The Art of Writing, Part 2: Making the Time

The more I read what writers create, the more I grow amazed by their extraordinary artistry. No wonder so many people think authors have some sort of supernatural talent. But the more I read about how writers work, the more I understand the one factor they all have in common: they regularly make the time to write. Some write in the morning (from what I've read, most do), and others write in the evening. Some write fulltime, and others write before or after their other job, or in between two regular jobs (these groups include stay-at-home parents). Some use all their vacation time to write, and others use their vacation time to mine for ideas they will write about later. Some may write only three hours five days a week, and others may write  twelve hours six to seven days a week. Nevertheless, they all write regularly.

Developing writers (we all are) set a time to write. But they don't freak out if they miss their scheduled time. Let's say you've set a writing schedule of 6:30 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday, totaling 18 hours a day. All goes well until the third week, when you find your life catches up to you, making Saturday writing impossible. Big deal! Give it up. You're still writing 15 hours a week. Later, you find you miss the Tuesday evening or Thursday morning timeslot. Again, who cares? You'll continue with the next session, or you can find a moment on Wednesday to give it a little more time. The idea is not to let a small failure in time management stop the engine. If the world stopped operating over every time slip, we would not have a single building, bridge, tunnel, or car. Just make the time, any time. 

The Art of Writing, Part 1: The Craft Is All

In some ways, writing is like any craft. Developing in piano-playing, carpentry, pottery, sculpting, and other worthwhile art forms never ends for the creators until they walk away from it for good. Well into his eighties and his seventh decade of performing, jazz saxophone titan Sonny Rollins said, "I'm still learning." To experience the craft is to evolve with it throughout your life. People who do not have that feeling are not craftspeople or artists—they are just someone doing a job, and chances are a bad one. 

The artform you practice becomes integrated in everything you do: your socialization, leisure activities, education, reading, meals, sleep, even your dreams. It demands your total buy-in. Indeed, the art influences your worldview. It becomes the most important thing you do, in fact, the most important thing anyone would want to do, in your opinion. Over the next several posts, I will describe how this influence manifests itself to form a true artist, with a specific focus on my craft—writing. 

What a Word! Part 7: Be

I’m talking about the verb to be in all its forms (be, am, are, is, was, were, being, and been). Action verbs usually offer greater clarity than being verbs. For instance, “She is a manager” makes one wonder whether she manages a corporate department, a studio production company, or a baseball team; using an action verb, as in, “She manages a team of eight systems engineers,” avoids such ambiguity. Here are other examples:

Ambiguous: Ana was an employee in our communications department.

Clearer: Ana wrote press releases and opinion pieces for our communications department.

Ambiguous: Berta is ill.

Clearer: Berta said that she has a cold.

Ambiguous: Carmen will be a college graduate next year.

Clearer: Carmen will graduate with a B.S. in psychology next year.

Of course, the verb to be has its place:

Passive Voice: Daria was paid in full for her work.

Continuous Tense: Emilia was running / is running / will be running.

Dramatic Ambiguity: To be, or not to be, that is the question.

E-Prime proponents, who call for the eradication of to be from the language, are extreme. But they do have a point about the clarity that alternative action verbs usually bring to communication.

What a Word! Part 6: Re-sign

When I saw someone write, I will resign my contract because I received a significant salary increase, I knew it was time to discuss the value of knowing the difference between resign and re-sign.

If you resign a contract, you quit it; if you re-sign a contract, you sign it again. Quite a difference. 

The presence of a hyphen in re-sign gives us plenty to think about. Hyphens are often used for new words. I am not old enough to remember when today was spelled to-day (no one is), but I am old enough to recall when nondisabled and email used hyphens, as in non-disabled and e-mail. They were fledgling words that didn't sound weird but looked it. Then once a word becomes so commonplace that even our grandfather would know it—and I am a grandfather!—we gladly drop the hyphen in favor of a more fluid spelling. Yet the general rule that we don't need a hyphen after re except when the next letter is an e does not always work. In the case of re-sign, we hyphenate it simply to avoid confusing it with resign, which has quite the opposite meaning.  

What a Word! Part 5: Have, Has, Had

Often enough I hear uninformed people tell me that have, has, and had are passive verbs. These forms of the same verb have several meanings, but passive is not one of them. They can have meanings as individual transitive verbs or as an auxiliary verb to indicate the past, present, and future perfect tenses.  

As transitive verbs, have, has, and had can mean, among many other things:

• to possess (I have a laptop.)
• to include (The building has three apartments.)
• to be obligated (She had to go to work.)

As auxiliary verbs, have, has, and had need a past participle form of another verb to make the perfect tense:

• past perfect: I had chosen Virginia as my teammate before you did.
• present perfect: He has bought the sailboat.
• future perfect: By tomorrow, they will have worked on the job for two weeks.

The confusion of these words with passive voice is understandable. Passive voice also needs a past participle, but one that is accompanied by the verb to be (am, are, is, was, were, being, been):

• past: Virginia was chosen as my teammate.
• present: The sailboat is being bought.
• future: By tomorrow, the job will have been worked on for two weeks.

But have, has, and had are not in and of themselves passive!