We Are All Doomed: The Internet Is Blowing Chunks

I read with interest (and fear and loathing) a CNET review of Nick Carr’s recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. I’ll do here exactly what Mr. Carr treats as one of the disquieting subjects of his work: I’ll distill his book in a few sentences. In essence, he posits that the always-on, ever-spilling-over information font of the Internet is actually changing the nature of our brains. His position is that this next-next-next ad infinitum serving of info appetizers is resulting in a attenuation of the contemplative process, a wall to the deeper mulling over subject or sphere (and being able to distinguish which is important and which is simply “now”), and potentially the loss of our ability to reflect at a sustained level.

That made me consider how much advice on presenting information on the Net, particularly for copywriters, emphatically states that you must “chunk” information: render it in small, easily digestible paragraphs, preferably those not burdened with compound or complex sentences. Before anyone protests, of course I recognize that making any parallel between a broad—even philosophical—reading of how we now apprehend the world and how copywriters (with their loathsome goals of extolling benefits and persuading buyers) work their words might seem strained.

Fast-Food Information
But it’s a personal issue for me, because I am both a marketing copywriter and a fiction writer, and though I can readily compartmentalize the two, they still share an information DNA: communicating, spreading ideas, making sparks in the head. If Mr. Carr is right (and I’ve only read the review, not the book, so I’m stretching here), the Netheads of this world, a world that’s ever-expanding, will no longer have the hunger for—or even the skill to fully interpret—deep, thoughtful works.

For some reason, reading the Carr piece made me think of Crime and Punishment, how the central character, Raskolnikov, frets, fusses and agonizes over the killing of the pawnbroker, and later, has his psyche roil while undergoing the ferret-like questioning of the investigator Porfiry. Raskolnikov’s unease skirts near madness, and it’s a cumulative state, a long building of narrative tension and revelation. Would today’s readers just want the Cliff Notes: “Poor student goes crazy after killing pawnbroker and goes to prison to rot.”? That chunking summary is a dry cracker in the mouth of a sensuous, wine-mad, multi-course meal of a novel, a thousand spices and ten-story conversations.

There was a fabulous article in the New York Times yesterday titled “Tuna’s End,” an elegiac piece about the survival (dubious) of the “wild ocean” and some of its top-of-the-chain denizens (here, bluefin tuna) though our depredations. It’s a nicely written and sharply compelling piece, but quite long. I found myself skimming, looking for the high points. And going back and forth to my email and the project I was working on in between the skimmings. Even being aware that I was giving short shrift to the article didn’t stop me from being pulled in multiple directions. This is your brain on chunking.

We Did Survive Elvis
I worry that Carr’s right, that our scanning for immediacy, our appetites stimulated to hunger for the new, will result in an ever-more shallow analysis that is self-reinforcing. I worry about distinguishing the important from the trivial, if I can only absorb either in chunks. But then I think I’m carrying the same hoary “The End Is Nigh” sign that my parents carried because of Elvis in the 50s, and that their parents carried because of jitterbugging in the 30s and that Fred and Wilma Flintstone carried because the latest stone wheels had sidewalls.

Ahh, well. I hope richer thought will survive, amidst the ephemera. I was heartened to read Molly Ringle’s recent grand prize winning entry for the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, awarded for the composition of the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels:

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss — a lengthy ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s gerbil.”

Molly doesn’t believe in that chunking stuff; had she sallied forth and written the full novel, I’d judge it would be 1,456 pages of delicious prose. Heck, Raskolnikov might have even made it in there too.

PS I know you skimmed this post, but I forgive you. I did too.

The Intimate Relationships Between Camels, Entreprenettes and Scribes

Appetizers today—but guaranteed tasty. First off, it would probably be completely impractical for you to go off on a camel-back desert caravan trip. (Not only would it be dusty, but you those animals spit! Accurately!) Much easier, but still authentically atmospheric, would be to download my pal Joel Canfield’s free Arabic trance travel tune. It’s a kickoff for his psychotic, er, I mean exotic adventure he’s going to make with his family. Joel is an ace business consultant, writer, musician, raconteur and camel driver, as you can see by checking out his stuff.

Entreprenette Am I
I’ve extolled the virtues of using HARO for entrepreneurial purposes before. Here’s an example of what I mean: I answered Sarah Shaw’s Entreprenette Gazette’s HARO inquiry about how to manage time as an entrepreneur, and she put my answer (along with those of 128 other desperate climbers) in her latest blog post. Of course, that entrepreneurial answer comes with the answerer’s business/blog URL to boot, so your pretty business face is front and center. (I guess being there makes me an entreprenette too. If it allows me to wear a funny hat, I’m in.)

Answering HARO posts is one of those win-win situations that can drive traffic to your site. (Note: I’m tiring of that limp “win-win” phrase. Maybe it should be “chocolate brownie-chocolate brownie.” Or “shot o’ bourbon-shot o’bourbon.” Well, I’m working on it…)

Scribd Ain’t Just for Misspellers
I blogged previously about using EzineArticles to circulate your promotional publications (you remember, the ones with USEFUL content) around, and here’s another venue: Scribd. Scribd is, according to their breathless About, “The largest social publishing and reading site in the world.” It’s got books, essays, poems, how-tos, how-not-tos and publications of all kinds, for sale or for free. It’s easy to set up an account and upload material. I uploaded the two free writing-related PDFs I offer here, as well as another free how-to writing essay. Again, you can include your contact info, pitch and URL in your pub, so you can spread the good word—and even multiple words—of your work around the ‘electronic universe.

Watch out for those camels.

Don’t Muzzle (or Muffle) Your Writing Voice

I was thinking of the issue of “voice” in writing recently: you know, your writing voice, that whiff of brimstone or reverberant cello note or cracked teeth and swollen tongue that stamps your writing as having been issued from you alone. You’d never mistake Donald Barthelme for Ernest Hemingway; the word blossoms gathered in Virginia Woolf’s garden would have flowers not found in the window-box plantings of Joan Didion. So your writing and your writing voice shouldn’t be confused with Schlomo Bierbaum’s—it should be yours alone.

One of the things that made me think of a person’s voice was a literal voice: a few months ago I saw Ricki Lee Jones in concert, and was so struck by her uniqueness as a performer (and possibly as a person). She was cuckoo and mesmerizing in the best of ways on stage: banging on the roof of the piano, exhorting the other players, talking to them in asides during some songs. She played a lunatic version of Don’t Fear the Reaper(!), beating out a slapclap on the top of her piano. The performance was so Rikki Lee Jones: singular, eccentric, passionate, moody. You wanted to be around her just to see what she might do or say (or sing) next. Her voice was hers and hers alone.

Your Writing Voice Is There for the Singing
When you’re developing your writing voice, you might be so painstakingly wrapped up in expressing yourself JUST SO that you drain the blood out of your writing, pull the plug on the electricity of your ideas. You might have read an essay by Pico Iyer or a story by Alice Munro or a novel by Cormac McCarthy and you might be trying so hard to source and employ the rhythms, humors and tics of those gifted writers that you spill onto the page a fridge full of half-opened condiments that cancel each other’s flavors.

Be yourself behind the pen, be the channel between what cooks in your brain and what courses through the keyboard. Even if that self is one day the grinning jester and another the sentimental fool, be fully that person, unmasked, on the page. Maybe you grew up in a slum in Mumbai or have pied-à-terres in every European capital, maybe your adolescence was a thing of constant pain, maybe you never made a wrong move, maybe you never moved at all—it should be in your writing, whether in its proclamations or its subtext. Your voice is all the Crayons in your box.

A Voice, and Its Chorus
Of course it’s no monotone: Sometimes I might write about Sisyphus and sometimes I might write about drool (and sometimes I might speculate whether Sisyphus drooled while pushing the rock up that endless hill). By that I mean your short stories might have a female narrators, male narrators, be set in a tiny town one time and in a howling metropolis the next. But you still must find the voice—your voice—for that story.

I like to write essays that often take a humorous slant, but at the same time, that isn’t the limit or restriction I put on my own expression. I published a piece on not knowing my father, and another that discusses (among other things) never finding out what happened to my high school girlfriend after she vanished in Colombia, and both had a tone of pathos. That pensive tone is also one of my voices, and its sobriety doesn’t cancel the chiming of my comic voice. So your voice might be part of a choir.

Getting Gritty About Grammar
A friend of mine who is putting together a “private university” recently asked me if I would teach a 16-session class on grammar, because of what she perceives as the lamentable state of comprehension of language structures and their underpinnings among the young. Now I could probably do a decent job of that, though I’d definitely have to brush up on some grammar formalities and its seemingly obscurantist vocabulary. But after thinking about it, I decided that it just wasn’t right for me. It wouldn’t be an expression of my voice, like teaching a class on writing an essay or developing a character would be.

The tools are important indeed, but the authentic voice is transcendent.

Shoot Your Audience! (Er, Shoot for the Correct Audience.)

The image above was part of a pretty elaborate direct-mail piece sent from the NRA to me for a sweepstakes in which the grand-prize winner takes home 24 guns. (The first-prize winner would receive a paltry 10 guns.) I did have one pressing question when I received the piece: What, no grenade launcher?

No, the real pressing question was how the ##$@#!! did the NRA get my address? Granted, I was tempted, because with that arsenal, I could finally control the gophers in the veggie garden, but unless one of those dreadfully liberal entities that I’ve supported in the past, like Greenpeace or the Natural Resources Defense Council were selling their mailing lists to all comers, I wondered if this was just fishing on the part of the NRA.

Which brings me to the two-pronged subject prompted by the 24-gun salute: permission marketing and know your audience. I won’t go deeply into the permission marketing angle so clearly enunciated by Seth Godin, but in essence, its message is: Don’t send crap to people who don’t want it.

The concept I want to look at a little closer is Know Your Audience. Now, I have no objection to legal gun ownership, obtained through licensing and registration. (Though the open-carry Starbucks people have it all wrong: they should have open-carry acetylene torches, to warm up the coffee.) But I am not the NRA’s audience, and they wasted their postage on me. It’s the same sort of concern I have from the proliferation of catalogs (particularly at Christmas time) from companies from which I’ve never ordered anything. Sometimes these catalogs are hundreds of pages long, and obviously expensive to produce. The scattershot-mail effect doesn’t acknowledge the simple adage of knowing your audience, your tribe.

Ask About the Audience
When I am asked to write a tech or operations manual (I am working on one and probably beginning another soon), one of the first questions I ask is, who is the manual for—who is the audience? That tells me what the slant or tone—formal, salesy, explanatory, light, crisp, storytelling—of the piece should be. Obviously, as a writer you’d ask the same if you were writing an ad or a brochure or a sell sheet. I didn’t ask clearly enough about audience for a recent radio ad I wrote, but nailed it on the second round, after getting the elaboration.

I had a brilliant film teacher at college who was irreverent, flippant and profane. She gave me a lousy grade for a paper that was good, but limp. The next one I wrote, filled with snarky comments and casual asides (but still on topic), got a stellar grade. Know your audience.

I used to write manuals for Maxis (SimCity, The Sims) software, and was encouraged to put in a whimsical tone to the “Click here. See that. Click there” instructions, and from later user comments, found out how much our audience appreciated it. About two months ago, some guy who read a manual of mine for a Maxis product from more than 10 years ago emailed me to explain a joke I’d written in the manual. (Yeah, some funny joke—the guy took 10 years and still couldn’t understand it.)

Anyway, I actually dug the NRA sweepstakes offer, because I don’t get the chance to win 24 guns every day. If they include a cannon with the next offer, I’m going for it…

Bonus Book Love
While you’re mulling over the consideration of which of your 24 guns you’d have pointing at the front door, and which at the back, I’ll change tack entirely. Being more of a books than a bullets guy, I saw a HARO request from the Power of Care site soliciting stories of book love. (No, not porno book stuff—what books you love!) I wrote mine on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. You can see that brief testimony and many others here on the site.

Expert Answers to ALL Questions (as Long as They Concern Condiments and Blog Traffic)

Really, I do have some good mustard recommendations. But I’ll explore the “expert” notion after a few warm-up sentences. Since I don’t hear a lot of horns honking around here, I have been reading articles about increasing traffic to blogs. I really don’t want to peddle porn (though for a dollar I will email you—in a plain, brown message envelope—a photo of me simultaneously holding a pound of bacon and a garter snake while wearing short-shorts), I am implementing some of the methods proposed by bloggers who really do have folks lining up at their screens to read.

One such paragon is Jonathan Fields, author of the sterling Career Renegade, and who blogs craftily on issues of entrepreneurship, social media, marketing and creativity. One post of late was guested by “traffic-generation specialist” Elysia Brooker, on the topic of article marketing.

You really should read the original post (but don’t leave me here alone and teary eyed), but in essence it discusses the uses of posting articles (including blog posts) to article directories to generate traffic back to your site. The article directories are used by a lot of publications and other sites as a content and syndication source, so you are giving away your material in exchange for your embedding of your blog/site links in the articles. The directories themselves are probed by search engines as well, so anyone stabbed by your sharp wit in an article might very well seek further swordplay on your site.

Ezine Articles Paddle Through Cyberspace
Taking the post to heart, I plunked down an article of mine at Ezine Articles, one of the directory mainstays, and one recommended by Elysia. One of the keys here (for me, at least) is that this was a “How to Write a First-Person Essay” article of mine published a while back in Writer’s Digest, for which I own the reprint rights. It was just listlessly sitting around in a back pocket of my computer, so why not put it to use again and see if it brings any baying of writing bloodhounds to my site?

At Ezine, it’s a simple matter to register and submit (you can put in bio info as well as a link in your post), and then the article is vetted, and in a few days, they tell you if it’s approved and that it went live. Here’s the best part: they told me I earned “Expert Author” status with the posting, which includes them sending out an RSS notice about the article to their list. Finally, I am an expert. (I recommend wasabi mustard with all your sandwiches; I recommend it on cereal too.)

It will be interesting to track any traffic changes as a result of that article posting, but as recommended by Elysia, post frequently. Obviously, your content has to be good (or scandalous), but you can repurpose many pieces if you have a lot of existing content, including blog posts as well. Article topics cover most of the subjects in the known universe. There’s a lot of elaboration from Elysia on directories and traffic-building techniques in the comments section on Jonathan’s site.

Not So Harrowing
One other traffic-building tip, convincingly given me by writer extraordinaire Becky Blanton, is to register to receive the twice-daily HARO (Help a Reporter Out) quote/pitch solicitations. The emails are full of inquiries from writers and reporters working on stories for which they need a quote or an expert angle or an opinion; Becky has had success in answering queries and getting her responses (and her URL) published in various articles. The article subjects range across the board, and the writers can be from publications like Turnip Quarterly up to Atlantic Monthly. If the reporters pick up your statement, they will often post your site link in their articles, which can lead to greater things. Now that I am an expert, I’ll be spouting off frequently.

And a sad goodbye to John Wooden, a genius, a gentleman, a man of strong words and a man of his word. At 99, for my money, he didn’t live long enough, but he changed lives, and not just in the sports world.

How to Write After Midnight

Ha! You thought I’d open with a clever bon mot about cocaine here, didn’t you? Silly! I’m going to do that later in the post. No, first we need to talk about the best time of day to write. Simple: Any time you can. Of course, if you’re a freelancer like me, some projects require you to grind through successive hours, some can be grazed over a period of days, a paragraph here and a transitional phrase there, and some can be surveyed and then dispatched: I saw the hill of that essay, I saddled up my sentence steed, and I surmounted it, verily!

In that regard, learning how to parcel out your time when you’re working on multiple projects is a valuable skill, and one that will endear you to your clients. It has taken me a while to be able to judge how long it will take me to edit a 200-page book, write a case study or come up with an ad’s headlines, but now I’m much more comfortable about projecting (and meeting) deadlines. Until it’s second nature, it’s a good habit to track how long it takes you to work with a certain type of writing. One good method with new clients is if you’re given something lengthy to write or to edit, work on the assignment for an hour or two to see what it tastes like, and you’ll be better equipped to know when you’ll finish eating. Don’t give them your milestone schedule until you’ve snacked on the copy a bit.

Morning Becomes Electric (Coffeemaker)
Related to how much time you can or must spend on a project is what times are most suitable for for the spending. I’m a morning guy, love to get up early, coffee in bed with a magazine to start the day, and then to the computer before 7. Unless there is something truly pressing, I’ll sift through email, check out the antics of fellow Tribesters on Seth Godin’s Triiibes site, glance at the news, vomit over the news, and then begin work on whatever’s workable.

Now when I say working, I mean working with clients if I have some, or working on essays or magazine/newspaper pieces if I don’t—or a combination when everything’s clicking. I normally have a number of queries out to various editors, and also some just at the note-taking stage. Some of the material that goes into a query is boilerplate (like your writing credentials/clips and your sign-off), so if you know well the core of your proposed article, the meat of the query can be massaged (oooohh!) a bit and then quickly stitched with the boilerplate. It might take as little as 30 minutes to write an article query, so if you find a gap in your day, why not? Of course, it might take 30 months for an editor to answer your query, but we won’t address those sins here.

Back to those morning pages: I write with more focus in the morning, and with renewed focus after the afternoon coffee, but not with any real afternoon sustain. Thus, when my monitor’s eye begins to look as bloodshot as my own, I start to crank down its shade in the waning afternoon hours. Then, I’ll often do the busywork of cleaning out the inbox, boxing with the outbox, and wondering if I need botox. I’ve never been one of those types that can merrily scribble away in the evening hours. I’m both fascinated and horrified by (and middlin’ jealous of) those industrious souls who can bang out another five or six hours of writing after the five o’clock cocktail-hour bell has rung. (Though perhaps my religious adherence to that magic hour is what makes liquid all my after-hours writing resolve?)

In the Midnight Hour (Softly Snoring)
So, how to write after midnight? There is that cocaine that I was talking about earlier. But since that stuff makes me sneeze out automobile parts, I’d rather sleep. The only way I can write after midnight is to let the pinball machine of my brain zing around the bumpers and ping-ping-ping the lights while I snooze. I really have found that if you nest on a writing problem in the sunlight hours, you’ll sometimes find a fresh egg of a writing solution in the morning. Of course, that doesn’t help when you need a gross of eggs to finish a book, but it might help you realize that your main character should be named Zeke and not Arbogast.

(Oh yeah, I do keep a notepad by my bed and indeed I have jumped up to madly scribble an idea a’borning. But so often when I’ve eagerly scanned it in the morning, I see that I’ve inscribed something like “Blizzard muffins not naysayers. Harken Wheaties. Bilge, breathless, truth.”)

Better wait for that morning coffee…