Proper Focus

Posted on Jun 30, 2009 in Write Anything, Writing | 0 comments

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.

Speak Your Mind

Posted on Jun 4, 2009 in Looking Back, Politics, Write Anything | 0 comments

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.

My Cliché of Choice

Posted on May 26, 2009 in Write Anything, Writing | 0 comments

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 Rules

Posted on May 19, 2009 in Write Anything, Writing | 0 comments

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.