While you’re waiting for a new post HERE, let me direct you to the one I wrote for Joyful Jubilant Learning.
The month’s theme is about Communication, and since today would have been my grandfather’s birthday, I wrote about communicating between generations. Please come over and read it!
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I’m not one of those Luddite purists that screams that Television is Evil and rots your brain. When it’s good, it can be very good, indeed. (The West Wing, anyone?) And even half-way decent television can be entertaining, with a good story, and be a fun distraction for an hour. Since this is Summer, though (according to the television schedule, at least), most of the programming right now is either repeats–if you’re lucky–of shows you like, or a lot of dreck which I wouldn’t willingly give an hour of my valuable time. So, lately, we’ve been watching a lot of DVDs.
One thing that I’ve just realized, though, is how similar some of my very favorite shows are. They have an earnest, smart, good-hearted hero who devotes his time to helping people in need, usually with some, extra, supersensory gift. Sound familiar?
The shows I’m talking about?
And those are just the tv shows I have on DVD. (Yes, I do own copies of all of them, and yes, some of them are better than others.) That’s not even counting other shows I’ve watched over the years. A lot of those heroes have similar traits, too. Jarod from The Pretender, for example. How about Max Evans, the gifted (and earnest and good-hearted) alien from Roswell? Anyone remember Benu from the really old, short-lived series The Phoenix? Patrick Jane of the Mentalist fits this mold, too. For that matter, so does Buffy Summers (except for the fact that she’s obviously not a man.)
Obviously, I’ve got some kind of archetype of HERO in my head that calls very strongly to me–especially when sitting down for some entertainment in front of the television. Or with a good book, for that matter, because I can think of any number of heros in my library who would fit right in with this group of men on my television screen.
What is it that makes this template of a hero call to me so strongly?
The fact that these characters are so determined to help and not be corrupted by the gifts they have (even if occasionally tempted)? They’re all handsome, and that doesn’t hurt. There’s something very appealing to me in the fact that they (mostly) all have special gifts–I like the extra touch of magic/certainty that their special abilities give them. It takes away so much pesky questioning–”Is this really a person I should help?” King Arthur and Benton Fraser would get along just fine. Luke Skywalker and Chuck Bartowski could certainly get together over a drink and commiserate (though maybe not about their father-issues).
The word “hero” brings different pictures into different minds, of course, and there are always varying definitions of heroism. Certainly there are a wide variety of heros I admire and appreciate in my reading and viewing pleasure. But obviously the earnest, well-meaning, smart, and gifted hero touches a special kind of chord.
What kind of heros do you find yourself drawn to? And does it affect the way you write them? Affect the types of books, shows, and movies you enjoy?
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Today, in the U.S., all televisions are officially switching from analog to digital transmission, forever turning the page on the tradition of television signals broadcast, for free, through the air.* In many ways, this is a seamless change–most people will never even notice–but the very IDEA is one that I find intriguing.
How many ways has the digital revolution touched and changed my life? Your life?
Telephones: We went from party lines with a real, live operator connecting our calls, to rotary dials, to push button phones. Then we went cordless. Then there were car phones and really heavy, bulky briefcase phones, which were quickly supplanted by cell phones which have gotten smaller and sleeker.
Answering Machines: I remember so clearly when I was the only kid I knew whose house had an answering machine, and that was solely because my father’s business was down in our The machine recorded on magnetic tape and it only recorded messages of a certain length. If you were too wordy, too bad; you got cut off. Then there were machines that recorded the messages digitally, so that you could call home and dial in a specific code to pick up your messages. Now, most people have call waiting and voicemail and don’t even need a separate machine anymore (though, we still have ours).
Music: Golly, remember when transistor radios were cool? How about vinyl 45 singles? 8-track tape players? The ever-popular boombox? Sony Walkman? And, CDs, of course, which were going to revolutionize music forever. And, well, they did for a while, but then along came MP3s… People used to be limited to listening to (1) live musical performances, (2) personally-selected music on the stereo in the privacy of their own home, or (3) whatever the DJ chose to play over the radio (AM or FM). If you were lucky, on long family vacations, you’d be able to find a decent radio station so that everyone in the car was satisfied with the choices.
Calculators: Once, there were piles of stones to use in aid of mathematical achievements, then there was the abacus. Slates with chalk. Pencils with erasers. Automatic pencils that never needed sharpening. And then calculators. I still remember when my father brought our first one home in the early 1970s with firm admonitions to my sister and me to not touch because it was so expensive. By the time I was in high school, they were being given away as freebies by every bank, car wash, or business-type-of-your-choice.
Computers: Talk about BIG calculators. At the beginning, that was really all these machines did–massive, complicated mathematical calculations. Then they started doing other things. My father got into computers early, in the 1950s, and worked as a programmer at one of the first banks to use one and still tells those “walked barefoot in the snow to school” kinds of stories about the vast size of the computer he worked on compared to the (relatively) tiny amounts of data it recorded. My first computer didn’t have a hard drive or a color monitor, and it used those old 5.25″ floppy disks, but I was still the first of my friends to have my own computer. Next came hard drives, and color, and laser printing, and smaller, faster machines with computing power that still makes my Dad giddy from time to time.
The Internet: While having your very own computer for word processing and video games was cool, computers really got fascinating when the internet came along. Email. Chat rooms. Message boards. Wikipedia. Websites on every topic under the sun. Blogs by the thousands. Talk about an amazing resource–you can research, ask questions, confer with friends, make travel plans to meet them, and do just about anything all at the touch of a keyboard.
Television: When my parents were children, houses had radios for entertainment. Then, there was one television–big as a piece of furniture, but with a tiny screen (possibly round). With, let’s not forget, rabbit ear antennas on the top, and a dial to turn for channel selection, plus a knob for volume. Then along came color. Next, it was cable television so you didn’t need the antennas anymore, then satellite. Now, we not only have cable and satellite for clear, sharp pictures, but we also have high-definition signals for even clearer, sharper pictures. Not to mention the internet, where we can watch shows at our convenience, rather than according to when the networks want us to watch.
Television Recording: Do you remember the VCR revolution? Not only did you suddenly have a movie theater in your living room, but you could record a television program so that you wouldn’t miss it if you were out, or watching something else? Sure, philistines complained that the point of being away from the television was to miss watching things, but I remember this as being akin to magic. We could watch one thing and record something else. We could go on vacation and still not miss the season finales of our favorite shows. (Well, six of them, since the video tapes could only hold up to 6 hours of recording … and at $20 each, you didn’t have too many of them.) This lasted for years, and then there were cable boxes which limited the channel you could record to the one you were watching (bummer). Then there was Tivo and the other digital recording devices so that you could record and save shows without needing the tapes, and … with a DVD-recorder, you could burn them to DVD, too.
And now?
The absolutely amazing thing is that you can pretty much do all of these things at the same time, on the same piece of equipment.
You can watch television on your computer. You can check your email from your telephone. You can make video calls over your computer. You can calculate your tip at a restaurant on your watch. If you even wear a watch, because many people don’t because they can check the time an assortment of electronic devices within finger’s reach. All of these electronic gadgets are one bare step away from being interchangeable, allowing for a certain level of portability–and weight.
Just in my lifetime, I am astounded at how much has changed–and the digital electronics revolution has been a huge part of that. There was no such thing as cable television, personal computers, answering machines, calculators, or VCRs when I was born. So MANY things that I can’t imagine my life without simply didn’t exist. And the fact that they are all (except, apparently, electronic book readers) working together, blurring the boundaries just makes me feel excited to live in such a wonderful time.
With all this cool, new-technology hoopla, it’s sometimes easy to forget how far we’ve come, so quickly. Or to get so wound up with the freedom to be able to listen to whatever we want, whenever we want; to watch whatever we want; to call anyone from anywhere that we forget that the sense of freedom.
It’s easy to forget that it didn’t always work this way.
It’s easy to forget that we didn’t use to have so many choices.
It’s easy to forget that, while we arrange our digital lives to fit our personal needs, our NON-digital lives are still intertwined.
We need to remember that, while so many things transition to cool, fast, customizable digital technology, that we as people are, in fact, analog, and we need to work together, like the old vacuum tubes in the first computers–where, if they didn’t work together, they didn’t work at all.
So, remember this as you walk around your day, listening to music of your choice, talking to friends and business associates from the grocery store via the gadget in your pocket, checking your email while you wait on line, watching last night’s episode of Burn Notice while you ride the train.
All these choices and options at your fingertips–wondrous and convenient as they are–doesn’t make you the center of the universe, just the center of your own.
*Yes, I know that some stations are now broadcasting digital HDTV signals that you can capture with an antenna, but it’s still digital, and the people watching that way are very much in the minority, so … ignore that.
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Last time, we talked about the ways you could preserve your anonymity by keeping your precious novel untouched and unpublished, but what if you don’t write novels? What if you write other things, like articles, press releases, and other types of non-fiction? How can you make sure that they stay unpublished?
This one’s simple–If you don’t tell anybody that you write, nobody’s going to ask you to write for them. If you don’t want to be pestered by paying clients and publishers, eager to have your words gracing their promotional materials, simply don’t tell them you could–you know, like a doctor keeping his profession to himself at a cocktail party if he doesn’t want to be asked for free advice.
(But do it very, very quietly)
Maybe you have announced that you’re a writer. You like the sound of it, you enjoy the idea of it, you like bragging about it, but you just don’t want to have to do any, well, work. So, this is ideal. By avoiding doing any promotion or any advertising, by not sending out queries, samples, resumes, and business cards, you can enjoy the idea of writing without ever having to prove that you can.
(While you’re at it, feel free to call yourself a designer, too. Or a photographer. Musician. Magician. Whatever you like. So long as you’re never called on to prove that you can, feel free to claim any skills you might want. What harm can it do?)
If you appreciate the “loner” aspect of writing, you’re going to enjoy this avoidance tactic. If you make yourself as unpleasant to work with as possible, it won’t be long before even those few, hardy souls who offered you a writing gig will be running, screaming, in the other direction, swearing never, never again. Be rude. Be nasty. And if you get the chance in person, blow smoke in people’s faces. Soon, nobody will want to come within 50 feet of you or your cellphone and you will be left in blissful peace.
What if you have prospects who simply cannot be discouraged by generally obnoxious behavior? The next step is to be thoroughly unprofessional as well as obnoxious. Don’t return phone calls or emails. Never follow-up on a lead. Make promises and then neglect to keep them. If you can manage to add in long trip where you are completely inaccessible, or a houseful of teenagers who are constantly on your phone and computer, you get bonus points for originality.
This may be too obvious even to list, but if you are truly a bad writer, chances are you will easily avoid the hassle that comes with being successful and sought-after. If you’ve been coerced into agreeing to write something, then hand in truly shoddy, sub-standard work–writing that is not only bad, but is patently nowhere near the word count you promised. Misspellings and bad grammar are particularly useful, here, especially if you use the kind that would easily have been caught by the most basic of spell-check programs.
See? It’s just as easy to be unpublished and unhired in the non-fiction world as in the fiction world. All you need to do is follow these few, simple rules and you will have all the time to troll the internet and play video games that you want. It’s not like anybody is going to pay you to do anything else, right?
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I’m practically an expert on this subject because, even though I’ve had a completed manuscript since the late 90s, I remain an unpublished novelist.
I know, it’s an impressive feat, right? I bet you are just dying to know all my tricks so that you, too, can be an Undiscovered Novelist!
Really, though, those tips are for amateurs. Anybody can claim to be a novelist and then not carry through by writing an actual, well, novel.
The real challenge for being an Undiscovered Novelist is to actually HAVE a completed manuscript, one that is good, interesting, and entertaining, one that has real character development and depth, and a multi-layered plot that all ties together. A masterpiece, that is, or at least something that is good.
To have all that and still remain unpublished is tricky. It takes a master of evasion. An expert at avoidance. That’s where my distinct talents come into play. Because, naturally, my completed novel is wonderful. Every time I pull it out of mothballs, it makes me laugh, smile, cry, and tingle all the way to my fingertips, it’s so darned entertaining. But, you know, that’s my little secret, which brings me to tip number 1.
I should warn you that this last option can come at some cost to your ego. If you do, in fact, know that your manuscript is dripping with pearls of wisdom and contains some of the finest verbiage since John Grisham or Shakespeare first put pen to paper, it may be hard to believe that nobody is knocking down your door, trying to get to it. Why wouldn’t they? At some point, you may start questioning whether it’s the fault of your prose. (Nah, couldn’t be.) Or … maybe it’s your fault for giving them a clear run to your door? You didn’t make sure enough of them knew the book existed? You didn’t tell the right people?
Hmm. See, at this point, when you KNOW your novel is brilliant but it remains unpublished, you’re left with two choices.
And, really, isn’t that what you wanted?
(Your turn, folks. What tips did I miss?)
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Truly, it’s not something I talk about often, but I love writing fiction. Ironic, I know, because I don’t do it very often.
I write non-fiction a lot. All the time. Blog posts. Emails at work. Notes to friends. Marketing pieces. Comments on blogs. Pretty much everything is non-fiction. Facts and opinions, and I’m fine with that. I like all sorts of writing, so I’m not complaining. If I truly wanted to be writing fiction and nothing else, well, I wouldn’t be having this (non-fiction) conversation with you. I’d be up to my eyeballs in the next Great American Novel.
So, why am I bringing this up? Well, Melissa’s talking about Fiction all month, so there’s that.
But also, on a whim, I opened up the Word document of one of my unfinished novels. …Um, yes, I have more than one. I have one, complete novel, a half-written sequel to it, and a third, half-written novel that kind of bumped the second one out of its place in line but which has been stymied by a circa-1912 legal problem whose solution escapes me. None of these are novels I’ve managed to sell, and since I’ve been focusing on the non-fiction writing for the last several years, they’ve been languishing on my harddrive, poor things.
Anyway, I opened the Word document of that half-written sequel of mine and started to read … and ended up with a huge smile on my face. I LIKED it. I enjoyed it. I was enchanted … it felt wonderful.
Now, I’m not saying that that my fiction is the best fiction in the world. But the fact that simply skimming over the story I had in progress made me feel so good about it reinforces my Number One Rule for Fiction.
I’ll read almost anything. I’m a reading addict, for heaven’s sake. I can’t go to sleep at night without reading in bed. I carry a book around the house with me, so it’s always in reach. I read while brushing my teeth, while stirring things on the stove, while waiting for the kettle to boil. It’s pretty much my default behavior–if I’m not doing something that is incompatible with reading (driving, bathing, walking the dog), chances are good I’m reading.
When I wrote my first novel, I wrote it because the story that came to me was so good that I wanted to READ IT. And since nobody else had written the book, I was forced to do it myself.
The entire process was a pleasure. Figuring out the story. Making sure my characters were realistic (I hope). Working out the interweaving of the various plots. I loved it. It was like creating my own puzzle, and I ended up with a book that, had I seen it in a bookstore, I would have bought in a minute.
There’s plenty of fiction out there that I read but have no desire to try to write. Tom Clancy-esque action/adventure would require too much technical research. I like reading mysteries, but working out the gruesome details of a murder is too, well, gruesome for me. Those dark, brooding, symbolic books that are loaded with Meaning but leave you feeling like you’re carrying the world on your shoulders are too depressing for me to immerse myself in.
No, the three books I’ve written (more or less) all tell stories that I love. Love! The kinds of stories that make my eyes light up when I think about them. The kind that make me smile. The kind that–even if somebody else had written them–would live on the bookcase next to my bed for the next several eons, just so I could keep them close.
Forget about writing what you know. I mean, yes, it’s decent advice, but even better? Write what you LOVE.
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Do you know what my favorite part of writing fiction is?
Putting the pieces together.
See, the best fiction … heck, the best writing … starts with a single germ of an idea. Something that sparks. Something that sets off a chain reaction.
If you’re lucky, that one thing is GOOD. It’s beautiful and holds together and deserves to be part of something bigger. But one good idea isn’t enough to make a story.
You need to start putting it together with other pieces. Pieces that compliment it. Pieces that help make that little idea GROW.
These include things like:
Three-dimensional characters. It’s characters that make a story interesting–if you don’t care about the people, who cares how brilliant the idea of what’s happening to them is? I’m a lot more likely to keep reading a less-than-stellar book if I care what happens to the characters, than to find out if the earth is going to explode.
Plot points that are interesting, creative, and believable (at least a little bit). You can be writing romance, mysteries, thrillers, or science-fiction, it doesn’t matter. What happens in your book has to make sense within the boundaries of your book. If your characters have superpowers, that’s fine, but make sure the rules are consistent. Your romantic leads can have a “cute” meeting, but don’t stretch my gullibility too far.
Because, little by little, as you add pieces and thoughts, your idea can grow into something bigger. Something you couldn’t have seen coming.
The best books, the ones I personally love the most, combine characters that I love (or at least, who evoke an emotional response, even if it’s hate) and that I’m interested in, and to whom interesting things happen. The more multi-layered and seamlessly woven a plot is, the more I like it, but it has to WORK.
All the pieces–the plot, the characters, the scope of the story–they all have to fit just right, like a jigsaw puzzle to be perfect. (Let’s not forget good writing, too, huh? Fascinating characters and an elaborate, perfect plot still won’t keep my interest if the actual writing is terrible.)
Because, when it all fits? When everything holds together, it’s like magic. One loose thread, one bad connection, and the entire thing can fall apart.
The act of finding and creating all those pieces, though? I love that part.
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You have heard this “rule,” haven’t you? It’s all the rage these days. Internet gurus tell their initiates that all they need to do to gain thousands of readers or sell gazillions of widgets is to simply Write the Way You Talk. They insist that a dependence on grammar rules is not as important as simply saying what you need to say, without getting bogged down by pesky grammatical details.
This is a topic that actually gets discussed in my house. When my father gets some kind of marketing piece that sounds convincing and interesting, he doesn’t let a few mis-spellings or grammatical no-nos get in his way. After all, you don’t need to have been an English major in college to know good business, right? A go-get-’em entrepreneur isn’t going to let concern over the placement of an apostrophe slow him down when there’s money to be made and people to sell. His feeling is that a person’s verbal skills do not necessarily reflect their intelligence (true) or their competence (um…).
My mother and I, on the other hand, feel that sloppiness in the sales materials implies sloppiness in the product–or in the salesperson. That, if you can’t be bothered to proof-read the copy that’s supposed to convince people to buy your product, how can we be sure that the product is any better?
All in all, it brings up an interesting dichotomy.
Now, I’m the first one to admit that I may be more of a stickler than other readers (cough). But then, I like things neat, tidy, and organized. Piles of papers have to have their corners aligned. Crooked pictures drive me batty. I like things to be correct, accepting no substitutions.
I know, of course, that people and their writing are imperfect. I also fully embrace the fact that “good” writing is not necessarily the same as “correct” writing (especially in a sales pitch). Finding one typo in an email emphatically does not make me assume that the writer is an incompetent, lazy slob who dozed through English class in 7th grade. It just makes me assume the writer is human–which is preferable than one that is, say, a computer, or inhumanly perfect (because that would just be annoying, really). A breezy letter with a folksy tone wouldn’t sound right in itself without contractions and a certain amount of casual grammar usage.
But when there are multiple errors, and the apostrophe for “don’t” is after the “D”, I really start wondering about who is writing this thing. How smart can they actually be if they cannot spell “your” correctly?
Have you ever gone to look at a house and been greeted by a whiff of cinnamon, or baking bread, and thought “Wow, this is fabulous. So welcoming! They obviously know what they’re doing.”
It all goes back to that First Impression business. A person in a suit is going to be taken more seriously than a person in a clown costume. (Crazy, right?) A house with a tidy yard is going to look more appealing than one that looks like a junk yard. A shiny, polished, immaculate car is going to inspire more interest than one that looks like it just came out of a war zone.
You don’t have to be perfect. But it never hurts to look like you know what you’re doing. And if you can’t string four sentences together without egregious abuses to the laws of grammar, you’re not going to inspire my confidence.
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I’ve got a guest post up at Joanna’s Confident Writing today. Go on over and read it! You know, so Joanna won’t think we’ve let the place fall down around her ears while she’s away…
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Hey, look at that … I have a guest post over at SocMedia101.com.
This site, if you don’t know, comes from the brilliant minds of Julie Roads and Ron Miller and is devoted to helping people (especially new people) navigate the waters of the social media river.
Confused about Twitter? Wondering about Facebook? How about LinkedIn? (I know I’m still trying to figure that one out.) Well, this is the place to go for answers.
Not only that, they’ve got a brand-new, free eBook out called Finding Your Voice in a Crowded World. I helped proof-read it for them, so I was one of the first people to read it, and can vouch for its helpfulness.
Go! What are you still sitting around here for? (grin)
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