Time to Write

Writing in the Land of the Free

A high school student who wrote an essay describing violent and sexual events was arrested for "disorderly conduct" in the Chicago area last week. The student, Allen Lee, who had recently signed enlistment papers was also told that his application to the Marine Corps had been revoked.

The eighteen-year-old had been told to write whatever he wanted in a creative writing class. It was a 'free writing' exercise in which the instructions included: "write whatever comes into your mind...do not judge or censor what you are writing...don't cross anything out."

Police searched his room at his parents' house and confiscated his computer. The school authorities removed him from the general student population and placed him in a separate building to continue his education. He said he was told he might be expelled.

I've read some excerpts from his essay and they contain disturbing images which suggest he might benefit from counselling and that it would be justified for the police to interview him to make sure that he had no intention of carrying out the violent acts described--but arrest him and charge him with two counts of disorderly conduct? Ruin his potential career in the Marines?

If freedom of speech doesn't apply in a writing class when you are instructed to 'write whatever comes into your mind and do not judge or censor what you are writing' where does it apply?

Your Writing Sense of Wonder

On his Global Moxie blog, Josh Clark writes about “magic boxes, canned chaos, and creative totems,” pointing out that “the process of creation depends on flashes of inspiration, moments where you manage to leap out of your usual groove and see things from a new perspective.”

I think a sense of mystery is something that comes naturally to kids but we lose it as we get older, and sometimes we need some kind of prompt to help us get it back. Clark mentions the “826” non-profit writing labs that author Dave Eggers has set up to teach kids how to write. They are located behind  whimsical storefronts—for example, one is the “Brooklyn Superhero Supply” store, where the stock includes capes, masks, and cans of “Chaos” spray. Another one is a “Pirate Supply Store.” The kids go through a secret passage to get to the writing lab. What a great idea! (see a movie about the 826 labs here). Regardless of your age, wouldn't it be cool to go through some kind of secret passage to get to where you do your writing?

If you find your sense of wonder flagging, go out and find something that can act as a creative totem for you, maybe something that reminds you of the sense of wonder you used to have as a kid. Some of mine include a bust of Frankenstein, some tiny Tim Burton figurines, and an unusual old pen. What works for you?

More Book Reviews

A while back I wrote a post about the shrinking and disappearing book sections of newspapers, so it's great to hear that the Financial Times (London) is actually expanding theirs. As well as more reviews and news, there will be essays on topics like the design of book covers, interviews with authors, etc. If you click on the link, you'll see the current articles. The expansion is part of a general re-design that's intended to make the paper sharper, fresher, and with an appeal beyond just financial news.

It's not a paper I normally read, but I'm going to make a point of picking it up on Fridays...such behaviour should be rewarded!

Book Topics: Too Strange?

OK, you're sitting there with an idea for a non-fiction book, but you're wondering...would anybody really buy a book on this topic, or is it just too weird to interest a publisher or readers?

As Rod Serling might have said on the original "Twilight Zone" when I was a kid: "Exhibit A. For your consideration, a book that exists not in a parallel universe, but in our very own backyard...."

It's called "Milk, Eggs, Vodka."

Here's the blurb: "Milk, Eggs, Vodka features over 150 found grocery lists--funny lists, sad lists, unhealthy lists, organized lists, party lists--everything from the mundane to the marginally insane. This voyeuristic look at the private lives of our fellow shoppers is a find."

No, it's not self-published. And you know what? I'd probably read it.

(PS: Just to let you know that --fingers crossed-- our server problems are over and the www.yourwritingcoach.com site is back up.)

When Creating a Brand Goes Too Far

In Advertising Age, Simon Dumenco wrote an article titled, “News Flash: Anything this Graphic Should Never Have a Logo,” about the way the TV coverage of the massacre at Virginia Tech used graphics that queasily resembled the branding of an entertainment event:

“During "Anderson Cooper 360" on Tuesday night, for instance, CNN's animated MASSACRE AT VIRGINIA TECH logo throbbed and twirled with all the subtlety of an "American Idol" bumper. MASSACRE was in a stark typewriter font (a transparent attempt, of course, at evoking the gravitas of gritty old-school journalism) in white against a blood-red background, with AT VIRGINIA TECH in black typewriter type just below it. A gaudy, twitchy animation effect caused the MASSACRE type to briefly explode outside of its red box, as did the AT VIRGINA TECH type a moment later. It took me a couple of rewind passes on my DVR to realize that the grainy gray background behind the twitching type showed a gun sight's crosshairs floating in slow motion across the screen.”

Another example: “ABC, in a minimalist mood, tagged its on-site reporting for "Good Morning America" with the words BLACKSBURG, VIRGINIA, and, in the lower left-hand corner, appallingly, a stand-alone graphic of a gun sight's crosshairs in white against a blood-red background.”

I’m teaching a branding mini-workshop in a couple of weeks, and I think writers and others need to establish a brand and back it up with relevant symbols, but it’s not hard to go too far—and in this case, as Dumenco points out, TV overstepped the mark.

(By the way, this article came to my attention via the newsletter of Bo Sacks, a publishing futurist whose website is www.bosacks.com.)

The Master of Big Ideas

One of my heroes in the pantheon of people who have big ideas is ad legend George Lois. Some years ago I flew to New York just to do an interview with him. To the left you see one of his (in)famous covers for Esquire magazine (in case it's too small for you to make it out, it shows Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's tomato soup).

I've just discovered a site that has videos of a long lecture he gave at The School of Visual Arts. He's well into his 70's now (although if you look at his own site, www.georgelois.com you'll see that he prefers to feature pictures of himself as a younger man...), and he rambles a bit, but it's great to see and hear his passion and his devotion to Big Ideas. The site with the videos of his talk is here. (If you're a fan of graphic design, you'll also be interested in the talk by Milton Glaser you'll find there.)

ps: if you've been trying to access my www.yourwritingcoach.com site and not been able to do it, we've had massive problems with the server. We are in the process of moving it to a different server so the problem should be solved very soon.

Writer's Block and Rituals

Some writing related rituals are harmless, just a signal to ourselves that it's time to get creative. However, they can turn into compulsions, as mentioned in a post in Mitch Wagner's "the Information Week" blog post about his friend, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow (left):

"Prior to his 250-words-a-day-routine, Cory said, he was blocked for many years. He was a ritualistic writer. He had to be smoking while he wrote, had to play (and win) a certain computer game (I think it was Minesweeper) before he got started. He said he saw a hypnotherapist who made him see that all this nonsense was in his head. He could write anywhere. Moreoever, the only difference between a good day writing, when things came easy, and a bad day, was in his head. Going back and re-reading he couldn't tell which passages came easily to him and which were difficult.

The hypnotherapist also helped him quit smoking, he said. That was important because, by tying together smoking and writing, he was coupling together one of the things that gave him most joy in the world with something that was killing him.

Writing every day, he said, creates a smooth communication channel to your unconscious, where all the real writing gets done (he didn't use the word "unconscious.") For example, he said, he described how he worked on a novel for several years, only to have to put it aside for a long time because he couldn't think of an ending. One day, he thought of one, wrote it up, and then set out with a heavy heart to do the unpleasant task of rewriting the novel so that the ending would make sense and was properly foreshadowed. But when he re-read the novel, he found that no revision was necessary -- the ending was already foreshadowed; he'd been leading up to that ending all along, without being aware of it."

To me, these two things are great illustrations of the fact that our subconscious mind can work for us and against us. It provides us with great ideas, works while we sleep or are thinking of other things, and gives us great joy. Sometimes, though, it can also trap us in negativity or repetitive thoughts and behaviours. Some people are afraid that if they tamper with the negative stuff (for example, through counseling) it may drive away the good stuff, too, but that's wrong.

Overcoming Writing Blocks

On her Write Ideas Marketing Blog, marketing coach Andrea Morris has an interesting idea for how to overcome blocking your more extreme and interesting ideas:

"I’ve discovered a secret during my career as a copywriter and marketing coach. Toning ideas down is a heck of a lot easier than jazzing them up.

My first few projects started from a logical point of view. I wrote and edited at the same time as most people do. The words were acceptable, but they lacked that certain je-ne-sais-quoi. It needed some sparkle - but adding sparkle to swill isn’t easy.

One day I decided to give my thinking a makeover. I set a goal to find all the outrageous ideas lurking in the far corners of my brain and get them out of my head and onto my computer screen.

I decorated a piece of card stock with silly symbols and the words “JUST THINK” and covered my computer screen. Somehow the paper removed the tiny editor that sat somewhere in my head trashing ideas before they even got to the screen. Since I couldn’t see my work, all my crazy ideas (not just the logical ones) made the journey from my brain, through my fingers and onto the computer.

The result? I discovered many of the ideas that normally wouldn’t have made the cut were more effective than the so-called logical ideas. With a little tweaking and toning down I had writing that worked. The process also saved me time and was fun to boot."

I also have a strategy you might want to try: on one or two sheets of paper, write the numbers one through fifty down the left hand side. Set a kitchen timer for five minutes. Then, in that five minutes, write down as many ideas as possible (your goal is 50) about whatever you want to write. The time pressure tends to shut down or distract the inner critic. Later you can go over the ideas and pick out the best ones.

For UK Writers

First a quick mention for my London-based readers: on Sunday (22nd April) I will be teaching an afternoon "Right-Brain Writing" workshop at Ealing Studios, from 2-5pm and the price is an amazing £12--amazing because that includes a copy of my new "Your Writing Coach" book, which sells for £9.99! For last-minute signup, enter the Living Spirit Media Group website and click on "April Seminar." I guarantee you an enjoyable afternoon full of useful innovative writing techniques (they work for writers of scripts and all kinds of fiction).

And for people living in the UK, the BBC has put out a call for applications to its Writers' Academy, which is opening to budding screenwriters for a third year.

Potential writers must already have had at least one film, television or radio drama script produced, or one theatre piece performed professionally, or be graduates of Skillset-approved screenwriting courses.

The Academy will start with a 3 month training course in writing for Continuing Drama Series, consisting of a number of workshops and lectures accompanied by intensive writing exercises and analysis. During this period, each writer will be commissioned to write a broadcast episode of Doctors.

After the initial training and the Doctors script, your work will be assessed. If you have reached the required standard for production on Continuing Drama Series you will begin the next phase of the training, writing a broadcast episode of Casualty, Holby and Eastenders in turn, spending approximately 12 weeks on each show.

The writers will be engaged by the BBC for 12 months on a non-exclusive basis, although the course will be a full time commitment.

A retainer of £400 a week will be paid during the 3 month initial training course.

Thereafter writers will be paid script fees for commissioned scripts on each of the four shows.

The application deadline is May 14. To apply, visit the BBC jobs website.

McKee Takes the Stand

If you're interested in what happens behind the scenes in the movie business, you may want to follow the current juicy court case between novelist Clive Cussler and Crusader Entertainment. The gist of it is that the sides are suing each other over the flop feature film, "Sahara." Cussler claims that the company promised him approval of all elements of the film and then cut him out of the process, while Crusader claims he was a control freak who overstated the size of his fan base and then bad-mouthed the finished picture and thereby hurt its takings.

All kind of fun facts are coming out, including that there were 10 writers on the project, for a total writing budget of over $3 million. Apparently none of them delivered a script Cussler liked, so he decided to try writing the script himself. Now screenwriting guru Robert McKee has testified on behalf of Crusader, about Cussler's script. Part of what he said:

“The writing is very bad. How bad? I have thought of phrases like ’seriously flawed’ [or] ‘fatally flawed.’ But it is beyond all of that, because when something is flawed there is an implication that something else about it is good… On average, there is something unbelievable happening every two minutes.”

Something unbelievable happening every two minutes? Sounds like a hit to me...

I haven't provided a link because the story is updating every day--if you Google "Cussler Saraha Lawsuit" you should find the latest. It's much more entertaining than the film.

Do You Have Problems With Deadlines?

The (London) Times has a long article about dealing with always being late, referencing the book "Never Be Late Again: 7 Cures for the Punctually Challenged" by Diana DeLonzer. Now, it's possible that you are late for most things, but never have trouble meeting writing deadlines...but it's not likely. DeLonzer writers, "It's something that tends to go across activities; most late people are late for everything."

Apparently people who are habitually late also tend to be messy, anxious, easily-distracted, perfectionist, and with low levels of self-control or a tendency toward thrill-seeking. Is any of this sounding familiar?

The bit I found most interesting is that people who are late genuinely have a problem estimating how long things take; in research studies, when the habitually early were asked to read for 90 seconds, they tended to stop before the time was up, whereas the habitually late kept reading, sometimes for minutes. They also tend to have a strong aversion to waiting and to indulge in "magical thinking"--that is, assuming that when they travel, all the roads will be clear, there won't be any problems, etc.

Here are some solutions, as they apply to writing deadlines: Promise yourself something enjoyable to do if you finish early that you will deny yourself if you finish late; break the task down into chunks, with mini-deadlines all along the way, so you can tell whether or not your're on track; and automatically build in an extra 25% time for each part of the task for unexpected developments.

Kurt Vonnegut on Writing

The Independent has reprinted an interview with Kurt Vonnegut that appeared in the Paris Review in 1977 (which was actually patched together by Vonnegut himself from a series of interviews conducted over the course of a decade). He mentioned that his sister was the person he wrote for:

"...every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. That's the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind. I didn't realise that she was the person I wrote for until after she died."

The interview also touched on his time as a PR and advertising man, and asked whether he felt this was wasting or crippling his talent. His pragmatic response:

"No. That's romance - that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time."

Still true, maybe more so, 30 years later!

How Michael Ondaatji Writes Novels

There's an interesting interview with novelist Michael Ondaatje ("The English Patient") in an article in the Toronto Globe and Mail. His way of working is very different from some of the others I've mentioned on this blog. He's said he begins a book with a single image. For "The English Patient" it was a plane crash. The interviewer asked what it was for his newest novel, "Divisadero." His reply:

"We were in California, I was teaching a semester at Stanford. A friend who has a farm said I could work there. I heard a story about a wild horse that attacked someone in a barn. I wrote that scene very quickly, with no plan of knowing where the book was going to go."

The interviewer noted that writing this way this is a major leap of faith. Ondaatji replied:

"It is scary. There are writers who plan everything beforehand and know what the last sentence is going to be. I'm so envious of them [laughs]. Even five days before the end, I'm not quite sure if this thing is going to click together. It's why one has to do this in the privacy of one's own home. The story begins very small and I see what's there. I was interested in the idea of a family that splinters — people who grow up in a very tight universe, and then something happens and they go out over the whole world. You grow up with people till the age of 15 or 20, and then you go off and live such different lives. How are you connected any more? So that allowed me a very open form. Then I crawl down that road."

Not surprisingly, this method of working requires a lot of rewriting and takes several years.

Celebrity Writers (and a little surprise)

I see that now former Spice Girl Gerri Halliwell is following in the footsteps of Madonna, Fergie, and a lot of other celebrities and is "writing" a series of children's books. She got a six-book deal with Macmillan "to chronicle the animated adventures of Ugenia Lavender, a bold and assertive 9-year-old girl who balances everyday school life with solving mysteries and working her way out of fantastic situations."

The first title will be "Ugenia and the Mystery of the Ghost Writer." No, wait, that's only a rumor...

By the way, acccording to CBS, Halliwell said writing books has been a perfect fit for her lifestyle now that she's a mother. "I'm up in my office, so I can still be with my child, which is really important for me." Bless.

Personally, I think five of us writers should announce that we're re-forming The Spice Girls...

Anyway, for better or worse, it does point out the importance of marketing in the publishing scene, and the fact that non-celeb writers need to know how to market themselves well, which brings me to the little surprise for the first alert blog reader to email me at [email protected]: a free spot on my May 5 afternoon session in central London on powerful self-marketing for creative people. It's a £29 workshop, yours as my gift if you are the first to get in touch--just email me your your name and email address.

Writing: New Challenges/Options

Mark Brownstein had an interesting essay in Advertising Age, in which he talks about the challenges facing advertising today. Here in the UK, the amount of money spent on intenet-based ads just surpassed the amount spent on newspaper ads, and there's a lot of confusion and alarm about where this is all headed. As you'll see, Brownstein has a different slant on it:

"Folks, the new media that we live with today has forced us to go back to our roots and remind us of what business we are in: ideas. Any kind of idea. But certainly not one with a pre-destined media scrip attached to it. It has to be a free-form idea, applicable to anything, anywhere. Like a microsite. Or a guerilla effort. It's OK to recommend print, or direct mail, but it's made more relevant when it drives you somewhere, like the microsite, to seek more information about the brand."

He goes on: "A lot of people in the advertising business bemoan the state of the industry today. But I think it's incredibly exciting. And so do a lot of copywriters and art directors I talk with. Think about it: The discipline of coming up with a concept, without pre-destined media vehicles, is very liberating. I'd argue that it disciplines a creative team into having a laser focus on solving the marketing problem, without being encumbered by the "where" phase of the marketing plan. Better ideas are being birthed. Creatives are having more fun. Clients are getting better work. And, ultimately, advertising will continue to be relevant and effective for years to come."

Personally I'm not so concerned about advertising, but I think what he's saying can apply equally well to writing of all kinds. I'm thinking about how best to respond to all these changes in terms of my own career--hmm, is that anxiety I'm feeling, or excitement? Probably both!