Time to Write

The 13 Secrets of Article Writing

OK, I lied. I'm only going to tell you one secret of article writing: it's that magazines have gone number crazy. Check the newstands and you'll see that magazines in almost every category feature articles that include numbers. Here's an example from a magazine I picked up today, Men's Health Best Life:

* Stay Young, Retire Rich - 5 Best New Investments
* 9 Smart New Brain Boosters
* The Sexually Satisfied Wife - 3 Must-Have Moves
* Be a (Much) Better Man - 55 Rules for Living the Best Life
* 19 Essential Guy Skills Every Man Must Now
* 45 New Ideas that Will Change Your Life Forever!
* 8 Secrets of Super-Successful Fatherhood

Now, as a reader, I'm getting tired of the hype (it's very seldom that the content matches the cover promises), but as someone who sometimes writes article as well as fiction, this phenomenon tells me that right now if I want to sell an article, I'd be smart to come up with some numbers. You might want to consider doing the same, it might make you ten times as successful (maybe even 33 times...).

The Wonder of Writing (and Reading)

I'm in Palm Springs at the moment, and the temperature outside is over 100 degrees F. Ironically, what I've been writing is a TV movie about an avalanche. I kept the air conditioning turned to "high" to get into the mood. To me, the true wonder of writing, but also of reading, is how easily it allows us to slip into other worlds.

In an essay in which she recalls her education in a one-room schoolhouse, Joyce Carol Oates writes, "Franz Kafka has famously said that a book is an ax for the frozen sea within. How more accurate to see any artwork as a portal of a kind through which we step, like Alice through the looking glass, into worlds not our own and unimaginable by us, conjoining ourselves with persons not known to us. In the cramped, finite space of the one-room schoolhouse what an infinite space was evoked: Each book, its cover opened, led miraculously inward and downward, tunneling away from the mere surface of things." *

Being able to take those journeys is a blessing, and sometimes I wonder whether kids growing up today with less time for reading are going to miss out on it. The internet is an infinite space too, and one for which I'm grateful (not least because it conjoins me with you reading these words) but at least for me it'll never take the place of the fresh joy of turning the first page of a book...or writing the first page of one.

(*The essay appears in "The Writing Life," edited by Marie Arana, published by PublicAffairs, 2003; by the way, I've just added a new "reviews" page on my website, www.timetowrite.com, on which I review writing-related books.)

4 Rules for Writers

In a collection of essays called "The Writing Life," Francine du Plessix Gray offers four guidelines for powerful writing:

* Keep your sentences erotic
* Strive for muscle
* Create a pact of trust
* Rebel against the tyranny of genre

Points one and two are a rebuff to the kind of flabby writing that we enounter all too often, full of cliches, repeating what others have written rather than striving to express genuine experience in individual ways that excite the senses.

The third point is about quickly capturing the attention of the reader and then being worthy of it.

And the final point is about daring to go past the conventions of the genre within which you are writing.

I've jotted these four on a Post-It note to keep near my computer; I think they make a great checklist for all the writing I'm doing.

I'll share some more tidbits from this book with you as time goes on. You might also enjoy looking at my website, www.timetowrite.com for more writing tips and insights.

It's the CHARACTERS, Stupid!

I saw the "Poseidon" remake yesterday and it was a disaster film all right. Somebody somewhere along the line forgot that that it helps if we care about the characters.

Here we have people who look and act like they stepped right out of the 70's-- Kurt Russell as an overly protective father who objects to his daughter (who looks to be 25...) sitting and talking to her boyfriend alone, and Kevin Dillon playing a bizarre character called Lucky Larry, who is like a parody of a 70's male chauvenist (notice the ruffled shirt). Naturally he tells everybody how lucky he is just as he steps onto a precarious catwalk--no prizes for guessing what happens next.

There is also a complete absence of conflict. Just one peril after another to be overcome, like the levels of a video game. Therefore, there's no emotional involvement.

There are lots of indications that scenes that were about characters may have been cut, so I'm not sure we should blame the writer. So often, a bad picture doesn't start out being nearly as bad a script. But it's astonishing that nobody noticed that the final product is dull, dull, dull except for the glug glug glug.

Who Said Writing Is Fun?

Writer Gay Talese has an interesting little essay on the Borders.com web site. The title is, "Writing Well Hurts." Here's part of it:

"Writers are enslaved to their work. The reader should enjoy the act of reading a book—for the reader, it should be like eating a box of chocolates; for the writer, the act of writing should be a suffering experience, all consuming and dedicated to doing the very best work they're capable of doing, and to achieve this "best" level is not, I repeat, akin to having fun. I never heard Michael Jordan saying, "I'm having fun." Jordan was an artist. I do not think that writers should necessarily enjoy the act of writing. It is okay to enjoy the completed work, the finished book; but when you're actually producing a book, writing each page, day after day, year after year, I believe it should be torture. I think that bleeding over each page is normal, or should be considered normal."

I found this particularly interesting because recently when I offered Writer's Digest Press a manuscript about writing, they said that it made writing seem like hard work...and they were after titles that made it seem like fun...I don't totally agree with Talese but if you're writing and you're not finding it "fun"--nothing's wrong, you're doing fine.

A New Market for Writers?

I see that two London teachers have come up with Britain's first podcast revision course (for my American readers, revision here means studying for exams). The Evening Standard writes that the teachers had the idea when they noticed how many of their students have iPods or other MP3 players. They wrote the material, drafted friends to speak it, and recorded and edited it themselves.

Now they are selling it to schools in the form of a teacher's CD and 20 CDs for students, or students can buy the course themselves. At the moment the only topic they have available is business studies, but they are planning to add other subjects.

Clever thinking--and maybe a whole new market for us writers. What do you think?

The Perservering Writer

There was an interesting feature in the Sunday Times magazine this past weekend, about novelist Lionel Shriver, whose book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the Orange Prize. It was originally rejected by 30 publishers, and she and her agent split over it. But she kept on trying and eventually it was picked up by Serpant's Tail--and it has sold more than 200,000 copies.

"The royalties keep collecting like lint," the article quotes her as saying. She added, "I did have a rather satisfying encounter with the head of Weidenfeld recently. I ran into him at a coat check and he said, 'Mea culpa--I guess I made a big mistake.' The article says she believes publishers are way behind the curve on what readers want, routinely underestimating the desire for complexity, subtlety and moral ambiguity.

Another good model for hanging in there--which is what I hope you're doing, too.

Are You Making These Mistakes?

According to the folks at the Oxford English Corpus (a database of a billion words), there are some terms that are now misspelled more often than spelled correctly. Here are a few--see whether you're one of the guilty ones!

strait-laced (not straight-laced)
just deserts (not just desserts)
free rein (not free reign)
sleight of hand (not slight of hand)
fount of knowledge (not font)
fazed by (not phased by)
vocal cords (not vocal chords)
a shoo-in (not a shoe-in)
any more (not anymore)
some day (not someday)
under way (not underway)

I confess I've made a couple of these mistakes myself (somehow chords seems to go with vocal, doesn't it...).

Writing & Pitching

We had a great workshop yesterday on pitching ideas for movies, books, and TV shows, with 40 participants. It was enjoyable to see people who were petrified at the start of the day gain confidence and begin to let their personalities emerge as they presented their ideas.

One of the misconceptions that people often have about pitching is that you have to put on some kind of song-and-dance-man persona. The opposite is true--you just have to be yourself, and to overcome your shyness or nervousness in order to let your self shine through.

One of the best ways to be less nervous is simply to know that you have prepared adequately--you know your idea well and you have some notes (maybe in the form of a mind map, or on index cards) to fall back on in case you forget.

The other thing to remember is to maintain good eye contact with the person to whom you are pitching, and to gently match their body language.

Of course there are many more things that can help, and I'm going to put together an ebook on this at some stage, but even just these few points above can put you on the road to making your idea sound as good as I'm sure it is.

Writer's Block? Hang in There

Ben McIntyre's column in The Times (London) recently mentioned that Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code, in case you've been on Mars for the last year or two) has a particular strategy for getting inspiration when he's stuck: hanging upside down using a pair of 'gravity boots.' You strap yourself into these babies and then hang like a bat (the boots hook over a bar at the top).

I tried this once, many years ago. The only thing I felt was that my eyeballs were about to pop out and shoot across the room. Hmm, maybe if I'd stayed upside down a little longer I would have written The DaVinci Code and be very very very rich...

McIntyre suggests that writer's block is a relatively new invention, but then so is the idea of writing as a profession. I find that brainstorming is a good solution when i feel stuck. For some stimulating creativity ideas, have a look at my other website : www.BrainstormNet.com. If that doesn't work, I guess you could try gravity boots. But keep your eyes shut.