Inspiration

"Gotta write!" Some feel the urge, some have a deadline, and some can't think of anything to write about. Writers' forums often carry the query, "Where do you find inspiration?" I think of it as part of an equation: writing = inspiration + perspiration + respiration. First you breathe in ideas/information/data, then you work up a sweat with it, finally you let it out and rest. Ways to find inspiration:
open fortune cookies, visit an ethnic community, eavesdrop on conversations, closely observe nature, listen to the lyrics of a song, look at the oldest photos in your family's album, list words on a theme, sniff perfumes and sift memories.

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Quote Week Five

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try" Beverly Sills.

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Lie With Statistics

Here are some numbers from a series of legitimate, authoritative surveys conducted by The Harris Poll®. Percentages of people questioned from 1997 through 2004 who said these were favorite leisure-time activities:

Reading 28, 30, 27, 31, 28, 26, 24, 35
Watch TV 19, 21, 22, 23, 20, 15, 17, 21

What could you say about these data? (Data is the plural of datum). Americans Read in Record Numbers! Yes, limited to this small period of time, and if you don't care what they read or how much, or the fact that 35% is only a little over one-third, a minority figure. Reading Rises, TV on the Decline! Actually, the percentage of people who said they read for pleasure rose only overall and in the last year, and the numbers for TV watching have declined from a high in 2000 back to about the same level as the beginning. Finally, a factor most often not considered (probably because it isn't understood) is that the surveys had a +/- 3 point error. This means the actual percentages of people who like to read was as low as 32%, and the true figure for TV could have been as high as 24% in 2004. Or the spread could have been 38% to 18% -- a more dramatic difference. In 2003, the figures could have been almost equal. Take care when writing about statistics, lest ye be accused of data rape.

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That Which

Which is it, that or which? Both words are relative pronouns connecting clauses together. Here's an easy shorthand way to remember: which refers to animals and inanimate objects; that may refer to animals, inanimate objects, and people (who only refers to people). Strunk and White suggest "the careful writer ... goes which-hunting, removes the defining whiches". This gets more complicated because defining means restrictive, which that is, and which is not. If the pronoun doesn't restrict the definition of the noun to which it refers, then the clause containing the pronoun is set off by commas. Examples: Of all the cats in the house, the cat that had kittens is the one in the box. The cat, which had kittens, defended her territory against the dogs.

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Booktastic!

Finally, a board game besides Scrabble that I might win. Booktastic! is the brainchild of a book collector and described as "literary board game for book lovers, their friends and family! Over 800 questions in three categories." It's for two or more players or teams, age 12 and up. Because the "casual reader" questions are opinion-based and have no wrong answers, anyone can play including children and non-readers.

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Book Standard

A potentially exciting new web service launched today at The Book Standard. It's a combination site of news, reviews, jobs, and directories of agents, books, and deals. It aims to be "all things book", but I noticed a lot of re-runs in the material offered, not only aged but duplicates. Still, it's a new site and they need to fill up pages to get started. Part of the website requires a subscription (like searching for an agent) but the everyday news and jobs database were open. Not even registration was required to search for open positions. Mentions in Writer's Edge are not meant to be construed as endorsements of sites, services, or products; however, if it's suspicious or useless at first glance, you won't hear about it here. For example, I monitor writers' newsletters for several months before suggesting them.

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Reality

Freelancing, whether fiction or nonfiction, is no career for wimps with tender sensibilities or easily bruised egos. Writers who want to be paid (and usually published) can prepare themselves for the realities of the writing world: you have to please readers and editors; you must endure rejections; some pieces will never sell; few get rich; some make a living; writing is only part of the work. Lately I've been hearing beginners whine about rejections being depressing and refusing to participate in marketing or to learn about book distribution systems (critical for self-publishers). Be sure you know what the writing life really is. Eventually rejections become just part of the process, but in the beginning, surround yourself with ego-boosters and encouragement. Misery does love company and sharing it helps. It also leads to advice for improvement and tips on other markets or ways to handle problems. Even if you need seclusion to write, don't isolate yourself from peers, even when you become "rich and famous" as Jay Allen likes to say. Then's the time to "pay it forward".

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Who Blogs

Entries in these blogs top my list of faves in the Week 6--Why ((Insert Occupation here)) Should Blog from Blogger Idol:

• superblessed
• the last burnt sienna crayon
• Bald Man Blogging
• Red Interior
• Risk

Of course, if you already blog, you're already a winner!

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Useful Resource

Tired of pawing through piles of returns from major search engines? Seeking value amid the rubble? You might want to become familiar with the Librarians' Index to the Internet - lii.org, a directory of Internet sites already vetted by professional librarians for usefulness. They claim "Every site entered in the LII database is reviewed at least twice--sometimes three or four times--before it goes 'live.' An active weeding program keeps us current". The service provide several types of searches and offers a newsletter emailed weekly describing the latest sites added to the directory. By itself the newsletter is a fascinating read.

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Mailer on Reading

Today's Parade magazine, a weekly tabloid carried by many U.S. Sunday newspapers, ran a piece by Norman Mailer. He suggests that eliminating TV ads will alleviate declining literacy rates in the U.S. His focus is the concentration it takes to read; his thesis, TV commercials not only make children fat, but also teach them "that concentration is not one's friend but is treacherous." His solution is to convert us all to fee TV so that the U.S. can "have the best of all possible worlds" and avert the danger that "The rest of the world is getting into position to do far better than us with future economic conditions." His foundation for these charges and the solution is fraught with if's and seem's and a vague reference to research proving "too many hours are devoted each day to the tube." I question the logic of Mailer's premises and certainly don't support the chauvinistic cause. There is a simpler, less expensive solution to declining reading: turn off the TV, teach children to read, give them reading material they enjoy, and reward them for learning and reading until they learn that reading is its own reward.

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Quote Week Four

"If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded." Maya Angelou

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Recycled Story

Godzilla meets [insert monster] all over again! At least, that's what I'm witnessing this morning in the new Pokemon movie, "Destiny Deoxys" on the Warner Brothers TV network. It's also a: kids are heroes, good vs. evil, love lost and found, sci-fi anime festival -- a little something for everyone, Japanese-American style. It's true, there's nothing new. People have told stories since they started grunting at one another, and we've exhausted all possible plot lines. Don't waste time and creative energy trying to come up with an innovation, choose a proven winner. Flesh out the skeleton of a plot with effective writing practices, and you'll be successful.

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SAT Writing

Tomorrow millions of college bound U.S. high schoolers will take the last SAT Subject Test in Writing, only to face a more grueling version in March. That's when all SATs will include a new, third skills measure equivalent in points to half the old version (each part will be worth 800 points). Half the writing hour will be devoted to multiple guesses about grammar and word use, the other half to actually writing an essay. In 25 minutes, students will have to read and understand the task, then scribble out enough words to "Organize and express ideas clearly, Develop and support the main idea, Use appropriate word choice and sentence structure". I don't envy the teachers being trained to score these productions. Good luck, kids!

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Name Game

Naming characters can be a challenge for some writers. If you're writing about someone born in the United States, the Social Security Administration offers a searchable database (apparently limited to the last 14 years), the top ten male and female names for 2003, top five names from 1990 through 2003 by state, and the top 1,000 names by gender and birth year from 1880 to 1997. Scroll down the page to see the search forms. When you look for a particular name and nothing is returned, then the name just isn't in the top thousand. Tops for 2003? Emily and Jacob.

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Sic

"Why did you include the word sic in this week's quote?" someone wrote in to ask. When I inserted [sic] within the Wilde quotation, I was using the Latin phrase meaning of "adv. Thus; so. Used to indicate that a quoted passage, especially one containing an error or unconventional spelling, has been retained in its original form or written intentionally. [Latin sc. See so- in Indo-European Roots.]" from dictionary.com. In Wilde's case it wasn't the spelling; the sic followed the incorrect "their" (a plural possessive pronoun) which refers to the preceding pronoun "everyone", which is singular. I thought it a trifle ironic that a writer well-known enough to be quoted widely wrote inaccurately. Now some Great Grammar Stickler will probably write in to expose my ignorance. That's how we learn!

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Dick & Jane

Pearson Education holds the copyright to Dick and Jane books. Now it is suing various companies and people over the publication of Yiddish With Dick and Jane which "uses the familiar rhythms of the original 'Dick and Jane' primers" (from the back cover blurb). 'Dick and Jane sentences' is an epithet often applied to writers who use, or overuse, simple declarative sentences. "See Spot run," Dick said about his dog. It is the journalistic style of Hemmingway, who was not prone to vague, involved, or terribly intellectual prose. "Too many Dick and Jane sentences," one of a book club members declared about one month's read. A few others murmured agreement. What's wrong with Dick and Jane sentences, I wondered aloud. "Boring!" they said.

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Influenced Writers

I wrote about Writers Under the Influence, a section of Amazon with new writers' essays on who influenced them. I found the New York Times did something like that 20 years ago and recently. Of the under-forty fiction writers queried, I recognized only one name, Susan Choi, and only a few of the authors listed as "the writer or writers who had most influenced their work", except for Zadie Smith's classics. I'm not sure what this says about my own reading, but I learned from the article, because the Times also asked these younger writers to explain how their work was influenced. I liked what Nell Freudenberger said: We start to write by reading, admiring and subconsciously imitating what we admire. Most eloquent is J.T. LeRoy's ode to Breece D'J Pancake. This sounds similar to my uneasiness with Sylvia Plath's poetry: The disconnection and hopelessness in Pancake's stories were too familiar. I felt too close to their possibilities, to how he ended his life, committing suicide in 1979 -- the year before I was born -- at the age of 26.

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Quote Week Three

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their [sic] mistakes." Oscar Wilde

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Writers Blog

This week's topic, "Why --------- Should Blog" was custom-designed for Writer's Edge (no, I haven't suggested a topic yet.) I've already expressed some ideas about writers keeping journals here and in various Orkut.com forums for writers and bloggers (invites available, ask by email or comment). I do find value in curling up in the corner of the couch with a favorite writing instrument to noodle around ideas or scratch out a poem on paper on a rainy day. Still, the ordinary writers' world has gone electronic. Blogging requires digital devices and connections and holding still long enough to keyboard. Disciplined blogging (sounds vaguely S&M) encourages daily writing, keeping the juices flowing, like regular sex or bowel habits. It's part of a healthier lifestyle, she enthused, tongue planted firmly in cheek. I'll admit to controversy over personal vs. business blogs being an issue even for writers, or authors (writers flogging novels). I do a bit of both in my blog, using personal tidbits either as spurs or examples of professional points offered. In these autumn years, blogging is the easiest way to share accumulated mistakes in hopes of easing another writer's path. It's more fun than writing a book and faster than teaching a class. If I want to complain about the leaking roof, I email family and friends, which looks and feels just like blogging and returns more satisfying results. In brief, writers can benefit from blogging by:

building disciplined writing habits
participating in current required formats
improving logic development
storing a cache of story ideas
providing insights for other writers
building fan bases
teasing editors

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Gmail Accounts

Here's a little weekend bonus: free Gmail email accounts to the first half-dozen requests by email or leaving a comment below with a first and last name and email address. Yes, you can leave an anonymous post with the required information.

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Unitary Culture Demise

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, John Bowman, resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, hails the demise of "unitary culture". He cites the beginning of the end as 1974, when anonymous book reviews ended at the Times Literary Supplement of London, although the anachronistic vestiges remain in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Review. The problem, Bowman says, is that with almost 500 books appearing daily in the U.S. readers and booksellers depend on reviews to guide purchases, "Yet the opinions actually on offer in these magazines are every bit as quirky, perverse and prone to bias as they are in publications where the writers must take responsibility for what they say." That's exactly the point I made transparent in my review of the new edition of Plath's Ariel. It's part of the writerly code of ethics I've developed over the years that includes modeling, self-responsibility, attribution, and self-disclosure.

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Dialect

William Deresiewicz has an interesting essay in the N.Y. Times about writing and speaking "correct English". Citing David Crystal's The Stories of English and Robert MacNeil and William Cran's Do You Speak American?, he favors flexibility. My view is that the variations add spice to writing, although a little dialect goes a long way. If it's pertinent, by all means use exemplars of a vernacular, as long as you're facile with the form. In other words, if you use it, use it! If you aren't very familiar with a certain dialect, trying to use it in your writing could make your work a minefield of mistakes.

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Censorship

Self-censorship? I'm all for it. You can probably guess how I feel about government censorship. Today I received a message from my closest email buddy, pleading that I let the world know that Iran Telecommunications has blocked Iranians' access to Orkut (a social networking service where we met). She was moved to express herself with a four-letter word, which I suspect is a profoundly unusual action for this Muslim woman. Hasty research uncovered an entry at Iranmania about the issue. The website is probably overloaded by now. According to some, the Iranian powers are blocking the wildly popular Persian Blog, as well as blogs at Blogspot (another holding of the Google empire) and more. Are they protecting Iranians from evil Western influences? Preventing them from speaking out against their government? It's certain they are preventing Western minds like mine from a better understanding of the Muslim mind.

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Action

Fellow scribblers in my fiction group keep whittling away the beginning of the novel I'm writing. First they said "eliminate the Foreword". Then they threw out the introduction. They agreed the first chapter had to go. Finally they said, "Just start with the action." Ray Rhamsey seems to agree. If only I a had bunch of good cat pictures like his! The post is a very amusing illustration of a pertinent point about starting with strength.

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Da Vinci Code Buzz

Trapped on the horns of a dilemma, as if it were a big ox, I decided to give more buzz to Brown's book. Another writer, Lewis Perdue, is suing Brown, Random House, Columbia Pictures, et al., for IP infringement, based on study by a forensic linguist. Last year I met a forensic accountant who expanded my conception of the application of the term forensic. Forensic linguist, hmm, a new career path? Also an author and historian Sharan Newman has written The Real History Behind The Da Vinci Code". In a review last Sunday Regis Behe quoted Newman as saying her book "is not a refutation" of Brown's, but meant to be a companion guide to set the historical record straight. It's about time!

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Quote Week Two

"A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out." Walter Winchell

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Word Humor

Grammar Stickler wants you to know she's not entirely without humor. Almost, but not completely. Take a look at The Duplex by Glenn McCoy for January 9, 2005. It would appear here, except for copyright issues. Accustomed to quick scans of the screen, Grammar couldn't understand why two cops were tickling a man with their feet until she read the parking sign "VIOLATORS WILL BE TOED" and noticed the ... well, see for yourself. Then you can be amused at the Q&A entry "Q: Are you only excepting original / one of a kind works of art?" in a contest sponsored by the McCormick Foundation, whose benefactor ran the Chicago Tribune, the World's Greatest Newspaper, and endowed a center at nearby Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

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Blog Ethics

Some might think the title words are mutually exclusive. Certainly digital diaries they have received beaucoup attention lately with "blog"the word of the year, bloggers the people of the year at ABC and Time, the latest Pew report on blog popularity, and Fortune declaring no business can afford to ignore them. Inevitably defenders and critics lined up to tell bloggers what to say and how to say it. Cyberjournalist may have been the first, and the venerable Poynter suggests traditional journalists and bloggers can learn from each other, although Steve Outing appears to favor bloggers adopting journalist's ethics. Why bother? Because once you put your words on the Internet, they are officially published and available to a much wider audience than only putting your words in print offers. They (and you) are protected by copyright law and the first amendment (for U.S. citizens) and equally subject to laws about libel and slander and plagiarism and other infringements of the intellectual property laws. Before you say, "It's just a blog!" or "It's only my opinion," you might want to subject what you're about to spout to the old three-way test: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?

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Whitbread Prizes

More prizes for British novels: the Whitbread awards were announced. The BBC carried an amusing article on it. The winners are: First Novel, Eve Green by Susan Fletcher; Novel, Small Island by Andrea Levy; Biography, My Heart is my Own,The Life of Mary Queen of Scots, by John Guy; Poetry, Corpus, by Michael Symmons Roberts; and Children's, Not the end of the World by Geraldine McCaughrean. Am I imagining that the U.K. gives more prizes for writing, while the U.S. offers more for performance? If so, what does this reveal about our cultures, if anything?

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DocuTicker

ResourceShelf's DocuTicker is a daily update of new reports from government agencies, ngo's, think tanks, and other groups. DocuTicker is compiled by the librarians who bring you the more comprehensive ResourceShelf.com. The blog has a site search engine provided by Feedster for the entries that began June 14, 2004. If you're a journalist who wants to keep up with newly available online data resources, this one's for you.

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Sexuality

Sex--the most potent force in humanity. Without it, we wouldn't continue. Our sex, as in gender, shapes how we experience life from biology and chemistry to psychology and sociology. Try writing without referencing gender. The results are often drab, colorless. I happen to feel that characters without sexuality are missing a dimension that "real-izes" them for readers, as those in Matthew Pearl's intellectually satisfying The Dante Club. I'm wondering if readers' perceptions and receptions of writers' works are equally affected by knowledge of the writers' sexual preferences. This question surfaced while reading in Patrick Moore's Los Angeles Times commentary that "Susan Sontag was a brilliant, provocative writer who had vital, loving relationships with some of the most fascinating and creative women of her day. I believe that her intellectual accomplishments are even more compelling when one understands how her sexuality informed them."

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Quote Week One

Frederick Douglass, "The Soul that is within me no man can degrade."

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B4B #7

The Zero Boss: Blogging for Books #7: Life is as Strange as Fiction is open for business. Prize is a book by Thomas Fox Averill, the judge for this round of writing. If you want your entry posted in Writer's Edge, be sure to read the first comment under The Zero Boss' announcement.

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Freelance Success

With a title like that anything might sell. Freelance Success is a simple website for working writers, more for those who write nonfiction articles. Usually the online resources I recommend are no-cost options for beginners. This one currently charges $89 a year for a subscription, including a listing in a searchable database which is open to view by the public. It also entitles you to set up a simple web page for yourself; receive a weekly newsletter; access a newsletter archive; participate in forums with peers. Veteran freelancer and word woman, Martha Barnette told me she'd "highly recommend FS for anyone wanting to break into the magazine biz or advance one's magazine or corporate-writing career. It's a great little community of writers, and people are very generous with their advice and help." She also assured me that editors do use the FS database to find writers, especially in a particular location.

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Petard

Alas! I have been hoisted on my own petard. I used to confuse a "petard" with a "yardarm", thinking both had to do with masts on sailing ships and hanging oneself. Not even close, in the case of the petard. If you only look at the definition of the word, you still won't understand the phrase. Check the dictionary.com page and scroll down until you can read the Word History. I'm using the phrase in the sense to "be undone by one's own devices", although it's actually blogger.com's template device that undoes longer posts hidden in the archives. Every time I refresh the template for a page that includes an entry with a "more" link, the longer version disppears. So, I can quit tinkering with the template, quit entering abbreviated posts on the main page, or try to remember to upload the archived versions. Try to remember? Stop playing with the blog bling?! There will be no more continued entries.

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Diarist Awards

Nominations are open for the 2004 fourth quarter blog awards at Diarist. The short list of rules includes: you must be a blog writer to nominate, and you can't nominate your own writing. Categories abound for overall writing and for outstanding individual posts. The nominations close January 15. Writer's Edge no longer qualifies as a new blog. Aaaarrrgh! I feel so old!

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