Category: Writing

So I tried out the I Write Like site using the first couple of paragraphs from my last novel:

Robert Davies tried to log onto FuckedCompany.com, and he could not, and he knew he was fucked.

The chair squeaked as he leaned back. He double-checked the URL in the browser’s address bar; it was correct. He pursed his lips and typed the URL again. Again, Microsoft Internet Explorer showed him its regular, unhelpful, the-page-cannot-be-displayed screen. It suggested he might want to check his browser settings.

Robert typed in www.nTropics.com, the address of the Web servers sitting in the large, bomb-shelter safe room in the basement. His company’s site popped up, with its neo-Aztec cursive logo and gold bar icon. He typed Instapundit.com, and the popular blog loaded. His Internet connection was indeed active. But when he tried to get to FuckedCompany.com again, the same.

The first time was an accident, the second time coincidence, and the third time, one of his college professors said, was a pattern. This was the other shoe, and the axe was going to fall. He wanted to be sure, so he went looking for Daryl.

Daryl was the company guru. Whenever a new employee at nTropics.com needed some help with his or her workstation, that person went to the two network administrators in the unlit office that probably was a supply closet before nTropics took over the building. Those who had more than six months’ experience, few as they seemed to be, would go to the same guy the certs-from-a-book weenies did: Daryl Simon. So Robert made his way up a half flight of stairs into the Customer Support Room.

I Write Like said:

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I didn’t like that answer, so I tried with the next block of text:

Daryl studied his computer screen. His visibility, and the high level of background noise imposed by fourteen other technical service reps all in open cubes, didn’t bother him. When Robert got close enough, he saw Daryl was reading some system board review, dazzled and probably slightly intoxicated by the speed of the front side bus and the RAID capabilities.

“Ahem,” Robert mentioned after standing for a moment at the edge of the half wall, just over Daryl’s shoulder and conveniently noticeable for anyone, probably, but Daryl.

“What’s up, Robert?” Daryl said.

Robert dropped his voice. “I can’t get to F Company.”

“What?”

Robert hated to say it, so he hissed, instead. “I can’t get to FuckedCompany.com!”

“You kick your Cat5 out?”

“No, I haven’t lost connectivity, I just can’t get to the site. That means they’re blocking us, and that means we’re going out of business.”

“What’s up, guys?” Kevin Horton appeared and asked.

“Robert can’t get to Fucked Company, so we’re all fired.” Daryl tapped on his keyword.

“What’s Fucked Company?” Kevin said.

“The Dot-Com Deadpool,” Robert said.

“It’s a rumors site,” Daryl said. “When a company’s thinking about layoffs, someone drops Fucked Company an e-mail and the guy puts it up on the Web. A lot of times he’s got actual e-mails and whatnot. Mildly amusing.”

“As long as you’re not on it,” Robert said.

“If you can’t get to the Web site, why don’t you just can the net admins, Robert? Why do we all have to pay for their incompetence?” Kevin rubbed his cheek with the arm he was leaning on. Elbow up, he looked foolish instead of nonchalant, Robert thought, but Robert’s idea of nonchalance tended to parade rest. Hands behind the back in a non-threatening way. Kevin liked to repose like that, in his Dockers and collared shirts, dressed in business casual to rank him somewhere above the casual information technology rabble. He probably stuffed a sock down his trousers, too.

I Write Like said:

I write like
William Gibson

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I don’t like that answer, either.

I’m giving up. There’s no telling how long it would take me to find a snippet that I Write Like would tell me the answer I am looking for (Ernest Hemingway).

But if my writing style varies that widely from one page to the next, I don’t question myself: I question I Write Like.

March’s History Magazine is at your local bookstore now, chock full of it’s normal goodness and an article by me. It looks like this:

I didn’t make the cover, but it’s on page 47. Trust me.

Coming soon to a newsstand near you:

Click for full size

Seriously. Any time I’m published in a magazine you can get in your local Barnes and Noble, I’m thrilled. I would prefer to get jaded, though.

John Scalzi tracks his annual earnings from writing science fiction.

As if this wasn’t encouraging enough.

(Link seen on Instapundit.)

Writers, take note:

And don’t blow up Cleveland. Somebody’s going to need that later on.

The power of the pen is mightier than the neutron bomb.

Two excerpts from the article entitled “Why I Write Horror and Why You Might Want To” in the November 2005 The Writer:

1:

I learned what horror was when, for a school assignment, I read All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. I had never read anything where anguish and the moral implication of the reader in the death of the protagonists were the goals of the story. Not that I was so sophisticated that I understood the effect; all I knew was that if everyone over at the United Nations would just read Remarque’s nocel, we’d have no more war, as the world leaders would finally know what they’re putting the world through.

2:

If it [the theme of his novel Move Under Ground, which depicts Jack Kerouac saving the world from Cthulhu] sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the world we live in now, where, as I write this, the media has millions of us more concerned over the collapse of Brad Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Anistan than we are over the mounting body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Horror is a genre in which the novel of ideas and the social novel are still alive and well.

Here I was trying to glean some insight into writing horror, and I get politics. Perhaps Mamatas even got around to comparing George W. Bush to Azathoth or Karl Rove to Nyarlathotep, but I didn’t complete the article.

Roeper weighs in on the Maggie Galagher microbrouhaha:

Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post reports that syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher pushed the Bush administration’s “marriage initiative” without disclosing that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services.

That’s the second time in recent weeks that we’ve heard about a columnist taking money to push a political agenda. When radio disc jockeys took money to play certain records, the name for it was “payola.” Isn’t this the same thing?

Kurtz also reported that Gallagher received $20,000 from the Bush administration to write a report titled “Can Government Strengthen Marriage?” I wonder what conclusions she drew.

Yet Gallagher told Kurtz: “Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it? You tell me.”

Well. YES.

You also violated journalistic ethics by taking the money in the first place, dear.

Message: When the government wants you to do work for it, you do that work for free, citizen.

Perhaps the government needs someone to comment on its training films….I nominate Roeper. For free!

Subtitle this piece "Is Maggie Gallagher the Devil?" because that’s how she’ll be played by people who want to discredit the ideas she has expressed in her writing. So is she the devil? No, she’s a writer, but let’s get into the case as presented by the Washington Post‘s Howie Kurtz:

In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush’s push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.

“The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples” and “educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage,” she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could “carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children.”

But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president’s proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.

“Did I violate journalistic ethics by not disclosing it?” Gallagher said yesterday. “I don’t know. You tell me.” She said she would have “been happy to tell anyone who called me” about the contract but that “frankly, it never occurred to me” to disclose it.

So her crimes against the prevailing and convenient ethos of those who are now hunting for conservative writers who write for a living include:

• Drafting a magazine article under contract for a customer
• Writing brochures under contract for the customer
• Conducting a briefing for the customer
• Writing a column about the same topic covered by the work for hire

If Maggie Gallagher is the devil for making a living at writing, then most working writers are.

I’ve worked as a technical writer, during which time I have:

• Written technical manuals covering a specific technology for my employer
• Written press releases and marketing material for my employer covering the specific technology
• Written a white paper for a customer (my former employer) about the technology
• Written articles about the technology for publication

We’re both guilty of:

• Learning about a particular subject
• Writing about a particular subject
• Writing about the same subject for publications and for business customers

Unfortunately, the slippery slope of evil means that once you become knowledgeable on a subject, more different clients will pay you to write about it. As a writer, your powers and your inner darkness grow hand in hand!

So am I the devil, too? Guilty of payola, plugola, writola, or whateverola? A tool of the vast technology-embracing conspiracy, working at the beck and call of shadowy figures with their own agendum to sell the technology? No, I am a writer, maximizing my knowledge of a particular technology in as many formats and for as many markets as I can. The only difference between Maggie Gallagher and me is that I’ve done my work for technology companies, talking about technology, instead of writing about public policy for magazines and syndicates and for the big customer, The Federal Government.

Her contract price wasn’t out of line for what she did for the government, and I assume that her syndicate and the National Review pays her a salary upon which she and they have agreed for her work. So all sides in this transaction are happy, and the consumers can read what she wrote and evaluate the information the same as anyone who’s read one of my white papers can. Take the contents of the article or leave it.

But because she’s written materials regarding public policy, the rules are different. Instead of making a case for an opposing policy, some people attack the person. Current writer ethics, used as a cudgel, demand a monastic existence from Writers in Papers or Magazines, where the writer cannot work outside the realm of the Reader’s Interest or some other inchoate abstraction. Startled editors and other townspeople with pitchforks and torches want full disclosure, but any writer with any success or with any experience in contract business writing should overwhelm lists of customers, clients, and publications. Sometimes the details of the contracts aren’t the writer’s to disclose.

As I said, I’m fortunate to not have any technical writing contracts in public policy. The rules in technology are different. The technologies and their marketing fluff, white papers, and ideas contend in a marketplace, where the competition doesn’t stoop to knocking the individual authors who write about technology. Instead, the competition develops their own technologies and hires people like me to write marketing fluff, white papers, and other materials for trade shows and for inclusion in trade magazines.

Maggie Gallagher is guilty of being an efficient and a smart writer who has successfully marketed her insight, gathered knowledge, and writing talent to a variety of customers. As a writer, I applaud her success and wish her continued success. I also wish her character assassins would fight ideas with ideas, but recognize that’s unlikely.

(Rant inspired by this post on Outside the Beltway.)

Full disclosure: I have taken sums of money and favors for writing things, but neither from Maggie Gallagher.

From the February 2004 issue of The Writer in a column entitled “Writers in good company” by Benjamin Cheever:

Why did I choose to be a writer? I was born to the trade. My father was a writer, my mother is, my sister.

Whew, that was close. The fellow was one comma away from saying my mother is my sister. That’s demonstrating some faith that your copy editor isn’t passive-aggressive.

Note: I’d apologize for the title, but Metallica should know better. Any time a musician creates a song wherein a single word is presented independently and uniquely, the musician should expect people to use any other word with the same number of syllables in its place to make a relevant song about an occasion. “Battery” is one such song. “Goldfinger” is another, but not applicable in this case. Thank you. That is all.

So I got a rejection slip from a major east coast magazine yesterday. I won’t say which magazine; suffice to say the name is body of water + period of time. So I opened the self-addressed, stamped envelope postmarked Boston, Massachusetts, and I got the (new) stock rejection.

The envelope contained a new rejection slip — a different typeface and whatnot, so it’s new to my rejection slip collection, as well as my submission, a poem. If you think that makes me a wuss, you’re wrong; the fact that I own cats makes me the wuss. The poetry-writing only reinforces the felinity. How do you feel now, big man, now that you have reduced me to shameful tears?

However, my returned poem bore two interesting marks: a single hole, which would indicate a thumb tack (an even number of holes might indicate staples, and numerous holes might indicate dartboard, but a single hole is a thumb tack, definitely) and a lowercase v above the title.

Is it a good sign, that maybe it just missed the cut? A sign that an intern liked it and tacked it in his or her cubicle before returning it? What do these entrails mean?

I mean, aside from the fact that I now have to send a fresh copy of the piece to a different, as-yet-undetermined target and have to spend another $.74 on the damn thing.

CNN’s reporting that a National Commission on Commissioned Writing Professionals, or some such nonsense, reports that kids in school cannot clap together enough ramshackle sentences to impress the academic commissioners. Undoubtedly, though, the students are floating lazily on a tide of their own scholastically-induced self-esteem while trying to use emoticons to describe the sentiment of Julius Caesar when he said, “Et tu, Brute?”

The commission, or some other commission (I get confused since the article apparently refers to three or four different bodies), most heartedly recommends five points:

• Every state should revisit its education standards to make sure they include a comprehensive writing policy.
  I sincerely hope that in the tablet handed down from the commission, it didn’t chisel in a pronoun disagreement between every state and their. Nevertheless, this sounds a lot like each state should chair a statewide commission of its own, or three.
• Those writing policies should aim to double the time most students spend on writing and insist that writing be taught in all subjects and in all grades. They should also require writing theory in teacher licensing.
  Of course, a national commission would want a national solution, and doubling time spent on writing might be too much in many cases. Unless they propose making the school day fourteen hours, they’re asking schools to take that time from other programs–programs with their own national commissions, no doubt.
• Political leaders should call for a national conference on writing.
  It’s a special call, sort of a trilling not unlike a ruby-throated thrush. A clarion call that alerts the flock that it’s time to feed on tax dollars scattered among the golden fields. Of course, calling is not action, but perhaps that’s best, since the action would be more expensive contemplation by the distinctly non-ascetic wandering wisemen who sit on these committees.

• Higher education should provide all teachers, no matter what their discipline, with courses in how to teach writing. Writing courses for students should be improved.
  Of course, higher education used to require courses in writing, rhetoric, and other thoughtful disciplines until some committee said it should focus on whatever discipline the student chose to pursue. The courses are available as it is, but when you’re twenty, you’re more into studying the opposite, or the same, sex. Besides, higher education is part of the system that’s churning out students who cannot write, including teachers, I would assume.

• States and the federal government should provide more money so schools have the time and staff needed to focus on writing.
  Tkaching! Now we’re into it. Spend our way out of stupidity, or at the least keep the committees and commissions running so the academic experts don’t have to teach students. The old saying intones, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but apparently there’s a corollary that says, “Those who can’t teach, administer, lobby, and commiss.”

Poor writing isn’t a problem in itself; it’s a symptom of poor thinking skills. Our culture has shifted from a deliberate, Enlightenment-thinking culture into a quick reflexes culture. From the multi-tasking Business World, to the short attention span leisure of television, newspapers, and laddie magazines, our culture breeds Video-Game-Reactors that can do a lot of quick things simultaneously and who are lost trying to puzzle out a point or an argument, much less put it on paper using the set of words designed to deliver the message concisely.

You want Brian’s tips for better writing? Here, have some for $0 in tax revenue:

• Do it yourself.
  It’s okay to take a couple of classes at the college if you want, but it’s a starting point. Doing the bare minimum you need to finish the class, whether it’s just a couple five page papers or participating in unholy group writing assignments, won’t teach you how to write well. They’ll teach you to write enough to get by.
• Read a lot.
  Read cereal boxes, newspapers, magazines (and not just laddie magazines). The exposure to writing styles, words, and turns of phrase will give you fodder for that slot machine in your hand to improve the odds that something you click out on a keyboard will be a jackpot. Although this is not necessarily the case, as the last metaphor proves.
• Write a lot.
  Write every night. Get a blog and run off at the fingertips as much as you can. Send letters to long-lost friends and family members.
• Workshops won’t teach you how to write.
  Join a workshop if you want, or suffer through an academic one, but understand that the workshoppers can only tell you what they think of what you write. They can’t tell you if it’s good or not. But if they react the way you want them, whether that’s to make them mad or to revulse them, tells you if you’re doing it right.
• Drop the IM and E-Mail habits.
  Current standards, or lack thereof, let you get away with shortcuts, emoticons, and poor diction. They sux.
• And then read and write some more.

Like playing a musical instrument, you can pick up the mechanics easy enough, but practice and improvisation over a period of time will lead to natural, effective, and purty written communication.

Update:Make a statement, someone will disagree. An opinion in Wired says kids learn how to think from video games. But not necessarily how to write. (Link discovered on TechDirt.