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When is a writer real?

by Bill on October 14, 2009

Last week I came across a discussion over on LinkedIn about “real” writers. It began with a post about how sometimes you can come across a bully type in writing discussions, someone asserting that to be a “real” writer a person had to meet certain requirements. Often these assertions are followed by litanies of the person’s professional credentials, thus proving that they are real.

I find the whole business annoying, so I wrote my own comment, which reads as follows:

My own view, which is admittedly personal, limited and not necessarily a view someone else would take, is that I don’t really care if someone is a “real” writer. I’ve been doing what I do long enough that I don’t need someone else deciding whether I exist as a writer or not. More to the point, I want to spend as little time as possible with disagreeable people so, even if you are a “real” writer, if you’re an unpleasant person please go away. Besides, as my mother pointed out to me a long, long time ago, the best way to deal with bullies is to ignore them.

Too many people have romanticized ideas of what writers are and what writing is. Rather than focusing on the writing, they are focused on writer as social status. Even for poets, it is work and in that sense no different than accounting or plumbing. And if you like plumbing, it will be as rewarding as writing is to a writer.

I’m sounding more cranky here than I like to sound but this is a theme that irks me quite a bit (rather obvious, I suppose).

Finally, I have to admit that every so often I fall into that “real” writer nonsense, I think because I get the impression some people are bamboozled by romantic ideas of writing. When I do fall into this, I tend to say, “Anyone can write. Real writers rewrite.”

I don’t like that “real” business, but I think there is truth in it. I’ve seen too many people think that once it’s down, it’s finished. I think it has just begun.

And that’s my pontificating nonsense for the day! :-)

To me, it seems really simple. If you write, you are a writer. Of course, differences occur when you start adding modifiers. For example, you may be a good writer or you may be a bad writer. Either way, you are a writer if you’re writing. If you are the latter of those two modifiers, however, you may want to work on it with a bit more diligence.

In my experience, everyone who is a writer is also a reader. Compared to the average person, they read a lot. Why they read so much is obvious to me: 1) they love it, 2) they encounter new styles and words, 3) it feeds their own writing with ideas and perspectives. Also, at least in my case, when I started writing it was largely imitative. I was like a bad version of many really good writers. Eventually, however, through constant writing, my own style, voice or whatever you want to call it emerged.

I guess if I had to make some grand claim on the subject I’d say writers write. And good writers rewrite. And everyone is as real as anyone else. (Aren’t there a number of famous writers through history who couldn’t give their work away? What kind of professional writer resume did they have? How real were they?)

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Horatian exercise: digging up the past

by Bill on October 5, 2009

On the weekend I was going through some very old files. I bought a floppy drive for 3.5″ discs about two years ago with the intention of locating and moving files I considered important to my other hard drive, or burn them to a CD or DVD. Well, two years later I finally opened up the box with the floppy drive and went through some of my discs. (And believe me, it took a while going through the house and searching for where I had put them.)

The first thing that struck me was just how many of them there were. The second thing was just how much writing I had done over the years. They contained files from a number of different jobs I’ve had (as a writer) as well as a lot of personal writing such as fiction and poetry.

Good grief! I wrote a lot!

I was mainly interested in the fiction and poetry material. Or maybe I should say I was sidetracked by it.

Three things characterized the material: 1) the quantity, 2) how dreadful most of it was, 3) how good a very small amount of it was.

I think I knew even at the time that most of it was rubbish. But it was interesting to see what mistakes I was making (primarily three) and how, over time, I eventually began to eliminate those mistakes. In other words, there was progression in the quality. That has always been one of the aspects of writing I like most: seeing it improve.

And what were the three main mistakes I was making? First, there was too much telling and little showing, at least in the early stories. Second, there was a great deal of over-writing which could also be rephrased as pretentious writing. Thirdly, and related to the second, much of it tried too hard to be cute or clever.

But that was the negative side of things. From the positive perspective, a good deal of it was damn funny! I could also see I write fiction best when I begin with an absurdity. For some reason, that triggers my creativity. For instance, I had a very, very short story called The Itinerant Town. It was about a town that every day was in a different part of Canada. It was, as you can imagine, very difficult to find.

It was a fascinating exercise and, in some sense, gratifying because while I saw how utterly awful most of the material was, I saw the few that were pretty good. And even many of the bad stories and poems in those files have some good ideas at their core. It reminded me of Horace (I think it was Horace) who wrote somewhere that you should take what you write and bury it for a number of years. Then, when you finally go back and look at it, you’ll truly know if it was any good. In other words, it’s difficult to judge truly in the moment. Time gives you a more objective perspective.

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Readers have responsibilities too

by Bill on July 29, 2009

I saw some tweets to a post, The Trouble With Twitter (Melissa Hart, The Chronicle review), and something occurred to me. The essay is another of the many Twitter critiques that, personally, I’m finding a bit tiresome. After reading it, I thought that what it amounted to was, “I don’t want to change.”

That’s fine. No one needs to. At the same time, those who do want to are free to do so.

In some ways the essay is critical of the 140 character length imposed by Twitter and almost seems to confuse a headline with a story or, as I’ve put it before, a postcard with a letter. It doesn’t quite get to that point, however. The essay seems to be more focused on the time element involved with Twitter and the idea that it takes time to fact check, absorb and understand, and then write the story. And I agree. However …

In the case of the Twitter streams I follow, that’s what happens. Tweets are more about: “This has happened,” and “Something appears to be developing here,” and “Trying to confirm a report …”

In other words, they are often about the progression of the story, not the end piece. They are about keeping followers involved in the development of a story. And eventually, when all is said and done, the story itself – a link to the full piece.

What is often overlooked in all the pro and con debates about tools like Twitter is the responsibility of a reader. It’s not just the journalist, or blogger, or whoever is doing the tweeting that has a responsibility. Readers have a responsibility to question what they are reading and consider its merits and to understand its intent, meaning and so on. If a story is unconfirmed, it is unconfirmed. That means it could be true but could just as easily be false. And anyone who has done any reading at all of news stories knows that what you read today can very easily change tomorrow because journalism has to wade through facts, PR spin and rumour to find out what exactly is true and many stories are ongoing.

The essay mentioned above is entirely from a particular journalist’s perspective. It is about how she wants to research, understand and present a story, and that doesn’t include a desire to keep readers informed of her progress as she does this. Again, that’s fine if that’s how you like to do things.

The problem, however, is that as a reader, I don’t want to wait.

I don’t want to wait till all is said and done and everything can be put in context before I find out what is or has been happening in my world. It is happening now and I want some information, even if incomplete, about what is going on. I want to know it’s being investigated. I want a heads-up that a complete assessment is in the works and headed my way.

And I understand that, as a reader, I have a responsibility to give a tweet or post the appropriate credence and to see it for what it is.

Journalism is a two-way street. I know that. Give me some credit for being able to assess and judge the merits of something.

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The first draft is the outline

by Bill on June 15, 2009

There is a post over on Living the Romantic Comedy (Billy Mernit’s blog) called “You and Your Shitty Draft” where the odd quirk many writers have of wanting to make that first draft perfect is discussed. I made a couple of comments and decided it was worthwhile to post them here. They are:

Comment #1:

It’s interesting how many people can do the same thing yet all approach it in a different way. For me, the first draft IS the outline. I can only write by starting with nothing and seeing where it goes. I can only know characters by discovering them as I write – scenes, dialogue etc.

Usually, it begins with a lot of rambling exposition as I try to see where I’m going and who walks into the scene or what my character(s) might do or think. Then something happens and I just start following to see where it all goes.

As Ray Bradbury says somewhere about how he writes: “I throw up on paper then clean it up.” (Or something to that effect.)

Writers inevitably want everything nice and tidy and gussied up before anyone sees what they’ve done but, for me, a first draft is by definition crap. To use an old analogy, you would hardly expect to see David when they dug out the chunk of stone DaVinci eventually sculpted.

My outline is only revealed when I can go over the first draft and see what the story is.

Comment #2:

May I be Columbo a moment? One more thing … Samuel R. Delany (who tends to be a bit egghead-ish in his essays) has what I think is a great observation about writing in an essay called ‘Thickening the Plot.’ He says of writing:

“I distrust the word ‘plot’ … (it) refers to an effect a story produces in the reading … Talking about plot, or theme, or setting to a beginning writer is like giving the last three years’ movie reviews from the Sunday New York Times to a novice filmmaker. A camera manual … would be more help. In short, a vocabulary that has grown from a discussion of effects is only of limited use in a discussion of causes.”

He goes on to talk about the story revealing and developing before our eyes as we write, how each word, each choice, reveals more of the story, just as each word removed alters it.

When talking about something like an outline, it seems to me that is an attempt to determine effects before seeing what the causes are, which are revealed in the writing process – as it happens, so to speak. So the whole business of worrying about shitty first drafts is kind of … I dunno. Maybe a worry less about writing than about how we might appear. (”What a shitty writer! Did you SEE that draft?”)

(btw … Delany’s essays are in a collection titled – About writing: seven essays, four letters, and five interviews. As mentioned, very eggheadish. I found it a bit turgid overall, but with interesting bits.)

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How I write radio ads – Part 1 – Structure

by Bill on December 13, 2008

I worked in commercial radio for a long time, writing and producing radio ads. Today, for some inexplicable reason, I was thinking about those ads and about how I would write them, which is really about how I thought about them. I decided to write it down.

Structure

While there were some 60 second ads (which I approached the same way), even a few 10 or 15 second ads and promos, the vast majority were 30 seconds. In my mind, I thought of them as three segments, roughly 10 seconds each: intro, middle and close. These three segments were related to the words but also to the background – music and sound effects. (Some ads, of course, were cold voice – no background, just the voice.)

There were a number of benefits to approaching it this way. The first, for me, was parameters. Granted, there was already one over-riding parameter: time. It had to be 30 seconds. (To be specific, I aimed at 29 seconds.)

I work best with rules. As arbitrary as they may be, they keep me focused. I believe in breaking rules but I also believe that in order to break a rule successfully you have to know what it is and why it’s there.

With this three part structure I imposed on myself, it helped to keep me aware of the listener. (“If I don’t do something in the script to keep their attention soon, I’ll lose them.”) My reasoning was that after roughly ten seconds of an ad, assuming people are listening, if something new doesn’t happen you will have lost their attention.

Three segments

Intro: The first part, or intro, was basically the hook. A lot depended on the kind of ad you were writing, so it could be a different kind of hook. It might be a key benefit of a product or service (“For just $9.99 you can get your own 2008 Porsche! Can such things be? You bet – but only at Bob’s Outrageously Underpriced Auto Showroom!”).

It might be a skit type of ad:

MARY: Sam! Put your pants back on!

Okay … so maybe those weren’t the best examples. But hopefully you will have gotten the idea.

There are any number of ads, so there could be any number of openings. But the point was to have something that would stand out and get someone’s attention. Once you have it, you can get down to business. The intro is like a headline. If it’s a good headline, people might read the story.

Middle: The middle is the hardest part and also the riskiest. It’s essentially the meat of the ad and is usually where a listener’s attention is lost because, to be blunt, it’s boring. If you’re fortunate and have a good client, you can focus on one thing. But more often than not you have a grocery list you have to shove into the ad. Some writers find creative solutions for this, but it ain’t easy. Using two voices going back and forth can help (depending on the kind of ad it is), as well as sound effects and music – they can help punctuate key items.

Whatever you do, however, try not to linger overly long in the middle. You want out of there fast because, as mentioned, it kills with tedium.

(This doesn’t necessarily apply to an ad that is meant to build brand awareness. With those you often have time to let the ad breathe and be more creative, primarily because the ad is intended to communicate one thing – an image.)

End: The end is exactly that: the end. Here, it’s important to reiterate the key points of the ad: what product or service it is, the key benefit, and the client name and location (or phone number – twice, if you can, for the phone number).

The story

I can’t think of any kind of writing that isn’t built around this simple structure – novels, short stories, screenplays – though for many the structure is more complex. Even the complex ones, however, are only complex because the middle is portioned off into subsections.

Keeping this in mind – all writing has a structure – helps to also remind us that everything is a story. News, novels, ads: they all tell stories. And any good story has a beginning, middle and end.

But wait! There’s more!

The above is long-winded, or so it seems to me, and I haven’t yet touched on some of the things I had intended to. So it looks like I’ll be writing a second post on this topic. Here, I’ve been focused on structure. Although a good deal of what I’ve said is nothing new to anyone who has looked into the job of writing, it all needed saying before moving on to what really fascinated me about doing radio ads: the sound.

That will be part 2.

Notes:

  1. When I say I think of it as three 10 second sections, this isn’t carved in stone. Often the intro may be 5 seconds, and the end will be 5 seconds, leaving more time for the tedious middle. When I had that situation, a 20 second middle, I would sometimes think of it as being two parts, or 2 subsections. However I handled it, I would focus on trying to keep it interesting, usually by breaking it up somehow.
  2. The tense of my headline (present) and of my post (past) are in conflict. I should fix that, but I won’t because it is all based on what I did in the past when I worked in radio but, were I to write radio ads today, I would still approach it this way. (Yes, I know. That still doesn’t excuse confused writing.)
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