Places to Start Building Clips

In class last week we discussed query letters and the daunting hurdle of "clip" submission without any published clips. In addition to starting a blog, there are a few other ways to publish and start building clips online. The two that I've found easiest are (1) Examiner.com and (2) guest posting on a blog. If you click on the link to Examiner.com above, it will take you to a list of topics the site is actively seeking in the Seattle area.

If you see a topic you like, apply. The application process is not onerous and there is no posting frequency requirement (although you have to post once every month or so if you want any chance of getting paid some day). If you don't see a topic in the Seattle area that interests you, you can check the National listing or another region.

The best way to start guest blogging is to ask a blog you would like to write for if they post guest blogs and then ask to submit. If you are connected to the person with the blog, this becomes much easier, but most bloggers are happy for the chance of supplemental content especially if it puts a new and fresh spin on the bloggers' topic.

Consider the Editor

One of the many things I enjoyed about "Consider the Lobster" was imagining the look on the Gourmet editor's face when, having commissioned a report on a food festival for a food magazine, she got so much more. I found a brief interview with the editor about her experience editing and publishing the piece, and Gourmet readers' reactions to it.

Food Writing by John McPhee

John McPhee's 1979 book Giving Good Weight includes "Brigade de Cuisine," a piece about a chef and his wife. I particularly liked this sentence:

"The dacquoise resembles cake and puts up a slight crunchy resistance before it effects a melting disappearance between tongue and palate and a swift transduction through the bloodstream to alight in the brain as a poem."

Anyone hungry?

Facebook Chain Post

This made me think of all of you....

It's National Book Week. Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 56, and copy the 5th sentence as your status. No title, just these rules.

There are some things that float pretty free of time, chronology, the book of history, and the lies of experts.

Best Worst Restaurant Review

I wrote my "place" piece on Outback Steakhouse. I had several setbacks and the end product, much like Outback Kookaburra Wings, was disappointingly bland. I think if I had read this brilliant restaurant review in Vanity Fair first, I might have been more inspired. The review gives great descriptions of the place, the food and the people. One of my favorite paragraphs starts:

Twenty minutes later, possibly under their own steam, the snails arrive. Vesuvian, they bubble and smoke in a magma of astringent garlic butter and parsley. We grasp them with the spring-loaded specula and gingerly unwind the dark gastropods, curling like dinosaur boogers.

I have found a new favorite writer and am committed to pushing my own writing a little harder.

Spring break fine reading

One of your three readings over the break is in the free New Yorker archives: "Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica" by Anthony Lane.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/09/24/070924fa_fact_lane?currentPage=all

The Peculiar Qualities of English

"To write English well, it is generally agreed, is not to imitate, but to evolve a style peculiarly suited to one's own temperament, environment and purposes."

"No writer should fail to reckon with modern reading habits."

"It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful."

"Imaginative readers rewrite books to suit their own taste, omitting and mentally altering as they read."

"We do not suggest that writers should indulge busy readers by writing down to them--giving them nothing but short messages simply phrased; but only that sentences and paragraphs should follow one another so easily and inevitably, and with such economy of phrase, that a reader will have no encouragement to skip."

-Robert Graves & Alan Hodge in The Reader Over Your Shoulder

ALL CAPS MEANS YOU ARE YELLING

Procrastination is a wondrous thing. I do laundry instead of writing my "place" paper, I write my "place" paper instead of doing a blog posting, and I write a blog posting instead of doing my paid job.

Best of all are the amazing websites that encourage and enlighten procrastinators. For example, if I hadn't put off writing this blog post (to put off doing my paid job), I wouldn't have come across this great Gawker post of a Washington Post story with editor's notes. Do they always comment in ALL CAPS?  It is an interesting look behind the curtain. And, it makes me a little uptight (maybe because it is so critical?).

So here is my another of my favorite procasticatory sites: McSweeneys Internet Tendency. It is full of fantastic writing that may or may not be non-fiction, but is varied and creative and entertaining. For relaxation, I suggest an article on Tai-Chi, which never fails to reset my mood.  Ommmm....

Material Disaster

Earlier this week, I spotted an invitation to an “all-Ivy-alum speed dating” event in my inbox. Before I enrolled in this class, I would have shuddered and deleted the message unread. The regimented awkwardness, the efficient judgments and romantic bet-hedging, the third-party-administered rejection, a buzzer severing the one weak sprout of a possibly meaningful connection that had somehow managed to bud in such an inhibited environment, and, just to toss in another glowing-hot coal of despair, all this carried out amidst the faux-camaraderie of those still seeking validation from their admission to one of a tenuously connected group of schools, an achievement based entirely on some nice things they’d done back in high school - it would be traumatic to experience. But delicious to write about. Before I knew it, my new writer-ish self had RSVPed.

I used to view having a good story to tell as a consolation prize for an entertainingly crappy adventure I wish I’d avoided. But ever since I started writing, I’ve been on the hunt for good material, the more soul-wrenching the better, and I’m willing to subject myself to all sorts of humiliation to get my fix. I’d always ducked my company’s “work in customer service for a day” training, but now I sit impatiently on its waitlist and dream of fumbling an expletive-laced call from the world’s most irate consumer. Last quarter I took a driving lesson after a 5-year hiatus from the road. I hated the experience (as did several honking motorists), but I loved writing about it, precisely because it was so painful. This appetite for material has made me more adventurous and provides some comfort whenever an unwanted person or circumstance invades my life.

I was pondering the ethics of planting awkward pauses and other mood-killers into each of my speed dates. Then, as I was assuring myself that all this would come naturally, I heard back from the organizer. As with most things involving hypercompetitive yuppies and courtship, I was too late – the event was full. (Either a lot of people wanted to have an uncomfortable, depressing evening and write about it, or a lot of people thought this would be fun. At any rate, it’s weird.)

I felt devastated that I’d been turned down for something I didn’t really want to do in the first place but wanted to experience the misery of so that I might have fun writing about how awful it was. And suddenly, as I considered what a pathetic layer cake of negative emotions I’d just indulged in, I realized I still had something to write about.

Backblaze Back-up & Search this Blog

First,it turns out there is a Search on this blog! Look up in the upper left hand corner of the blog in the bar that goes along the top and you will see a Search Box. It works pretty well. You have to put the exact word in - for instance when I searched on "book report" (singular) it did not find the posts about our "book reports" (plural).

Second, tagging onto Amanda's post about computer crashes, I want to share a personal story of computer salvation in case it helps anyone else. To make a long story short - in trying to sync my calendar to a phone using a syncing program all of my appointments and events on my calendars were deleted!

Fortunately, I use an online computer backup service, Backblaze. I have been using it for almost a year but this was the first time I had ever had to go to it to recover files. Wow! Now I am a Backblaze Believer. It was easy, clear, worked extremely well! I was able to select just the file I needed to restore, but if I had needed to restore all my data - it was all right there.

The thing I like about Backblaze is it takes care of everything for you. You do not need to select which files or folders need to be backed up. So many of the other backup programs require you to select the files and folders that you wish to back up. This leaves you selecting the obvious, like in Amanda's case her photos, but leaving you at risk of losing the rest of the data scattered around in hidden corners of your computer's hard drive. Backblaze has a simple (3 clicks) setup - you don't even have to enter a credit card - and then it does all the work behind the scenes when your computer is idle. It does not slow down your computer at all.

I personally choose to backup online because of fear of theft. If someone breaks in and steals a computer - they will probably take an external hard drive too if they find it. However, that said, I am planning to get an external drive to use for backups as well. I would rather have duplicate systems. Loosing just my calendars was scary enough for me.

Now, here is a disclaimer! I am jazzed enough about Backblaze from this experience that I signed up to be an affiliate - which means if you click on the Backblaze link to sign up and try it out . . . and you eventually decide to become a paid subscriber ($5 per month or $50/year) . . . I get some kudos and a very small amount of credit. That is NOT why I am writing this post. You don't need to use Backblaze! Use a different program or system - but just do backup your system at least weekly!

Back that thang up!

I blue screened last night. For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with this phrase, it is the technical term  for when a computer, at an inopportune and previously unscheduled moment, chooses to roll over and die. Since both my husband and I work in the high tech industry, we have multiple backup plans in place. For our photos.

So this is my personal PSA to encourage everyone to implement a boring, reliable and automated backup system for their writing. There are many online services which are free for the first 2 - 5 GB and fairly nominal after that. Especially when compared to trying to recreate a masterpiece that went down in a blaze of blue glory.

Comcast - 2GB free storage for customers

Dropbox -- a good way to backup and share large files.

I just read an excellent 4,709 word article in the New York Times Magazine and thought I would share the link with you all - for a few reasons. First, the beginning paragraph (below) is a good one. Secondly, I found it fascinating to watch how the author, Jonah Leher, builds the story and transitions from topic to topic. It's a good read - as a writing student, a city dweller, and a small business owner. In light of our most recent class, it is also interesting how Leher chose to end the article - with a quote and only wrapping up the last major topic of the article. The other main topics he wrapped up as part of the transitions. The article is A Physicist Solves the City.

Geoffrey West doesn’t eat lunch. His doctor says he has a mild allergy to food; meals make him sleepy and nauseated. When West is working — when he’s staring at some scribbled equations on scratch paper or gazing out his office window at the high desert in New Mexico — he subsists on black tea and nuts. His gray hair is tousled, and his beard has the longish look of neglect. It’s clear that West regards the mundane needs of everyday life — trimming the whiskers, say — as little more than a set of annoying distractions, drawing him away from a much more interesting set of problems. Sometimes West can seem jealous of his computer, this silent machine with no hungers or moods. All it needs is a power cord.

How to end a story

Here are the examples of endings I projected in class on 3/8. Enjoy.

We watch in awe as from a hand moving lightly and swiftly across the drafting table there leaps into being something never seen before.

—Brendan Gill, Many Masks [a life of Frank Lloyd Wright]

---

And if it’s not a bluff? Well, there really isn’t any Plan B, because at this point you no longer have a problem bear. You have a bear problem.

—Lawrence W. Cheek

---

I love these stories because they show where we began, and therefore how far we have come, from the blame and delusions of our drinking days to the gentle illusions by which we stay sober. Now we understand that the blanket really does protect Linus and that Schroeder really does play lovely music on a toy piano, because both of them keep at it. They believe.

—Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

---

...Moments later, two court officers approached Madoff, who stood silently and still, and then he moved his arms a little so that his hands were behind his back. And then there was a click.

—Nancy Franklin [in a New Yorker article about the sentencing of Bernie Madoff]

---

[quoting a park ranger on a man’s six-month run of calamities after he followed a bird to a prehistoric ax head and stolen the ax.] “...He didn’t say it was a crow, did he? Because a crow—well, you just don’t follow crows.”

—Douglas J. Kreutz, “The Year of the Ax”

---

Tyler looked stricken. Lori shifted nervously in her seat. Bandit growled. Cesar turned to the dog and said, “Sh-h-h.” And everyone was still.

—Malcolm Gladwell [in a New Yorker profile of Cesar Millan, the famous “dog whisperer”

---

And so it goes for all of us: for me, Ron, the poet plumber and the professor, who place ourselves within the confines of a personal ad hoping someone out there will connect with our 50 words and nervous voices on a recorded message. If we were really honest, our ads would read: “My heart has been shattered and I’m scared. Will someone take a chance on me?”

-—from “Like New (With a Few Broken Parts) by Irene Sherlock

---

The water is blue satin, the breeze as slack as a snoozing cat. Paddling at a casual three knots, we overtake a small sloop, its owner lounging on the deck. “Great day for paddling, maybe not so great for sailing,” I call out.

“No, it’s a great day for sailing,” he replies.

“You’re not going to go anywhere fast.”

“Why would I want to go anywhere fast?”

—Lawrence W. Cheek [in a Sunset travel story on the San Juan Islands]

The advice section Do Your Job Better in the Chronicle of Higher Education includes regular writing advice columns from Rachel Toor, a writer and professor at Eastern Washington University. Although the columns are targeted towards academics and students, the advice often applies to the general writer. I often read the Chronicle's writing advice because it is usually relevant and of high quality. I think that must be because professor-types have been trained to be horrible writers (emphasis on the passive voice, incomprehensible language and style, etc.) and now professional writers must step in to reverse bad training.

In a recent column, "How do you learn to edit yourself?", Toor emphasizes the importance of the basics (like knowing the difference between further and farther and recognizing a comma splice when you see one) and recommends a few good style guides.

The decline, fall and ruin of English

Here's a terrific essay for all of us who cherish language and fear for its safety:

http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_snd-american-english.html

How to describe a person

If you’re on the lookout for good writing, you discover it in all kinds of places. (Though the same goes for bad writing, and more frequently). John Phillips’ column in the current issue of Car and Driver magazine is a short personality sketch of Ferdinand Piëch, former CEO of Volkswagen, and it bristles with excellent characterizations:

“Courtrooms fall silent just before the judge reads a verdict, and Piëch exerts a similar effect on any chamber he approaches. It isn’t exactly charisma, and isn’t his physical presence, because the guy vaguely resembles a talking human tendon ... He sometimes sports a two-day stubble of albino beard, lending him the countenance of a high-school janitor who lives in the basement.”

However ...

“His cheeks are pinkish from capillaries that ruptured when employees made the same mistake twice ... “

“His smile has been known to lower ambient temperatures 15 degrees ... “

“...underestimated by his adversaries, many of whom now work as night managers at Der Wienerschnitzel.”

Have a good picture of Piëch now—not only his physical appearance but also his manner and style? I do. The whole column, by the way, runs about 900 words.

March 1 Overheads

Here are most of the overheads I used in class last night. It might be useful to copy and paste them into a separate document you can keep for your own reference.

If you’re going to build a Church of Ecology, might as well do it dramatically and audaciously. Plant it smack in the devil’s sprawling front yard and rub his nose in it. Build it in Bellevue.

The new Mercer Slough Environmental Education Center is a stunning retort to the grade-it, pave-it and supersize-it ethic that has shaped Bellevue’s built environment, just as it has every other affluent American suburb. This clump of five modest buildings doesn’t just suggest a different direction. It’s an alternate universe.

Seattle has the townhouse pox. A rash of trite, stale, and clumsy faux-Craftsman eightplexes is ripping through the city’s neighborhoods, bleeding vitality and visual interest out of the streetscapes.

Some at least offer the virtue of low price—that’s relatively “low” in the pathology of Seattle’s real estate—but we’re trading short-term affordability for long-haul blight.

+++

Two leads from The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

The ground had just thawed when I drove to Wyoming in 1976. It was night. All I could see of the state was white peaks, black sky, and the zigzag promenade of rabbits unwinding in front of the car . It’s said that sudden warmth drives frost deeper into the ground before it loses its grip, as if to drive home one last tentstake of numbness before the protective canvas. That’s what happened to me that year: things seemed better than they were, then took a declivitous slide before they improved.

I used to walk in my sleep. On clear nights when the seals barked and played in phosphorescent waves, I climbed out the window and slept in a horse stall. Those “wild-child” stories never seemed odd to me; I had the idea that I was one of them, refusing to talk, sleeping only on the floor. Having become a city dweller, the back-to-the-land fad left me cold and I had never thought of moving to Wyoming. But here I am, and unexpectedly, my noctambulist world has returned. Not in the sense that I still walk in my sleep—such restlessness has left me—but rather, the intimacy with what is animal in me has returned. To live and work on a ranch implicates me in new ways: I have blood on my hands and noises in my throat that aren’t human.

+++

Anecdotal lead of Sturgis Robinson’s “person” story:

She was an Amazon, indefatigable, tireless and fearless. She saved my life once in the Grand Canyon on a foolish mid-winter kayaking trip. I, of course, had brought along cheap and worn out equipment that did little to keep my skinny body warm or dry during the eight to ten hours a day we paddled down the freezing river. She found me listless and shivering along the bank, unable to help myself and already deeply hypothermic. Riverside tamarisk bushes overhung with icicles hid me; the rest of our party had passed me by. She pulled me out of my boat and peeled off my useless wetsuit and her own. She built a fire; even in the cold wind she got it lit on the first try.

+++

Scene-setting lead from a student’s “place” story about a strip club:

The mirror behind the stage is still streaked with hand prints, smudges of sweat and body oil. The girls still climb up every few dances with a spray bottle of glass cleaner and a rag wiping it up and down, back and forth, like slutty Cinderellas in their g-strings and bras. There are still black vinyl benches strewn about the room and tucked into dim corners that stick to bare thighs when you sit down. There’s that same odor of slightly rancid perfume, of roses blooming in a pasture of cigarette butts, even though smoking was banned here a year ago.

+++

A “quip” lead by Ian Frazier:

Among the cruelest tricks life plays is the way it puts the complicated part at the end, when the brain is declining into simplicity, and the simplest part at the beginning, when the brain is fresh and has memory to spare.

Two more fine “quip” leads:

It’s hard to believe that only 73 years ago, the golden Gate Bridge did not exist. The airplane is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. The particle accelerator is older than the Golden Gate Bridge. Betty White is older than the Golden Gate Bridge.

—Jennifer B. McDonald, NY Times Book Review, 8.8.10

I once worked in a New Hampshire cabinet shop with a gray-bearded guy named Paul who regularly offered only two criticisms of my craftsmanship. He would say either, “We’re not making a damn pigpen here,” or “We’re not making a damn piano here.” When I put the appropriate amount of effort into the job, he’d let me be. If Paul ever looked over Joe Greenley’s shoulder as Joe built one of his strip-built kayaks, I think he’d sputter, “We’re not building a damn Louis XIV escritoire here.”

—Christopher Cunningham, “The King,” Small Boats 2009

+++

Two quote leads:

“This is probably the best thing I’ve done in my whole life.”

Peter Gron, forty-two, is talking about his Arctic Tern, a twenty-three-foot full-keel sloop now taking elegant shape beside his home on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. There is no trace of irony or self-consciousness in his voice or expression—he means it.

—Lawrence W. Cheek, The Year of the Boat

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“Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet.

“Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his graying beard, squints out over the bay ...

—Bill Roorbach, “Shitdiggers, Mud Flats, and the Worm Men of Maine

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Two question leads:

This is a car’s-eye view of Houston—but is there any other? It is a short report on a fast trip to the city that has supplanted Los Angeles in current intellectual mythology as the city of the future ...

—Ada Louise Huxtable, “Deep in the heart of nowhere”

Like any out-of-the-way place, the Napo River in the Ecuadorian jungle seems real enough when you are there, even central. Out of the way of what? ... Of human life, tenderness, or the glance of heaven?

—Annie Dillard, “In the Jungle”

+++

Finally, a step-by-step example of my distillation process in writing leads:

First try:

Newspaper editor-turned-developer Charles Waldheim is plodding around a grassy park in downtown Mesa, dreaming out loud. His peculiar idea, which might already have been instituted if the cost hadn’t ballooned to 10 times its original projection, is a penguin park. Right here. In the middle of the Arizona desert.

Second:

It is a sunny day in downtown Mesa, and Charles Waldheim is dreaming out loud. His peculiar idea is a penguin park. Here. In the middle of the Arizona desert.

Third:

It is a sunny day in downtown Mesa, and Charles Waldheim is talking penguins.