What’s It About?

I found that one of my faults when writing assignments on tight deadlines, is that I don’t focus my writing enough.I’m not sure why, but now that I know it can be a problem, you can be sure that I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

When you ask “what is this writing piece about” you should always be able to describe the what or objective of the narration concisely in a sentence. When you answer with multiple items, you know you have to pick one and cancel out or shorten considerably the remainder. Not only is it good practice to be brief with extraneous details and items that can potentially send you writing on a tangent…but more importantly, you don’t want to annoy your reader. So it’s best to stay focused. Be on target.

It’s also important to find a trusted soul — or if you’re particularly gifted by the writign gods, then two or more — whom you can send items to for clear, objective feedback. I can’t think of a better way to find out what’s good and what’s bad. What items stay with the reader and what item will bug them. Whenever something bothers your reviewer(s) pay particular attention, because you probably can detect the inconsistency and eliminate it better than anyone. Feedback will undoubtedly provide you the key to the lock of a good writing piece.

Personally, I always welcome constructive feedback. It’s just that sometimes those who end up providing me solicited or unsolicited feedback can have hidden agendas that I detect and then this information taints the usefulness of the feedback. It’s also important to discern when valuable feedback is being offered no matter who is offering it to you. Each bit of feedback is a gift, so make use of it to improve your writing.

Do you have a particular technique that helps you stay on target when writing? Do you catch yourself meandering? Do you later use your meanders in other pieces? I’ve acquired the practice of noting down splices and portions of thoughts that I think can be expanded into blog posts or writing pieces. It’s important to write down just enough so you can recapture the train of thought when you return to it.

So how do you keep on track? Do you have a group or a sole reviewer you trust? What do you do with tangents?

Guest Blog Success: Optimize Your Social Media Optimization

I was invited to guest post for the great folks at the Search Engine Blog. Please take a gander at my post, titled “Optimize Your Social Media Delegation.”

Copywriting Zen

There’s an excellent post over at Copyblogger about The Art of Zen Copywriting for Bloggers. It discusses the fine line and balance that a hard sale copywriter must strike when entreating the interest and action of blog readers.

Eventually, good writing translates into customer/audience action–action favorable to the business that owns the website, blog, Twitter account, Facebook account, or whatever other channel they’re disseminating through on Web 2.0.

The Zen approach is softer, you know your audience is reading you because they are already interested, they already want to do business with you, and you should engage and entreat them as individuals with personalized needs.

Take a gander at the blog post, it’s really good and has some very potent, actionable steps to consider.

Book Reading Update: 2010

I’ve read halfway through The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. Excellent, excellent book that I feel covers the areas of motivation, self-help, philosophy, and social sciences very well. Each chapter attempts to capture one of the major humanistic lessons that are common across cultures and religions to help us become more in tune with our nature and with those around us.

I found The Pursuit of Happiness and Love and Attachments to be my favorite two chapters now. I have 5 more chapters to go and hope to finish this book by next weekend sometime.

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Another book that I’ve tried to finish reading is Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing. I find a little convoluted in the word choice and narrative, but because Bradbury’s such an esteemed and renown personality in the field of science fiction, I am making myself read it. I really hope to get the momentum I lost and get it done with.

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I also received two, very large textbooks for my two computer courses starting in about a week. I begun reading one of the books and found it too information-intensive (to an anal retentive extent), however, because the topic is one I have experience with, I am not too worried.

Writing Great Notes

I’ve received some gifts from co-workers and have had to write the pursuant thank you notes. I’ve also gotten some holiday greeting cards sent out. Whenever faced with these two tasks, I’m always stuck with the usual holiday and new year’s wishes or variances thereafter. Not very illuminated writing.

And as I wallow in my mediocrity and pedestrianism, wallowing in my tepid notes…then things like the following hit me from left field: the best thank you note ever, courtesy of the two personal assistants who work for famed author Neil Gaiman.

Writing Course Update

I signed up for two writing classes, come January 14:

• LAE 515 – Feature Writing (Chicago 1x week)
• LAE 599 – Thesis Project (TBD per advisor’s sched)

It’s an ambitious schedule, but that’s the only way I know how to make progress on the program I’m pursuing. It’s also a great way to keep busy in the cold, dark, winter months of Illinois — sometimes it’s the hardest time of all year.

If all works well, I’ll have 3/4 or more of my Masters thesis completed by mid-March.

I was very pleased to learn that my last class’ teacher will be also teaching the feature writing class. She was great, and helped create an amazing environment in the class.

I am also taking two web programming classes at another school to catch up on the many developments in HTML since 1999 (my last web development coursework). I will definitely be busy as a bee!

The Walk

The wires were buzzing loudly.  Electrical pylons sided the prairie pathway on the weedier side. The drizzle and snow mix were making the wires buzz like many ventilators set on low. Barely audible, yet noticeably there.

I was getting soaked. Just a little further, just down to the loop where I can walk it around like a U-turn and then go back home. Back inside where the air is warm and the rainy,  foggy, snowy evening is shut out.

The owl on a nearby tree heard my footsteps and began hooting softly, when I looked up to find his roost he lifted up both wings softly and glided away on the night air.

The road up ahead on the bridge was illuminated by a single light pole, the foggy air surrounding it made the orange glow seem like two arms opening up in a half embrace under the lamp.

Poe Book Auctioned for over $660K

According to a post by @NPR (on Twitter), a book by Edgar Allan Poe fetched just over $660K USD at a Christie’s auction – making it the most expensive book of American literature auctioned to date.

Word of the Day

Today’s word of the day was captured in one of the horoscope websites I read. Sadly, I forgot which one and where to find it :*(

But without further delay: pantheism. This word means the philosophy or belief that nature and God are equivalent, or one, all-encompassing entity.

Reviewing Another Writer’s Work

It’s very difficult to review a friends work, and it’s awfully easy being honest reviewing a stranger’s work. However, I always like to look on the positive and emphasize it over the negatives when reviewing something…unless the negatives outweigh the positives.

Someone approached me on Shelfari and asked me to review their book. It took me about a month to finally finish it. It was only 170 pages long, including a cover page and a title page.

I questioned this lag. It’s exceptionally unusual for me to take this long reading something. I read hundreds of things in a day or more. Was it partially due to a very busy schedule? It was that, and the fact that  the book was slow-moving and became a difficult read. It was a fictional story about a family in New Orleans and the people they interact with–some of questionable character and health of mind–with most of the emphasis on the two children, a 16-year-old girl (the narrator) and a 19-year-old boy.

There were many opportunities where the writer could have cleaned up the narrative stream to tighten up the story, the characters, and the plot–I’m confused whether there was a plot. Some dialogue was narrated instead of used as dialogue. Some details emerged out of nowhere and were taken for granted when they did, instead of being incorporated into the storyline in dialogue or a description–and then some of these details weren’t even relevant to the story anyway.

There was a grittiness and confusion that made me ask myself whether this was stream of consciousness, the aura/environment the story took place in, or just haziness due to an organizational issue. I’m opting for the latter two.

This was also the first case I’ve come across where the narrator, one of the main characters, has very little personality that we can speak of — is the character just flat or is it flaky–a character flaw? What is this character’s motivation? Why do I feel like I’m seeing through here eyes without her really making much of an impact in the story? Why is everyone so self centered? You don’t buy in to self-centered, unlikable characters. Why do we get the feeling everyone is in abject poverty up until little details slip out every now and again that reveal these people have much more resources than we first thought?

You start questioning your understanding of the story. Is it me just not getting it or is it how the author drew it out, with too many holes? The camera moves us through scenery and events that I don’t feel I have a real stake in–either in understanding them or enjoying them. Not anymore. I just don’t care. When you lose the audience’s interest, when they stop caring about the characters or the plot, you’ve lost it all.

It’s troubling when you see potential just missed by thismuch. Lots of the areas I mentioned above could have been rewritten, tightenend up, or otherwise reworked to create a connecting thread, a writing style, and characters that worked together more neatly.

I couldn’t take it anymore so I replied to the author on Shelfari’s private message system that I couldn’t provide his book a positive review. And I apologized. I’m not sure why I apologized, I had to sit through the 170 pages. I saved any long explanations and just used those very simple words in two, concise sentences. Something I wish the book had more of.