Ann throws open Twain for writing inspiration

When I feel the need for a big helping of writing inspiration, I turn to Mark Twain.

I appreciate his blend of clarity, succinctness and wicked humor. And it's fascinating how well his advice holds up more than a century later. Here's an example:

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English -- it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them -- then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice."
- Letter to D. W. Bowser, 20 March 1880

Sounds very Zinsser like, doesn't it? In my search for Twain quotes on writing, I came across this book that I immediately added to my Amazon wish list: "Mark My Words: Mark Twain on Writing."

Amazon's review describes it as "kind of like an I Ching for writers: You throw the book open to wherever and some good advice or insight spills forth from this greatest of American authors: The same man, after all, who said he hadn't done 'a day's work in all my life. What I have done I have done because it has been play . . . ' A good attitude, indeed, to bring to your word processor, quill pen or typewriter."

It sounds delicious.

-- Ann Zeman

Why can't I make Kitti's suggested site work?

Here's what Kitti sent me for the blog, but I confess that on the URL she gave me I have never been able to get past the sponsored links to track down the "less positive" spin on the "pros from Dover" that Kitti mentions. I had better luck on a British site, which may be the one Kitti was referring to later in her post. Let me know if you have better luck. Here's Kitti:


When writing my 700 word essay I found a great site entitled "phrasefinder," which provides the actual wording and meaning of commonly used phrases as well as their derivation and how their usage has been adapted over time.

The site also offers a subscription option to "phrasethesaurus" which is a British on-line publication.

I was interested in using the phrase "the pros from Dover" from MASH in my 700-word essay and was surprised to find the interpretation provided on the site had a less positive perspective than I remembered from watching the TV show years ago. I think Hawkeye would prefer my impressions.

-- Kitti Lile

Alice wants to know your writing habits

As an aspiring writer I own my share of books on writing and the "how to" books on writing.

Someone mentioned earlier that the hard part is closing these books to open up the computer and start putting down our own words.

So true! It seems that I can always come up with a hundred excuses why I can't write for the day. One reason I'm taking this class is to gain the discipline that I believe must be established in order to become a better writer.

I've always been curious about people's writing habits and would love to learn more about how my classmates approach writing :

How do you make time for your writing?

Do you have a daily/weekly schedule with a set time?

How do you go from a lazy mood to a productive one in which you do the writing anyway?

Do you just make yourself sit down at the computer no matter what?

-- Alice Nguyen

Paul suggests a starting point: "Liposuctioning Flab"

A professional editor recommended a book to me that I have found very useful.

It discusses both fiction and nonfiction writing including revision work. I highly recommend chapter 21 "Liposuctioning Flab," even as a first chapter to read.

The book is: "Stein on Writing" by Sol Stein (right).

Hope this helps.

-- Paul Gift

Andy shares what has helped him write better

I’d like to share a couple of simple practices that I think have benefited me as a budding writer.

The first practice is quite straightforward: keeping a journal. Anne Lamott (left) recommends doing so in her book about writing “Bird by Bird.” If you’re stuck for a topic, she advises that you try writing about something from your childhood, like family vacations.

I have tried to follow her advice. For the past six months, I have kept a journal, in which I make entries two or three times a week. I write about whatever comes into my mind. I haven’t written about vacations, but I have written about many other childhood experiences, as well as about many adult ones.

It is a good thing to get into the habit of writing this way. Like many other activities, writing is something that you improve at the more you do it. I find it easier to get started writing now than I did. Many times, my writing goes nowhere. But sometimes, it turns into a nice little story. One of my journal entries gave me the start for my personal essay for our writing course (parts of which were read in class Tuesday). Other entries have the potential for being turned into essays as well.

The second practice is to read an essay by a good writer and try to analyze what makes it a good essay. I got the idea from “The Situation and the Story,” by Vivian Gornick. Gornick (far left) takes personal essays and memoirs by different writers and analyzes their style and structure.

It turned out that another book I had, “The Art of the Personal Essay,” edited by Philip Lopate, contained most of the essays Gornick analyzed. So I decided to read each of the essays Gornick analyzed and try to do my own analysis before I read hers. For example, I read James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son,” and was struck by his combination of very concrete descriptions of what he saw as the effects of racism on his father with his discussion of racism in general. (Roy Peter Clark refers to this as the juxtaposition of the concrete and the abstract in this manner as working the “ladder of abstraction.”)

I’d also like to repeat a recommendation I made earlier in the course: “Follow the Story” by James B. Stewart (below). Stewart, a former Wall Street Journal editor, has written several successful nonfiction books, including “Den of Thieves,” about Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and other 1980s Wall Street crooks, and “Blood Sport” about the Whitewater scandal. He devotes chapters to the following subjects:

· Curiosity · Ideas · Proposals
· Gathering Information
· Leads · Transitions · Structure
· Description
· Dialogue · Anecdotes · Humor and Pathos
· Endings

He gives detailed examples of his approach to each of these areas. In the chapter on dialogue, Stewart discusses the dilemma faced by a nonfiction writer in deciding how far he or she can go to create a compelling but accurate reconstruction of a conversation – something we discussed on our class last week.

-- Andy Seiple

Ready to write in text-speak, slang and emoticons?

"The internet is there for snacking, grazing and tasting, not for the full, six-course feast that is nourishing narrative."

Agree with that statement or think Ben Macintyre (left) is selling the internet short? It's in an article I'd like you to read before Tuesday night. The headline sums up the point of the author:

"The internet is killing storytelling: Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information."

And if that's true, how should we, as writers, respond to the internet and its possible threat to the long-form narrative. Let's talk about that Tuesday night.

BTW, here is the article Macintyre mentions that appeared in Atlantic Monthly. Strange that he didn't link to it. Perhaps it is his way of keeping us from engaging in what he calls "moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé." The article by Nicholas Carr (right) in the Atlantic Monthly is also worth reading, but I warn you: You can get lost in all the links from it.

Ardelle helps us clear our minds

William Zinsser is a mind-reader.

In his book "On Writing Well," he said, "Clear writing doesn’t happen by accident. It takes effort, focus and discipline. Clear writing reflects a clear mind; a clear mind requires a thorough understanding about the ideas you’re communicating . . .Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts.”

Touche!

Zinsser read right through me. I'll admit it: My mind is messy. And my apartment, my cooking and especially my writing are reflections of such messiness.

So if we're supposed to clear our thinking before we can write clearly, the question is How? I searched Zinsser's book for an answer but didn't find a satisfying one. I found this interesting web page instead.

It explains simple exercises from Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way" on how to lighten your mind to create better content. I have found these to be very helpful and they don't take much time.

Julia Cameron, where have you been all this while? What a relief!

Ardelle Merton

Mary finds physical descriptions a slippery slope

I was revising my article today and in just the first paragraph found a couple of things that Professor Saul had asked us to avoid. I had written:

"What’s it like to stand on Olympic ice, before the crowd and TV cameras, waiting for the music to begin? Pair skater and two-time Olympian Cindy Kaufmann Marshall knows. Quick and athletic at sixty, with striking blue eyes and a blonde skater’s ponytail, the three-time world bronze medalist offered to teach me about her career and the mental side of her sport."

Gag.

Strike the "striking" eyes and the "blonde" ponytail. He is right, I would not have put that much energy into describing her appearance if she were male. She still is, and looks like, a figure skater, and I did want to say that.

I also wrote "offered to teach me," which has that pesky "me." My next-try thought also had me in it, something like, "Cindy met me at Highland Ice in Shoreline, the rink where she and her brother Ron skated together."

I wouldn't put "I" or "me" in an academic paper, but I don't have a reporter's reflex to keep it out of other kinds of writing.

I read an article in the NYT dining section recently that went through some weird gyrations that I thought were intended to avoid the first person. The reporter observed a chef telling a worker to put on a belt, and described it like this, "While he remains a demanding boss — an unfortunate young counter worker at New York’s Bouchon Bakery recently received a personal lecture on the importance of wearing a belt — Mr. Keller says he has become a more patient leader with a greater appreciation for collaboration."

I didn't like the middle of that sentence. I would prefer, "While he remains a demanding boss — I watched him lecture an unfortunate young counter worker recently at New York's Bouchon Bakery on the importance of wearing a belt — Mr. Keller says he has become a more patient leader with a greater appreciation for collaboration."

But on second thought, the "I" does make the aside jump out of the middle of the sentence too much, and it could be written without it, like so: "He recently lectured an unfortunate young
counter worker at New York's Bouchon Bakery on..." I think I like that best.

Why did the reporter put the "unfortunate counter worker" first? She must have wanted to emphasize the person being dressed down (and told to dress up) by his boss.

Now I'm doing something else that scares our professor: rambling.

Back onto the first person, do any of the rest of you have trouble avoiding it? Does it grate on you to see it outside of a personal essay? How about the descriptions of personal appearance? Do you describe a female's physical appearance more than you would a male's?

Mary Saylor

Thank Mary for links to the NYT article

I had meant to put up links to The New York Times article we discussed last night, but never found time to do it. Along comes Mary to the rescue:

I thought some people in our class might want to read the article that we
were talking about last night, so I'm sending the link and some accompanying
information for you to pass on.

The New York Times article

A New England Journal of Medicine article, "Dr. Pou and the Hurricane."

A long video interview with the reporter of the NYT article.

Thank you, Mary. You may have saved my job.

Kate finds good advice on story starts

Back on November 2nd, John's blog post mentioned Zinsser's book and what Zinsser said about the beginning of a piece of writing:

"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead."

I want to add to that something I found in "The Journalist's Craft: A Guide to Writing Better Stories" edited by Dennis Jackson and John Sweeney.

The newly aspiring writer is admonished against using false openings in the hope of snagging a reader: "Splicing a snazzy lead onto an otherwise conventional article strikes me as false advertising. The lead should establish the tone and voice of the story. Best not to begin your story with a cheap trick."

I am guilty of the afore-mentioned trick and then I struggle for continuity of tone for the remainder of the piece. I also struggle with finding a place to use scene-driven narrative as mentioned by Daniel James Brown. By the time I get the necessary facts in my article, my writing sounds more like a news article than a lyrical prose piece moving along scene by carefully chosen scene.

Is anyone else running up against this issue?

I guess it fits that a book by writers on how to become better writers would be well-written and enjoyable reading. After reading the section on writing narrative non-fiction, I was drawn into the section called, "These Things we Can Count On" with its list of "linguistic misdemeanors" committed by lazy writers.

That was so enjoyable to read that I moved into the chapter on finding good stories. By the time I was finished I had even read the pages entitled, "Business Writing that Screams "Read Me!"

No small feat for someone who summarily pulls the business sections out of the paper along with the flyers for hearing aids, truck sales and Rite-Aid coupons.

I have also picked up the "Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Writing." which is also a good read. The problem with all these engrossing writing guides is putting aside the teaching manuals and opening up the keyboard to practice what they preach.

Kate Boris-Brown

Rathnakar recommends two books on punctuation

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires shots in the air.
"Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit.
The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

That's the joke that spawned the title of Lynne Truss' book on punctuation.

In that book she says, “Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

I think Winifred Watson and Julius M. Nolte meant the same thing when they wrote in their grammar book almost 70 years ago: “Sentences have stop and go signals: a capital letter at the beginning is a green light; a dash, comma, semicolon or colon is a yellow light to make readers hesitate; a period, question mark or exclamation point is a red light.”

It looks there are couple of used copies of this book available through Amazon, I might order one.

The first student post comes from Lorraine

Lorraine shared the following with me in an e-mail, and I decided to make it the first of our student posts.

It's short (you can go longer if you want). It's about writing and gives Lorraine's reasons for why she found the webinar valuable. It also has a link to something you might consider (this is not an endorsement by me or the UW).

Here's what Lorraine had to say:

I recently attended Dr. Julie Miller’s webinar on “Get a Grip with Grammar.”

It cost $79 and was worth every penny. She delivers an interesting interactive webinar and provides numerous tips for remembering complicated grammar rules.

You may not need a refresher on grammar, but it's a good resource to keep in mind.

My highlighter is back, and it's long overdue

Some of you may think I'm belaboring this point since I made it when editing several of your profiles, but I had meant to get to Zinsser's Chapter 9 sooner than this. So please bear with me as we follow along with the highlighter.

Here's the first thing Zinsser (above) says in "The Lead and the Ending" and what I wrote at the top of some of your papers:

"The most important sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn't induce the reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead."

There couldn't be anything more important when writing for a purpose -- for pay, to entertain, to inform, whatever. If your readers stop reading, you have not achieved your purpose. Hook them with facts, with something they didn't know (called news in my old business), with humor, with mystery, but mostly with clear, strong, specific language, something that's easy to follow, easy to relate to.

You may move in "leisurely circles," as Zinsser says, toward your eventual point, but this is certainly true:

"Readers want to know -- very soon -- what's in it for them."

If this doesn't come in the first sentence, it should show up fairly soon. In journalism, it's known as the "nut graf," the paragraph that tells the nut of the story -- the reason why the readers might care and should keep reading. Editor, and readers, like to see it in the second or third graf.

So you get the reader's attention, tell them what you are up to and then start lacing together paragraphs that keep the reader going (see "Managing the Murky Middle" in an earlier post to this blog).

Do that until you get to where you reward your reader for persisting: A gift of an ending.

More on that, and "spiraling," too, at a later date.

See you Tuesday night at the front entrance to Odegaard Undergraduate Library. See map in a post below.