When you have the chance to do something to grow as a person and/or improve your skills you should take advantage of it.
Archives for April 2013
What Is The Proper Length For A Blog Post?
(A version of this post can be found here. Based upon recent discussions I thought it made sense to run it again.)
She accused me of plagiarism and gave me 12 ‘F’s. Don’t ask me to try and explain how I received those 12 failing marks on one paper because I can’t tell you.
It happened twenty-six years ago and I simply don’t remember what sort of cockamamie grading system she had in place. I remember her black wig and how she liked to eat raw sticks of butter.
And I remember how she told me that my writing was inferior. It made me angry but I didn’t let that stop me. When she refused to listen to me and insisted that I had cheated on my paper I decided that she was unhinged.
Of course that was before I noticed the wig and sticks of butter. When you are a 17 Â year-old boy you tend not to notice that kind of stuff because you are too busy trying to look cool in front of the girls.
I don’t know that I ever managed to pull off cool, but I think it is fair to say that I learned how to write. That is assuming that you accept her insistence that my writing was inferior.
I suppose it is possible that it was, but I doubt it. Since I don’t have any of the papers I wrote for that class you’ll have to decide if you accept her word or mine.
Writing Isn’t About Limits
Every week I try to participate in several different online writing groups. Some of these groups provide writing prompts for us to write about. In addition to a topic they usually provide a word count and ask that we not exceed it.
I hate word counts. I don’t like limits. Writing isn’t about limits.
Writing is about telling a story. It is about using words to paint a picture inside the minds of the readers.
Word counts create limits that impact the tales that must be told.
Don’t limit yourself. Don’t let your stories be ripped apart, shredded and destroyed by the limits of length. A tale must be as long as it needs to be to be told.
Tighten Your Tale
A while back someone told me that word counts were a good way to instill discipline in our writing. They said we should limit our words to only those we require to tell the tales that must be told.
My response was that “brevity can bite me.â€
That is because my stories are going to be as long as they need to be. I wish that I had told the Butter Eater to adjust her wig and suck on another salty stick. She wasn’t supposed to try to crush the imaginations and dreams of her students.
Don’t get me wrong because she didn’t crush mine. She lit a fire under my ass and made me want to prove her wrong. But that is neither here nor there.
When you are telling the tales that must be told you need to just write. You need to put pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard and let the words flow forth. Write first and edit later.
Word counts cause confusion because they create a condition in which you let your internal editor take creative control. Don’t do that. Write with reckless abandon and use as many words as you need.
I am not repetitive because I am forgetful. I am repetitive because it is necessary.
Tell A Story
A story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Every story you write needs those three things. Go read It Was Logical and you’ll find them there waiting for your visit.
Word counts are for bad stories. Word counts are for worriers who wonder how they are going to read 100 papers. Word counts are for very specific papers and purposes but they should only be used as guidelines and not as law.
Learn how to tell the tales that must be told with talent and you won’t ever have to worry about a word count again.
And now if you will excuse me I am going to start stretching because in a moment I am going to be chased by a thousand angry editors. So I am going to run and lead them on a merry chase hither and thither.
Once they are exhausted and worn out from our time on the road I shall sit down and let them know that I believe in brevity. I will tell them that we should all work on tightening our tales and using fewer words to tell them.
But it should only be done after we have spit out how ever many words it takes to tell the tales that must be told.
Just write my friends without wonder or worry. Just write without regard for word count, editors or readers because when you do that your passion will come out and your personality will prevail.
Success shall be ours.
This Is A Boring Headline
The experts can excoriate me for not preparing a more exciting headline. The shamans, gurus, ninjas and voodoo docs of the blogosphere can slap me around for letting potential readers run away because I didn’t ask if you are guilty of sloppy writing or if you are undisciplined.
Yeah, those were among the prospective winners that I considered using but I couldn’t do it because they sucked the life out of me and any sort of sucking that doesn’t bring a smile doesn’t deserve a place at my table.
But this post is about writing. It is about storytelling. It is about how to take readers from point A to point Z without boring them.
Style, Substance and Discipline
Some of you know that I am working on several different stories that I want to publish.
That is just a sample, a snapshot of some of the pieces of the puzzles that I am working on now. You can read them or not read them, I didn’t link to them this time for promotional purposes but because they serve a couple of roles here.
They are examples of stories that remain unfinished because they weren’t written with an outline. Each of those started with an idea and I just sort of tapped at the keyboard and let my fingers tap away until other responsibilities pulled me from the keyboard or the internal editor said “you suck, walk away from the keyboard.”
Each story has some style and substance to them. There is meat there. There are issues, challenges, possibilities and opportunities that readers can relate to and that is enough to make them worth continuing.
What is lacking is discipline.
Undisciplined Writing
I am biased because those words are my babies and like most writers I want you to love them. Why wouldn’t I. Why shouldn’t I, especially if one day I want to be an award winning novelist.
There is a case to be made for being undisciplined. Some might argue that it makes it easier for the characters to tell the story. It is not hard for me to sell that. I can sell it to you just as easily as I can sell it to myself.
But I can also talk about how an outline does not prevent your characters from telling the story and how it helps to enable a deeper and more layered approach to the stories. People are not one dimensional.
A good character is someone who shows that. Look at Walter White in Breaking Bad. He is a sort of antihero.
A father and schoolteacher who learns he has a terminal illness and is terrified because before his diagnosis he is just barely keeping his head above water. Now he has to figure out how to pay for his medical needs and provide for his family after he is gone.
So he uses his advanced degree and knowledge of science to become a very successful drug dealer.
That is not the best description of the show, but it is quite good and quite compelling.
What Makes Great Writing
Great writing is subjective. What I look for is something that does more than tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. I don’t want a baloney sandwich on stale bread. I want something that has a bit more, some sort of kick.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it has to have pickles, lettuce, tomato and spicy mustard. It just needs something that gives it a bit of distinction.
What I want as a writer is to take my stories and give them that kick so that you can’t stop reading.
One of the tricks that works best for me is to take bits and pieces of my life and integrate that into the tales I tell. Fragments of fiction is what I call it because the people are an amalgamation of people I once knew.
It provides a certain amount of realism and authenticity that seems to resonate with others.
Waiting For The Click
FWIW, there are one or two stories that I intentionally haven’t finished because I am waiting for the click. There are some things that have to happen and I am confident that when that click comes I’ll put the pen on paper again.
But when it comes to the rest I think it is probably time to start working with an outline of some sort.
What about you? Do you use an outline for your writing?
Fear And Pride
There are three things that I wish I had real talent/ability:
Singing, Dancing and Painting.
Alas, I am not particularly good at any of them.
When I shed my fear and remove my pride I find my way with ease through each one of these mazes. I sing loud, dance with reckless abandon and don’t feel obligated to describe my painting as being modern.
Sometimes Fear And Pride Influence Me
Sometimes fear and pride have more influence over me than I wish to admit. Sometimes they stop me from doing what it is that I really want to do. There are moments where they have had their way and I have missed opportunities because of them.
I am not prescient which I suppose is part of why there have been those moments where I didn’t walk into the cornstalks to see where the other ballplayers went. Sometimes I could justify it by basing my decision upon experience and the gut feeling that the time just wasn’t right to go for it.
Sometimes that payed off and I could rest comfortably knowing I did the right thing, but not always.
Wanderlust is a part of my heart and that restless need to find out what lies just around the bend or behind the door doesn’t always accept playing it safe.
What Price Do We Pay?
There is a price to be paid for all that we do and fear and pride are no different. But I remind myself that this is not necessarily a good or bad thing. It is just part of life. Every time we make a choice it comes with a little something but we don’t always know whether that is good or bad until we do it.
So I have tried to adjust how I live my life so that I don’t walk around like some sort of crazy bookkeeper tabulating the cost of every little thing I do. I don’t spend every moment trying to calculate how many calories are in the extra slice of pizza or worrying that playing it safe/not playing it safe will hurt me.
When I think about watching my children learn how to walk I remember how every time they fell they got back up and did it again. Every time they wobbled they kept pushing until they didn’t rock back and forth on their feet.
Once upon a time I was no different.
I was them and most of the time I like to think I still am.
Painting/Singing/Dancing
The reason I wish I could do all three of these things more skillfully than I do now is very simple. I like creating. I like expressing. I like letting loose and finding ways to translate the images I see in my mind.
All three of these things would help with that. They are all made for it. They are made for expression of any and all feelings.
There is joy to be found there and I always look for more ways to experience and share joy.
All I have to do now is keep working at preventing fear and pride from spoiling that, most of the time I think I am pretty about it.
How about you?
Hard Questions Need Simple Answers
There is a half formed idea floating around in the back of my head. I can feel it shifting around back there, not quite baked but close enough to prick my conscious and demand attention.
It is making me a bit crazy, this unfinished thought or idea. I want to take a spoon and start scooping away. I want to clear away the clutter and blow off the dust so that I can see clearly, but it is just not possible.
And we move on to the poem:
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
Ozymandias-Percy Bysshe Shelley
Sometimes the best way to figure out what lies beneath the surface is to stop poking around and to think about other things so I am trying to figure out what sort of metric to use to determine what posts here are the most important.
Do I base it upon which ones I am most proud of or do I pick those that have generated the most pageviews/comments?
And if I do that do I need to try and account for which ones have received the most promotion?
There Is A Difference Between Best & Most Popular but we already covered that now didn’t we. Maybe it is best to focus on How To Give The Gift of Gratitude
and to just ignore this other stuff.
Maybe it is time to stop with posts like How I Used Bad Headlines and Jedi Mind Tricks To Make A Billion From Blogging or maybe not.
What does it all mean and does any of it matter.
Spit Or Swallow Always Means You Have Time To Blog
I am not interested in hearing that you don’t have time to blog. Life is about priorities and determining how to spend your time.
Ask me why my abs don’t look like they did when I was 19 and I’ll tell you it is because of my diet. I could tell you it is because I have too many responsibilities and I simply don’t have time to eat right, but that is not true.
Most of the weight and responsibility falls on my personal choices not to adjust my eating to fit certain changes that have taken place. I own it, just as I own what happens here.
One of the reasons you haven’t seen as many comments from other bloggers is because I haven’t spent as much time commenting on other blogs. When you don’t make the rounds that is part of the impact.
It is part of why it is important to build community.
Priorities
I have shifted my time. I have increased the amount of time I am spending working out and I am doing my best to go to bed earlier.
Why?
Because if you want to be a great writer you have to read a lot, write a lot and take care of your body and brain. Sure there is the whole mystique thing of living large and hard and producing amazing content, but I can’t do that for very long without paying a severe price.
So I shifted and adjusted things.
I took initiative to remove the excuses…mostly.
Useful Information Used Usefully
Useful Information Used Usefully is the headline to an older post I wrote in about 15 minutes and so is the The Secret To Better Sex Is…
Why I am including those two posts here?
In large part it is because they are worth sharing again. There are readers who haven’t seen them and might enjoy the content. It is also because I have myself seven minutes to write this post.
When the bell goes off I will hit publish, put on my shoes and go to work.
I will leave feeling good about this post and confident that it is chock full of useful information. I’ll leave knowing that I didn’t let the desire to be perfect prevent me from publishing.
Perfection Is Paralyzing
Vince Lombardi was right about the need to chase perfection. We should always do so and strive to come as close to the mark as possible but don’t let the pursuit prevent progress.
There is always a better way to say or write things. I could come up with a better headline. I could come up with a better picture. I could do more to optimize this for SEO and that would be great.
But it would prevent me from hitting the other mark I have set and my priority is to publish.
My goal is to become a better writer and sometimes that involves practicing how to publish in less time.
You can do all of these things too. It is a matter of choice, desire and practice.
What do you think?