Just, whatever you do, don’t get caught up reading every single thing that The Oatmeal has ever published. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Edit: The links appear to be down. Check back later. It’s worth the wait!

Bash ideas with a trash can lid if you have to!

This was probably because she made submitting to magazines sound deceptively easy. Cauley writes for all kinds of publications, including The Sunday Paper, an Atlanta alt weekly where I’ve noticed her byline before. She writes all types of pieces, too, from food criticism to human interest pieces to travel guides. Her seminar reminded me of the reason why I wanted to be my own boss in the first place – control over my own work.

Cauley is also a hustler. (In a good way. Not in a Paul Newman way, or a corner of Peachtree & 8th way.) Many freelance writers have the luxury of a spouse to foot half the bills and, hopefully, snag the health insurance, but Cauley made a career all on her own as a single mom. Go girl!

My big takeaway from Cauley’s seminar was to stay constantly on the lookout for ideas, and wrestle them down when they come along. For example, she once saw a sign pointing to a chapel here in Atlanta at Hartsfield Jackson Airport. Her curiosity about a chapel in an airport turned into a story about the airport’s full time chaplain. Who knew they even existed? Few people. Which is why it was a great story.

So, follow in H. M. Cauley’s footsteps. You probably see and hear dozens of story ideas every day. When one pops up, knock its legs out from under it and take it down!

Check out this article on Salon.com about class warfare in language and think about your intentions next time you slap someone upside the head for a dangling participle.

I wasted time and now time doth waste me. – Shakespeare

What are you up to today? Aside from reading this blog, I mean. Have you worked toward a goal? Written something that makes you remember why you love writing again? Kissed your boy or your girl on the mouth like you mean it?

Have you done anything today that you will look back on in five years and remember? Have you tinkered with a sentence until it rolls off your tongue like poetry? Have you bought somebody a cup of coffee? Given an old relative or a congressperson a call? Dared to eat a peach?

What are you going to do when you X out of this window? Don’t be like King Richard up there and let time waste you. Do something that counts today.

Well, my good friend, a husband, father and fire captain who pulled off the drooping walrus mustache look where so many others had failed, passed away at 3am this morning. Of course, the stereotypically sensitive writer might be expected to brood over this, write a poem about it, or even go on a whiskey bender. But you know what? We’re not all like that. We don’t all trickle absinthe over our best friend’s graves before propping on a headstone to write a long, tortured poem with a title like “O Ye Purple Creeping Death.”  And as for the writers that are a little nuts, they often – discounting notable exceptions like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan – did their best writing in periods of sobriety, clean living and relative happiness.

Photo courtesy of Aandre Banyai via Flickr

So I thought I would address today some of the stereotypes that we writers have to deal with – the long-suffering, head-in-the-clouds, suicidal alcoholic. My friend the gentleman firefighter – may he rest in peace – was the kind of man’s man who wouldn’t mind me using the event of his death to make an important point about a misunderstood profession.

Let’s first examine the evidence in favor of the argument that all writers are lunatics.

Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at the age of 39 in the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village. Distraught over her failing marriage, Sylvia Plath sealed all the doors and windows and stuck her head in her gas oven. Hemingway, true to himself until the end, took the functional and utilitarian way out with a Boss & Co. shotgun. More recently, David Foster Wallace hanged himself while attempting to write the Great American Novel on the subject of boredom. Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pocket with stones and kept walking until the water from the River Ouse closed over her head.

Can you really blame people for stereotyping writers? And those are just the deaths. Let’s move on to the drugs, alcohol and mental illness now.

Psychology professor Nancy J. Andreasen (who, interestingly, holds a Ph.D in English), conducted a 15 year study on 30 writers who came through the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop in an attempt to find a link between creativity and schizophrenia. She didn’t end up making that connection, but instead found that 30% of writers went on to become alcoholics as opposed to 7% of the control group of nonwriters. She also found that 80% of the writers – that’s 4 out of 5 – suffered from some kind of affective disorder such as bipolar. Out of the control group, only 30% suffered from affective disorders. Two out of the 30 writers committed suicide. Everybody in the nonwriter control group appears to have made it through the study without chasing a bottle of happy pills with a fifth of bourbon.

As for drugs, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s albatross was opium while William Burroughs was a heroin addict. Charles Baudelaire got low on hashish while Jack Kerouac got fast on Benzedrine. Aldous Huxley tripped the light fantastic with LSD. And we’ll just go ahead and round up and say that every famous writer ever was an alcoholic.

There was kinky sex, too, of course – I’m looking at you, Marquis de Sade – but that isn’t as well documented so I’m not going to go there. This time.

So yes, there may be some truth to the stereotype that writers have problems. But we’re not all like that. In fact, I would venture to say that the most functional of us – the ones that churn out a book every few years, keep up appearances on their author tours, refrain from blowing advances on scotch and midget hookers, and, it stands to reason, get more work – are sane, normal people. Healthy, even.

These are the working writers making a living from writing, not bull fighting like Hemingway, or piloting war planes like Roald Dahl or Antoine de Saint-Exupery. They’re sane, healthy, functional, and they live comfortably on their royalties. That sounds like a nice life.

So I suppose the question you need to ask yourself, while the clock is ticking, the drinks are pouring, and leukemia is taking good men, is what kind of writer do you want to be?

While you think about it, I’ll be down at the bar.

Thus, I’ve dubbed August 10 – 14, 2009 “International ‘It’s Hard Out Here for a Writer’ Week.”

Our first tale of woe comes from a colleague and grad school friend of mine. After submitting a short story to a fiction ezine, our colleague received this response:

“Some people might be offended by parts of this story, so you should be careful what you write in the future.”

I have to admit that, after the initial outrage subsided, I was titillated by this letter. What on earth could our colleague have written to elicit such a response? Surely it’s spicy or salacious if Grandma Editor felt the need to warn our colleague off the topic ever again, right? Wrong. Our colleague had submitted a short piece that dealt very mildly with the issue of race. Not only was the personalized rejection letter from the ezine dumb advice, it was bad advice and unprofessional advice all rolled up into a hateful little ball about the size and worth of the tar that gunked up Dorothy Parker’s cigarette holder.

Fiction can be offensive if it damn well wants to be offensive. People learn about different points of view from reading compelling, sometimes offensive, fiction. From watching the news lately it seems to me that we could use quite a bit more a.) informed discourse on race b.) respect for unfamiliar points of view.

Even though the piece did fit the posted publication guidelines, what the editor should have said, of course, was that the piece isn’t right for the publication and good luck. By advising our colleague that she could muzzle her natural writing voice in order to write within some sort of “rules of polite society” this editor basically let a good writer know that their publication wasn’t professional enough for a writer of her caliber. Which is an upside, really.

“Be careful what you write in the future”? Honestly.

I wish I now had a classic rejection letter to share, but  mine have generally been some variation on the old “regret that we can’t use it at the time” pleasantry. So instead I’ll share the absolute worst rejection letter ever received, and also ask for your contributions. Bring on the bad rejections! Let’s laugh about them and then take a moment of silence to imagine poking the editor in the eye with Dorothy Parker’s cigarette holder.

For more on this topic from the freelancing point of view:

The Seven Stages of Writer’s Grief or What to Expect When You Get Rejected

Today I’m going to talk about love words. Not as in “Baby, you so fine,” but as the words that we fall in love with and suddenly find ourselves using over and over again. I have had many of these over the years. Sometimes I catch them in time to avoid making myself look silly, but others times (especially in my early fiction), people have actually pointed them out to me. Thanks, people.

So what’s wrong with recycling the same word over and over? First, it’s visually boring. Use another word already! As a writer, your goal should be to move the piece along with every sentence. If your current sentence repeats a sentiment, thought or fact that you have previously declared, then that sentence is probably unnecessary.

Second, using the same word over and over again is tiring. If the reader has to stumble over “anthropomorphically” three times in the same paragraph, her brain is simply going to get tired. No matter how spectacular the rest of the piece is, you’ve lost her just a little and chances are she’ll put your story or article down sooner.

Ready for some examples of my love words?

Ubiquitous – This is my current love word. I’m not sure why I write about things that are ubiquitous so often. If they are that ubiquitous, the reader should probably know about them already. But there it is.

Manifest – For a long time, nothing in my world appeared or cropped up. No, it manifested. Even though I dropped my “manifest” habit long ago, now that I’m looking at that delectable word again, I’m feeling awfully tempted to use it. That’s why it’s a love word.

Unfortunately – This is the Jennifer-slayer. Throughout my entire life I have used this word like they just dropped it from the dictionary. Perhaps I write about a lot of sad topics? Of course, when I write about happy topics, there’s always unfortunately’s sister, “fortunately.” That “unfortunately” is one of my love words is especially sad because it’s usually unnecessary. The contents of a sentence beginning with “unfortunately” usually speak for themselves. (I.e. “Unfortunately, Frank’s whole family had been slaughtered by lizardmen.”)

Before I conclude, I do want to mention that sometimes frequent usage of a word isn’t a bad thing at all. In some instances, especially in poetry, repetition can create a cadence. Other times favored words become part of a writer’s unique style. For example, my favorite poet, T.S. Eliot loves the word “linger.” I don’t get irritated every time something in one of his poems lingers. Instead, I feel comfortable knowing that I’m enjoying his unique style.

So how about you guys? Do you have any love words? Let’s hear them in the comments.

Now, at first I looked at this quirk as a productivity killer. If I wait for an interval to write the last paragraph, I end up opening each file three or more times (because proofreading and editing is a whole other can of worms) and getting into the writing mindset for even the shortest pieces at least twice. Plus, knowing that I have this quirk, I have to schedule extra time for some pieces.

Lately though, I’ve decided to embrace the quirk. First, I’ve noticed that pieces I dash off – yes, I am guilty once in awhile when a client needs something in a rush or when grad school is in session – just aren’t as good as the pieces I’ve let sit and stew for awhile. Second, the process just works for me. Instead of telling myself that I need to be like everyone else and write an article in one sitting, I’ve embraced my style. Whether it’s the last paragraph or the last sentence, I just need a little distance and thought before I can write a paragraph to tie everything together.

And in conclusion, who’s to say that “everyone else” writes articles in one sitting? I’m sure you guys have as many quirks, flaws and foibles as I do when it comes to your writing. Care to share?

(And no, I did not let this blog post sit and gel before writing the last paragraph. Let’s see if it suffers for that!)

]]> http://blog.jennescalona.com/2009/07/20/writers-what-are-your-writing-quirks/feed/ 10 http://blog.jennescalona.com/2009/06/19/the-cardinal-rule-of-freelance-writing-know-how-to-write/ http://blog.jennescalona.com/2009/06/19/the-cardinal-rule-of-freelance-writing-know-how-to-write/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:00:29 +0000 Jenn Escalona http://blog.jennescalona.com/?p=583 I like to say, “yes.” I like to give encouragement, advice, and even the occasional bracing hug. (But only if I know you really well, so don’t get any ideas.) I also intend this blog for beginning freelance writers, baby birds with your beaks open, chirping away for small, slimy worms of wisdom to sustain you until you spread your wings and fly away. That said, I almost hate writing this post, but it needs to be done. Know that I’m not singling you guys out, and in fact, if you have commented on this blog, I have checked out your website and I like you. Yes, every single one of you.

But the fact is, if you are a newbie freelance writer, there is one question you need to ask yourself before you proceed any further down the path of a successful freelance writing business. And that question is:

Can I write?

Sure, freelance writing is about scoring clients, managing time, coping with solitude, and getting kickass testimonials from clients, but first and foremost it is about offering a marketable skill, and that skill, my friends, is writing.

If you can’t write, then you have no business being a freelance writer. Would you set up shop as a graphic designer if you had no idea how to design? Or as a stockbroker if you had no idea how to trade stocks? (Ouch. Okay, so in light of recent events that one was a bad example.)

But truly, the same goes for freelance writing. If you don’t know a predicate from an adverb, have never heard the phrase “show don’t tell” and haven’t written a single word except web chat since leaving school, then freelance writing probably isn’t for you.

Here’s an example. Someone once asked me to look over his novel. I kid you not, this book originated when its “author” read his first book since college, a weighty tome by one of our famous American White Male Scribes, and then decided, “Hey, if he can write a book, so can I.” That was my first clue.

My second clue came when the first sentence of the “novel” ran for an entire paragraph. “I wanted to slap the reader in the face from the first sentence,” said the “author” when I called him on the crime.

Let’s just say that I certainly did feel slapped in the face.

The lesson here is that that guy couldn’t write. I won’t say that he couldn’t learn to write or that with practice, he wouldn’t get quite good at it, but he did not know the conventions of writing. And not in the I’m-so-cool-I’m-throwing-the-conventions-of-writing-out-the-window way. To throw the conventions of writing out the window, you have to know what they are in the first place.

If you are a freelance writer, your writing skills should be the last thing you worry about. Writing is the thing you should be confident about. It’s what you DO. All that marketing and billing and networking stuff can scare the socks off you, but if you are unsure of your writing skills, then maybe this business isn’t for you, kid.

(Have you ever read a blog post with a chastising tone and come away thinking it’s meant for you? Well, if you are taking the time to seek this blog out from the depths of the internet, chances are it isn’t aimed at you. The people who need the talking to I just threw down wouldn’t even bother coming over here. It’s like I’m shouting this out the porthole of the space station. Truly.)

For more like this:

Why a Reputable Freelance Writer Will Never Do You Homework (So Stop Asking)

Aspiring to the 9th Grade Level, or How Simple Language Will Reclaim our Knowledge

What would William Strunk do?

I love this book so much that I’ve memorized a whole chapter, which is helpful, because I don’t have the book in front of me right now. So here goes with Rule 13:

“Omit needless words.”

Yes, that was it. Though I’m not sure which of the authors had the idea to write such a short and insanely helpful chapter, I always imagine it was William Strunk, because a.) He looks like a taskmaster b.) While E.B. White went on to write Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, etc. William Strunk seemed to decide that further words beyond his imminently helpful style guide were well, needless.

As a writer, economy is my first rule. I have expounded on this at length in an earlier, rather argumentative post on the Flesch-Kincaid scale. When writing I look at every word and make sure it added to the sentence. Then I look at every sentence and make sure that it moved the piece forward. (Except for these blog posts, in which I allow myself a little much needed latitude.) That’s not to say that I’m the best, most economical, Strunkian writer in the world, but I do worship at the altar of Strunk, and I think the guy was brilliant.

Also, William Strunk would have beat SEO content with his cane.

So, when editing that concise piece of marketing collateral or ad copy, take a great man’s advice by asking yourself, “What would William Strunk do?”

(Intrigued? You can win a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style and a bushel of other writer’s bibles by entering this FreelanceWriterville contest by April 30, 2009!)