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Crafting Things and Quiet Time

Random thoughts, Writing January 27, 2015 Comments: 2

I have been trying to find my way back to writer mode. Kitten is now 13 weeks old and the current challenges are normal kittenly concerns – don’t chew that electrical cord, not a good idea to pounce on a sleeping dog, unrolling the entire toilet paper roll is a bad idea. (He has particular trouble with that last one as the unrolling makes him so gleeful.) Now the vigilance is similar to parental, but not quite so intense. Still, I am struggling with getting my mind into a fertile writing groove.

I have had time to think about creativity. I always find it interesting to steer a conversation onto a person’s impression of their own creativity, especially if I consider that person to be creative in some manner. It is rare for the person to define themselves as creative. “Oh, no I am (fill in the blank with any number of adjectives)…” Creative seems to be something reserved for the application of lofty projects and considerable talent.

Crafty is often the chosen adjective, more likely if my conversation companion is female. Crafty seems to fall within the realm of hobbyist, putterer, occasional participant. Somehow people are more comfortable identifying themselves as crafty – or some word that directly identifies their chosen mode of creative expression such as knitter, woodworker – than claiming to be creative.

Both of my parents were creative, crafty – dad with woodworking and mom with sewing. I spent hours quietly watching each work on projects as a child. Dad also painted, made models, and drew. Mom also wrote, played the piano, and learned dozens of crafts over her lifetime. I grew up expecting creativity to be a part of life. Not only to admire what others did, but to participate in something creative of my own.

It takes time for quiet thought, this ability to create. Melville said that a writer needs to be in a ‘quiet, grass growing’ mood to write and I think that applies to almost any other creative endeavor. Time must be carved out of an overfull schedule, understanding of when the mind is most fertile for ideas to grow. It should be a block of uninterrupted time. Which is hard to arrange with a small creature in the house.

I am eager to get my writing muscles back into shape, but fear I will not be a regular poster for some time unfortunately.

So, what about you – do you consider yourself creative?

Collaborative Writing

Writing is supposed to be done alone in a cold garret somewhere. The writer tortured to some degree by the blank page. Characters, storyline, theme development all taking up a great deal of space in the writer’s thoughts. Is that still the image?

How about the place of the reader? Should a writer develop ideas based solely on personal interest and preference, or in some consideration of the potential reader? Particularly in this medium, which is so immediately public. And yet, only so much so as the blog’s SEO commands.

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I used to wonder about writing as part of a group. I did take a play writing course in high school where we often worked in teams on pairs. Sometimes this led to better pieces and sometimes to drivel. How does the division of labor work out?

I warmed to collaborative writing in the business environment. It helped that I came across a writing partner with similar sensibilities and a more developed (at the time) methodology. One or the other of us would usually take a first stab at writing the first draft after a brief discussion of need or intent and then we would sit together and hone it. Move sections about, sharpen wording, tighten the message so that there was plenty of white space. White space is very important in business writing. In the early days, I thought that she spent too much time honing. But I learned better editing.

I came to realize that my interest in fiction was actually useful in this writing environment. Story is necessary here, too. Not as in making something up, but in creating a clear arc; keeping the focus of the piece clean. Every detail isn’t necessary, in fact too much detail is detrimental to keeping the reader engaged in the message.

We are writing about this issue. This is a bit of the background for why we are writing. This is the solution. The adage to start in the middle has merit here, captures interest. Keeps things moving.

A strong conclusion – with a call to action. Here is what we want you to do with this information. In business writing the reader is highly important, if not properly considered then the message may fail. Collaboration of minds and writing styles can make the effort more effective.

What Do You Recommend?

Business Writing September 26, 2014 Leave a comment

A thoughtful recommendation is a fine thing to give or receive. LinkedIn has made this process a whole lot easier. My first attempt to get a recommendation from the Head Librarian where I worked during college didn’t go as well as I planned. While she appreciated the work that I had done, she never did get around to writing that recommendation and sending it to me. I think that she might have been more likely to follow through with her intention if she’d been able to post it to my profile.

Back in the day, a professional kept a portfolio that would include originals of recommendation letters on company letterhead, carefully saved in clear plastic sleeves. I still have my dad’s judiciously built portfolio, in a nice leather binding, glowing letters spanning his career.

I have actually enjoyed writing the recommendations that I have given. (I also see benefit in thoughtfully writing employee reviews.) I spend time thinking about the characteristics and skills of that person that make them effective at their job. I tie these to specific projects and tasks that the person has completed. Sometimes if time has elapsed since we worked together, I might ask to meet and talk to refresh my memory. Vague platitudes from me aren’t going to do anybody any good.

I learned about having that conversation beforehand from one of my HR friends. I asked her for a recommendation and she asked me about my goals and expectations from the recommendation. A nice addition to the question – would you give me a recommendation – and the usual casual answer – sure.

But I don’t want to be told exactly what to say either. Any more than I am going to answer a survey on a company when they tell me that they want to hear that I was highly satisfied. (If you already know the answer, why bother to pretend to ask the question…) The reader will be able to tell when I have taken the time to craft my impression of that person from my own experience and interactions.

I’ve come to see recommendations as another facet of writing as communication. It might be simpler to ask and to post now, but that just means the effort can all go to being thoughtful in your expression.

Pursuing Ideas

Writing September 23, 2014 Leave a comment

I have trouble getting my mind to quiet down. Tick, tick, tick it goes – all the time. Sometimes it is a gibberish jumble and other times laser focused on a single topic. I think that is part and parcel of writing since writing begins with the formulation of an idea.

What makes a person a writer is the compulsion to write, to put that idea on paper (virtual or real) and pursue it, build it, launch it, nurture its growth. Sometimes that idea that started out as a tangle of gibberish becomes a viable, wonderful thing. And sometimes that laser clear idea collapses into useless mush. For now. (I don’t fully discard any post that I’ve started, it might have a seed for a future idea.)

Walking and driving distances are great for mulling ideas but lousy for capturing them. I now try to remember to keep a recording device in the car on long trips, and can find myself chanting a couple of sentences when hurrying home from an amble.

Waking up slowly is also fertile idea time. My mind likes to tell me the things it has been pondering while asleep if I let it.

Sometimes repetitive tasks can bring forth a good thought or two that have been wandering in the back of my mind while my hands are busy. It can be annoying when the thought gels in the morning when I’m getting ready for work so all I can do is jot it down on my way out the door. And hope that I can pick it back up at the end of the day.

I like the discipline of posting regularly as a bit of pressure to complete an idea. Although there are periods when too many ideas don’t pan out. And nothing that I have previously completed appeals to me at the moment when I should post to meet my self-imposed deadline. Sometimes my post meets the writer’s version of software developer’s minimum viable product. And sometimes a post that I felt came together quite well is received with a thud or echoing silence.

What the writer writes isn’t always what the reader perceives.

Or maybe I am overthinking. What is the right amount of thinking on any one topic, idea or issue? My hat is off to the person who gets the answer to that one right more often than not.

Now that I am rounding up in a couple of months to completion of my second year blogging, I have been thinking about objectives. (Different pursuit of ideas.) My first objective was to set up a blog and see if I could sustain it past the average of 4 months. Counting my first blog, I have certainly met that objective. Then I thought a year was a fine goal. Met, check.

As I became more familiar with the blogosphere, I realized that I wanted to find a community of bloggers, and I have managed to find or be found by others with similar interests. Not quite a community since there is little cohesion beyond the fact that we are all blogging on WordPress.

Not being content with blogging for the sake of blogging, I have been wrestling with the open question of ‘now what?’. I don’t have an answer for myself. I will keep pursuing ideas to blog about while I pursue this larger idea.

Any suggestions?

Things I did Instead

Random thoughts, Writing August 26, 2014 Comments: 2

I have a post that I have been working on for the past couple of days, but it isn’t ready to show yet. I have other half done posts that aren’t even that close and time says it is up, post time is at hand. Crap.

How many others have sat down to write today’s blog post and noodled on one thing until it petered out, and then fiddled with another until it seemed garbled? How often have you stared at the screen for a little bit and thought about how you got farther today than yesterday when you didn’t even bother to open up a new post and stare at the screen?

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When writing isn’t happening, eventually I stand up and wander about the house and:

Clean the tracks on the shower stall and the tracks on the sliding door
Water the indoor plants
Take inventory of the kitchen and bathroom for a grocery list
Pull out the lambswool tool and get rid of cobwebs
Go for a walk (and I’m even nice enough to bring my son’s dog along)
Collect quotes cut out from various magazines that have appealed to me and put them in the book that I keep for that purpose
Go through the pile of mail, flyers and papers that breed on the table
Ponder what to make to use up the 2 overripe bananas on the counter
Watch Sneakers or other dated, but still entertaining movies
Thought about going out to get plants for my 2 hanging baskets but then realized that wouldn’t appear to be writing in the slightest

And this is the post that you get today. What do you get done when you are ‘writing’?

Why Write?

Random thoughts, Writing July 15, 2014 Comments: 2

I was raised to think, not just do. This thing happened to me, mom. Why do you think it happened like that? What can you do about it? The balance is to think and then do, or you get analysis paralysis.

This is at least the third version of a piece that I revisit periodically ever since I stumbled upon this exercise. The first version was read by me and the person at Poets and Writers magazine who rejected the submission. The second was posted on my original blog as Why I Write. It seems like every other person is a frustrated writer these days. Some people are attracted by the potential for fast money, so it behooves those of us who persist at the craft to think about why we do what we do. And since we are writers, thinking usually means writing.

Writing is permanence in a disposable world. Committing words to paper – electronic or actual – requires a bit of thought beyond letting them spill from your mouth and moving on. Which doesn’t mean that a writer can’t do the written version of misspeaking, mind you. That’s why we need editors.

For every attempted act of communication there is equal opportunity for misunderstanding and discord as there is for understanding and agreement. Written communication allows the opportunity for more deliberate consideration of intent and word choice to appeal to the ideal audience.

We learn very early, probably as our first conscious thought, that we have to figure out how to communicate. Our needs are simple but urgent – food, sleep, a fresh diaper. But babies have little means to get their point across and then they start to decode the sounds that they hear as words with attached generally accepted meanings. Ah, communication begins.

We spend the rest of our lives communicating, whether we actively think about it or not. Most often through oral communication, but we have to learn that pesky written part too. (It is fascinating that for as many people who claim interest in writing, a large number of people groan at the idea of using writing as a means to communicate in business.)

Spoken words can fade in the memory, or morph into something entirely else than originally intended but written down they can become information that can be referenced again and again. Imagine being given multi-step instructions verbally and then having to recall step 6 or so, some time later. If you have this ability, I applaud you. I can create a mental list of 4-5 things that I need at the store, recite it all the way and only manage to remember that there were supposed to be 4-5 things in my basket when I actually get to the store.

The act of writing, itself, helps the brain to remember the point more clearly. This is why we are taught to take notes in school. Typing the thing has some power, but not nearly the power as picking up a pencil or pen and putting it to paper.

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Written communication reaches more people with exactly the same message than through word of mouth. (Remember the game of telephone?) This doesn’t mean that the message will be interpreted the same by all recipients, but at least it was the same message at the beginning.

I wasn’t sure what would come out when I decided to revisit this topic today, it appears to be more general and less personal than the other efforts. Who knows how it will turn out next time.

The Lack of Possession that Killed the Impression

Business Writing, Work Life June 10, 2014 Comments: 2

I’ve never claimed to be a grammarian. My time as an English major was spent reading literature, not parsing sentence structure. (Though a tortured sentence could make my enjoyment of any story come to a screeching halt.) Spelling, now – I used to be pretty good at correct spelling until Microsoft Word made me a little soft. (It’s my fingers that can’t spell, not my brain – really – they get a lot of little squiggly red lines.)

The most basic point of decent grammar and spelling are to create common understanding so that we can communicate. Given that, I suppose my grammar is sound enough due to all the practice of reading and writing, just don’t ask me much beyond explaining nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. I base most of my grammar judgment in how a sentence or phrase sounds when I read it out loud. (A trick I highly recommend before you send out that message to anyone whose opinion matters.)

I am still doing much better than some people. Such as those who never grasped the important task that the apostrophe holds in showing possession. This must be why we had to do pages and pages of Bill’s dog and Laura’s pencil ad nauseam and still too many people might call this Beths blog as if it were written by numerous people named Beth. (Clearly they don’t do their typing on Microsoft Word because I just had to tell it to ignore Beths.)

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And since I brought up their – more possession – it shouldn’t be confused with they’re there, as in they are there in that moment to understand their proper usage.

Maybe in this world of text speak and informal interaction it isn’t as important to make the proper spelling and grammatical impression. But maybe it is – if you want the job, or the grade, or to show your erudition.

Not so Great Now, But Later…

Random thoughts May 30, 2014 Comments: 2

My niece had a bad few moments yesterday afternoon that is primo material for a great story later. I am part of the phone tree for the alarm on my sister’s house and sometime before 3pm today my cell phone rang but I was in the middle of something so I let it go to voicemail. When I checked the phone later, I had a message from the alarm company that ended by telling me that the police had been called. Curious, all this time that I have been on the phone tree and this is the first time that they have called. (I couldn’t tell you what I am supposed to say to them… I think I have it written down somewhere.)

Anyway, my niece got home from school and set off the alarm and got to have an unpleasant conversation with a local police officer. I feel empathy for her embarrassment frustration and worry, she is that lovely age of 13 when almost everything is potential for embarrassment. I won’t mention yet that she will be able to tell this story for years.

I think back on some of my moments that still get laughs when I trot out the stories… There was my high school graduation when I was the only one out of 700 plus proud graduates who managed to catch the sleeve of my gown on the stair rail and I had to walk backwards up the steps, in high heels, to unhook myself. There was the time when I was dressed like a ghoul and I locked myself and my kids out of our house and car when we were trying to go to a Cub Scout Halloween party.

I have to laugh when I think about the time when I was dropping off my older son at preschool and accidentally locked my younger son in the car. He just kept smiling and waving at me when I tried to pantomime him unlocking his car seat and hitting the button to unlock the car doors. (I had a bad habit for several years of locking myself in or out of places.)

I’m not going to say that I don’t lose my cool when things go a bit haywire, but honestly having something go a bit off just makes better memories. I try to remind myself of this in the moment. To err is human, and makes for a fine story.

Poetic to Prosaic

Random thoughts February 3, 2014 Comments: 4

Prosaic is one of those words that I come upon infrequently and in such context that I never bothered to look it up in the dictionary. So I never had a clear understanding of its meaning, only gleaned it from the situations where I found it used. I’ve recently discovered that I had the wrong idea of this word all along.

In gleaning a meaning, I give weight to the way that the word sounds to me and prosaic has a pleasant little lilt to it. But it means the same as mundane – which sounds as it is intended, stodgy and dull. In enjoying the way that prosaic sounded, I was uplifting it to be similar in meaning to poetic instead of its opposite. Being a word in the periphery of my awareness, I never thought about the origin; its direct relationship to the word prose. A word which encompasses all of my efforts on this blog, a cousin of my chosen word essay. Around 1746 the dictionary says prosaic’s meaning was “having the character of prose (in contrast to the feeling of poetry)”. This was almost 100 years after the word came into being.

I love the huge variety of words that we have at our disposal (and yet we still have so much difficulty expressing ourselves at times), some of which have been with us for centuries. With such a vast selection, is it odd or understandable that most of us use so very few words repeatedly and some words become so overused as to be akin to nails on a chalkboard? (Think of just about any buzz word, which I wrote about on my old blog last year, Buzzspeak, Hmmm.)

It seems understandable to me that we become familiar with a narrow selection of words and then use what is most familiar. In our constant search for meaning and value, we cling to the things that are comfortable and familiar. Regardless of how prosaic they may be.

Formal Writing Habits

Business Writing, Work Life, Work Smarter, Writing September 17, 2013 Comments: 2

A friend called the other day to offer a suggestion for a blog post. (I love it when they do.) And we ended up in a bit of a debate. Well, half of one anyway since we agreed that there is still a place for formal writing styles. But disagreed whether the upcoming generations will consider this to be a truth. Millennials now in the workplace, and those upcoming generations still in school.

Cursive writing seems to be a dying art, saved now for posh invitations. I’m ok with that, a lot of people say that they can’t read my writing anyway. So too will it be for formal letter templates? The salutation, indentation of a new paragraph – or my preferred extra carriage space – full sentences, grammar and punctuation? (Do these younger people who’ve only known typing on a computer even know what I mean by carriage space?)

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I am betting on the continuation of business letter formatting. It is not a just because sort of thing, there is logic behind these rules. Formal address is respectful and the format helps the eyes and the mind absorb the message where big blocks of unpunctuated text make the eyes and brain balk.

Everything old is new again – this has been rediscovered over and over as humans have evolved on this planet. Formal styling in writing will see a resurgence. The content of a message must be packaged carefully, in order to retain its meaning.

Your turn – what say you? Don’t let your younger self that struggled with all the little rules speak here; think about reading comprehension, eye strain, possibility of misunderstanding. (Hey, if we could maintain this strict formatting using a typewriter doing it on computers is a breeze… My friend isn’t here to push her side of the debate…)