writing

On Expanding Your Comfort Zone

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Derek Sivers writes an inspiring post on how he’s been able to expand his comfort zone over the years:

I’m 40 meters underwater. It’s getting cold and dark. It’s only the third dive in my life, but I’m taking the advanced training course, and the Caribbean teacher was a little reckless, dashing ahead, leaving me alone.

The next day I’m in a government office, answering an interview, raising my right hand, becoming a citizen of Dominica.

I’m in a Muslim Indian family’s house in Staten Island, washing my feet, with the Imam waiting for my conversion ceremony. Next week they will be my family in-law. The Muslim wedding will make her extended family happy. I’ve memorized the syllables I need to say. “Ash hadu alla ilaha illallah. Ash hadu anna muhammadar rasulullah.”

We’re on a rooftop in Rio de Janiero on New Year’s Eve, celebrating with some Brazilians we met the day before. Down below on the beach, a million people are wearing all white.

I’m alone on a bicycle in a forest in Sweden. I left from Stockholm 6 hours ago, headed south, with only 50 Krona, and I’m getting hungry. I don’t know the way back.

We’re in a filthy dorm-room apartment in Guilin, China, studying at the local university. At the local grocery store, we choose from a bin of live frogs.

The India Embassy official hands me a pseudo-passport that says I am now officially a “Person of Indian Origin” – a pseudo-citizen of India.

I’m the back of a truck in Cambodia, soaking wet, hitching a ride back to Phnom Penh after an all day bike ride. The roads were flooded but we rode our bikes through anyway, Mekong River water chest-high.

That week I speak at four conferences in Cambodia, Singapore, Brunei, and Indonesia. By the 4th one, my American accent has started to morph into something kind of Asian.

Derek mentions how some people push themselves physically, but he’s been pushing himself culturally. I want (need!) to improve in both arenas.

Do check out Derek’s question at the bottom of his post and the hundreds of comments people have left in response.

Everything in Writing and Life is Fiction

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It seems like every writer has some advice that he can offer on how to write better, smarter, faster. So it was quite refreshing to read Keith Ridgway’s take in The New Yorker, where he readily admits he doesn’t know what’s he doing:

I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

Something, obviously, is going on. I manage, every few years, to generate a book. And of course, there are things that I know. I know how to wait until the last minute before putting anything on paper. I mean the last minute before the thought leaves me forever. I know how to leave out anything that looks to me—after a while—forced, deliberate, or fake. I know that I need to put myself in the story. I don’t mean literally. I mean emotionally. I need to care about what I’m writing—whether about the characters, or about what they’re getting up to, or about the way they feel or experience their world. I know that my job is to create a perspective. And to impose it on the reader. And I know that in order to do that with any success at all I must in some mysterious way risk everything. If I don’t break my own heart in the writing of a book then I know I’ve done it wrong. I’m not entirely sure what that means. But I know what it feels like.

I loved this paragraph:

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Highly recommend reading in its entirety.

A Tribute to Dmitri Nabokov

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Lila Azam Zanganeh, author of The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, remembers Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dmitri was a womanizer, whose life resembled a James Bond film. But he was also his father’s best translator. It’s a beautiful tribute:

Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”

What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.

“We Met on the Internet”

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Andre Torrez writes about the stigma of “meeting on the internet”. It’s a thoughtful piece:

At one point that night the entire group decided to walk from the place where we ate to a bar about four blocks away. As these things go our group quickly turned into a long line of people walking along the street. This was a Saturday night so there was the usual crowd of bar goers and people out for dinner.

While standing at a red-light (half our group continued walking, talking, and not worrying if the group behind them would catch up) a woman also waiting to cross asked, “What is this?” She was smiling like she was about to discover something that was cool. She looked hopeful.

“You will laugh if I tell you,” I joked. I was fairly intoxicated. I couldn’t think of anything better to say.

“No, tell me. What is this?” She looked at the group. We are from all parts of the country (and world) and so we are dissimilar both physically and the way we’re dressed.

“We are all members of a web site. We met online and are now meeting in person.”

She laughed. Not even in the, “okay, I get it” way or “that’s cute” way but more like the “that is very stupid” way. She said something like, “Yup, you were right,” and continued on her way.

I think this is a post that will develop into something more.

Death to Microsoft Word

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Tom Scocca, writing in Slate, argues that we should give up on Microsoft’s word processor. He brings up a few interesting points, especially this portion about how Microsoft Word bloats simple text with insane amount of metadata:

For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper. I just went into Word and created a file that read, to the naked eye, as follows:

the Word 

Then I copy-pasted that text into a website that revealed the hidden code my document was carrying. Here’s a snippet:

<!—[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> 

And it goes on:

<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”22″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” QFormat=”true” Name=”Strong”/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”20″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” QFormat=”true” Name=”Emphasis”/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”59″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Table Grid”/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Placeholder Text”/>

And on: 

<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”70″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Dark List Accent 5″/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”71″ SemiHidden=”false”
  UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Colorful Shading Accent 5″/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”72″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Colorful List Accent 5″/>
<w:LsdException Locked=”false” Priority=”73″ SemiHidden=”false”
   UnhideWhenUsed=”false” Name=”Colorful Grid Accent 5″/>

The whole sprawling thing runs to 16,224 characters. When I dumped it back into Word, it was an eight-page document. 

So where did Scocca type his post?

This piece started out as a Gmail message, which saved automatically and was easy to access at home, at the office, or on my phone in transit. Then I switched over to TextEdit, which gives me a bigger window to work with and handles line breaks more cleanly than Gmail does. For protracted edits, I create a Google document, so multiple readers can work on it at once. If they want to track the changes, they can read the revision history. For short blog posts, I write straight into the publisher.

A lot of my compilations happen on Gmail as well. I like TextEdit for Mac OS X as well. Something that the author neglects to mention, however, is Word’s ability to integrate together with the other Office products: Excel and PowerPoint. I think this ability to link objects (a chart in Excel or a graphic in PowerPoint) into Microsoft Word is something that I have found to be very useful.

My final take: don’t be singing eulogies for Microsoft Word just yet.

Writing Advice from C.S. Lewis

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In June of 1956, a young American fan named Joan Lancaster sent C.S. Lewis a letter. Lancaster received a letter back in which C.S. Lewis offered the following writing advice:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’timplement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

A lot of these tips appear in Stephen King’s On Writing. But it’s good to know when/how writing tips are recycled and offered as wisdom time and time again.

How to Get a “Lives” Essay Published in The New York Times

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The “Lives” essay has been running in the magazine section of The New York Times since 1996. Though The Times solicits professional writers for this content, it is open to anyone with a good story to tell. Hugo Lindgren asked the magazine’s editors for a single, succinct piece of advice in order to get a better chance of having your story published. The advice is below:

• More action, more details, less rumination. Don’t be afraid of implicitness. And the old Thom Yorke line: “Don’t get sentimental. It always ends up drivel.”

• If it reads like it would make for a Hallmark TV episode, don’t submit it.

• Meaning (or humor, or interestingness) is in specific details, not in broad statements.

• Write a piece in which something actually happens, even if it’s something small.

• Don’t try to fit your whole life into one “Lives.”

• Don’t try to tell the whole story.

• Do not end with the phrase “I realized that … ”

• Tell a small story — an evocative, particular moment.

• Better to start from something very simple that you think is interesting (an incident, a person) and expand upon it, rather than starting from a large idea that you then have to fit into an short essay. For example, start with “the day the Santa Claus in the mall asked me on a date” rather than “the state of affairs that is dating in an older age bracket.”

The rest of the advice is here. If you can’t write it, try telling it.

Robert Walser on the Artistic Individual

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The passage below is from Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories, which have been translated into English for the first time by Susan Bernofsky, and just published in a new edition by New York Review Classics. Walser arrived in Berlin from Switzerland in 1905 and wrote hundreds of short reflections about the city’s charms. This passage on the successful artist is excellent:

The artist who is crowned with success lives in the metropolis as if in an enchanting Oriental dream. He hastens from one elegant household to the affluent next, sits down unhesitatingly at the opulently laden dining tables, and while chewing and slurping provides the entertainment. He passes his days in a virtual state of intoxication. And his talent? Does an artist such as this neglect his talent? What a question! As if one might cast off one’s gifts without so much as a by-your-leave. On the contrary. Talent unconsciously grows stronger when one throws oneself into life. You mustn’t be constantly tending and coddling it like a sickly something. It shrivels up when it’s too timidly cared for.

The artistic individual is nonetheless permitted to pace up and down, like a tiger, in his cave of artistic creation, mad with desire and worry over achieving some output of beauty. As no one sees this, there is no one to hold it against him. In company, he should be as breezy, affable, and charming as he can manage, neither too self-important nor too unimportant either. One thing he must never forget: he is all but required to pay court to beautiful, wealthy women at least a little.

Featured in full here.

Andrew Sullivan on Blogging

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I’ve just stumbled upon Andrew Sullivan’s essay “Why I Blog,” and it is brilliant. The prolific blogger that he is (previously at The Atlantic, now with The Daily Beast), this was a joy to read:

The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more. And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.

Furthermore, Sullivan explains how blogging is participatory:

To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth. A blogger will notice this almost immediately upon starting. Some e-mailers, unsurprisingly, know more about a subject than the blogger does. They will send links, stories, and facts, challenging the blogger’s view of the world, sometimes outright refuting it, but more frequently adding context and nuance and complexity to an idea. The role of a blogger is not to defend against this but to embrace it. He is similar in this way to the host of a dinner party. He can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but he also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.

Perhaps my favorite one liner from Sullivan’s piece is this: “A good blog is your own private Wikipedia.” What I post here, for example, I want others to know/learn as well. On at least a half dozen occasions, I have searched through my archives (or via the search box on the right) to find something I linked to that was worth mentioning in a dinner conversation or a friendly dispute with a coworker.

Finally, Andrew’s metaphor for a blogger is spot-on:

There are times, in fact, when a blogger feels less like a writer than an online disc jockey, mixing samples of tunes and generating new melodies through mashups while also making his own music. He is both artist and producer—and the beat always goes on.

The whole piece is a must-read.

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(via Alexis Madrigal)

Pico Iyer: In Praise of the Long Sentence

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Pico Iyer has a beautiful, poignant essay in The Los Angeles Times, praising the long and winding sentence. He argues that writing longer phrases is a way to protest the speed of information bites people are subjected to daily:

Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

Pico carefully lambasts the short sentence and then mentions authors who thrive on the long sentence:

The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity’s greatest adornment).

If we continue along this road, whole areas of feeling and cognition and experience will be lost to us. We will not be able to read one another very well if we can’t read Proust’s labyrinthine sentences, admitting us to those half-lighted realms where memory blurs into imagination, and we hide from the person we care for or punish the thing that we love. And how can we feel the layers, the sprawl, the many-sidedness of Istanbul in all its crowding amplitude without the 700-word sentence, transcribing its features, that Orhan Pamuk offered in tribute to his lifelong love?

Interestingly, Iyer finds Henry James unreadable (I think The Turn of the Screw is an easy read, while The Portrait of a Lady was a challenge for me):

Not every fashioner of many-comma’d sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around.

Perhaps my favorite part of Iyer’s essay:

But we’ve got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.

The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut.

A beautiful, must-read. Writers: are you paying attention?