How’s this for a metric of decline: There’s a newsletter called ‘Plant Closing News’

by Grant Hamilton

I just read a fantastic column on the ongoing economic struggle (recession? near-collapse?) and how it continues to affect people even as the market appears to have escaped. I would characterize it as a must-read. It’s called “The Ghosts of ‘Old G.M.’ and you can find it in the New York Times.

Paul Clemens, the writer, ties in the “new” G.M. stock offering with the spectre of “old” G.M. plants, which, vacant and shuttered, still litter the landscape and occupy what he calls “an outsized amount of psychic space.”

Several passages stood out for me, but I was particularly struck by this bit:

Plant closings cost jobs, of course. But on a smaller scale, for a finite time, they also create them. I talked to workers from the auction company that ran the initial fire sale; to the riggers who took the equipment apart; to the truckers who hauled the equipment away; to workers from the scrap company that cut up the presses that hadn’t been sold overseas.

All kinds of businesses are involved in plant closings, so many that there’s even a trade publication: Plant Closing News, a biweekly newsletter “targeted to surplus industry service providers,” including “rebuilders, used equipment dealers, dismantlers, demolishers, remediation contractors, equipment riggers, craters and equipment transport firms looking for current business opportunities, particularly those arising from the closing or relocating of North American industrial manufacturing plants.”

There’s a lot to absorb in that passage, not least “surplus industry service providers,” a phrase for our economic times if ever there was one. Taking apart industry is an industry, and tracking the decline of the one for the benefit of the other is the job of Jon Clark, who runs Plant Closing News.

I was also struck by his closing paragraphs, in which he remembered a Philip Roth passage:

Roth imagined a scene of a father giving his son this advice while attending a baseball game: “Now, what I want you to do is watch the scoreboard. Stop watching the field. Just watch what happens when the numbers change on the scoreboard. Isn’t that great?” Then Mr. Roth asks: “Is that politicizing the baseball game? Is that theorizing the baseball game? No, it’s having not the foggiest idea in the world what baseball is.”

Sounds like the disconnect between the economic activity of the market and the economic experience so many people are facing. Powerful stuff.

(photo by Ben Lawson — taken in Saskatchewan!)

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Things to do in November

by T. Keith Edmunds

I meant to post this yesterday, but we’re still only on the second day of the month, so there’s still time to partake in the two greatest events to take up the entire month of November: write a book and grow a moustache.

Yes, both are endorsed activities, albeit by completely different groups.

November is “National Novel Writing Month.” This activity is simply a way to encourage people who have always wanted to write a book to get 50,000 words down on paper over the course of the month. Note that these do not necessarily have to be quality words, but no matter how bad your book is, by the end of the month, if you are successful, you will have at the very least a first draft of your novel.

There are all sorts of online tools and encouragement for this project. I encourage you to try. I have at least half a dozen friends that are doing it. Check out the Nano website (www.nanowrimo.org) and join in!

November is also Movember (www.movember.com) is a worldwide event that raises awareness and funds for men’s health. As indicated on the website:

Movember challenges men to change their appearance and the face of men’s health by growing a moustache. The rules are simple, start Movember 1st clean-shaven and then grow a moustache for the entire month. The moustache becomes the ribbon for men’s health, the means by which awareness and funds are raised for prostate cancer. Much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, the men of Movember commit to growing a moustache for 30 days.

In 2009, Canada ran the second largest campaign in the world, raising almost $8 million for Prostate Cancer Canada.

I bet that somewhere someone is combining these ideas and writing a novel about a man’s quest to grow a moustache. If there isn’t, I’m doing it.

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The writing style of Absurd Intellectuals

by T. Keith Edmunds

Using a statistical tool that “analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them to those of the famous writers,” I decided to determine what famous writer Grant is most similar to. In order to ensure the validity of this test, I selected a number of Grant’s recent posts to see if there is consistency in (a) this tool and/or (b) Grant’s writing style.

Based on this post: Margaret Atwood.

Using this post: David Foster Wallace.

By analyzing this entry: David Foster Wallace.

And finally, based the most popular post accessed on this site: Dan Brown.

Thus, according to my analysis, Grant tends to write like a male whose name begins with a “D.” That’s science.

You can analyze your own writing style at I Write Like (iwl.me).

(According to this humble entry, I also write like David Foster Wallace.)

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The natural world — not good, not bad, just indifferent

by Grant Hamilton

I’ve just finished reading a wonderful essay that I think you should all go and check out here.

Half book review, half something more, Mark Dery riffs on a book by Gordon Grice, “Deadly Kingdom: The Book of Dangerous Animals”. It’s an entertaining and thoughtful essay on its own, but it also makes me really want to read the book, too.

Dery starts with a hint at the animal nature of mankind:

Do you, like me, rejoice in the knowledge that you could eat an adult mouse whole, if you wanted to? …. The rodent’s bones are “no more troublesome than those of a catfish.” In medieval England … “a mouse on toast was thought to cure colds.”

But he quickly segues into the corrolary: if humans are animals, then animals are not human — and investing animals with anthropomorphic desires and motivations doesn’t help anyone.

Grice does an end run around the Free Willy/Jaws binary, the culture/nature version of the virgin/whore dualism. “I often read accounts that point out what the human victim did ‘wrong’ before she was attacked by a bear or a shark,” he writes. “Many writers depict virtually all animal attacks as ‘provoked’ by the victim.” (The blame-the-victim rape narrative, transposed into the key of When Animals Attack.) “On the other side, some writers are at pains to paint dangerous animals as monsters of cruelty.”

In truth, he suggests, nature isn’t so much malevolent as indifferent.

The indifference often lends itself to misinterpretation, but any “meaning” comes straight from human perception, both Dery and Grice suggest.

The essay is nice — but it’s filled with so many grace notes that are lifted straight from Grice’s book, that I’m desperate to read it, too. Dery seems in love with Grice’s writing, as well, saying it’s as if “Cormac McCarthy turned his hand to nature writing.” High praise, but it seems appropriate, with passages like these:

With grim relish, Grice tells of a toddler “whose mother smeared his hand with honey so that she could shoot video of him playing with a black bear. It ate his hand.” (That’s a Grice signature: the devastating punchline, a short, sharp , declarative sentence that serves as a kind of a black-comedy rimshot.)

We learn that a grizzly can fit a human head into its mouth: “If the person is lucky, the skull slides out like a pinched marble.” (Like his noir forebear, Raymond Chandler, Grice has a nice way with the simile.)

Sure, books like these can seem somewhat voyeuristic — mainly, we’re reading for the frisson of the macabre — but this one seems particularly well-done. And Dery’s essay is nicely done as well.

I particularly enjoyed the clever touch of ending with a mirror image of the beginning. Sure, it’s no trouble for a human to eat a mouse. So what kind of trouble does a human pose to a grizzly?

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What it’s like to be a hack

by Grant Hamilton

I really enjoyed this behind-the-scenes essay by a copywriter — albeit, an unusual one.

Jason Toon works at Woot, a company that sells only one thing (a different thing) every day, and usually at a pretty good price. He writes the ad copy that appears with each of these products, and they are usually funny, isightful, and, well, different.

Today, for example, Woot is selling a pair of mice, once white, one pink. Instead of just giving the specs for the mice, though, Toon has written a little story about his-and-her mice, atop a wedding cake. It goes from endearing to odd and then all the way to pathos.

He does that every day. Except, of course, when the site has what it calls Woot-offs: a time when they sell maybe a dozen or two products, one after the other, in a single day. Those require a little more than the usual amount of work, and Toon didn’t think he could do it.

Turns out, he can:

That morning would have looked like any other to you. Me, at my desk, pondering the minutiae of some hard drive or LCD monitor or robotic vacuum cleaner. You wouldn’t have seen the crushing weight of the 25 product descriptions I had to write before I could claim my next sleep. I felt like I could barely breathe. I tried to commit every detail of my comfortable desk to memory, to savor during the unbearable hours at whatever my next job would be. I started typing, a doomed man, my doomed fingers dancing a macabre funeral march on the keyboard.

…

Along the way, I’d gained an enormous respect for hacks and hackery (in the old sense of cranking out anonymous creative work by rote, not in the computer-age sense). I’d always flattered myself with the self-designation of an “idea man”, a superior intellect whose brilliant visions were too valuable to waste his time actually carrying them out. But as I pounded out those two dozen joked-up pieces of marketing ephemera, my awe only grew at the comic-book illustrators and pulp novella writers and dance-craze tunesmiths who just got the job done, in the days when their professions earned them no respect and not much more money.

In a sense, although he doesn’t say so explicitly, he’s also describing journalists, or even bloggers. Not every word I write is golden — far from it — but there is a certain sense of accomplishment in just sitting down, banging something out, and Getting It Done. And then looking back over what you have written and noticing, with a professional’s eye, that maybe you did happen to turn a nice phrase here and there.

It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s something.

Read “The Hack Hustle: The Inspiring Story of the Slacker Behind the Woot-off”

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This headline is awful … or, how to write a good title

by Grant Hamilton

As a news writer, after I do all my research and interviews, I find it difficult to actually sit down and write the story until I have an angle to attack it from. Usually, this is the lede, but sometimes it’s a grasp of how the first couple of paragraphs will turn out.

Once I have that, I find the structure of the rest of the article just flows right along from there.

At least one other writer in my newsroom writes his ledes last, though. I guess he gets all the info structured, then introduces it. It’s not wrong per se, just completely foreign to my experience.

Headlines, in case you’re unfamiliar with the way that newspapers work, are written dead last — and they’re not even written by the reporter, rather they are written to fit into the space available by the person doing layout.

I suspect that book titles are similar. And in fact, this post at The Rumpus takes a look at what makes a good title, how some titles are very bad, and why authors don’t always come up with the best ones:

The point is, though, when it comes to the writing process, sometimes a bad title can help you more than a good one. In their book Deepening Fiction, Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren talk about the idea of creative beginnings versus actual beginnings: Even if we end up cutting the original “creative beginning” of a novel or short story—the part of the novel or story, often, that we’re most attached to—this doesn’t mean it’s not an essential part of the writing process. In some ways, it’s the most essential. The same goes for titles, I think. I’ve heard students tell me they come up with their titles first, before they have the slightest notion of a plot. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as they’re willing to give up their “creative title” when it no longer serves the story.

There is also a good, thought-provoking list of Titles To Avoid. I will keep them all in mind.

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The top rules for writing

by Grant Hamilton

If you like writing, then you might be interested to know what’s worked for other writers. Thankfully, The Guardian has compiled a list of 29 different writers’ Rules For Writing.

Mostly, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s list, they come in batches of 10. But some writers condense it down to five — others focus on a single, very important rule.

There’s surprisingly little overlap, which perhaps just proves that you need to come up with your own rules. But there are lots of good ideas, from the stylistic (“Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.” — Michael Moorcock) to the idealistic (“Learn poems by heart.” — Helen Dunmore) to the practical (“Do back exercises — pain is distracting.” — Margaret Atwood).

Part one is here. Part two is here.

I believe it would be fun to design a series of inspirational posters based on this compendium of advice.

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NaNoWriMo: Update #1

by T. Keith Edmunds

Okay, so my schedule isn’t exactly brimming with spare time, but I made the announcement that I would participate in this year’s NaNoWriMo. Silly me. I also said I would incorporate suggestions. Again, silly me.

I should have considered whether I had a basic plot idea or not. I didn’t. Therefore, I did what any good writer should do: I procrastinated. Luckily, inspiration struck as I read one of my regular webcomics.

So, yeah. That’s the basic premise: teenage werewolf at a high school for vampires. Detective. Kidnapping by automatons (steam-powered robots). Dad’s airship.

And some of the lovely ideas provided in the comments.

To reiterate about NaNoWriMo:

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

At the end of day 3, my calculator tells me I should have written 5,001. As it is, I’m about a thousand words behind schedule.

In future updates I will treat you to some of the crap I output. Lucky you.

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NaNoWriMo: Yes or No?

by T. Keith Edmunds

Attempted twice, completed once, I don’t know if I have the intestinal fortitude to try the grueling task of writing 50,000 words this November. It is, after all, NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month. The prize, should you care about such things, is the fact that at the end of the month you will have a good start on something you can perhaps polish up at some point in the future.

I’m thinking about competing, but it’s already the end of the first day, putting me about 1,600 words behind schedule. Then again, it would give me something to blog about over the course of this month…

Why not? This is my official declaration that I will not only endeavour to write a 50,000 work novel over the course of November, I will also include in my opus any story element suggestions provided by the readers of Absurd Intellectual.

Get those ideas in to me soon. Because I don’t have any of my own.

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Style rules that will get you fired

by Grant Hamilton

Yeah, yeah, Twitter, trendy, blah, blah, blah.

But I’ve just started following the Twitter feed of FakeAPStylebook, and it’s hilarious.

Of course, the AP (in Canada, CP) Stylebook is the bible of any newsroom, settling arguments and keeping newspapers on the same page (hee!) when they do their writing. Journalists follow Associated Press or Canadian Press (or Reuters, or etc.) style so that if it’s spelled “email” on Page 1, it’s not spelled “e-mail” on Page 3. (Basically, it’s a series of rules and rationales to settle arguments.)

The people behind FakeAPStyle have come to Twitter to share their much pithier rules and rationales. Some of my favourites from their recent feed include:

  • If you’re short on space, “fake” may be used in place of “psychic” or “homeopathic.”
  • While it’s tempting to call them “baristi” because of the Italian roots, the plural of “barista” is “journalism majors.”
  • The correct spelling is ‘Mr. T.’ People who type out ‘Mister’ are fools to be pitied.
  • Until one gains the credentials to be regarded as a professional, a person who has sex for money is called an “amateurstitute.”
  • “Android” and “robot” may be used interchangeably. “Filthy gear head” should be avoided.

Fyi, you can follow Absurd Intellectual on Twitter, too. So far, it’s just an auto-feed of all our blog posts, but if I ever manage to stumble on a good Twitter app for my HTC Touch Diamond, I might do more esoteric updates, too.

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For all your writing needs, the Pen Addict is there

by Grant Hamilton

What a great idea for a blog: the Pen Addict.

I’ll be honest, I adore a good pen. When paired with nice paper, the sensation of writing can be an effortless glide — pure delight. It makes the rough scratching of a crappy ballpoint and cheap paper almost physically painful.

In my opinion, the paper makes more of a difference than the pen (as long as you have a reasonably okay pen) but a good writing utensil can be sublime. For many day-to-day tasks, I’m happy with a standard blue Papermate. But I’ve got a soft spot in my head for the Pilot G-2, and I have a glass pen that I dig out on really special occasions.

Cutting directly to the chase, topping the Pen Addict’s Top 5 Pens list is the Uni-Ball Signo DX 0.38mm Pink:

pinkpen

If you are new to this blog, or are new to Japanese and micro tip pens, the Uni-Ball Signo DX is the first pen I would reccomend for you to try out. It is the perfect combination of function and form. I rank the Pentel Slicci and Pilot Hi-Tec-C higher on my personal favorite list, but I think the DX is a pen everyone can love, while there may be a thing or two about the Slicci and Hi-Tec-C that aren’t for everyone. Start your journey here and you will do just fine.

Mmmm, makes me want to visit a good office supply store and geek out on expensive pens.

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Who creates the creators?

by Grant Hamilton

Provocative piece in the New Yorker: Should creative writing be taught?

Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers …. There is one person in the room, the instructor, who has (usually) published a poem. But workshop protocol requires the instructor to shepherd the discussion, not to lead it, and in any case the instructor is either a product of the same process—a person with an academic degree in creative writing—or a successful writer who has had no training as a teacher of anything, and who is probably grimly or jovially skeptical of the premise on which the whole enterprise is based: that creative writing is something that can be taught.

…

What is usually said is that you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft. What counted as craft for James, though, was very different from what counted as craft for Hemingway. What counts as craft for Ann Beattie (who teaches at the University of Virginia) must be different from what counts as craft for Jonathan Safran Foer (who teaches at N.Y.U.). There is no “craft of fiction” as such.

I’ve snipped just two bits from the lengthy article, which I found interesting, but also lacking. It spends almost no time dealing with the number-one benefit that a creative writing class offers to the aspiring writer: it gets you writing. Once you’ve paid to enter the program, writing becomes homework — it becomes something you must do, something that can no longer be put off, something more than a hobby. A lot of people, I imagine, find that it takes a pleasurable pursuit and turns it tedious. In creative writing classes I’ve taken, I’ve really enjoyed the fact that writing becomes necessary — something I can tell other people that I have to go do. And I’ve benefited from an explosion of creativity when I’m forced to sit down and write and write and write.

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Blame now assigned for 50 years of bad grammar

by Grant Hamilton

elements_of_style_cover

There was a fair bit of interest in my post on writing for the web, so I suspect some of you may be interested in this little anniversary: tomorrow marks 50 years since the publication of a little tome called “The Elements of Style.” Since then, it has become de rigeur in classrooms across the English-speaking world, and a handy little reference book many have found it to be.

Not all, however, will be celebrating the anniversary. One Geoffrey K. Pullum, head of linguistics and English language at the University of Edinburgh, says in a recent column that Strunk and White are wrong and they make for bad writing:

Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it …. Both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less.

Pullum then proceeds to deconstruct much of the vaunted advice in Elements of Style, paying special attention to that old bugaboo, the passive voice:

The bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don’t know what is a passive construction and what isn’t. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.

Personally, I think grammarians (like dictionary writers) have to walk a thin line between being descriptive and being proscriptive. Erring too far in one direction or the other makes you seem out of touch. (For example: Ebonics is too descriptive; Esperanto, too proscriptive.)

It’s a tough row to hoe — and I’ve happily disregarded Strunk and White when it suited me. But I always try to remember my Orwell.

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How to write for the web

by Grant Hamilton

I’ll keep this brief, but there’s a good rundown of web-writing basics over on the AIGA website.

I don’t agree with everything, but there’s a lot of really thoughtful information in the essay. If you’re blogging — even if you’re just making posts on Facebook — you could probably be doing it better. I sure could.

Check it out:

This medium has led me to develop a different way of writing—tighter, simpler, more transparent. The results, I believe, are greater clarity and persuasiveness, and a speedier, more user-friendly read. … The novelty of the web, on the other hand, made me question every move. During my first few years, I treasured the free online advice offered by Jakob Nielsen and other pioneering web specialists. I became fascinated by theories about how users absorb information online. Everyone seemed to agree that the web user was, above all, impatient.

How the Web Made Me a Better Copywriter

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Read, learn and remember

by T. Keith Edmunds

As an educator with an ever-increasing portfolio of course, I am stunned at the low, low standards at which many students write. I won’t ever claim to be grammatically perfect, but I do have standards (my distaste of proofreading my own work notwithstanding). I, therefore, offer the following link in an attempt to clarify some issues that any readers may have:

The 32 Most Commonly Misused Words and Phrases

I would consider it a personal favour if everyone would take careful note of numbers 7, 17, 19 and 24 as those are the issues that grate on my nerves most.

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