Tag: Writing

Oops, missed September

Current status:

  • ~500 unreads in my RSS feed (and that’s after some aggressive scanning and running through some of the higher-volume-but-lighter-weight stuff).
  • ~100 open tabs of stuff to either finish reading, share, or process in some way.
  • Inbox is read but I’ve got a handful of messages to still respond to (apologies if you’re waiting).
    • Been terrible at keeping in touch in general, so you could apply that statement to various messaging services as well.
  • Completely missed posting anything in September, despite plenty of desire and even some thoughts to share.

Lots of excuses: I flew out to a conference at the end of August, but promptly got sick the first day of the event and missed it; we bought a house and that’s been a steady supply of tasks; the work project I spent the last 10+ months on finally released and the month leading up to launch was kinda crunch-y; we adopted another dog and have been getting her acclimated… the list goes on. After the flurry of stuff the past two or three months plus the year of traveling, it feels like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath in a while and I’m fucking tired.

Some quick thoughts:

  • I’ve been pondering looking at other blogging options, possibly rolling something up with a platform like Astro or similar. It’s no diss on WordPress, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment. It might give a nice opportunity to try out different layouts and patterns and ways of approaching the site beyond the traditional “blog” experience (maybe start thinking more of the garden concept). I’ve got a few underutilized domains sitting around, so I’ll probably experiment there rather than muck with this blog directly (for now). My actual blogging/writing needs are pretty simple: a spot where I can write without it feeling like a chore; working RSS feed support; maybe some improved media handling. Everything else is gravy.
  • One of my favorite online communities (the Slack associated with the XOXO festival) is going read-only soon, as the conference has officially run its course, and there’s sort of a scramble within the community to find a solution folks can migrate to. As I mentioned before, I don’t have a particular desire to run a forum or online space again, but the conversation has still piqued my interest and left me curious about what the options are these days, especially if you want something open source.
    • A few I’ve noticed while looking around is setting up an XMPP server, or a Matrix server, or a Rocket.Chat server, or a Mattermost server, or a Discourse server.
    • They all seem like kind of a pain in the ass in different ways. I think the ones I’d be most interested in experimenting with personally would be either Matrix or Discourse (and yes, I know Matrix is technically a protocol, but I don’t really care whether it’s Synapse or Conduit or whatever). I think it’s kind of neat that Discourse is primarily forum software, but they’ve implemented what looks like a fairly robust chat system on top of it, so you get a hybrid chat+forum experience.
  • Thinking about my relationship with information in general, and how to better organize both what I write and what I read and want to save. Sort of a perennial topic if I’m honest, but I’m getting that itch again. This blog is still too high friction to be a scratch notebook, but as a step past that it might still fill a purpose. Pondering giving a genuine go at using Obsidian for that lower level scratch role.

Tired, a little fried from the pace of things lately, but hopeful that this fall and winter will strike a better balance. Hope you’re all doing alright as well, and that this fall turns out to be slow in all the best ways.

Simple Language is Better

I’ve ranted about this before, but here’s yet another article (this time in The New Yorker), “Why Simple Is Smart” about how using simple language is better, and using overly elaborate, verbose, or jargon-y language is a sign of insecurity, not knowledge.

Simple is smart. High school taught me big words. College rewarded me for using big words. Then I graduated and realized that intelligent readers outside the classroom don’t want big words. They want complex ideas made simple.  If you don’t believe it from a journalist, believe it from an academic: “When people feel insecure about their social standing in a group, they are more likely to use jargon in an attempt to be admired and respected,” the Columbia University psychologist Adam Galinsky told me. […] Why? It’s the complexity trap: Complicated language and jargon offer writers the illusion of sophistication, but jargon can send a signal to some readers that the writer is dense or overcompensating. 

Derek Thompson

Aside from that central talking point, the rest of the article is also a nice read, discussing some basic tips towards better writing (writing musically is an interesting note, for instance). It’s a quick read, so just go read the article yourself.

Link: On Editing (Your Own) Fiction

Naomi Kritzer has a solid article on editing your work, with advice about doing your post-first-draft edits. A lot of advice out there is focused on just getting the first draft done, but glosses over the essential editing/rewriting process that takes it from a messy first draft to something you’d actually want to show someone else, so this is a welcome addition to the conversation.

I think this is a worthwhile thing to remember:

One of the really magical things about writing is that sometimes, that throwaway bit that didn’t mean anything when you put it there turns out to be the key that holds everything together. I think of those moments as gifts from the muse. Editing isn’t always about making the thing Not Suck; it’s also about spotting the really brilliant bits and polishing them up and focusing the lights on them so people can notice how very shiny they are.

Neil and Kazuo Talk Genre

Not sure why it resurfaced now, but from 2015 over at the New Statesman, there’s a delightful interview between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro, discussing genre and class and escapism and all sorts of interesting things. Well worth the read, and feels pretty topical even now.

KI I don’t have a problem, necessarily, about reading for improvement. I often choose a book because I think I’m going to enjoy it, but I think also it’s going to improve me in some sense. But when you ask yourself, “Is this going to improve me?” what are you really asking? I think I probably do turn to books for some sort of spiritual and intellectual nourishment: I think I’m going to learn something about the world, about people. But if by “improving”, we mean it would help me go up the class ladder, then it’s not what reading and writing should be about. Books are serving the same function as certain brands of cars or jewellery, in just denoting social position. That kind of motivation attaches itself to reading in a way that probably doesn’t attach itself to film.

Many of the great classics that are studied by film scholars are sci-fi: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Kubrick’s 2001. They don’t seem to have suffered from the kind of genre stigmatisation their equivalents would have done in book form.

NG I remember as a boy reading an essay by C S Lewis in which he writes about the way that people use the term “escapism” – the way literature is looked down on when it’s being used as escapism – and Lewis says that this is very strange, because actually there’s only one class of people who don’t like escape, and that’s jailers: people who want to keep you where you are. I’ve never had anything against escapist literature, because I figure that escape is a good thing: going to a different place, learning things, and coming back with tools you might not have known.

Ursula Le Guin

To Ursula Le Guin: You were an astounding writer, and by all accounts an equally astounding human being. I’m grateful for your stories and your thoughts, and what you brought to this world. Rest well.

In John Scalzi’s piece on Le Guin’s passing, he said it quite aptly:

Look at the top tier of writers in science fiction and fantasy today — names like Jemisin and Gaiman and Jeff VanderMeer and Catherynne Valente, as well as rising stars like Bo Bolander and Amal El-Mohtar and Monica Byrne — and you see the unmistakable traces of Le Guin in their work. Multiple generations of her spiritual children, making the genre more humane and expansive, and better than it would have been without her. And all with stories of her.

[…]

The speaking of her name and of her words goes on, and will go on, today and tomorrow and for a very long time now. As it should. She was the mother of so many of us, and you should take time to mourn your mother.

Link: So You Want to be a Writer?

So You Want to Be a Writer? Essential tips for aspiring novelists over at the Guardian, by Colum McCann, who also has a book on the topic. It’s an enjoyable read, and has some good advice without being a shill or clickbait-y.

The only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves. There is one simple word for this: empathy. Don’t let them fool you. Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open. Once you go there, you can be changed. Get ready: they will label you sentimental. But the truth is that the cynics are the sentimental ones. They live in a cloud of their own limited nostalgia. They have no muscularity at all. Remember, the world is so much more than one story. We find in others the ongoing of ourselves.

Link: Advice about Writing

25 habits that will make you a writer by Shaunta Grimes — ignore the terribly clickbait-y title, the advice is actually pretty good. A lot of it may come off as pretty obvious (write every day), but I think it’s still worth a read, and includes some links to some other good books and resources. (Also, pretty relevant regardless of whether your chosen medium is writing or painting or sculpting, or any number of other creative outlets.)

Elizabeth Bear on Committing

Here is thing I learned when I was 29, which I now give away for free:

If you want to do a thing, do it now, or as soon as feasible. Because there might not be a later.

[…]

But to succeed at a thing–a job, a relationship–in the long term, the thing is: You Must Commit, even though commitment is scary. And commitment is scary because once you’re in you’re in. It’s not bobbing around close to the shore, paddling with your feet. It’s both feet and swimming as hard as you can out where the rip currents and the sharks are, where the water turns blue.
— Elizabeth Bear, everybody’s scared of things that they don’t understand and all the living they don’t do.