Other People's Writerly Advice Tip #5

This helpful suggestion series returns after a short hiatus of...what is it...year and a half? Anyway, last time you'll remember that the tip was on why you should get an MFA. Well, you've had time by now to get that MFA and write your first or possibly fourth novel and now you're in the heat of revision. So here's Martin Amis's tip on style that every reviser needs. I ran across it in a footnote as I read his memoir Experience:

John Gross was one of my two significant early editors, along with Terence Kilmartin of the Observer. he instilled a rule in me, one I still follow in fictional prose as well as journalism and book reviews. Never start consecutive paragraphs with the same word--unless (I add to myself) you begin at least three paragraphs this way and the reader can tell that you're doing it on purpose. John is right. It looks uglily inattentive, clunking against the eye as well as the ear.

This tip I think is obviously true, but I wonder at its mechanical or mathematical nature. Won't there be or isn't there already a program that will scan a piece of writing for style. Image StyleCheck right there with SpellCheck and GrammarCheck. Instead of an anthropomorphized paperclip, a little picture of Joyce pops up: "Are you trying to writing in stream of consciousness?" Ah, the future! Where all our soul-crushing laziness will be realized!

How Many Poisoning Stories Can There Be?

So it's Thanksgiving break and I'm with my wife (formerly known here as Heather) visiting the in-laws. And we also visited one of my favorite places on earth: McKay's Used Media (or some such) where you take in the books your tired of and the cd's that no longer have any relevance whatsoever and they give you credit to get more books that you might one day tire of. I'm wandering the creative writing reference aisle, and I see this catchy title Howdunit: The Book of Poisons. It's part of the Writers Digest Books on how to get your crime facts straight. I actually have the original one about police procedure and criminal acts but a whole book on poison? How many stories can one write where someone gets poisoned? Naturally, I had to have it, but then I got distracted by Norman Mailer's The Spooky Art and forgot to put it in my basket. Though I failed to get me a copy, I thought it would still make Thanksgiving-appropriate reading.

How to Blog

Here, in a helpfully numbered fashion, I will tell you how to blog for fun and profit. Mostly for profit because once you have that fun will naturally follow.

1. Live life. Many bloggers forget this one, but it is essential. You need to go out into the big, dark world and find something mysterious and terrifying, then wrestle it to the ground and in this way have an experience. Once that is done, you must come directly home to your computer where you will set it all down in words or else that experience will be completely meaningless and lost in your ever fading memory. If you’ve done that, then you’ve completed the first step, but that’s not all. Go on.
2. I cannot stress this one enough. Click the publish button. If you fail to do this your post will not appear on your blog, and you will, in fact, not be blogging.
3. Do not put any pictures on your blog. First, readers do not like pictures because it makes them feel childish. Secondly, if you do, you will be sued.
4. Make people read your blog.
5. Set up an account with one of those places that measures the hits your blog gets. A hit is the measure of how many times a person clicks on your blog. This count, in theory, measures the amount of people reading your blog when, in fact, it can’t actually tell if they clicked on it by mistake or are painstakingly crocheting your words onto a pillow. Don’t worry about that. What is important is that you put the total on your blog, so that people can see how many theoretical people are reading your blog. If you do not do so, you are a coward. And no one likes a coward. Especially a coward who blogs.
6. Some people will tell you not to measure your stats with other blogs. They will tell you that blogging is not a competition. They are wrong. The numbers are all that matter. Obsess over them endlessly. Hits are as good as money (see the Money section below).

Congratulations! You are a blogger. Enjoy your success.

Troubleshooting: Marketing. Let’s pretend people aren’t reading your blog. What to do?

1. Make your family read it. First, tell your family that you’ve started a blog. They will not read it. Second, tell them that you’re talking about them in this blog. Some of them will look into it. Be sure to say rude things about one family member in particular, usually the one who is least likely to read the blog. Your brother, perhaps, who sells irrigation equipment and accessories. After a while rotate which family member you choose to ridicule. The more negative, the more likely your hits will go up. Corollary: the more hits you get, the less you will be invited to family functions, which will have the advantage of giving you more time to blog.
2. Make your friends read it. First, do not tell your friends that you’ve started a blog. Instead, write several long posts about them where you use their full names. They will inevitably find the blog while Googling themselves. They will feel a secret thrill as if they’re reading your secret diary, when in fact they are falling for your secret plan.
3. Get more friends.
4. Go to any random blog and leave a comment. The comment doesn’t even matter, only that you link it back to your blog. In fact, the comment should be something inscrutable. For example, just write “Turnip!” I would also recommend an exclamation point. The blogger and the blogger’s audience (i.e. that person’s friends and family) will inevitably think to themselves who is this person that has written “Turnip” with an exclamation point and then click on your link to uncover the mystery. Presto! More readers.
5. Pay people to read it. Warning: this step may cut into your profits.

Troubleshooting II: Money. Why are you not rich yet?

1. Hits are not as good as money. Only money is as good as money. Hits, however, can be converted into money.
2. There are programs like Adsense that will place ads into your blog and based on a complicated geometry problem decide how much money to give you from these advertisers. I suggest you not do this because this is what we in the biz refer to as “selling out.”
3. A far better and easier way to capitalize on your blog is to, as we like to say in the biz, be “discovered.” This is where a person with a lot of money reads your blog by accident and decides you are brilliant and wants to give you a lot of money to be your sponsor.
4. An even easier way to capitalize off your blog is to convince your significant other that the above shadowy sponsor will find you sooner the more time you spend on your blog. Suggest to your significant other, therefore, that you should quit your job in order to dedicate more time to the blog. Enjoy not working.
5. Finally, sell things on your blog. Like transcripts of this very “How to Blog” manual, available here for only $9.95!

You have completed my online course on the fundamentals of blogging. You are free to put the button “S. Craig Renfroe, Jr. Approved” on your blog (WARNING: This button is trademarked and the sole property of S. Craig Renfroe, Jr. Any attempt to actually put said button on your blog will result in a lawsuit).

Copyrighted 2008 (One final tip: be sure to put this at the end of every post so that no one steals your beautiful ideas and makes more money off them than you do.)

Other People’s Writerly Advice Tip #4 (Celebratory Edition)

So it's been a busy weekend, plus some. Mainly because Heather graduated with her MFA! Congratulations to her! Now, she's official. Officially...well she was already a poet...officially a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry, I suppose.

Which brings us not to The Twilight Zone, though it might as well be because we come to that popular party question: why get an MFA anyway? That's the subject of our advice today. Mike Kobre gave part of the commencement address, and in his remarks he delivered a great account of Melville's friendship with Hawthorne. Melville's literary star was fading while he worked on the ultimately doomed novel The Whale (a.k.a. Moby Dick) which would kill his career until it's brilliance was "rediscovered" years after Melville's death. What kept him going was his friendship with the more popular Hawthorne. And Kobre would say that is the kind of unquantifiable benefit of an MFA: a community of writers.

I would have to agree. Though I do owe a lot to UNC-Wilmington, what matters in my day-to-day life now are the friends I still have: Melody Clayton and Derek Nikitas chief among them. But even ones I don't see or talk to that often offer help in the dark night that is writing. Eric Vrooman, for example, just returned my manuscript with the kind of comments and close line readings that you should have to pay thousands of dollars for.

With this post and the last, I feel like I'm getting too sentimental. I promise to kill a kitten or a puppy in later posts to make up for it. Maybe a cute animal caged death match. Stay tuned.

Other People’s Writerly Advice Tip #3

Today's advice comes to us not from my former professor, but from that stoically spooky guy on The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling.



I would have to disagree with his contention that ideas are easy because I had to steal this one from Don Pizarro.

Other People’s Writerly Advice Tip #2

Today's advice comes to us not from some old stodgy book, but from my former professor in grad school Philip Gerard. He gave a reading at the Museum today and will give a reading at the University tonight and stopped by my Intro to Creative Writing class between.

He told my students if they wrote down anything from the class it should be: "Backstory drives present action." He had interesting things to say about how we have to consider what has happened before the story to understand the present scene. I fear that when writers (even good ones) think about backstory it manifests itself in the present action through flashbacks that slow or stop that action. Or--worse--writers want to excuse present action on past events, the armchair psychobabble way. Oh, he was a bad guy now because he was sexually abused then.

I liked better when Gerard told the students to pretend they are movie producers with a set budget when writing a story. So they couldn't just have anyone say anything. You have to pay speaking parts more than extras, so if a character has dialogue that character should play an important role in the story. Don't build (describe) an elaborate set location if you're not going to have action occur there.

I only fear my imagination is impoverished, limiting my budget.

Other People’s Writerly Advice Tip #1

Speaking of Strunk and White, they make a great starting point for a regular feature: Other People’s Writerly Advice. The Elements of Style was, of course, the result of E. B. White revising and adding to a book by his professor William Strunk, Jr. It’s very short (my edition has 105 pages). Here is a piece of advice that I find particularly pertinent:

9. Do not affect a breezy manner

The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. "Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric, the person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest and that uninhibited prose creates high spirits and carries the day. Open any alumni magazine, turn to the class notes, and you are quite likely to encounter old Spontaneous Me at work — an aging collegian who writes something like this:

Well, guys, here I am again dishing the dirt about your disorderly classmates, after pa$$ing a weekend in the Big Apple trying to catch the Columbia hoops tilt and then a cab-ride from hell through the West Side casbah. And speaking of news, howzabout tossing a few primo items this way?

This is an extreme example, but the same wind blows, at lesser velocities, across vast expanses of journalistic prose. The author in this case has managed in two sentences to commit most of the unpardonable sins: he obviously has nothing to say, he is showing off and directing the attention of the reader to himself, he is using slang with neither provocation nor ingenuity, he adopts a patronizing air by throwing in the word primo, he is humorless (though full of fun), dull, and empty. He has not done his work. Compare his opening remarks with the following — a plunge directly into the news:

Clyde Crawford, who stroked the varsity shell in 1958, is swinging an oar again after a lapse of forty years. Clyde resigned last spring as executive sales manager of the Indiana Flotex Company and is now a gondolier in Venice.

This, although conventional, is compact, informative, unpretentious. The writer has dug up an item of news and presented it in a straightforward manner. What the first writer tried to accomplish by cutting rhetorical capers and by breeziness, the second writer managed to achieve by good reporting, by keeping a tight rein on his material, and by staying out of the act.

Is there a breeze in here? I fear Strunk & White might not like my blog.