the word studio notebook: Following

chialynn:

wordstudio:

All right, we get it. Your life is beautiful. Your life takes place in picturesque urban and rural settings. You eat lovely breakfasts on weathered tables adorned with cloth napkins and perfectly chipped plates. You eat at the local dive where the poutine comes in a paper basket with a checkered…

This morning, Timehop reminded me of one of the best things I’ve ever read about Tumblr. Thanks, Will.

Thank you! I kind of totally forgot I ever wrote this bit and am happily surprised to be reminded it exists. Much obliged!

Source: wordstudio

For the Los Angeles grid is warped, like the assumed mathematical netherworld, and must be moved through in an illogical manner. As the surface is unpeeled, a deeper level is revealed, but just below that the surface level appears again. This effect leaves the writer seeing only quark smoke trails, the evidence of something richer that has been missed.
Steve Martin, “Hissy Fit” (appearing in Pure Drivel)
What I find though is that the solitude of the act of seriously writing fiction is such that it comes within the whole loopy shitstorm social media that most of now live in. It comes anyway, and you’re absolutely alone doing this strange, sometimes, sometimes seemingly very hard and other times wildly exhilarating thing and there’s nobody else there, even though you’re Tweeting with the other hand.
William Gibson (via The Awl)

Something Can’t Be Very Unique

So, you know that bit at the beginning of the West Wing episode, “Galileo,” where the President, Sam, and CJ get on the case of the NASA Public Affairs writer to let him know that “very unique” and “extremely historic” are bad writing? After that, Sam improvises a stirring intro speech that puts us and the 12,000-lb spacecraft into a shared context? You know the bit I’m talking about? 

It contains a sentence very much like this:

“You, me, and 60,000 of your fellow students across the country, along with astroscientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Southern California, NASA Houston, and right here at the White House are going to be to the first to see what it sees, and to chronicle the extraordinary voyage of an unmanned ship called ‘Galileo V.’”

I’m pretty sure that “me” in there isn’t correct because “Me am going to be the first to see” isn’t correct. It should be, “You and I and 60,000 of your fellow students […]”, right?

I’ve watched that episode one thousand and twenty times and I just now noticed that. Wouldn’t matter except everyone just got on the poor NASA guy’s back about that sort of thing. Editing is hard.

What’s Hard To Write

Yeah, I’m stymied. I’m at the bottom of a embankment in my work. It’s a bit of writing I’ve been wrestling with for a week or more. I’ve outlined it, I’ve written a draft or two of it already and proceeded to delete or type over a bunch of it—I’ve surveyed the turf and plotted my course. Still, stymied.

Sometimes, when this happens, I think about the writers and dramatists who say they just “skip the boring parts.” (It might’ve been Elmore Leonard or Alfred Hitchcock who said it most famously.) I do that sometimes—skip ahead and then see if I really need to come back and write the bit that got me stuck. Sometimes it works. Just skipping ahead helps me find a way to convey the beat I skipped without having to chart it precisely. The drive to the place is sometimes less interesting than what happens at the place.

This isn’t one of those times. This is exciting material I’m working with and, honestly, I don’t think that it’s the material being boring that’s holding me up. This material is important.

The problem is it’s just difficult. I keep thinking, “What I wrote today is okay but I’ll be sharper tomorrow and then I’ll revise and hone this stuff until it’s the best it can be.” Every day is some day’s tomorrow. Most days I am only as sharp as I usually am and so all these revisions and preparations and drafts aren’t getting the actual writing finished. So I’ve written this thing six or seven times now and it’s still not where I want it.

Sometimes I try to use the fact that something is hard to write well as an excuse to skip it and come back to it. That’s bending the old advice to “skip the boring parts” out of shape, though. Not every challenge is a fun puzzle to be solved. Some challenges are bent-knee trudges through dirty, weedy mires that leave your feet cold and your knuckles scraped to hell.

These are worthy challenges. Some of these must be overcome to get to the remote valleys and hidden temples. Don’t confuse what’s stymying for what’s boring.

I’m finding it tedious to not be good at this one thing that I’m writing but that just means it’s not fun right now. When I get good—at this scene, at this essay, at this character—things that might otherwise be boring can become intriguing,enticing, thrilling. In the hands of a great actor or storyteller, for example, the conversation in the car can be as captivating as the adventure at the destination.

In other words: Sucking at kung-fu sucks but get the moves down and I hear it’s fun to be a master.

Make the boring part a fun part worth reading, right? Even if it’s not easy.

Fewer Commas, I Think

Can we talk about commas for a minute?

Here’s something writerly (yay?) and brief (yay!). While I was out in South Carolina teaching creative writing a few years ago, I listened as a professor lamented the proliferation of needless commas in so much of the text he read from students and pros of all ages. I leaned back, happily skeptical. I thought about all the power and punch, mystery and mood that lay in the delicate pause of a cunningly placed comma. I thought about how it alters dialogue and how maybe all writing is essentially dialogue.

He was right. I was wrong. Too many commas.

Commas are great. I love commas. Commas, people, seriously.

Yet I’ve stopped installing them in so many sentences. I’ve stopped thinking of them as turn signals letting the reader know that an and or a but is coming up. Let the conjunctions do their jobs and let the reader find some of the rhythms on their own.

Sometimes, yes, sometimes commas add the right curve or swerve to a sentence, giving it that serpentine glide that entrances, that lures, that adds fatty coils, that gives the bedspread its menacing topography hinting at the asp beneath the sheets. Sometimes the comma is the venomous bite, sometimes the tangling constrictor.

That thing you’re writing now? That sentence you’re typing into the email you’re procrastinating even as you read this post? That tweet that needs just two more characters to go from molten gold to solid gold? Try scrubbing it free of commas. Put them back in the hopper for future use. See what happens when you trade in the twirling swordplay for a single jab with a sturdy spear. Sometimes it’s best to drive the point straight to the heart.