PureBlogging

Good morning! Anybody else see Hellboy II over the weekend? I was sorely disappointed — I was hoping for something vastly better than the first movie, but got something only marginally better. Oh well — I’m still looking forward to this weekend’s double-whammy of The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia.

And speaking of Batman…

Warren Ellis has called for an end to linkblogs. Maybe the whole Boing Boing vs Violet Blue thing soured him — I know it soured me. Meanwhile, Quark Soup makes some pretty reasonable complaints about blogs in general (h/t Gerry Canavan). Remember: There’s no niche too small. As blogs become more and more localized, will we stop caring about the generalists and focusing more on the experts?

The Writers’ Bag offers a cool tutorial on speed writing. As someone who keeps a moleskine handy at all times, I think I’m going to try this, since my brain often works much faster than my hands.

MetaFilter reminds us that Terry Rossio, half of the screenwriting team that brought you Captain Jack Sparrow, is blogging again. The blog itself seems to indicate that the table of contents was last updated in Fall of ‘07, but hey, a goldmine is a goldmine.

“Trust and credibility are worth more than a fast buck,” say the Men With Pens. It’s a lesson many of us could stand to keep learning. Not me, of course. I am a paragon of virtue.

The adorable manga girls at Dosh Dosh remind us to contextualize the information we share. Also at Dosh Dosh: You’re not just a writer, you’re the editor in chief.

I enjoy cooking. I’m not really spectacular at it — my roux always seems a little pasty and my soups too often turn a bit too soupy. But I’m pretty good with spices. Which isn’t surprising; I got a lot of practice using commas.

Learning to use commas is like learning to use spices. Add too many, and they can utterly destroy the flavor of your content. Read an essay with too many commas in it, and you’ll be tasting commas for the rest of the day. And whenever you see one, you’ll recoil, even if it’s used properly.

But if you don’t use enough commas, your writing will be a flavorless, incomprehensible mush, a bizarre melange of non-flavors that intrude on each other like chicken gravy spilling over the TV-dinner-tray barrier into the chocolate cake compartment. And that’s just unpleasant.

(Another thing you never want to do when writing is use half-assed mixed metaphors that you’ll later have to apologize for. But that’s another post.)

In my travels across the Internet, I’ve noticed that most writers generally tend to take the same approach to using commas that I used for talking to girls in college:

If I don’t do it, then I can’t screw it up.

The same way I avoided Alicia Wrobleski, most bloggers avoid using too many commas, figuring that not using a comma is better than misusing a comma. Of course, this is nonsense. Not doing something is usually worse than trying and failing. And just as the bedpost in room 311 of Sherwood Hall could have had a lot more notches in it if I had just put forth the effort, so your writing can flow effortlessly through your readers’ eyeballs into the Broca regions of their brains.

So: If you only remember one thing about commas for the rest of your life, remember this: A comma is a breath. If you’re a long-winded writer, commas are some of the best gifts you can give to your readers.

Consider this sentence from an advance review of The Dark Knight, posted on one of the Web’s more popular movie sites:

I personally am not a fan of the Joker and find him often grating and overused foil for Batman but there’s no denying his place in history and to many people the first film’s Achilles Heel was the lack of the signature Batman villain.

There’s actually a lot wrong with this sentence (though I agree with the sentiment it expresses). The word “personally” as used here is unnecessary, and really, this whole thing should be broken down into two or more sentences. But let’s see what we can’t fix with commas:

I personally am not a fan of the Joker, and find him often grating and overused foil for Batman, but there’s no denying his place in history, and to many people the first film’s Achilles Heel was the lack of the signature Batman villain.

It’s still not perfect, but see how much simpler a few commas made your reading experience? Commas aid in comprehension in ways that are subtle and subconscious to many of us.

Here’s another example — one that’s more easily fixed — from a popular political site. Here the writer is reacting to a column on marriage in the New York Times:

I just think it is unrealistic and feeds into those crazy ideals we have to internalize and then adds more pressure on our relationships.

One of the problems with failing to use commas when offering your opinion is that it’s easy to come off with a lecturing tone. Again, there’s plenty wrong with this sentence, but it can be patched up pretty well with the addition of a few commas:

I just think it is unrealistic, and feeds into those crazy ideals we have to internalize, and then adds more pressure on our relationships.

But you didn’t come here for examples. That’s not where the hot, wet grammatical action is. You came here for rules.

So, with the caveat that the rules of grammar are really more like guidelines, I offer a few simple rules (um, or guidelines) for using commas.

1. Commas go before conjunctions introducing independent clauses. Conjunctions are words like and, but, or and yet. Independent clauses are sentence clauses with a subject and verb (think of them as clauses that could stand as complete sentences if need be). Keeping an independent clause separated from the rest of the sentence by a comma helps the reader know when he’s moving on to a new thought. The sentence “Alicia Wrobleski was a total babe, and I’m still kicking myself for never having the nerve to talk to her” is a good example of how to use a comma to separate clauses.

2. Never use a comma when a semicolon will do. Don’t simply use commas to separate two independent clauses; doing so betrays a lack of wordsmithing acumen. (See what I just did there?)

3. The rules for lists aren’t as hard and fast as you think. Some people will use commas throughout a list, as in “apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas.” Others will eschew that ultimate comma, opting to write “apples, oranges, grapes and bananas.” Either way is correct, so don’t sweat it.

4. Use commas to separate nonessential elements of sentences. What constitutes a nonessential element may be a bit hazy at times, so try to think of this as one of those times when you’re giving your reader a chance to take a breath. Think about this sentence:

Barack Obama, who is originally from Hawaii, is running for president.

Now imagine it without commas. Pretty hard to read that way, isn’t it?

5. Don’t use commas after conjunctions. Look at every use of the words and, but, nor and or (as well as subordinating conjunctions like although and because) — how would they look with a comma stuck after them. Pretty bad, that’s how.

I know I’m going to get a lot of arguments from big-money SEO types about how this kind of stuff doesn’t matter if it doesn’t affect your clickthrough rate or your pagerank. And to be honest, the rules of good grammar are malleable not always trustworthy. But trust me: This stuff is important. How you sound to others is important.

It probably would have impressed Alicia Wrobleski. At least, I like to think so.

Well, it’s still Monday morning on the West Coast. For a little while longer, anyway.

37 Signals offers some great motivation (and good ideas) for finding revenue streams.

Hacker News has a great discussion on the nature of SEO.

Copyblogger has tips on managing the length of your blog posts.

Men With Pens asks the Ultimate Question: Why do we blog?

Seth Godin makes a great observation about Wall-E and the bravery of creating great content.

Has anyone seen Wall-E, by the way? For my dollar it’s the best movie of the year. If I ever make it as an actor, I’ll be able to cry like a hungry baby, on command, just by thinking of the scene where EVE is trying frantically to find a new circuit board to replace Wall-E’s broken one. See, there I go right now. Big salty tears, right in the keyboard.

I never watched much Saved By The Bell. And I’m reasonably certain it’s not a great show.

But there’s a lot it can tell us about writing.

The show, which ran on NBC from 1989 to 1993 (and in syndication thereafter), documented the dating adventures of a small congress of high school students — sort of like the Archie comics, but less sexually charged, as though each episode were given Tipper Gore’s stamp of approval. During the years it was on TV, I was just old enough that social pressures forced me to think it was stupid, and not watch it. Of course, those social pressures turned out to be correct, and the upshot is that I’ve never really seen a whole episode.

But there is one thing I have noticed about what I have seen of show: The lead character, Zack Morris, has the power to stop space and time. He does this roughly once per episode, mostly so he can talk to the audience. I can’t imagine what this is like from his perspective — how does he perceive the audience when he interacts with it? Does he know it’s out there? Or does he perceive it as some horrific Lovecraftian space-god, hanging massive and aloof at the edge of his consciousness, having granted him this celestial power that he may entertain it before it devours his soul? Is that weird prickly energy we see in Mark-Paul Gosselaar not tenderfoot acting, but barely restrained terror?

Frankly, I don’t care. Whether or not the pitiful vestiges of Zack Morris’s consciousness mourn for the days of summer love and Sadie Hawkins dances as they lazily flap from the muscularis mucosae of Nylarhotep’s oily duodenum is of no matter to me or you.

What does matter is that, whether you’re using Microsoft Word, a pen and paper, or a rusty Smith-Corona with a missing K, you are far more powerful than Zack Morris could ever have hoped.

Most of us tend to forget that when we write, we are the master of all we survey. When faced with rules of grammar and usage, and the panoply of websites telling us how the Really Good Writers do it,  and the many, many voices out there claiming to be experts, we fail to appreciate the pure power we have when we site with a blank slate before us. And even more, we fail to appreciate the extent to which that power grows once we’ve committed words to that slate. The editorial process is scarier to many of us than Zack Morris’s ancient and polypous captor was to him. So too often, we bloggers dash off a post without drafting, without taking a third look, without an editorial process that goes beyond proofreading.

I do it too. And the reason is because I don’t really absorb the full scope of the power I have as a writer. Like Zack Morris, I can stop time. But I can also change the past. I can travel back in time, to six paragraphs ago, and make a change that reverberates throughout all four dimensions of my essay or short story or blog post. I can create the future before the past has even happened — then create a past to match it. I can make changes whose ripples create other changes, whose results I could never have dreamed of.

Too many of us see the drafting process as something that limits us — a slate-grey mechanical process with no art to it, far removed from the blossoming spring of initial creation. A few weeks ago I met an aspiring screenwriter who boiled all of this thinking down to four simple words: “Write drunk. Edit sober.” Usually, any aphorism that advises heavy drinking is one I endorse. But not here.

Editing is power. Drafting is creativity. And to end the writing process after the initial heady thrill of creation is to rob yourself, and your readers, of all the brightness and Brobdingnagian creativity within you.

You owe that to yourself. You owe it to your readers.

And, god knows, you owe it to Zack Morris’s soul, as it is slowly digested over thousands of millennia.

As a writer, you’ve always got to be ready to learn. Because writing lessons can strike at strange times, in strange places.

Like at two in the morning when you’re trying to stare down a guy who’s got six inches and fifty pounds on you, all while wearing nothing but a pair of Snoopy-themed boxer shorts and a t-shirt that reads “I (heart) Puddn.”

But I should start at the beginning.

A couple of nights ago my girlfriend and I turned in for the night only to hear our downstairs neighbor’s booming voice as he talked on the phone.

He does this from time to time, talking on the phone for upwards of three or four hours, always well past 2:00 AM. It doesn’t happen often — maybe twice a month — but it’s consistently annoying. And while I don’t begrudge anyone the right to keep unusual hours, the overall rule is simple: Shut the heck up between midnight and 8 AM.

So finally I went downstairs to talk to the guy (we’ll call him “Bellows von Shoutington”). I threw a shirt on so I wouldn’t look totally outlandish. Unfortunately it was a shirt my girlfriend had had made for me a few years ago. (”Puddn” is a term of endearment she and I use to describe a very specific set of activities. I won’t get into it here.)

I was polite but firm. I told Mr. von Shoutington I could hear every word of his conversation even though we had two fans on (it was a hot night). I asked if he could please shut his window while he was on the phone. There’s no chance we’d be able to hear him through the floor, since our building is old and well constructed. Shutting his window was really all he needed to do.

Of course, this was just too much for Mr. von Shoutington. He told me the window was shut, and that he should be the one complaining, because of all the constant stomping around he hears coming from our apartment. He made it very clear that the problem was mine.

So I gave him a slow, measured stare, and said: “OK, whatever. But right now, could you just keep it down, please?”

I don’t know what you’re like, but I’m not the world’s most confrontational guy. I’m no doormat, but looking someone directly in the eye and making a demand, or even a firm request, isn’t so easy. Particularly when you’re wearing Snoopy underwear and a shirt advertising the snoogy woogy language you use with your sweetie.

Good writing is a lot like staring down someone bigger than you while wearing silly clothes. If you’re not laying it all out on the line, If you’re not, as Walter Smith said, sitting down at a typewriter and opening up a vein, if you’re not taking the risk of looking like a complete sod, then you’re not doing your best.

And looking your reader in the eye is a good way of testing your writing out.

Whatever you write, take a look at it and think to yourself: Am I really looking my reader in the eye with this? Could I look someone in the eye and say what I’m writing?

As writers, it’s our job to engage our readers on the most basic emotional levels. It’s our job to make them understand just how serious we are about what we’re saying. It’s our job to look them in the eye. The more scared you are to say it — and the more scared you’d be to say it while looking someone directly in the eye — the more you can do with it on the page.

There were a lot of things I wanted to say to Mr. von Shoutington, but I didn’t say them — partially because they were irrelevant, but partially because I just didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye. Things like “God, but you stink! What did you do today, smoke every damp cigarette butt you managed to find on the ground? You smell like French cinema in the 60s!” Or, “Well, I may stomp around a lot, but you look like a damn cartoon rat. What’s up with that nose of yours anyway? Does it always twitch like that, or just when there’s a triangular wedge of Swiss cheese nearby?” I’d argue that the humor value of those lines comes from their inappropriateness. It’d be almost impossible to look someone in the eye and deliver one of those.

Later, when I got back up to bed, I heard the sound of a window sliding shut from just below us. He hadn’t told the truth about his window being shut — yet he still felt compelled to shut it. That’s what looking someone in the eye can do.

When you’re writing, if you’re not terrified on some level, you’re not doing it right.

You know, after all is said and done — after you’ve internalized all you can about grammar and usage, after you’ve learned how to structure essays and arrange paragraphs, after you’ve learned all the little tricks, there’s really just one secret to good writing. Just one.

(Don’t worry. I’ll tell you what it is in just a couple of paragraphs.)

Two weekends ago the charitable arm of the Writers’ Guild of America held a conference for wannabe TV writers; there were a whole slew of writers and showrunners there, representing a pretty broad range of shows. I went, and sat through four separate panels, where writers from a whole bunch of shows I love (Lost, The Shield, The X-Files) and whole bunch I, um… don’t love, but for which I hold some degree of respect (Sex and the City, Everybody Loves Raymond) said the same thing:

Write what you love.

Write what you love.

Write what you love. Seriously, they said it over and over.

Practically each one of them said it, at least once. And — not to put too fine a point on it — these are people who have managed to make what your major economists like to call a “crapload” of money, just from making up stories.

Now you’re saying, “But I love writing about something that everyone else seems to hate. Wouldn’t it be better if I just worked up a Lost fan site or something? You know, something everyone likes? Something that’s bankable?”

Well, no. I sort of thought that too, but the WGA writers on the panel — many of them bright-eyed and well-rested after having a few months of strike-inspired “vacation” — were adamant. These are people who are constantly seeing spec scripts from hopeful writers looking for jobs in TV (A spec script is essentially a sample episode of a TV show that you write as a “calling card” in the job search process). The vast, vast majority of these scripts are for whatever hot new show is hot this season. This year it’s 30 Rock and Grey’s Anatomy. The year before that it was The Office and House.

And from their point of view — and what are they but another audience — the whole affair gets very tiresome. But once in a while, they’ll come across a script for a show that’s good, but maybe not so popular. A Crossing Jordan or a ‘Til Death. Often, these scripts make it to the pile simply because someone out there loved Crossing Jordan so much that they just had to write a story with those characters. And often, because the writer has focused so strongly on something he or she loves so much, these will be some of the best specs out there.

So their advice was to write what you love, instead of trying to write something that has mass appeal. There are two reasons this advice works — they provided the first, and I’ll provide the second.

The first advantage to consider is simple enough: The more you’re invested in something, the better you’re likely to make it. Sure, your Founding Fathers slash-fic site may not be as immediately bankable as, say, a Hillary Clinton fashion analysis site, but your very adoration for the concept of John Hancock and Benjamin Rush making sweet forbidden fop-love on the cold cobblestones of Elfreth’s Alley is more likely to move you to invest in its success. Here, I’ll get you started:

Jefferson ran his hands through his lover’s hair. “You know,” he said, “I never can resist you when you come to my office so sweaty and musky, smelling as you do of malt and hops.”

Sam Adams couldn’t resist either, and wished Tom would live up to his taciturn reputation and stop jawing so much. “Shut up and kiss me, you agrarian fool,” he said, and they fell to the floorboards in a mess of passion and wig powder.

The second advantage is the one I came up with, so you know it’s good: Sticking primarily to writing what you love will kindle your love of writing overall — and that means you’ll excel even when you’re writing about things that might not excite you as much. I’ll give you an example.

Part of my work involves writing about things that are — apologies to my clients — somewhat boring. Things like industrial-grade refrigerators and mold remediation. And though I contend that anything becomes interesting if you research it thoroughly enough (just ask Malcolm Gladwell), writing about these topics often becomes so tedious that it’s really, really hard to give it my all. But I get paid for this sort of thing, so I can’t slack off. What’s the answer?

For me, it’s spending a portion of every day writing about things that interest and fascinate me. I just finished a short story that really excited me (I spent about seven hours on it Thursday alone). And ever since I started making sure I work on that story every day, I’ve brought more and more of myself to the writing I get paid to do. It’s sort of like a miracle, but it’s not — I just reminded myself why I love the written word so much.

So: Those ideas you’ve written down in your notebook that you’re saving for some day when you have enough time to devote to them? Make the time now. Even if it’s just a half hour a day. And it might take a week or two to get into the habit and really see results, but trust me: It’ll happen.

Now get to work! But seriously, keep the Founding Fathers thing to yourself. It’s not a good idea.