The Worst Writing Advice

Zestful Blog Post #162

The worst writing advice I’ve ever heard is ‘kill your babies.’ Many, many fine writers have spewed this advice, including such vastly different story fabricators as William Faulkner and Stephen King. I just hunted up the original reference (thank you, Google), and here it is, from the British novelist and critic Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, writing in 1914:

‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’

He was being facetious, implying that if you think very highly of something you’ve written, it’s most likely pretentious dreck. Actually, this is often true for very young writers, or very new ones.

The true point of ‘murder your darlings’ is simply this: You must have the strength to cut material which is irrelevant or unnecessary to the piece at hand, in spite of how much pride you feel in it. This is common sense. Yet many writers get nervous about it, thinking maybe they’re supposed to destroy whatever they think is good. Which is insane.

The quotation keeps getting delivered with tremendous pompousness by authors and critics alike, as if it's some kind of golden key to excellence. I’ve also seen critics use it to mean whatever they want it to mean. I’m always like: Just say something doesn’t work, then justify it by whatever literary standards you want.

Furthermore, I say, love your babies, love your work, do your best to write with passion and concision, and forget stupid crap like that.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

5 Keys to Not Looking Like an Imbecile on Web Video

Zestful Blog Post #161

Over the past week, I watched eleven webinars on the business of writing and teaching. I learned many things. Some of the most interesting had to do with the presenters/panelists themselves. The ones who came across like stars did a few simple things right, and the ones who came off looking like cavemen did them wrong.

1) Get your camera level with your face. Meaning don’t have it on your desk or your coffee table so you’re looking down at it. Even people in good shape look double-chinned and sleepy from that angle. On a laptop or tablet, the camera is usually a little dot embedded at the top center of the frame around the screen. The screen is not the camera. The screen is not the camera. The screen is not the camera. An easy way to level the camera is to booster-seat your laptop on books or a briefcase. Remember briefcases? Maybe there’s one in the attic.

2) Look into the camera. When you look at your likeness on the screen—or the likeness of the person you’re talking to, in a hangout type situation—you are looking down and away from your audience, and they will spend the whole time waiting for you to make at least glancing eye contact. When your face and eyes are level with the camera, you are showing your audience that you’re literally ‘on the level.’ You look earnest and natural, even though you’re forcing yourself to stare at a tiny inanimate dot. That’s showbiz.

 3) Comb your hair and wear something halfway decent on top. I recently had to get ready in a hurry for a book group Skype, so I put on a nice top, jewelry, and a little lipstick, but didn’t bother changing out of my elastic-waist charwoman’s shorts below. For all they knew, I was a hundred percent glamorous.

4) Sit up straight. As in back-not-touching-your-chair, Downton Abbey style. When you sit back, especially in an upholstered chair, it looks like you have bad posture even if you really don’t. Your audience might not consciously notice, but these subliminal things add up. If you don’t have a yoga-teacher body, sitting up straight makes you look your trimmest. Also, since the time of Herodotus, civilized people have known that sitting up straight just makes you feel more bright and energetic.

5) Mumble away, if you must, when making your points, but for the love of God slow down and be clear when mentioning the name of a person, product, or company. It helps even more if you spell it out or give a clue as to the spelling. Not one single person, not even the best of them, did this in any of the eleven webinars I watched. They all threw around the names of web companies like they were still swallowing their cereal—was that ConvertIt? ConverKit? Kevorkian? Oh, maybe it’s ConvertKit.

6) I can’t help adding a sixth tip, and can’t believe I need to, and it would seem it hardly needs saying, but don’t pick your nose. I watched a multimillionaire business owner give a webinar during which he kept his laptop on the coffee table and for the entire hour looked down at his own image on the screen, never the camera; sat back on the couch so he looked porky; mumbled everything; swigged from a two-liter bottle of some beverage; and picked his nose. He did it starting about a fourth of the way in, and from then on. The thumb side style. Constantly. Alternated with back-of-hand wiping.

The hilarious thing was that he would look away from his laptop when he did it, so that HE didn’t see himself picking his nose on camera. I believe he might have presumed in some reptilian lobe of his brain that therefore WE couldn’t see it either. To top it off, near the end he humble-bragged about paying $750,000 in taxes last year. The next day I saw a screen shot of him and just got this immediate visceral feeling of ewww.

If you do have to attend to your nose, say, “I beg your pardon for a second,” turn or step away from the camera, and use the handkerchief or tissue you made ready before starting. It should be right next to your glass of water and your just-in-case throat lozenges. And if you do have to mention how much you pay in taxes, don't.

Now, thanks to me, you will not look like an imbecile on web video.

Do you have a tip to add or something fun to gripe about? To post, click below where it says, No Comments, or 2 Comments, or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

Lost Advice Here Now

Zestful Blog Post #160

You must not fear death.

That sentence was cut from my book You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams. My editor at Writer’s Digest Books made the cut; I suppose he thought it was over the top. It occurred in a chapter about writing freely and giving yourself permission to write poorly in order to get to the good stuff. Although I noticed the cut I didn’t object, because that piece of advice really needed a chunk of explanation, which I hadn’t put in, because I sensed it could have interrupted the flow of the chapter too much.

Of course fear generally is a toxic emotion. I don’t know of anyone who has ever said fear helped them achieve anything. Caution yes, intelligence yes. You don’t jump over a balcony instead of taking the stairs because you’re afraid; it’s because you know you’ll wake up in the ICU or the morgue.

When I counsel writers to be fearless, the counsel goes way beyond the practice of writing.

The fear of annihilation—death—is the chiefest of all human fears, and it of course drives much bad behavior. If I annihilate you first, maybe that will delay my own annihilation. But if we face life accepting that death will come sooner or later and go—OK, so what?—then we are truly free, and whatever we create will reflect that.

What do you think? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.

The Secret Life of Typos

Zestful Blog Post #159

Many a spell-check has missed many a typo. I was appalled to be notified of a typo in the first line of last week’s blog post about how missing ballpoint pens form the molten core of the earth. (Thank you, MB, KD, PR, and GC.)

It wasn’t a misspelling, it was a usage typo. In my first draft of the post, I’d written:

[Once, years ago, when I was fumbling around for a pen at work, a coworker informed me, “The core of the earth is made of molten ballpoint pens.”]

When I read it over, I decided I didn’t want ‘coworker’ to follow the word ‘work’ so closely, so I changed ‘coworker’ to ‘office mate,’ like so:

[Once, years ago, when I was fumbling around for a pen at work, a office mate informed me, “The core of the earth is made of molten ballpoint pens.”]

As you see, I neglected to change the ‘a’ to ‘an.’ Only after the post went out via email did I learn of that hideous, hideous error. If anyone had opted to unsubscribe after that post, I would have been so humiliated. Of course I edited the post immediately.

One of my correspondents tells me the free program Grammarly is helpful to catch such problems before they explode into disaster. (Have I mentioned this before?) I haven’t adopted it, though, because I’m fearful that it would pop up and annoyingly try to correct my sometimes deliberate ungrammatical usage. So, live by the self-copy-edit, die by the self-copy-edit. It’s a price I guess I’m willing to pay.

However, if you’re a first-time author who wants to self-publish a book, definitely get a professional copy edit before hitting that upload button. You don’t want to give your audience any extraneous reasons to be disappointed and look away. If you get a professional copy edit but the copy editor finds no corrections to make, you will be a first among writers, and you should leave your brain to science.

This is pretty much the kind of audience attention you want. These people were watching two guys try to kill each other.

Also in last week’s post I used the word ‘incroyable,’ which was not a typo, but is French for incredible or amazing. Given that I was talking about the Olympics in France, I thought it appropriate. Further down the page I mentioned Parker’s Quink Flow ballpoint cartridges. Quink was the brand name Parker initially used for a new quick-drying bottled fountain-pen ink. Now they use it for everything, including cartridges. Why, God, why? BTW, Quink is an example of a portmanteau word: quick and ink. Gonna run my spell-check now.

Weirdly, I found an inexplicable copy error in the most recent editions of my first novel, Holy Hell. I was reading through, making pronunciation notes for the vocal artist who will be voicing the book for Audible, when I found the word softball capitalized in the middle of a sentence, as if it were a proper noun. It occurs in both the Kindle and paperback Create Space versions. It did not occur, I found, in the first edition paperback published by Alyson Books; I have no idea how it came to be capitalized in the current versions, which I went over with fine attention. And over and over. I found a few other minor errors in the other books, mostly formatting mistakes: a missed indent or such. Haven’t fixed those yet.

What do you think of the secret life of typos? To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

If you'd like to receive this blog automatically as an email, look to the right, above my bio, and subscribe there. Thanks for looking in.