Tag Archives: writing

A Quick Writing Course from John McPhee

I used to teach a class in creative nonfiction (a descendent of the “New Journalism” of the 1960s-1970s). If there is an American master of creative nonfiction, it would be John McPhee.

I could have just taken this long interview with McPhee from The Paris Review, chopped it into bits, and had most of a semester’s worth of lecture notes. It’s that good.

A few excerpts—here is McPhee on choosing what or whom to write about:

I certainly don’t go around looking for loners, but I guess I am interested in people who are expert at something, because they’re going to lead me into some field, teach it to me, and then in turn I’m going to tell others about it. The ideal situation is to be watching somebody do their thing, and they don’t give a damn about you because they’re so absorbed. They’re confident about what they’re doing, and they’re not at all consumed with self-consciousness.

I used to tell all my students, particularly those just starting out, to read their stuff aloud. (It’s amazing how many students cannot read aloud comfortably.) McPhee does it:

Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit.

I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.

And here is an excerpt from a section of the interview where he talks about how creative nonfiction pieces develop their own structure—and how that structure can be manipulated.

But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you’re really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for a climax. That’s what’s exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case it’s a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past.

Read the whole interview here.

Trapped on Block Island

"Block Island" -- portion of a cartoon from the June 27, 1994 New Yorker magazine

Randy Cassingham makes the argument: “There is no such thing as writer’s block” and invokes the “10,000 hour rule.”

I used to tell students, “The first million words are just for practice.” But you can count blog posts on your way to the million.

Cassingham’s version of a traditional exercise:

But one day he told me he was “blocked” and hadn’t written anything for weeks. I went over to his house and said, “Want me to fix that for you?” He didn’t know what I was up to, but he definitely wanted help, so I gave him this assignment: sit his ass in front of his computer and start writing — right now! I told him that I would come back in half an hour. Here’s the key to my method: I said if he could think of nothing else to write, he was to type “I have nothing I want to say” over and over and over again, until he had something better than that to write.

 

Zing that Taupe Floozy

And twenty-three other words first recorded in English in 1911.

Lexi-blogger Dave Wilton has started an ongoing series of new words of the year on his blog Wordorigins.org, which I will be adding to the blogroll here.

I tried to select twenty-six words, one for each letter of the alphabet. But in some cases I’ve got more than one for a particular letter, in others none. My selection is not scientific or systematic; it is based on what I think is interesting; Sometimes they are words that appear earlier or later than I would have thought; others have a particular historical affiliation for that year or represent some historical trend; and others are just odd words. I’m avoiding back-formations and variations on existing words. Again, be warned that the coining of a word does not necessarily coincide with the invention of a concept. Often, there will be older words that express the same sense.

V.S. Naipaul’s Rules for Writers

V.S. Naipaul’s rules for writers—some of them are very apt for the Web—start with “1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.”

I made Naipaul’s acquaintance, in the literary sense, as a fifth-former at déCarteret College in Mandeville, Jamaica, which I briefly attended.

Mr. Stanley, the English master, handed me a copy of The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America with a comment to the effect of “Read this and learn about where you are.” [more than 12 words there!]

I did to the best of my 16-year-old ability, but the book fixed an idea in my head of Naipaul only as a writer of nonfiction works, which does not do him justice. [I can break the rule if I keep the paragraph short.]

Do Not Follow This Link …

… if you are not a style-conscious writer, editor, or otherwise a word-nerd.

Otherwise, move on; there is nothing to see here.

Walt Whitman and His Sock Puppet

I have been collecting links on writing and plan to toss them out piecemeal over the next week.

Here is a New York Times piece on literary self-promotion from times past:

The most revered of French novelists recognized the need for P.R. “For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed,” Balzac observed in “Lost Illusions,” his classic novel about literary life in early 19th-century Paris. As another master, Stendhal, remarked in his autobiography “Memoirs of an Egotist,” “Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.” Those words should be on the Authors Guild coat of arms. . . .

American authors did try to keep up. Walt Whitman notoriously wrote his own anonymous reviews, which would not be out of place today on Amazon. “An American bard at last!” he raved in 1855. “Large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded.” But nobody could quite match the creativity of the Europeans.

Read it all—for ideas!

 

Clickety clickety clickety DING!

It’s the end of an era.

I still have two machines, one out of the old Colorado Springs Free Press building, for which I paid $5. And another that I hold onto for sentimental reasons, because I bought it with the money from the first short story that ever sold, at age 17. (I think it was the only short story that I ever sold, for that matter.)

UPDATE: Apparently I—and a lot of other people—were suckered. It was just the one factory in India that closed. Typewriters are still being made elsewhere.

The 4C’s: Still Lost in Theory-Land

When I started teaching college writing classes (here meaning mainly rhetoric and composition) in the early 1990s,  I attended the national Conference on College Composition and Communication at least three times at university (i.e. taxpayer) expense.

One of them produced an early Letter from Hardscrabble Creek piece back when it was a column appearing in print: “A Pilgrimage to the Parthenon.” I was learning how to pursue my own agenda.

I did that because the “4C’s” conferences themselves increasingly bored me. They were full of grad-student-ese (“foregrounding the hegemony”) and the usual citations of Foucault, Bakhtin, and Paulo Freire.

I heard papers written in perfect, grammatical English about how students did not need grammar, etc. Were the authors part of a conspiracy to keep practical language skills down so that people like themselves could succeed? Or where they so far under the spell of Freire, etc.., that they neither practiced effective rhetoric themselves nor taught it to their students?

Attending the 4C’s, I learned a lot about university writing-teacher culture but much less about teaching writing to my students.

Apparently the 4C’s conferences are still the same, only more so, according to Mary Grabar, whose piece “Writing Teachers: Still Crazy After All These Years” is a reaction to her spending “four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta.”

She quotes a presenter  who is all too typical in my experience:

“We are bigger than comp/rhetoric. . . . We do language,” she declared to nods of agreement.  Because we do “critical analysis,” we occupy the most important position in the academy.  But her own comments and repeated references by others to Marxist theorist Paulo Freire, “post-capitalism,” and “Marxian” readings, betrayed her call for neutrality when teachers engage in classroom discussions of  “what is good for society.”  In bypassing the traditional modes of argument, teachers deny students the very tools necessary to make and  [any?] “critical analysis” of their teachers’ political objectives.

It is true that a  lot of university writing teachers want to teach “critical analysis,” and true that they often have politically desirable outcomes in mind. I saw that happen frequently. Not all are that way: the honest ones can appreciate (and fairly grade) an argument that runs counter to their own personal positions.

The second group, however, is  not that much represented at the 4Cs.

One problem is that the issues faced in the first and second-year composition classes don’t make for exciting conference papers. How does the student learn to paraphrase without plagiarizing? How does the student learn to intellectually evaluate difference sources? What sentence structure best reinforces a desired rhetorical effect?

But at the 4Cs, these bright, verbal products (increasingly) of graduate-level comp-rhet programs can set aside their huge stacks of papers to be graded and instead delight in deconstructing Facebook’s “colonized vision” or whatever, well-mixed with political group-think. Think of it as the scribal class at play.

Blogging: Why Build Somone Else’s Brand?

There is some political name-calling in his post, but Stacy McCain does make one valid point about blogging.

If you are going to work for free, why build someone else’s reputation rather than your own?

I know two people who were writing for The Huffington Post—the site that owner Arianna Huffington has now sold for millions of dollars. As the man said, they got played, she got paid.

Now some of them are suing. But as they have no contracts promising payment, what are their chances?

Another colleague at the university started blogging at Daily Kos. So big deal, you have a “diary” buried deep in the site. You are building Markos Moulitsas’ reputation, not your own. Your “diary” exists only at his whim—regardless of what the site says about “community.”

Yes, I did have a blog at BeliefNet at one time—it was the feed from this one—but they purged it for, apparently, religious incorrectness. I would not go back, nor to the rival religion portal, Patheos.

If you are a blogger—in love with the sound of your own typing—independence is the main fringe benefit.

UPDATE: Law-blogger Eugene Volokh says (tongue in cheek) that we are all exploiting commenters.

UPDATE 2: Is the Huffington business model really piracy?

Spamming and Swindling with E-Books

Spammers and plagiarists target e-books (Kindle, etc.)

Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Impact Media blog.

Amazon does not care.

Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have “written” thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.

More information at Making Light.

Bad writers, yes. One man’s trash is another man’s pit of voles. But one of the advantages of e-book/Kindle store/et al that we keep hearing from the e-book enthusiasts is that it bypasses the gatekeepers.

“Stolen content and scammers” is another area, and there isn’t any pressure on Amazon to stop ‘em, since they get their cut regardless. Adding acquiring editors would add time and expense, and keep the struggling geniuses whose works no one understand from ever getting published at all.

Ain’t it wonderful? This is what happens when you “bypass the gatekeepers” (all those grumpy editors).