Do 'real writers' Tweet?

Suggest Tweeting to some writers – or writers in their own minds – and they go all infra-dig snooty on you, like “Thou shalt not Tweet” is some kind of Writer Religion Commandment, or something.

What a mistake. Tweeting can be a wonderful discipline. For me, a former newspaper person, it’s like writing headlines. Having to squish the essence of a 1,200-word story into three lines of 18 characters each focuses one’s thinking very fast. Especially with some grizzly, cigar-chomping Ed Asner look-alike editor growling over your shoulder. And that’s kind of like the old saw: “Eat a live toad first thing every morning, and nothing worse will happen to you all day long.”

Being a ham radio operator (K4GLX) since age 13, hasn’t hurt either. As a teenager, I spent long hours thinking fast and translating information into the dots and dashes of Morse code, or CW, as we on the inside call it. Brevity, in that mode, is always more than just “the soul of wit.” It is a necessity.

I loved it when I first read Stephen King’s now famous line from On Writing: “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” It’s also full of more such encomia praising needless verbosity. We can all tighten up, me included.

So, Yikes! That’s almost 300 words up there. I better stop. But before I do, if you’re interested in a great essay on this whole topic of good writing, including Tweeting, by a master essayist, Thomas Beller, writing for The New Yorker’s “Page-Turner” feature, Google it. He reminds us, after all,  that it was Gertrude Stein who wrote, “There is no there there,” one of what he calls ”the great proto-Tweets.”

Umm: You do Google, don’t you?

On writing well

Writing well is a life-long job, I’ve learned. People and mores change, but if I ever let-up on the idea that I must always be a student of good writing, I’m doomed.

So how does that work?

Reading good writers is one way. And learning from editors.

When I was a teenager, my father perceived that I was a potential writer. So he encouraged me, and along the way he gave me a couple of books by Theodore Bernstein, then an assistant managing editor of  The New York Times. The books were collections of Bernstein’s critiques of writing by Times staff writers. They were a huge helps and even fun to read. I’ve missed them over the years, but recently I’ve discovered that The Times still does in-house critiques of its writers’ work. In a column called After Deadline  -- Newsroom Notes on Usage and Style, Philip B. Corbett does the job. He praises good examples, and offers positive criticism when it’s required. It’s published internally, but you can find it on the Internet right here.

For my writer friends and friends of writing – and I know you follow this blog – these are for you:

Uber Adds a Low-Tech Twist to Its Modern Business Model in India

 

Some of the green-and-yellow “autos” come equipped with speakers in the back that blare Bollywood hits. Many drivers will allow more than the legal maximum of three riders, leaving some passengers clinging to the sides of the vehicles. Few use their meters without a fight.

 

This feature by Nida Najar, about Uber’s move into India’s auto rickshaws, was full of fine descriptive touches. This paragraph is particularly effective because of the three-part structure, building to the short, sharp final line.

 

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Hunting a Serial Killer as a Political Enemy Nips at Their Heels

 

“Child 44,” directed by Daniel Espinosa from a screenplay by Richard Price, is an English-language movie set in Russia, which means that it is above all a festival of accents. Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Vincent Cassel measure their vowels and consonants carefully, but the most floridly enjoyable voices belong to Tom Hardy and Noomi Rapace, last seen together speaking Brooklynese in “The Drop.” In that film, Mr. Hardy dropped his r’s like a champ. Here he lands heavily on the aitches and contracts the words “it is” into the letter Z. “Zimpossible,” he says. “Zdifficult.”

 

As for “Child 44″: Znot too terrible, but znothing great, either.

 

A typical funny touch by A. O. Scott, one of several that make the review worth reading even if the movie isn’t much to cheer about.

 

An Unprecedented Tsunami of Hyperbole

We all want our stories to be engaging, even exciting. Deep reporting, clear writing and sharp detail are the best tools. But sometimes we can’t resist the impulse to pump up the prose with hyperbolic language.

It generally doesn’t work. Often, the overhyped language seems clichéd or trite rather than gripping. If every dispute is bitter, every development unprecedented, every performer a superstar, then there’s nothing so special about yours.

By all means let’s be vivid and descriptive. But restraint is a virtue, too. Here are a few recent overheated examples:

That is the largest such gap, or “spread,” since 1989, according to Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman. And it has unleashed a tsunami of capital flows from Europe to the United States.

Unless you’re describing an actual natural disaster, metaphors like “tsunami” or “earthquake” are almost always over the top. (And speaking of earthquakes, let’s not say “epicenter” when all we mean is “center.”)

But in a volatile example of how thorny and tangled the debate can become as communities nationwide implement new rules to protect the brains of young athletes, Florida’s mandate has created a combative firestorm that has reverberated across the country.

What’s more powerful than a tsunami? A “firestorm,” of course. Here, we embellished further — and mixed the metaphor — with “volatile,” “thorny,” “tangled,” “combative” and “reverberated.” The subject, by the way, was girls’ lacrosse.

The history of Atlantic Records, now part of the Warner Music Group, is populated by a small country’s worth of megastars from across the spectrum of jazz, pop and rock — names including Ray Charles, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack, Charles Mingus, Wilson Pickett, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Abba and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

First, there were singers, musicians and other performers. The truly outstanding ones were singled out as “stars.” At some point, all performers became stars, and the most successful were promoted to “superstars.” Now, apparently, in a world full of superstars, we have to switch from Latin to Greek and single out a handful of superstars as “megastars.” Putting aside the question of whether Aretha and Abba really occupy the same niche, this passage would not suffer a bit if we just called them “stars.”

In fact, Mr. Obama’s ties with teachers’ unions have grown increasingly toxic.

“Toxic,” meaning poisonous, seems like an overstatement; “strained” may be closer to the mark. And once again we’re mixing metaphors; as a colleague said, a “toxic tie” sounds like a weapon in a James Bond movie.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite his victory in this week’s elections, signaling that it is in no rush to repair a historic rift between the United States and Israel.

Perhaps it will prove historic — that is, important in history. Or perhaps it’s a blip that will pass with a new administration or other unforeseeable developments. The Times’s stylebook urges care in using “historic”:

Use it with caution for a current event, because history’s verdict is rarely predictable by journalists, and the word suggests hyperbole.

War Baby scores in new review

 

War Baby - 4 stars (of 5)

E-Book Planet’s Review

War Baby takes us on the journey of a recovering alcoholic. It is a powerful autobiographical account which demonstrates how any of us can stumble into a pitfall, and how the battle to get out can be a long and arduous one.

Dougald Blue writes in a descriptive, flowing manner which carries real emotional weight and makes each scene tangible. At times this book feels nostalgic, but more often it feels pained or bitter, and the circumstances Blue found himself in have taught him valuable lessons which he is happy to share. He has strived to capture the complexity of his own mind and of the individuals around him in order to process difficulties which are too often oversimplified.

The characters in the book are real people (with their identities changed) and by the time I had finished reading, I felt I knew them as individuals. The book is brutally honest throughout, and I imagine Blue exorcised a lot of demons during the writing process. His honesty just made the read that much more absorbing.

Those who have faced problems such as addiction will find a lot to relate to, and those who know someone going through such problems may  be able to understand them better once they have finished reading. This is a very good book which is a little on the short side, but has a reasonable asking price, and so is worth picking up.

More here: http://goo.gl/6Q2OnV

BOOK REVIEW: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

First things first: the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature last year. And it was the number two best-seller among The New York Times’ hard-cover fiction books last week.

So why all the accolades? You will know by the time you have finished reading the first chapter. It is less than a page long – a whole chapter, mind you – and you find yourself engulfed in something that is almost impossible to put down – all 530 pages of it, all delivered in the same staccato short-chapters. I had dreams about the story. I felt at times as though I were in it. And I learned from its telling.

Set mostly in Nazi-occupied France during World War II, All the Light weaves together the lives of a French girl who has been blind since age six and Werner, a young German man, conscripted for service to the Führer, and a genius with radio and electronics.

How they finally meet and relate and what happens in their lives is the stuff of some of the best writing I have ever known. It is not what you expect. It is otherworldly – and in more than just ways of relationship.

There are legends of perfect diamonds – things the Germans seek to steal and put in what they plan to be the world’s largest and greatest museum ever.

Meanwhile a patriot they cannot find risks his life to radio codes – and Shubert’s music – to the Allies forming in England to take on the Teutonic Übertreibung. And in the end Doerr has somehow created one of the most beautiful stories of how we get along in this wretched world by caring for each other.   

The book takes concentration, and all the more – soul, spirit, belief, wonder, and imagination.

It is not for the faint of heart or the literary gadfly, the seeker of cheap thrills. To them I say: stay with your dime-novel-equivalent e-books.  All the Light is some serious literature.

It provokes thought – requires it, really – and is spirit-challenging with unforgettably well-drawn characters. Meshed with Doerr’s mastery of simile and metaphor, the result is a book that spoke to my heart. And our spirits are passed along, no matter what.

“And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel these paths? ... They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken every word transmitted still reverberating within it.”

What reconciliation looks like

One hundred and fifty years ago this week (April 1-5, 1865), the Confederate capital of Richmond fell to Union forces. This editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch earlier this week recalled those days. Click here to read it.

Abraham Lincoln and his young son Todd came to town on April 5. By then most of the commercial areas of the city had been reduced to ruins by a fire set by Confederates who were heading south. Their plan was to retreat to Danville, Virginia. But the soldiers barely made it to Appomattox Court House, where Lee formally surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865.

Just a few days later, Confederate General Joe Johnston surrendered to General William Tecumseh Sherman at Durham Station, North Carolina, effectively ending the Civil War.

Reconstruction followed. But less is written about reconciliation during those turbulent days.

This modest structure, located just behind the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and open to visitors to this day, evinces that spirit of reconciliation.

This is the Confederate Memorial Chapel. It was completed in 1887, funded by private donations. The largest single individual donation for its construction came from former United States President and General of the Union Army, Ulysses S. Grant.

That’s what reconciliation looks like.

BOOK REVIEW: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Writing a review of Bel Canto feels like writing the obituary of a long-lost friend who has just been found.

It touches something inside – something  rarely feel-able in this time of so much contention among so many different warring creeds, peoples, and thoughts. It reminds me that while something may have passed away from a troubled world, deep-down we may yet be touched anew and energized at rare times in our lives. Bel Canto heralds one of those times.

It is a feeling of love. Real love, universal love, not the everyday family-and-friends type,  but the kind that extends to all people at all times and which resonates with Jesus’ declaration that he has come, died and been resurrected for “all people.”

So while I write at the beginning of Holy Week, it is still a tough review to write for other reasons. The story is too beautiful to commit to the mere words of another writer. Patchett is the only person who could have written it. She is a “virtuoso,” says her publisher Harper Collins. And Bel Canto is her “most exquisite” work, The New York Times writes. In other words, you have to read it to get it.

Set in an unnamed Latin American city, a lavish reception for a visiting world-class opera singer is interrupted by a terrorist attack. A rough-hewn but disciplined band of armed thugs from the jungle forces everyone – the celebrated opera star included – to the floor and the warriors take over, making their nonnegotiable demands of the authorities which soon arrive outside the walled compound of he nation’s vice-presidential mansion.

Sounds like game, set, match … but the book’s just getting started when that happens. Its beauty is to come in the unfolding, which is simply one of the most remarkable stories I have ever read. At first it moves along at a barely perceptible pace. But you can feel it. Then you see a larger story building itself, bejeweled along the way by a strange and unexpected symbiosis of terrorists and their high-toned captives.

“…he had no secrets then and now he did: it was that now there was something that was strictly between himself and one other person, that it was something that was completely their own that it would have been pointless to even try to speak of it to someone else…”

That’s it. Anything else would be what they call “spoilers". So spoil yourself, and read this amazing piece of literary genius.

And, of course, you can always buy it through Ms. Patchett’s now-famous Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books.

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Click here for a link to Parnassus Books

And here for a link to Ann Patchett’s interview with TerryGross on NPR’s Fresh Air

And here for a New York Times review of Ms. Patchett’s latest book, along with commentary on her style and career.

What every boy needs to know about sex

When I was working on my memoir, WarBaby, I doodled about some of the highlights of my growing up. One memory stands out. It was about sex and the public library.

I was 17. That was many years ago – days when students were required to do hard research and write original papers that had damned well have been at least C-grade in quality. A long time ago, for sure.

I came to love libraries in those days. I did much of my research for papers in the main city  library. It was near my father’s office. After school I’d ride the bus downtown, work in the library and then ride home with my dad.

One day, I was browsing in the library and I came across a book entitled What Every 16-Year-Old Boy Should Know About Sex. Well, being 17, I suddenly developed an overwhelming desire to see if I had missed anything.

I slid the book in with the three or so others I had picked out and approached the check-out lady. She processed my books until she got to The One. The quince-like expression of her face reminded me of Lily Tomlin as The Telephone Lady on the old Laugh-In TV show. (Tells you a bit about how long ago this was, eh?)

“I’m sorry,” she said with a salacious smirk. “You can’t check this book out.”

“Why?” I said. “I’m 17, and the book’s for 16-year-olds.”

“But you have to be 18 to check out books of this nature,” she replied, the salacious smirk morphing into a Leni-Riefenstahl-wannabe grimace.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said, asking for the name and address of the head librarian to whom I later wrote.

(His reply was classic bureaucratese – wordswordswords, all saying yesnoyesnoyesno and my favorite “notwithstanding our commitment to learning…”)

I dealt with it. I waited out the bureaucracy. And when I turned 18, I went back and got That Book.

They should have called it What Every Ten-Year-Old Boy Already Knows About Sex. 

The poetry group's meeting

Once all were cozy

I started reading me poesy

in the dim-lit den

of a house with drawn blinds.

We brooked no interruption

from the noise and disruption

of the world in turmoil outside.

Just a little poesy,

with mayhap a nip of rosey,

as we sought some cheer for the ear.

But things have a way

of bringing a fray

when someone gets nosey.

So it was no surprise

when I came to surmise

a stranger snuck into our midst.

It was our vanity

to keep our sanity

by leaving warp and woof outside.

And here was this dude

with the potential for rude

interruption of our rosey and poesy.

But no posey lover

under cleverer cover

had ever darkened our door.                                             

For through fates unknown

into our midst he’d been thrown

to escape all the woofing and warping.

So we welcomed him as guest

perceiving his quest

to be one with ours perforce.

And we had quaffed enough rosey

to invite his initiation by poesy

so the test was laid out for him thusly:

You can join our merry band

and we’ll gladly lend a hand

if you can pass this one little test

Promise never to pitch

a line with a twitch

like…

     “There once was a man from Nantucket…”