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

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.

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.

It’s the same with writing, at least non-fiction. With fiction, you don’t need to worry so much about facts, though internal consistency is important once you get the story going. You just more or less give birth to the characters and let them go. They will create their own facts.

But with non-fiction, there’s fact-gathering (which I always overdo), interviewing, more fact-gathering and checking, more interviewing, collating of notes, rough drafts, editing and yada yada yada.

Depending on the subject, you may even have to re-check facts you have already checked (sound like fun?). For instance, I did a piece on the fire ant a few years ago. The story took a long time to come together, and while I was working on it, new facts came out on the spread of the ant and about a fly that was being used to try to contain the growth of ant colonies. One never knows when the facts will change.

Still, fiction scares me. So much power, so much responsibility. Despite the work, I still think I prefer non-fiction. Too timid for fiction for now.

She ambled in, hair totally bird-nested and too unwashed even for dreads. A nearly dead cigarillo didn’t so much hang from between her puffy lips as cantilever there on her lower, stuck by dried saliva. She dropped a pull-tie Hefty bag, no doubt filled with dirty clothes, by the front door and headed for the couch, the left side of which has an indention that exactly matches her butt.

“Hey, Elwood! Got any cold beer?” Don’t know why she calls me Elwood. She dropped what was left of her cigarillo into my Starbucks grande double latte I just brought home with the Sunday New York Times.  She lit another.

“Whadjago deef or somethin? Ya got a cold beer or ya gonna make a run?” She blew a few smoke rings, a small fast one through a slowly moving big one, then fixed me eye-to-eye with a steely glare. I fetched her a beer.

“Thanks, bub.”

My karma must be bad. I asked the Universe for help, for inspiration, for something to end my creative drought, and the next day, she shows up as if from Hell’s temp agency.

“So, tell me. Didja get any work done or did you miss me?”  She flicked an ash toward the Starbucks cup and missed. I hoped the Times wouldn’t catch fire.

“Yeah,” I said with too loud of a sigh, “I did get some writing and web site work done.”

“Good boy, Elwood! Another few months, and maybe all my help will really pay off,” she said, before nearly losing a lung in another of a long line of hacking coughfests. Then she snorted up the excess mucus and drained the beer.

“Ya know what that tasted like?” she asked while actually belching the last word.

“No. I don’t.”

“That tasted just like another one!” she said with unsuppressed glee at her humor. “Just like another one! Ha-ha-ha.”

I don’t think I can make it. Can one fire one’s muse?

(To be continued…)

On the plus side, I have been led to some great web sites and articles. That has been very good, but I am not sure that outweighs the negatives. Here they are in no particular order:

1. Some people seem compelled to tweet their every thought — and most of these people appear to have salient thoughts in their heads that would sound, if they were made physical, like two BBs rolling around in an empty tuna fish can. They suffer from a mind-numbing twitterhea. I don’t need to know you are bored tonight or read the drunken conversation you overheard in a bar.

2. Other people seem to do the above and then re-tweet what I already get from the original twitterer, probably in an attempt to push as many tweets as possible. Didn’t we follow one another because of similar interests in the first place? There is no need to re-tweet to fellow travelers.

3. Some tweets are simply empty and obvious marketing moves, sort of tweeted junk mail. I don’t mind links to relevant blog links (I’ve even done that once or twice.), but don’t keep trying to sell me on links to marginal copy.

4. Many tweets are just fluff, simplistic ideas that are the written equivalent of like, uh and um in spoken language: they take up space unnecessarily. A well-known designer took the time to let everyone know that content is more important than design and design should support the content. Well, duh. Share your genius not platitudes.

5. Finally and this is rather like No. 4, some real experts in a field seem to think that we want reports on their daily life instead of insights and thoughts along the lines of their professional expertise. As an example, I follow the Getting Things Done guru, David Allen. I had hoped for some good daily tips. Instead I have found out about wine, gardening and the weather in Ojai, Calif. Interesting, but not what I hoped for. I’ll stay a follower, however, because the occasional gem is in there.

I have been guilty of a few of these, in part because I felt the need to say something once or twice a day, but no more. Tomorrow I cull my “following” herd and will tweet only what I think is truly important, even if I am silent for awhile.

I am sure the Twitterati will be saddened…. The Muse is merely miffed.

The latest was the difference between re-writing and editing. Can writers edit or do they only re-write? If an editor does a heavy-handed job, is it really a rewrite? When does it reach a point that an editor deserves a co-byline? Should editors even be allowed to edit that much?

I worked one summer as a copyeditor at a ski magazine. The editor had accepted a freelance article that was so badly written I had to take a heavy blue pencil (yes, it was that long ago) to it. The story was as much mine as the writer’s. We should have sent it back to the author.

As a writer, I always re-write — probably too much. But do I edit my own work?

I know it doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying about it.  I have to quit this post. The Muse just raised her head from the couch and inquired about proofreading.

I am organizing the notes and documents into a set of folders that follow the current, loose outline. I have to scan some documents.

I have to set up organizational and reminder software. I want to just start writing, to get into the “fun” work (HA!) of writing. This preliminary stuff is almost enough to make me kick the Muse off the couch and take a nap.

Is writing an addiction? Why do we writers willingly spend so much time suffering? We suffer to write; we suffer when we write. We agonize over the flaws after publication.

We write again. Ad infiwritum.

Bad typography, whether it is type size, line width or linespacing (and it’s usually a combination of those three), can make reading a book an almost painful experience.

I can’t imagine how frustrating it is for a writer to find his or her work basically ruined by a bad designer. I think it underlines the importance of writers, editors and designers working together as a team.

On this blog, I increased the linespacing a bit because the type is set pretty wide. Had I not done that in my CSS file, the type would clump into a ball of stems and strokes and not be as easy to read.

Writers: pay attention to typography. Don’t leave it all to the designer.

I believed — and still believe — that the best final presentation of information for the benefit and pleasure of the reader requires that the three not be conceptualized as separate tasks. All three must be worked on simultaneously or almost so.

For instance, if the writer is better informed about what the final presentation will look like, he or she will be able to gather the necessary facts. The editor needs to be part of the loop so that all the elements are pulled together consistently.  Then the designer, of course, completes the presentation with visual flair.

If each part is worked on in isolation of the others, the output will be less effective.

Awhile later, someone came up with a similar idea for newspapers called the “maestro” concept, and then more recently, we got W-E-D (thus, the title of this blog). Regardless of what it is called, the important thing is the concept.

Integrate the writing, editing and design into one process. That’s how you end up with the most effective design for your content.