Close Reading 1

Zestful Blog Post #163

His mother peers out over his head to the end of the walk, where his father is waiting for him. Good-by, good-by!—until tonight he is off with his father, the whole week has exploded white-hot on Saturday morning, and not even his mother's worried angry kiss can distract him. Out there his father is waiting with his hands on his hips, a man. Yes, he is coming!

That is the second paragraph of "Wild Saturday," a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, one of my literary heroes. It was first published in the September, 1970 issue of, unbelievably now, Mademoiselle magazine. Oates had burst on the literary scene as a very young woman, and won the National Book Award with her novel THEM in the same year this story was published. She was 32.

When one reads for pleasure, whether one is a writer or not, the way to learn from another author is to ask, always, these two questions: What is really going on? What am I being told or shown?

What's so special about that paragraph from Oates's story? Nothing and everything. It shows us a young boy being handed off from Custody Mom to Weekend Dad. The breakup of the marriage was acrimonious. How do we know this? If we're paying close attention, we notice that the parents are so estranged that Dad doesn't even come up to the front door to greet his ex-wife and collect his son. Is he afraid, ashamed, a wuss? These questions might crop up in our readerly minds. And as we read further, we might be on the lookout for answers.

If we hadn't caught any significance to dad-on-sidewalk, we're told more by the mother's "worried angry kiss." Yes, the dad could be a little leery of his ex's suspicion and fury, which is perhaps well justified. We might already be developing a feeling of uh-oh.

Because "the week has exploded white-hot" just now, and the mom evidently has reason to be worried because this isn't the first time the boy has gone off with his father on the weekend. We know this because the situation is presented as if routine, not the first time.

And because this is the beginning of a story, we know we're going to get a story, and the title of the story has the word 'wild' in it, and we know that the author is Joyce Carol Oates, and because we know her, we know that this will almost certainly be a harrowing, spellbinding trip—especially if we read it with fine attention.

That is how good authors work: with economy and attention to every detail, to make the most of every word. Do you like this? I'd like to do more of these if you think it would be interesting/helpful. To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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To the Ballpoint

Zestful Blog Post #158

Once, years ago, when I was fumbling around for a pen at work, an office mate informed me, “The core of the earth is made of molten ballpoint pens. The ones everybody constantly loses. They migrate through the dirt and eventually arrive at the core of the earth, where they become molten.” Even though I’d minored in geology in college, I thought this theory had a lot of merit.

For most of my life, ballpoint pens have justly occupied the lower rungs of scriverdom (I just made up that word—no applause, just throw money) because they were so unpleasant to write with. Even though they were invented before the turn of the 20^th century and mass-produced by midcentury, 1960s  ballpoints tended to be sticky and skippy, and you only used them because they were cheap. They even leaked in pressurized airplane cabins. That fact I learned from watching the Mad Men episode where Don and Salvatore fly to someplace and Sal’s pen leaks. (Given the context of that episode, the leaking pen is very funny.)

BIC pens found a temporary place in my heart after the 1968 winter Olympics in Grenoble, France, where Peggy Fleming won gold in women’s figure skating. Sitting next to my mom on the couch, watching our flickering Zenith black and white, I was entranced by Peggy’s grace and athleticism, riveted by the breathless announcers calling her moves: “And now… the double-axel… Yes, she does it…” It was only later that I saw the fabulous chartreuse color of her dress in a magazine. After the Olympics she did a TV commercial for BIC pens where she skates around a darkened arena just like at the Olympics, with a BIC strapped to her ankle, point down on the ice. Point down. On the ice. At the end she does a long hard spin, and man, the ice chips fly! Then she skates over to a pan of fire—a pan of fire!—just like the Olympic flame, unstraps the pen, and holds the point in the flame for seconds on end. Then, stunningly, she writes BIC on a pad of paper. Incroyable. So I was like, BIC for president. (Sadly, there seems to be no available video of that spot. If you find it, please send me the link.)

The costlier Papermate brand always wrote smoother, and anybody remember Lindy pens? Bullet-shaped cap, metal pocket clip with a cutout of a tiny seal balancing a ball on its nose. Those were cool pens, smooth-writing, plus they came in different colors. Gone, though.

[My current purse pen, a Parker Jotter with Schmidt Easy Flow cartridge.]

So once I got old enough to discover the joys of fountain pens, I became a fountain pen devotee, even a fine pencil connoisseur. But lately I’ve realized that ballpoint technology has moved forward. Of course we have the ball-tip gel pens, which were a significant leap.

Over the course of the past year I’ve been experimenting with various ballpoint pens and cartridges, and gosh, there are some good ones out there. Anybody familiar with the Schmidt Easy Flow cartridge from Germany? Really smooth and nice. Fits the Parker Jotter and others. The Parker Quink Flow cartridges are good too, way better than the standard Parker cartridges of even 15 years ago.

The best part of Parker Jotters, by the way, is the click mechanism. Hear the biting authority of it, feel the taut certainty of it. Yeah, baby. Did you know that every time you click it, the cartridge rotates 120 degrees, to ensure even wear? Brilliant.

I’ve heard good things about the Monteverde Superbroad refills and have a few in my Amazon cart. Various ink manufacturers have gotten into making Parker-compatible refills, to satisfy different customer tastes. And, given funding sites like Kickstarer and so on, metalsmiths are designing and selling small-batch nice pens of aluminum and other metals that will take those refills. I have a few, and I suppose I'll wax poetic about those someday.

Write on. I’d be very interested to hear any ballpoint-related thoughts you might wish to share. To post, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

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NPR's Appalling Language

Zestful Blog Post #157

On Monday (April 18, 2016) I was listening to Diane Rehm’s show on NPR while driving around to some appointments. I’m not a die-hard NPR devotee, but I do tune in sometimes. The reason I’m not a die-hard devotee to NPR is the bewildering language used by some of the guests—not so much the hosts. Diane Rehm is blameless. Diane Rehm for president.

My beef is with the guests / interviewees who torture language trying to make themselves sound more intellectual. Often, I’m sad to say, they are writers. Writers who have written books published by intellectual presses about intellectual things like social theories.

Having cut my teeth as a newspaper reporter and editor, my anti-bullshit axe is sharp and fierce. Maybe I’m just getting older and crabbier, or maybe the NPR problem is really getting worse. I think it’s getting worse. Things were so bad Monday morning that I had to pull over not once but twice, and make notes.

A group of guests were talking about Brexit. You know, the possible exit of Britain from the European Union. The word Brexit is fine. It’s a witty shorthand that one could text to friends when messaging about world affairs.

But when one guest said, “The atmospherics of the summit will be tense,” I was like, what did she just say? Atmospherics? Why would you say that when you mean atmosphere? Oh, of course: to sound brainier! People who use words with more syllables are perceived as being more intelligent than ordinary folk. You have to listen with some alertness to notice when the extra syllables are phony.

Here’s another one from the same conversation, different guest, who was asked about reciprocity between Britain and the EU if Britain Brexits. “Well, the automaticity of that will no longer be there.” What the f*ck? Automaticity? Have you ever heard that word before? But you know exactly what the guy meant: The reciprocity would go away. But when you’re in front of a microphone, whether on the radio or a dais, air time is important. Fill it with syllables, preferably ones that can more or less be grasped by people dumber than you. Automaticity originated as a science word to describe certain functions in cells, then became, according to the Free Dictionary: “Acting or operating in a manner essentially independent of external influence or control: an automatic light switch; a budget deficit that triggered automatic ...” Automaticity is actually a perfect NPR word: It's unnecessarily complicated and not really accurate, yet it’s easy to tell what the speaker means. 

Side one of my angrily scribbled note card.

Another guest, discussing his book about the dangers global aid workers face, used the term ‘sea change,’ which bugged me, because the clearer, simpler ‘change’ would have sufficed. Sea change is a somewhat archaic term referring to the shift in one’s perceptions, mostly having to do with sense of balance, when one embarks on a long sea voyage. The movement of the sea makes for lots of vestibular input, and one feels different, and possibly out of sorts, until one adapts. MFK Fisher, by the way, wrote beautifully (and economically) about the subject in The Gastronomical Me. People now use sea change to mean a vast change. When you say sea change, you simply sound more worldly, don’t you?

The same guest said, “The safety of aid workers evolves onto the local population.” He of course should have said devolved, but he was either unsure of that, or he sensed many listeners would think devolve is incorrect in that usage. But it’s correct. This example isn’t exactly parallel to the others, but valuable nevertheless, to illustrate the deep insecurities of many NPR guests.

Same guest: “Secondly, and probably most foundationally…” Foundationally? Beautiful. So much more dolled up than basically. More syllables, more letters. Same guest: “The latter question is of sentinel importance.” Lovely! The term is completely meaningless, yet you instantly know that he meant special importance, or more probably, signal importance. But sentinel! An extra syllable! Not only that, but just the sound of it is so serious! Sentinel. Yeah, man.

Do things like this bug the same crap out of you, or am I just a bitch? 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.