Write for free and you take us all down

Posted by William Gallagher

There is a catch in your voice when someone asks you what you do and you answer that you’re a writer. And the catch is that everybody thinks they can write. Most can’t but that’s okay, I’ll never score a goal at football or successfully tie my shoelace, I don’t beat myself up about it. I also don’t go selling my services as a shoelace advisor. But enough of the not-we advertise themselves as writers that they damage what we do. And because they cannot, literally cannot, distinguish themselves in any way but price, they go hell for leather in distinguishing themselves on price. You want a 5,000 word article for 20 cents? I’ll do you 10,000 for free.

You will never find a shortage of people foolish enough to hire people for free – it’s a core tenet of how the UK government believes everyone but themselves should be volunteers – but you could ignore that. It’s harder to ignore the line you get that writing for free will be great exposure.

The Freelancer by Contently argues this week that this could be true. The full piece is centred on Lisa Earle McLeod who writes for Huffington Post for free and says that her articles there are responsible for “nearly every major sale” her company has made. But:

McLeod recognized lawyers and physicians don’t give their work away for free. But she said her business model isn’t based on writing. Writing is a means to an end, a strategy for generating more work in other areas.

“My business model is speaking and consulting. Why wouldn’t I write for free?” she said. “Now when people call me, I don’t have to establish credibility.”

Writing for Free Can Pay Off. But Only for a Select Few – Gary M Stern, Contently.net (27 August 2014)

Let’s see her speak and consult for free, then.

Why a routine stops you being routine

Posted by William Gallagher

How to sculpt an environment that optimizes creative flow and summons relevant knowledge from your long-term memory through the right retrieval cues.

Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. (Even Buk himself ended up sticking to a peculiar daily routine.)

Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful.

The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine – Maria Popova, Brain Pickings (25 August 2014)

Okay, I’m listening. Prove it.

And Popova does. Just please skip right on to her full piece as it is a simply absorbing piece that flies so quickly that it disguises just how much information is in there.

Watch a Community writing lesson

Posted by William Gallagher

In case you don’t know and haven’t heard me rave about it like the late-comer evangelist I am, Community is a US comedy set in an adult education college. It is very funny but it is also so deeply imaginative that I spent the whole second season simply agog.

Now, I do believe that reading the scripts and watching the episodes is an education in writing. I believe that about most scripts: I once read all seven years of Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts in order to see how a successful show finds its feet, matures and ends. That’s 178 one-hour scripts and my conclusion, if you’re interested and have far less time than you imagine this will take, is that most of them were boring puzzles rather than stories.

Whereas I then read all 176 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in script and enjoyed it immensely.

Only a few Community episodes are online but there are some at Lee Thomson’s fabulous site TV Writing here. Unfortunately, none of them are for the episodes I want to talk to you about.

More than talk: there is a Making Of documentary about two of them that is on YouTube now. Before I show you that, though, let me say that the episodes are sequels to the show’s first big hit. That was a season one story about a paintball game gone wrong – honestly, it is one of my favourite television episodes ever and I long to have been the one to write it – and that’s the lesson I want us to focus on.

Not why you should make a sequel to a hit since that’s obvious financially if in no other way. But actually why you shouldn’t. Why the show was told it could never top that original and how it did. Watch the episodes, would you? In fact, just watch the show. Part of the fun of seeing the episode A Fistful of Paintballs and its second part, For a Few Paintballs More, was the anticipation. And the part of the fun of watching was to see how it used the season leading up to it, how it was a true finale instead of a stunt episode.

You can get Community season one on DVD at Amazon UK here and at Amazon USA there.

Now, YouTube. The Making of the Paintball episodes:

Know your theme before you write

Posted by William Gallagher

Sitcom comedy writing star – seriously, not only does he write superbly but he’s had a hugely popular blog for many years – Ken Levine this week answered a question about themes in one’s writing. A blog reader said how he had been recording some material for an album and was now finding it hard to discover what that music was really about. What it’s theme was.

Levine:

Well, the first thing is I do is determine what the theme is before writing. The story, or in your case, album, should reflect that. Taking a finished product and sifting through it looking for gold is rather counter-productive.

This is a question I get a lot (and answer a lot). It’s an important point that needs to be repeated. Sort of like a “theme.”

When people tell me they just want to start writing and see where the story takes them, I tell them most often it leads to Death Valley.

Put in the time and effort to determine your theme first. And yes, I know – it’s HARD. The hardest part actually. But once you have it, the rest falls into place and it’s much easier to determine if you’re on track or straying. The theme is your compass.

Bottom line: what is it you want to say? And if you don’t have anything, then why are you even bothering?

Friday Questions – Ken Levine, ByKenLevine.com (25 July 2014)

He makes good points and perhaps I think that most because usually I agree with him. But it’s straight answers like this that have made his blog a daily read for me. Do check out the full Friday Questions from this week but then also the whole of the blog.

Use the Hemingway word processor in earnest

Posted by William Gallagher

Hemingway was an online-only app for word processing which would let you type away and then wince at you. Give a sharp intake of breath at you. And mark up your text thisaway:

Red highlighting means ouch.

I have never used it and wouldn’t rush to write anything online, said William typing this directly into a WordPress page on Safari. Hmm. That changes my mind. I have actually just changed my own mind.

Still, I’m writing where I know I have a steady wifi connection. And this news story is currently only 92 words long. You could live with me losing these 92 words, I could live with it too. But a novel, say, that would be harder to shrug off after one lost wifi connection.

Now, however, Hemingway brings all its vicious accusations to the desktop: you can buy Hemingway for PC or Mac at $4.99 each from the official site.

If you’re firing me, get on with it

Posted by William Gallagher

Last week we had an email from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella of which the kindest thing you could say was that it was less embarrassing than his previous one. I tried reading it for here, to see if there were any actual news items in it that I would want to tell you, and I just glazed over. Others ripped it apart to mock, many ripped it apart to say there was one fact buried in this palimpsest of overlapping indecipherable sentences.

It was that Microsoft sounded pretty damn likely to lay off a lot of people very soon. They’ve now been laid off.

But the actual blow, the news of their redundancy came after another obfuscated email. This time, it took eleven paragraphs before it got to the point and one writer rips it apart par by par.

Typically, when you’re a top executive at a major corporation that is laying off more than 10 percent of your workforce, you say a few things to the newly jobless. Like “sorry.” Or “thank you for your many years of service.” Or even “we hate doing this, but it’s necessary to help the company survive.”

What you don’t do is bury the news of the layoffs in the 11th paragraph of a long, rambling corporate strategy memo.

And yet, this was Microsoft honcho Stephen Elop’s preferred method for announcing to his employees today that 12,500 of them were being laid off. (18,000 are being laid off companywide; Elop, the former head of Nokia, oversees the company’s devices unit, which was hardest hit by the layoffs.)

How bad was Elop’s job-axing memo? Really, really bad. It’s so bad that I can’t even really convey its badness. I just have to show you.

Here’s how it starts:

Hello there

Hello there? Hello there? Out of all the possible “you’re losing your job” greetings, you chose the one that sounds like the start to a bad OKCupid message? “Hello there” isn’t how you announce layoffs; it’s what you say right before you ask, “What’s a girl like you doing on a site like this? ;)” It’s the fedora of greetings.

Microsoft Just Laid Off Thousands of Employees With a Hilariously Bad Memo – Kevin Roose, NY Mag (17 July 2014)

It’s not funny for the people who’ve lost their jobs, which is the main point of Roose’s piece. It’s also easy to say that you shouldn’t do it in this way, but actually, no. You shouldn’t. Take a read at Roose’s whole piece.

What you, me and especially Microsoft could learn about writing

Posted by William Gallagher

Earlier this week, Microsoft’s new head Satya Nadella sent out an email to all employees and, practically by natural extension, the world. I started to read it, wondering if I could find out something useful but I stopped when I realised I’d been thinking more about the cooking I had to do that night.

I did have one evil thought, which is that Nadella’s predecessor Steve Ballmer famously wrote a tortuous email like this not very long ago. I remember seeing the sheer length and the utter absence of any information and feeling that this summed up Microsoft. I believe the company is in a better state now with Nadella but I did do a quick word count. I expected Nadella to be quicker and to say at least some things more substantive but no and no.

I left it. But others have not and I think they make smarter points than I could have done. Specifically, Jean-Louise Gassée extrapolates from this one email what a bad situation Microsoft is in and he extrapolates lessons we could all learn in how to write betterer email things, like.

Clarity and ease are sorely missing from Satya Nadella’s 3,100 plodding words, which were supposed to paint a clear, motivating future for 127,000 Microsoftians anxious to know where the new boss is leading them.

Nadella is a repeat befuddler. His first email to employees, sent just after he assumed the CEO mantle on earlier this year, was filled with bombastic and false platitudes:

“We are the only ones who can harness the power of software and deliver it through devices and services that truly empower every individual and every organization. We are the only company with history and continued focus in building platforms and ecosystems that create broad opportunity.”

Microsoft’s new CEO needs an editor – Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note (undated but probably 14 July 2014)

That was shockingly bad: Nadella’s line about what only Microsoft can do is bad. I remember reading this on an Apple iPad. That would be a device that did everything Nadella says only Microsoft can do, but it would also be a device that Microsoft didn’t do and so far can’t come within sight of competing with. Gassée has some thoughts about this. But he also points with detail toward this core idea that I think, and he clearly thinks, is relevant to us all:

As I puzzled over the public email Microsoft’s new CEO sent to his troops, Nicolas Boileau’s immortal dictum came to mind:

Whatever is well conceived is clearly said,
And the words to say it flow with ease.

I’ll have that. Even though I know I ramble, I’ll keep focused and clear. In my head, anyway.

Gassé isn’t a fully uncontroversial figure but he’s been around the block in this industry for a long time and he writes this analysis well. He does include diagrams of how such emails should be written and I just naturally recoil from so much prescription but I have agree it makes sense. And that Nadella’s email truly lacks anything but a hip photo at the top.

Go somewhere boring to write

Posted by William Gallagher

I’ve had recommendations via friends-of-the-site before, I’m having a recommendation from wife-of-the-blog.

That sounds dreadful. That sounds like a 21st Century version of phrases like “her indoors”. My wife’s name is Angela Gallagher. You and I are having a recommendation from Angela which is this piece she got from traveller Chris Guillebeau:

Don’t go to paradise to get something done. Go to Bali, or any place like Bali, for lots of reasons. (I went there for a birthday by myself.)

But if you want to find a place to write, don’t go to an interesting place. Go somewhere where you can withdraw from the world, fully free of engagement. Go somewhere where there’s nothing to do.

If You Want to Write a Book, Go to a Boring Place – Chris Guillebeau, The Art of Non-Conformity (7 July 2014)

Do read more but don’t just read more: delve on in to his The Art of Non-Conformity, and when you’re fully engrossed, remember to thank Angela. I can pass messages on.

The 5 tools you need for writing, definitely

Posted by William Gallagher

Actually, you could do this with three and those would be:

1) Computer
PCs are cheaper, Macs are better. I vote Mac because I put a big value on the time I no longer have to spend piddling about getting Windows to damn well work. But Macs don’t suit everyone; if you like piddling, save yourself some bucks and get more geeky enjoyment with a PC.

But.

If you’re buying a PC, you have a million options and every one ends up with you having to make a choice between models that have some clear and obvious difference like a 1Mhz speed increase or something. Ignore salespeople, they will – seriously – just read you the spec sheet you were already puzzling over. Instead, ask a friend who has one, get their recommendation and then see if you can find it on the end of this Amazon UK link. That way, if it all works out for you, I get some pennies from your having bought this way and if it doesn’t, it’s your friend who gets your support calls. Everybody wins and it costs me nothing.

If you’re buying a Mac, you’ve fewer options and they always end up with you needing to make a choice between two very similar models. In all cases, save money by buying the cheaper processor speed and spend money on extra RAM and extra storage space. You’ll thank me later, which is nice as I am going to suggest an Amazon link – here it is, do check this out – but I also think you should go into an Apple Store and ask there.

If you’re looking at me like that for the bit about processor speeds and RAM, Apple Store staff will just tell you straight what Macs are good for and not so good for. They’ll ask what you expect to be doing with Mac: be honest. Tell them straight that you should be writing but you’re going to distract yourself with a photography habit that you only do to be social, that you can stop any time.

They will translate processor speeds – actually, no, they won’t bother translating, they’ll just tell you what it means in terms you can use. And Apple Store staff are not on commission so they’ll push this stuff but it’s more from genuine enthusiasm.

Last, if you’re havering between a laptop, desktop or tablet computer, they all work, they all do the job. You will just typically get more done on the desktop, you will be substantially freer with the laptop and the iPad will do everything, everywhere but you need to think about it more as you go.

2) Word processor
Microsoft Word if you have to, if it’s already on your computer or if you know you like it. Google Docs is fine, if a bit clunky looking. If you did buy a Mac, you’ve just got yourself a word processor called Pages and the odds are that you may never need anything else.

3) Email
How else are you going to deliver work? It’s also great for pitches. Just for god’s sake make sure you get a sensible email address.

Get and use these three and you’re away to the races. But I’d recommend two more:

4) Somewhere to track what and where and when your work is
I track invoices in the Numbers spreadsheet and jobs in Evernote. I track tasks in OmniFocus and I keep an eye on my week with Calendar in Mac OS X.

So this would be one of the five tools and I’m saying it’s – wait, counts on fingers – four different applications. Yes. You could do it all in your word processor though. And the time it would take you to pick up and figure out all these applications would probably be better spent at first on learning what your word processor can do. You’re smart, you can use anything but they all have nooks and crannies that are worth exploring for how they may be able to speed up your work.

When you know your word processor well, though, then start branching out into these others.

5) Kettle
Enough said.

Time and space

Posted by William Gallagher

I got up at 5am this morning to write but I also came to a certain spot. Instead of my office, I am in my living room working on my MacBook Pro with its endearing keyboard fault. (There’s something wrong with the W and Q keys so every time you’ve read w or q I have actually keyed Apple-1 or Apple-2: I set a Keyboard Maestro shortcut to save me having to take the keyboard apart or take the time to bring it in for repair.)

But the reason I’m here is that here is where I started writing a short story. I’ve been commissioned to write one and as part of the job, I had an evening with a readers’ group. When I got home that night, I had an idea pounding away at me and I had to get it down, so I sat on my couch and typed a few notes. That was the intention. I ended up writing around 500 words of story, feeling it out, experimenting, testing whether the idea was really a story.

And every now and again, I come back to this couch to continue it.

It just feels right. I had this with The Blank Screen book which I wrote primarily on my iPad while working on a massive non-fiction title in my office.

Location matters more to me than I realised and I think it might mean more to you than you’ve thought. I don’t know, but I’m surprised at the depth of difference it’s made to me and if it helps me this much, in some intangible way, then I want to see if it helps you.

Follow. I don’t consider myself a journalist any more but I certainly was one for a long time and as part of that I grew the ability and the preference to write wherever I happen to be and for however long I happened to have. A sentence here. An article there.

Part of moving to drama is that I’m having to reach further inside myself and somehow what’s around me physically is getting in the way.

I still can and I still do write wherever and whenever I can. But coming to this couch to write the short story, going to the Library of Birmingham to do my regular OmniFocus reviews, it helps.

I’ve found this through accident. Can you try it deliberately? Try writing your next thing somewhere else and see if it helps you.

And then explain to me how I can claim this helps me write my short story when I’m visibly not writing it, I’m visibly talking to you instead.