Posts filed under ‘Tips and techniques’
An interview with Robert Plotkin, author of The Genie in the Machine
I mentioned in an earlier post on this blog that a couple of years ago, I worked as a book doctor and writing coach with Robert Plotkin, a Boston-based patent attorney. At the time he contacted me, Robert had been working for several years on an idea for a book about a new breed of software applications, which he dubbed “genies.”
Prototype genies were already in use at NASA and in the consumer products industry; the wishes they’d made come true included everything from other computer programs to radically enhanced satellite antennas and toothbrushes. Based on interviews with the computer scientists who’d come up with the genie concept, Robert estimated the eventual impact on society would be staggering. Genies can come up with designs a human being working alone could never even conceive of, and can work far faster as well. It may sound like, well, a fairy tale - but one of Robert’s predictions is that someday you and I will have access to consumer versions of genies. In which case, we’ll be able to find out for ourselves.
Every writer’s biggest mistake - and what to do about it
No matter what it is we’re writing, from a book chapter to a letter to a friend, there’s one mistake we’re more likely to make than any other. And it’s a bad mistake, too - a source of confusion and misunderstanding in our readers, a defilement that if we knew of it would seem as gross as a blotted mosquito or coffee spill on the page. Yet for all this, we no more see the damn thing than we can see a molecule of air! It’s as if a hypnotist had seduced us into adding nonsense words to our prose, which everyone can see but us.
Stuff your ears with wax: why writers should ignore literary critics and English teachers
I’m teaching a course on essay-writing this semester at New York University, and so naturally I assign short essays to my students. One essay I got back was interesting in part because it was so incoherent: it started off about a specific event, but thereafter devolved into a series of disconnected descriptions - almost if the writer had tried a free-writing exercise before giving up. And yet I knew the student in question was too diligent for that to be the explanation.
When I got in touch with him, he abashedly confirmed that indeed, he hadn’t wanted to write a straight account of the event in question: what he was after was an “allegory,” in which actions and consequences would seem so unimportant that their details could be discarded. His inspiration, he added, had been a Hemingway short story and a related commentary by the late novelist and literary critic, John Gardner.
Quelle mésaventure littéraire! I realized that what had happened to my student had happened many years ago to me, back when I too was a budding writer. (I’m not sure whether I’m still budding - let us get a little further into spring and I’ll tell you).
Tips from Delany and Didion: let your nonconscious mind make you a better writer
In my classes and with clients, I teach the conscious development of craft, with an eye toward making the processes of reading and writing more explicit. However, there is an additional route - and that is to read as much as possible of the genres you enjoy, so that nonconsciously you absorb the forms and expectations and pleasures of these genres as if through the pores of your skin. After which writing in those genres becomes not so much easier as more natural.
How to interview an expert: throw away your canned questions, ask for stories
I was a reporter for many years, and I have to confess I wasn’t the best. I was a far better writer than nearly all of my colleagues, but the goal of journalism is news - and for all my pretty words I wasn’t hard-nosed or streetwise enough to get the best and toughest stories. I was a decent feature writer and a decent depth reporter - but even there, no more than decent. And one of the reasons for this was that I was not as good at interviewing as I should have been.
My faults as an interviewer were not mine alone; many reporters have them. One was talking too much, filling in the silences rather than letting them stretch out to see what the other person would finally say. The other was asking too many leading questions.
