Tips To Write a Book

You may already know that the reason my blogs have suffered for the past 18 months is because I'm writing a book. I don't have much to say about it just yet, because I've done a lot of research, but I don't exactly know what it's about yet. Some days I freak out over that fact, afraid that I cannot actually write something until I already have it all figured out, but I do my best to keep on track. The best thing lately that lets me stay on track is to hear about how many successul authors get their books written. They pretty much all boil down to: write even if it sucks, freakouts are normal, and books take a really long time to write do don't give up.

History Vs. Historical Fiction

I have been researching a historical event for some time now, and I think I can make a book of it. However, I was having trouble coming up with a way to do it: do I write a non-fiction book using truthful historical facts, or do I turn it into a historical novel where I can make a better, but untruthful, narrative? Guy Vanderhaeghe has an essay on how history and fiction fit together, which has given me more to think about.

Weekly Geeks: Blog Burn Out

This week's Weekly Geeks asks how bloggers deal with blogging burnout. You might not know it, but I blog quite a bit: I have a personal blog, a cool-stuff I found blog, a cool-stuff copied from other blogs blog, a kitschy blog, a collectibles blog, and a few others that I write but don't advertise that they're mine, just as venues to write about things on my mind that I don't care to advertise are going on in my mind. Heck, my list of abandoned blogs is just about as long. With all this blogging going on — and a full-time job, to boot — I can accurately say, yes, I get burned out quite a bit.

So, what do I do?

I take the easy route: I stop blogging. Oh, I can't completely abandon all writing, because Collector's Quest pays me to blog, so I better not fall behind there, and something may suddenly strike my fancy and force me to blog despite my embargo. But this blog and The Infomercantile, both of which have some dedicated followers and some high-profile in-links, each has periodic lulls in which nothing happens. The Infomercantile has been pretty much dormant all summer, with some minor exceptions. It's a research-heavy and scanning-heavy blog, which takes a lot of time; when we've got kids, and the weather is nice, and there's a whole big world out there, who wants to sit at the computer and feed photos into a scanner? From the 10th to the 11th, I was in Minot for work, which took a lot out of me, so last week I didn't blog much at all. Frankly, it's not a big concern.

One thing I learned from a public speaking class a few years ago is that when you stop talking, the listeners' brains stop, too. It's a reason to allow yourself a pause without saying "um" or "uh" for fear of having dead space, or freaking out over having to shuffle your notes a second to figure out where you were. Your listeners don't even register the pause: their listening-bone is locked up, waiting for the next word, and time has ceased to move. Eventually people's brains wake up and realize nothing's happened, but that's a good 10, 20 seconds of time for you, as a speaker, to allow yourself some silence to regroup.

Blogs work the same way. If you're cruising along, posting every day or so, and you've got readers who like what you're putting out, a break will not register with them. Give it a few weeks, eventually they will start to realize, "hey, so-and-so hasn't blogged in a while," but even then it probably won't stop them from checking your blog — that anticipation makes the pause insignificant, because once you start blogging again, they'll start back up reading just as they did before. The probloggers who say, "Update daily! Update hourly! Don't stop to pee, blog's gotta be updated!" are working on the high-volume advertiser-friendly kind of blog. They're not trying to attract readers, they're after eyeballs. Doesn't matter who's looking, as long as they're looking. Their traffic drops precipitously when blogging stops, even for a day. That's not the kind of blog I write: when I stop, it doesn't really register to the reader, not enough to lose the reader. A short pause in blogging to cultivate my sanity doesn't hurt a blog, but it helps my writing overall. When I come back to blogging, there's a spring in my step. By spending my days reading books, going to museums, or doing oft-neglected lawncare, my mind is clean and refreshed and ready to come up with new witty and thoughtful ideas to spread wide and far on the internet.

I do have some other tricks, though: to avoid appearing burned-out, I blog ahead. I generally have several posts scheduled out into the future. If I'm good, posting prodigiously, I'll either fit them in and schedule something else for the future, or just move their scheduled date out further. If you completely walk away from the computer for a week, those pending posts will still trickle out, making it look like you only slowed down instead of stopping. I also don't blog on weekends, usually; it's a schedule people understand, but it's almost a third less content than trying to constantly blog. Both of those help mediate the burn-out feeling, because I have some built-in opportunities to stop blogging without having less of a blog.

Flame and Fur, Fangs and Wicker

As we've seen, Lyttle-Lytton released their results recently, but so has the Big Boy of these competitions, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Best In Show is nautically-themed as well: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the "Ellie May," a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

Once a strong and respected genre, the seafaring novel seems to have fallen from favor with the literary illuminati. Or, maybe nautical authors are simply lacking in skill and quality; the lack of opportunities to actually crew a square-rigged ship may mean too much is left to the imagination. I mean, look at this other example I found online: "Here have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, - aye, and ignorantly smoking to windward all the while; to windward, and with such nervous whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among torn iron-grey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more - " I mean, who does this "Herman Melville" think he is, writing a book about whaling?

Alas, such dreck isn't acceptable to the Bulwer-Lytton contest; being previously-published, the B-L won't accept it. Both contests are parodies of horrible writing, which — as any parodist will tell you — requires nearly as much talent as being a novelist in entirety. B-L does recognize that horrible writing didn't stop in the 19th century with the original Bulwer-Lytton and that hack Melville: they happily show off some recent examples of the obfuscated and poorly done metaphors.

Briskly, Pants On Her Legs

The Lyttle-Lytton contest for unintentionally-funny literature has released their 2009 results — the winner, it seems, was the nautically-themed "The mighty frigate Indestructible rounded the Horn of Africa and lurched east'ard." Interestingly, at least according to the internet, "east'ard" is an extremely rare word, although it was featured in the title of a 1936 Time magazine story. This, sadly, lends no credibility to the Lyttle-Lytton winner.

Writing Advice, Via Metafilter

I'm becoming a fan of Ask Metafilter, a tangent of the regular Metafilter in which people ask questions — it moves so fast it's hard to really follow, a flood of need and satisfaction, all user-created. A couple days ago, the question was, boiled down from several paragraphs: how do you write as a professional writer, overcoming the need to be inspired, the draining effort needed to combine words into sentences, or the nagging fact that your work sucks? The responses aren't much different from the usual "Get Your Novel Written!" advice books, but so much seems to have been culled from personal experience, it's like being taught how to be a writer by Frankenstein's monster compiled from the useful parts of dozens of amateur writers.

Always Collect

...and not in just the "Hummel figurines" kind of collecting.

Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship.

The website is "A Historian's Craft," and the recommendation to collect is as a jumping-off point for a lifetime of historical scholarism. The focus is to make sure you have references available when beginning to assemble data — which a wise option for anybody aspiring to be a writer. Arthur Mee, creator of the Self-Educator and the Children's Encyclopedia, kept an enoromous catalog of clippings and references to pull his information from. Authors, whether writing a textbook or writing a short story, need to pull information from someplace, and a long-held fallacy is that everything comes from a spark of inspiration deep inside a talented-person's brain. Talent may have a lot to do with the quality of writing, but in terms of content the amount of information you put into your writing is directly related to the amount of information you have at hand. Unless you can rely entirely on your brain, it is far easier to amass a library to refer to. Especially if you have no idea what the future may bring: the wifey and I were recently discussing a series of children's books set in pre-WWII Europe. I have no library of 1930s Europe in my head, but we do have plenty of early 20th century books and magazines. I'll be more successful relying on the books than my own memory of high school history class. (via)

Most Annoying Phrases

Got an article to write, and need a way to pad out your wordcount while annoying readers? Check out the list of most annoying phrases, as assembled in the UK, so not only will you be annoying readers, you'll have that British Isles flavor that makes you seem smarter. The majority are either absolutes used as generalizations, or a combination of absolutes with generalizations, such as "fairly unique" — 'unique' means the one and only; being 'fairly' unique would indicate it's not unique, but the phrase lets you expand out the word 'rare' to two, and up goes your wordcount!

I'd like to include "literally" on the list: literally means exactly as said, as opposed to 'figuratively', but when you're interviewed on a Discovery Channel show about ghosts and say, "it literally scared me to death", people will be wondering how you're still up and walking around despite your fear-induced demise. Using literally to indicate hyperbole is making the word mean the exact opposite of its original meaning.

Arthur Mee, on Freelance Writing

This is a subject I have trouble with, but am beginning to overcome:

"Everything has been Done." The population of greater London is seven millions: how many articles, one wonders, are there in that fact? How many books have been written out of it? It is a fact that everybody knows, yet it is a fact that can be written about by a thousand men in different ways, or by one man in a thousand ways, without ever wearying us or driving us to say "I knew that before." There is nobody so hopeless as the man who discards a subject merely because "it has been done before." If the subject had any inherent interest yesterday, it has the same inherent interest to-day. There may, of course, be a hundred reasons why it need not be written about to-day, but the fact that it was written about yesterday is no reason at all.

Emphasis mine: some of my writer's block has been prolonged by the negative sentiment, "I just wrote about that a couple months ago" or "I read two or three blogs about that lately," but I need to remember that there's still plenty of people who haven't seen all the blogs or read all the magazines or owned all the books that I do. There's plenty of freelance work out there writing dreary, repetitive articles that have been seen a million times before, but people still read it. If the axiom above were not true, there would be far, far fewer fashion, housekeeping, and car magazines.

The snippet is from "The Freelance Journalist", itself an excerpt from The Harmsworth Self-Educator, written in the late 19th century.

Arthur Mee, on Freelance Writing

A Rare Courage. And, because [a writer must be at his best always], he must have a courage that is one of the rarest things in the world — the courage to cut off his income at any moment. He will find that the strain is at times greater than he can bear, and there is only one penalty, as tragic as it is sure, for the man who neglects the warning that Nature always gives in time. No man should rely upon a free life as a journalist who is not prepared to face the risk of having to stop his income for a week or a month or a longer period at the bidding of a master who cannot be disobeyed.

From "The Freelance Journalist", itself an excerpt from The Harmsworth Self-Educator, written in the late 19th century.

Print Isn't Dead, It's Different

Reading online is the dissemination and absorption of information -- pleasure reading is like a day at a spa, effortless and engaging. Friend Gracie has had this problem at sex-kitten.net (NSFW, and I designed it), difficulty finding readers online willing to read a couple-thousand word article, but their book sells pretty well. We've long said we won't publish eBooks, because of the pain of reading them online. Short, informational pieces work better online? No wonder newspapers are declining in their corporeal influence.

So, where will long-form writing go? That's why people say print isn't dead - it does something online doesn't do. It is, however, why blogs took off but online magazines haven't -- blogs are easier to read, and easier to write, and the cost is right. Produce something people want in large quantities, for very little cost, and it's a good product.

How Suzanne Vega Writes

I've always kinda liked Suzanne Vega -- offbeat, but catchy -- in the New York Times, she talks about how she writes music, which overlaps a bit with how all writers produce their work.

(via)

Time Travel Mart: A 826 Project

826 National is a nonprofit group that sponsors wacky storefronts, behind which hide student writing seminars for gradeschool kids. Why wacky storefronts? The first store, 826 Valencia, wasn't zoned for a workshop space: be retail or go away. Solution? Add retail to a non-retail production -- and be creative about it. There's several of the stores, but the one to the right is my favorite so far (but the spy shop is close behind). The Time Travel Mart sells itself as supplier to time-travelers, when it's not teaching students how to write creatively. If you'd like to see a bit of the store's interior, this person has a bunch of photos worth seeing. It's amazing how much thought and work is put into the environment -- people over at Neatorama miss the point, but I do get it. It's like the entrance to a museum or theme park: the person enters a world quite different than what's outside, and they're to leave it behind at the stoop. Writing creatively requires the putting on of a different hat, so like most skills children need to feel comfortable and immersed in order to learn. Now, most kids aren't going to write science fiction just because they're sitting a few feet from mammoth stew. Sitting a few feet from mammoth stew gives kids permission to see their world from a different perspective, one where the rules are left behind, like zoning ordinances preventing a writer's enclave.

Writing On Tribbles (well, not literally...)

No, putting a pen to the surface of a tribble with most likely result in a gummed-up pen and a cranky tribble. David Gerrold was a budding science-fiction author in the 1960s, who managed to get a foot in the door down at a new show...something like Wagon Train in space or something. That show was Star Trek, and the book The Trouble With Tribbles: The Birth, Sale, and Final Production of One Episode chronicles Gerrold's trials and tribbelations (ha!) on the road to creating one of the more endearing episodes of Trek. It's a pretty much the story every budding screenwriter has, but it's got Trek in it, and it's got tribbles, and, well, that's just fuzzy. The whole book is online, so you can read it at your leisure.

Do You Mind If I Go Blogging This?

Language Blog writes about a strange lingual abberation, embodied by the sentence "Would you mind go checking on the laundry?" My first thought was, "what's wrong with that?" as it's completely understandable if spoken to you -- I probably would look at it more than once while editing, but would attribute it to colloquial style and let it go. However, if you look at it, word-by-word, it's a mess of tenses and posessions, missing 'ands' and adding superfluous suffixes.

My second thought, while I appreciate the language analysis of such sentence and its relatives, is that the ability to construct proper sentences is not the same part of the brain that speaks. Oh, they do cooperate, but writers and speakers are not the same ilk. Writers benefit from self-editing (writing, then re-reading what was just inscribed) and editors (who aren't watching for content as much as mechanics) to make sure their sentences are accurate within the Rules of American Language. When you're speaking, it's a cascade of proper words quickly grabbed off the shelf and placed in as close a proper order as possible; people often aren't sure how they're going to end the sentence when they start it, hence the mixups of tense and action. If it works, and people understand it, then that assembly of words gets put back on the shelf, intact, for quick retrieval later. This is part of why people say "um" instead of pausing, and use the word 'like' as an all-purpose word and punctuation. It works, so the unconsious word-assembler keeps using it. Writing and proper english requires consious assembly, which takes longer than speaking. It's almost suspicious when people speak too properly or correctly; it's assumed they're reading off a script, like those so-called "real customer testimonies" on the toothpaste commercials. Nobody uses words and contractions like that. Real sentences are full of misplaced contractions, invalid suffixes and prefixes, ums, and restarted sentences.

So, I generally forgive improper language (although I annoyed the girls more than once for picking on the whole "can I" or "may I" thing) when spoken -- otherwise, you'd spend your entire life annoyed. Remember people's words are coming out of their head faster than their internal editor can keep up, and start feeling a little sorry for real-time subtitlers.