Category Archives: Writing Process

Too Busy

I’ve been too busy writing to do any writing.

It is now June 12. This year I’ve been to Nashville three times to read scripts I’d written (31 of them) for an educational company that hired me to design three online writing courses.

I also went to Savannah with my sister (spending every evening writing scripts).

I went to Miami with my husband for our annual botanical-gardens trip. I worked on scripts on the train and in the evenings.

My husband and I also went to Canada. By then the scripts were done and the project was over, and I spent evenings working my way through a backlog of almost 300 emails (mostly articles I wanted to read). I also outlined a Shaw presentation I’m hoping to do at a conference in New York next year.

And I went to New York City for a bliss-filled five-day trip that included two Broadway plays (both female stars won Tonys), two dinners at Sardi’s, a family-and-friends cookout, a visit with my husband’s family, a ragtime concert, a wonderful library exhibit, and visits to Theodore Roosevelt’s birthplace and the Tenement Museum. And pizza. Lots of pizza. No writing while I was there. Well, I sent a few postcards.

This year I’ve already written eleven articles for a law enforcement website. And last weekend (after two weeks of rehearsals) I danced in the ballet school’s annual show (both an evening and matinee performance). I went to a meeting about a consulting job in July.

Seven trips in less than six months. In April and May we just parked the suitcases in our living room.

Enough of that! I want to get back to MY writing. Before all the trips began, I was working on my writing book. I would love to get back into it. I have a newsletter to send in three days – haven’t done anything with it. There are five blogs to keep up with. I posted an entry yesterday, this one will be done in a few minutes, and that leaves three to go. I have two letters to write and four articles to do for the law enforcement website.

This weekend I have NOTHING scheduled. Yay. I’ll be able to focus and write, and write, and write. Can’t wait.

airplaneok

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Make It INTERESTING

Not easy to do.

Twice a month I write a newsletter about police reports. If you think about that for, say, three seconds, you’ll soon realize that it is a near-impossible task. Twenty-four times a year I have to come up with a bunch of things to say about a very structured task that never changes. And I have to make it interesting enough for subscribers to read and (a less obvious but equally important task) for me to keep it going.

What do I find to say about police reports twice a month?

What I’ve been doing is to incorporate three features into every newsletter. One is a timely article about something going on in law enforcement right now. Since I’m a staff writer for a law enforcement website, I just repost those articles on my own newsletter.

Another feature is a short usage quiz. I enjoy doing those, and I keep a chart so that I don’t repeat a topic (-ed endings, lose/loose, coordinating conjunctions) too often.

The most challenging task is coming up with a PowerPoint or activity that goes into a writing issue in some depth. Yesterday’s choice was objectivity.

On one level that was no problem. I had a number of things to say that would be helpful to an officer who’s still learning how to write reports. I even had a couple of pointers that an experienced officer might benefit from.

But how would I make it INTERESTING?

I found a solution. Police reports have one counterintuitive feature: Officers aren’t allowed to showcase their experience or reasoning skills. They can’t discuss hunches, thinking processes, or conclusions. They can’t even say that a suspect seemed confused, dishonest, manipulative…you get the idea.

Just the facts, Ma’am.

And so I started my PowerPoint with a picture of a brain scan, pointing out that cops have highly developed thinking processes – which they can never refer to in a report.

You can view the PowerPoint at this link: http://www.slideshare.net/ballroom16/objectivity-in-police-reports

Joe Friday

 

 

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Tapping Away

This morning I’m tapping away at my computer keyboard. Last night I was tapping away at a Christmas show.

I guess I should explain that I’m taking a beginners’ tap class.

I am constantly discovering connections between writing and dancing. A big one is that both require my stomach to activate and engage with what I’m doing. In dancing, a strong stomach stabilizes my whole top line and sets the stage for magic to happen.

In writing, a steady hum in my stomach signifies that I’m interested in what I’m doing. Readers are likely to be interested too. When my stomach doesn’t turn on, I hit the delete key and look for another topic. (It happens depressingly often. Am I really that boring?)

It’s the eternal question of where ideas come from.

In dance, the music generates many of the ideas. Get yourself a good piece of music, and you can’t miss.

Writing is more problematical. Having a terrific topic and great ideas is only the beginning.

Years ago I wrote a doctoral dissertation about Bernard Shaw that thrilled my dissertation committee. Breakthrough stuff, they said. Publish it!

But I couldn’t. Because it was a learn-as-I-go project (probably most dissertations are), the ideas didn’t hang together.

I spent several futile years trying to find a way to make it work. Total failure. (Well, not totally. I kept researching and learned a lot more about Shaw.)

And then one day a student of mine said something about Shaw’s Pygmalion that set off fireworks in my brain. “It’s a play about language,” she said.

Eureka. I was off and running.

Back to my earlier point. Ideas aren’t enough. You need what used to be called “an occasion for writing” – a jumping-off point. I find this hard to do sometimes even in a letter to family or friends. I have all kinds of things to say about what’s been going on in my life. But how do I make the connection to the person who’s going to read my letter? It’s wonderful if I can say something like “I was thinking about you yesterday when XYZ happened” – but sometimes there isn’t any XYZ connection.

The other requirement (at least for professional writing) is a unifying idea. Again, that can be tough. Life is messy. Rarely is an experience unmitigated joy or a ghastly disaster. (I was in an automobile accident a couple of weeks ago. My beloved PT Cruiser wasn’t worth fixing, and the bruising on my arm was a problem with the sleeveless dresses I wore at a dance competition a week later. But the EMTs were nice, the emergency room was interesting, and my insurance company was wonderful.)

I’m rambling! Witness the real-world writing process at work. (Can you tell that my stomach was humming the whole time?)

Pencils in Wire Cup

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The Finish Line

A friend and I are collaborating on a report writing book for code enforcement inspectors. After months of emails (we’ve never met), the book is finished. We’re waiting for an endorsement from one of his colleagues to put on the cover, and then it will be published.

Earlier this evening some mysterious impulse drove me to take another look at the manuscript. While admiring our work and reveling in our success, I found…seven errors.

Ye gods and little fishes. After going over the book a zillion times (or so it seems), there were still corrections to be made.

How does that happen? How can an experienced and (if I may say so) meticulous writer allow so many mistakes to slip through after endless passes through the manuscript?

Let me explain. Better yet – let me give you a real-life, up-to-the-minute example.

Scroll up this post to the paragraph that begins “Ye gods and little fishes.” Read both sentences there.

Notice anything?

There’s a dangling modifier! Did you spot it?

After going over the book a zillion times (or so it seems), there were still corrections to be made.

Words that end in –ing are dangerous if they’re placed at or near the beginning of a sentence. You have to say who was going over the book. I neglected to do that.

Here’s a corrected version of the sentence:

After I went over the book a zillion times (or so it seems), there were still corrections to be made.  CORRECT

Or I could have done this to fix it:

After going over the book a zillion times (or so it seems),I still had to make corrections.  CORRECT

Here’s my point: Almost any time I (or you) – write something, mistakes are going to creep in. My experience today (despite the teeth-grinding that went with it) was a good reminder about the importance of proofreading.

write-with-us5

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Writer or Reader?

Why do writers like to write? Part of the appeal has to be that it’s a totally self-centered activity. Pick up a pen, or sit down at a keyboard, and you can go on and on about whatever interests you at the moment.

Or you think you can.

More and more I’m coming to think that writing isn’t about I: It’s about you. The first requirement of good writing is figuring out what will entertain, amuse, or enlighten your readers. Often you have to take a familiar experience, idea, or feeling and transform it into something new and unfamiliar.

Not easy to do. Welcome to staring-at-a-sheet-of-paper-or-a-blank-computer-screen.

My current project is writing material for a continuing-education module on police report writing. Looked at one way, it’s an easy task: I know the content, and it’s easy to organize and write develop.

But there’s a problem. My future readers are experienced police officers who have been writing reports (probably good ones) for years. How am I going to hold their interest?

Aye, there’s the rub.

So what I’m doing is looking for “potholes” – issues that officers might not think about during a typical shift. I’m also seeking practices that have changed or need to change. Traps and pitfalls. And some stories about police reports gone wrong…or right.

Remember the Navy Yard shooting? Turns out that several months earlier, a Connecticut police officer had interviewed the shooter about his claim that aliens were pursuing him. What seemed like an ordinary police call turned out to have national significance.

Solid gold.

Open Notebook

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Castle

My husband and I have just discovered the TV show Castle. If you’re more out of touch with popular culture than we are (unlikely) I should explain that it’s a TV crime show starring a best-selling mystery writer named Richard Castle. He has partnered with an attractive New York City detective named Kate Beckett to solve a large number of bizarre homicides.

Thanks to reruns on TNT and a DVR, we are watching all of the old shows at the rate of two a day. I am officially no longer a workaholic.

The shows are entertaining, well written, and well acted, and we both enjoy them immensely. There’s just one thing about the show that keeps nagging at me.

When does Castle get any writing done?

Murders don’t happen on a tidy 8-to-5 schedule. Castle is constantly taking calls from Kate Beckett and racing off to be one of the first to show up at a homicide.

When does he write? Heck – how does he get anything done?

I consider myself a serious and productive writer. Rare is the day when I don’t sit down at the computer to do a blog entry or tackle one of my current writing projects: a book about writing, appropriately enough; a book about code-enforcement reports I’m co-writing with another author; an article for the law-enforcement website that uses me as a staff writer; material for my twice-monthly newsletter.

Lately I have been struggling. In addition to my regular dance lessons and classes, I’ve been having lunch with friends, I took a short trip to New York last week, I’ve been invited to give a talk next week, and I have two consultant jobs to prepare for.

Not to worry: I’ve been on this planet long enough to know how to get things done. Next week’s presentation – about my book Gretel’s Story – has eaten up tons of time. But it’s finished, and I think it’s going to go over well.

As for the other projects – luckily I enjoy writing, and I love sitting at a computer keyboard. No kidding. I get up in the morning, eat breakfast, and head straight for my home office. Procrastination isn’t a problem, at least when it comes to writing.

But I’d still love to know how Rick Castle pulls it off.

Castle

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Backstory

Sometimes one word can change the way you think.

The word I’ve been thinking a lot about is “backstory” – the events that happen before a novel (or short story, TV show, play, or movie) begins.

I suspect that many would-be authors have difficulty with this concept. In fact I know they have difficulty with it, because I’ve read their manuscripts. The hopeful writer (often a friend or a friend-of-a-friend) has visions of bestseller status and fat royalty checks arriving in the mail.

And then I deliver the bad news: Nobody is going to publish your book.

Often the first page signals that a manuscript is unpublishable. Here’s the giveaway: Inexperienced writers usually start a book at the beginning of the story. A man and a woman meet at a bar. Or a wife dies. Or a man loses his job.

Slowly, like a train departing from a station, the story builds up speed and power. And during that slow build-up, readers lose interest and go on to something else.

If you’re a novice writer, it may never have occurred to you to start your book later in the story. And then you hear the term “backstory,” and you start thinking about it. And suddenly you’ve taken a giant step towards becoming a professional author.

Experienced writers choose a starting point that reveals character, relates to their theme, or starts the action moving. Or – better yet – does all three. Background information (the “backstory”) gets introduced later, after readers are hooked.

Little Women is a great example. The famous opening line (“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug) doesn’t explain who Jo is, who’s there with her, or why there won’t be any presents this year. What it does – very effectively – is pull you into the room where the four sisters are thinking about the bleak prospects for this year’s December festivities.

Think how different the book would be if Louisa May Alcott had begun it this way: “Jo March was born in 1838, the second of four girls, to a loving New England family beset with chronic financial problems.”

I can’t recall every being taught about backstory in a writing class – or ever talking about it myself when I used to teach literature. But it’s an intriguing concept, as well as a counterintuitive one.

Common sense tells you that books should never confuse their readers. The plot, characters, setting, and theme have to be crystal clear if you want to sell your book. You can’t let too much time go by before you explain what’s going on.

And therein lies a paradox. If you pause to introduce your characters and explain what’s happening and why, readers won’t bother to turn to the next page. Back goes the book onto the bookshelf, never to be opened again.

The trick is to work your backstory into your opening pages so skillfully that the story never slows down – not even for a second.

How can you learn how to do that? Simple. Go to your bookcase, pull out five or six novels you’ve enjoyed, and read the first page of each one with an eye to backstory. How did the author pull it off? Look and learn.

And then try it yourself.

Wooden Pencil Holder

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Mystify and Simplify

Toni Morrison

I love this quotation from Toni Morrison: “The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”

Unpacking what she’s saying would take a long time, and even then I don’t think I’d get all of it. But that’s not the point, is it? I mean she’s already said what she wanted to communicate. Why is a restatement necessary?

What really excites me about her statement is that it breaks away from so much of what we think is true about writing: Write what you know. Write from your gut. Be true to yourself.

Nope. According to Morrison, writing isn’t about you (or me) at all. It’s about power – using words to transform reality into something new and unexpected. “Familiarize the strange” – make me feel connected to something outside the realm of my experience. “Mystify the  familiar” – show me that what I’m seeing (or what I think I’m seeing) is only part of the picture.

My favorite nonfiction book, The Little Princesses, falls into the “familiarize the strange” category. I’m never – alas – going to be on intimate terms with royalty. But I can slip into their world and look around – thanks to this reminiscence by the governess who taught Princess Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) as a child.

“Mystify the familiar” is the category for the piles and piles of books I’ve read about language and psychology. Nothing is more ordinary than the everyday words we use and the habits that shape our daily lives. But when someone with a brain like James Hillman’s or Jacques Derrida’s gets to work, nothing ever looks the same again.

What an exciting way to think about writing!

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The Finish Line

If you look up “writing process” in a writing textbook, you’ll find a tidy, linear explanation of how writers get their ideas on paper and polish them to be read by other people.

What those books tell you…isn’t true. (You can trust me on this. I’ve written two of those textbooks myself: Sentence Power – Holt, Rinehart & Winston – and Introduction to College Writing – Pearson.)

If you’ve read my previous posts about the Shaw and Education chapter I’ve been writing, you know that my own writing process is neither tidy nor linear.

It doesn’t have to be! The only thing that matters is coming up with a finished product you’re proud of. It doesn’t matter how you get there.

My favorite part of the writing process is the last step. Textbooks say that this is the proofreading step – making small editing changes in punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure.

I don’t work that way. For one thing, I edit as I go. Usage mistakes drive me crazy, and I find that rewording a sentence often affects the next sentence, and then I have to rewrite the following paragraph….It’s a lot easier just to get my sentences right during the early stages.

What I do last is work in additional material that I discovered after I completed my early drafts. It is an insane way to work. It is also fun, sort of like putting a puzzle together. While I was finishing up my Shaw and Education chapter, I pulled out some notes I’d made several months ago. Because I had a strict word limit (3,000 words), I’d had to leave out many marvelous ideas, examples, and quotations.

Nevertheless – and cheerfully ignoring the fact that I’d already hit my word limit – I read through several scribbled pages of notes to see if anything jumped out at me. And something did. In his essay “The Religion of the Pianoforte” (strange title!) Shaw had written, “It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thinking that sets a man feeling.”

Central to Shaw. It needed to be there, even if it wasn’t strictly about education. Fiddle, fiddle. Find some unnecessary words to cut.

Success! Quotation in, word limit honored.

I’m finished.

And it was fun, just as I’d thought it would be.

Open Notebook

 

 

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George Bernard Shaw and Education

A while ago, a friend invited several Shaw scholars – including me – to help him with a book he was putting together for a university press. Friday afternoon I went to the college library and picked up a book I needed to complete one last task for my contribution, a chapter about Bernard Shaw and education.

Of course I’m not really finished, even though I’ve already asked another Shaw scholar to critique my work. (He loved it!) I keep tinkering with what I’ve written, making tiny changes to sentences that have already been rewritten over and over.

It’s like something I’ve been told by friends who are famous for their culinary skills: When they sit down to eat a meal they’ve cooked for a dinner party, every bite is disappointing – even though their guests are raving about the food. I suspect it’s an unavoidable part of the creative process: The finished product never comes up to the glittering standard you were aiming for.

Still, it was fun to push my chapter over the finish line, and I’m happy with what I’ve done. I went into a drawer and pulled out notes I’d made along the way (some on the backs of baggage forms I’d picked up in an Amtrak station while we waited for a delayed train) to see if I’d missed anything important.

Happily, I hadn’t – but I came across a few quotations that were just too good to leave out, and that meant cutting elsewhere so that I could stick to my 3,000 word limit. That final stage in the writing process was fun, easy, and tidy.

But calling it a “writing process” sounds more formal and serious than it really is. I had gotten off to a messy and disorganized start (as I always do) a year ago by listing everything that absolutely, positively had to go into the chapter:

  • a famous quotation that infuriates teachers (“He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches”)
  • Shaw’s unhappy memories of his own schooldays
  • a governess who taught him how to read
  • his astoundingly successful program to educate himself

I also knew I’d be talking about Pygmalion (which later became My Fair Lady) – a play in which a half-educated flower girl learns how to speak and act like a lady.

And that was it. Do you see anything profound there? Or anything that a 21st-century educator would find interesting or inspiring? Or anything that could be expanded into 3,000 words?

I didn’t either.

The next thing I did was to purchase a 1958 book called Shaw on Education. It’s a well-researched and thoughtful book – but it’s also hopelessly out of date. I started reading and found the first two chapters astonishing. The British education system from Shaw’s time was totally different from what we have in the US today. I read those two chapters at least a dozen times because they provided such a good explanation of Shaw’s educational philosophy.

At that point a month had gone by, and I had no clue about how to put my chapter together. Shaw died in 1950. How was I going to make him relevant to today’s readers?

More in my next post!

Bernard Shaw

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