Writing, editing, design

(When we left the story, I had just escaped from The Muse at a muse convention workshop and hit the hotel bar. I thought I was alone, then…)

“Fancy seeing YOU here.” Gads. It was my Muse and some of her cronies who had skipped out on the session about avoiding being assigned to a journalist.

“Uh, I ah….er….”

“Don’t get up,” she said. (I hadn’t moved.) “Barkeep! We’ll take a bottle of tequila over here. Put it on his tab.”

“But….”

“Don’t interrupt, Elwood,” she said. “It’s unbecoming for a world-class author.”

I was stunned. The Muse and her cohorts repaired to a table in the corner while I contemplated what she had said. World-class?

I was trying to figure that one out over my gin and tonic when the Muse appeared at my elbow (I think she is part cat with her stealth).

“Don’t get a big head now,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “HEY! BARKEEP! How about an ashtray and some matches?”

“This is a smoke-free hotel, m’am,” the man said.

The Muse gave him one of her laser-beam stink eyes. He wisely relented and recommended a “back room” I didn’t know existed.

“Listen, bub,” she said. “I had to say that because I need to keep my street cred among my colleagues. I can’t let them know who I am really working for. They think you are a real writer.”

“But…”

“Now quit interrupting. I don’t have the time, and you don’t have the talent. You need to get to work. Don’t you have ANY ideas?”

“That’s your job, I thought,” I protested.

“My job is to make sure you write, not tell you what to write about,” she said while lighting an unfiltered Camel. The bartender started to correct her, but she gave him another stink eye. He skulked back to his post at the far end of the bar.

“Now why don’t you just whip out that lil ol’ laptop and started tickling those keys like a real writer. I’ve got some partying to do.”

She left me open-mouthed at the bar as I watched her walk back to her laughing harpy friends. I swear there were at least eight of them. Watching her butt while she walked was like watching two bear cubs wrestling under a blanket. She had gained weight.

I got out my laptop and put it on the bar. I ordered another gin and tonic. I sat and waited for an idea to arrive, like an e-mail, from the ether.
(more to come)

The New York Times has decided it’s time to end the speculation and say they are definitely going to a paid model for their web site about a year from now. According to the WSJ, paper execs say that core readers are ready to pay.

The plan calls for a limited number of free reads per month for everyone, then you’ll have to pay to gain access. Subscribers to the print edition will have full access.

The key is to avoid fungibility. Too much of news is fungible, i.e., it is easily exchanged for another similar product.

AN EXAMPLE is wheat stored in a silo from a variety of farmers. The exact kernels are interchangeable — what matters is the number of bushels each farmer has stored, not which individual kernels are his.

Too much of news is fungible, i.e., it can be substituted for by others’ news quite easily, so why pay for it? The NYT, and others who will inevitably follow, needs to create content that is unique, that cannot be found by going elsewhere.

How they do that is up to staff creativity and hard work. But who better to show the way than the Times?

The Times is basing its decision largely on the success of the iTunes music and app store. What is the secret of that store’s success? It’s content isn’t fungible. It cannot be gotten elsewhere.

When readers are cornered they will pay. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

PREVIOUS POSTS: Read more about the future of newspapers .

I had nothing better to do, so I went to the Muse Convention. Who knew that Muses have to amass Continuing Education Credits each year. I had thought it was a lifelong gig like some marriages or herpes.

Tagging along also meant maybe I could find a better Muse. This one is just a temp, as are, it turns out, my inspired ideas. They don’t last long enough for me to write them down. Then when it comes time to write, the Muse is snoring on the couch, and I’m sitting chin in hand at the keyboard.

I sat in on a session called, “How to Avoid Getting Assigned to a Journalist.” It was packed. Glancing around the room, I noticed my own Muse, sitting in back and giggling with a few cronies, all sharing something from an aluminum flask.

I wasn’t sure whether to be offended because she was at the session in the first place or
thankful because she obviously wasn’t paying attention.

With all that giggling going on in the back corner, it was hard to follow the speaker, but I
gathered from the PowerPoint slides that being assigned to a journalist was the Muse
equivalent of being assigned the overweight kid as your partner in elementary school
ballroom dancing class.

The bulleted list explaining all this went something like:

• newspapers are dying
• journalists are hacks anyway
• you can wave your Muse wand ferociously and little more than “It was a dark and stormy night” is achieved
• they are notoriously tight with their liquor closet
• they THINK they are actual writers

The last one drew a storm of howls and laughter and many nods of agreement. I glanced over at my Muse, and she was high-fiving her buddies and and laughing so hard that the flask contents were dripping from her nose.

I couldn’t take any more and left for the lobby bar. I needed a drink, and I didn’t want to
have to buy one for my so-called Muse. How the hell did she keep her license? What kind of an operation is this?

I gratefully tipped the glass back and the nectar of forgetfulness (Ah, Lethe!) was about to hit my lips,
when….

“Hey, Elwood! Fancy seeing YOU here!”

The Muse!

(To be continued)

Has anyone else noticed that consonants, especially the T, seem to be disappearing? It’s as if we are breeding a group of American Cockney. Examples:

It’s not the Tennessee Titans (ti-tenz), they are the Ti-uhns. The second T is dropped. It’s impor-ant (and don’t get me started on “impordant”). It’s not Twit-ter, it’s Twit-er.  I am blanking out on the other examples I have heard recently, but you get the drift. The T seems to be the worst because it requires a little extra work with the tongue. Maybe it’s all those tongue studs….

Not only are we losing our ability to read at any great length and write accurately (my student journalists seem to think that close counts and gross factual errors are — meh….), we seem to be getting lazy in our spoken word as well. Can texting be ruining that, too?

UPDATE: I think the R is going away as well. More and more, I hear people say fo-ward instead of forward.

I was working on a piece that addressed the issue of the failing financial health of newspapers when I felt the presence of my Muse at my elbow.

For most writers, knowing your Muse is at your side as you type is a wonderful and rare thing. If it weren’t for her onion breath and the fact that her presence at my side probably wasn’t to inspire, I would have been thrilled. I was fairly certain it meant we were out of beer.

“Those publishers are in the middle of an Egyptian river,” she cackled, while running her fingers through her greasy hair and chewing on sunflower seeds. She was reading over my shoulder again, though she knows I hate that. Inspire me and then get the hell out of my way was what I wanted, but I didn’t get either one.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“It’s obvious,” she said. “They’re in deNile….” Then she exploded with laughter.  She loves her own jokes.  She spit out a few sunflower seeds on my keyboard during a particularly boisterous paroxysm.

I just sat, arms crossed until she regained control.

“That’s not that funny,” I said. “Lots of really good people in the newspaper business are trying to find a way to keep newspapers alive.”

The Muse sighed.

“They been givin’ it away for years on the web, and now they want people to pay? HA! That ain’t gonna happen. Yer wastin’ yer time.”

“Well, thank you very much for your help and inspiration,” I said.

“Don’t go all sarcastic on me now Captain of the Good Ship Jejune. Get me some more beer and then you can go back and save the news biz with your mellifluous prolixity.” She headed back to the stain that represented her spot on the couch.

“Say,” I said to her receding back, “the agency never called back about stopping the contract renewal, did they?” I was so disgusted with this Muse that I couldn’t wait to send her back.

“Yeah, they called yesterday while you were on that beer run. Don’t worry, I said you wanted another three months. Now get back to writin’ that crap before you miss yer deadline and yer editor — whatsizname, Shrike — calls again.”

At least she knows her literature. I headed out for more beer. What else could I do?

(To be continued)

“Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.” — Yoda

At the risk of channeling Yoda, I have been chafing a bit lately whenever I or anyone else says something like, I’m trying to write a ___________ (fill in the blank). It could be a tweet to a novel. It occurred to me that “trying to write” is the wrong attitude.

Writing is writing. You are either writing or you are not writing. You can’t try to write.

I am no longer going to say I am trying to write this or that, or even that I am “working” on writing whatever. I am going to, as Yoda advises, do or not do. I am a writer. I am going to write. Not talk about writing, not “try” to write. Not even write a blog post about writing. I need to go. Write.

They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talk about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman

“Fail” and “epic fail” seem to be showing up more and more in the tweets I read. Both went viral on the web about a year ago and people assign the terms to both simple and catastrophic fumbles, stumbles and, of course, failures.

According to Slate’s Christopher Beam (Oct. 2008), fail really took off when the blog Failblog started up in May, 2008. Failblog set up a taxonomy of what constituted various levels of fail and of epic fail, the highest fail there can be.

I want to introduce a subtle variation on the theme: FLAIL and, of course, EPIC FLAIL.

A flail differs from a fail mainly in scope. Whereas fail represents the inability to do something, a failure being utter and complete, a flail represents a bad performance on something most people can do easily, but it’s not a complete failure. Just an inept, incompetent, or incomplete performance, usually by someone who believes they are very good.

For instance, an act deserving a fail might be forgetting to put the top up on your convertible during a thunderstorm; a flail would be if you go out to put the top up and you forget your keys and have to dash back through the rain to get them. Then you grab the wrong keys. If you then finally put the top up, but forget to close the windows, it would be approach epic flail status or almost total incompetence, especially if you were going off on people who don’t take care of their cars like you do when the storm hit.

Flail also involves people who think they know what they are doing but don’t, their lack of self-awareness providing much entertainment for those around them.

You run into a lot of flailers in amateur sports and in bars and in school. A person who has the most expensive golf clubs and brags about it, but fails to break 100? Flail. A person who has the most expensive golf clubs and loses his grip during a swing so that the club ends up in the pond? Epic flail.

A guy who walks up to an attractive woman in a bar and gets rejected is a fail. A guy who walks up to an attractive woman in a bar trailing a long piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe and gets rejected is a flail.

A poor student who turns in bad work or zeroes an exam is obviously a fail. A student who believes his weak paper was directly dictated to him by God, and who doesn’t agree with the prof that a mere 10 errors in the first three paragraphs is too many, is a flail.

The difference is subtle but important. Anyone can fail, but only the blindly incompetent can flail.

As a writer and freelance editor and designer, one thing I am very good at is creative work avoidance behaviors. From checking my e-mail to hitting the kitchen for a snack to re-arranging my sock drawer, I’ve done them all. At least twice.

That’s one reason I looked for a Muse. I needed someone to be my border collie and keep my worktime peregrinations to a minimum.  More about the Muse’s latest in another post.

Anyway, to be successful at being a writer, here are three things you must do. Now.

1. STOP READING THIS BLOG POST AND WRITE. You are probably procrastinating, aren’t you? I bet you have been sitting there, chin on one hand, mouse in the other, clicking your way through link after link while the razor-sharp second hand slices away what’s left of your day.

WRITE.

2. PLAN FOR YOUR WRITING TOMORROW. Write down ideas before they slip away. If you have an iPhone, use the Notes or Voice Memo. Better yet, use a concept map. Draw a circle in the center of a piece of paper (or use free software, like CMap Tools) and put down your one good idea you have that is rattling around your mind like a BB in an empty tuna fish can. Then draw five circles around it and write down five related ideas, two of which must be opposites. Then draw two lines off each circle and put two more ideas based on that circle. One must be a positive connection to the circle idea and one a negative, or anti-, idea.

There. Now, even if some of them are dry holes,  you have certainly enough ideas about what to write tomorrow, don’t you? Now get back to work and WRITE.

3. THINK OF 3 PEOPLE you can connect with by end of day tomorrow who can help your writing or consulting by brainstorming with you about story ideas, potential clients, or markets and marketing ideas. Get out their phone numbers NOW and write them down on a real or virtual Post-It and put it on your monitor or desktop. Call each before noon tomorrow. Ask each for the name and contact info of one other person who would be valuable for you to network with. DO IT.

Then get back to writing.

You’re welcome.

The Muse got off the couch long enough the other night to look over my shoulder as I flailed away at the keyboard trying to make cogent thoughts materialize from the flotsam and jetsam of my mind. I not only have brain damage, I think I have mind damage as well.

She still doesn’t understand why she is needed as a see-Alice for my flagging writing abilities.

“What’s the big deal?” she taunted. “So you have these 26 symbols you have to almost randomly group into sound-maps called words that stand for an idea or thing. Then you freight-train those groupings into sentences, paying attention to which cars you attach and/or sequence with other cars. Then you clump all those into paragraphs, which you stack on top of one another like cold cuts on rye, and Boom! You gotta story.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

“You really think it’s that easy to write?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, stifling a yawn. “I sometimes wonder why I became a Muse out of college. I mean who needs the frustration? I shoulda gone into public relations.” She headed into the kitchen, no doubt to get a beer. I silently prayed there was only light beer left, which she hates. Some Muse.

I turned back to the keyboard, sans inspiration, and cut open a vein.

I am convinced that dogs and people are involved in much more of a symbiotic relationship than we might think. Of course, if you’re not one of the tribe of Dog People, the whole topic must seem weird to you from the start. I’ll try to explain.

Most people look at the dog-man relationship as one way, as one of subservience,  as dog being taken care of by man. But it also goes the other way. Back in the earliest days of barely domesticated wolf-dogs, man benefited from the presence of dogs. Besides the obvious watchdog and even guard dog functions, dogs also provided companionship, meal scrap clean-up and a hunting partner.

Even today, dogs still gain from the relationship, but man gains as well, especially with certain ones. In the life of every Dog Person is one special dog, that one dog among many that touches the heart in a special way.

There’s a relationship that is hard to explain, but it is best described by love. Not just the love of a pet, but the love of another living being that is trying to understand and please you just as hard as you are trying to understand and share life with it. It’s not simply a pet-and-owner relationship. It’s more.

That’s why, several years after her death from cancer at age 3, I still miss my chocolate lab terribly. She provided something in my life that was missing, and remains missing today. It is a hole in my life. I am not embarrassed to admit it.