John Shore

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

The Book Doctor Will Needle You Now

In Writing on November 26, 2008 at 6:01 am

I’m always really pleased (and, frankly, surprised) by how many people read the posts I do on the how-to’s of writing. I’m freakishly enthusiastic about All Things Writing, so it’s gratifying to share that enthusiasm with others.

My last post,  A Would-Be Writer Asks: “MUST I Go to College?” made me think of a job I took earlier this year doctoring a novel. If you don’t know, “doctoring” a novel means taking someone’s novel and either outright fixing it yourself, or directing its author on what he or she needs to do in order to fix it themselves. It’s the most intrusive and inclusive kind of editing; it covers every aspect of the book at hand: pace, setting, characters, dialogue, wardrobe malfunctions, etc. I sometimes take on this sort of work if I believe in the author, or think the book has potential.

Below are excerpts from the last summary report I wrote for a would-be novelist (a fellow whom I’m proud to say took my advice, returned to college, and is now well on his way to making it as a writer of literary fiction).

 

Back to basics

Just like a physicist must first master basic math skills, so a writer must first master punctuation, grammar, syntax and usage. You simply have to know this stuff, cold. I don’t know how you’re going to learn it as thoroughly as you need to—if you’re going to take an adult ed class in English composition, or buy some style or usage guides and study them, or what. I can tell you what I did—though I wouldn’t recommend it. I taught that stuff to myself. I spent about three years with my nose buried in “The Chicago Manual of Style,” and Kate Turabian’s classic style manual, and the “Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage,” and the AP Style Guide, and about a zillion other such titles. (One of the best, most comprehensive books of this sort available today is “Quick Access” by Lynn Quitman Troyka. It’s awesome. If you’re only gonna have one such book—and don’t, of course—make it this one.)

I wouldn’t recommend teaching yourself this material because the best way to learn anything so vast and complex is systematically, which is pretty much the whole purpose of (shudder!) school. I think you want to take some classes in English composition. You need to know what constitutes a complete sentence; the basic rules of punctuation; the pitfalls and earmarks of sloppy syntax. However you go about it, do not try to short cut around learning this stuff, because without it I guarantee you will never get off the ground as a writer….

Reading is really the best way to learn the basics of writing. If you read enough, for long enough, after awhile you just know what does and doesn’t make for a sound, clean sentence; you understand the functions of punctuation; you come to have a solid feel for syntax and usage. Read any modern master: Updike, Vonnegut, Hemingway, John Irving, Steinbeck. Read it hard. Study it. Take a class or two (or ten) on English literature. Give it a some time. It’ll be worth it, because once you know grammar and syntax you’ll be in possession of all the bricks necessary to build yourself virtually any building you want….

 

Show and (not) tell

If I say to you, “Bob was angry at Tom,” that’s one thing. But if I create a scene in which the living, breathing person that is Bob is railing violently against a cowering Tom, then I’ve given you something you can really get into; I’ve made the fact of Bob’s anger come alive for you. If I just tell you that Bob was angry at Tom, you kind of … don’t care that much. It’s the difference between reading about being on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, and being on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Whole other thing. They have so little in common that they’re almost unrelated….

Besides committing the cardinal sin of inserting yourself between the reader and whatever you’re meaning to convey to the reader, one very definite thing about telling rather than showing something is that it’s soooooo much easier. You can see the difference between just saying, “My father was a difficult person,” and actually taking the trouble to construct a scene in which you not only show an example of your father being difficult but also convey how typical that behavior is or isn’t for him. “My father was a difficult person” is six words. A scene showing your father being a difficult person will cost you many, many times that. Directly telling and artfully showing represent radically different orders of work. (And because properly/effectively showing something takes up so much more room than does essentially reporting it, in a novel you have to be very careful about what scenes you choose to focus on, to present in their fullness to the reader. Everything that happens in a novel must have an extremely good reason to be there; you’ve no time—you lack the raw available word count—to present anything that’s not critical to moving the story forward or helping us understand or empathize with a character.) ….

 

Read ‘em and weep

Without knowing you (and I certainly don’t mean to insult you), I would hazard too suggest that you need to read a lot more great novels. Read “The World According to Garp” by John Irving. “The Fixer” by Bernard Malumud. Definitely “Huckleberry Finn.” Definitely Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” The classic first person American novel is J. D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Any modern classic of this sort—anything by John Updike, for instance, is golden. You need to read a lot of great books, so that the style of such writing sort of sinks into you, becomes part of your subconscious bedrock of knowledge, power, and aesthetic understanding into which you can then dig as a source and even inspiration for your own work. You need to ask yourself the degree to which you’re familiar with the basic cannon of Western literature—at the very least, of modern Western literature. If you can’t say that you’re truly familiar with our best literature—that you really have read at least as much as any student with a Master’s degree in English Lit.—then I’m afraid there’s no getting around your need to change that. Get a library card. Start hitting used book stores. (And thrift shops! The best book deals are at thrift shops!) I would even recommend you take a year or two off from writing, and just read. In the end, there’s nothing better you can do to improve your writing skills. And there’s no question but that you will never improve as a writer without that kind of reading under your belt. Every writer knows he owes everything he writes to the authors he’s read and loved, to the writers before him who inspired him. Find out who those authors are for you. (For what it’s worth, mine include Twain, Chekhov, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, John Irving, Jane Austen, and John Kennedy Toole, the guy who wrote one of my very favorite novels, the unbearably hilarious “A Confederacy of Dunces.”)….

 

And in conclusion…

What I hope you’ll be left with coming out of this is what I know you had coming into it: your desire to be a great writer. If that core desire remains intact, then believe me it’s possible for you to achieve that goal. You’ve got the brains; I assume you’ll keep the drive. All you lack is foundation; all you need to do is take the time to establish that foundation. If you have a community college near you, enroll in it, and get an A.A. in English Literature. My personal opinion is that that, right there, would give you everything you need to start a serious career as a real writer. You’d learn mechanics: grammar, punctuation, syntax. And two years of study would give you a good sense of Western Literature—the same body of work of which you’d like your own work to one day be part. Take some creative writing classes; get involved with some writers groups. Start writing short stories, which of course constitute their own art form, but also prepare you for novel writing. Share your stories with readers you respect, inside or outside your writers group. Get them critiqued. Have people talk to you about your work, and talk to others about theirs.

This is how you learn to write. It’s the only  way to learn to write. And we’re talking about a total of three years here. You do that stuff—go to school for two years; join a good writer’s group; start writing short stories–and at 50 years old (if I’m remembering correctly that you’re 47) you’ll be ready to write your first real novel. I personally think that’s the perfect age to begin saying stuff nobody knows until about that time in life anyway. 

 

Related posts o’ mine: When Punctuation Goes Really, Really Wrong, How To Make a Living Writing

 

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How To Survive as a Co-Author

In Business, HowTo, Writing on September 7, 2008 at 1:11 pm

I was surprised at how many people read my last post, which concerned how a book I co-authored was unexpectedly edited. I figured, who would care? But I got a fair number of emails about that post, and a fair number of those expressed, basically, this sentiment: “How can you so sanguinely let someone change your words?”

Sanguinely! I just had it at Olive Garden! Too many capers!

No, but that’s a fair question.

And the answer is this: When you go into a co-authorship deal, you do so knowing that the final product won’t be yours. It’ll be partly  yours, of course—but mostly it will be the result of a collaborative effort. In a book that’ll have my name alone on its cover, I don’t let anybody change any word I’ve written without my permission. I’m a veritable Word Nazi when it comes to that; it’s an area about which I’m obnoxiously uncompromising. (Which isn’t to say my ears are ever closed to the ministrations of a great editor. I’m fond enough of the work I do, for sure. But I’m not stupid.) The simple fact is that the books I’m doing with Stephen Arterburn aren’t mine. I’m expected to chime in with my opinion on anything having to do with the text of our books, and, God knows, I do. But at the end of the day, I’m not famous. I don’t have a nationwide ministry. Nobody listens to the radio show I broadcast every day to some 250 stations across the country. I don’t speak to tens of thousands of people a year. My name’s not on the front of a major bestselling Christian book title.

That would be Steve. 

Which is why on the cover of my books with Steve his name is above mine, in larger font.

Steve’s the star here, not me. It’s his game. His name. His fame.

A while back Steve happened to read my book, “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang.” He liked it enough to then ask me if I’d write something with him. I had a couple of suggestions, and the next thing I knew (sort of), we had signed an extremely nice four-book deal with Bethany House. We met a few times with the Head Honchos of Bethany, and I liked them a great deal. You couldn’t ask for nicer guys.

Steve opted to be exceedingly generous to me relative to my percentages on the books we’d do with Bethany. He offered me a significantly larger cut than is customary in such deals; he knew I’d have happily taken less than he gave. It was his way of initiating between us the kind of relationship he wanted us to have. He then went on to prove himself extremely easy to work with.

I just bought a new house that’s better than not just any place I’ve ever lived, but than any place anyone I’ve ever known has lived. I can’t even believe this place exists, much less that by some freakish confluence of circumstances my wife and I came to live here.

I’m pretty big on suffering for my art; I’ve spent the lion’s portion of my life doing just that. Learning how to write in my own voice, with my own style and tone and so on, proved a longer, more brutal, less forgiving haul than I ever imagined it would be. I don’t even like thinking about how hard it’s been.

Point being: This little chapter in my writing life is just fine with me.

Sometimes, to win a game, you have to let yourself not be quarterback.

 

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An Example of How My/Our Book “Being Christian” Was Edited

In Business, Writing on September 5, 2008 at 10:22 pm

The very kind response I got to the excerpt I ran yesterday from “Being Christian,” the just-released book I co-authored with Steve Arterburn, moved me to want to run another (and more serious) excerpt from that book. So I found on my computer the finalized text of “Being Christian,” and began the business of cutting and pasting the excerpt from it that I thought I’d share.

In clearing that text of its MS Word formatting goblins (which is of course accomplished by first pasting it into Notepad to clean it, and then cutting and pasting it into WordPress), I lost some of its line breaks. So I opened my hardback copy of the book itself, so that I could be sure of where to properly insert those breaks.

And that’s when I discovered that after we had sent off what we understood to be the finalized text of ”Being Christian” (rendered via back-and-forths with the book’s exceptionally talented editor, Christopher Soderstron), someone at the book’s publisher had decided to go ahead and further edit that text.

So here’s an example of what resulted. This passage now appears in the book as published:
 
“That we are saved not by works but by grace alone—the grace that comes through an unshakable faith in Jesus Christ—is central to the doctrine with which the German theologian Martin Luther profoundly challenged the Catholic Church and which ultimately resulted in the Protestant Reformation.

“Read the following carefully. It is the Great Reformer’s interpretation of the apostle Paul’s words, and it’s something all Protestants believe: …”

And here is how, the last we knew, that same passage was going to read:
 
“That we are saved not by works, but by grace alone—that is, by the grace that comes from having unshakable faith in Jesus Christ—was central to the doctrine with which the German monk and theologian Martin Luther lit afire the profound challenges to the Catholic Church that ultimately conflagrated into the Protestant Reformation. (“Protestant” as in, “protest”; “Reformation” as in “reform.” See? Luther protested! He wanted reform!)

“Read the following carefully. It was written in 1537 by The Great Reformer, and it’s something all Protestants believe. … “

So you see the differences. Certainly nothing substantive was changed, and—what with them having paid for it, and all—the book does, after all, belong to its publisher, who is ultimately free to do with it as it pleases. (And of course it’s possible Steve okayed such last minute changes. He’s a busy guy; the book was on a schedule … just because I didn’t see this stuff doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t.)

I only mention this little bit of business because I thought it possible that those of my readers who are particularly interested in the Publishing Process might find it vaguely diverting.

 

Related/follow-up post: How To Survive as a Co-Author.

Why A Book Proposal Is Everything

In HowTo, Writing on June 30, 2008 at 12:13 pm

If you’re just joining us, see How To Write A Book Proposal, Part 1. Even though this post should be called, “How To Write A Book Proposal, Part 2,” I changed it to, “Why A Book Proposal Is Everything,” because … well, because ”why?” most naturally comes before “how”? Sorry for not thinking of that sooner.

There are three Major Reasons for which you have  to write and submit to your literary agent or publisher a book proposal instead of a finished manuscript. (And remember, we’re only talking about nonfiction books here, not fiction.) First, publishers don’t have time to read a 40,000-plus word manuscript. They don’t even have time to read anywhere near all the proposals that every agent in the world is sending them. (Which is why, as you climb up the publishing ladder, you want representing you an agent with whom publishers know, respect, and have previously worked, since a submission from such an agent automatically goes atop publishers’ Must Read stack.)

Proposal? 15,000 words. Whole manuscript? 45,000 words. Publishers’ time? Priceless.

A proposal it is, then.

Secondly, the quality of your book idea and the facility with which you write is one thing. But what really matters to a publisher — who after all has to make a living selling books – is how sellable your book is. Before a publisher commits the kind of money it takes to bring a book to market, it has to be as sure as it possibly can be that that book will sell. Determining that — figuring out how many people can reasonably be expected to buy your book, and why — entails considerable thought. That’s where you come in. That’s largely what a proposal is:  It’s your summation of all the reasons the publisher reading it can be safe betting that once your book is published the world will flock to it, and he or she will be rich and get a promotion and get to take the spouse and kids to Paris the following spring. 

A proposal is a sales document. It’s a pitch.  It’s everything an editor would need to know in order to boldly throw your proposal down on the table before the collected editorial, sales, and marketing people at his publishing house, and say with ringing confidence, “Here. I’ve got a winner. Praise me, ye underlings! Marvel yet again at my awesome perspicacity!”

Or, you know, whatever they might say.

Point is: Books are art. Art isn’t quantifiable. Money is. Publishers want to make money. A proposal is your best effort to show publishers that, artistic wonder or not, your book will  result in Mucho Incoming Cash.

Thirdly, publishers don’t want  you to have already finished your book before they get it. You know why? Because if there’s one thing of which publishers are confident, it’s that they know what makes for a good, sellable book. They want to participate  with you in the writing of your book. They want to help you make it the best book it can be.

You are, after all, just a writer. What in the world can you  be expected to know about writing a book?

It’s easy enough to be offended and/or disparaging about the degree to which publishers tend to assume a real kind of ownership of the text of the books they publish. And a lot of what they do in that regard is grounded in nothing more interesting than grunt arrogance: Editors and publishers are, after all, the gatekeepers to fame and fortune, and they know it, and … well, you know how people are. But it’s also more than fair to say that through long and hard experience, editors and publishers have learned that the most efficient way to create the best possible books is by working hand-in-hand with their authors. Especially given that most nonfiction authors aren’t primarily writers; they’re primarily experts in whatever it is they’re writing about. Most often nonfiction authors are glad  to benefit from the knowledge and expertise of their editor; they understand the value of that kind of input. So it’s all good. It’s just that if you’re new, you want to know, going in, that you’d do well to hold lightly the sense of proprietorship that most authors naturally feel toward their work. It’s your book until you sell it; after that, it belongs to you and the publisher, and no two ways about it.

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How To Write A Book Proposal, Part 1

In HowTo, Writing on June 28, 2008 at 3:45 pm

I just finished and sent to my agent a book proposal. So now I have book proposals on my mind.

How fascinating, I know.

Actually, because I am a very famous writer known far and wide throughout my apartment complex, people very often ask me why I’m staring into their window how to do a book proposal. And when they do I’m always kind of surprised, because wanting to get a book published and not knowing anything about book proposals is like wanting to be a dentist and not knowing anything about making people cry by drilling directly into their central nervous system.

So herewith is however much I’ll be able to cram in here about book proposals before my beautiful wife wakes up from her nap so that we can go food shopping so that we can wail and cry aloud in the dairy section over the fact that a gallon of milk now costs more than a whole live cow.

If you’re wanting a publisher to buy a non-fiction book you wrote, you have  to write a book proposal for that book. You have absolutely no choice about that. None. Zero. Trying to sell a book without a book proposal is like trying to stage Hamlet  without actors. You can try it, but people will first ridicule, then pity, then sic their dogs on you.

Important note: Book proposals are only for non-fiction books. If you want to write a book of fiction, you’re going to have to finish that whole book and then submit it for publication, unless you’re already such a famous fiction writer that there’s no way you’d be reading this. If you’re not sure about the difference between fiction and non-fiction, then you are James Frey, and I want to tell you that, honestly, I only read three pages of your book A Million Little Pieces before I literally threw it away, because it was that obvious you were lying. How it took Oprah and so many other people so long to discover that is yet another reason I despair for the entire human race.

Anyway, a book proposal is a document that, though Mondo Hefto indeed, is still a lot smaller than a whole book, which no one in publishing is going to want to take the time to read. It’s a blueprint of your book, a comprehensive overview of it. It’s everything a publisher would need to know about your book in order to decide if they want to risk their money publishing it.

It really is  a book proposal. It’s something you (through your agent) give to a publisher, by way of saying, ”Will you marry this book?”

Speaking of marriages, my wife is up! If anyone cares, I’ll continue this post at some point after the police have let us out of jail because they’ve realized that we’re not miscreants intent on disturbing the peace, but only simple, reasonable folk who, like themselves, can no longer afford food.

Next post: Why A Book Proposal is Everything.

 

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How To Earn Respect and Power, Kids

In Family, HowTo, Writing on May 13, 2008 at 9:11 am

Yesterday, at Jamul Intermediate School, in Jamul, California, I spoke to fourth and fifth graders about writing.

If you are one of those kids: Hi, kid! Thanks for having me out at your school yesterday! Not that you had a choice! Still, you were very polite, and laughed at all my jokes, and asked intelligent, fun questions, and in general helped me to have an all-around fabulous time.

DON’T FORGET THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT WRITING!

Here’s the gist of that again:

Power and respect. That’s what writing well can get you — and nothing can get you more power, and more respect, from more people, than knowing how to write. That’s why you’ve been learning about writing from the moment you started school: It’s that important. If you don’t know how to write well, it will be way too easy for people to think you’re stupid. Not knowing how to write well doesn’t make you stupid, but people can’t help but think that it does. If someone sees something you wrote that’s sloppy, difficult to read, and filled with mistakes, they will  think you’re stupid. At the very least, they’ll think you’re uneducated. And in your life, you do not  want people thinking you’re stupid or uneducated. Because then they might not respect you as much as you want them to.

It’s hard  to get people’s respect; that’s one of the main reasons respect is so valued. You really have to earn respect. When you write well, you show people that you’ve already done the work it takes to earn their respect. And they’ll willingly give you their respect, too, because what your good writing proves to them is that you have a good mind.

If people can’t respect your mind, they can’t respect you at all. The only way people know you at all  is through what they know of your mind. Even if you want to be a famous athlete, it’s not what you can do with your body that people will respect: it’s what, through the power of your mind, you made your body do that people will respect. The quality of a person always comes down to the quality of their mind. You want people to know you’ve got a good mind, a mind that’s done things, a mind you’re proud of, a mind they should respect. The best  way to communicate that is through writing.

There are only two ways to let people know what you think: talking, and writing. You’ve learned how to talk. Now you must learn how to write.  

If you write well, you can have any future you want. You can go to any college you want. You can have any job you want. You can live anywhere you want. If you don’t know how to write — if every time you write something it comes out looking like something that someone who is stupid or uneducated wrote — then, as soon as you’re out of high school, you’re going to end up doing what people who can’t write well always get stuck doing, which is having to take a terrible job working terrible hours for terrible pay with a terrible boss.

You don’t want that. A rotten job is an awful thing. But that’s what you will  be stuck with if you don’t give people a very clear reason to know you deserve better.

Being able to write — a good school essay, a good college paper, a good email, a good letter — gives you power in your life. And you want all the power in your own life you can possibly get, so that you have all the choices in your own life that you could possibly want.

A person is as free in life as they have choices in life. That’s why prison is so bad: Prisoners have less choices in their lives than anyone else in the world. That’s what makes prison so punishing: No choices.

You want choices! You want freedom! You want respect! You want power!

Knowing how to write well is the only thing you can do that guarantees that throughout your life you can have as much of those three things as you could possibly want.

 

(If you know of a kid whom you think could benefit from the above Big Advice, please forward the url of this blog post to them and/or their parents. Thanks.)

Blogging; Writing A Play

In Writing on May 10, 2008 at 5:14 am

Every blog post I write appears in three places at more or less the same time: here on my WordPress blog, and on my Christianity.com and Crosswalk.com blogs. Together the three bring me some 40,000 “views” per month. I have no idea how many people that number represents, but I’m guessing I couldn’t fit them into my living room at once.

I’ve been blogging for one year now. It’s become one of my two primary creative outlets: I blog, and I write books. Both are dear to me.

Lately I’ve been doing neither. I’m between books — the editing of one done; the exact structure of the next still in the works — and my last blog post was on May 6, four days ago. Four days isn’t much time in real life, but in Blog Time it’s about four months. My view numbers have plummeted like a toddler on a tight-rope. Posting to a blog is like drinking water: If you don’t do it all the time, you pretty quickly expire.

I like to post a new piece at least every other day, because I know people are showing up to my blog, and I hate the thought of not giving them something for their trouble and precious time. It kills me that people come to my blog. I feel it as an honor. So I want to do my best by the people who show up here; I want to show them, via the quality of what I give them, the same respect they show me by coming here in the first place.

Lately, though, I’ve been having one of the most exceptional writing experiences of my life. I’m writing a three-act play. I figure it’s at most ten hours’ work away from being finished. I expect to have it done by the time my father arrives here this Thursday. (I wrote about my pop’s upcoming visit on my last post, My Dad, My Book, and the 2008 San Diego Book Awards.)

I won’t bore you with why, exactly, I’ve found writing my first play such an … enveloping experience (especially since I know I’ll never fully understand it myself) — but it has meant that lately, whenever I sit down to write a blog post, I instead open the play and work on it. Which is so bizarre I can barely think of it without making funny Martian noises. I never don’t blog. At this point, I don’t even know how not to. I think in blog segments. I’ve felt destined for a daily column since I first learned there were such things. Blogging for me is like swimming for a fish.

Except that lately I’ve been being Joe Playwright.

I’m afraid all I’m saying is that I may not post anything new here until my play’s finished. That might be tomorrow. That might be in two weeks. I have no idea. But somewhere in there, for sure.

You’ll wait for me, yes?

My Dad, My Book, and the 2008 San Diego Book Awards

In Autobiography, Family, Religion, Writing on May 6, 2008 at 4:48 pm

My book, “I’m OK–You’re Not: The Message We’re Sending Nonbelievers, and Why We Should Stop.”, is one of three finalists for a 2008 San Diego Book Award, in the category of Spirituality. (My book “Penguins, Pain and the Whole Shebang” won that award in 2006.)

If, on the evening of Saturday, May 17, I attend the SDBA awards ceremony/ schmooze-fest, my 80-year-old father will be with me. To me, this is like saying I’ll be accompanied by Popeye, or that on that night I’ll sprout wings and fly to the affair. It’s that unimaginable. As it happens, my father will be visting me that weekend. My father hasn’t stayed overnight in any town I’ve lived in since I moved out of our family home when I was 16 years old, which was 34 years ago. From then until I was 45, I don’t think I saw him five times. I grew from a teenager to a middle-aged man without him.

I became a Christian when I was thirty-eight. Then I wanted to be closer to him: Honor your father, and all like that. So I started writing to him. One day he wrote me back. Then I called him. Then I called him again. Then he invited my wife and me to come to his home for a week and visit with him and his wife, my stepmother. So we did. The following year, he invited us out again, and of course we went again. A lovely time, both times, was had by all.

In February of this year, my dad’s wife of 40 years, my stepmother from way back when, succumbed to cancer, and passed away. (I wrote a little about that here.) Since that sadness, my father and I have grown considerably closer; I would say we have become good friends. My wife and I would like him to come live with or near us. It’s for the purpose of exploring that possibility that he’s coming out to stay with us the weekend of the San Diego Book Awards.

My dad — who is straight from the 1950’s school of Responsible Living — thinks it’s Beyond Bizzare that I’m a writer. To him it’s like I make a living making balloon animals, or … I don’t know … stacking rocks. (Wait. Writing is a lot like those two things….) He doesn’t understand how I can possibly make a living doing something so nebulous and … weird, basically.

And, of course, all I ever wanted my whole life was for the guy to take me seriously. Same as all sons want from their fathers.

I don’t know if my father’s going to be in the mood to go the San Diego Book Awards. I don’t know if I will be. But we’ll probably go. And if we do go, and I do win, I could see, once I’m back in my seat with him, having to take more time than I really should to stop smiling.

 

The follow-up to this post — what DID happen the night of the SDBA – is Connecting Flights.

How To Write in Tandem with God/Holy Spirit

In HowTo, Writing on April 26, 2008 at 8:21 am

I get a fair amount of questions/input around the dynamic of writing in conjunction with God. So I thought I’d burble out a little sumpin’ sumpin’ about that particular phenomenon.

First of all, if you’re trying to do any sort of creative work, do you have any choice but  to access and stay with the divine within you? All creativity is born of the Great Power, however you personally understand or conceive of that. Being Christian, I say that in order to do my best creative work I must tap into and let flow through me the Holy Spirit; I assume if I were a Muslim I’d say the same thing about the spirit of Allah, or maybe Mohammad. However you personally understand The Great Being or Divine Power Within, you’d better  connect to it and let it work through you if you hope to write anything more interesting or substantial than whatever you could scrape together with your normal, everyday brain.

Your normal, everyday brain is great for doing taxes, returning videos on time, and remembering why you shouldn’t attack your boss in an elevator with a stapler. It’s generally useless, though, when it comes to creative work. For creative work, you’ve got to get down and give it up for the source of all creativity.

The key to successfully doing that — to truly divesting yourself of what really does amount to all control over your writing — is trust. You have to trust in the quality of whatever God produces through you. The thing that most often causes writers to choke is thinking too much about the end result of their work: they wonder if it will be good enough, smart enough, clever enough, engaging enough. But thinking about all that sort of stuff is like taking a boat out into the water and then shooting a hole through its floor. You’re sunk before any of the fun can even begin.

Writing has to be about the means, not the end. And the key to experiencing creatively rewarding means is not worrying at all. You can’t create if you’re worrying about being creative. You aren’t creative. God is creative. The creative spirit residing within you is creative. You aren’t: You can barely tie your shoes without accidentally snagging your thumb in a tourniquet. So let The Great Creative Power use you to do his/her/its creative thing. All you have to do is ride the train of blessed phenomenon to wherever in the heck it takes you.

The key is to trust that train will  take you somewhere new, good, and exciting. Don’t worry about the results of what you write: that kind of evaluation is for uptight teachers, loser supervisors, pursed-lipped Church Lady types. Worrying about the quality of creative work is the mortal enemy of creative work. So don’t. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t do it to the creative spirit within you. It can’t be anything but a waste of time.

When you want to write, poise yourself with your pen in hand or keyboard beneath your fingers, close your eyes, open your heart and spirit, keep them open, and then wait.

Pretty soon you hear that distant train whistle blow. Then you hear the train coming closer.

Then it’s upon you, and you catch onto its rail — and then go, cat, go.

How To Write Stories and Articles That Sell

In HowTo, Humor, Writing on April 22, 2008 at 5:54 am

One of my Big Points in yesterday’s More On How to Make A Living Writing was, “If you’re not pretty much an idea factory, you’re never going to make it anyway.”

One of my more consistently perspicacious readers, “SamWrites2,” left a comment to that post.

“Hi, John!” he wrote. ”You know, I’ve been thinking. I need you. I want to have your baby.”

No, wait, wait. Sorry. That wasn’t Sam. That was my Christian minister lesbian friend, Anita. What Sam said was: “Can you expand on your ‘idea factory’ idea? How does one become an idea factory without getting one’s ideas from someone else? Is there such a thing as an original idea? The reason I chose to work in journalism is because it was easier to look around, ask ‘Why?’, and then write about that, rather than try to pull something brand new out of my brain.”

Good question, Sam! Disgusting imagery—-but good question! Being an Idea Factory, is, after all, the key to being a successful writer, and no two ways about it. If you wait to get assigned  a story, you die waiting; if you come up with a good story of your own, though, you’re gold. From fiction to poetry to nonfiction, idea is king.

Let’s first consider whether or not there’s such a thing as an original idea. Of course there is; if there weren’t then today we’d still be trying to open up cans with our teeth. Luckily, in 1972 Barnabas “Big Collar” Canopener invented the gadget that still bears his name, and cosmetic dentists everywhere were forced to become tile layers and make-up artists.

No, but yes: There are definitely new and original ideas. The whole point of good ideas is that they’re new. They of course exist in symbiotic relationship with their contexts: the cuff link, for instance, was just stupid until someone finally invented the loose, oversized, hole-bearing man-cuff. I feel safe in saying that each and every one of our brains is veritably abuzz with new ideas just waiting to coalesce, spark to life, and then burst out in such a way as to embarrass us in public.

I don’t in reality know if it’s possible to teach people how to come up with good writing ideas. I think  it is, but I don’t know. I do know that in my years of trying to teach/impart that particular facility to freelance magazine writers, I invariably failed. I simply had a pretty much impossible time getting people to, as they say, “think outside the box.”

The reasons I personally have always had pretty good luck flopping around outside that stupid box are two: I’d rather burn alive for an hour than be bored for twelve seconds, and I in every last way loathe work.

Seriously: I think the two most important qualities a writer can have are an actual fear of boredom, and a deep and abiding drive to be lazy.

Here’s what I mean: One time when I was working as the managing editor of a monthly magazine, we got in a press release about how the performance season for this local circus troupe was about to begin.

“Why don’t you write a story about this local circus troupe?” my boss asked me.

“Why don’t you quit so I can have your job, you dribbling moron,” I replied. I’m kidding, of course. What I really did is storm into my office and slam shut my door.

Then my brain went like this: “Man, I love having my own office. I can’t believe I have to write a story about those stupid local circus performers. I do respect them, though; I can barely sit in a chair without toppling off it. Hmm. Lemme look at their press release.” Therein I learned that one of the circus’s featured performers was “Ivan, The World’s Strongest Man.”

“Hmmm,” I thought, staring at a photo of Ivan. “Must be weird being the world’s strongest man. Guy definitely needs to update his wardrobe. No one wears sleeveless leopard-print unitards anymore. How does he not know that? Then again, if you’re the world’s strongest man, making astute fashion statements probably isn’t your main concern in life. Your concern is that you keep breaking things. You try to open a door—and suddenly you’re holding a door. You go to apply your car brakes, and your foot goes through the floorboard. You scratch your head, and you almost bleed to death. It must be horrible being the world’s strongest man.”  

So then I contacted the guy who plays Ivan, and asked if he’d be down for doing an interview with me based on the idea that he actually is the strongest human male currently alive on the planet. He thought it was a great idea—and bingo, I had my piece. And that story was fun to write: I got to talk about how as a baby Ivan used a lawn mower for a rattler, and how as a schoolboy he had to use special steel pencils, and was not  fun to play with at recess, and how his dad had to run away from home from the shame of having a three-year-old son who could totally beat him up.

Point being: Writing that story didn’t bore me to death—and  I didn’t have to work, as I would have if I’d done the normal kind of story, where you have to take notes and get all the facts right and learn stuff. I hate learning stuff.

I’ll give one more example, if you don’t mind my writing yet another blog post longer than the Constitution. Once, when I was the editor of a weekly tabloid newspaper in downtown San Diego, I noticed the city had put up all around downtown these round signs with nothing but the letter “P” on them. They were about the size of STOP signs. I thought, “What the heck are those signs for?” But right away I sensed that finding out what they were really  for might involve actual research. So instead I simply went outside, stood underneath one of the signs, and when people walked by told them that I was a reporter doing a story on what people thought the “P” on these new signs stood for.

And that’s when people, yet again, started being the funniest thing since Charlie Chaplin.

“I think it stands for Padres,” said one guy. (As in the San Diego Padres baseball team! Like the city would just put up signs everywhere showing the first letter of San Diego’s baseball team! Cracked. Me. Up.)

A porty chap guessed, “Pizza? That’d be cool. It is hard to find good pizza downtown.” A hippie girl mused with what I suspected was organically generated mellowness, “You know what? I think it stands for peace.” A wino-type guy said, “There’s a bathroom nearby?” I made a questioning face, and he goes, “You know. Pee?!”

That was about the best half hour of my life. I took a couple of Pictures of People Pondering the P—and just like that, I had half a page of usable material. (The sign, by the way, stands for “Parking.”)

One time one of my favorite writers—a guy named J. R. Griffin, for whom I used to freelance back when he was running a music rag in Los Angeles called “Mean Streets”—was interviewing a musician when he noticed the batteries on his tape recorder were running low. So part of his story became about how he didn’t stop the interview and say his batteries were low, because he was embarrassed about making such an amateur mistake and didn’t have extra batteries anyway. So in the profile itself, J.R. wrote things like, “When I asked him about how he writes his music, Bob said that when composing he liked to hurt his hubble, or hug his stubble, or something like that. I’m not sure.” Or he wrote, “And that’s when I’m pretty sure Bob said something about being inspired by his cat,” or, “‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a musician,’ I’m pretty sure Bob said.” 

I died. I still count it as one of the funniest thing I’ve ever read.

My point is: If you really want to be a creative idea machine, think lazy.

What I’m really saying, of course, is think about things not so much as what they’re supposed to be, but what they actually are, if that makes sense. It’s all  about pointed, ingenuous honesty. I really do think the secret to consistently producing quality creative ideas—whether it be for local, regional, or national magazine or newspaper work, or for fiction, or poetry, or play writing—is to never fail to be brutally, crazily, viciously, obsessively (and always politely) honest  about whatever it is you’re writing about. That’s it. Say what you see. Never force things to be what you or anyone else most typically wants or expects them to be. Let things and people tell you who and what they are: Let the real truth of whatever you’re considering unfold itself before you—and then just hang on, and see what happens.

Watch and ride: that’s my motto.

The other Truly Excellent Way to find as many great stories as you can possibly write is to go out into the world secure in the knowledge that people are absolutely fascinating: that they do fascinating things, have fascinating histories, are involved in fascinating dynamics. Move around in life assuming that everyone you meet is astoundingly original and infinitely interesting—and sure enough, their stories will never disappoint you.

 

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A related post o’ mine: How To Make a Living Writing