Archive for June, 2010

Actually About the New Yorker’s Top 20 Under 40

So a few posts back I shared an entertaining article joking about the New Yorker‘s “Top 20 Under 40″ list of authors and how to complain about it if you didn’t make the cut.

Now that I’ve finally read the first issue of selections, I find myself embarrassingly willing to do just that.  Not that any of the individual stories seem bad — some appeal more to my tastes than others, which is the nature of lists — but the overall selection seems to be intensely repetitive.  It’s pretty much just a collection of stories that teach us how people don’t really understand one another and relationships end badly, with a heavy focus on educated, middle-class-and-up people’s relationships ending badly.

I guess there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t say much for the breadth of literature that the editorial board was considering.  I’d just feel better if there had been any stories about things that weren’t people being hard to understand and relate to.

Still, I suppose it was good for what it is.  For what it is.

2010
06/28
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
TAGS


2 comments

“The Art of Manliness” Website’s 100 Books for Men

More of a reading list, really, but this blog doesn’t need another category.  In the course of my fashion writing, I’ve had some interaction with a few of the minds behind The Art of Manliness, a multi-author blog that’s everything it sounds like, good and bad.  I can’t fault their dress advice, enjoy the run-downs on some basic world-ready skills that everyone should know (jumping a car battery, shining your shoes, etc.), and find much of the social perspective somewhere between charming and heinous.

Their reading list for men is about an equal balance between timeless classics and horribly dated machismo.  Book lists are always a matter of taste, of course, but I don’t know that today’s gentlemen are actually all that well-served by things like William Alcott’s The Young Man’s Guide or Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.  The fiction is a little more even-handed, balancing testosterone-pumped classics like H. Rider Haggard and John Steinbeck with Jack Kerouac and Mikhail Bulgakov, but don’t look for female authors here — there’s four of them, out of the hundred books.  My whimsy-loving mind recoils from the absence of Peter and Wendy (the original novelized form of Peter Pan) or any fairy collections like Grimm’s or the various-colored Fairy Books, but for good or ill, here’s the list:

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library

What do you think?  Glaring omissions?  Wonderful curriculum for America’s youth?  Either way, if you’re planning on writing something that you want men to buy, you might do well to at least read through a few of these and keep their strong points in mind…

2010
06/25
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
TAGS









Leave a comment

Library Shame

I’m a big user of public libraries, in no small part because I live about three blocks from a branch of a very good system.  I wish for books and they arrive, which is kind of magical when you think about it.

The problem with this system (and many will say it’s not a problem at all, including me during my peppier days) is that you quickly get to know your librarians, and they more slowly come to know you — your borrowing habits, literary tastes, habit of forgetting to hand them the library card and then the books to check out (stupid system; you can’t reach your wallet with an armful of books), silly hats, and so forth.

All well and good, sez I, if you’re checking out the great works of Western literature — or better still, in this day and age, the great works of post-colonial literature; those librarians are progressive, and dead white males earn you no points with some.  But when you show up with an armful of paperback romance, or a fantasy comic book from recent decades, there’s that quiet, irrational shame.  What if he only reads post-modern metaphysical literature, you think, what if her mother was run over by a truck full of paperback bestsellers?

(It’s possible that I did not sleep enough last night.)

My comfort to fellow sufferers of library shame is thuswise:

First, librarians too are human.  They are just as likely to enjoy a really bad book as the rest of us — probably more likely, since they tend to be active readers, and are by necessity exposed to all the options out there.  At the point where they’re making purchasing decisions (and in many smaller libraries, the nice person checking out books at the counter very likely does have a hand in collection policy), they’re definitely reading bestsellers as well as Proust.  Probably more of the former than the latter, since a) less library patrons are going to want Proust, and b) you pretty much already know what Proust adds to your collection, and don’t actually have to read through it to make a purchasing decision.

Second, librarians see a lot of patrons, and you’re not as memorable as you think.  Relish your invisibility or seek to change it as you please, but be aware that they do the same card-scan, book-scan, book-swipe, have-a-nice-day routine about a hundred times a day (made-up statistic).  Take it from a worker of various small, repetitive, service-sector jobs over the years — they’re not actually seeing and thinking about every title that passes through their hands.

Thirdly, you’re checking out books because you like to read (or because you’re a pretentious ass who thinks it will make you a better person, which it will if you actually read the books but not for the reasons you’re thinking).  So you’re already a librarian’s second-favorite person (their favorite, I’ve found, is a person with a challenging-but-answerable question).  You almost certainly share at least one interest with them (books), and you’re a patron of the service that pays their bills.  They’re unlikely to judge you harshly for your Diane Steele fetish as long as it keeps you coming back.

And finally, it doesn’t matter in the long run unless you somehow wind up becoming personal friends with your local librarian, which isn’t as hard as it sounds — but at that point, you’re friends, and can share secret little sins like paperback sci-fi serials unashamedly.  Expect some toe-curling literary confessions in return.

Got library shame?  Got a cure?  Just got a crush on your local librarian and want to know how to charm one without being creepy?  Drop a comment, and I will share my wisdom…

2010
06/23
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Thoughts & Musings
Writing Life
TAGS








4 comments

Keep Calm and Carry On, Printing Errors, and More

My life is not very interesting today, and my writing time is largely consumed by a rough draft for a commercial product, so here’s a picture of the new pocket journal I started to use yesterday:

It’s an image that’s taken off recently, despite being a Ministry of Information poster that never actually got used during the war it was designed for (WWII) — apparently Crown-owned copyright expires in only fifty years, so it’s in the public domain now.  I wonder if that’s why the royal line hasn’t produced any stunning artists lately?  They’re supposed to be bred for that sort of talent, I think…any road, it’s the new journal, and it’s larger than I usually prefer and uses lined paper, but I find it charming all the same.

It came for free, because of a printing error that damaged the pages.  We thought at first that someone had been leafing through it with chocolate on their hands or something, because there was a small brownish smudge on an interior page.  After some leafing of my own, I realized that the same smudge occurred every eight pages, occasionally bleeding through to leave a fainter smudge on the next one — some printing error had dropped a blob of the red ink from the cover on each bundle of pages as they were bound, leaving a rusty, bloodstain-looking smudge on every eighth page.

I find this endearing for several reasons:  first, I like thinking about how books are made, and it tickles me that I can tell every time I come to a new sheaf of pages in the construction.  Second, it’s a small, rusty-brown drop, so I can always imagine that it’s a vital clue in a publishing-house murder (don’t worry, the stains are too thick and clay-like to actually be dried blood).  And mostly I just enjoy the design being iconic of British propaganda despite never having been used for any actual practical purpose.

If I ever fill it with anything useful, I’ll be sure to let you know.

2010
06/21
CATEGORY
Personal Life
TAGS





Leave a comment

Writing Life: How to Expose Yourself

I’m not going to lie, I’m hoping that title brings in some interesting traffic.  But I am, of course, talking about exposing yourself to different sources of English usage, as advertised in Wednesday’s Writing Life post (and canny readers of this Blogging Basics post have already figured out why I chose those two words to highlight for my link — always lots to learn here, kids!).

As discussed on Wednesday, your brain relies on what you put into it and what it can retain of that to create your basic understanding of the English language, which is never clearer than in your writing.  It’s certainly possible to write slowly and carefully in a deliberately-affected style, but the prose that comes out when you really get on a roll and start banging words out without thinking about them is the construction of your memory and your understanding of How Words Go Together.  We talked Wednesday about the memory side of things; today we’re taking a look at the sources of English usage you’re putting in there in the first place.

This is, incidentally, where the “writers should read lots” advice that makes it into every “How To Be A Writer” bullet-point list comes from, whether it’s properly articulated there or not.  You’re not just building vocabulary and literary references to sprinkle your works with; you’re training your brain to understand every possible way words can come together for specific effects.  But I generally find that writers tend to be good at reading already — it’s an odd career to embark on if you don’t have a preexisting fondness for the written word.  So my advice there is simply to mix your reading up — try genres and authors you’ve never considered before, even if it’s not the kind of work you personally plan on producing — and I’ll leave it at that, moving on to some less-considered sources of English you may want to be seeking out:

  • Poetry – Since poetry is, fundamentally, the art of word choice, it’s an excellent example of English usage for your brain to chew on.  I wouldn’t call myself an expert on the subject, but I try to expose myself to some kind of poetry or other regularly — at the very least, I get two a week from The New Yorker. And I should probably be reading more.
  • Theater – Some of the best speeches in the English language were written for the stage.  More importantly, theater is almost entirely dialogue, making it one of the best examples out there of what does and doesn’t work in writing conversations that people want to read.
  • Journalism – The word limits and formatting restrictions of newspaper journalism make for some interesting prose sometimes, and the overall approach is very different from most prose fiction (although there have been some notable exceptions, most famously Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).  Being aware of what’s going on in the world never hurts, either — if you don’t mind people thinking that you’re old and boring, I find that the Wall Street Journal has the best writing, but there’s something to be said for just reading the local paper as well.
  • Feature Articles – Theoretically a subset of journalism, the kinds of feature articles you see on the front pages of special-interest magazines are really a different sort of writing from news reporting.  With a few exceptions, these articles tend to be broad glosses on a general subject, and it’s worth seeing how people cram big ideas down into small, easily-digested paragraphs for a casual audience.
  • Blogs – And, of course, the internet has generated entirely new forms of writing, including these humble blogs.  Some are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in between, but they’re all examples of how people in this day and age use their words.  If nothing else, it’s an opportunity to know your audience.

Got another source for written (or spoken) words that you think belongs here?  Drop me a comment, and tell me why it works for you!

2010
06/18
CATEGORY
Writing Life
TAGS









2 comments

Writing Life: Memory and How You’ve Stopped Using It

This started out as a longer post that got into some reasonably scientific brain-talk, which wound up confusing me as I wrote.  I shudder to think what the jumble would have looked like to another reader.  But my fundamental premise for the day remains the same:  writers need good memories, and technology is currently making it easy to let that particular faculty slip.

The first assumption there, that writers need good memories, may be prone to misinterpretation — I’m not necessarily talking about being able to remember a minor character’s name without a bunch of finger-snapping “I know this one,” though that can save you some time too; I’m talking about how well your brain can capture written and spoken words as it processes them.  Your “voice” — the habits of phrase and syntax that you default to as you write — is basically a hodgepodge of everything your brain remembers about How Words Go Together, and the more you remember, the richer your voice will be.

There are two basic ways to strengthen your habitual voice:  exposing yourself to as many sources of English language as possible (another post on that Friday), and remembering more of what you read/hear.  Unfortunately, recall is becoming a less and less useful skill.  In some ways, that’s no bad thing — education, for example, is slowly wallowing its way toward being research-skill focused rather than rote-memorization focused, which will undoubtedly make primary school more fun, and make that guy who knows fifty digits of pi even less impressive.  But it also means that we don’t train our brains to remember details anymore.  Phone numbers are stored automatically, passwords are remembered by our web browsers (and can be e-mailed to us even if we do forget them); Facebook tells us when all our friends’ birthdays are.

Breaking down the different types of memory is where the first draft got muddled, so I’ll skip straight to the simple conclusions:  you’ll be a better writer if you stop relying on machines to remember things for you.  This doesn’t mean that you have to go out and learn some sort of total-recall memory system (though there are some fascinating ones, including methods dating back to the Renaissance and even before) — in fact, one of the best things you can do for your writing skills is get in the habit of writing things down. Not just stories and letters and other prose, but lists, numbers, and anything else that you might rely on a phone or a computer to remember for you.  Just the act of putting pencil to paper activates your memory, as does reading off what you’ve written.  This is how Grandma remembers twenty different friends’ phone numbers by heart — she read them all off a scrap of paper until she didn’t have to anymore.

Since big changes are hard to enact (and don’t I know it), here are a few things you might try slipping into your daily life that can help get your memory back in gear.  Try one or two for a couple months, half a year, something like that, and let me know how it goes for you:

- Stop finding people’s names in your cell phone and pressing the “call” button.  Look at the number instead, and punch it in manually.

- Don’t tell your browser to remember passwords for websites.  Write them down somewhere, or better still, choose mnemonics for each site (a password for a banking site could include the $ sign in some way that’s meaningful to you, for example — mnemonics drawn from personal experiences will also be harder to guess, adding some security)

- Use a pen-and-paper datebook rather than a computer-based calendar system or a smartphone to remind you of important dates.

- Do crosswords, play cards, go to quiz night at the pub, or do something else for fun that requires your memory in an active, involved way.

- Whenever possible, do minor math (figuring tips, etc.) in your head or on paper, rather than using a calculator.  Remembering the way numbers add up and internalizing common numeric patterns uses the same part of your brain that remembers how words go together.

- Read and listen to a wide variety of English usage — more on this tomorrow, so stay tuned!

2010
06/16
CATEGORY
Writing Life
TAGS







3 comments

Personal Pages: Cars, Insurance, and Not a Lot of Writing

I thought for a while about how to turn fender-benders and insurance hassles (the result of neither my driving nor my insurance company, thankfully) into a post about writing, and it just ain’t coming.  So let’s just say it’s been a busy morning and try again Wednesday, eh?  Apologies to the readers.

2010
06/14
CATEGORY
Personal Life
1 comment

Writing Life: Freelance Writing, or, Choosing Your Own Damnation

I suspect I may be guilty of slight melodrama in my title; this hopefully does not come as a surprise to regular readers.

But the point is thuswise:  for those of us who write, and those of us who wish to be writers in some serious and perhaps spiritual way, there is no greater confirmation-of-existence than getting paid to write.  The first paycheck — mine came some time in high school, from a gaming magazine; you can still find me listed as a “game designer” on some odd industry-headhunter websites because of it — is something in the line of a missive from on high, a personal note from your god of choice saying go forth and do this work. Add to this the highly romantic term “freelance,” with its roguish associations and pseudo-military swagger, and you can see why essayist-for-hire is such an ideal choice for the aspiring writer.

Or is it?  Setting aside the fiscal considerations (which are overall poor), freelancing can be a complicated creative-energy balancing act for someone looking to eventually sell his or her own work for publication rather than salary/wages.  Most projects will be corporate in nature, and therefore sales-driven; virtually none will actually be related to your personal interests, unless taste and opportunity intersect in a spectacular burst of luck.  Editorial control can range from comfortably easy-going (blessedly, all of my forays into paid writing have fallen into this category) to downright antagonistic.  And often enough, new writers just plain get screwed, turning in a story and seeing it reappear in slightly different language a few weeks later, with someone else’s name on the article (and the paycheck).

On the flip side, any kind of freelance writing — whatever publication or company it happens to be for — is paid writing, an emotional reward that’s hard to beat.  It’s also a byline, not necessarily of direct value to aspiring novelists but good for convincing people (i.e., agents and publishers) to at least take a passing look at you, and obviously handy for snagging writing-related day jobs to pay the bills until your big break as well.  And you may find yourself picking up some useful skills along the way, since most freelance jobs involve the intersection of a person with specialized knowledge but limited ability to communicate it and a writer with solid communication skills but no previous expertise on the subject.  God knows I’m a better dresser since working on articles for a menswear company.

There’s certainly room for lengthier discussion of freelance writing as a career, and exploration of the different forms it can take — you may see some of those explorations in subsequent posts, in fact.  For today, let’s leave it at this — if an opportunity to write for money comes your way, I would say take it.  There will be frustration, there will be a sharp decline in either productivity on your personal writing or hours spent asleep (possibly both), and there may be cantankerous editors or fraudulent employers; there will also be practice with different styles of writing, the chance to learn some fascinating professional skills you almost certainly wouldn’t pick up on your own, and the emotional satisfaction of seeing your talent turn into a black number on the bank statement.

Choose your own damnation, at the end of the day, but I find I’m happier struggling to find time for novel-writing in between articles than I was just working the day-job and writing fiction with all my spare hours — even though the short non-fiction I’m currently being paid for isn’t the sort of writing I ultimately want to wind up doing.  It’s still writing, and I’m getting paid for it.

And that’s pretty cool.

2010
06/11
CATEGORY
Writing Life
TAGS








3 comments

Writing Life: Google Knol and You

A few posts ago I mentioned a site called Google Knol as a good place for short articles that you can’t find another home for, and I’ve periodically mentioned my articles on the site as well, so it’s about time I actually went over what the service does, and what it can do for writers in particular.

If you visit the site, the mechanics are pretty self-explanatory — search bar, constantly-updating “most recently posted” section, sidebar with the current top authors/articles; all the trapping you’d expect.  The content, which is user-generated and entirely unedited, generally falls somewhere between casual, personal blog quality (like this post) and full-blown wikipedia-style articles with multiple professional sources cited.  Some topics are more popular than others, and therefore tend to have better articles (or at least more scathing comments on the bad articles), but so far I haven’t found anything that made me actively skeptical of the content in general.

Why is this relevant to you, particularly if (like many of my readers) you want to write fiction, not short internet content?  As with many of my posts, the heart of this is internet presence — Google Knol gets views, and more than a personal blog can usually hope to get until it really takes off (for example, my month or so of posting articles on Knol has resulted in about 10,000 page views, more than this blog has garnered since I started it in December 2009).

The direct, practical result of all those views is likely nil, at least as far as a career in fiction writing goes; no one’s going to read what I have to say about fashion for tall, skinny men and say “gee, I should publish this guy’s story about fairies” — but that’s not really the point.  The point is, like having a blog, having written words that other people have viewed sets you apart from just another hobbyist, even if you’re not getting paid for those words.  And if you can manage to get some dialogue going with your commenters, there is a chance for some networking opportunities.  They may not be for exactly the job you want, but hey — getting paid to write beats the rat race, even if it’s not quite what you dream of writing.

So even if short non-fiction isn’t your thing, give Google Knol a try.  Write about writing, if it’s all you can think of — do a step-by-step on how to outline and draft a story, or something like that.  Post it, and be sure your Google profile includes your e-mail and a link to your website/blog (a reasonably sedate profile picture is always good too, or at the very least an abstract image to make the photo box stand out as something other than the blank-face default).  Spend a little while searching for topics similar to yours, and leave a few comments.  Just like in blogging, this encourages people to come see what you’ve written and reply to it.

And if all else fails, just come back every once in a while and look at the “most recent” for anything interesting — I never would have thought to search for “Chicago hot dog” on my own (being from the Windy City, I already know how to make ‘em), but I enjoyed this article on the subject all the same.

Let me know how it goes!  Better still, drop me a comment with a link, and I’ll come check out your Knol — and you’ll have an incoming link, which boosts search engine ranking and therefore traffic.  See how it all comes together?

2010
06/09
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
TAGS










4 comments

Writing Links: David Mamet’s Words of F*$king Wisdom

Since the advice is for screenwriters — specifically the writers of The Unit — I’m not sure I can really get away with this one, but all the advice on what is and isn’t dramatic holds true for written narrative as well as film.  And I get to tell my David Mamet joke, so here’s the link for today:

David Mamet’s Memo to the Writers of The Unit

And the promised joke:

A well-to-do lady steps out of a theater on London’s West End and is confronted by a good-natured panhandler.  Sniffing in disdain, she says “In the words of the immortal William Shakespeare, ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be,’” and turns to walk off.  The fagan replies “Yeah, well in the words of the immortal David Mamet, ‘Fuck you, lady.’”

2010
06/07
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
Writing Life
TAGS



Leave a comment

Visit Me on Facebook

Geoffrey Cubbage
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 950 other followers