Books

I’m reading Seth Godin’s most recent book, Linchpin, and I was thinking today about how he writes. In this book, his style is a bit different than in the past, though if you’ve read some of his other books you can see how he has evolved into this style.

In Linchpin, the style is more direct, more emphatic and more personal than in the past. The key word in that sentence is “more” because it isn’t as if he hasn’t written that way previously. It is simply more.

Other people also write in this way and there is a good reason for doing so. I see it best illustrated by setting it against my own writing in blog posts.

I have a bad habit of equivocating. That isn’t an issue in Linchpin. Godin is direct and doesn’t fudge his statements. That makes for greater impact and thus effectiveness.

I think there are a few reasons why I equivocate. The first is the really bad reason. I don’t want to make a firm commitment to a statement I’m making. That is so very bad. I hope I don’t do that too often.

Another reason is a good one, but done to excess becomes a problem. I want what I write to be conversational. I don’t want my writing to come across as academic or formal. I want it to read in a way that you can “hear” someone speaking it in conversation. So I put in the odd conversational phrase, more or less, kind of … Like that, at least every so often. It’s okay occasionally, but done too much it undercuts what has been written. (Those italicized words are an example of what I do.)

The last reason is because I want to remain open to other perspectives. I don’t want to be dogmatic. This may be a well-meaning reason but it undermines the writing, makes it come across as non-committal and just reads as namby pamby. You can’t be all things to all people all the time. Take a position and live with it.

Godin does this in Linchpin and the book benefits. It is effective and engaging – partly for what it is about and partly for how it goes about it. It is direct and doesn’t equivocate.

If you’re writing, don’t be like me. Be like Seth.

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I’ve just quickly created a page of books that have influenced me. In fact, while it’s page name is “Books” the secondary headline is Books that have influenced me.

It’s a short list — just five. I think of all of them as related to writing though only one is specifically about writing. Most are web/social media related. But I see their messages as applicable to writing.

And a couple may strike you as peculiar. You may ask, “What the hell has that to do with social media?” or something similar. You may think they are old and no longer relevant.

As mentioned, I threw it together quickly and I hope to explain soon what it is about each of them that I think is important. If the stars are properly aligned and I can write well, you’ll understand what it is about each I find of value and why I’ve picked them.

You can see the list here.

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I’ve been busy this week and haven’t posted anything. (The web collectively mutters, “Thank heaven!”) But I have come across a few things that caught my attention.

The first is oodles of writers providing their rules for their craft and while it is in a fiction context many, if not all, are applicable to any kind of writing. The second is a brief Seth Godin post that points to how to use clichés (and why they work). Third is a post of my own from my other site, included if only because it has been ages since I’ve added anything new (probably of limited interest). And finally … a post that begins talking about language but soon reveals itself to be about impermanence. It’s interesting, at least to me, and may prompt me to write a lengthy post of my own. We’ll see.

And now the links:

Ten rules for writing fiction

“Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts.”

How to use clichés (Seth Godin)

“The effective way to use a cliché is to point to it and then do precisely the opposite.”

A Lady Takes a Chance -1943 (Piddleville)

After having it on my computer for about two months in a half-finished state, I’ve finally posted my take on A Lady Takes a Chance (1943). It stars Jean Arthur and John Wayne and, yes, it’s a romantic comedy.

Let’s Get Radical (thinkBuddha.org)

“… We are, perhaps, not very good at thinking about change. Western thought, in particular, seems to be very wedded to an idea of stasis as the fundamental condition of things.”

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I was excited when I first picked up Douglas Rushkoff’s book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. I confess I expected it to articulate ideas and feelings I had, hopefully better than I could, and also flesh them out so they were more substantial. Yes, I was doing something I complain others do: looking for opinions that affirm my own rather than challenge them.

In many ways, the book does all that. I also think it’s an important book, at least its thesis is important: that corporatism has so ingrained itself in our lives, in our very thinking and seeing, that we’ve become corporations ourselves. At least, we see the world through corporate defined eyes. Whether others agreed with this idea or not was irrelevant, in a sense. I thought it important to see the world from this perspective because we seldom stop and think about why we live and think as we do and what its meaning might be.

But the book’s tone undermines all that. As Publishers Weekly puts it, “An engaging history of commerce and corporatism devolves into an extended philippic on how increasing personal wealth and the rise of nuclear families constituted a failure of community—whose services are now provided by products and professionals.”

Each chapter starts well, but a strident, proselytizing tone soon creeps in and it is off-putting, to put it mildly. I also found myself questioning some of the interpretations and conclusions. If the book were a Wikipedia entry, I think there would be a number of places where the note, “citation needed” would appear. In some cases, there were supportive footnotes but in others, no – they were just conclusions Mr. Rushkoff drew having interpreted information a particular way.

Overall, the book is pretty humourless and annoyingly earnest. And that means the book’s good points – its research, the information it provides, its fundamental argument – all get lost in its obvious politics.

I’ve not completed the book – I’m probably three quarters of the way through – but I’ve not seen (as I can recall) alternative explanations or, if something not supportive of the argument appears it is quickly dismantled and dismissed. Or it’s turned inside out and offered as an example of how something that appears one way is actually the opposite. There is a paranoiac quality to it all, a bit like those people who find passages in the Bible to justify anything.

There is also Mr. Rushkoff’s fundamental argument about the focus on the individual moving us away from the idea of community. It appears reasonable except when it’s put almost exclusively in terms of a kind of a corporate conspiracy to separate us and transform us. Are there no other possible reasons for the individual focus? For the disappearance of community? Have we lost the notion of community or is the idea of community a much broader one? I know many people who would find the elimination of communities a dubious assertion. And I’d question the example of unions as community (some seem pretty corporate to me). I think Mr. Rushkoff’s definition of community is a very limited one.

I suppose I’m saying there is an imbalance in the book. There is also the unstated belief in some kind of golden age when we had it right, whatever “it” is. It feels as if the argument was decided upon then material was gathered to confirm it, rather than explore whether or not it held water. The book becomes more polemic than anything else.

My biggest frustration, however, is in the feeling that what is of value in the book is lost by the tone and approach. When young people (or anyone) worry about personal brands, when corporations and everyday schmoes are involved in charities as ways to support their brand or when (to use Mr. Rushkoff’s example) we’re more concerned about our property value than our personal safety … surely something ain’t right?

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I did one of those meme things on Facebook and thought, “Why not post them on the blog too?” The list is simply the fifteen books I’ve read that have stuck with me, which I take as the ones that immediately come to mind. Here they are:

1. Dhalgren – Samuel R. Delany
2. The Sot-weed Factor – John Barth
3. Memoir from Antproof Case – Mark Helprin
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
5. Foundation (Foundation Trilogy) – Isaac Asimov
6. The Shadow of the Torturer (The Book of the New Sun) – Gene Wolfe
7. Ulysses – James Joyce
8. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
9. Slapstick – Kurt Vonnegut
10. Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
11. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
12. They Shall Have Stars  (Cities in Flight) – James Blish
13. Fifth Business (The Deptford Trilogy) – Robertson Davies
14. All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy
15. Odes to Common Things/Odes to Opposites – Pablo Neruda

In a number of cases I’ve given an arbitrary novel title but it’s actually the collection (as in trilogy) that “sticks” with me. And the last, “Odes,” is actually two companion books which I think of as one.

By the way, most of these are favourite books but not necessarily all. In some cases (like Cormac McCarthy), it’s the first book of the author that I read but not my favourite of their work. It does, however, stick me – probably because it was first.

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I had an interesting back-and-forth on Twitter with Andrew Keen (@ajkeen) after he posted a tweet that roughly read, “Blogs aren’t dying – they’re dead.”

I tweeted back something about them not being dead and included a link to an earlier post of mine that sorta, kinda (but not really) touched on the subject. Anyway, the upshot of it all was this tweet he sent,

let’s purge word “blog”. It’s archaic & meaningless. New thing is “real-time communications”. I want to broadcast in real-time

I agree completely. And that’s why this post is titled Blogs aren’t dead because they didn’t exist to begin with. The stereotypes of bloggers and the technology of blog tools are confused with what blogs actually are, and that’s why I say blogs didn’t exist to begin with.

There is a lot of misleading baggage attached to the word “blog” and, I believe, it results in many people not understanding what a blog is, which is a way to communicate. They seem to think a blog differs from a web site. It doesn’t. Yes, there may be some technical features that make it differ from a traditional site, but they’re irrelevant when you think of what a blog does.

It’s a bit like the guy who buys his first barbecue and loves it. “Ovens are dead!” he announces. “Kitchens will change to accommodate barbecues or be replaced by something better!”

The truth is this: be it an oven or a barbecue, both are tools for preparing food. Period. Just tools.

But we hear how social networking tools, like a Twitter, are replacing blogs. “Blogs are dead!” So life, now, must be discussed in 140 characters or less. (The end of civilization! The death of thought!)

Good grief. We live in a world so in love with polarization that everything has to be either/or. The tools can’t support one another. They can’t have complementary purposes. No, it’s this or that. And that leads to ridiculous articles like this one.

Whether it’s a blog post, a web page, an article in a newspaper, a chapter in a book … all are communication. What you want to communicate and to whom should determine the method you use. The most recent tools, social networking tools, are particularly effective at communicating quickly, in “real-time.”

The tools, like a Twitter, aren’t so effective when it comes to long form communication. That’s partly why I say the either/or approach is silly. The tools can and should be supportive. You have something lengthy to communicate? Use a blog. Once posted, let people know about it and where it is using Twitter.

I wish people would stop declaring the “death of everything” and think about what the tools are, what they do, what they best facilitate and – I may be pushing the envelope here – how they might be used to support one another so each is used to its best effect.

Please, no more “either/or.”

In the meantime, I will continue to use Twitter, Facebook, blogs and those most ancient of artifacts, books.

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On Tuesday I posted Reasons to think Kindle. It was basically a quick look at Kindle from a practical viewpoint because of problems I’m having with my left hand.

But yesterday I came across a commentary titled Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought, a look at what Kindle and similar e-readers might mean (and by extension just about everything available digitally). I recommend reading the commentary regardless of whether you agree or disagree with what is argued.

One of the main reasons I found this piece interesting was the sentence, “In our rush to adopt new technologies, we have too readily surrendered ownership in favor of its twisted sister, access.” I hadn’t really considered the difference between owning and access.

Is what we “buy” actually a purchase of something, or is it really a variation on rental because, what we really have, is access? And if it is access, does it matter?

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I’ve finally found reasons to consider e-books, Kindle and the like. I’ve never disliked devices for reading on a screen. I was never one of those people who ranted about the barbarity of the idea of words being on something other than paper, but for reading of a bit more depth and serenity, I preferred a book. The paper thing. Until now.

Reason #1: Two things converged for me recently. One is the book I’m currently reading, A. Lincoln, a recently published biography of Abraham Lincoln by Ronald C. Jr. White. It’s 816 pages and ships, according to Amazon, at a weight of 1.2 Kg. (It’s hardcover.) The other thing is my left hand. I’ve no idea why, but it hurts – more or less constantly, though to varying degrees depending on the day. I don’t know if it’s sprained, a rheumatic problem or what.

Put together, these two things mean simply holding the book as I read is difficult – painful, even. That’s never been a problem before. Not only would I never have considered a heavy book an issue, I may even have enjoyed it. But not now. I’m making my way through the book at a snail’s pace largely because it’s difficult to read due to my hand.

Reason #2: As I’ve written before, I recently picked up an iPod Touch. One of its features is its ability to provide me with viewing options: choose portrait or landscape orientation, enlarge text with a tap. It’s actually easy to read (at least for me). While it still may not be easy for everyone, this ability removes one of the barriers to reading on a handheld device – it’s too small, who can read that? You’ve heard those arguments. (It also has a larger screen than cell phones in the past have had. I think most handheld devices are like this now as more and more manufacturers copy Apple’s iPhone.)

Of course, I live in Canada and as far as I know Kindle is still unavailable here. I don’t know the “why” for this but I believe it has something to do with copyright issues and so on. For the purposes of this post, my point is that I’ve not actually seen a Kindle “in the flesh” so to speak. I’ve never held one to get a tactile sense of it, which I’d like to do since reading, for me, is not just visual but tactile as well.

But according to Amazon, a Kindle is, ” …10.2 ounces, lighter than a typical paperback.” That would certainly make reading A. Lincoln an easier task for me. I think it’s about one tenth of the weight.

My hand would be grateful.

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Two of my favourite blogs, Seth’s blog and Gapingvoid, have gotten together (in a manner of speaking) in an interview between Hugh MacLeod and Seth Godin about Seth’s latest book, Tribes. And the interview is worth a read because they touch on a number of areas vital to marketing and, more generally, how the world actually is today in an information, communication, service world. The post is titled, Tribes: Ten Questions for Seth Godin, and in the interview, prefacing a question, Hugh says:

Looking over my work from the last couple of years, I increasingly see marketing [by that I mean, GOOD marketing] as a function of LANGUAGE and NARRATIVE. In other words, the art of marketing is figuring out a way to talk to people in the market in a manner they SIMPLY HAVE NOT been talked to before.

I agree with this completely though, as a writer and editor, it would be surprising if I didn’t. I would add, or take the liberty of clarifying here, that referring to language and narrative does not necessarily mean well-written, grammatically correct, properly punctuated writing. Depending on who you are addressing, and the way you are addressing them (formally? conversationally?), perhaps a less correct approach would be “good writing.”

I’m rushed, so I can’t really complete my post … yikes! I hope you get my meaning. Regardless, have a look at the interview. If nothing else, it is full of ideas.

I wish more people and companies thought the way they do.

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