The Habit and the Ritual of Writing

This is the first of two posts dealing with the not so obvious persona of being a writer. These internal characteristics are habit and ritual. Standing in front of the mirror and saying “I am a writer” makes you neither a writer nor a stand-up comedian. One becomes a writer by studying the writing of recognized good writers and by developing the habits conducive to writing. Not only must you develop good writing habits, but you must also approach your craft using rituals designed to foster the skills and the habits you need to consistently write well. You cannot separate the two nor can you assign more value to one than the other.

Part One: Writing by habit

Before you can truly begin to channel your wish to write into a reality, you need to find the motivation driving you to write. Is it the desire for money, for fame, for great recognition, or is it a still small voice urging you to write. You cannot ignore this step. You can and should ignore what others might think of your motivation. What is important is that you see it as being truly unique and very important to you. 
Take a moment for some introspection. More than one person has tried to trivialize the requirement of motivation. What is critical, they say, is that I want to write. If you really want to write you need to strive for a reward, and that is your motivation. Find out what that is, write it down and memorize it. Every time you think of writing think of your motive for writing. 
My motive for writing is I want to be read. That is why I write a blog. I  know a little about writing so I write posts about the craft and intricacies of writing. Since “blogger” supports pages I post my fiction under pages. I enjoy reading comments and try to answer all of them even if it is only to thank the reader for having commented. I also pay attention to my blog statistics and the analysis offered by Pinterest. I know what post is being read and which posts are being ignored. 
Everything you write will play to the fulfillment of your motivation. Now that your motive is in clear view, and your subject is known, how are you going to write today? Establish a clear, attainable goal for your writing session. If you are starting a novel, your goal is not to finish it today. Think in terms of how many words can you write for as long as you are going to write today. Steven King writes about 2,000 words a day. If you can do that every time you sit down to write I am happy for you and honestly, I am envious of you. I have learned over some years that I am most comfortable with from 350 words on a not so good day to one thousand words on a really good day. If I get between 500 to 750 words a day, I am a happy writer. Note, I said writing daily. Looking in the mirror, I realize I am a fallible person. I don’t write every day all the time. I am a voracious reader and if I want to take a day to read that is my right, and I will do so as I see the need. But I do know that for most of the week I will spend whatever time is necessary to meet my word goal.  
If you can achieve your daily writing goal, you are well on the way to forming a lifelong, writing habit. If you can only write once or twice a week, remember that you are writing from habit while you write. Encourage yourself to write every day, but do not belittle yourself if you are not 100% successful. For every goal you achieve I applaud your effort and encourage you to continually strive toward achieving your motivation.
**The Ritual of writing** will appear by Wednesday, October 3rd.

Titles that Lie

Let us discuss blog post titles and the headlines of contemporary publications. Fictional titles are blurbs about lies, and that is perfectly acceptable. If Stephen King had called his master horror tale It,  Clarence the Clown or Melvin The Spider the content would still scare you out of your recliner. 

Bloggers are sellers of ideas and products. Most good posts range between 350 and 750 words. That’s not much time or content to make a point.  The writer must be both concise and compelling with his arguments. The title should be both captivating and enticing. Lying, while it might suck you in one time, won’t work the next time.

The two most often used lies on writing blogs are

1) “I am a Writer, and I will make you a Writer too.”

This person could sell snake oil at a  rattlesnake convention. The first scent of mendacity is when you look at the bio and see the author expounds he is, in fact, a successful writer. He is the writer of at least five well received and sought after books on writing and personal development. What you don’t see is all the books are self-published, poorly written, and are freely given away to help convince you to follow his unusual and unique “Develop as a Writer” class. The class which usually sell for $1500 is now available for just $900. If you act within the next 24 hours, you will get the early bird 33% discount on top of that. A lot of people will pay to be told they are a writer especially when it is a "successful writer" doing the telling. Let me be really obvious about this one point. If you have to tell people you are a writer, you probably are not. 

There is an excellent variation of this lie in extensive use today.  This is the lie of “Write 500 words a day and you…”. I’m still not sure what you get from writing 500 words a day, but I do give a certain validity to the argument because it has one important outcome for some of the people who practice it. It imparts a degree of discipline. If you can write 500 words a day of good prose, you are doing something right. If you write 500 “WTF’s” daily, you gain nothing. If your writing is incoherent, you learn nothing. The discipline is an excellent goal to realize, so I applaud those who follow this regimen. By itself, discipline does not and will not make you a writer.

2)  “I have published 5 posts a day for the last 526 days, and this is what I have Learned.” 

I have altered this headline with the number of posts and the length of time stated. The inherent lie is the statement that something of value has been learned and will be shared. This lie suckered me in just last week as I really wanted to understand what he had learned and how it had affected him. 

This was a six-page post. Page one thru five were pictures; one per page. Each picture was of a yellow writing pad with much of the writing crossed out, and a pen laying across each page. The finale of this work was an acknowledgment that he had learned little. If the e-zine publishing this work had an editor with the slightest understanding of content the article would never have seen the light of day. 

When you publish, you have an obligation to the reader to produce a coherent and convincing body of thought. Your title should be written with the same commitments in mind.

Comments are welcome and appreciated.

Writer as Scientist as Writer

A shortcut through time

Years ago, before The Martian Chronicles were written and when Wool was sheared from sheep, there was a distinct dichotomy between science and the arts. This dichotomy has been with us for years and has influenced not only education but even child rearing. Drake loves numbers and Arielle studies ballet. That concept has been with us long before Descartes thought about the value of logic.

When we talk about art and science, we are also talking about measuring time. Think of the time between the cave drawings of prehistoric man and the creation of the abacus in China. That’s a lot of time. Now consider the length of time between the abacus and the building that housed Eniac; 1,800 square feet to hold 18,000 glowing vacuum tubes surrounded by as many relay switches. The device you are reading this article with has 100,000 times the memory of the Eniac and is a million times faster in its response. Yet the time from the abacus to Eniac is far less than prehistoric man took to reach the abacus. 

Crunching the time span once again, consider the length of time from the Eniac to the Internet. Eniac was developed in 1946. The Internet was developed under the acronym ARPANET in 1969. In twenty-three years, the foundation for the web was already in place. The Cloud was released to the world in 2006 by Google. All of this in less than a human lifespan. The distance from the cave painting to the cloud approaches an almost immeasurable span, but with each development, time compresses itself, and we leap into yet further understanding of our universe.

A scientist and a writer were sitting in a bar.

Probably not true since both are more introverted than extroverted, but the driving forces behind both are remarkably similar. The distinction is in how the problem is perceived. To the scientist, most issues are seen as a collection of events described numerically. The solution depends on finding a precise manipulation of the inputs, like an algorithm, to derive an expectable and repeatable set of outcomes called a solution.

The writer sets down a series of occurrences to be developed. This is the plot of his work or the problem environment. The problem environment like the scientific environment does not change. It is constant. To the static environment, the writer introduces characters. The writer develops these characters with specific attributes and traits. Like the input variables of the scientist, the characters are going to act and react to the environment in such a way that is consistent and repeatable. As the scientist can change the input variables to influence the experiment, so the writer changes the actions and the reactions of his characters to change the plot in a consistent and repeatable manner.

Both scientists and writers look at problems (ideas) openly and uniquely. Instead of constraining their universe they expand it.

Both numeric methods and artistic methods attempt to see the environment in new and unique ways always pushing boundaries to increase our knowledge and our understanding. 

Leonardo da Vinci expressed it best.  “Art is the queen of all sciences, communicating knowledge to all the generations of the world.”

We writers see the world as uniquely and as brilliantly as Einstein saw it.  Use your words as well and as creatively.

Comments are welcome and appreciated.

Lightning Across The Page

    Flash fiction demands you impose the limitation of length on your writing. As novelists, bloggers, memoirists, and essayists we have a general idea how many words or chapters will be involved in our opus. Usually, the word count is always in flux. It is something we consider as our work comes closer to its end. 

Word Limitations

Flash fiction gives you the word count before you put word one on paper or on display. It is usually agreed that flash fiction is less than one thousand words. A short story is from one to seven thousand words, and a novella is from thirty to sixty thousand words. 

Within flash fiction competition, word lengths are usually given as 300 words or 500 words, and rarely 1000 words. Flash fiction aficionados sometimes impose a maximum length of 100 words, but that is not only very rare it is difficult to do well.

Character limitations

When you build your characters in a novel or short story, you have the time to craft them carefully with an emphasis on traits and emotions. If you are working in a three hundred word environment, you don’t have that luxury. In this genre, you usually restrict yourself to two characters, the protagonist and the antagonist. You build their character through plot development and dialog. You can have more than two characters, but usually the third or thirtieth plays off of one of the leading players.

Plot Limitations

Building the plot is where you get to excel. From the plot, you develop your stories tension and drive it to its conclusion. 

Spend some time determining how your plot will interact with the characters to drive the story. Take a moment and read A Country Ghost in the pages section. There are a few things I hope you pick up on. First, the primary characters, the ghost, and Melisa are introduced in the first two paragraphs.

The story deals with bullying, budding sexuality, and friendship in less than 300 words. 

The value of writing flash fiction

There is great satisfaction in working with flash fiction especially since it can teach you to build a real story in the most minimalist of environments.

Beyond the satisfaction of working in a difficult genre, let me propose a simple exercise which might be of serious help with your writing. Write a piece of flash fiction with a maximum length of 500 words. The topic is “A jungle.” When your story is complete, use it as the seed for a novel, or a long short story, or even a novella. Great art comes from such small ideas.

Comments are welcome and appreciated.

Some Characteristics shared by Writers

I read a blog post last night detailing the seven personality traits all writers should have. What I found fascinating was the implication that people lacking these qualities were not writers and could not become writers. 
After reading this post, it became apparent these characteristics were true not only for writers but for policemen, fire rescue personnel, bartenders, middle-level managers, even for CEOs and CFO’s. At some level, these characteristics could be applied to professional assassins and Mafia Dons as well. The stated personality traits had very little to do with defining the class of people known as writers.
Four traits are crucial for writers. Can you write without them? Yes, but probably not very well.
1) If you want to write well, you must be an avid reader.
I think it is the norm to read more than to write. I don’t write for relaxation or pleasure. I write because I want to be read. I see writing as a vocation, reading as an avocation. I read for pleasure. I enjoy well-written novels and stories. I enjoy seeing some really well-done movies and intuitively knowing what if any book drove the film. I devour classics. My favorite books are War and Peace by Tolstoy, The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, and Heart of Darkness by Conrad.
2) Writers must love to manipulate words. You should want to take a paragraph you’ve written and make it stand out. You want to grab your readers attention. You want to rivet the reader to your words. For a perfect example of grabbing your reader, read the opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. This short story is recognized as perhaps the best written short story in American Literature.
3) Writers must be able to view their first draft through jaundiced eyes.
You may be most accepting when you review the works of a fellow writer, but you cannot be so accepting of your own work. Your first draft gets something on paper. Even if you have Steinbeck's soul, your first draft stinks. You have spelling errors, errors in grammar and tense abound. Consider yourself a great surgeon and the life of your manuscript is in your hands. Make it whole, and when you have done that, do what not even a surgeon can do. Make it better. When you have accomplished that, your work is ready to be seen.
4) Writers must write.
Now that’s an obvious characteristic, right? No, it’s not. The number of writers who are working on chapter two of their first novel, which will be a fifty-three chapter work of absolute brilliance abound. They’ve been writing it for seventy-three months, but they are experiencing a slight block in creativity. They don't write. They brag about their work in progress and do nothing else. We know writing is hard work. We know we stumble. We suffer from self-doubt. We are plagued by insecurity. If you don’t make the time to write and you don’t use that time to write you will never be a writer. Bragging rights are free, writing is hard.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated.

The Myth of Writing Every Day

The Internet is the reference point of choice for mathematicians, scientists, teachers, and most certainly for writers. It has become a fact of writing apprenticeship that to write decently one should produce five hundred words each day. For day after day, week after week we grind out 500 words. I have written about my dogs from three different perspectives; as their owner, their friend, and as a fellow walker. Five hundred words about two dogs and after rereading the essay, it was not all that well written. But I did do the 500-word daily gig. The questions needing answers are: 1) Did it make me a better writer? 2) Did it teach me to write well? 3) Was the process of cranking out words worth a damned thing?
Did it make me a better writer? No, how could it? How does writing 500 words on Wednesday make them better than the 500 words written two weeks prior? It doesn’t. It can’t.
Did producing 500 words daily teach me anything about writing well? No. All it accomplished was to let me write on Facebook, “Another 500 words written!!” This generated many kudos from other aspiring writers trapped within the same vortex I was being sucked into.
And finally was any of this process worth a damned thing? Yes, for me it had value. Its value had nothing to do with writing per se, but I could not write at all well without having learned this one lesson. I learned to make writing a habit. I have learned to sit down with my open MacBook on my lap, knowing what I want to write about, and just write. I could not have learned to do this without the ordeal of writing 500 words every day.
When I first began this process, I wrote my short stories in segments of 500 words. There were days the words would not come. Even when I knew how I wanted the story to progress over that 500-word segment, the words would not flow. Writer's block is very specific. I put aside the story and began working an idea about a blog post I wanted to write. I also learned to keep a journal and write in 500-word segments. I wrote about friends, animals, my life partner my wife, even about going to a natural foods grocery store. All those subjects are excellent grist for a journal.
Your goal is to teach yourself that you can control how you write, what you write, and most importantly when you write.

Your comments are welcome and appreciated.