The Art of Writing, Part 4: Getting Ideas

As a writer, you can find ideas everywhere, from the sound of garbage trucks that wake you up, the little girl talking to her father in a line at the bank, the sighting of an unusual bird that landed on your window ledge, the little leaguers warming the bench by talking about their Pokémon cards, the pickup basketball game across the street you catch between passing cars and trucks, the tattoo "Regina Only Yesterday" on the arm of the woman who serves you your coffee in a favorite café, a colorful drawing of the solar system by a first grader, the warning labels on a cigarette package, the contrasting backgrounds of Zoom meeting attendees, the sudden wistfulness of a song you're hearing for the first time in years, the tired looks on the faces of train commuters, the dents and scratches on a brand new parked car, the changing color of sand as the day turns to dusk, the lone leaf dancing down the gutter, the homeless woman who refuses your offer of a dollar, the juxtaposition of you eating delicious dinner while watching state-sponsored atrocities on television, a billboard advertising an exotic vacation during a global virus lockdown, the interaction between two dogs meeting each other for the first time, the abundance of ripe lemons falling from their tree in a neighbor's backyard, the radiant colors of profanities spray-painted on a tenement alleyway, a skillful salsa dance between an elderly woman and a teenaged boy, a reckoning about your mother you never had until today, a deaf woman typing her menu choices on a smartphone for a waiter in a restaurant, a furious battle between a mockingbird and squirrel over a nest in a tree hollow, a couple sitting on a park bench in a light September afternoon rain sharing an ice cream cone, the clothing in a children's store window, the connection between a biblical passage and a movie scene, the taste of a favorite food with one intentionally added or missing ingredient, the old man who always occupies the same chair at the public library, a typo on a sign in a restroom, an email from a scammer promising you $137,000, a robocall threatening to shut off your electricity, the letter you receive from a friend you haven't heard from in 30 years telling you she has stage 5 cancer, the worn condition of the only book you've ever read three times, a friend's ostentatious signature, another friend's uncharacteristically shabby appearance, a wedding photograph of your parents, dandelions growing in cracks on the concrete pavement, the hairs sticking out of your boss's nose and ears, the muffled argument you can't make out from the neighbors, the lost sock you found months after you disposed of the other one. 

I'll stop at 40 examples for now (I could have gone until 40,000) in the hope that you get my point about finding ideas anywhere.

The Art of Writing, Part 3: Getting It Done

The last post covered making the time to write. Getting into a writing routine is so important because time is all you have. You might wonder how much time Ayn Rand had on her hands to write her 311,596-word novel The Fountainhead (1943) and her even longer 561,996-word novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Well, here's the answer: not as much as you think. 

Let's say you write a mere 300 words per day, roughly one double-spaced page of 12-point Times New Roman type. In 17 days (a bit more than half a month), you'd have a 5,000 word short story; in 133 days (not quite four-and-a-half months), a 40,000-word novella; and in 267 days (nearly nine months), an 80,000-word novel. This is not to say that Ayn Rand wrote The Fountainhead in 2 years and 10 months and Atlas Shrugged in 5 years and 2 months; perhaps she needed more time, or maybe she needed less. All I'm saying is that word production accumulates. 

My word counts are terribly low at the beginning of a writing project, maybe no more than 50 words a day, but then I gain momentum, often to well over 1,000 words a day, sometimes 5,000. I compare this buildup to a footrace. Usain Bolt's 100-meter world record of 9.58 seconds averages 0.958 seconds per 10 meters. But he ran about double that time for the first 10 meters, about 1.85 seconds, and progressively faster until he peaked from the 50- to 80-meter marks, averaging about 0.80 seconds per 10 meters. 

Momentum is priceless for writers as well. Once you get into what Mihaly Csikszentmihaly calls flow (I strongly recommend his book on the topic), or others call "being in the zone," you're too busy  creating to realize, or even to care about, how many words you're producing. You're just concentrating on whatever you're writing about and having fun.

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!