Take a Hike

Novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth) once said in an interview published in Writers at Work: The Paris Interviews, “My springboard (to writing) has always been long walks.” (103)

I find that the same thing works when I’m stuck on a writing task. Staring at a blank screen or aimlessly netsurfing won’t get me any closer to completion; however, cleaning out my head with a spirited walk has done the trick in getting me back on the job. As a bonus, I’ve made discoveries along my walking path that might show up in my next piece: a toddler enjoying the sensation of walking backwards, a weary postal worker climbing the few steps of her two hundredth house that morning, or the first spotting of spring of a cardinal in flight.


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Counting the Words

Want to measure your writing progress? Count the words! Ernest Hemingway revealed he did just that in an interview with George Plimpton for The Art of Fiction: The Paris Review Interviews, Number 21. Of Hemingway, Plimpton writes:


He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself””—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, to 512, the higher figures on the days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream. (63)


I remember political commentator William Buckley saying that all writers need are a mere 150 words a day—42 words fewer than this posting—to have an in-depth article in a week, a hefty short story in a month, and a novel in a year.

Counting the words seems like a good way to keep encouraged about keeping your progress in perspective. If it works for you, then do it!


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Wooing Your Readers

Do you write proposals for upper management’s approval? Are you aspiring to a leadership position or already in one? Can you see sound courses of action ahead that need loads of buy-in from all levels of your organization or community? Is your future success based on influencing others over whom your power is limited?


If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you will find profitable reading material in The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa (Portfolio Books, 2007). The authors systematically take their readers on a constructive process aimed toward persuasion without manipulation. Among their practical tips:
• Summarize the idea in a five-minute pitch.
• Confront barriers in your credibility with your audience.
• Map the decision making process, including all key players along the way to the ultimate decision makers.
• Confirm your own passion for the long haul and value small victories.
• Respect your audience’s beliefs.
• Personalize your pitch.


The book has much more to offer than these points. I found especially refreshing the authors’ admonishment that would-be wooers leave relationships better than they were before the wooing began. It doesn’t hurt that the case studies they use are highly entertaining, particularly the one of celebrated rock star Bono’s unlikely success in wooing archconservative U.S. Senator Jesse Helms to support African debt relief and funding for AIDS programs for Africa. This book is a must-read for persuasive writers.




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Uses of Philosophy in Writing

Readers of British Nobel Prize laureate Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) are bound to discover ideas applicable to any intellectual discipline. Take “The Value of Philosophy,” his famous last essay in The Problems of Philosophy (1912). In making a brilliant point about why we should live philosophical lives, Russell also alludes to the challenges of writers:


The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. … Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect. (156-157)


If everything were certain, why would businesspeople bother to write persuasive proposals? Why would politicians fuss over crafting compelling position papers? Why would novelists labor over emotionally powerful moments in their stories? Russell is on target in asserting that the reflection emerging from doubt, not the ignorance bred by certainty, inspires a deep thinking that eschews intellectual shortcuts and prizes a comprehensive, honest approach to logical analysis. Want to keep it fresh? Take in some philosophy.


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This Culture Thing

I mentioned in my September 29, 2007, entry on this blog that I had spent a good part of the year reading about creativity. That trend has continued into this year. In the coming installments of WORDS ON THE LINE, I will share some thoughts that have struck me as useful to writers looking for heightened inspiration, enhanced quality, or improved productivity.

This week, culture has been on my mind. The idea of culture—whatever that means—frequently surfaces in my writing seminars in the form of statements such as, “I’m new to the company and have to learn the corporate culture.”

Throwing around the word culture without defining it could be dangerous business. Much of what we believe to be true—our behaviors and attitudes—are culturally bound. Even our concepts of space and time grow from our culture, and we express ourselves not by language alone but by visual signs: postures, apparel, inanimate images, music, and video representations among them. Anthropologist Edward T. Hall writes a lot about this idea in The Silent Language (1959) The Hidden Dimension (1969) Beyond Culture (1976), and The Dance of Life (1983). Reading any of these books would get the concerned reader up to speed on the complications of culture. For instance, in The Silent Language, Hall explores what he calls the vocabulary of culture, including our primary message systems, the first being interaction. He notes:

Interaction lies at the hub of the universe of culture and everything grows from it (38).

Since speech and writing play vital roles in interaction, Hall’s theories should make for interesting reading to writers concerned with how their ideas are subjected to misinterpretation depending on what readers bring to the reading.


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