Links and books that came from Bill Dietrich

When Bill Dietrich talked to our class he mentioned some web sites and books that sounded like they would be helpful to aspiring writers. I found the Writers Market site more useful than the publisher site, to the point that I wonder if I have the correct site. But there are jobs advertised on the site, which may be of interest.

And for you budding science writers, have a look at the site for the National Association of Science Writers.

I'm also curious to read these books he mentioned:

"Thinking like Your Editor" and  "On Writing" by Stephen King.

Anyone read either of these? Tell us what you think.

A couple of reminders about next week

Remember the class starts on Tuesday, Dec. 6, at 6:30 p.m. in Miller Hall, Room 301. We should be
back in Smith Hall, Room 309 by 7:30 p.m. to critique six papers.

Also, remember that on Saturday, Dec. 10, from 9 to 11:30 a.m. there will be another workshop at
NARA. They are expecting about a dozen of us to show up.

Here's what we learned from Bill Dietrich

On interview ethics: make sure what they said is what they meant. They won't remember what they said but they will remember what they meant.

becoming a writer = (talent and hard-work) x fate. 

knowing your audience + business savvy >the stories you tell.

To be a successful author, write for the readers, not yourself. Who will read this? Who will buy it? Audience, audience, audience.

"Read, read, read. Write, write, write."

Want to make a character in your writing truly scary?  Make that character relatable to your audience.  Then when they do something awful, it will seem that much worse.

In his career as a writer, William Dietrich beat his head against a lot of closed doors - and then found open doors right next to them.

Much as I wish Dietrich was still turning out Northwest natural history books -- what a powerful voice for our  environment  he was -- his practicality and commitment to expanding his talents was surprisingly admirable.

A Cinderella story

On Friday, Betsy Morais, an Atlantic Magazine writer, asked "When does a writer become a writer?"

Some writers appear to come out of the chute as successes (see previous post about Jeffrey Eugenides). But many are the stories about writers who weren't appreciated or didn't achieve significant recognition until after they'd died.

Some writers, including Franz Kafka and Anton Chekov, are driven to toil away in what spare time they find outside their unrelated day jobs, seemingly with little hope of being published and even less of receiving awards or achieving bestseller status. Alexis Jenni was such a writer, filling pages with prose on the weekends when he wasn't filling young minds with information about physiology, ecology and the theory of evolution. So the 48-year-old was stunned in early November when he won France's top literary prize; it wasn't even on his radar.














Morais writes:
"In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or the conviction of having something to say. A writer is not defined by his career, but the simple act of writing regularly. And authors who found success through the muck of making ends meet have taken that approach for some time now, in practice at least."

I guess the answer to Morias' question is: when someone practices "... the simple act of writing regularly."

An interesting aside: Jenni apparently received his share of publishers' rejections and then didn't bother to submit one manuscript. He sent his award-winning manuscript to only one publisher, which took a chance on Jenni. But many also are the stories of the rejections received by now-famous authors, including Kurt Vonnegut and Vladimir Nabokov. The Atlantic has compiled a few such gems as evidence that publishers don't always recognize what they receive in the myriad of manila envelopes that cross their desks. Or in the plethora of PDF files that fill their inboxes.

A critic speaks: "And So It Goes"

To follow-up on the previous post, The New York Times has reviewed Sheilds' biography of Vonnegut. Kind of.

It's actually more a criticism of Vonnegut himself. Here is the one sentence in Christopher Buckley's article that addresses the book: "Shields has a deep affection for his subject and does what he can to rebut charges of hypocrisy, but in this he is not entirely convincing."

Other than that, Buckley summarizes Vonnegut's life from Shields' book and then picks apart Vonnegut's actions. I guess he could have done that without Shields' book.
Buckley makes the point that the book is depressing because Vonnegut's life was kind of depressing, but what's the point in now saying "Hey, don't be so depressing, Kurt."

My critique: Buckley didn't write the greatest book critique.

And so it goes

I read my first Kurt Vonnegut novel, "Slaughterhouse-Five," in a high school literature class. Fascinated, I quickly followed it on my own with "Cat's Cradle" and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater" and was hooked on Vonnegut.
When people ask my favorite food or my favorite movie, I usually have to stop and think. But for several years, I never hesitated when asked my favorite author (he's still a favorite but he's been joined by others).

So I snapped to attention when I heard on a recent NPR interview that Charles Shields has written a biography of Vonnegut, due out on Wednesday. Regrettably, it's initially available in Kindle and hardcover versions only, otherwise I'd have signed up to receive a copy the day it came out.

I like reading some biographies, as long as the individual is interesting and the writer is good.
I have no doubt that Vonnegut was interesting, having started his adult life fighting in World War II. The NPR interview highlights Vonnegut's disenchantment, the extent of which I hadn't realized, even though I knew he'd tried to commit suicide.
Probably few can read his works and not sense he had lived through enough to develop a clear-eyed, cynical view of people. But he veiled the cynicism with humor, coming across as more upbeat than he apparently was; as the saying goes, "Scratch the surface of a cynic, and you'll find a disappointed idealist." Some substitute "romantic" for "disappointed idealist"... potayto, potahto.

I knew nothing about Shields' writing. When I looked him up on the Amazon website, he mentioned a blog he'd kept while writing the biography. He just wrote the final post a few weeks ago.
I didn't get too far into the older posts but from what I read, the blog deserves its own post here because it gives some wonderful insight into Shields' process. If it's indicative of the quality of the biography, I won't be disappointed.

I was saddened in 2007 when I heard of Vonnegut's death and didn't buy his posthumously-published "Armageddon in Retrospect" for the longest time. I finally bought it a few months ago when I saw it languishing on a sales shelf in a little independent bookstore. Vonnegut's son, Mark, wrote the introduction, and the first two grafs seemed written for writers:

"Writing was a spiritual exercise for my father, the only thing he really believed in. He wanted to get things right but never thought that his writing was going to have much of an effect on the course of things. His models were Jonah, Lincoln, Melville and Twain.
He rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, muttering whatever he had just written over and over, tilting his head back and forth, gesturing with his hands, changing the pitch and rhythm of the words. Then he would pause, thoughtfully rip the barely written-on sheet of typing paper from the typewriter, crumple it up, throw it away, and start over again. It seemed like an odd way for a grown-up to spend his time, but I was just a child who didn't know much."

New book from Roy Peter Clark

If you find the exercises in Roy Peter Clark's book useful, you might check out his new book: "Help! For Writers: 210 Solutions to the Problems Every Writer Faces." Read a review of it here.

What we learned from Maureen

Here are the Tweets you sent me about the session with Maureen O’Hagan from The Seattle Times. Sorry if I missed someone’s – as I did with those you sent about Cheryl’s visit.

Thanks again to Maureen.

And I’m expecting Tweets from you about Bill Dietrich’s visit.

Here’s what you said you took away from Maureen’s talk:

Don't tell the story just for the story's sake. There should be something of consequence that the reader can take away
from it.

Murder, mental mayhem and medication: how to explore the terrain of mental illness to uncover the mind of a gentle killer.

The story is in the details. Paint a picture with words to capture the essence of your subject. Write for yourself & the readers will come.

What’s your story? Truth. What do you want me to know? Discover.  How? Investigate the facts.  Show me, don’t tell me; write, revise, edit.

"A good editor is going to save me from myself"

What are the most important things to bring to a difficult interview?  Pencil, paper, and the ability to walk in the other person's shoes.

“I’m kind of nuts about fact checking . . . Editors don’t really want to hear it’s a good story. They want an excuse to run it (the story) . . If I had to make stuff up out of my head -- I’d be a failure. I can’t write fiction."

"I think of writing as a puzzle, and what's the best way to put that together."

If you can’t grab the reader, don’t bother. Write as many leads as you need to – 20? – ’til you find the one that works.

Every piece of work has a back story more rich and complex than the work itself.  The puzzle is knowing how much of the story to share.

"Happy topics are boring."

In journalism, you encounter difficult decisions, so you need to use your best judgment.

Fact check. Be fair. Capture the essence of things. A good interview is like watching a movie unfold. Fact-check again.

Free Sunday afternoon? Consider attending this

Sunday • November 20 • 2pm
Obliterate the Empty Page:
Okay, I've Written a Novel — What Do I Do Now?
A Q&A with the Northwest Independent Editors Guild
U District store
Get tips and advice for your NaNoWriMo project from a panel of expert editors from the Northwest Independent Editors Guild:  Kyra Freestar is a freelance editor specializing in both copyediting and developmental editing for authors and publishers. She also works for the Author-Editor Clinic, where she often writes for the blog The Editor's POV. Sarah Martinez, an editor at Pink Fish Press, has participated in NaNoWriMo since 2007. Before joining Pink Fish Press, she edited and read for a local literary agent.  A specialist in working with writers on tight deadlines, developmental editor Anne Mini has helped quite a few NaNoWriMo participants overcome writer's block and revision reluctance. She also teaches writing and marketing classes, and writes Author! Author!, a popular blog for writers. For more information on the Northwest Independent Editors Guild and its services, please visit www.edsguild.org.

"Virgin Suicides" author gets comfortable 20 years later

I was listening to the BBC on the radio Sunday night and heard an interview with author Jeffrey Eugenides on the "Talking Books" programme (must include the "e" because it's British, after all). Eugenides is best known for his first book "The Virgin Suicides" because of the movie adaptation. But his follow-on book, "Middlesex," won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003.

He has just published his third book, "The Marriage Plot," which prompted the interview. Most of the interview discussion is about his fiction books and characters, but I thought writers of any genre could relate to his final comments, which I include below.

His message has both good and bad ramifications. Good because they show even a talented, recognized writer struggles; bad because it shows those struggles can last up to two decades before authors begin to feel even somewhat comfortable with writing.

Hope no one's in a hurry.

Host:
"Since your debut with “The Virgin Suicides”… you have written two other novels. Do you feel that you have come of age now… do you feel completely at ease as a writer?"

Jeffrey Eugenides:
"I think I’m getting the hang of it. I’m just getting a sense that I can do it again.
Your first book… Don DeLillo once told me your first book comes to you as a gift – you don’t know how you wrote it, somehow you did. And your second book is the book that teaches you that you actually can do it.
I agree with that but after the third I feel more so, as though this is what I can do. I’m not that kind of novelist who’s always going to repeat the same kind of novel. Usually, I rebel against the novel before and change it up quite a bit.
But I do feel a kind of… I had terrible, terrible anxiety on the level of the sentence for the first 20 years of my writing career. Didn’t know how I wanted my books to sound, didn’t know how to write, didn’t know if I could actually get my point across in a certain way. And that started to go away and recede in writing “The Marriage Plot” and that feels like maturity - I don’t know if it is but it feels like a kind of maturity. I was pleased about it and I think I’ll stay in the same mode for the next couple of books."

The audio file of the interview will remain up on the BBC site until Nov. 21.

What we learned from Cheryl Phillips

I'm way late on sharing what all of you said about our guest speakers so far. Here are the "Twitter" posts you did on Cheryl Phillips from The Seattle Times. And thanks again, Cheryl.

Coming soon: What we learned from Maureen.

Here are the Tweets:

In today's class you have changed my view towards search engines. You taught me to search data that was not caught by google."

Start offline .Once online get a strategy & get organized!
Don’t throw darts @the WWW & don't forget the invisible web. Dive
deeper.

Ask for e-copies of federal or public documents or review them before asking for print copies. There's no substitute for talking to/interviewing people.

Search invisible web by using special links, a natural language search engine or “way back” machine which takes snapshots of previous sites!

Most of the information on the Internet isn’t available through a single, direct search, even using Google.

RE: S. Palin’s Alaska property  “ I wonder what she can see from here.”  My guess: Russia. Thanks for teaching public records to us!

Google isn't the end-all resource for online research, only the start. The great info is found in other sources, you just have to find them.

Online information below the top of the Internet, searched with
structure, is best. Curated sites, databases, and .gov sites are most helpful.

No substitute for talking to people!! Know what you are after. Bookmark and organize into subject folders & sub folders

There’s a place that even Google can’t find; the deep and invisible web where firewalls and intranets hide information that’s found only by those who know how to look.

Be curious and persistent - the amount of information available to you is astounding if you know where to look, and how long to look for it.

Exhaustive research, exhaustively catalogued, supports factual writing.

Good research means you scour multiple search engines. Be aware of the invisible web. Google and Yahoo, like our brains, use less than 10% of available data.

I have been an internal person. Cheryl showed an example of full worldly engagement, and the courage to do so with the joy of leaning in.    

Be tenacious. Her advice was to ask for what you want and if you don't get it, ask again. If you still don't get it, change the way you are asking for it.  This is relevant to interviewing subjects as well as researching information. Though the Internet is a valuable resource, not all data will be readily available. Pursuing answers and information efficiently is part of the challenge inherent to research and reporting. 

Most critical thing I heard from Cheryl was her focus on exhaustive research, exhaustively catalogued and organized, in order to support factual investigative reporting.  Especially as it seems she might often research more than one complicated story at a time.

Reads blogs and comments

The following are Seven Bar Jokes Involving Grammar and Punctuation by Erik K. Auld. Most demonstrate various writing mistakes in a fun way.
Commas seem to throw everyone a curve now and then. Three years ago, John B. recommended the book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" to me, and the first entry on the list below reminds me of "eats, shoots and leaves."
I particularly like Number 6 since it used to be my Number 1 nemesis.
Better to laugh at the problems this way than when they show up in your own writing... when they aren't so funny.

1. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves. (As I said, commas are infamous, so an editor has taken up the challenge to expand this sentence into its possible permutations. For those who are so inclined.)

2. A dangling modifier walks into a bar. After finishing a drink, the bartender asks it to leave.

3. A question mark walks into a bar?

4. Two quotation marks “walk into” a bar.

5. A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to drink.

6. The bar was walked into by the passive voice.

7. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They drink. They leave.

Thinking about writing

My previous post came out of an evening of frustration while copy editing. But I must acknowledge that most of what I was editing was written in just a few hours, if that. The unfortunate nature of the small newspaper business is that writers don't have much time to think about their stories before they have to move on to the next thing.
I would hope, if the reporters had the time, that they would have gone back and fine-tuned what they had written.

My frustrated observations are nothing new. Many writers more experienced than I am have already commented on the matter:

"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
- Mark Twain.
(Editor's note: Forgive Mr. Clemens this use of "'tis.")

‎"Writing is nature's way of letting us see how sloppy our thinking is."
- Richard Guindon
Apparently, this was the caption of one of Mr. Guindon's cartoons. I wish I could find the cartoon.

"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
- Samuel Johnson

"The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over."
- Toni Morrison.

Yes, we writers are afflicted with a modicum of masochistic madness.

Avoid sounding like everyone else or even yourself

Words and their meanings have perplexed and fascinated me for most of my life.
So many wonderful words exist that it seems a shame not to sample as many as possible. But sometimes, to really get your meaning across, only one will do.
Writers should make it their quest to employ the right words. Even though the thesaurus may list 10 lines of synonyms, Catherine Soanes demonstrates that rarely can you substitute one word for another and have it convey the same meaning.
True, if your reader isn't familiar with such nuances, substituted words might not make any difference... or the reader may get the wrong idea no matter what word you use. But you are not writing for them.
Writers are often tempted to find something different to spice up their copy after they've had to repeat a word, no matter how right. If so, they should at least make the effort to find the next best word.
I guess that's why #TheOldEditor says "Giving a reporter a thesaurus is like giving a toddler a loaded handgun."

Think about the words you use and why you choose them. One writer I work with uses certain words in almost every story; I guess they're supposed to be part of the writer's voice. But if I never read the words "folks," "critter," or "first ever" in a news story again, it will be too soon. "Fire folks" is probably not a good substitution for "fire crew."
But I don't think the writer is thinking about the words themselves. Perhaps they are just thinking about what might sound cool.
Or we get into habits.
I almost wrote the first sentence of this post like this: "Words and their meanings have perplexed and fascinated me all my life." But has it really been "all my life?" Did I come out of the womb contemplating the difference between "your" and "you're?"
No, it's just the kind of thing people say.
Whenever superlatives or extreme words like "always," "never," "all" or "none" pass from your keyboard to the computer screen, you should stop and ask, "Is that really so?"

Some writers might try to up the coolness factor by throwing in some line -- metaphor or phrase -- that they've read elsewhere. Writers throw in terms like "that's a sticky wicket" or "that begs the question" because they've heard others use them. But some meanings aren't intuitive, and the phrases are sometimes used the wrong way (The photo shows a sticky wicket -- a muddy cricket pitch -- at the North Perrott Cricket Club). Just as it's sometimes enlightening to look up the meaning of a common word (I am still occasionally surprised), writers should make sure they understand phrases before they use them.
Other times, writers recycle tired metaphors, which can hinder their efforts to come up with original ideas, something my teachers favored ("Avoid cliches" is tattooed on my left hemispheric cortex, not that I've always heeded it).

Originality is a key part of being a good writer and it applies to both word usage and ideas. But creating an original idea is challenging because so many types of stories have already been written.

Talk about challenging: Anyone who has had to write a holiday story knows what a struggle it can be to avoid the trite, the sappy and the cliche'. The temptation elves are everywhere, which is why the editor of the Baltimore Sun has put out a warning to stay away from the snow-borne sirens that have seduced many a writer: forced riffs on holiday phrases, such as "white stuff," "Bah, humbug," "T'is" and "T'was."

Every writer wants to produce engaging prose. But while you're trying to make those enlightened words flow onto the page, check your word and phrase choices now and then. Then go back through and ask yourself if anything else might work better.