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cross-pollination selling your work writing

Social Media as Formal Poetry and Other News

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Today, the sun rises on a glorious time here in the Bay Area, a holiday I like to call the first day of school. Today, I lose my unpaid interns to third and fourth grade and gain five hours a day of quiet work time. Gaudeamus igitur and laborare est orare.*

So here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately (and yes, the Latin does enter in). In addition to editing manuscripts and articles, I’ve been picking up odd jobs maintaining website content for others. The most recent of those jobs involves a social media management component, including Twitter.

How can Twitter be an effective social media marketing tool and a source of entertaining and thoughtful content? Well, as one example there’s this guy, who is promoting his book using Twitter, not in the usual way but by releasing a short story one tweet at a time: a free sample in serial form.

I’ve written before about how formal constraints can help a writer focus, so I’m approaching this Twitter thing the way I would take on the task of writing a sonnet: use the rules as scaffolding, not obstacles. A single Twitter resembles haiku, whereas an ongoing feed would be more like an epic poem, or like this (if you like Victorians—seriously, every stanza would fit), or this (for those who prefer the moderns). I may be approaching the task sort of like this.

orange_182924

Digress? Me? Anyway, that’s the challenge that will occupy my quiet hours this fall. Content generation is easy, but how to make it both promotion and poetry? Not obviously either, of course, but delayed reaction poetry, an afterimage that blossoms in the reader’s memory.

* “Let us rejoice” and “to work is to pray.” The organization that has hired me for the tweeting is spiritual in nature—told you there was a reason for the Latin.

science writing

Science and Poetry: Dog Days Edition

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Sirius A, overexposed so you can see Sirius B (lower left)
Sirius A, overexposed so you can see Sirius B (lower left)

My latest favorite phrase from technical reports is method of moments. There are actually two definitions, one from statistics and one from probability theory, and the thought of explaining either of them is making me sleepy right now, so instead I present to you what I think that phrase should mean (hey, if it can have two quant-related definitions, it can have a literary one, too).

Got a story in your head? Some people do a traditional outline, some go for less linear processes such as spider diagrams, and others like to sit down and type it out from start to finish. Nothing wrong with any of these methods as long as they work.

Here’s another way. Most stories start with a seed: an overheard phrase, a road sign, an earring, a dog tied up outside a store. Call them moments. What if you laid out the entire story as a succession of moments? Put them on index cards, either physical or virtual, so you can shuffle them around until they tell your story the way you want to tell it.

Two reasons why this works: One, it’s an organic method of recall; when you try to remember something that happened, it usually comes to you as a jumble of events, not always in chronological order. Once the pieces are collected, you can assemble them in the most effective way to relate the experience, which, again, not always chronological. Two, and closely related, the story changes with the sequence of moments and how you choose to connect them. Like a constellation.

Try it sometime, whether you’re writing fiction, memoir, or sampling techniques. You know you’re going through life filching moments like a ferret steals socks; now you can put them to some use or at least string them all on a narrative cord so they don’t get lost under the sofa with the cat toys and spare change.

Still wondering why there’s a photo of stars at the top of the page? The Roman phrase “dog days” (diēs caniculārēs) refers to the hottest part of the summer, which coincided, at that time and location, with the period when Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, rose with the sun. It was considered an unlucky time, rife with disease, and the Romans sacrificed a red dog to Sirius to keep off the worst of it. This astronomical coincidence no longer happens (and red dogs are safe to chase Frisbees and pant in the shade), but the name lingers and still signifies torpid, sweaty weather.

Enjoy the dog days. Don’t forget to collect some good moments.

cross-pollination writing

What I Learned on My Summer Vacation

Updated on

I try to get out from under the laptop occasionally to do things that have nothing to do with books, words, or getting money in exchange for books or words. Try it sometime, seriously.

Anyway, the following suggestions may be helpful in your writing process or your general pursuit of happiness.

1. Go see these guys at your earliest convenience. They spread joy wherever they go like brilliant, tub-bass-playing, dirty-minded bees.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/qp2bdSxZGDA?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

2. Lost your smart phone? Borrow a friend’s phone, and text your own phone asking the finder of your phone to please call or text the number of your friend’s phone. It shows up on the lock screen. Most people genuinely do not want your lost items and would prefer to see you reunited with them.

Writing process? Totally getting to that.

3. Step outside of your own field. Having a community of writers is invaluable; in fact, I’d have to say it was one of the highlights of my graduate writing program, and I’ve made efforts ever since to keep in contact with such a community. However, and I’ve said it before, you need to get out and talk to people who view books as entertainment commodities at best and don’t give a rat’s ass about semi-colon abuse, plot structure, character development, or synecdoche. Your daily page count? They don’t care about that, and neither should you, ultimately. This is a transitory success.

4. There are people out there making gin from wild-harvested roots and berries, and if you don’t see a connection between that and writing it is possible that you are in the wrong field (or don’t drink enough, which amounts to the same thing). Whether it’s hillbilly moonshine or  gourmet spirits, make something out of the abundance available to you.

5. Excellent advice I heard from a musician: when learning something new, be prepared to suck for awhile. Beginning musicians require a room of their own for entirely different reasons than writers do, but the impetus to study a new instrument or take on a new writing project is the same. Relax and let the process develop at a natural pace, like small-batch, handcrafted mountain gin.

Enjoy your summer break in whatever form it takes. Don’t have one scheduled? You might want to revisit your priorities.

selling your work writing

Notes from the Field: Special Fiction Edition

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It’s summer vacation time, which means school’s out and my office hours shift toward the nocturnal because during the day I am surrounded by people who are boooored. What do we do when we’re bored? Read a good book, obviously. Or write one. For those of you struggling with drafts of your fiction, here are the top three problems I run across in novel manuscripts and what to do about them.

1. throat clearing

By this I mean taking the first two or three chapters to find your voice, to really get your story rolling. Guess how long an agent will read a book that doesn’t grab her by the eyeballs in the first paragraph. About as long as it takes to read that first paragraph, possibly less. Skipping the whole agent thing and self-pubbing? Most prospective readers of fiction will give you even less.

This is one of the easiest problems to fix, however. Simply take everything that precedes the scene in which everything starts happening for your main character and delete it. You might have to add a sentence here and there for exposition. That’s it. “But—” No. You don’t need it. Listen to your inner 7-year-old moaning about the second week of summer vacation, and jump right into the action.

2. low stakes

You’ve set up a story, some characters, some situations and obstacles, and everything is going great, except that nobody’s really sure why the MC has to do whatever it is he has to do, or else. Or else what? In a good story, there are stakes clearly outlined in the beginning of the second act, and then, as the action continues, the stakes go up. The screw is turned. Your hero doesn’t have to save the world, but in a way he does. He has to save his world as he knows it or have a fantastic reason to let that world go straight to hell to save someone else’s.

This is a harder fix because if the stakes aren’t there, you’ve got no story. Get it done in your storyboarding/outline stage and save yourself a lot of heartache and liver damage.

3. I hate this guy

A corollary to the one-dimensional hero/villain problem in fiction is the character that is profoundly and thoroughly annoying, so annoying in fact that your annoyance yanks you right out of the story. There’s “Dude, I totally know someone like that,” and “OK, that’s like my old boss, but worse!” and from there you drift uncontrollably into “No! No one is like that, and if anyone were, someone would lock that person in a construction site portable toilet and drop it off a bridge. Into a dry ravine. That’s on fire.”

Go on and write that guy. Get him out of your system. It’s one of the great joys of being a writer: the ability to lambast jerks in print. Then take a few days off and go back and add a little realism, even and especially if you’re working in genre fiction. There is no room in a book worth reading for someone whose sole purpose is to be the human equivalent of a Claymore mine. All your characters need to pull their weight, and none of them should be upstaging the primary movers.

Enjoy the long (so very long) summer days, and when the editor in your head says, “I’m bored! This is boring,” pay attention and do something about it. If you have real live children telling you this, pat them on the head and tell them they’ll make fine literary agents someday.

 

science writing

Voice and Fiction: Finding the Right Note

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Recently, I’ve been in negotiations with authors for projects that ultimately were not a good fit. Sometimes it was the author who made that call, and sometimes I’ve had the luxury of opting out myself, not because the manuscript was a cracked bell but because I personally could not make it sing. The author and I were, as my former boss the surface scientist used to say, out of phase.

What do you know about wave physics? It’s cool stuff. Next time you’re facing down some nasty writer’s block, go and do a quick search on the dynamics of sound and light. Light, obviously, is not only a wave, it’s also made of particles, but that makes the subject even more fascinating. And I digress, but digressions on wave–particle duality are exactly what you need when you’re stuck.

Back to voice. Every artist has a closetful of those, and in the beginning most artists try on different voices to see what fits. We all try to emulate our idols for a time, and then we develop something in reaction to what we hate, and the voices we keep tend to be an amalgam of the better parts of all those we discarded.

(Could there be more metaphors in this post? I’m thinking yes.)

My point? Is two-pronged. Prong 1: Writers, play with your voice. If a story isn’t quite working for you, try it with a different accent. Don’t be afraid to take on a verbal persona that doesn’t feel like you. You’ll find a balance between overkill and underwhelm and between out of control and overly contrived. Doing that work is what separates the aspiring from the published. Push the voice a little too far in any direction to find the boundaries of what works. Recognizing the “too far” point, not to mention the critical “not far enough” point, is a valuable skill that only comes with practice.

Prong 2: Editors and collaborators, don’t be afraid to say no. Work is nice, paychecks are good, but trust your instincts no matter how dire your finances. If you don’t think you can make something work, if it’s physically painful to read, don’t waste your and the author’s time. Cut that one loose like a bad first date, and move on to the next project.

Editors have voices too; they may not be immediately audible to the reader, or they may create a subtle harmony to draw attention to the force and talent of the writer. Proper harmonics send a shiver down the spine, and that is the feeling we’re all hoping for with every new project. When you feel that resonance, you’ll know that you’ve got hold of a sound project, one that will repay all the dewing and sanding and polishing.

 

usage writing

Notes from the Field: May 2014 Edition

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Oh, hey, where did April go? No matter; Happy May Day and Beltane to all! Let’s get on with it.

based off of vs. based on

I have ignored this usage issue for years because it seemed so obviously wrong and illogical. Every time I heard or read “based off of” I automatically inserted the word “jump” between “base” and “-d” because that was the only possible way it could make sense. This phrase has become a pervasive weed. Let’s apply some herbicide, right now.

Imagine a base, a foundation. It’s what you build on; it supports stuff. If you put something off of a base, you are removing it, so it’s no longer supported or connected to the base. Yes?

The film was based on a bestselling novel.
Your conclusion is based on faulty data.

in behalf vs. on behalf

In behalf of means “for the benefit of.” On behalf of means “in place of” or “representing.”

The defense attorney entered a plea on behalf of his client/on his client’s behalf.
We raised money in behalf of the orphanage/in the orphanage’s behalf.

octopuses vs. octopi

Octopus is not, nor has it ever been, a Latin word. Some well-meaning or possibly just uptight grammarians a while back decided that octopi was more correct because it looked like the legitimate Latin plurals, and so it entered the literature. You will still find marine biologists who prefer octopi when discussing multiple species of octopus, and it isn’t strictly speaking incorrect, but in most cases octopuses is just fine.You may also go with octopods for more informal writing.

Pegasus

…is this guy:

 

220px-The-Winged-HorseHis dad was Poseidon. His mom was Medusa. Somehow a sea god and a great-granddaughter of Chaos created an immaculate winged stallion. Just go with it. My point here is that Pegasus was an individual, not a species. If you’re talking about winged horses like the cutie things in Fantasia, call them winged horses, not Pegasus or Pegasi or Pegasuses.

Thanks for reading!

writing

Character Building

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Here’s something I’ve been noticing lately in the work that has been crossing my desktop: there’s a right way and a wrong way to create a memorable and fascinating character. Actually, there are several ways to do it wrong, but one stands out in conjunction with the right way.

To illustrate, I collated a list of great characters, culled from many other lists (type “best fictional characters of all time” into the search box and you’ll get my sources), very scientifically weighted, and also skewed heavily toward characters I care about, with one or two exceptions (I honestly can’t get excited about Batman, but he serves my purposes right now). Here it is, with the characters arranged in order of the number of other lists that featured them:

  1. Sherlock Holmes
  2. Darth Vader
  3. Humbert Humbert
  4. Buffy Summers
  5. Harry Potter
  6. Hannibal Lecter
  7. Han Solo
  8. Emma Bovary
  9. Hamlet
  10. Elizabeth Bennet
  11. Mrs. Norris
  12. The Doctor
  13. Tyler Durden
  14. Bartleby
  15. Ahab
  16. James Bond
  17. The Dude
  18. Jay Gatsby
  19. Leopold Bloom
  20. Batman

What do you notice about the list? Some are heroes, some are villains, some have a foot in both categories, but what makes them all interesting is that they are multifaceted. Even the most depraved (Lecter, Humbert, Ahab) have a complex back story and a brilliantly wicked intelligence. Mrs. Norris, in her banality and manipulation, is more terrifying than many villains who are far more bloodthirsty.

The heroes on the list, the ones who solve the crimes and save the world over and over, have dark sides. They do bad things on a regular basis, and they are surprisingly not all that tortured about it. We also have the tragic heroes, the ones who can’t even save themselves (Hamlet, Bovary, Gatsby, Bartleby); they interest us because of their flaws, the things that seal their fate, the traits that unsettle us because we might have them too.

Finally, there are the in-between characters, the narrators, the sidekicks, the unintentional heroes: Bloom, Solo, Lebowski, Bennet, Durden (he’s a fun one because he gets into some good old-fashioned Victorian doubling, just like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster). I’d add Potter to the list because, although he’s nominally a save-the-world hero, in fact he’s a dumbass, making colossal mistakes on a regular basis from which he is saved by his confederates and assorted dei ex machina.

What description fits none of these characters? What quality does not appear on the list? Perfection. Not one is entirely good or entirely bad. Not one is preserved from making mistakes or dumb decisions, from being occasionally afraid, or vain, or stubborn. No villain is 100 percent unadulterated evil, all the time, because that’s boring.

The best characters are those we learn about over time, like the best friends and lovers. They surprise us. They are unpredictable, layered, and remarkable. They leave us wondering.

 

selling your work

Drinking Muddy Water: Why Your Pitch Isn’t Working

Updated on

Recently, for reasons that aren’t important here, I found myself at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco with a gaggle of third-graders (a gaggle is six, if you’re unfamiliar with the imperial system of measurement). One of the most interesting items I saw there was Neil Gaiman’s original pitch to DC for Sandman. And yes, if you’re wondering who goes to the cartoon museum and gets excited about the pages with no drawings on them, that would be me.

Anyway, that made me start thinking about pitches in general and why so many of them are terrible. It’s true, and the simple reason is because authors are so wrapped up in their story, the world they’ve been living in for months or even years, that they can no longer articulate it quickly for anyone else. I think it was in Save the Cat! that the author described pitching screenplay ideas to strangers in line at coffee shops. If their eyes didn’t glaze over after 30 seconds, he knew he had a decent story. This is a great approach if you’re kicking around ideas and haven’t written anything yet.

If you’ve already written your masterpiece and are now trying to get it read by agents, publishers, or anyone other than your mom or your spouse, you need a slightly different approach. It’s fun, it won’t take much effort, and you might discover something about your story that you never knew before. Instead of the standard breathless paragraph embedded in a query letter, try to tell your story in a different format, preferably one with very strict rules.

My personal favorite is the 12-bar blues method, but you can also go with villanelle or sonnet, anything that makes you fit your ideas into a box with a new shape. I like the blues format because the lyrics have a lot of repetition, which can help simplify a complex story, or possibly add nuance to a simple one. Here’s a fine example of the AAB lyric structure, brought to you by the North Mississippi Allstars, who you should be listening to anyway.

[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/39640318]

How is this going to make your pitch better? Well, like the coffee-shop method, if you can’t sell yourself your idea using a formal structure, chances are no one else is going to get it either, and that’s usually because there’s a flaw in your story somewhere. You don’t have a solid plot, or you have too many subplots, or you’re not entirely sure who your characters are or what they want. If your story easily flows into a formal poem or song structure, it’s going to translate in any medium. I don’t recommend sending your final pitch to prospective agents in this format, but your ultimate presentation will be stronger for the process, and you may be able to save yourself a lot of revision time with the next project if you create a pitch first.

Give it a try. If you’re feeling noncommittal, by which I mean lazy, use the poetry magnets on your fridge and make a haiku out of your story instead. We all have them. Mine happen to be lolcat magnets, but anything works.

 

writing

What You Love

Updated on

Happy Imbolc/Candlemas/Lunar New Year!

A few nights ago, I had dinner with a chef. He didn’t make the dinner; he just happened to be there. Someone at the table asked him a question, and his wife interceded with, “Don’t ask him—he hates food.” The chef elaborated that he didn’t so much hate food, just the people he worked with who saw it as a commodity, as a budget item. I could see how that would frustrate a person who has dedicated his career to creating meals with respect for the ingredients and the end users. It’s difficult to love something and watch other people treat it like a plastic bag.

But you probably already know this if you are a writer of any kind. Your story, your science, whatever you’re putting out there for people to read is drafted with love and respect for the raw materials: words. The right words get the job done, whether that job is explaining a newly hatched theory or making someone cry. If you don’t love the words, if you don’t cringe when you hear people abuse them, it’s possible that you are in the wrong business.

If you aren’t using the correct words to say what you mean, then you have no idea what you’re saying, and neither does anyone else. The grant application is misunderstood and denied. The novel excerpt is scanned and rejected because agents can spot a callous amateur in less time than it takes to hit Send on your query letter.

I could ramble on, but dozens of semioticians, semanticists, linguists, and my fellow pedants have thoroughly harrowed this ground already, so I’ll settle for some entertaining examples of linguistic ignorance (underlining is all mine).

  1. “‘Bill Stepien has not broken any laws,’ the lawyer, Kevin H. Marino, wrote, arguing that the subpoena violates his client’s rights against self-incrimination and unreasonable search and seizure.” New York Times article
  2. “It wasn’t until the Renaissance that true theater enjoyed a rebirth,” Kaplan CSET Subject Examination for Teachers
  3. “As they say, the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur.” Newsweek article

To be fair, the first quotation is from an attorney, and they get paid for intentional obfuscation, but it’s still worth mentioning. The others? No excuse. I would also like to point out that all three examples were brought to my attention by a person who learned English as a second language. This fortifies my theory that the best way to learn about language is to study a different one.

Let me contrast my usage shaming with a reference to some of the most remarkable nonfiction I’ve discovered in decades. I say discovered because I didn’t actually read it; it’s from a TV series called The Story of Film: An Odyssey. You can watch it on Netflix and probably some other places. It was written, directed, and narrated by a guy named Mark Cousins. Watching it will not only give you a thorough yet condensed education on the history of film, it will, if you have any sensitivity to the language at all, make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck the way they do when you hear the very best lines of poetry. The film is based on a book, which I suspect would be a joy to read, but watching the series gives you the moving images and the words together. Remember “Poetry makes nothing happen”? Film makes light happen.

Anyway, love your work. Learn to do it mindfully and with respect, or find something more suitable. Accept that other people will stomp all over it and react with hostility and scorn when you try to educate them. Feel free to complain about it in the comments; I understand.

writing

Notes from the Field, New Year’s Resolution Edition

Updated on

Happy New Year!

New Year’s resolutions—I don’t bother with ’em, but if you do, and one of yours is to be a better writer in 2014, here are a few useful tips. I added some audiovisual aids because you’re probably nursing a hangover and will appreciate something to look at besides a box of text. You’re welcome.

fiction novel—This is a redundant term, and using it on a query will earn you a form rejection in record time. You might not even get the “Thank you for submitting” boilerplate, just an email with the words Fat Chance. A novel is a work of fiction; if a book-length manuscript is about real people or events, then it is nonfiction, unless you made part of it up, in which case you may call it historical fiction as long as all the people you write about are dead or you have a strong legal team.

ellipses—These can be tricky, and I see a lot of people overusing them in place of other punctuation. An ellipsis in academic writing is used to replace part of a citation that is not relevant or too long. If the excised part of the citation comes at the end of a sentence, use four dots: an ellipsis plus a period.

Example: “Hey, they aren’t half…bad.” (Statler and Waldorf, 2002).

In fiction or literary nonfiction, an ellipsis may be used sparingly to indicate a pause in dialogue or a trailing off at the end of a statement. If dialogue ends abruptly or is interrupted by another character, use an em dash. Like any other writing trick, overuse of ellipses results in diminished effect.

Bad example: “I think…it was the…old man…who killed me!”

Better examples:

Joe spoke haltingly, fighting for breath. “I think it was the old man who killed me!”

“In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… the Great Depression, passed the… Anyone? Anyone?”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

 

The Player: The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: Good God. We’re out of our depths here.
The Player: No, no, no! He hasn’t got a daughter! The old man thinks he’s in love with his daughter.
Rosencrantz: The old man is?
The Player: Hamlet…in love…with the old man’s daughter…the old man…thinks.

(Skip to 2:06, or enjoy the full clip if you’ve got time.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk7V8f6E5po?rel=0-A&w=320&h=240]

since and while—These are words that indicate the passage of time. If you are using them to mean because, whereas, or although, stop.

Incorrect:
Since you asked, I’m packing up your stuff.
While that is a valid point, I disagree.

Correct:
I’ve been living here since 1993.
While you were sleeping, I kidnapped your goldfish.
Because you never kiss me goodnight any more, I’m moving out.
Although you make a mean cup of coffee, that’s not a strong enough basis for continuing our relationship.

chaise lounge—I know, I know; it started as a simple typo, but that’s no reason to let it fester in our language. Chaise longue means “long chair” in French. It rhymes with “fez wrong,” only you need to lengthen that o  and put a little Long Island on the ng. Lounge is what you do on the chaise longue, or possibly the room in which you display this article of furniture.

influencer—This word is very popular right now, and it’s making me crazy. Influence is both a noun and a verb. It means “flow into,” in the sense of a stream or small river joining a larger river, bringing its unique pH, native plants and animals, and sediments with it. An influence is an addition to someone or something that alters content, direction, or velocity. Influencer is a superfluous, unnecessary, and illogical formation, and you can tell all the thought leaders who are tossing it around that I said so.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes for prosperity and published work in 2014.