Last week I was helping a friend write a report for her job. After about 10 minutes, she had a question for me – an important one. “You keep talking about showcasing myself,” she said. “What does that mean, and does it really matter in something I’m writing for work?”

Good questions!

“Showcasing” means crafting your writing so that readers are impressed (or intrigued or convinced, depending on your purpose) by what you’ve written. To put it more simply, it means selling yourself and your ideas.

“Showcasing” is essential to writing, but it’s often overlooked in traditional writing courses. When you’re writing in school about a topic that’s been assigned to you, your instructor is probably looking for unity, coherence, effective word choices, sophisticated sentences, and so on. There seems to be little need to “showcase” yourself and your ideas. (Actually there is, and I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Once you enter the working world your writing takes on deeper and broader purposes.  You’re promoting an idea or a project – or yourself. Often you’re trying to create an identity or brand for yourself:  “This is who I am. Look what I can do!” (And that strategy can be useful in school as well. It doesn’t hurt to make your instructor think you’re smart, or witty, or insightful – and a good writer can incorporate all those qualities into an essay or research paper.)

I can pinpoint the first time I began to think about a writing task as a showcase. I was teaching in the prison system and had some ideas about how officers could do their jobs better. They received little training in communication skills and problem solving, and the deficiencies showed  in their chaotic interactions with inmates.

But as a female English instructor I had little clout in the male-dominated world of corrections. So I didn’t even bother talking to the administrators about my observations. Instead I wrote an article for the statewide corrections newsletter. And I wrote it not from my point of view – “You guys need help!” but from theirs: Good problem-solving and communication skills would reduce officer stress and make them safer.

A few weeks after the article was published, I received a phone call from the state office of corrections. Soon I was traveling to prisons all over the state to conduct staff training in communications and problem solving.

On one of those trips I talked to an instructor who said she’d been trying for years to persuade administrators to offer the kind of instruction I was doing. “How come they listened to you and not me?” she asked.

“I wrote an article,” I said. “And I did a selling job.”

It worked for me. Will it work for you? Yes!

                    Showcase Yourself!

It’s been a dream of mine for a long time: Write a scholarly article about Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It’s easy to see that my dream is unlikely to come true, for two reasons. 1) I’m a Shaw scholar, not a Shakespearean expert. 2) So many articles and books have been written about Hamlet already that I’m unlikely to come up with an idea to write about.

(I do have one advantage: I spent several years obsessively reading about Hamlet. And I knew I’d be quoting from my favorite scholarly piece about Hamlet: “The Prince or the Poem” by C. S. Lewis.)

But I wasn’t really going to waste time on such an unlikely project, was I? My unconscious mind had an answer to that. A couple of mornings ago, it woke me up at 4 AM with the beginning of an article in my head. It’s a terrific idea – one I’d mentioned, in fact, in an article I just published about Shaw’s Pygmalion.

But there’s this teeny-weeny problem that I don’t know anything – big, fat zero – about the idea I want to pursue (here it is, in a nutshell: Hamlet as a student of literature). Where should I start my research? Jacques Derrida? Stanley Fish? Roland Barthes? There’s no guarantee they’d have anything useful to say.

And even if I were able to create a research plan, I don’t know if there’s enough content to warrant an article.

Nothing daunted, I started doing some research this morning. And what I found out – improbably – is that C. S. Lewis – yes, the same C. S. Lewis! – has written a book (not about Shakespeare – its topic is literary criticism) that might feed me some of the ideas I need.

I downloaded the e-book edition this morning and started reading. Yikes. I had forgotten what a fabulous writer Lewis is. (I used to be a Lewis maniac – have read almost everything he ever published. It’s so good to be spending time with him again.)

So thank you, Unconscious Mind, for an early Christmas present: I am having FUN! 

I’ve self-published five books through CreateSpace and helped several of my friends publish books they’ve written. So I consider myself an expert – able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so to speak.

But I was stymied recently when a friend asked for help with a book he’d written. Everything worked fine through most of the formatting process. I even figured out how to insert the custom title page that another friend had done for him.

But when I tried to set up the copyright page, my software kept inserting a blank page. Despite all my computer smarts, I couldn’t solve the problem. I started thinking that I’d have to hire a formatting service ($200 and up) to fix that one mistake – or abandon the book project. (There’s no way he could pay that kind of fee.)

And then I remembered that Word often embeds hidden codes when you hit the Enter key at the end of a paragraph. I deleted the paragraph break (also called a “hard return”), and the blank page vanished. (Good riddance!)

___________________________________________

My point is that formatting a book requires discipline. You have to use the Styles feature in Word. You can’t blithely keep hitting the space bar or tab key to get the look you want. If you throw that advice to the winds (or never learned how to use Word properly – my friend’s problem), you’re likely to end up with a mess that only a wizard can straighten out.

I consider myself – ahem! – one step closer to wizard status. But I hope I never find myself in that situation again.

Here’s the problem I was facing: a December 1 deadline for a proposal to do a conference presentation in the spring.

And here’s what’s amazing: despite a really tough struggle with inertia, I just sent it off.

Maybe the problem was the holiday preparations (we’ve shipped all our gifts and done most of our decorating). Maybe I just needed a break. Or it might be simply that I lost my momentum when I stopped thinking about writing and started focusing on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Whatever it was, I couldn’t get past it…until yesterday, when I used a favorite trick to get my writing engine started – two tricks, actually.

The first was a reward (or self-imposed threat, depending on how you look at it). A friend loaned me a crime novel that I was eager to read – Hell Fire by Karin Fossum. I told myself that I couldn’t start reading it until I’d spent some time on the proposal. (And now that I’ve read the book, I kind of wish I hadn’t: it’s sad.)

The second strategy was something that time management experts call a “leading task” – a non-threatening chore to get myself moving. I challenged myself to type some quotations I wanted to use in my proposal.

Total time invested: about 20 minutes. Bonus: I was so proud of myself – and so energized – that I drafted almost the entire proposal in one sitting. I was typing away, starting to really get into it, and I suddenly realized that I had my required 250 words.

That was yesterday. Today I did some revising and then sent it off.

Now comes the fun part – putting a PowerPoint together. The presentation is about Village Wooing, a playlet by Bernard Shaw about a man and woman who meet on a cruise ship and eventually decide to get married.

I’ve already found a picture of two deck chairs to use in my presentation! 

A few years ago I started reading books by Joan Didion, an important contemporary American writer. Her memoirs about the deaths of her husband (The Year of Magical Thinking) and daughter (Blue Nights) are extraordinary books – honest, deeply personal, and yet universal.

Didion is most famous for writing books that combine social commentary with reflections on her personal life. I have not yet read any of these, but her name is high on my To Do list. A couple of weeks ago I came across a paragraph from her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem that reminds me of James Hillman, my favorite author:

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

There’s an entire book in that paragraph. Yours. Mine.

Years ago, when I was recovering from a severe case of shingles, I made a couple of appointments with a psychologist friend to try to figure out what had triggered my illness. (Shingles is widely regarded as a stress-related disease.) Part of the intake procedure was a decade-by-decade survey of my life, and the name Richard Burton inevitably came up when we talked about my college years. I lightheartedly recalled how besotted and silly I had been – a foolish college girl who knew very little about life.

To my astonishment, my psychologist friend was intrigued by my imaginary love affair – even respectful of it. And so I gradually began to revise my attitude towards the Jean-I-had-been. She knew some important things that I’d forgotten about. She was someone important, even if she sometimes embarrasses me today.

Our relentless march toward a New and Improved Self is often a…mistake. Didion is right: The people we used to be need to be welcomed back into our lives.

I really like the disciplined and hard-working person I’ve turned into. It’s a thrill to open my mailbox and find a scholarly journal that features an article I’ve written. (That happened to me earlier this week.)

But so much has been pushed aside, buried, forgotten. Did you know that one Saturday, years ago, I watched a live performance of Swan Lake not once but twice? That I’m gradually filling a metal dollhouse with vintage Renwal plastic furniture? That Bill the Cat is my favorite cartoon character? That I read The Boxcar Children over and over when I was a child?

Not everything I used to love has held up well over the years. But – Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding – often you can go home again. At least I can. Swan Lake is still my favorite ballet, The Boxcar Children is still a wonderful book (I reread it recently and loved it all over again), and Bill the Cat is back with us again, courtesy of Facebook, and as funny as ever.

If you want to be a writer, the first step is to become an interesting person. You can always hire someone to fix your punctuation and sentence structure. But nobody can fix you – that’s a task you have to do yourself.

The good news is that you already are an interesting person. If you sometimes feel empty, or lost, or useless, welcome to the human race. We all feel that way. But there’s a remedy. The energy reserves you need are hidden inside you. Start looking for them, and start writing!

              Joan Didion

A headline on the front page of yesterday’s newspaper caught my eye. (“Polk” refers to the county where we live.)

Duke Energy Making Polk Lines More Avian Friendly

Why “avian friendly”? What’s wrong with “bird friendly”?

Here’s the likely explanation: Somebody on the newspaper staff had an English teacher who liked fancy words. The truth, though, is that pompous words don’t impress anyone. If you want to be a good writer, don’t try to cram as many big words as possible into your sentences. Your first goal should be to have something interesting to say.

A couple of hours after I read about the avian friendly electrical lines, I happened to visit the newspaper’s website. I found this improved version of the headline there:

Duke Energy Moves to Keep Birds on Wires Fireproof

It’s still clumsy, but at least it’s talking about birds.

Here’s how I would have written that headline: 

Duke Energy Making Polk Electric Lines Safer for Birds

This is a good opportunity to remind you about a neurological principle that’s solid gold can for writers: There’s an ongoing movie track inside our heads. Good writers exploit this principle by providing a steady steam of pictures for their readers. 

Let me give you two examples of what I’m talking about. Take a look at this sentence:

John and Mary planted annuals near the front door.

It’s a fine sentence. But if you change “the” to “their,” it becomes a better sentence because your brain sees John and Mary twice, rather than once:

John and Mary planted annuals near their front door.

I use this “create a picture” principle all the time. Let’s take another look at the first sentence in my post for today:

A headline on the front page of yesterday’s newspaper caught my eye. 

My sentence includes four items that you can see: headline, front page, newspaper, eye. Good writers are always looking for words with eye appeal. Is that something you strive to do? If not, it’s a good habit for you to start developing right away.

Years ago when I was writing my book about Bernard Shaw, I knew I was facing a daunting task. But there was one thought that gave me solace: I didn’t have to study Karl Marx.

Although Marx’s writings were once a huge influence on Shaw’s economic and political thinking, they became less important as Shaw grew older…or so the scholars thought. Huge sigh of relief from Jean.

And then, unexpectedly, I found out that the opposite was true – a story for another day. (Preview: The starting point of the story was that James Hillman was getting over a bout with the flu. I am not making this up.)

What I discovered was that Marx had a huge effect on the way we think about language. Jacques Derrida was an avid Marxist, for example. Yes – alas – I ended up studying Karl Marx. 

All of which explains why I made a point of reading an article about Marx in a recent New Yorker magazine: “Karl Marx, Yesterday and Today.”

The author, Louis Menand, specializes in language and writing, making him one of my favorite New Yorker writers. So I was astonished when I read Menand’s comment about historians who try to read Marx in the context of his own era:

The mission is worthy. Historicizing—correcting for the tendency to presentize the past—is what scholars do.

Presentize? Really, Louis?

Talk about a made-up word! If you Google presentize, you come up with…nothing. How did presentize end up in the New Yorker?

And yet…it works. Menand’s sentence has an elegant balance between historicize (an accepted word) and presentize.

(Historicize, incidentally, means “to interpret something as a product of historical development,” “to make historical,” or “to narrate as history.”)

Allow me a moment to explain why presentize shocked me so much. New words tend to have a slangy or jargonish feel, and it’s a good idea to avoid them when you’re writing for publication.

Invented words ending in –ize are a particular problem. Here’s an example I made up myself: Someone writing about cooking might be tempted to include batterize (meaning “dip in batter”) in a recipe for fried chicken. (I just Googled batterize. Mercifully no one seems to have tried to use it as a cooking term.)

So: Was it ok for Menand to coin the word presentize? Here’s the thing: After you’ve built a reputation (as Menand has done), you’re allowed to run a red light now and then.

I’m trying it myself in my latest piece about Shaw – not coining new words, but trying to inject some energy into the steady and impersonal tone you usually hear in scholarly writing. I’m not sure how well it will work, and I may end up throwing away the whole thing. But geez – it’s fun to try it!

                       Karl Marx

Like many states, Florida is gradually moving toward decriminalizing marijuana use. Last week the commissioners in a nearby town were thinking about softening the penalties for possession of small amounts of pot. Here’s the opening sentence from a November 11 newspaper article about the controversy:

LAKELAND — The City Commission chose not to buck the advice of municipal, county and state law enforcement officials by pursuing an ordinance to reduce the penalties for Lakeland Police Department’s enforcement of minor marijuana possession.

I was befuddled when I read that sentence, and I don’t think it was entirely my fault. The journalist who wrote it chose to cram everything into one sentence instead of recounting the events step-by-step. Result: confusion.

If you rewrite the information as an unfolding narrative (story), the information becomes clear right away:

LAKELAND – There’s a growing feeling that Lakeland Police Department’s penalties for minor marijuana possession are too severe. But when the City Commission started considering an ordinance that would reduce penalties, law enforcement officials from the city, county and state pushed back. In the end, the City Commission voted down the ordinance.

You probably noticed that I ended up with three sentences instead of one. Breaking a complicated sentence into several smaller ones is my favorite way to solve a writing problem. Strangely, though, I don’t often come across that advice in books about writing. (Naked, Drunk and Writing is a notable exception.)

I suspect that many writing instructors are members of the “long sentences are good” club – and that’s unfortunate. When I conduct writing workshops, I often find that writers are afraid of simplicity and clarity. They may not remember how to use a comma or apostrophe, but they continue to cling to the complicated sentence patterns their instructors preferred.

Here’s a common-sense principle for you: Long sentences with lots of commas don’t make you look smart. If you want to impress readers, work on your thinking skills. Read.  Join a writing group, or find a writing buddy. Master the usage principles that writers tend to overlook (parallel construction, clear pronoun references, and so on).

Most important, don’t confuse complicated writing with good writing. They’re not the same thing!

The Shaw paper I’ve been working on has been stalled for several weeks. Much of the energy I normally use for writing has been diverted into the presidential election. Ever since the political conventions this summer I’ve been volunteering for the Get Out the Vote effort, and I’m feeling more urgency as Election Day approaches.

It’s not just that I get tired walking from house to house in Florida’s heat. Canvassing requires digging deeply into my reserves of psychic energy. I’m a strong introvert, and talking to strangers isn’t easy for someone like me.

Whatever energy I have left over has been invested in (of course) dancing. Saturday morning I took a folk dance class before I headed out to knock on doors for my candidate.

Two things that happened have stuck in my head, and it finally occurred to me that they have something in common – something that can perhaps be applied to writing.

The folk dancing I’m learning is a stylized form often used in classical ballet. (The technical term is “character dancing.”)  There are three adults in the class and ten children.

Usually we adults have a hard time with the class because so many steps require jumping or hopping. But on Saturday the kids were struggling too, and the teacher was trying hard to help them with a tricky pattern.

And then – unexpectedly – she started grinning and talking about a friend of hers who trained horses. Watching the children today, she said, she suddenly realized they were colts!

And then it was okay that they were struggling. They’re supposed to. They’re colts, for heaven’s sake. (The teacher had the grace not to say that we adults were old nags!)

Here’s the point, though: She was making meaning by combining two dissimilar things – something that writers do all the time. That kind of connection is the basis for allegory and metaphor, but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

What interests me right now is energy. When those colts found their way into the ballet studio Saturday morning, the energy level changed. Suddenly it was ok to be young and awkward, with your limbs going every which way.

I started thinking about energy again while I was canvassing. Several children – maybe six or seven years old – were playing in front of an apartment building when I walked up with my clipboard and campaign button. They were wildly excited when they found out which candidate I was representing.

Suddenly I wasn’t tired any more, and the Florida heat didn’t matter. It was fun to be treated like a celebrity, but there was more. That enthusiasm had to be coming from somewhere. This election was really important to those children’s parents and grandparents, and the entire building was buzzing.

Back to writing. It requires high levels of energy, but most people have never been taught that simple truth. I know so many people who would love to write a memoir, a short story, a poem – even a letter to the editor – but they can’t find a way to rev up that writing engine. Sadly, many of them eventually get tired of struggling with that inertia and simply give up.

Experienced writers, on the other hand, know that there are many ways to crank up that energy: talking, drawing, reading, taking notes, visualizing the finished project.

And maybe sometimes – as long as it doesn’t become a habit! – we need to give ourselves a break.

Tomorrow is Election Day. Starting Wednesday, I’ll be coming back to my Shaw project. That’s a promise.

Why is the apostrophe there?

The answer is that I like it. The original name for Hallowe’en was the Eve of All Hallows, so it used to have a “v”: Hallows Even (think “evening”). When the “v” disappeared, an apostrophe was substituted (the same thing we do when we contract did not into didn’t).

“Hallow” is an old word for “holy” that you can still hear in the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be thy name.”

I often hear “hallow” pronounced like the word “hollow.” But if you know the history of this holiday, you’ll be careful with that a: Hallowe’en.

Here’s a brief account of how Hallowe’en got started. The Christian calendar designates November 1 as All Saints Day. Churches hold special celebrations to honor all the holy people who lived in earlier times.

Christians used to believe that on the evening of All Saints Day (October 31), the spirits of the dead came back to Earth. Those who were not-so-holy used their visiting time for pranks. Hence it became an ideal time for unruly adolescents to create all kinds of mischief: Any resulting damage could be blamed on the dead.

Over time, All Hallows’ Eve evolved into Hallowe’en. Or Halloween, minus the apostrophe.

Both are correct. I often use the apostrophe because I like the idea that our language still has hints of its history embedded in the spelling of some of our words.

But here’s the thing: If I were writing professionally, I would probably omit the apostrophe so that I’d be consistent with what other contemporary writers are doing.

English usage isn’t as cut-and-dried as many people think it is. Sometimes we’re allowed to make choices. I think it’s important for writers to be able to explain the reasons for their choices (as I just did).

Happy Hallowe’en! I hope you’ll have fun today.