Fringe Life

Zestful Blog Post #165

I started to write a few paragraphs about the terrorist massacre in Orlando, but others have said everything already, and I need to keep this blog about what it’s about: zestful writing, zestful living. In that spirit I wish to tell you the results of a small choice I made yesterday.

I’m in my hometown of Detroit, on family business. (Local friends, don’t hate me for not getting in touch. Very tight timelines. I love you.)  Marcia and I are staying with a friend in the leafy, low-crime, northern suburbs. I happen to be under contract for a new article for Writer’s Digest magazine, so yesterday when I had a few hours to myself, I decided to start work on it.

My protocol for developing a new article is to hang out in as large a library as is available to me, brainstorm initial notes, and do research in the stacks. Yesterday my choice was to go around the corner to a nice suburban library, or take half an hour and drive down the crumbling Woodward corridor to the Detroit Public Library.

I tried to convince myself to stay north of Eight Mile, but the pull of the old cultural center was too great. They call the area that comprises Wayne State University (where I got my master’s), the main public library, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and assorted newer museums the Cultural Center. I knew I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t go to the DPL, for old time’s sake if nothing else. But I knew in my heart it would be worth it. The trip cost extra time, trouble, and, to be honest, anxiety. You just can’t grasp the enormity of the city’s decay via web posts and pictures. I stopped to take a couple of ruin-porn photos en route, steeling myself to be this white lady getting out of a twenty-year-old Lexus and photographing bombed-out buildings with only black folks around. Needless to say, no one bothered me.

En route I found the whole of Woodward Avenue to be blocked off: all seven lanes, with police barricades and mounted officers. I slowed down and saw the cathedral off to the left, remembered I’d listened to the radio yesterday, and thought: right, Gordie Howe’s funeral. So I found a parking place in the Boston-Edison district and walked up to see. Nobody who wasn’t invited could get in to the funeral mass of the hockey legend, of course, so I hung out on the fringes, across the street with some photographers and a few citizens who showed up to honor the sportsman.

So yeah: They were broadcasting the mass outside, so we could hear everything. I noticed that the camera guys were positioned directly across from the church main doors, and realized that’s the correct spot to get the classic casket-being-carried-out shot. Chatted up the fans, who had their Gordie stories. Chatted up the cops, thanked them for serving. Watched the mounted officers get down next to their trailer, water their horses, and pour coffee for themselves.

Got back in the car, fought the construction along the rest of Woodward, found a parking spot near the library, figured out the new parking-pay kiosk, went in, and got a spot in one of the reading rooms:

It’s the coolest library I’ve ever been in, and I’ve been in a lot of major ones. As soon as I established my campsite, my breathing slowed down, and I got to work making notes and thinking. Who wouldn’t feel completely at peace in a place like that? Who wouldn’t have wanted to stumble upon a little piece of Detroit history along the way?

There’s a lot to be experienced along the fringes.

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Finishing Sets You Apart More Than You Know

Zestful Blog Post #164

My wife, Marcia, is currently serving as a teaching assistant for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an online course in game design. (She is a very good programmer and designer.) The course is free; 11,000 people around the world signed up for it.

The course is in the fifth week of its six-week term. As of now, 2,800 people have either introduced themselves or made a comment in the online forum: that is, 2,800 people have participated at all. And 37 have submitted the final assignment, which is a finished game. (Finished more or less; we all understand the concept of a first draft…)

From 11,000 starters to 37 finishers.

Lots of people want to be game designers; they love to play games and they figure they could make one as good as or better than the ones they love. Lots also believe they can become millionaires by designing a cool new game. So they sign up for the course. This is not some crummy tutorial, it is a course designed and presented by MIT, home to the most innovative game lab in the world.

You see where I’m going with this. Lots of people want to write a book; they love to read and they figure they could write a book as good as or better than the ones they love. Lots also believe they can become millionaires by writing a cool new book. [Tiny pause for bark of laughter.]

Your competition is far less competent than you think, and far less committed.

Side note: Marcia took that MIT course herself in 2014. She was one of the few finishers. Apart from designing her game, she actively participated in the forums; she took the trouble to offer ideas and helpful feedback to the others. The professors and assistants thought highly of her. Come time to renew the course in 2016, guess who they asked to be the TA?

That’s all you need to know today.

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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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