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!

Political is Personal

As NPR today has a show exploring how the art world and artistic expression are dealing with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I need to report that I’m already ahead of the curve there. Not in anything I’ve published in real life, but in an art installation in the virtual world of Second Life.

I’m already well acquainted with Second Life, as I co-write Second Seeker, a blog that reviews PG-to-R-rated places and activities in Second Life, and also co-authored chapter three of Wiley’s new book, the Official Guide to Second Life. But when my co-author, who is an artist in Second Life, approached me about collaborating on a project there, I was indecisive.

I’m used to having a lot of control in my writing. By its very nature, writing is linear: one reads from front to back, top to bottom, and the author is thus able to control how his or her words appear to the reader. What Paul was asking me to do was allow my words to float in the air as others walked through the installation — including walking through the words themselves! What that meant was that I could group pieces of the words together, but know that some people will start reading in one spot, some in another, and that all will walk through the installation in different ways.

It was one incredible challenge. Yet I was ready to do something. I’d become first tired of and then angry with people telling me to not take politics so personally — the political is always personal. So I wrote something that expressed my pain … and could be read with different starting-points.

And the political is always
personal.
And God bless America
isn’t anywhere in
the Bible.

Paul — or PleaseWakeMeUp Idler, as he is known in Second Life — created an incredible build with my words as a starting-point. In one space, visitors are walking through films of red, causing one reviewer to call them a “fog of blood.” In another, faces of Iraquis follow the visitor along with the plaintive words — “Why am I dying?” Yet another space speaks of and illustrates conspicuous consumption, the energy that drives acquisition and aggression. One illustration shows Americans clutching Bibles and guns; on the flip side is an Iraqui clutching the Koran and a gun. Finally, one section of the installation requires one to confront the names of American military dead — and the names of Iraqui civilians dead.

As one reviewer notes,

I didn’t know what to expect, but the wall of text that greeted me - names, ranks, ages, dates, places of death, sickened me. I could have known these people. Some were so young. Some of the notes left me ill. “body found near…”, “Baghdad?”, “checkpoint on outskirts of…”, “road between…”, “throat slit”, “Mother of”, “Son of”, “Sister of”, “Father of”.

What are these children, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers doing now? Now that their loved ones have been taken for nothing more than senseless greed?

The installation — called Political is Personal — will be available for viewing in Second Life until the end of March. Come make yourself an avatar in Second Life and visit it. It’s so far beyond the elements of style that I’m not even going to use that catchphrase here today.

Netiquette 101

One of the things I used to do for a living was teach people to write effective, professional, and courteous business letters. Well, the mills have pretty much closed on that particular revenue stream, but it’s worth perhaps taking a look back and seeing what got lost – and what we might want to recapture – with the advent of the internet and email.

Emails today may or may not be effective, depending on the writer; some manage to be professional; but very few people seem to feel a need for them to be courteous.

So perhaps it’s time to revisit email etiquette 101:

• DO respond when someone emails you. I’ve often sent information requests to an individual in a company with which I do business and received no response in return, even though I know that person is in front of his computer. In these days of questionable deliverability, it’s a good idea to respond with a simple “Okay, I saw what you need, I’ll get back to you by Thursday.”
• DON’T ignore emails. Not quite the same as the above; if you don’t know the answer or cannot give the person what she needs, then just say so. You’d never stay silent on the telephone and not respond to the other person; don’t do it via email, either.
• DO phrase requests as requests. Words like “please” and “thank you” and “when you have time” are as necessary in email as they are in real life (you do use them in real life, don’t you?)
• DON’T assume that people can “hear” your tone. What is meant to be humorous can be hurtful. If there’s a “wrong” way to interpret anything, someone will find it.

We all live and work on the net to some extent. Maybe it’s not too much to hope that we can all play together nicely?

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

Happy Thanksgiving … Anyway!

I have to admit that when it comes to Thanksgiving, I’m a bit of a bah-humbug sort of person. I don’t celebrate the holiday and it makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as you’ll see in a moment.

But I do want to say that taking time off to acknowledge everything for which we are thankful is an excellent idea, and one we should implement all year, not just on one day. I’m grateful for so many things and many people: the growth of my company, Customline Wordware, and for all my wonderful clients who make it possible; for my sales team, headed up by Julia Blackburn, and mostly, my business partner, friend, and husband, Paul Cézanne. I’m grateful to my publishers for continuing to put my words out there, and for my literary agent, Philip G. Spitzer for enabling that to happen. I’m grateful to my readers (”if a writer falls in the forest…”) who mean the world to me: I don’t know who all of you are, but I thank you!

As for the rest … well, I explain my attitude best in this op-ed I wrote that appeared in last week’s Provincetown Banner:

Thanksgiving, Provincetown-Style

Having decided not to travel for the holiday (the sanest course of action when one considers how difficult flying anywhere has become), I found myself recently wondering how to spend it. While I’m totally onboard with the general sentiment of the time – it’s an incontestably Good Thing to stop and feel gratitude for all we have and all we are, and an even Better Thing to thank people who have been good to us this year – I’ve never been able to feel right about celebrating a holiday that has its historical roots in a genocide.

So how does one mark the day?

At one time the Wampanoag did a sort of anti-Thanksgiving at Plimoth Plantation, but I’ve not been able to find anything out about it in recent years. And while one could of course go to one of the local restaurants and gorge oneself, it seems a little pointless. So I was delighted when the solution was suggested to me: perhaps I should celebrate Thanksgiving exactly like the first Europeans did!

You don’t have to go far to research the roots of the holiday: the museum up at the Provincetown Monument tells the story. The Pilgrims, we learn via a diorama there, were close to starvation and despair when they suddenly found some corn! It was carefully stacked and well preserved, apparently just waiting for them. They rejoiced over that discovery, took the corn back to their ships, and thus famously survived the winter.

So here’s my plan: on Thanksgiving morning, I’m going to break into the Grand Union grocery store over on Shankpainter Road. I’m going to proceed to the canned vegetables aisle (it is, after all, past the season for fresh vegetables) and take the corn I find stacked there. Surely the store owners and the local police will understand, just as no doubt the rightful owners of that original harvest did, right? Stealing is, apparently, a holiday tradition.

Okay, so I’m not going to really do it, but it’s a tempting thought. After all, as long as you get to write the history books, you can – apparently – do whatever you want. Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving indeed, on this and on every day! Being grateful puts us all … beyond the elements of style!

Doing Well By Doing Good

Well, the word is out … and it’s not just those of us involved in “causes” that are paying attention. According the the new BBMG Conscious Consumer report, nearly nine in ten Americans say that the words “conscious consumer” describe them, and that they’re more likely to buy from companies that manufacture energy-efficient products (90%), promote health and safety benefits (88%), support fair labor and trade practices (87%), and commit to environmentally friendly practices (87%).

Wal*Mart doesn’t have to get worried, yet: the report noted that the above considerations will only cause a consumer to purchase if products are of equal quality and price. There’s that price-point issue again. We’re good at holding fast to values … until they begin to cost us.

The good news? While “convenience” used to be a major consideration for American consumers, it has been edged out by more socially relevant attributes.

Those of us who use words for a living need to be aware of this trend. Even advertising copywriters, possibly the lowest on the rung of writers (and I say this even when I’m wearing my copywriting hat!), need to know that social responsibility ins’t just the right thing to do … it sells, too.

There may be hope for us, after all. And then we’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!

Deadlines and Other Strange Creatures

Well, we’ll make it short and to the point his week, as I am wrestling with every writer’s best friend and deadliest enemy –– deadline time. I’m co-authoring a chapter in the upcoming second edition of Wiley Publishing’s Official Guide to Second Life, and this is Crunch Week. So I’m feeling neither erudite nor clever… just a little over-caffeinated!

But it’s a good subject for writers of all sorts to think about, as deadlines are as inevitable as the proverbial death and taxes. Amd when we sign the contract or make the agreement, the deadline is so blessedly out of sight in the future that it seems like a Small Thing.

Believe me, it very quickly morphs into a Very Big Thing indeed!

How do you deal with deadlines? While I could go off into the predictable every-writer-is-different spiel, there are some concrete bits of advice that will apply to all. To wit:

1. Write something on that first day when you’ve signed or sent off the contract. Even if you don’t eventually use what you write, write something having to do with the project anyway. That keeps you grounded in it, makes it real.

2. Plan the project. This is the next day, after you’ve had the champagne and the excitement has fizzled a little along with it. Use project management software if it’s complex, plain pen and paper if it isn’t. In one column, note the parts that you can do off the top of your head, no problem. In another column, note long-term pieces (if you need to get permissions, for example, or quotes: the sooner you’re on to that sort of thing, the better off you are). A third column will have to do with items, actions, etc. that have to be done in order for the first column to be completed (looking up references, speaking with someone, etc.).

3. Now take the information from #2 and look at your deadline date. It’s calendar time: look at how long you have to complete the project, and plug dates into the pieces of the project you;ve separated out in #2.

4. Start the long-term part right away. Seriously: right away. Don’t wait for the Muse: she’s notorious for disappearing once you’re on deadline.

If you plan everything out well in advance and follow that plan, you have a much better chance of not losing sleep — or sanity! –the last week or two of your project.

Speaking of which, I’d better get back to mine! Need to stay beyond the elements of style ….