Hero

Today The Zero Boss announced some changes about next month's Blogging for Books contest. It starts Monday. If you want to enter, the topic will be posted Monday, October 4, as a main blog entry.

In the past, heros sacrificed their lives to protect others. Gradually the meaning altered to make dying optional. Now the term is used to indicate someone who leads a cause, succeeds in an endeavor. Read all the definitions from various resources. While I mean no disrespect for any occupation that involves endangering oneself to help others, calling people heros simply for doing their jobs seems counterproductive, linguistically speaking. What do we call a woman who runs into the street to snatch her child from the path of an oncoming car, saves the baby, and dies as a result? Is there a new uber term? Superhero? Could we revert to the original connotation and invent a new term for those who don't sacrifice their very lives? What about "champion" and all the rest of the synonyms?

Champions of linguistic freedom wail about the need for a living language in which usage fluctuates with the times. Extremists on the right side of words beg for stasis. In the case of "hero", I'm siding with the SOTS (Save Our Tongue Society). We have a perfectly good lexicon of words with a wide range of applications for people who perform remarkably well. Let's save the heros for true heros.

amazon.com

Is it me, or is Amazon getting more difficult to navigate? The page addresses are so obscure, and the search engine so glitchy (still!) that unless you save a link to a page or its URL, you risk never finding it again. For example, click on this godawful long address resulting from a search I can't recall. If you've the patience to scroll way down the page, through ads, through some customer's reviews (including one by self-styled freelancer "InvisibleGirl", who can't spell 'lesser-known', a lessor being a person who leases out property to a lessee) eventually some interesting resources for writers appear.

Two on working and earning a living as a writer are identical, but contain a great list of basic resources. Some of the books appear in the third article with interesting commentary by a beginner. Following the articles are three Listmanias. Skip the middle one. The last useful section on this looooong page is "Look for similar books by subject:" It suggests categories and subjects on which to search. The searches could lead you to more buried treasure in the Amazon.

Point of View

In fiction writing we get to choose who tells the story. The omniscient author P.O.V. appears attractive at first glance. The all-knowing writer tells us what's happening, what people are thinking, feeling. Oops! This contradicts the good advice to "show, don't tell" what's going on, a better method of engaging readers. Also, frequently shifting the P.O.V. keeps readers off-balance and sometimes confused. A third person P.O.V., telling the story through the eyes of one or two characters, eliminates the potential hazards of the omniscient, but limits what the readers can know. Even more limiting is writing in the first person. Not only must you know the experience you write about, but it takes high technical word skill to avoid every sentence containing the word "I". Another limitation is that the character cannot know more than the narrative voice. Worst of all is speaking in the second person. It sounds like the writer is telling the reader what to think and feel. It's all tell and no show. Playing with the P.O.V. can help when you're stuck in a plot. Maybe the story needs telling from another character's perspective than the one with which you began. One piece of P.O.V. advice is usually pertinent: never shift the viewpoint within a single scene. Break up the action if you must; and give readers a visual clue that the P.O.V. is changing with a line space, asterisks, a pound sign, or some other signal.

Rules of Writing

Sometimes I think there are as many writing rules as there are writers. Certainly for every writer, or writing instructor, who dictates a rule, there's a successful writer who flouts it or flaunts breaking it.* Even Bruce Sterling, whose excellent lexicon of workshop terms is found on the Resources page, advocates the adage "Write What You Know". I'd like to turn that about a bit to read "Know What You Write". Your repertoire of topics could be severely limited if you only write on the familiar. Learn about something new for your next poem, article, or story. It's called "research", and most good writers rely on it to keep their works fresh. Even niche writers must keep up with the latest developments in their specialties.

* 'Usage Note: Flaunt as a transitive verb means "to exhibit ostentatiously": She flaunted her wealth. To flout is "to show contempt for": She flouted the proprieties. For some time now flaunt has been used in the sense "to show contempt for," even by educated users of English. This usage is still widely seen as erroneous and is best avoided.' from dictionary.com.

Reading for Writers

Another writer who advocates reading is Maggie Muphy. The 2000 edition of The Writer's Handbook includes her article Are You Reading Enough? She lists ten ways to expand and deepen reading including, I was delighted to discover, joining a book club. Other suggestions: read aloud to a friend, read on a theme, take a book wherever you go, and read widely. Like Audubon Society members' "Life List" of birds they see, Murphy keeps a list of books she's read to monitor and celebrate her reading accomplishments.

Incidentally, this year's edition of Writer's Handbook is the 69th to be published by The Writer, Inc. I remember using it in the early 70's as one of my guidebooks. That one, along with Writer's Market and Writer's Digest magazines helped launch my writing career.

Pondicherry

A little eek of delight escaped my throat when I read in the Life of Pi's Author's Note that he'd been to Pondicherry. I remembered the Indian setting from Robert Waller's Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend: lush tropics, jasmine by the Bay of Bengal, incredibly romantic. The basic facts both authors state about Pondicherry jibed. Martel could have read Waller's book and lifted the setting. I noticed the Author's Note was unsigned. Is it true or is it part of the fiction? A tiger features in both books, too.

I pondered the name Pondicherry. It looked English until I highlighted it in my text editor, used the CleverKeys keyboard shortcut to bring it up in Google (303,000 returns!), clicked over to dictionary to find the alternative pronunciation as if it were spelled Pondisherry. Ah! That makes it sound more French. It's so, je ne sais quoi, romantic. Anything sounds better in French. From the tourism site I learned the area is deeply Hindu. That might explain the religion's role in Martel's book, especially if he came from Pondicherry. Back online. No, he didn't, but in a two-year-old interview at browsebook.com, copied from writtenvoices.com, Martel said he'd been to India three times, twice researching for Life of Pi. That was good enough for me, and I read no further. I like to approach books as virginally as possible, seldom reading reviews or interviews before allowing the book into my being.

Blogging For Books Winners 09.04

Winners of the September 2004 Blogging for Books competition are announced here. Congrats! The October contest begins on Monday, the fourth, but you'll have to visit The Zero Boss to discover the theme on that day.

Making Words Count

In a techie blog, Slashdot, I found the following by Hemos: Zugok writes Wordcount.org has an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words. In addition they have Query Count which is a dynamic database of what are the most queried words on Wword Count. Then there is the conspiracy corner where certain words seems to end up in some sort of eerie order.

Unfortunately the website was suspended when I checked, but this is a perfect example of tracking a meme through cyberspace. We could probably visit the HP Blogalyzer and enter "wordcount.org" or "most frequently used English words" to see a path of references through the blogosphere. I wrote about this meme tracker elsewhere. Other people call this "bloggers steal".

Resources for Writers

Very 'lert visitors may notice a new navigation button in the bar at the top of the blog pages. Enough good writing resources have accumulated to gather them together in a semi-coherent manner. Send in suggestions for organization (the hardest part) and the best resources, by comment or email. If I can figure out how to cram another column into the page, there may be room for attribution. Tell us what you think makes your suggested resource the best or how it helps you in writing.

Another new page links from the Writing Resources. It's an article on how to create an effective website, part of a series of articles I'm writing on Effective Websites for Writers. You can read it through the Writer's Edge blog first! This is material not yet available on the site.

How to Get Published

I've been listening to a lot of talk lately by beginning authors who aren't submitting their writings. They have numerous excuses for why finished works sit on their desks or disks. I had to dig deep into the memory pit to unearth how it felt to have that kind of writers' block, to remember when each piece of writing felt like my child or even a tender part of my own body. Those precious gems of prose or poetry sparkled brightest just for me. To send them out was to risk rejection. I took it personally.

To overcome this fear (for that's the reason behind the reluctance), a writer must separate self from manuscript. Getting that involved with your work is an unhealthy codependency. Don't be a dysfunctional writer. It slows your career and hinders your development. Detach from the finished pieces. After all, you can't sell reprint rights if they haven't been published. They won't be published if you don't send them out. Courage is acting in the face of fear.

Word of the Day

A few days ago I added some suggestions to keep the writing flowing. One of humorist Dave Barry's "lert readers", sobriquet Vernon, from Beats Per Minutes commented with an additional resource called oneword. The idea is that you're presented with a word and given 60 seconds to write about it. If you wish, you can post your flash brain dump; or you could open the dictionary and do the same thing; or use the Word of the Day buried within dictionary.com. (I can't recall who told me about that one, or where I saw it -- sorry!) Today's word is "chimera", one of my favorites. You have 60 seconds to write about it in a comment, whether or not you know what it means.

Amazon's A9 Search

Last year Amazon.com cranked up a little search engine called "A9" tied in with another Amazon enterprise, Alexa. A9's grown out of its beta diapers into full version mode as of this morning. Writers searching for information from such disparate resources as gurunet, imdb, Alexa, and from Google, images and the web, will rejoice to find them united in A9. Furthermore, the little engine can save a history of searches, import IE Favorites to be manipulated, track sites you've seen and visited and give you information about them. There are drawbacks. You must register. You must manually delete history entries if you want them out. The Advanced Search feature is a limited form of Google's, even though it only pertains to the image and web parts of searching (which is Google's anyway). See if you can find the grammar gaff on that page! Privacy nuts, see the generic version.

CleverKeys is PrettyGood

The title is not bad grammar. CleverKeys is a small utility program I introduced earlier and promised to review. After using it for a week, I can honestly say that it works perfectly on my computer and with my browser. Your experience may vary. How useful it would be to you depends on how you work. It was most handy when I was in the midst of creating an email message and questioned if I were using the right word. I highlighted the word, pressed Ctrl-M (because I can't remember what the other two combinations bring up) and selected "Dictionary" from the menu. The program would be more intuitive, and easier for the memory-challenged to use, if the commands were Ctrl-D for dictionary and Ctrl-T for thesaurus, or -A for Amazon, or -G for Google, or all four!

How to Write Poetry

"I'm looking for a writing group that's less commercial, more focused on words," said a prospective member. This statement followed a discussion about critiquing poetry, in which the writer said "I write for an audience." I'm not sure how one would find an audience without publishing. I won't analyze someone else's work because of the way I write. My poetry flows from strong emotion. I think poems are intensely personal expressions. Mine arrive full-grown, maybe needing only a trim and a touch of blush. Writing poetry is an effective tool from the "feel and deal" school of psychotherapy. It's very right-brain for me. I admit mine has the advantage of a subconscious link to a left side with a huge vocabulary and a love of le mot juste. I'd hate to construct poetry, almost as much as I hate to deconstruct it.

Bridges of Da Vinci

I could easily sign up for a trip to see The Bridges of Madison County, which appear in Robert James Waller's beautiful book. Why, however, are people flocking to tours based on the best seller The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown? Sure, sometimes it's fun to make up an excuse to travel, but these travelers are annoying people like the pastor of the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris, Rev. Paul Roumanet. Saint Suplice plays a major role in the thriller's plot. The visitors are asking ridiculous questions, based on their belief that the book depicts real events. Rev. Roumanet put it well: "It's very unpleasant, everything that (Brown) scooped out of the trash cans of history". Jean-Manuel Traimond, who operates what he calls the "Da Vinci Con Tour" in Paris, says that Brown "invents bridges that don't exist."

Just Write the Thing!

"All what's left is to actually write the thing!" This sentence begins the last paragraph of copy in an overview of a UK commercial software to help you write a book. Well, boy howdy! Don't that tell all? If the same people who provided content for the website also wrote the software, I don't want it anywhere near my machine. They have the gall to provide a price in US dollars, but don't care enough to provide a website for American visitors. I have to assume that the software is designed with British spelling, grammar, punctuation, and other idiosyncracies that would certainly confuse a fledgling American author.

More on Writer's Block

In my web design business, I often find tips that help writers. Content providers write for the web, as do bloggers, who can drive themselves to a writer's block just as poets and novelists. D. Keith Robinson's blog had a great entry about how he keeps on writing.

Here are some of his suggestions:

Record Everything
Wander The Bookstore
Ask A Question
Take Risks
Take Advantage of Creative Highs
Use Real World Stories
Take A Drive or A Walk

Read the whole post and Keith's readers' comments for explanations and more ideas.

Stopping by Words

I had to quit writing this morning to get ready for an appointment. The story was just flowing. At first I thought, "Oh, no. I can't stop now." Then I remembered a sage piece of advice I read (source unknown): don't stop writing until there's more to say. That way, you don't have trouble getting started. Make a few notes if you think you'll forget, but don't stop when you're stuck.

Blog, Enter & Win Book!

The theme for this month's Blogging for Books is "Adaptation". Zip across to The Zero Boss for details. The prizes are signed copies of Mark Falanga's The Suburban You, courtesy of Broadway Books.If you haven't a blog of your own, add your entry to this post as a comment, or email it to writersedge@att.net. Good Writing!

CleverKeys

I'm beta testing the newest Windows version of the utility CleverKeys. It's a tiny program you're only aware of by it's bright blue icon in your system tray. When it's running and you're browsing or writing a document, you can highlight a word or phrase and press Control-L, -M, or -S to check it on Google, Amazon.com, Thesaurus.com or Dictionary.com. You have the option of the reference opening in a new window.

Personally, I'm not a fan of shortcut keys, but I know many people are. The Google Toolbar is already integrated into my IE browser. Once at Google, it's only one click, usually, to look up a word at the online dictionary which has a link to the online thesaurus. The only feature it adds for me is a shorter route to Amazon. I suppose it eliminates a couple of mouse clicks. Still, I'm old and set in my ways, and it would mean learning a new set of behaviors. We'll see.

If you've used CleverKeys, let us know what you think of it via a comment.

Now a Grammar Goddess!

Just when I thought it was safe to write, someone alerted me to Diane Sanford's My Pet Peeves. She's billed as the Grammar Goddess. She asks: "Trite, common, and overused phrases. How often have you heard someone use these phrases?" and lists:

dumb as a doorknob
go the mat for you
like the pot calling the kettle black
no pain, no gain
on the same page
out of the frying pan and into the fire
poor as a church mouse
push the envelope
think outside the box
white as a sheet

See! Said those dead metaphors will do you in. What's worse, Sanford thinks that "Trite phrases are the mark of a thoughtless or lazy writer. If you've heard a phrase before, then do not use it. That is the rule, period. Perhaps other, lesser writers can use common phrases, but you may not." She makes a good playmate for the Punctuation Goddess, Lynne Truss, who is equally outspoken. Her column continues with even more self-abuse you can heap on your headlines.

Quotes Resources

In fiction we create quotations for our characters. In nonfiction, we need the real deal. To find a quote's author, or to find the entire quote from a fragment, there's the Usenet group "alt.quotations". This group ostensibly has a website at http://www.newsone.net, but it doesn't seem to be functioning today. Another resource is the Quotations Forum. Finally, you can try the Mailing List, for the Quotation Ring, which links 173 quotation websites. The ring sites are all listed, but there's no search facility, nor are they listed in alphabetical order.

Charlie Fink's Quote-o-Rama has a couple of interesting services. One is its Archives and the other is a mailing list to receive a weekly quotation. The sign up form is on the home page. Charlie warns, "I must confess there has been no attempt to verify the accuracy of the quotes or attributions." They're still fun and you could use them in fiction.

Metaphors

I mentioned Project Gutenberg in a recent post. The material they are uploading is so interesting that I subscribed to their RSS feed (link on their home page) to keep tabs on it. This is like a trip to a store named "Free Old Books & Assorted Ephemera". It's readers' candy. After perusing most of a 1922 tract on metaphors, I'm feeling a bit uncomfortable about my own writing. An extended diatribe against habitual use of "dead metaphors" hits too close to home. There! Right there is what the Society for Pure English would have called a dead metaphor -- hits too close to home.

"Metaphor becomes a habit with writers who wish to express more emotion than they feel, and who employ it as an ornament to statements that should be made plainly or not at all," the Society said. Ouch!

"Writers fall into habitual metaphor when they fear that their thought will seem too commonplace without ornament; and, because the motive is unconscious, they choose metaphors familiar to themselves and their readers." That's better. Now it's a conscious habit I can break.

A lengthy list of dead metaphors contains phrases I use daily (but not "on a daily basis", a currently overused phrase). Either my writing is archaic or dead metaphors are zombies. Read about them for yourself.