Tag: writing life

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education writing advice

Text-Based Teaching

I’ve been teaching writing in virtually of its forms for over a decade. My resume includes working with a diverse range of students at every post-elementary level, including college and including students with mild and severe learning disorders.

My primary teaching style is Socratic. I ask lots of questions and challenge lots of answers. But I try to do so in as affable a way as possible, hoping the conversation leads us to whatever wisdom is possible that day.

But the confrontational tone of my personality sometimes gets in the way.

I am the product of a male-dominated childhood where I learned to fight with words rather than fists and where fighting was often done for fun. I try to overcome the evolutionary forces that cause me to nip and bark, but after 41 years, I’m finding it’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.

It might be time for a new strategy, one where the my confrontational tone doesn’t harm the learning opportunities of my students.

I can be a good teacher. I’m definitely not for everyone, but I’ve helped some students, and perhaps even many, become better writers than they were.

But now, in the absence of my job at the soon-to-be-defunct Green Mountain College, I need a better way to find those many.

Should I Go Freelance?

I recently visited one of those online freelancer-marketplaces to research what it might cost to hire a voice actor to record an audio version of my novel, but while I was there, I considered the idea of going freelance for a moment, and I asked myself what I’d be willing to do.

A couple of days ago, one of my best friends asked me to mentor his college-age son with a creative writing project, and of course, I agreed. Because they live on the West Coast, the mentorship would have to take place online.

I asked for his son’s number, sent the son a text, and off we went.

But here’s the thing. Because it’s just texting, I can work with him while also doing basically anything else. When I get a few minutes and I have something to say or a question to ask, I pull out my phone, send him a text, and move on with my day.

I don’t expect him to get back to me immediately. He could be doing anything else in the world, so why should he stop and respond to me? When he’s available and interested, he can text me back and I’ll get back him when I can.

As I browsed some of the writing gigs on the freelance marketplace, I started to wonder if that might be something many people would like: text-based access to a highly-qualified writing teacher.

This isn’t an original idea. It’s basically freelancing as a writing coach.

But that’s not all I started wondering about.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job

I teach at a school with students whose faces I know, but I often see those faces focused on their screens rather than on the people around them (including me), and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t also offer something like this at my school.

Imagine a school where teenagers come to pursue whatever projects they want. The projects don’t have to be related to anything or compared against anything or checked for excellence in any way, but during those projects (and after school hours), teachers text with the student, supporting them and challenging them in different ways, sometimes academically, sometimes emotionally, but always openly and honestly.

The teachers at this school spend part of their day working one-on-one with students, or offering group discussions or group collaborations, or working independently on their own projects, keeping an eye on student behavior while also engaging several of them through texts whenever the moment inspires or allows.

Such a school wouldn’t be much different than one I work in now, where most (if not all) of our teachers sometimes (and often) connect with students through texts.

But I’m wondering if we (or at least, I) could be more intentional about how we (I) use texts. Teachers know the importance of developing relationships with their students, but how many of us strategize the way we engage in the text-to-text aspects of that relationship, an aspect that might even be more important than the face-to-face one thanks to this generation’s connection to its devices?

Leave Me Alone, Kid (or) Go Fuck Yourself, Sir

Why would teachers not want to develop a text-based relationship with their students?

The obvious issue is privacy. Teachers deserve the opportunity to turn themselves off — not just go into sleep mode, but turn themselves off.

Giving students text-based access invites them to disturb their teacher’s most private hours, and every teacher has taught at least one student who was not yet skilled in the art of respecting privacy.

But the issue goes both ways.

Students don’t want to hear from their teachers when they’re busy with their friends or when they’re getting ready to Netflix & chill.

There are also rotten apples among us who would take advantage of their age and authority to manipulate students into doing something they may not want to do (or realize they shouldn’t do).

Still, even with those caveats, there’s definitely something here to think about; something that may be worth getting right.

Categories
works in progress

The end of the beginning

In June of 2006, a few weeks after graduating from college with a bachelor’s degree in Theories of Writing, I decided to apply to an M.F.A. program in Creative Writing. The only school I wanted to attend required a longish writing sample (20 pages) as part of its application. Because most of the stories I’d written in the past few years were unfinished or less than 10 pages, I needed to write something specific for the application. I decided on a short story whose concept had obsessed me for months: the secession of Vermont from the United States.

My plan for the story was simple in form, but complex in execution. The general idea was to capture the secession in both its planning stage and its aftermath, and to allow the reader to imagine how the secession moved from one period to the other.

But the execution saw me creating a larger cast of characters than usually belong in a short story, with the perspective of the story shifting to a different character with each individual paragraph. Some of those characters were in the present day, but others were two hundred years in the future. The effect, I hoped, would make the reader feel like they were caught in a tornado (which was tied thematically to the idea of secession by way of The Wizard of Oz, i.e., secession leads to a new world of possibilities, and by the concept of the moment, i.e., the ever-swirling influences that come into and move out of each individual moment, including the moment of secession).

After I finished the first draft of the story, which was titled, “If you walk away, I’ll walk away,” something strange happened. I started crying. I remember being so happy with the story, so proud of it, that, all of sudden, it felt like everything I’d ever done, every decision I’d ever made that put me on the path towards being a writer, was validated. It was a pretty great moment, and my emotions were caught in the swirl of it.

After revising it once or twice, I sent the story off to grad school as part of my application, and a few weeks later, I was accepted. For my creative thesis, I decided to turn “If you walk away, I’ll walk away” into a novel. And for the next two years (minus a few weeks at the end of the first semester when I flirted with starting a completely different novel), that’s what I did.

Except I decided from the get-go that I didn’t want it to be a novel. A novel would have followed a relatively straight path from the origins of the secession, through the eventual battle(s), and into their aftermath (perhaps doing so as a trilogy). But I wanted to stay true to the form of my short story, which went “around” the secession rather than through it. I also wanted to use my creative thesis to engage (in a fictional way) with all of the strange, philosophical ideas that I encountered during my undergraduate career. The end result wouldn’t be a novel, per se, but a fictional exploration of political philosophies, utopias, and ontological states of being.

To highlight this, I gave it the working title: The Gods of the Hills: An act of creative non-philosophy.

At the end of the two years, and after receiving feedback from some incredible advisors at the college and from some incredibly supportive friends, I completed the book, now titled (to erase the academic flavor), Gods of the Hill: An Act of Secession.

And then I let the book sit. Didn’t touch it. Didn’t think about it. Completely let it go. For five months.

When Spring came, and I finally picked it up, I sat down with a few glasses of wine, and over a couple of days, read through the whole thing, at the end of which I said to my wife, “I don’t care what anyone thinks. I like that book.”

And then I got to work rewriting it.

This process went on for three more years. I’d finish a rewrite (which, in my process, involved not only cutting and adding scenes, but also a wholesale retyping of every single page), then I’d let it sit for about five months, then I’d give it another read, after which I’d declare how much I enjoyed it, then get to work on another revision.

And then, on Thursday last week (one day before my fifth wedding anniversary), I finished it. That’s right. Finished it. Gods of the Hills: An Act of Secession…is…finally…done.

And on Monday, I sent it off to an agent to see if she’d like to represent it to publishers. Within two hours of receiving my query letter and the first group of the book’s pages, she asked me to send her the whole thing. I can’t tell you how excited that’s made me.

What’s kind of scary, though, is that the agent will be the first person in three years, besides myself, who will have read my book. I completely suspect that she will not want to represent it (it is, after all, a piece of experimental fiction that actively prevents a “traditional plot” from breaking out), but still, the fact that she wanted to read the whole book is a good thing indeed.

Even if she does choose to represent the book, I completely suspect that she’ll have some suggestions on how to improve it, which means, of course, that the book isn’t “done done.”

But sending it off to an agent…it’s a big deal. Because it means that the beginning stage of seeing my manuscript turn into a real book is…truly and completely…done.

There were no tears this time. Just a sense of resoluteness.

Because any way you slice it, five years is a long time.

Oh, and did I mention that my wife and I, after five years of marriage, will be having a baby pretty soon?

It’s the end of the beginning in oh so many ways. And I can’t tell you how excited that makes me.

Categories
writing advice

A Roundup of My Writing Apps

There’s never been a better time to be an OS X or iOS user than right now. Thanks to Apple’s App Stores, individual developers and smaller shops now have access to a large volume of customers, giving them just as much influence over the future of the platform as Adobe and Microsoft once wielded.

And with that greater democracy comes greater innovation. We’re now seeing ideas on the app front that wouldn’t have made it through the more cost-conscious or committee-driven development processes of larger companies. Shops such as Information Architects and individuals such as Marco Arment have expanded our notion of what we want from our apps.

So, wanting to help some of my favorite developers and wanting to shed light on apps that will be helpful to writers such as yourself, I thought I’d share the OS X, iOS, and Web apps that have made my writing not only easier to manage, but also more enjoyable to produce.

The Indispensable Writing Apps

Scrivener

Scrivener logoThe Big Poppa when it comes my writing life, Scrivener is a novelist’s best friend. Not only does Scrivener offer a fully-customizable, full-screen writing experience, but more importantly, it serves as an all-in-one project-management tool. Scrivener helps you keep track of all the various documents and files that go into developing a long piece of creative writing.

Scrivener is a huge application, with outlining tools, a system-wide scratchpad, file-tracking options, document versioning, character and setting templates, footnotes and comments, export options that run the gamut (including Final Draft, ePub, and Kindle file formats), syncing features that hook up with some of the more popular iPad apps, and more. But don’t let its giant feature-set fool you. If you want, you can just start a new project and start typing. Scrivener is an application that allows itself to be discovered. It has everything you want, but only when you want it.

If you do any writing at all, I can’t recommend Scrivener enough. It will, without a doubt, become the Big Poppa of your writing life.

IA Writer

Writer logoIf Scrivener is my Big Poppa, IA Writer has quickly become the ambitious little brother.

IA Writer belongs to a growing category of “minimalist writing applications,” and like other apps in the category, it promises to get out of your way and just let you write.

But IA Writer takes its idea of minimalism a bit further than its competitors. Simply put: IA Writer won’t let you do much else but write. There are no preferences to tweak, no formatting options to play with, nothing at all to distract you.

Because they take away all your options, IA put a ton of time into making sure that Writer looks and feels perfect right out of the gate. They chose a fantastic font (a customized version of Nitti) in a perfect color (HEX #424242) laid on top of a relaxing background (it’s actually a subtle pattern). IA even spent a considerable amount time developing a non-standard blinking cursor that, frankly, is more amazing than any blinking cursor has the right to be.

IA focus modeOn top of that, the folks at IA added what I’m pretty sure is a unique feature among all writing apps. They call it “focus mode,” and what it does is gray out all of the sentences you’re not working on (click the picture to embiggen). Focus mode helps you to focus all of your attention not on what you’ve already written, but on what you’re writing right now. I love the mode so much that I’ve taken to doing the majority of my writing in IA Writer.

Of course, as a minimalist writing application, IA Writer can’t approach Scrivener for project management, so when I’m done with a particular writing session, I just copy and past into Scrivener to keep track of it all.

I should mention that IA Writer works on both iOS and OS X. I bought the iPad 2 on the day it came out, and I bought IA Writer on the day the iPad got delivered to my door. I’d read so many rave reviews of it by that point that I knew I just had to have it.

As you can see, it lived up to my expectations.

iTunes

Itunes logoI know iTunes isn’t a “writing app” per se, but it’s just as indispensable to my writing life as IA Writer or Scrivener. When I sit down for any writing session, those three icons are the ones I click on.

To clarify though, it’s not iTunes that belongs on this list. It’s a particular playlist within iTunes that does, a playlist I’ve named, simply, “Writing.”

Comprised entirely of bands who produce mostly instrumentals or extended jams, my “Writing” playlist creates an ambience that my muse has learned to trust. When my muse hears the guitar of Jerry Garcia, or the driving rhythms of Do Make Say Think, or the rising crescendos of Explosions in the Sky, or the urgent horn of John Coltrane, she knows that serious writing is about to get done, and thankfully enough, she comes running.

The Specialty Writing Apps

I use IA Writer to compose most any text, Scrivener to manage all the sections and chapters and files that go into my fiction writing, and iTunes to motivate my muse to find me wherever I am.

But these next apps I use for very specific purposes. If you don’t have to achieve certain goals, these apps might not be for you. But then again, they might be.

MarsEdit

Marsedit logoMarsEdit is, hands-down, the best dedicated blog-writing application I’ve ever tried. I’ve been a fan of it for years, using it to post stories to both Fluid Imagination and the online literary-journal I edit, One Forty Fiction.

With customizable preview templates to show you exactly how your story will look when you publish it to your blog and customizable shortcut keys that allow you to format your HTML at the push of a button, the app is designed to work the way you want it.

Originally developed as the writing component of Brent Simmons’ legendary feed-reader, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit was spun off on its own and sold to a new developer, Gus Mueller of Flying Meat. Gus later sold it to its current developer, Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, and Daniel used to work as a Senior Software Engineer at Apple. ‘Nuf said.

As for how MarsEdit fits into my own process, I write the first draft of my blog posts in IA Writer. When I’m done, I export the text into HTML format, and then copy and paste it into MarsEdit, where I play around with images, proofread using the customizable preview, and revise as necessary. After the post is exactly as I want it, I click the publish button and voila!, it’s sent to them there Internets.

Evernote

Evernote logoI’m not going to lie to you. I’m new to the “note taking app” category. Prior to getting my iPad, I spent the majority of my time sitting at my desk, working on my Mac. I didn’t need a note-taking app because right there on my desk, right where I needed it, was my trusty pad of paper (no bugs! no crashes! works with legacy technologies!).

But the iPad changed all that. Now I find myself in all manners of the house when I am struck by some idea or come across some inspirational article, and sure enough, my trusty pad of paper is nowhere to be found.

Enter Evernote. With an iOS app, a OS X app, and a Web app, all synced together so I never lose anything, I can save a snippet of text from some article or type in a few sentences to capture a thought, and then, when I sit down at my Mac for the evening’s writing session, boom, there it is.

Now, with all that being said, I’m not entirely sold on Evernote. It was popular enough so that I’d heard of it before even thinking about getting a note-taking app, and now that I have entered that particular market, it works well enough to have become a regular part of my writing process. But I still find myself wishing for something…different. Something that makes me say, “Yes!” as quickly and as passionately as I still do for Scrivener and IA Writer.

Until then, I don’t have any problem recommending Evernote to those who might need it.

Microsoft Word 2008

Word logoLet me state for the record that I do not like Microsoft Word. The only reason it still exists on my computer is because, in my day job, I work as a marketing specialist for a company that runs on PCs, and most every file they create comes from Microsoft Office. I’ve tried several workarounds (Pages->Word, Scrivener->Word, TextEdit->Word, etc.), but all of them take several steps and involve some worry about compatibility.

Microsoft Word may not be fun to use, it may take forever to launch, and it may crash more often than any other application I have, but it’s still the most used word-processor in the world, and it’s too much of a pain in the ass for me not to have it.

Some day though. Some day I’ll say goodbye.

The Online Writing Apps

What makes an app an app? Is it the chrome around the window that you’re working in? Is it that you have to install it on your computer? Wikipedia, the genius of the collective, currently says that an app is “computer software designed to help the user to perform singular or multiple related tasks.”

If that’s true, as we all (via Wikipedia) say it is, then here are the web apps that I use to perform certain writing tasks.

Etymonline.com

Etymonline logoEtymonline is an online etymology dictionary. Etymology dictionaries tell you what a word really means. It gives you not only a definition, but also the history of the word, the life of it. It tells you, as best as it can, how and where the word originated and how it transformed over time.

A self-reflexive example? How about the etymology of “etymology?”

late 14c., ethimolegia “facts of the origin and development of a word,” from O.Fr. et(h)imologie (14c., Mod.Fr. étymologie), from L. etymologia, from Gk. etymologia, properly “study of the true sense (of a word),” from etymon “true sense” (neut. of etymos “true, real, actual,” related to eteos “true”) + -logia “study of, a speaking of” (see -logy). In classical times, of meanings; later, of histories. Latinized by Cicero as veriloquium. As a branch of linguistic science, from 1640s.

How cool is that? Using the etymology of “etymology,” I can know I’m speaking the truth when I say that “An etymology dictionary is where you want to go when want to know what a word really means.” After all, the very word “etymology” stems from the word for “true, real, actual.”

I’m telling ya: Skip the regular dictionary and go to Etymonline.com instead.

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

Onelook logoKnow what’s frustrating? When you have a sense of what you want to say but not the word itself; when the word you want is on the tip of your mind’s tongue.

Enter the OneLook Reverse Dictionary. You type in the basic concept you’re looking for, and OneLook will check through its huge library of dictionaries to match your concept to the definition of a word. It then shows you all the words you might be thinking of.

You can even play around with wildcard searches. If you know the concept you’re looking for has to do with the process of thought, plus you know that whatever word it is, it begins with a “th,” you can run a search for “th*:process of thought.” And sure enough, the first word they’ll return is exactly what you were “thinking.”

The third option on that list of words that relate to “th*:process of thought?” Thermal depolymerization. Why? Because according to its definition, thermal depolymerization “mimics the geological processes thought to be involved in the production of fossil fuels.”

See how that works? A search for “process of thought” returns a word whose definition contains “processes thought.” Pretty cool, huh? Are you telling me you can can’t use that kind of tool to help you write? I didn’t think so.

Behind the Name

Behindthename logoThere are more “baby name” pages on the web than there are babies born in a given day (estimated number of babies born each day: ~360,000; estimated number of pages related to “baby names”: ~52.6 million). And in the pursuit of the perfect character name, I’ve used a good number of those pages.

But the one I went back to time and time again, the one I finally ended up bookmarking in my browser, was Behind The Name. It’s a basic web app that allows you to search not only for a given name, but also for the given meaning of a name.

That last bit is crucial when it comes to character naming. You don’t just want something that sounds good; it also has to mean the right thing. With Behind the Name, you can run a search for a name that means, for example, “warrior.” You can then filter that list for male or female names. Then you can just scan down the list to find the name that sounds best for your character.

It’s quick and easy. And you don’t have to deal with a cutesy, family-friendly design, or have the names compete with ads for diapers or skin cream. There’s just a purple background and text-driven design.

Oh, and did I mention that its tagline is “the etymology and history of first names.” After what I wrote above, is there any way I wouldn’t prefer this site over the crap at BabyNames.com? Didn’t think so.

Writing Apps (I Think) I (Would) Like But Don’t Use

I’m only going to mention two, and they’re both by the same developers, The Soulmen.

The first is Ulysses. Ulysses is similar Scrivener (or going chronologically, Scrivener similar to Ulysses): they’re both full-featured, writing and project-management applications. The major difference is in Ulysses’ design philosophy. As the folks at Scrivener say about their competitor:

The designers [of Ulysses] have a very strong design philosophy—if that philosophy matches the way you work, you will love this software; if not, you might find yourself frustrated at the lack of rich text and hierarchical organisation capabilities. Either way, you owe it to yourself to check out Ulysses.

I used Ulysses before I used Scrivener. And while I thoroughly enjoyed it, what ultimately turned me away was its price, which at the time (if I remember correctly) was about $30-$40 higher than Scrivener’s. Funnily enough (and several years later), Ulysses 2 is now about $15 cheaper than Scrivener 2. Who’da thunk it?

(Updated on July 25, 2011: Since writing the above, I’ve not only used Ulysses 2.0, but I’ve also written a review of it for Mac.AppStorm. You can check it out here: “Managing Your Writing Projects with Ulysses 2.0.“)

The second app on the list is an iOS app I haven’t used yet, but the concept of it deeply intrigues me. Its developer, the Soulmen, describe Daedelus as “the first truly next-generation text editor for iPad,” and they make a bunch of fuss about the app being based on the metaphor of the paper stack (don’t ask; just watch the video).

Of course, I kid about the “fuss” thing. As you can see from the video, it actually looks pretty great.

The only reason I haven’t bought Daedelus yet is because I love, love, love my IA Writer and I don’t want another app on my iPad that competes for the same attention. Maybe if the iOS App Store could offer demos of different apps…but alas, Apple says no.

Final Thoughts

App store logoThe galaxy of writing apps on OS X and iOS is huge. It didn’t used to be. Now that it is, you owe it to yourself and to your chosen platform to explore its furthest reaches.

There are hundreds of developers out there working hard to make magical code. Most of them do it because they’re writers themselves, and they’re trying to make an app that they most want to use. Who knows? Maybe their dream app, the one they’ve put all their effort into developing, shares the same the design and features as the one writing app you’ve been waiting for. You owe it to yourself to find them.

Besides, it beats writing.

Categories
asides

A Day in the Life of John McPhee

“OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write. ” — John McPhee