#12 The Secret of Finishing, Don't Dazzle, Communicate: An Interview with David Margolick: Avoiding typos with technology, A Stylophile's Confession
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TIP OF THE WEEK
"Finish the story you started. You can't revise what isn't written,"
Novelist Robin Sloan inspired this tip. In our recent rich interview he said the breakthrough moment in his writing, the one that led to his best-selling novel, "Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore," and his second novel, "Sourdough," came when he learned the power of completion.
"The thing that unlocked writing for me — writing of all kinds, but fiction especially — was so simple that it almost feels silly to type it out. finish things. For years I thought of myself as someone who wanted to write; for years I maintained an archive of partial chapters belonging to novels I would someday write. But it wasn't until I zoomed in, wrote short and share what I'd written with others that I actually started to learn and improve."
Is there an unfinished story, a poem, a chapter sitting in your hard drive? Finish it, then start revising.
INTERVIEW: Three Questions with David Margolick
Interviewing David Margolick is like taking a class in reporting and writing as I learned when we spoke about his work for Nieman Storyboard in June.
Margolick is a consummate professional with a distinguished writing career. For many years he was a legal affairs writer and columnist at The New York Times; he's also been a longtime contributor at Vanity Fair. He is the author of, most recently, "The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy," five other books and is working on books about Sid Caesar and Jonas Salk.
Not surprisingly, he describes himself as a "workhorse." Surprisingly, he says, "it's never come easy to me, but with enough effort, I've usually — and eventually — gotten the job done."
Given his history, it's well worth heeding his most important lesson about writing:
"Write what you see and feel; don't censor yourself. But don't indulge yourself, either. You're not out to dazzle but to communicate and, with any luck, move. The fewer words, and even syllables, the better."
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CRAFT LESSON: Text to Speech: A Digital Proofreader That Makes You a Smarter Writer
If typographical errors — misspellings, double words or missing ones — besmirch my blog or this newsletter, blame me. The credit for the ones I catch before posting goes to Moira.
Moira is the digitized voice of a young Irishwoman who resides in the System Preferences of my Macbook Pro where she serves as a text-to-speech feature that reads aloud my copy while I follow along with what's on the screen.
Like any good proofreader, she's a line of defense between clean and messy prose. When I have the brains to use her, as I point out in this week's Craft Lesson, Moira makes my copy cleaner, smoother, less prone, if not immune, to rhetorical gaffes.
Romance novelist Carolyn Jewel is a fan of text-to-speech because hearing her work read aloud by a computer kept her from "supplying meaning that isn't really there."
"Lots of writers recommend literally reading one's work aloud because it's a great way to catch clunky phrases and repetitive bits. I tried that once, but it's pretty hard on the voice, and it still doesn't solve the issues of your eyes and brain conspiring to "fix' typos for you."
Text-to-speech (TTS) is a useful addition to every writer's toolkit. Microsoft also offers digital proofreaders in its operating system. One caveat: no Moira.
WRITERS SPEAK
"Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting. It's a rare life so dull that no crisis ever intrudes."
- John Updike
What crises are intruding in your characters' lives? Dramatize them. Exploit them.
BOOKBAG
In 1999, a college drama teacher in the small churchgoing town of Kilgore, Tex. decided to mount a production of "Angels in America," the Pulitzer-Prize winning drama about gay men and the AIDS crisis.
Twenty years later, the people that writer Wes Ferguson grew up there with "are still feeling the aftershocks. His excellent story in Texas Monthly, "When 'Angels in America' Came to East Texas" describes the backlash: death threats, angry antigay demonstrations, a $50,000 cut in county funds to the local Shakespeare festival. It's a sad but stirring narrative about prejudice and the way its poison changed the lives of the director, his actors and the author of this story.
Word of the day. Steganography. It's a way to conceal a message physically. Think hiding morse code somewhere on a postcard digitally disguising one image within another. Or knitting.
Starting in World War I, brave female amateur spies sent coded messages with a purl stitch here, a drop stitch there, and signaled troop train movements. Learn the cloak and dagger (or yarn and needle) history in this fascinating Atlas Obscura article by Natalie Zarrelli.
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PERSONAL HISTORY: A Stylophile's Confession
Lately, I've found myself in a nostalgic mood, one ready-made for sharing secrets.
I am a stylophile.
Now before you call the authorities, let me clarify: a stylophile is someone who lusts after writing instruments: pencils, pens, particularly fountain pens. Fellow writers may understand my obsession, so I hope you'll indulge the story behind my obsession.
I trace my interest early on in life. I was a first grader at St. Mary Elementary School, young enough that my mother picked me up from school. One day, if memory serves, as we were walking down the sidewalk, she revealed a secret.
A devout Catholic, my mother told me that if I said nine Hail Marys every Tuesday, the Blessed Mother would grant me a wish. Dutifully, I prayed along with her and when we had finished she said, "Is there something you want, Chipper?" Without hesitation, I cried out. "A mechanical pencil!" Why I exclaimed that interest I have no idea, though I doubt it was the adoring gaze the woman shines on the mechanical pencil wearing in the vintage ad below.
My mother's indoctrination complete, she and I crossed main street to Woolworth's department store, the Walmart's of the 1960s. Soon afterward, I walked out happily clutching a plastic yellow barreled Scripto mechanical pencil with a red eraser and a slim box of replacement leads. According to the ad below, published in 1955, when I was six years old, the sale price was twenty-nine cents, a good deal for a conversion.
But soon I was after bigger prey, my own fountain pen, But st $3 a pop, Sheaffer's cartridge pen were out of my range. Eventually, when the nuns forced cursive writing on us, fountain pens became standard issue. I cherished mine.
Back then, all things stationery fascinated me, the raw materials of the writing life I would eventually embrace: reams of white paper, manila envelopes, paper clips and pens. Perhaps subconsciously, I divined my future occupation.
Many years later, as I approached my 50th birthday, my wife Kathy asked me what I wanted to celebrate. Once again, my answer was immediate. "A fountain pen!"
Unfortunately, I soon discovered that the cost of new fountain pens, the ones I craved, like the French Montblanc, the Mercedes Benz of pens, or the sleek German Pelikan, easily outstripped the budget for a family of five.
I then stumbled, via the World Wide Web, upon a community of vintage fountain pen collectors and found myself drawn to a subset of pens made during World War II. They were cheaper, still usable and had a fascinating history.
For instance, army regulations stipulated that nothing could peek over the pocket of a soldier’s blouse; a clever Sheaffer employee simply bent the clip over the top. Problem solved.
Another pen maker claimed technology that would prevent the rubber bladder that carried the ink from exploding at the high altitude American bombers flew at.. It may have been a dubious claim since pilots were soon issued a new invention, the bladder-less ballpoint, which survived the impact of air pressure.
I began collected advertising from the time by purchasing stacks of Life magazine in antique stores. I prowled pen shows around the country looking for Parker 51s, the kind Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower used to sign the armistice with the German Army. Even refurbished, they were pricey so I stuck with the cheaper Esterbooks and Wahl Eversharps though I did land a Waterman Commando. Obsessed? an understatement.
But then when it comes to writers, we all have our instruments of choice, except that they've switched from analog to digital. Word or Google Docs? Scrivener or Final Draft?
And most of us have hobbies, don't we? I have a writer friend who relaxes from his hours at the keyboard by work by playing golf. They're a good distraction, I've found, when a writing task gets difficult. I like polishing the nibs, especially the 14 carat gold ones and practicing my penmanship with rainbows of ink. I'd love to hear if you have any hobbies related to the writing craft.
MISCELLANY: The Week's Art
Like most kids, I loved comics, but while I read the usual suspects —Superman, Batman and the like — my favorites were the ones displayed this week: "Classics Illustrated: Featuring Stories by the World Greatest Authors."
For 15 cents an issue, the going rate when I worked in Mr. Quinn's newsstand filling the Sunday papers
with inserts, they were my introduction to writers like Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Homer, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, among many others.
Drawn by some of the leading illustrators of the time, they managed to engage the attention of a young boy with riveting adventures, all told with a sophisticated vocabulary for a 10-year-old. I know because I recently shelled out $7.50 for a vintage copy of "Daniel Boone" as the series stopped publishing in 1973. I was surprised to find multisyllabic words — arduous, privation, numerically — sprinkled through its pages, words that I use in my writing as an adult, but which must have puzzled me back them, Comics as literary education. Who'd have thought?
Chip in Your Ear
"With Pen in Hand"/Aretha Franklin
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