A couple of weeks ago I shared with you that I had created blogs for my two eldest children. Like many neophyte bloggers they have spent the last two weeks obsessed with the technical details of their new toys—which is all fine and good—but this obsession has come at the expense of any real care over the content of their blogs. I’m not so much concerned about the subjects of their posts—my boy seems preoccupied with locating YouTube animations of Star Wars Lego characters—after all the posts of a teen and a preteen off their leashes will nearly always seem vapid to an adult. But so far they seem unconcerned about things like misspellings, sloppy punctuation or style.

So it was a nice surprise a few days ago when I got little assistance from an unexpected source. Smashing Design is a site I’ve followed for a couple of years now that gives excellent tips and techniques for web design. They’re always giving out freebies (like icon sets) and compiling helpful lists (like 25 hacks for your Wordpress blog). It’s definitely one of those sites that can get a blogger lost in the nuts and bolts of keeping a blog up and running instead of focusing on writing.

But a few days ago, Smashing Magazine published 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills. It’s a actually a fairly comprehensive list of 50 websites that focus on the basics, like grammar and punctuation, and moving through some fairly technical tools that can check the readability of you blog.

I haven’t yet browsed through all 50 of the sites, but I have forwarded the site to my kids with the warning that their blogs were created to help them experiment with and improve their writing—and maybe it’s time they get started.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

You might be surprised to know how many of my posts here at Write Anything start with discussions with various members of my family. Then again, if you spent 20 minutes with my eldest son, and promptly lost count of the “Why does ______?” questions, you might not be so surprised. Well, all four of the little ones are 2 weeks into their 4.5 week summer break and they’re driving us crazy. I remember as a kid having to be forcibly kept in the house—sure I watched some TV—but with these kids they would be content to do nothing besides play the Wii and veg in front of the TV—most of the time food would merely be an added bonus. So we’ve put our feet down and demanded that they find some hobbies.

They have the imagination of zombies and immediately started thinking about what hobbies they’re favorite TV characters have—I kid you not. Then when they realized that TV show characters rarely have hobbies they asked us for suggestions. That’s when the oldest asked me about blogging. She’d picked up enough overhearing my sweetie and I talk abut our own blogs, to know that blogs involved writing but that was about all she knew.

So we started talking. In the last year or so she’s latched onto books in a big way, and in the last couple of months she’s been greatly enjoying the basic poems they’ve been writing in English. So we decided that she could have her own blog. Now her younger brother, all of 11, is nothing if not a follower, and he’d be apoplectic if anyone got anything he didn’t. So he had to have a blog of his own, too.

Now I may seem a little cynical about some of their reasons for having a blog, but I certainly take seriously the prospect of passing on the love of writing to my little ones. I’m not sure what they’ll use their blogs for, of even if they’ll use them for more than a few days. I spent a few minutes finding a template that fit their personalities, and a little while longer showing them how to use the software.

And as anxious as I am to help them share my love of the written word, I am also apprehensive about setting my little ones loose in the blogging world. Not only are there nefarious sorts out there who would take advantage of young children, but there are also honest people who can crush a young one’s spirit before they even realize they’re trashing the poem of a 13-year-old. So for now I’m keeping control of their blogs with me—I’ll see everything that gets posted, I’ll screen every comment.

So if you’d like to help two fledgling writers along, feel free to click on over to their blogs and leave an encouraging word, as they start down what I hope is a long, rewarding path.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

A few days ago someone sent me a link with a series of birthday trivia—what bread cost when I was born, the price of a new car—and it included historical events that happened on June 4. Several of the events I was unaware of or didn’t remember. But one, I will never forget, as I watched it unfold on TV.

Twenty years ago, on my seventeenth birthday, as I waited for my father to pick me up to go see the third Indiana Jones movie, around the world from me a young man—of immeasurable bravery—stood his ground.

It was twenty years ago this week that the People’s Republic of China brought a violent end to the peaceful student protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

For most of the people reading this post, the fight for your ability to think what you want and say what you want, was fought and won long before you were born. In my case (U.S.) the closest connection I have to many of them are the faces on my currency. As a young man it was difficult to understand the need to fight for such basic freedoms, and a world without those freedoms seemed abstract.

But watching as thousands of young Chinese put their lives second to the idea that they and their countrymen should be able to express their ideas, and seeing the brutal suppression of their protests, made it clear to those of us who were listening that the rights we take for granted are far from universal.

I’m a fanatic of free speech—the ACLU would consider me liberal on the subject. I can name many of the legal cases, decided over hundreds of years, that have codified my right to say what I want. But even I take them for granted—it’s inevitable when you’ve never had to fight for something.

But I’m not sure those of us who watched Tiananmen Square—who saw the Berlin Wall become irrelevant in a few short days—are able to overlook the rights the same way we did before June 4, 1989.

The West will never know how many people, students and soldiers, died at Tiananmen Square, but the number certainly reached into the hundreds—some say into the thousands. And we don’t know precisely what happened to the brave man who stared down a line of tanks (though most intelligence agencies report that he was tortured and killed). But we do know that in the 20 years since Tiananmen Square freedom has not come to the men and women who stood their ground.

It’s unfair to say the victims of Tiananmen Square died in vain, as their sacrifice gave a taste of freedom to more than 100,000 young Chinese—and freedom is a taste not easily forgotten.

But freedoms are like muscles—occasionally, they must be exercised or they will wither.

So this week, 20 years after 100,000 people you have never met, stood their ground and risked their lives for just a few moments of freedom, I challenge each of you to remember their fight by exercising your freedom. This week, stand up and say what others can’t.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

I had a different post planned for today—a wandering post about the value of a writing partner. But Paul’s and Jodi’s posts of the past two days—as well as the fact that I couldn’t stop said post from wandering—have led me to this post in its stead.

It’s important—perhaps even critical—for a writer to find a place that stimulates and nurtures his creativity. If you’re lucky enough you’re ideal spot will be at home. But Paul detailed the greatest threat to this set-up—the immediacy of the internet. Add to that a family, or the lack thereof, and the home office may be anything but creative.

So where does one write?

In a frightful nod to the cliché the best place for me to write has always been a café.

The most creative times in my life have been spent inside cheap—inexpensive, not run-down—restaurants. The Wag’s (if you never had Wag’s in your area, it’s not far removed from a Denny’s) on Biscayne Boulevard, down the street from the University, saw an incredible number of late-night pencil-and-paper sessions. And not just creative sessions, but study sessions of all sorts.

The café in question (although if you’ve ever been to a Wag’s you’ll know that café is a more than generous term) had the misfortune of having all the traits that make a location perfect for me:

• Open 24 Hours: Truth be told I could have cared less about the sunrise to sunset hours. But it was happily open for my mt creative hours.
• Busy: That is to say there was plenty of activity. A nice steady din is critical to a creative environment, and the groups of people coming and going allowed for plenty of people-watching and lent their quirks to more than a few characters.
• But Not too Busy: So I didn’t have to feel guilty for tying up a table for hours at a time, and I could always get a big table to spread out my papers and textbooks.
• Cheap Food: Dinner a drink and tip all for about $10.
• Good Air Conditioning: In Miami, when the dorms don’t have adequate air conditioning this is not a minor point.
• Waitresses: They were nice enough, kept the iced tea filled, and weren’t attractive enough to be distracting.

I list these reasons (well…hopefully because it’s at least mildly amusing) not under any assumption that the reasons will apply to you, but because Jodi asked us what our ideal writing space would be.

I don’t understand people who can write in a beautiful vacation spot. How Thoreau got any work at all done at Walden Pond baffles me. I’d spend my time sleeping in, hiking, maybe fishing…anything but working. But that’s me. My “café” wouldn’t be your ideal environment, and your writer’s retreat would be a terrible drain on my will to write.

But both Paul and Jodi are correct It’s vital that you determine what you need to be creative, and that you find—or create—a place that fits your needs.

Writers generally aren’t allowed many clichés, but we all have a few tucked away in a drawer somewhere. Writing in a café is one of mine.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

Writing is one of those trades/hobbies/activities in which we are always a student and nearly always a teacher. I could list many more, but this is, after all a writing blog. As we always teachers, we as a group are prime candidates for boiling our experiences down to rules. Nearly every writing teacher or professor I’ve had has their own rules, whether a formal set they force their students to follow, or an informal set they guide the students with. Likewise, every writer develops their own maxims and guidelines for their own work.

Three days ago I saw a post-it note stuck to a cash register that violated several of the rules I try to follow, so the topic has been on my mind. An with Jodi’s urging yesterday to look back, I thought today might be a good day to examine some of my rules.

Here is a partial list of my writing rules—rules wielded with the understanding that I’m free to break them as long as I have a good reason:

• You get 3 exclamation points in your writing career—use them wisely: a college Prof enforced this one more than literally, striking down every exclamation mark submitted in his class. His reasoning was solid even if his execution was a little fanatical. He thought that if a sentence, whether dialogue or exposition, needed an exclamation to make its point then the sentence needed some work. Since then I have never consciously used an exclamation mark.
• A writer’s knowledge should be an inch deep and a mile wide: that is to say we need to be able to speak—or write—conversantly about many, many subjects, but rarely is in-depth information needed, at which point we can research said subject. This was actually handed down by an advertising professor, but I’ve adapted it to writing if for no other reason than it gives me an excuse to read a variety of books on many, many subjects.
• To write snappy dialogue immediately throw out the first response: If we write dialogue the way it’s actually spoken, we would bore our readers nearly to death. The ums and ahs along with the simple one word answers of everyday speech may be informative but good writing it is not. When a character asks a question, throw out the simple yes or no answer, and give an answer with more depth, emotion, information, or whatever else your scene needs and your dialogue can supply.
• Do not curse: This one is adapted from advice my father gave me. There’s nothing wrong with cursing per se, but more often than not it’s a a way to cover up bad writing (or bad speaking as it was presented to me). It’s not that I don’t allow my characters to curse—characters have their own semi-free will and they will largely do what they will—but when the writer speaks I will not use profanity unless there really is no other way to say it.

What rules have you scraped together over the years?

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

Because of my affiliation with Project 2,996—an effort to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks—I have been contacted by several people who assume I would be in favor of creating a national holiday to remember the victims or 9/11. And most are rather surprised when I express my opposition to the idea.

Now, normally, I’m a to-each-their-own kind of guy, but in this case, and because of my public stance in the matter of the 9/11 victims, I thought I should at least state my reasons.

I’ll start by saying I love the sentiment behind the idea of making 9/11 a national holiday. I appreciate the thoughts of anyone who cares enough about remembering nearly 3,000 of our own civilians to campaign for a special day to remember them, but I have several objections to making 9/11 a national holiday.

But the only objection that really matters to me, is that I don’t think I can stomach the free market turning 9/11 into another reason for a car sale, or a furniture clearance event. And that’s what it it will become. Memorial Day is supposed to be a day to remember those who have given their lives in the military service of this country. But over the years it has become a day to celebrate the beginning of summer…a day for the mall to hold a slew of sales, and the opening day for half of the pools in America. But who really takes more than a moment to remember our military heroes?

If 9/11 becomes a holiday if will just become the day that businesses will end their week long Labor Day Sales Events, and I can’t think to a worse way to remember 2,996 unwitting heroes.

When I started writing fiction I was almost solely dependent on the omniscient third person narrator. It’s become the de facto standard for most fiction because it unobtrusive and…well, because it’s easy. Easy is just a euphemism because no writing is easy, but of all available points of view it is the easiest to write. But in the ensuing years I’ve become enamored of some of the more entertaining points of view.

To be sure, the dispassionate third person POV has a strong place in fiction. In fact in the modern age one could argue that it’s hold on fiction is stronger than ever, because it’s the closest POV to what’s on TV—with no voice between the action and the reader.

But think about the answer to this question. When you listen to someone tell a story—a friend, a coworker, a comedian…—how much does the narrator matter? Is the story the same no matter who tells it? Of course it isn’t.

But if you decide to ditch the bland third person POV, you still have some strong choices.

Lively Third Person: This POV is still in the third person, it’s still someone not involved telling the story, but instead of a dispassionate retelling of events, the narrator brings some personality—some flash—to the story. While not limited to humorous fiction, many comic fiction writers have used this POV to great effect. In fact this one is a natural for humor because we’re used to hearing comedians tell stories.

First Person: In recent years this one has become a personal favorite. But it’s biggest plus is also it’s biggest minus—you have to get to know one character better than you have to know your other characters. You can’t just know the narrator well enough to write him into a few scenes. You have to be able to get into the character’s head for the entire story, bring his attitude, humor, fears, vocabulary to the narrative. If your have a strong, engaging character for your narrator it will solidify your story, but if you don’t know your character well enough, or if your character doesn’t measure up, your story will fall flat.

For many stories there won’t be just one right POV for your story, but choosing an engaging character to tell your story can certainly add a little zing to your story.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

As any of you who are regular readers here will likely know, when it comes to the written word, I’m a humour junkie. It all started back in my childhood when I picked up a copy of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And through the years I’ve scrounged together quite a collection of signed first editions of humourous novels, and some non-fiction as well.

Though I have a love of many different types of fiction, there are several reasons I lean toward humour. But the primary one is that it’s incredibly difficult to write.

Sure, all writing is difficult—you’ll never hear me deny that. But trying to write funny adds an extra layer of difficulty. Why? What’s so hard about being funny?

There are dozens if not hundreds of ways to be funny. You can have standard world with a sarcastic narrator, everything can be slapstick, or the premise of your story could just be downright bizarre…I could go on and on. But very nearly all of it—in fact nearly all non-written humour as well—comes down to just one thing. Delivering the unexpected.

That isn’t to say that everything unexpected is funny—but the expected is sure not to be funny.

This is particularly important to understand because the corollary to my love of reading comic fiction is that I also love to write comedy. Or at least I used to. Actually, that’s a little misleading…I still love to write it, I’ve just lost the knack. But I’m trying to get it back.

In her essay “Learning to Write Comedy or Why It’s Impossible and How to Do It“, Connie Willis (one of my favorite comic and non-comic writers) says:

There’s no step-by-step method for writing humorous fiction (Step 4: Insert clever wordplay every sixth line) and no easily learned formula. It’s not possible to be taught to write comedy—I doubt if it’s possible to be taught to write anything—but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn. And the way to learn to write comedy is to watch and read comedies and analyze what you’re watching and reading.

So I’ve delved into some of my favorite comic gems, both to try to reignite the spark but also to try to see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. During this exploration I’ve also picked up some non-comic books, an even some downright depressing ones and I’ve found out something a bit unexpected.

There is humour everywhere. Nearly every book I’ve read that’s even half-decent has some humour tossed in. Often hand-in-hand with very serious subject matter. John Varley is a great example of this. No matter what his subject matter at least one of the characters—often the first person narrator—has an acidic sense of humour, which peeks it’s head out at some very inopportune times. Even authors who chronicle real-life horror, like the authors of Schindler’s List and Night, juxtapose light humour with the atrocities they describe—the humour making the sadness more poignant.

But why is humour so difficult? To oversimplify it, the situations that create drama and sadness are nearly universal. But what we find funny is much more diverse, and is colored by things like, where we grew up, what our family was like, our education, our friends, what we read, what we learn, and to a certain extent what we are told is funny by others.

Death is one of those things that is universally sad, but a good author can change the timing, or a critical word and some people will find it funny—but not everyone. The trick is to use humour to enhance the story, while not letting the story rely on the humor. That way if one joke or another falls flat, the reader is still involved in the story, instead of feeling left out of something.

To be certain it’s a delicate line, but it can add so much depth to your stories, and your writer’s toolbox.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

Powerlessness is the worst feeling in the world—the feeling that you have no control over your own life.

Lately it seems like every time I check my news feeds, there’s a new story about another mass shooting, or another normal person who went mad. It’s easy to demonize these people, especially as they rarely survive their own rampages. But I suspect that if they were to survive and tell their own stories, we’d all be secretly ashamed to admit that we might understand them just a little bit. I do.

Not their actions, to be sure. But the inner turmoil that tore their minds to shreds is something we’re all dealing with right now.

Is powerlessness worse than grief? No, they’re basically the same thing. Powerlessness is at the very heart of grief. We grieve because me miss someone or something and are powerless to bring them back.

Heartbreak is the same thing. We love someone and we can’t do anything about it.

Right now I am powerless.

Completely and utterly without power.

I have no job. And no matter how many jobs I apply for I get no calls. The only income I have is from unemployment, something I have never had to resort to. Last week I spent 6 hours in line to apply for food stamps. And just yesterday my sweetie had to sit in line for another 5 hours to get help with the power bill.

My kids ask for money to buy little things, and I have to say no. My sweetie or I would like to go out for dinner but we can’t afford to. I try to sleep, but I lie awake in bed, so I go back to my computer for some late night job browsing and ultimately fall asleep at my desk. I used to consider myself employable—after all I have a Bachelor’s degree, plenty of experience in my field, and I’m damn good at what I do. But a lot of good it’s doing me right now.

On top of that, friends have died, and too many friends have lost family members in the last few months. I had hoped to give my sweetie a tiny vacation in the form of a weekend getaway, but she just canceled because we can’t afford it.

It’s maddening to sit up late at night, my mind frantically searching for any way out of the situation we’re in, but nothing comes. I can’t read anymore because my mind wanders. I can’t write anymore because I’m apathetic. And frankly the only reason I can find not to do something drastic is that 5 people depend on me.

Recovery…moving on…happiness….they all just seem so out of reach.

There is no worse feeling…

My fiancée won’t sing if anyone can hear her. I won’t dance in front of anyone. Neither of these conditions is unique. Or even uncommon.

This is unfortunate as both singing and dancing are a way of expressing deep emotion. They are amazingly effective at expressing joy, love, anger, frenzy and despair at levels difficult to express through more mundane means. They also happen to be wonderful ways to relieve stress. The benefits of singing and dancing have been understood by religions and cultures for millennia—it’s why their so intertwined with rituals.

But a great number of people suffer these fears. People no longer sing out in joy because they expect others to judge them. I won’t dance in public because I’m afraid that someone will judge me a bad dancer, or laugh at me. And it’s a terrible shame that these forms of expression have been taken away from so many.

Why does this matter? Why did I bring this up on a writing blog?

Because the same thing happens with writing. Writing can be therapeutic in a big way. It’s not only a way to express emotion, it’s a way to test ideas, teach, communicate and create soaring works of art. But a large percentage of the population would never consider picking up the pen because they don’t think they’re any good.

Long ago, someone they looked up to, told them they were bad at it. Maybe it was a teacher who gave a series of subpar grades. Maybe it was a non-supportive parent. Maybe a helpful friend gave an accidentally-harsh critique.

As writers, amateur or professional, we have a unique influence over how others feel about their own writing. Most people don’t write for the purpose of entertaining, or with the thought of being published. Most people, when they pick up the pen, do so merely with the intention to communicate an idea. And they shouldn’t believe, as most of us do, that if we can’t do something at an unusually high level of quality, that we shouldn’t do it at all. We can encourage, or ruin a fledgling author with a well- or misplaced comment.

It’s a beautiful thing when someone sings and doesn’t care that they sound flat. There’s something freeing about watching people dance when they know it feels good, and don’t care whether it looks good. And there’s something refreshing about someone who writes just for the joy of writing, with no burden of the need to spell every word correctly, or to proofread to make sure every comma is in the right place.

Remember, expression should be fun, no matter how serious its message.

I for one, intend to fight to make sure that my tone-deaf daughter sings at the top of her lungs, and my son with a penchant for cliché continues to write his predictable comic books. Because life’s just better that way.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.