Category: Writing

The Fruit-Tree Structure

One challenge in writing a book is how to structure it. Putting all the material together in a coherent package is tough. Where to start, where to finish, how to best arrange things in the middle, and what to leave out(!)—it can all be rather daunting.

In Write Better I include a chapter offering a dozen common options for organizing a nonfiction book. But there are dozens more, and when I read a new book, I am always on the alert for effective ways writers use for presenting their ideas.

Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is an important book on an important topic that also offers an interesting structure that could well work for others. The main focus is the story of Walter McMillian, an innocent man who was sentenced to death row in Alabama. His case and how Stevenson became involved is fascinating and dramatic.

But every ten pages or so Stevenson pulls back from this tale and gives background information regarding related aspects of the justice system—trying minors as adults, sentencing practices in different regions, the use of solitary confinement, the political history of Alabama. These topics branch off the main trunk of the memoir like branches of a tree laden with heavy, nutritious fruit.

Stevenson also includes flashbacks on his own story or tells how he was building his organization (as a subplot, if you will) in parallel to the McMillian case. If Stevenson had structured the book around these “side” issues, readers could have gotten glassy eyed when statistics are piled up or legal precedents are detailed. But since that information is wrapped in a compelling story—it makes all the difference.

In addition, that content is presented in an emotional package of his passion that we as readers get involved with, being incensed about the many outrageous stories of injustice that he tells along the way. As readers we end up caring and wondering what we can do too.

As you think about writing a book, then, consider whether or not you have a story that:

♦    you were personally involved with
♦    stretched out over a period of years
♦    had barriers and problems that needed to be overcome
♦    touches on a variety of substantive issues you are concerned about that could branch off of your main storyline, and
♦    has a narrative arc that builds tension, has setbacks, and perseveres to a resolution that gives hope

I think you could find this a very fruitful approach.

—

photo: Hans Braxmeier, Pixabay

Overboarding

The business world is one of the worst offenders when it comes to jargon. It is full of superficially hip insider language that lends a sense of currency to ideas that are (or should be) just common sense. If I hear metrics, optics, curating, ecosystem, and granular one more time I will stack up all my business books in my front yard and set them on fire.

To put it plainly, jargon masks meaning. It doesn’t make things clearer. It hides what you are saying.

I suppose it is inevitable. Consultants persist in fabricating such vocabulary to make it seem they are worth the big bucks you pay them. Max Mallet and friends pull back the curtain on the machinery of these “all-powerful wizards.” Here are two of forty-five terms that are worst offenders.

Buy-In. David Logan, professor at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business notes: “Asking for someone’s ‘buy-in’ says, ‘I have an idea. I didn’t involve you because I didn’t value you enough to discuss it with you. I want you to embrace it as if you were in on it from the beginning, because that would make me feel really good.’”

Core Competency. In business-speak, this means a fundamental strength even though the word competent means only having a needed skill. “Do people talk about peripheral competency?” asks Bruce Barry, professor of management at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Business. “Being competent is not the standard we’re seeking. It’s like core mediocrity.”

One that annoys me most is:

Onboarding. Integrating new employees is important. Making sure they feel welcome and a part of the team is important. Why not just say that? Besides sounding like waterboarding or overboarding, do we want to begin by telling people they are getting on a cruise ship? Sure, workplaces can be fun. But if you want committed, long-term employees, captivate them with meaningful, life-giving work.

What’s the business jargon you love to hate?

—

image: Pixabay, mohamed_hassan

Upside Down Writing Strategies

One of the best writing strategies is to write a lot of bad stuff. Yes, the more bad stuff we write, the better. If that sounds counterintuitive, it is. Here’s how it works.

One reason Beethoven and Picasso produced so many great works was that they produced a lot of ordinary, unknown works. We might know a couple of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, the last of his five piano concertos, his one violin concerto, maybe his opera Fidelio, and probably “Für Elise.” But in his 45-year career, he wrote at least 722 pieces.

He produced twenty variations for piano, dozens of sonatas for piano, for violin, and for cello, chamber music including sixteen string quartets, and more. Yet only a few are in the standard canon of often-played pieces; only a few are considered masterpieces.

We know Picasso as the twentieth-century artistic genius who created Guernica, the sculpture in Chicago’s Daley Plaza, and stunning abstract portraits. But he produced “more than 1,800 painting, 1,200 sculptures, 2,800 ceramics, 12,000 drawings as well as prints, rugs and tapestries—only a fraction of which ever garnered acclaim.”*

We know creative geniuses for their few great works. What we don’t know is that in general they simply outproduced their peers. Creating so much increased their odds that a few would be landmark creations.

We shouldn’t be afraid to create junk or to write something that’s ordinary. For thirteen years I have been blogging at Andy Unedited. In that time I have produced over six hundred posts. I do my best but most of them are just OK. A few, I think, are very good Yet I wouldn’t have written any good ones if I didn’t have the discipline of trying to produce something every week, including the commonplace ones.

A second upside down writing strategy is to do stuff besides write. Studies have shown that scientists are twelve times more likely to win a Nobel price if they write poetry, plays, novels or other works, than if they don’t. And twenty-two times more likely if they perform as an amateur actor, dancer, or magician.** To be more creative with our writing we should branch out.

If you write mystery novels, experiment with poetry. If history is your field, try literary fiction. Take up a musical instrument, go to museums, do some painting, throw clay pots, immerse yourself in Japanese culture. As I say in chapter 11 of Write Better, when we have a wider range of new experiences and ideas that we are exposed to, the more we will make interesting connections that can inspire our writing.

A third strategy: Don’t start at the beginning. If you are writing a book, don’t start with the first chapter, start with the easiest chapter—the one you’ve thought about a lot already.

If you are writing a chapter or an article, don’t begin with the first paragraph. Start with the easiest thing for you to write, whatever comes to your mind. It doesn’t have to be great or even good. It just has to be there. You can (and should) always revise later.

I emphasize this strategy with writers because it is the one piece of writing advice that I give to myself most often. Every time I sit down to write, I pause. and tell myself, don’t worry about where to start. Just start . . . anywhere, with any related or semi-related idea or story, whether good or bad. Just start.

What writing strategies have you found helpful?

—
*Adam Grant, Originals, p. 36.
**Adam Grant, Originals, p. 47.

Credits: Daley Plaza (www.chicago.gov); Guernica (Pixabay, Almudena Sanz Tabernero)

Writer at Work

Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses and four books on Lyndon Johnson are legendary for their length (a total of almost 5,000 pages) and the length between volumes (about a decade). In Working, a collection of interviews and articles, we learn something of the method in his madness.

His passion is not just to inform readers but to help them see the force of these men and feel their impact. To do so he goes to tremendous, time-consuming lengths to track down and interview incredibly hard to find people and page through tens of thousands of pages of documents.

Caro was, for example, intent on finding out how Johnson’s ambition showed itself even in college. Everyone told him, however, that one key fellow student, Vernon Whiteside, was dead. Then one person said Vernon was alive and planning to live in a mobile home north of Miami in a town with “Beach” in the name. Caro and his wife tracked down every mobile home court in those towns (using phone books!) and finally found him–but didn’t call. He flew there to talk in person.

Multiply that by hundreds and we get some idea of why his books are so long and took so long.

Caro’s other passion is explaining how political power works because it has a tremendous effect on our lives. Robert Moses was determined to reshape New York City with bridges, highways, parks, and other public works. To do so, during his forty years in power, Moses displaced a half million of New York’s fourteen million people—forcing them out of their homes, destroying communities. In a democracy, Caro wants us to know how that kind of power (of an unelected official) works.

His powerful interviewing techniques range from the common (use silence to get people to fill in the quiet) to the persistent (asking over and over, “What did you see?”) to the obsessive (moving to the Hill Country of Texas for three years) to knowing the importance of place (taking Johnson’s brother to the Johnson Boyhood Home after visiting hours to trigger hidden memories of difficult dinner conversations between his brother and their father).

The book is disjointed and a bit repetitive because of its nature as a collection. But the dozens of fascinating anecdotes and tidbits give us a window into the work a writer with keen instincts and tenacity.

—

image: flyleaf of Working by Robert Caro (edited manuscript page by the author)

Tuesday Round Up

Charitable Writing

Just released is a terrific resource by Richard Gibson and James Beitler entitled Charitable Writing. I was glad to offer this endorsement:
“Who we are is absolutely foundational for anything we write. Gibson and Beitler take us to the heart of this largely unexamined principle. Without being grounded as people, our writing will run into a ditch, or we will, or both. As just one instance of this, the authors unmask the menacing metaphor of argument as a form of war, generously offering alternatives to reshape us. Throughout they gently yet firmly guide us to embrace loving others not only in what we write but in how we write.”

Books of the Year

Last month I reviewed Reading While Black. What I  called “a necessary book for all of us” has just been named the Christianity Today Beautiful Orthodoxy Book of the Year. Congratulations, Esau McCaully!

In addition, the Culture and Arts Book of the Year went to The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty which earlier I called “beautiful and profound . . . With stories and a fascinating window into violinmaking which provides a rich metaphor tying it all together, we have a deep look at our life in God, and the art of God in us.” A tour de force by Martin Schleske.

Common Writing Slip-ups

Here are some great little reminders. I suspect I’ve messed up “sleight of hand” and “bated breath” more than once.

Advice That’s Out of This World

Ray Bradbury, whose 100th birthday we celebrate this year, offered some dandy writing advice during his long career. Here are some salient snippets from interviews, talks, and essays. Of course his emphasis is fiction, but so much of what he says applies to any kind of writing.

Tuesday Round Up

Hear are a few, brief, miscellaneous items of interest. (See the last piece regarding this string of adjectives.)

Click on the Headline

Some of you who subscribe to Andy Unedited have mentioned that the font size is small in the email alert you receive. If you just click on the headline of the blog found in the email, you will be sent to the blog website which is much more readable. (So, for example, if you get this in an email, put your cursor on “Tuesday Round Up” in the email and then click! Easy as eating pumpkin pie.)

1917

My wife and I recently rented the DVD of this gripping story of two British soldiers in World War I who make an amazing 24-hour journey to deliver a message that could save hundreds of lives. The unusual use of only one camera during the entire film heightens not only the immersive immediacy of the movie but the dogged courage of this pair.

Write Better ebook and paperback sale

In honor of Cyber Monday coming up next week, the ebook edition of Write Better is now available for sale on Amazon.com and will soon be on ChristianBook.com for only $4.99 through December 2. Mark your calendar and take advantage.

You can also save 50% on the paperback edition (and a truckload of other IVP books) through Christmas just by clicking this link. Tell your friends. Happy Holidays!

Hope*Writers

I was recently interviewed by the good folks at Hope*Writers, a community helping people with the art of writing with the business of publishing. You can view it for free here as I discuss the importance of beginnings and endings, why determining your audience is so key (and how to do it), as well as ways to engage readers.

The Crazy Grammar Rule You Never Heard Of

Most click-bait headlines disappoint. The actual article ends up to be so lame compared to the come-on. But this one about the crazy “Grammar Rule You Know But Have Never Heard Of” is absolutely spot on. I never knew this complex rule as a rule, but I instinctively follow it all the time. So do you. Mind blown!

Dear Mr. Editor Person

Do I get letters? Yes. I get letters.

Dear Mr. Editor Person:

Often I read words or phrases that make my grammatical hair stand on end, my syntactical stomach churn, and my semantical head bow in grief. Someone uses “impact” as if it were a verb or “ask” as if it were a noun, and I become anxious, disoriented, and grumpy with my dog. Do I need medication? Can you help me?

Unsettled in Seattle

Dear Unsettled,

Editors and writers worth their salt have pet peeves. Being a salty person myself, I have many.

I sympathize with your problem. Why do people insist on forcing the word ask to do what it was never meant to do? They don’t even say, “Please,” to such a request. All along we have had a perfectly good noun to use in such situations. Oh, and there it was—request! So, no, I will not make a big ask here. I will make a polite, though perhaps large, request.

No doubt the ship has sailed when it comes to impact. Making it a verb is sadly now just part of standard usage. But I die a little every time I hear or read someone say, “How did that impact you?” or, “We were impacted by the recession.” Couldn’t they say, “The recession had a negative impact on us”? Or what’s wrong with affected or influenced when a verb is needed?

And what is the difference between giftables and gifts? Two extraneous syllables and four unnecessary letters! What could possibly justify creating a gratuitous adjective just to make it into a noun? And don’t get me started on using too many exclamation points!

If, however, I hear one more customer service rep tell me on the phone that they are going to “reach out” to a colleagues instead of “contact” them, I swear I will reach right through the ether and request that someone give that rep the gift of laryngitis. That would have a most salutary impact.

Then there is this. Since when did the undeveloped syntax of the playground retort, “You’re not the boss of me,” become standard adult usage? I have no problem if someone wants to tell me, “You’re not my boss.” That’s something I can engage with respectfully. But the former creates a massive facial tic that interrupts my ability to think rationally.

I’m sure my readers have other similar pet peeves, and I’d be glad to hear them. But what then is the solution for sensitive souls like you, Unsettled, and me?

We must remember that part of the genius of English is its flexibility. New forms and new words pop up all the time—some bad but many good. Time will sort out which is which. Certainly we should oppose confusion, ambiguity, and error. But we can’t eliminate all change if we also want to have the benefits of a versatile language.

Therefore, it is best to remember that for those of us who love language, it is our lot in life to suffer.

Blog Through Your Book?

Should authors blog through the books they are writing? This does not have a one-size-fits-all answer.

I wish I could have said a bit more about it in Write Better where careful readers may have thought they spotted a contradiction. In the preface I say, “Some of what is found in this book was originally posted [at Andy Unedited], though now in a much revised and expanded form.” Much later in appendix A I say, “Don’t give too much of your book away in a blog or web page.”

Did I break my own guideline? You decide. But first let me back up.

Blogging can be good for many reasons. It can help gain an audience for your writing. Blogging regularly can get you in the habit of writing and thus minimize writer’s block. It can also help you practice and improve your craft.

Most bloggers will naturally find themselves gravitating to certain topics over and over. This might trigger a thought that one or more of the topics could become one or more books.

If you start seriously working on such a book, I do not recommend you serialize your book in your blog. That does give away too much content. Now some might get the book anyway because they are your mother. But serializing for free can diminish the value a book that you expect people to pay for.

At the same time, you do want readers to associate you with certain topics. You want to build a reputation as someone who has valuable things to say in specific areas. It is fine then to put preliminary thoughts and ideas related to your book topic in your blog. Here’s a chance to be experimental, to see what works for you and for your audience. Some of these posts may make it into the book in another form. Most should not.

If it turns out that a lot of your book ends up to be taken directly from your blog posts, you might want to consider removing many (not all) of those posts from your blog site shortly before the book is published.

Another guideline is this: the less popular your blog, the more freedom you have to put whatever you want on your blog. If you are already a well-known author, the less you should blog material that might end up in your book. You can and should still do some to pique interest and build anticipation. But not a lot.

And me? I gladly do not consider myself famous. My blog has a modest following. In any case, I worked hard to create a lot of new content just for Write Better. But because I am not competing with Justin Bieber for social media hits, I felt more free to have some overlap between my blog and my book. For whatever reasons, my books have done better than my blog. And I’m not unhappy it has turned out that way.

—

photo credit: pixelcreatures, Pixabay

Solving a Coauthoring Problem

Coauthors have a problem.

How do you speak about yourselves in a book or article? Who is the “I” in your piece? Do you always use “we”? But what if you are telling a story of one author but not the other? Do you always say “I (Andy) once . . .”? But that can be awkward and intrusive.

In an appendix to Write Better I offer four options for how to handle this perennial problem. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. A recently coauthored book by Randy Richards and Richard James, Misreading Scripture Through Individualistic Eyes, offers a creative fifth option: Use “I” throughout and never identify which author this refers to.

The advantages are many. Readers don’t trip over the “I (Andy) once . . .” formula. Each author can freely tell their own stories in first person. This is also less awkward than one author using first person and the other being referred to in third person (“Once Andy . . .”). It likewise avoids the oddly impersonal option of both using third person.

But doesn’t Richard’s and James’s solution create confusion? How can you mix two different lives as if they were one? Because of that, this solution won’t work for many coauthored books. But it works in this case for a couple reasons they mention in the preface.

First, in this book half the chapters were not written by one author and the rest by the other. Rather the two were constantly sending all the chapters back and forth, drafting, adding, deleting, revising, reworking.

Second, and I think this is key, the stories they each tell are in a narrow range. They only have to do with their cross-cultural experiences—not about their children, marriages, early life, and so forth. And understanding other cultures is the focus of the book. In addition, they tell us that stories from the Middle East usually originated with Rich, and those from eastern Asia usually started with Randy.

Where coauthors tell stories from very different life histories, this won’t be a feasible solution. But these colleagues make it work.

Why Tell Stories

Teachers and nonfiction writers are sometimes hesitant to tell stories. Just giving the content straight seems so much better. People can get the wrong point from a story, after all. Stories can be subjective, vague, striking different people different ways. We don’t want people confused. And some may like a particular story and others not.

Giving content straight, however, has its disadvantages. Straight content can be limited and give the illusion that we know all we need about a topic in an aphorism or an essay.

If we say God is all-knowing and all-powerful, that is well and good. Maybe we add more. We say God is love, and as a result we also should love. This too is true. We definitely need to know that and believe it. It makes a massive difference in how we understand the Christian life. We have touched the mind in important ways.

And what if we tell a story? What if we tell of a man with two grown sons? The younger son shows immense disrespect for his father, asking for his share of the inheritance. Essentially he is saying he’d rather his father be dead so he can get his hands on the money.

How does the father react? Does he get angry? Does he laugh in his son’s face and mock him? No. He grants the son’s request. Promptly the young man leaves the family and squanders the wealth that he’s been given.

After some time, and having wasted everything, he is destitute and starving. In desperation he decides to return to his father, thinking to make an abject apology and ask for mercy.

All this time the father has been waiting, looking over the horizon, hoping to see his son return. And then, amazingly, he recognizes a disheveled figure, trudging down the road toward the house. The father sets aside his dignity and runs to meet him. Before the son can finish stumbling through his confession, the father calls for the servants to organize a great party for the whole community. Why? To celebrate the return of his beloved son who once seemed dead but is now back, alive.

And we? We have been touched in our hearts. We are moved. We are changed that this is the kind of God we have, a God who loves us even in this way.

—

image credit: wal_172619 Pixabay