Posts Tagged ‘ fiction ’

February Story Contest: ROMANCE!

dream-book-of-romance-coverOld news to everyone that saw our little advance warning post, but it’s February 1 and that means time for an official announcement:

We like to do the occasional creative writing contest over here at MA101, and by “occasional” I mean “we did one in October once.” But a decent number of people submitted to that one and everyone seemed to have fun, so we’re back this month with another!

Come one come all (hur hur hur, “come“) and give us your finest in romantic shorts this February. “Romantic” can be everything from touching tales of true love (“How I Met My Husband,” etc.) to steamy bodice-rippers. We’ve already received a couple of submissions from MA101 regulars, but don’t be shy — the more you people submit, the less posts I have to think up that week! Woo, lazy blogging!

As detailed in the earlier post:

The Rules

  • Story must be original, and either never published before or something that you own all the rights to and can republish freely. I have no desire to find myself wrangling with someone’s agent as a result of this!
  • 7,500 words max. Blog readers have limited attention span, as the few of you still reading this far know. Shorter is fine, and even encouraged.
  • “Romantic” can be interpreted however you like. If the story contains sexually explicit scenes I’ll probably put it behind a jump with a “NSFW” label, which everyone will promptly click through if I know a thing about my readership.
  • Submissions must be received no later than Sunday, February 10 (earlier is better).

Logistics

  • Email submissions to geoffrey.cubbage@gmail.com
  • Include with your story the name you want credited and, if relevant, a website you’d like your name to link to.
  • Stories will be posted starting Monday, February 11. Results will be announced the following week.
  • Judging is done by a rigorous panel of judges consisting of whoever shows up at one of my potlucks. Blog readers are disqualified from judging, so it will be everyone’s first encounter with all of the stories.

Prizes

  • First prize this time around is a cool one — a writer of erotic e-books has offered to do a short (5-10,000 word) custom story for our winner! You pick the pairings, the setting, and the kinks. I’m pretty excited that we get to offer this, and hope it’s a prize worth writing for to the rest of you.
  • If erotic literature is not to our winner’s tastes, he or she is of course welcome to choose the usual first prize of some Madison-local liquor instead.
  • If you don’t possess either of those vices, why the hell are you reading my blog? But we can get you some fancy teas from one of the teashops here, or some fair-trade coffee, or something like that if you really want. We’re easy.
  • Everyone that participates is welcome to a MA101 guest post on their blog or website. Any topic you like, up to 2,500 words, which is technically a $75 value at my going rates! Scary thought, huh?

I’ll have a guest post for us some time this February from our writer-in-resident and prize-donor, but for now, whip your pens out and get started!

Anyone else misread that last sentence? I surely hope so.

2013
02/01
CATEGORY
Writing Life
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3 comments

YA Needs to Be Better-Written Than Adult Fiction, Not Worse

hunger-gamesNo, not that kind of adult fiction. Teenagers are reading plenty of that online already, I assure you.

But seriously, what’s up with the badly-written YA blockbusters lately?

I don’t mean the stories, or the ideas, or the characters — we can quibble about those if we want to, but at the end of the day it’s a matter of taste. You can think Twilight‘s Bella is a terrible role model without that inherently making Twilight a bad novel.

What I’m talking about here is the actual, mechanical, writing.

Sat down with The Hunger Games the other day, just for example. Had the editors ever seen a semicolon in their lives? Apparently not, because there are more comma splices in there than there are flies on the slowly-cooling corpse of a teenager brutally murdered for the televised entertainment of a dystopian world. HEYO!

And it wasn’t just minor usage problems like that. The whole book is written in the first person but the present tense (unlike most first-person narratives, which are past-tense), and from time to time the narrative voice drops wrenchingly into a different tense mid-sentence, or makes a reference that could only be made by a past-tense narrator looking back at the events rather than someone living in the moment. That’s a serious problem — it breaks the whole illusion, and forces the reader back into the real world while their brain tries to make sense of the disconnect.

strunk-and-white-elements-of-styleThese are “bad writing” problems. It has nothing to do with the content or the theme or the characters; it’s about the mechanics, and the mechanics are wrong. They’re awkward. They’re not expressing what the author wants to express in a clean and coherent fashion.

This isn’t a problem that can get explained away by the target audience’s reading level. Do most middle school students have a good awareness of when to use a comma versus a semicolon? Almost certainly not. But that’s not an excuse to do it wrong.

If anything, it should be motivation to write more painstakingly, not less. This is setting the example for people whose writing skills are still in development. What they’re absorbing as a teenager is going to affect how they write as adults.

It’s the same frustration I have with badly-written pulp novels for adults — sure, the content isn’t literary genius, but it’s still more pleasurable to read when the language flows smoothly. Putting a book out with grammatical errors is pure sloppiness, and insulting to your audience. It presumes (not always accurately) a low reading skill, and takes advantage of it.

YA is the last place for that. We owe kids and teenagers the best examples they can get, not the worst. And there’s some great stuff out there that’s clearly being produced by talented writers and great editors — more than I could name.

But the headline blockbusters – Twilight, The Hunger Games, etc. — don’t seem to qualify. And that makes me worry an awful lot about how we’re guiding people’s tastes — and skills.

2013
01/10
CATEGORY
Writing Life
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6 comments

2012: A Year’s Reading in Review

Looking back at a year’s worth of reading has been depressing for the last couple of years — most of the words I read come from periodicals, not books, these days — but I do it every year anyway. Anything done twice is tradition, and this particular format was given to me by a good friend back in the days when you wrote such things down by hand, on a piece of paper, and passed it along, as opposed to just posting it on the blog.

Uphill both ways in the snow, with a baked potato to keep us warm. Obviously.

So without further ado, the Year’s Reading in Review for 2012:

How Many Books Read in 2011: 39 that I remembered to list on Goodreads, which is my primary tool for keeping track of these things. There’s always a few that get forgotten, or that are re-reads of something I already reviewed (the site won’t let you post multiple reviews of the same book, for obvious reasons), so we can safely peg it as somewhere near but not over the 50-book mark.

Fiction/Non-Fiction Ratio: Exactly one non-fiction book, although there are a number of others that I use as reference material in my work rather than reading cover-to-cover which don’t make it onto the Goodreads list.

Male/Female Authors Ratio: 14:6 male to female by author. By book it’s a bit more balanced: 21:18 books by male to female authors (a lot of Dorothy Sayers titles this year…)

Favorite Book Read: As always, there are lots that I want to give it to, but I’ll go ahead and say Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin. Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and Christopher Buckley’s They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? are also right up there.

Least Favorite: Surprisingly, I managed to avoid picking up any real stinkers this year. I’ll give it to Neal Stephenson’s Reamde, which wasn’t particularly awful — just overly-long and kind of squickily misogynist in places.

Oldest Book Read: The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne (which I liked).

Newest Book Read: The Princesses of Iowa by recently-debuted (and fellow Grinnell College alumnus) Molly Backes.

Longest Book Title:  The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy.

Shortest Book Title: Reamde by Neal Stephenson.

How Many Re-Reads: A guilty year for re-reading — 12 of them this time around, mostly by Lois McMaster Bujold, Lloyd Alexander, and Laurence Yep. There were a couple months there where feel-good escapism was pretty much the only thing on my literary plate (and my actual plate, for that matter; I ate my share of Doritos in french onion dip this summer).

Most Books by One Author This Year: Six by Dorothy Sayers. One of my many and scandalous lovers started me on her, and I promptly read all of the ones featuring Harriet Vane, plus a few of the earlier ones.

Books in Translation: Only one this year — And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov, translated by Stephen Garry

And How Many Books Were From the Library: Less than usual, but only because many were borrowed from friends or already in my collection. I believe the only books I actually purchased this year were ones by authors I knew and wanted to support personally (and most of those were given as gifts).

As always, the editorial subtext of this list is to go support your public library — it’s books, for free. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Feel free to steal this list for your own blog or website, or just comment, kibitz, etc. in the comments section down below…

2013
01/03
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
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7 comments

Activism in Fiction: Pros and Cons

It’s been a busy week here in Wisconsin.  Politics have been on my mind and just about everyone else’s.  Even the local pizza joint is getting in on the action; so many people have called in to order pizzas delivered to the protesters on the capitol square that Ian’s Pizza now has a running tally going on their blackboard.  As of Sunday morning they’d taken orders from more than half the states in the union and a half-dozen foreign countries, including Egypt.

All of which begs the question — can we write about this stuff?  As more than news articles and blogs?  I already suggested that our state senators’ flight across the border would make a great-if-implausible novel.  Explicitly political fiction is nothing new.  The ancient Greeks wrote transparently-disguised parodies of their rivals; Shakespeare pandered shamelessly to his Queen’s (and later King’s) family pride in his histories.

But is it good?

The Pro Side:  Politics in Fiction Reflect Real Life

Every book and author has at least a little bias.  Your work reflects a little bit of real life no matter how contrived the writing gets.  Even Dick and Jane gives us an understanding of what the author thought a normal childhood looked like.  To someone who didn’t have that childhood, the work is a little expressly political.  It tells us how to live.  There is judgment inherent in the writing.

So the argument for fiction with a deliberate social or political message goes that it expresses the same things as other books, more clearly.  The actions of the characters and the world they live in teach lessons that have bearing on the reader’s real world.  The author’s judgment is instructive rather than invasive in this paradigm.  It assumes that the reader has a degree of cynicism, or at least awareness, and is able to relate the fictional story to the real world.

Some very fine and very famous books have been produced as vehicles for a specific political ideology.  So have a goddamn mountain of bad ones, so be cautioned!  There is only one 1984, and it has already been written.  But the potential for the — I won’t say genre; let’s call it an “approach” instead — the potential for the approach has certainly been proven.

The Con Side:  Activism in Fiction Obstructs the Story

It’s worth revisiting an idea I threw at you just a couple sentences ago:  expressly political fiction requires the reader to be thinking beyond the covers of the book.  It’s almost directly counter to the whole process of willingly suspending disbelief.  You have to disbelieve to give the work any relevance; you have to think simultaneously in terms of what the characters are doing and what it’s supposed to be saying about your life.

That can get in the way of the story.  It’s hard to really bury yourself in a book when you’re also wondering if the brownshirts are going to knock down your door.  And some entertainment-minded writers would argue that it’s not what fiction is supposed to make people do.

Particularly opinionated novels and stories also have this habit of sacrificing character for Making The Point that frustrates both readers and writers.  The Oppressed Minority isn’t a person.  He/she is a point the author is making — and it’s often a patronizing point, which makes it worse.  It’s hard to care about someone who’s only in the story as an illustration.  Politicized fiction has to tread a very careful line between clarity of message and entertaining prose.

This is the Part where I Tell You What to Think

Nahhh.  Kidding.  I think there’s a strong case to be made for either side, which is why I laid both out in the first place.  I’d even go so far as to say that there aren’t necessarily two cleanly-divided “sides” here.  Lots of authors have written very entertaining works that happened to strongly advocate a social or political opinion.  My parting thought would be one of caution:  a political message is like anything else you write into a draft.  When you go back and look at it, you still have to ask “Does this actually add anything to my story?”  And if it doesn’t, cut the hell out of that little bugger.

You can always blog about the hidden messages once the work gets published.

2011
02/21
CATEGORY
Writing Life
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Five Blockbuster Genres (That Absolutely No One Writes Anymore)

If you spend any time around writers at all, you’ve got to know the term “genre fiction.”  In the modern parlance it pretty much  means science-fiction, fantasy, romance, or any other subgroup that would rather go by “genre” than the more pejorative (and generally accurate) “pop” or “pulp” labels.  But the practice, if not the term, goes back as far as the written word.  Earlier generations had their own sparkly-vampire-novel phenomena…most of which have since been almost entirely forgotten outside of English lit curricula.  Hopeful news for the Twilight-haters, right?  Here are a few of yesteryear’s blockbusters:

THE COLONIAL ADVENTURE

The Gist:  A man or group of men from England or America, or more rarely non-Anglophone European countries, travel in a colonial territory.  Both the native inhabitants and the environment get in their way as they pursue some objective, either for personal profit or, more commonly, for patriotic good and the prevention of disaster.

The Blockbuster Years:  The boom in colonial exploration novels peaked some time after the actual colonial exploration had started to go stale, with the 1880s and 1890s really defining the genre.  British imperialism didn’t last a whole lot longer itself; the novels were fairly passe by the time Kipling was winning the Nobel Prize in literature, and a new generation of writers got started on post-colonial and even violently anti-colonial novels as early as the end of the First World War.

Why No One Writes Them Anymore:  It turns out that Queen Victoria might actually have been worse than Hitler, if a little more hands-off.  Even well-meaning authors in the genre wrote really, really horrible things — things you know they went to hell for and they didn’t even know it was coming, the poor bastards.  But don’t worry.  Stories of crossing dangerous peaks and jungles to bang dark-skinned beauties and massacre villages were too good to give up, so they’ve been cagily shuffled into the realm of fantasy, where the minorities don’t get a lobby group.

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THE SCHOOLBOY STORY

The Gist:  A young boy comes of age in the company of other young boys and their aging Masters.  Pranks are perpetrated, scrubs are hazed, and everyone eventually learns to be a good upstanding chap.

The Blockbuster Years:  About the same time America was tearing itself apart in the Civil War, the Brits were devouring stories about rugby scrums like you or I chow down on cold pizza for breakfast.  For a popular genre the school-story was remarkably long-lived, enjoying great popularity in serialized and complete publications on up through the turn of the century.  The First World War finally did the schoolboy story in, largely by killing off the vast majority of school-age boys in Great Britain.

Why No One Writes Them Anymore:  Schools in England integrated genders in the 20th century, which made a lot of the traditional scenarios impossible, inappropriate, or both.  Various real-life horror stories about hazings gone out of hand made glorifying the older-boys-abuse-younger-boys relationship dicey, and a slew of mid-20th century literary critics decided that a lot of the classic boy’s school stories were secretly really, really gay.  Perhaps the shirtless rugby games tipped them off?

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THE SLAVE NARRATIVE

The Gist:  A slave is auctioned in a horrible scene, usually with the family being forcibly broken up.  He or she experiences all the horrors of plantation life and usually makes several escape attempts, suffering punishments for failed ones.  Most narratives include an explanation of where the slave acquired the education to write a first-hand account, usually with lavish credit given to a white, abolitionist editor and friend.

The Blockbuster Years:  Antebellum America both generated and consumed the majority of slave narratives, though some of the more successful ones made their way across the Atlantic as well.  They went on being published after the Civil War, and were taken and recorded in large numbers as a WPA project during the Great Depression, but their sparkly-vampire heights of popularity came in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s.

Why No One Writes Them Anymore:  While the subject matter is touchy, there are actually quite a few successful modern novels about antebellum slavery.  The reason we don’t see piles and piles of slave narratives, other than that the subject matter isn’t of as immediate interest as it was when we were about to fight a war over it, is that it required less willing suspension of disbelief in 1850 to convince yourself that a real slave wrote these real words, really (as long as a white person helped him/her).  These days it’s a stretch for the old imagination, so most authors avoid the “factual” first-person narrative.

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THE CAPTIVITY NARRATIVE

The Gist:  Decent white folks get captured by indecent, savage, non-whites!  Some sort of interaction or cultural exchange takes place — usually the whites get a better sense of how to live in harmony with their strange new land, and the savages get Jesus.  Either everyone goes home happy or there’s a massacre.  Sometimes there’s a massacre, after which all of the non-massacred people go home happy.

The Blockbuster Years:  People in late 18th-century America couldn’t get enough of these.  The stories taught such a great moral lesson that even women were allowed to write them, accounting for a massive publishing spree leading up to the turn of the century.  The passion then dropped off in favor of very slightly less offensive interpretations of the wise savage and the generous white man, which we’ve already lambasted on this blog.

Why No One Writes Them Anymore:  Primarily because they’re painfully offensive, although the genre has shown some staying power in odd ways.  Anna and the King of Siam, 1944, was practically a captivity narrative…and arguably, so was Avatar. But like the colonial adventure novels, the genre has mostly yielded its popularity to fantasy, where entire races can be unambiguously savage without ruffling feathers (unless they happen to be avian races, I suppose).

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THE GOTHIC OCCULT

The Gist:  Supernatural things happen in a remote and foreboding place.  This is almost always the result of some kind of pact with the devil, though the main character may be either an innocent victim of the supernatural or its actual agent (and occasionally, Faust-like, both).  Transgressions of deep taboos are used to provoke the emotions — blasphemy, rape, incest, and murder tend to occur in various combinations and permutations until the Devil finally claims his due.

The Blockbuster Years:  The original gothic occult novels mostly came from the last decade of the 18th century, when they were the titillating must-read for every young lady.  They resurged in popularity briefly after the (appropriately posthumous) publication of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, whose heroine reads Gothic novels obsessively, and various authors have co-opted the label since, but the heyday of the classic Gothic occult novel ended around 1800.

Why No One Writes Them Anymore:  Most modern readers find Northanger Abbey a bit of a dry read.  Given that it’s a light-hearted parody of an older and denser style, it’s no surprise that the true Gothic, in all its moody and florid prose, has been watered down into oblivion.  It’s also been a while since young female readers have been thrown into great emotional distress by descriptions of desecrated altars and murderous monks — and if they wanted to shock themselves with sexual deviancy, there’s 4chan.

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So readers take heart, next time someone’s going on about “genre fiction” like no one ever thought of themselves as a “genre” writer before.  People have been doing this scholck since the printing press was invented — actually, they’ve been doing it since before, if we get into genres like the 3rd and 4th century “calendars” of hagiographies, or the Greek epics.  But that’s a post for another, sparkly day…

2010
11/03
CATEGORY
Humor
Writing Life
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4 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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4 comments

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