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The elegant skeleton: writing and structure (and technical documentation)

Friday, May 15, 2009

I’ve been crazy-busy at work, and in the limited amount of time that is not-work I’ve been working on a short story, which I just submitted (sans ending, which I still haven’t thunk up) to my writing workshop.

I haven’t written fiction since a high school creative writing class in 1974. I was initially inspired to work on this story by some axes I wanted to grind, but as often happens in writing projects, it developed a life of its own. The people I wanted to mock weren’t that interesting on paper, and a character emerged whose motivations and life-roundedness became at least mildly interesting to me, at least as a problem to solve.

I’m not entirely sure I want to write fiction on a regular basis, and since I don’t earn a living from my literary writing, I certainly don’t have to keep doing it. But it’s educational to force my brain around the problems of fiction — particularly short fiction, with its myriad conventions. I find myself sneaking back to favorite books to reassure myself that there is life beyond the short story.

“Say, Mum, let’s not open in scene this time!”

“But Buffy, we’re supposed to.”

“In Cold Blood didn’t open in scene!”

“And Capote died a miserable alcoholic. Is that how you want to end up?”

Perhaps that was a little unfair…

But what I really wanted to say (really, how can we not love blogging, with its subway-conversation bagginess) is that a few months back I heard someone at a conference talk about the characteristics of good technical documentation writers, which included people who knew how to do really good structured writing, “Not like those creative writing types.”

I began snickering and quickly trotted away, since I didn’t want to be rude to this colleague. But I began wondering, does anyone read any more? Because you can’t talk about good writing without noticing how something as distinctive and memorable as voice is nothing without an impeccably correct structure. By correct, I mean, right and inevitable and seamless, a structure that appears self-evident, and is as discrete and omnipresent as a good butler.

Maybe that too is unfair, because if we’re writing well, a good reader should assume it’s easy. Nothing spells junior effort like a work where the skeleton pokes out all over the place, like a skinny kid in too-small clothes. Yet structure is hard.  Many writers go through several drafts just finding the right structure for their work. It’s a discipline and it’s a slog. But puzzling through structure is a great way to exercise the writing muscle — and I am sure it has produced more than a few people whose day jobs include dazzlingly well-wrought technical documentation.

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Saison du Mont, Again (Dave II)

Saturday, May 9, 2009

I offer this lagniappe since I am busy this weekend on personal writing and work-related projects (I try not to take work into the weekend, but there is a conference steaming my way).

I’ll follow up with another, more thoughtful post in the vein of “Brewing David,” but hey, take a looky-loo at this yeast activity from my second batch of “Dave” (Saison du Mont), brewed for the May 2 Big Brew of the National Homebrew Association! I adjusted the recipe, prepared a kick-ass yeast starter two days earlier, and vavoom! Is homebrewing fun or what? (A week later, the beer has hit its final gravity on the nose, and though young and flat, is a gorgeous gold and quite delish.)

The video is sideways not because we live in the Big Bend and are therefore skewed 90 degrees, but because I took this with my camera video and wanted to get the airlock-plus-yeasty-snowglobe-action in there.

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Sweetmeats from TWA Conference 2009

Thursday, April 30, 2009

“Who does Robert Olen Butler think he is?”

I was trying to explain to a young man why you always, always carry a writing notebook and a pen, so I showed him this genuine, overhead-in-the-hallways, can’t-make-this-stuff-up line I had jotted down minutes earlier, and no,  I’m not telling you who said it — not here on this blog, anyway.

But every time I repeat that line  (wickedly including the source) there is much covered-mouth tittering. Not at ROB, of course, who thinks he is a Pulitzer-winning author with a gorgeous reading voice, and he would be right, and who generously gave of his time at this conference, as did Philip Gerard, Pat MacEnulty, and others. And of course, the point is made: you can’t be a writer if you aren’t ready to write good stuff down the moment you hear it.

This was my first year attending the Tallahassee Writers’ Association conference. It was much bigger and better than a conference that size would appear to be, and I really can do little else than blurt out some of my cryptic notes and say, if you are a writer in this region, be at this conference next year!

I also met with an agent, and one thing I said is why can’t I put together a collection of published/publishable writing and publish it to Kindle? Well, she asked, then why do you need me? My response was for the expertise on the things I don’t know how to do.  She had never had that question before. But why not?

Stuff Heard, and Written Down

Speaking of Mr. Who-Does-He-Think-He-Is, Robert Olen Butler told us in his keynote, “Great writing comes from the place where you dream.” The only craft you legitimately earn is the technique you have forgotten. A short-short story has as its center a character who yearns.

Butler also said the Kindle is the future of publishing. He has a Kindle II, and read from it.

Philip Gerard had many good things to share. The persistence of vision is a nearly-perfect metaphor for how scenes work. A character goes into action to satisfy a yearning or escape a fear. If we don’t care about the characters, we don’t care about the story.

“Action is character; we watch what people do and thereby we know them.” (He says this is a second-hand quote.) Plot is often derided, but he holds it dear. (I knew these notes would appear nonsensical out of context.) Setting: he thinks of this as if he were staging a show. Setting is a stage of action. Also consider the apparent subject and the deeper subject.

“Choose language carefully,” Gerard said, noting that this is something “you can rarely do in the first draft.” Be sure you “earn the emotion.” As for creative nonfiction, it has to pass the “eulogy test” (alas, I no longer recall what that is!).

On building a book, Gerard first quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Every person should have a bottle of champagne chilled at all times.” The minute you give a book to someone else, you’re no longer alone. The writer’s work ethic involves a “peasant mentality” — the willingness to work a 12-hour day, all the way through.

In the first stage,  you work on the pre-vision.

What is the aboutness of the work? It can boil down to something very simple; it’s somebody in motion toward a goal.

Why do you want to write this book? Nobody can tell you what book to write. What’s in it for you?

A good ending has rectitude.

Pat MacEnulty (Sweet Fire, among other books), spoke about voice. “Once I find the voice, then the book writes itself.” “Most writers are actors,” assuming roles. As writers, we are allowed to hear voices in our heads. “Don’t censor the voices.”

Try having your characters say one thing and think another.

There are many approaches, but try layering: build a skeleton of your writing. She likes beginning with dialog and then adding action and description. For description, be sure to note the quality of light.

What is it like to be inside that character’s body?

Every scene does not need conflict and resolution, but a scene is more engaging if there’s tension in it. Let the reader experience the events.

Try writing scenes as if they were in a play (just as an exercise).

More Gerard (workshop, The Retrospective Narrator): If I’m a retrospective narrator, ask, how retrospective am I? Where am I in reference to this story?

A story is told by somebody, to an audience, at some time, for a reason.

Gerard also mentioned the Kindle. (The Kindle would come up at least four times at the conference.)

Have a business plan for your writing career.

Yet more Robert Olen Butler: Write what is authentic. Write every day. Begin close to your demographic. Go straight from sleep to writing. Use muscle memory. Listen to your writing (thrum thrum thrum… TWANG).

It’s always a struggle, but you learn how to struggle.

Books and other Writing Recommended, Seen, Desired

Pat MacEnulty, Sweet Fire

Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain [since borrowed and read -- quite fabu]

Robert Olen Butler, Tabloid Dreams

Philip Gerard, Secret Soldiers

River Teeth – see Gerard’s essay, “Thirteenth Hour”

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Brewing David, Part 2: a slow but strong heartbeat

Monday, April 27, 2009

So last night I crept up into attic while Sandy was at church. (I’m on a little vacation from organized religion right now.)

The crawlspace ladder creaked as I stepped northward, and I could feel the attic heat buffeting my face even before my head cleared the opening.

Dave — my first attempt at Saison du Mont — sat quietly under his blanket. I steadied myself on floor, pulled back the blanket, eased out the plug and airlock, slipped in the wine thief, slowly and gently pulled it back, eased the sanitized hydrometer into the liquid in the wine thief, and held my breath.

1.o10! A meaningless number to many of you… but sure proof to me that the extra yeast had hiccuped Dave into life once more, and that wee living things were nibbling away, converting sugars to alcohol, changing the texture and color of the brew, getting Dave ready for his final destination.

Sometimes the aging process is more unwelcome than others. I plan to live close to another half-century, and I feel healthy, fit, and sharp. But I see someone my age and think “You are old,” and then, with a start, realize I am looking at myself.

It’s not that the end is imminent, but that I know it will happen.  Furthermore, what an exasperating process, to accumulate all this wisdom and then to have to depart. It hardly seems to make sense. I don’t doubt the Creator’s plan for us, but I would like to see the heavenly recipe.

I tidied up, turned off the light, and floated down the ladder, light as a feather. I’m going to wait several more days to bottle Dave, as I was on yet another brew-mission last night, bottling a half-batch of Amarillo Ale, and that was enough beer activity for one weekend, what with writing and housework and all.

But I feel so ridiculously relieved. This may be the most undrinkable batch ever made of Saison du Mont, and I made a slew of mistakes I won’t make again. But I sense the quiet thump-thump of this brew’s yeasty heart, and I feel a little closer to the hands that first made it, feel a little more certain that there is a reason for how things work.

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Unconferences: teaching ourselves to fish

Thursday, April 23, 2009
fish market

Belgian Fish Market, 1980s

Once upon a time there was a church parishioner who kept complaining to his pastor that he wasn’t being “spiritually fed.” On and on he went at every church meeting. Nothing would help: not new sermon styles, not different music, not a change in the worship order.

Finally another parishioner turned to the unhappy guy and said, “You need to do some of this work yourself.”

Participant-driven unconferences – or even unconference activities built into a traditional conference — can be hard to explain to some higher-ups accustomed to the traditional “sage on a stage” model of conferences. Imagine going to a conference to give a five-minute talk that hadn’t been peer-reviewed… or even spending a day or a half-day sharing with your peers about topics that you bring to the conference without any prior vetting! How in the world can you get tenure by saying you were declared the audience favorite at a Pecha Kucha?

The answer is, of course, is that you probably can’t, unless you are working at a very enlightened institution (and one reason many conferences are “blended” is to ensure everyone’s needs and comfort levels are met — the Evergreen conference will feature a terrific balance of traditional and unconference activities).

I spend a lot of time these days talking about how librarians need to re-engage: with their tools, their ideas, their libraries. We need to become secular “fishers of men,” seeking ideas and pushing ourselves intellectually. Unconference activities help us get there. I still see a vital role for the “sage on a stage” model (and when it comes to unconference sessions, I prefer chairs in a circle, rather than the floor — some of the young’uns will understand this in twenty years).

But if you’ve resisted signing off on an unconference because it didn’t sound “professional,” think again. What better way to learn than to roll up our sleeves and think collectively about the problems of the day?

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My Big Fat Gay Thunderhead

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

I have been so busy lately that I complete missed the virulently homophobic “gathering storm” video — until tonight, when I saw it parodied. This video is an uncanny improvement on the original. (My fave: the mom from Massachusetts.)

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A Bouquet of April Links, Just for You!

Monday, April 20, 2009

Need a funny icebreaker for your next “info literacy” workshop, class, or discussion? I laughed with recognition at PIL InfoLit Monologue #2, which is about what students say about procrastination, course-related work, and conducting research in the digital age (2:10). This two-minute video comes from Project Information Literacy (PIL), a national research study led by Alison Head and Mike Eisenberg of the University of Washington’s iSchool and supported with a gift from ProQuest.

PIL InfoLit Monologue #1 is about what students say about Wikipedia — which is more nuanced than you might expect!

Are you hotter than a Brazilian librarian? Probably not — but see these collections (gents, ladies) and decide for yourself. I think it may be a bit biased toward the young and pec-ful, but at least it’s gender-balanced.

My sister and I are really the country mouse and city mouse, so this blog from writer-fiddler-mom Debi Lewis and her countrified colleague Stori Thompson thrummed for me.

At last, play is found to be good for work. I knew it all along!

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Sentence First, Verdict After: Quilting Bees and Amazonfail and Censorship

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Whew, back from an interesting week; in the first half, Kathryn Greenhill was visiting Equinox and GPLS, which was great fun; Sandy and I sped up to Atlanta late Sunday afternoon. We then zoomed back Wednesday so I could flap my wings and fly to Vancouver to present  (and meet some Evergreeners) at the British Columbia Library Association conference, returning late Saturday night.  My poor old laptop began failing on the latter trip, adding to the “excitement.”

While I was on the road, the Twitterverse got into an uproar over some strange delisting of GLBT titles on Amazon, with much finger-pointing and flinging of scarves and whatnot. This was called AmazonFAIL, for the hashtag that was appended to a million angry tweets.

The disadvantage of microblogging is the tendency toward microthinking coupled with hairtrigger reactions. I posted twice about Amazonfail; in one tweet I mused, “@RonHogan perhaps pubs are slow to respond to #amazonfail becuz they are gathering info? I like the rogue insider theory.”

But why gather facts? Far more fun for the nattering chorus of the Twitterverse — a quilting bee that can work itself into a buzz in no time — to scream, “Crucify Amazon!”  Did Amazon make mistakes? Undoubtedly. The biggest mistake was not to have a presence on Twitter — an officer for tweeting to monitor and react to the gathering storms. In this, Amazon was tragically unprepared (in a way that Dell, Comcast, Zappos, and other companies are not unprepared).

Note that often it is the unofficial presences — the real people and voices — that are most effective on the social networks — though that itself gets complex, as we see below.

But a week later and the easily-distractable Twitterverse has trotted off in new directions.  To really understand what happened would take more than a few cool-kid tweets. It would take the kind of measured, thoughtful investigation that is increasingly undervalued, even by “information specialists” such as librarians.

Meanwhile, I’m off to Amazon to order vacuum cleaner bags. (Oops! Did I accidentally slip a book in my order?)

You Cannot Crowdsource Individuality

Whenever people romanticize the “hive mind” and social networking, I am reminded of a couple of things.

The first is that there have been any number of times when the majority has been wrong (pace the reelection of George Bush — we’ll give 2000 a pass, since he didn’t win that one, in my opinion).

I also tweeted this week that we do not live in the aggregate, we live in the particular. This was in response to a comment from Clay Shirky about how Wikipedia “works.” Wikipedia “works” the way high school “worked.” In other words, power and popularity will nearly always trump quality and individuality.  Do I use Wikipedia quite a bit? I do. But I also attended high school every day. Some things are unavoidable.

My comment also applies more broadly to what I see as the disturbing crowd-mentality trends of new social networks.

Oh, the social networks. Overall, I hated high school, except for a handful of sui generis outliers who I am now catching up with online and who have had the best revenge — interesting, satisfying lives. Now I seem to be back in high school, only worse. The social networks too often have short memories, trigger reactions, and even more horribly, crowd mores. We’re on our way to the Precious Moments Interweb I have always dreaded… a bland, fast-food “community.”

Beer and Censorship

Then I noticed a couple of posts had come in on my post about the sexism — and more crucially, censorship — of homebrewtalk.com. Q.v.:

“I’m sorry you got a bad impression of HBT (homebrewtalk.com) on your visit. It IS a very male-heavy hobby, but I’ve never been treated with anything but welcome and generosity by the members of the board. I guess it helps if you have a ribald sense of humor and can handle a combination of 1)male flattery and 2) tongue-in-cheek sexism.”

This is what we call the big lie. I hung around this board for several weeks before exploring the “premium” membership and posting my critique. I didn’t have a problem with homebrewtalk.com; the forum moderators — call it a “board” if you like it, but it’s a company run for a profit — are the fainting lilies that censored MY posts.

In other words, homebrewtalk.com can dish it out — charging $100 for a private forum with special access to wimmin with big bezooms, yucking it up on the boards — but like most sexists, they can’t take what was really fairly mild criticism (because then it’s just not fun for them any more). And I should give them my money because..?

(Having saved $100, I spent $43 on a membership in the American Homebrewing Association, which among other things advocates for legalizing homebrewing. Libertarians take notice!)

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Brewing David, Part 1

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

As soon as I know I am all alone, I quickly creep up into the attic crawlspace and spend a few stolen minutes with David. I make sure he’s all right, check his temperature, then tell him I love him and that I’ll be back soon. Then I slip back down the ladder and push it up into the ceiling before anyone’s home to ask questions.

David’s not a love interest — I already have one of those — but a 3-gallon carboy filled almost to the brim with a persimmon-colored liquid that in the past month, as David has gently chugged through a fermentation process, has changed from an impenetrable haze (think foggy day on Mars) to a seawater-like translucence.

I haven’t always thought of David as David. For the first several weeks of his existence, I thought of him as a half-batch of Saison du Mont, a type of Belgian beer. I decided to create David when I read about the Big Brew, an annual event for homebrewers sponsored by the American Homebrewing Association.

The AHA listed two suggested recipes for the Big Brew. One was a mild brown beer, and since at this stage in my homebrewing career almost everything I make turns out dark whether I want it to or not, that didn’t seem fun.

But the recipe for Saison du Mont was a little different. It had an author, a title, a story. There was a man named David Levonian; he was a husband, father, and homebrewer; he loved to brew Saisons; he created Saison du Mont; people liked him; he died far too young. This recipe — one of his creation — was offered in his honor.

I knew nothing of Saisons — I have possibly tasted one or two — but I knew this was the beer I would create, and I decided I would start early, well in advance of May 2, the day of the Big Brew, so I could try it several times.

The recipe itself was also alluring, with its interesting ingredients, such as honey, and grains of paradise — who knew paradise had a grain? — and its pre-European-Union flair. I lived near Belgium for two years in the 1980s, when Uncle Sam sent me to an airbase in Germany, and what I remember of Belgium is rakishly good food, mouth-filling beer, and highways flanked by tall yellow lights that gilded my Friday evening drives to Liege and Bruge and the Benalux.

David probably isn’t a good choice for a new homebrewer.  Saisons are fussy and complex, with counter-intuitive fermentation temperatures and delicate spicing, and David was only my fourth brew. My previous efforts at fairly modest beers — bitters, red ale, and porter — had their share of quality-assurance issues. My first beer would be undrinkable by most standards, with its mild malts overwhelmed by tannins extracted through clumsy timing and poor temperature control (though it does look pretty in the glass — a lovely amber with a creamy head).  With these clownish efforts, how could I possibly pretend to be ready for David?

My beginners’ beers have been somewhat of a lark, but I feel obligated to David. It bothers me that I can’t get his gravity reading (measured through a simple glass hydrometer dropped into a narrow flask of liquid) pushed low enough to be  a classic Saison. It makes me quite sad and worried that I cannot convince the yeast I fed him to make a lively enough presence to burn through the sugars in his wort until he is respectably dry, as a Saison should be.

“You don’t have to worry about that as long as you like the beer,” says my local homebrew store. I understand their point, but it bothers me that someone could live and die and leave a recipe, and now that he is gone and his recipe remains, I cannot enthuse a batch of yeast into recreating his beer.

I understand this has more to do with me than Dave Levonian; I realize this means I am worried that someday I will die and take all of myself with me, with nothing left to remember me by.

But I’d still really like to get this beer right.

So into the attic I creep. “I am trying to be my best for you,” I tell David, and adjust a crocheted afghan around him. The blanket keeps him warm; the blanket keeps him dark. The blanket reminds me I am not done.

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From D.C. to Houston to the Holiday Inn in Tallahassee

Monday, April 6, 2009

Sugar lady, be my saviour,
‘Cause I’m tired, I’ve been eight days on the road.
That’s right, eight days on the road,
Travelin’ through the night,
There ain’t no town, ain’t no town, ain’t no rest tonight.

I am zooming through this post since the work-bell clangs in 24 minutes, but here’s my latest adventures:

Whisked off to Computers in Libraries, had what may have been the first-ever Evergreen User Group meeting, followed by a harrowing experience where I almost missed a panel presentation I was on because I was in the wrong room (there were many programs labeled Open Source in the CiL schedule… and I had shown up bright and early for the wrong one), though Kathryn Greenhill, Cindi Trainor, and Ryan Deschamps figured out I had not in fact missed my session and got my hide into the right place.

(I had never realized that I could perspire from every pore in my body.)

It was a great session, though I wish I’d had time afterwards to celebrate it with Ruth Dukelow and Andrea Neiman and Karen Collier, who were magnificent. But on to Reagan I went, then bump-bump to Houston for the Texas Library Association, arriving near midnight (it was also a week for hotel rooms with stunning aerial views), then bright and early the next day into the company booth.

That itself was a lot of fun; it’s pleasant to be at a conference where I am not running from meeting to meeting. I squeezed such work as I could for the Evergreen conference, now about six weeks away.

Then hist! On back to Tallahassee Friday night. (My bedtime medicine was my first glass of my fourth brew, E.J. Phair’s Phat Quail Ale — bravo me! Ruddy, tasty, and hop-a-licious.)

Next morning I plunged into the Tallahassee Writers Association conference, which itself was magnificent. I have many notes that I will blog tomorrow.  Probably my favorite moment was Robert Olen Butler’s reading yesterday, when he pulled out his Kindle 2 and read “Jealous husband returns in form of parrot,” from Tabloid Dreams, an out-of-print story collection.

(Audience question: How is it you are so expert at the female voice? Butler: I’ve been married four times.)

I had really wanted to attend the Tallahassee Book Festival on Saturday night, but I was exhausted and hadn’t written my pitch for the agent I was seeing. (”The pitch is a bitch,” saith my writing friends.) That’s ok, because the agent I spoke with waved it away and we talked. She thinks I should write a book. I have this book idea. I have to figure out if I can write this books in the nooks and crannies of my life, and now it is 8:29 and time to press the Publish button.

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