Admit To Being A Writer

As time goes by, I’m less astounded at the number of people who write who don’t see themselves as writers. But I’m still moderately surprised. Is there a stigma I’m not aware of? Or is it the classic image?

You know what it is. I just trotted it out again in a recent article, but here it is in a nutshell. People think that in order to qualify for writer status, they have to be this solitary soul in a cold water walk-up shivering in a ratty bathrobe while hunched over an antiquated Underwood at 3:00 in the morning, pecking out the great American novel with an overflowing ashtray at one hand and a jelly glass of rotgut hooch at the other. Not true. The bathrobe is optional.

I’m joshing, of course, but those of you who give presentations, speak at Rotary luncheons, or give keynotes at conferences are writers. Unless you farm out the task to someone else — and I really doubt you do that — you are the creator of your work. And that means you wrote it.

You might not consider yourself a writer, but you do write. Get over it.

Read more about being a writer here. Turns out it’s not as solitary as you think.

One of my favorite topics to speak about is indeed writing. If your group or organization needs a speaker, call or send an e-mail. I could talk about writing for days, but I’ve been known to keep it as short as 30 minutes.

Contact me.

Information For Information’s Sake?

I just learned something from Parade Magazine.

For the uninitiated, Parade is one of those supplements to the Sunday paper that most people ignore. Like the dimensions of the newspaper it’s tucked into, it has shrunk over the years. In fact, if it gets much smaller, they’ll have to change the name to Single File. I look at it out of habit and rarely, if ever, read an article. But I do read “Ask Marilyn.”

Marilyn Vos Savant is very smart and usually has something interesting in her column. Often, though, the entries have to do with impenetrable number puzzles: If a train leaves Pittsburgh at 10:00 traveling 60 MPH and another train leaves Boston at 10:15 traveling at 50 MPH, how many oranges will fit on a Frisbee? I leave them alone. But today was different.

The question a reader asked was if you wrapped a 25,000-mile-long band snugly around the Earth (assuming a flat Earth) and then spliced an additional 50 feet to the length of the band, would you be able to fit your finger under the band? The answer is yes, and then some. Turns out adding 50 feet to the band would result in the band floating eight feet from the surface of the planet.

Even more interesting, adding 50 feet to a band surrounding any round object, from a planet to an orange, will result in the same eight-foot distance from the surface. Golf ball, basketball, hot air balloon, Mars: add fifty feet, same eight foot gap.

The question is to what use do I put this nugget of info? This was probably it.

Any suggestions?

Have a Heart: Be nice to your audience

This happened maybe 15 years ago, so the details blur. I was attending a writers conference that offered beginner and advanced classes on various aspects of professional writing. One incident stands out.

One of the sessions was conducted by a woman whose name and credentials are lost in the blur. She went around the room asking us why we were there and what our backgrounds were. A sixty-ish man said he wanted to write a novel and eagerly explained his qualifications to do so by including the fact that he had read 50 books.

Not just 50 books on writing. Or 50 books researching the subject of his novel. 50 books total. In his whole life. Nobody said anything… except the presenter. She gave a rambling reply to the man, of which I remember only this: She looked at him and said, “Fifty books is nothing.” 

Cold, right? To the gentleman’s credit, while he deflated a tad, he hung in there.

Aside: To me, part of the impact of the man’s statement was the fact that he didn’t say “Almost 50 books” or “More than 50 books.” The figure was 50 books on the nose. That tells me the poor guy had been keeping count and he had reached the magic number. Onward.

The speaker said what we were all thinking but didn’t want to say to the poor guy. It was true that, for a would-be writer or anyone who purported to be a person of letters, fifty books was indeed nothing. But she handled it wretchedly.

Maybe she wanted to save him from failing by not even trying.

Maybe she was appalled that someone could have read so few books over the course of 60 years.

Or maybe she was just unfeeling and rude.

Regardless, there were better ways to say it. Then again, this woman was not a professional speaker. Rather, she was a writer and, therefore, unaccustomed to frequent human interaction.

A good speaker never sets out to embarrass an audience member. Never. Unless you’re Don Rickles, and I’m betting you’re not. (Besides, it’s a well-documented fact that people go to a Rickles show hoping he’ll pick on them.) Audiences put themselves in your hands, and when they reveal things that go counter to the tenets of your topic, you need to find a way to correct them gently.

If you’re verbally agile, you can do it in front of the rest of the audience. Or you can take the person aside after the presentation or during a break, and talk to them out of earshot of the rest of the group. And even then you’ll be nice about it.

Standing at the front of the room, you have an effect on the individual emotions of the audience members. Challenge them, sure. Change their perceptions, certainly. But do it in a way that leaves them feeling not diminished but enhanced.

Have a heart.

Jay Speyerer is both a speaker and a writer, so he comes with solid credentials of frequent human interaction. Visit www.jayspeyerer.com to find out how to get out of the way of your own language so you can say what you really mean.

Sorry, Gotta Dash

As of mid-March, 2011, the AP Stylebook, that bible for journalists, now advocates the elimination of the hyphen in the word e-mail. I’m against it, and not for curmudgeonly reasons, as you might think.

20- and 30-somethings in one on-line forum are staunchly for the elimination of the peculiar little n-dash, but I really doubt many of them know what the e stands for anyway. Now I’m all for updating and modernization, especially when it comes to my business image. I do not want to be the fellow who, to this day, has his contact information on his website listed in the following form:
phone
fax
electronic mail

(I forget his name and wouldn’t tell you if I knew it, but I swear I’ve seen it. It’s bad enough he has his fax number listed. Full disclosure: my fax number is on my business cards, but I’m trying to use them up and then re-order.)

As a student of language in general and languages in particular, I’m fully aware that a living language changes over time based on popular usage. Dictionaries are descriptive sources, not dictating the meaning and spelling of a word, but rather reflecting the majority usage. 700 years ago, the word nice meant foolish, a fact I relate in some of my seminars. But it wasn’t the result of a committee like the Academie Francaise issuing an edict. Rather it was a gradual evolution of meaning over the years.

 Since the e stands for electronic, to my mind, that makes it a compound word. As such, it requires a hyphen. I acknowledge I’m in the minority considering the fact that a Google search brings up 4.5 million hits for e-mail and nearly twice that number for email. This points to a solidification in favor of the latter choice, but I say what’s the hurry? My goal in writing is to include no usages that will blur clarity by slowing down the reader and raising questions about  my content. To my mind using the hyphen raises fewer, if any, questions.

 The Chicago Manual of Style still advocates use of the hyphen. Guess they’re as old-fashioned as I am.

For more in-depth articles, visit my Tips & Articles page, where you can access some of my archived columns.

Don’t Let Your Emails Become an Endangered Species

Remember the story of the boy who cried “wolf?” There is so much competition in your inbox that some people feel the need to resort to deception to get you to keep reading their emails once you get started.

I just received a cordial invitation from a friend of a friend to be his “guest” at a dinner and discussion. At least that’s what the first paragraph said. Later on, the text got around to divulging that the event was being held to raise money for a political campaign and the price of “individual participation” is $500.

That’s a fairly elastic interpretation of the word “guest.” I wonder how much I would have had to fork over if I hadn’t held that exalted rank. The first paragraph is nothing short of misrepresentation to get me to keep reading, only to find out it was just another rubber chicken fund-raiser.

Don’t fall into that trap lest your emails be automatically thrown to the wolves.

Writer’s Block?

I’ve often made mention of my contention that writer’s block is a myth, and that the inability to write something is because that certain something simply isn’t ready to be written yet. One of my suggestions has always been to switch projects and work on something else. There’s something else you can try. 

Riff. Jam. Improvise. Noodle on your instrument like a jazz musician. But what is my instrument, you ask? It’s not what you think. 

Computer keyboard or typewriter? No, that’s just what you use to write things down and preserve your improvisations. Liken it to a tape recorder to hold on to the gems you came up with so you don’t lose them. 

Vocabulary? No again; words are the arsenal, the supply closet, the quiver of arrows. Words are comparable to the notes that you combine in new configurations to create a brand new melody. 

Your instrument, you see, is your mind.

What Year Is It?

Many in the news media, as well as actual human beings, seem to be unsure about how to say what year we’re in. The new millenium ushers in a new era of confusion about the most accepted way to say the year. Let’s make a rule: it’s two thousand eleven, not twenty eleven. 

The nineteen in nineteen-fifty was short for nineteen hundred. Since no one says twenty hundred, case closed. It’s two-thousand-eleven. 

And while we’re at it, let’s clear up the fact that 2011 is the first year of the second decade. If you thought 2010 was, do me a favor: count to ten. If you started with one and not zero, you agree with me. Thank you very much. 

We’re also using words the wrong way again. I mean still. Amazing and awesome should refer to things and events that are so transcendently grand that they soar the the realm of the unbelievably wonderful. Instead, they’re being used to describe a taco. What are you going to say when something truly awesome and amazing happens?

“Oh my god, aliens landed on the mall in Washington, D.C., and gave the president the cure for aging! That’s– That’s – delicious!”

Please stop. That would be awesome.