bolts of freelancing, but you also need to consider the emotional side of the work.

I work best in silence and solitude. At the end of the day — literally — it’s nice to “go down the pub” and have a Guinness and talk to people; it’s good to have a writing group, as I do, and friends I can contact; but the core of my work happens in silence and solitude. And to me that’s really the best and the worst part of freelancing.

If that thought scares you, then it’s probably not for you. If you’re smiling at the thought, though, take a look at the article and see if it speaks to you. Either way, take a moment and consider what your life might be like if you made that choice, challenge yourself to see your life taking a different turn. No matter what you choose, as long as you’re always challenging yourself, 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!

What’s Up With Wikipedia?

Google anything, and chances are the first page of results will come up with a Wikipedia article. And it’s an incredibly quick and convenient way to look things up, there’s no question about that. I was reading an article that referenced Langrangian points, and the Wikipedia article (first in Google’s search returns) explained them in language that was accessible to a non-scientist like me. So far, so good.

There’s a catch, of course. As you probably know, anyone can write or edit a Wikipedia entry. That leaves a lot of room for erroneous and/or biased information to be included in any of the thousands of entries. And, yes, readers are encouraged to edit entries, either to correct mistakes or to add information not already there, the hope being that slanted material and inaccurate material will eventually get sifted out.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. And we tend to get seduced by the former, and ignore the latter.

Besides all that, thinking about Wikipedia raises the perennial issue of web anonymity. It’s been observed that, when shielded by anonymity, people will say and do things that they’d probably never dream of doing were their real name associated with the statement or act. We see this all over the web: some anonymous users are trolls, some are hateful, some are probably dangerous (as we saw with the horrible threats made to a female IT blogger last year). None are very nice. Just as people seem to morph into the lowest common denominator when in groups, so too do they seem to lose all civility and accountability when posting anonymously on the web.

What does this have to do with Wikipedia? Plenty, when you stop to realize that edits can be made anonymously there. Imagine the individual with an axe to grind and plenty of time on his hands, and you can imagine what havoc can be wreaked … and we’re not talking chatrooms here, we’re talking about a site that is perceived by many (including Google) as an authority site.

CIT graduate student Virgil Griffith did us all a service, I think, when he coded and released a tool called Wikiscanner; it allows one to see who has been editing Wikipedia entries anonymously. When Wikiscanner first came out, the expectation around the net was that the annymous posters who were furtively changing articles were what journalist Annalee Newitz has referred to as “some blogger writing in his basement in his pajamas.” Not so, as it turned out: Big Names were involved. As Newitz noted in a 2007 article on AlterNet:

“Turns out that all the anonymous propagansa nad lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all––they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the ACLU. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. (…) And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.”

So there it is. The political ramifications of this discovery can be discussed ad infinitum, ad nauseaum, but the point for this particular blog (which is, after all, about words) is this: check out biases before you’re quick to see a source as authoritative. I recently edited two books that relied on Wikipedia for their source material, and had to have very long, very candid discussions with the authors over the wisdom of using something that is in many ways a moving target, to back up one’s points.

Don’t trust the net. It’s a fabulous tool but it can take over one’s thinking very quickly and very insidiously. When you receive a chain email, check Snopes before forwarding it to 346 of your closest friends. And use Wikipedia as a beginning for your research … but never as an end.

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