Writing – Page 4 – Andy Unedited

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.

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image credit: wal_172619 Pixabay

Reverse Writer’s Block

Recently a friend asked an interesting question after reading my blog on writer’s block. He wrote:

Andy,

I wonder if I need some writer’s block. I don’t have a problem with getting started. Rather, as I jokingly tell students, I’ve never met a word count I couldn’t exceed. I am working on my first solo, non-academic book for a Christian audience. In each chapter, I’ve stuffed in all sorts of things that I think are useful to know about the topic. That is giving me 4000-6000 word chapters, which I’m told is much too long. I need a tool for discerning what pieces I can safely leave out without losing my authorial voice. Any recommendations for that??? Thanks.

Prolific in Pittsburgh

It’s a great question. I have met a few other authors with “reverse writer’s block.” They know they should write less (or have been told to write less by an editor) but can’t seem to stop or keep the word count down.

Normally I don’t suggest self-editing before we start drafting. That can often shut down our flow. Unless you usually find yourself writing 3,000 words for every 1,000 assigned, it’s best to cut afterward. But how? A few things come to mind.

First, expect cutting to be painful. It will hurt because you believe in all your content. Don’t think you can do it without some anguish. If you don’t feel pain you probably aren’t cutting enough. Don’t expect to achieve what you want by deleting a word here or there. Whole sentences and paragraphs will have to go. Probably whole sections.

Second, save what you cut in a separate file. Maybe you can use it later for some other purpose. That could ease the pain a bit, knowing that your hard work is not forever banished to a digital netherworld. Remember: You don’t have to put everything possible into a piece. You can always write another book or article.

Third, when in doubt, throw it out. If the thought crosses your mind, “I wonder if this should go,” that is a likely candidate. Highlight it and everything else you think could be cut. Then see how many words you have left. If you are under the target word count, then you can reinstate some of your gems.

Fourth, in nonfiction you will often have main points. Sometimes you’ll have subpoints as well. But if you find you have sub-subpoints, those are likely candidates to ax.

Fifth, get a neutral party or two to give you input on what to cut. It should be people you trust and will listen to. It’s not fair to have them spend time reading your draft only to have you ignore most of what they say.

Two kinds of readers can be helpful. One is a person with significant writing or editing experience. Another type is someone in the target audience—your average reader. Have such people mark where their attention lagged or what they skipped over.

Finally, remember that after you make your cuts, your piece will almost always be better. Readers will remember more, and your prose will be stronger. Believe it. It’s true.

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credits: Pixabay stevepb (axe); Pixabay lograstudio (sleeping)

A Message to the Future

What if you wanted to send a message to someone in the future. Would you need a time machine? Would you have to reverse the polarity on your deflector array to transmit a message through a supernova? Maybe you would need to harness the power of a black hole to energize the system.

That might not even solve all your problems. After all, sending a message into the future can be a tricky business. What could make sure that it didn’t degrade as it passed through the space-time continuum? The technology could break down. Human error or human limitations could prevent the message from being transmitted. And because language and culture change significantly over time, our words and syntax could be difficult to understand by those in the future.

Yet if these difficulties could be overcome, who would you write? To yourself in five years? To your children in fifteen years? Grandchildren in fifty years? To those living five hundred years from now?

What would you write? Your hopes and dreams? Your hard-won wisdom? Stories from your life of sadness and joy? Or just the funny thing that happened today?

It wouldn’t have to be profound. The very commonness of our letters to the future can profoundly communicate our bonds as humans across time and culture.

What can encourage us in this rather daunting project is that people have been sending messages to the future for almost ten thousand years. Some of those earliest messages scratched on clay tablets were very commonplace—a shopping list, a record of livestock sold, a recipe for beer.

We also have records of how teachers taught students to read and write five thousand years ago. They used some rather sophisticated techniques (both semantic and phonological) and unsophisticated (the cane).

But wait, there’s more. Two and a half thousand years ago Homer, Confucius, and Isaiah sent messages to the future. From hundreds of years past Dante, Scheherazade, and Shakespeare still speak to us. More recent messages to our day come from Hemingway, Achebe, Borges, and Solzhenitsyn.

Writing and reading are so commonplace we forget how almost magical the whole process is. We can receive and send ordinary and exceptional stories as well as knowledge across thousands of miles and hundreds of years with people we have never met and who may not know our language.

And what technology shall we use for this? While our words can easily be multiplied thousands of times digitally, ink on paper may still be the most likely to survive into the next millennium.

Today, then, read a message for the future that was written long ago. Today, write that those in the future might know you and as a result know themselves better.

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Credits: Pixabay eli007 (black hole); Pixabay Pexels (writing),

Everyone Gets Writer’s Block

One way or another we all fall victim to writer’s block. But it can come in many forms. It is not just a blank screen that sits forever mocking our lack of output. Sometimes it means we just move at a very slow pace. Our perfectionism kicks in so we fuss over every sentence before moving on. Or we fear someone will think we are shallow or just borderline literate.

If that’s you, you are in good company. The good news is there are very practical things we can do to get us moving. Let me just reiterate a few ideas that might help.

1. Get The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and practice Morning Pages as she describes them. Writing thirty minutes a day without self-editing or correction about anything at all can help us form new habits that can get us writing more on a regular basis. If you think thirty minutes a day is a lot to commit to, think of how much time you’ve wasted staring at a screen getting nowhere. Highly recommended.

2. Read Betty Flowers whom I reference in Write Better. In just a page she gives us a great image. We all need our Judge and need to assure ourselves that the Judge will indeed have her say. But not till the end of the process—not at the beginning and not in the middle.

3. Do some writing exercises regularly. You can find sentence completion and other options on websites such as these:

Writing Exercises

Creative Writing Exercises

10 Best Creative Writing Exercises

Doing these show us and remind us that we can indeed write on demand.

4. Play Balderdash. This box game in which we create phony definitions is great fun in a group, especially when you let your imagination run wild and other people can spur you on. Getting a group together will be easier, we trust, in the near future. The fun in this game is the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of writing without overthinking go down easily.

Finally, Paul Silvia in How to Write A Lot tells us that people who were required to write daily wrote 3.5 time more pages and had twice as many creative ideas as those who waited for inspiration.* Being productive (such as with Morning Pages), can—even if our writing is flawed, wordy, or logically suspect—get us into a rhythm of writing which allows an opportunity for creativity.

Remember: We always can (and should) fix it later.

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*Thanks, Marcia Bosscher, for highlighting this for me.

The Reason Is Not Because

The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz practiced the scales every day, even in his eighties. He wanted to continually master his craft so that he would be “be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.”

The same is true for us. Here are two skills you can master. Don’t worry about them as you write. Go back and look for them later.

First, we all know passive voice is usually a no-no. But recognizing it can be a trick. Here’s one easy way to catch a bunch. After you’ve drafted something, search for these:

There is
It is
There are

You can probably rewrite 90% of these sentences in active voice. For example,

Weak: There is much to learn about the theology of dancing porpoises.
Better: We still have much to learn about the theology of dancing porpoises.

Weak: There are other people who are as good looking as I am.
Better: No one is as good looking as I am.

Weak: It is well known that a supernova of the sun would eliminate male pattern baldness.
Better: As we all know, a supernova of the sun would eliminate male pattern baldness.

Here’s another one you can easily search for and fix. Sentences using the pattern of “The reason is because . . .” are redundant, and redundancy drives me nuts and crazy. This is like saying, “The cause is the cause that . . .” We can do better. Consider these:

Weak: The reason is because Facebook is trying to suck all the DNA out of my body.
Better: The reason is that Facebook is sucking all the DNA out of my body.

Weak: The reason is because the dog ate my homework.
Better: That’s because I had to burn my homework to stay alive when I was stranded in the middle of a blizzard.

Weak: The reason is because Al Gore is so boring his code name as Vice President was “Al Gore.”
Better: You can identify Al Gore when he is in a room full of secret service agents because he’s the stiff one.*

Be like Vladimir. Practicing scales can seem tedious and below you. But it can be the gateway to art.

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* Thanks to Al Gore and “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” for these two. www.npr.org/2013/02/16/172030420/al-gore-plays-not-my-job

Credits: Cianna Pixabay (porpoise); desimaxwell Pixabay (rock face)

Don’t Start Here

When we write, starting with an outline is almost impossible.

That’s the case I make in Write Better (chapter 3, if you are interested). First comes observing, thinking, questioning, reading, researching, discussing, jotting notes, and maybe drafting paragraphs. Somewhere in the middle we start organizing our ideas.

New York Times columnist David Brooks describes how he does exactly this.

I lay it out on the floor of my office in piles of paper. Every pile is a paragraph. I pick up a pile. Write that paragraph. Throw that pile of paper in the garbage. And then repeat for all the piles. By the time I start writing, the column is already 80 percent done. It’s the organizing of the piles that’s the key process.

That’s how I wrote Write Better. My research and doodling consisted of forty years of editing and speaking about writing, and twelve years of blogging about writing and editing. Those were my rough notes and research. Then I took those “piles” of material and started sorting.

I initially had at thirty or forty groups which I consolidated into about twenty. As I did so, I noticed they fell into four large categories—the craft, the art, and the spirituality of writing plus practical things writers need to know about publishing.

When I started seriously drafting the book, I continued to rework the arrangement of chapters. Then I got input from a dozen readers on my full draft who gave many suggestions for more reorganization. Once more I shifted chapters around.

Order and structure are essential in helping readers understand what we have to communicate. As I say in Write Better, we shouldn’t try to start with an outline. But we had better end with one.

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paper image credit: Pixabay myrfa

The Problem with Writers

One of the main problems writers have is that we keep getting in the way of our own work. We fret if our ideas are any good, if our writing is stale, if anyone will enjoy it or be moved by it. Thinking about ourselves in this way can bring our work to full stop.

How do we overcome this? Instead of treating our writing as an avenue of self-expression or a channel for our unique creative impulse, we treat it like a job. We take the self-focused emotion out of the equation. As Steven Pressman says in The War of Art, we act like professionals. “The professional loves her work. She is invested wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her.” (p. 88)

Our focus is not on ourselves but on production, on the words, on the craft. As professionals we commit to producing so many words per day or per week, and then we write them. We schedule deadlines for ourselves and meet them. If what we write is bad, we work at it more. If it is good, we improve it still further.

Yes, art matters. But it doesn’t arise by aiming at it. “The professional dedicates himself to mastering technique,” says Pressman, “not because he believes technique is a substitute for inspiration but because he wants to be in possession of the full arsenal of skills when inspiration does come.” (p. 84) Professionals engage in deliberate practice.

Writing as a form of therapy has its place. Journaling can help us work out a problem or deal with our past. But if our goal is to write something for other people to read, we have to forget about ourselves, be cold blooded and objective. We must listen to criticism as if it were about someone else’s work. Writing can’t be about us. It has to be about the writing.

Want to beat writer’s block? Act like a professional.

When Persuasion Dies

Eighty years ago, as World War II was erupting, the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, made a speech which sounds like it could have been given today.

He leads with a strong assertion. “Democracy is not merely a good form of government; it is the best.” His reason for this is interesting. “It is,” he said, “the only form of government that can combine three characteristics: law, equality, and justice.”

But, Hutchins asks, how can we know these three make a valid foundation? Because, he says, this basis for democracy is moral. “Its end is the good for man. Only democracy has this basis. Only democracy has this end. If we do not believe in this basis or this end, we do not believe in democracy. These are the principles which we must defend if we are to defend democracy.”

Here we come upon a problem, however. How can we know these characteristics are moral? How can we know anything is moral? It’s a problem because “for forty years and more” (and again, he was speaking in 1940) “our intellectual leaders have been telling us they are not true. They have been telling us in fact that nothing is true which cannot be subjected to experimental verification. In the whole realm of social thought there can therefore be nothing but opinion. . . . There is no difference between good and bad; there is only the difference between expediency and inexpediency. We cannot even talk about good and bad states or good and bad men. There are no morals; there are only the folkways. The test of action is its success, and even success is a matter of opinion. . . .”

Who is to say what is moral and what isn’t? If everyone is doing it, why not me or you? Who’s to say who is a moral person and who isn’t? I can justify anything I do as long as I can avoid the consequences of the law.

But an even more sinister consequence of this line of thinking awaits. If everyone’s opinion is equal, if there is no real way to convince someone that I am right and you are wrong, then we are left with yelling at each other. And if yelling doesn’t resolve disputes, the only option remaining is coercion. As Hutchins said, “If everything is a matter of opinion, . . . force becomes the only way of settling differences of opinion.”

What can we do in the face of all this? This is a huge question which requires a multifaceted response. Allow me, however, to mention just one simple step we can all take.

We can stop listening to people who yell, and start listening to people who are trying to make a rational argument. We can stop listening to those who are trying to manipulate, name call, or overwhelm us with hot rhetoric. As I’ve noted in my chapters on persuasion in Write Better, instead we should listen to those trying to persuade fairly, speak calmly, and appeal to the common good. We can also choose to listen to these who present different sides of an issue (not just one) while exercising this sort of principled persuasion.

Listening to or reading such persuasive arguments is harder than it may seem because it takes effort to follow such reasoning. It is also hard because doing so opens us up to the possibility of finding out we are wrong. And we don’t like to hear reasons or information that disagrees with conclusions we’ve already come to.

Being open and willing to learn is difficult but necessary because if we won’t practice principled persuasion or allow ourselves to be persuaded, force is all we have left.

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Image credits: Dr. Robert Hutchins becomes Chancellor of University of Chicago, 1945. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/91481464/; Faces–Pixabay, Clipart-Vectors

The Story Behind Write Better

For decades I have loved, reread, recommended, and extolled William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. He is wise, practical, enjoyable to read, and absolutely on target for new and experienced writers.

While I have been dispensing writing advice for decades (to authors, in lectures, in writing), when I thought about doing a book on writing myself, I was met with two thoughts—neither encouraging. First, how could I possibly say anything better than Zinsser when he says so much so well? Second, what would I possibly put in a book that Zinsser doesn’t already cover? Was anything left to say?

Most other books on writing fell into one of two categories. Either they were memoirs of famous writers with a few writing tips sprinkled here and there, or they were detailed guides to punctuation, grammar, word usage and so forth. While both sorts of books can be helpful, what I appreciated about Zinsser was his middle path of providing principles. His advice was concrete enough to put into practice but general enough to be broadly applicable. That’s the kind of book I also wanted to write—if I could.

I began by making a list of possible topics. Soon I saw they fell roughly into the three categories of craft, art, and spirituality. Half of Zinsser deals with craft but he says almost nothing about the other two. What he writes in that first part about simplicity, clutter, words, and usage is unsurpassed. So I focused on topics he doesn’t cover such as structure, persuasion, narrative in nonfiction, titles, and more. While he also addresses openings, endings, and audience, I took a different but complementary approach.

The last two-thirds of what would become Write Better would clearly be distinct. My five chapters on art consider the nature and practice of creativity, the value of breaking the rules of writing, the significance of tone, the glories of metaphor, and how saying less leaves room for art.

Zinsser had a Protestant upbringing and actually edited a book called Spiritual Quests. But he wrote little on the topic. In his final edition of On Writing Well, he considers the attitudes authors have toward their work—regarding voice, enjoyment, fear, and so forth. I consider some of these topics and many others in my final part on spirituality and writing, but within an explicitly Christian framework.

Something else I could offer that many writing books don’t include is a window into the mysterious world of publishing. Several appendices pull back the veil a bit on this realm of intense interest to writers.

I still recommend Zinsser. My aim is for Write Better to join him in the underpopulated category of principle-based books on writing.

Writing Tip #17: The Big Reveal

How do you keep readers reading? How do you pull them through a chapter or article or blog without them getting bored or distracted?

Fiction writers aren’t the only ones who can use a mystery to keep readers engaged. Nonfiction writers can also withhold a key piece of information—the whodunnit! It’s what I call the Big Reveal in Write Better. How does it work?

Adam Grant uses the technique effectively in his book Originals. At the beginning of chapter two Grant tells of “an invention [that] took Silicon Valley by storm.” Steve Jobs offered $63 million for 10 percent of the company and the inventor turned it down. But Jobs was so enamored “he offered to advise the inventor for the next six months—for free.”

Legendary investor John Doerr pumped in $80 million, thought it would be the fastest company to reach $1 billion, and “would become more important than the internet.”

“The inventor himself was described as a modern Thomas Edison—he already had a track record of remarkable breakthroughs” which Grant details. The inventor thought he’d soon be selling 10,000 units a week but six years after launch they had only sold 30,000 total.

The product? The Segway, one of the most hyped tech devices in decades with the most disappointing results.

Grant immediately tells us another tale in the same vein. Two entertainers with no TV writing experience struggle to put together a half-hour sitcom pilot. The test audience in Los Angeles gave it bland to bad marks. Somehow, though, the pilot was aired—to yawns. But a passionate exec ordered a few more episodes against the wisdom of others despite the fact that one of the writers said he’d run out of ideas and was ready to quit. Over the next decade, it became the most popular show in America.

“If you’ve ever complained about a close talker, accused a partygoer of double-dipping a chip, uttered the disclaimer ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that,’ or rejected someone by saying ‘No soup for you,’ you’re using phrases coined” on Seinfeld.

Grant hooks us by putting two mysteries in front of us which we actively try to solve ourselves before the author reveals the answers. But he doesn’t stop there.

The author then asks, How can our predictions about innovations go so wrong—sometimes predicting a hit that becomes a flop, and other times forecasting a bomb that becomes a sensation? He outlines what’s ahead—again without giving away the solution. We’ll discover “best practices in idea selection . . . how to make fewer bad bets . . . meet two venture capitalists who anticipated the failure of the Segway . . . see why it’s so difficult for managers and test audiences to accurately evaluate new ideas,” and more.

If we want to find out about all these interesting results, we’ll have to read on. I did.

photo: Pixabay talliev