Thanks to the Battle of Hastings of 1066!
Because it is a blend of languages, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Norman French,
English offers unusual facility for diction drops and spikes, and you, dear
writerly reader, if you care to dare, can employ these for a richly dazzling
array of effects. Irony, comedy, sarcasm, intimacy, poignancy, revelation,
poetry, punch, sass, shock… it’s a long list and I’m sure that you can make
it longer.
Here, taken from a few favorite books and blogs, are some examples of diction spikes– that is, a sudden rise in the level of formality of vocabulary and syntax (wherein it all gets very elliptically Latinate)– and drops– gettin’ funky with the grammar and using short, sharp words.
See if you can spot the spikes and drops. I
separate them out for you below the quotes.
#
“What then, does one do with one’s justified anger? Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose. They generally work. When they fail, she has the ability to dismiss inferior behavior from her mind as coming from inferior people. You will perhaps point out that she will never know the joy of delivering a well-deserved sock in the chops. True– but she will never inspire one, either.”
SPIKE:“What then, does one do with one’s justified anger? Miss Manners’ meager arsenal consists only of the withering look, the insistent and repeated request, the cold voice, the report up the chain of command and the tilted nose.”
DROP :“sock in the chops”
#
“Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals’ surface. The regional maintentance engineer didn’t think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination. Though maybe, he admitted, he was unenlightened. The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone that they weren’t treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama.”
SPIKE: “Department of Transportation engineers explained that aluminum highway signs bore a chemical film which kept them from oxidizing. And that the film over time formed a halo effect, a light-purple tinge which migrated to stress points on the metals’ surface.”
DROP: “…didn’t think the sign looked a bit like the Virgin, by the way. You must of had to use your imagination…”
SPIKE: “The manager of the plant that supplied the aluminum sheets assured everyone…”
DROP: “…they weren’t treated by monks or anything. It was done by a bunch of folks in Alabama.”
#
“As I thought about composing a new blog post over the past couple of weeks, I resisted the idea of writing about wildfire, even as the topic claimed a growing share of mind day after day. For one thing, I’ve touched the subject before. For another, yet another blog bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome. Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer.”
SPIKE: “…bemoaning the lack of precipitation seemed tiresome.”
DROP:“Plus, well, geez: fires are such a downer.”
#
“When I was a young man in the 1970s, New York was on its ass. Bankrupt. President Gerald Ford told panhandling Mayor Abe Beame to ‘drop dead.’ Nothing was being cared for. The subway cars were so grafitti-splattered you could hardly find the doors or see out the windows. Times Square was like the place Pinocchio grew donkey ears. Muggers lurked in the shadows of Bonwit Teller on 57th and Fifth. These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate ‘risk oblivious’ cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind. New York seemed done for.”
SPIKE: “These were the climax years of the post-war (WWII) diaspora to the suburbs. The middle class had been moving out of the city for three decades leaving behind the lame, the halt, the feckless, the clueless, and the obdurate ‘risk oblivious’ cohort of artsy bohemians for whom the blandishments of suburbia were a no-go state of mind.”
If you know who Jaron Lanier is you will understand why he, and probably only he, can get away with such a title for a commercially published book, a title that most people today, and that would include writers with books to promote, would consider hoot-out-loud humbug.
But perhaps they would not if they more fully understood the perverse and toxic nature of the machine Lanier terms BUMMER.
BUMMER = Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made Into an Empire for Rent
Writes Lanier:
“BUMMER is a machine, a statistical machine that lives in the computing clouds. To review, phenomena that are statistical and fuzzy are nevertheless real.”
And more:
“The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the Internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.”
BUMMER sounds like science fiction. But alas, as
Lanier explains, the business plan behind social media, and the use of proprietary
algorithms to hook users into addiction and subtly distort and shape
interactions among users, is both real and seriously icky. You’ve probably read
or heard something about FaceBook’s shenanigans, but in Lanier’s Ten
Arguments you’re getting a far broader, more detailed analysis and
argument, in a wierdly charming package, and not from some random TED pundit,
but from one of the fathers of the industrial-cultural complex now known as
Silicon Valley.
Call me a pessimist: I doubt that Lanier’s book will have any more influence on the general public’s social media habits than did Mander’s on television watching, which came out in the late 1970s. But perhaps such works may assist you in marshaling your attentional power for your creative endeavors, as they did for me, and for this reason I enthusiastically recommend them to you, dear writerly readers.
Carpe diem.
BUT BY THE WAY…
I have not deleted my social media accounts. What I have done is deactivate FaceBook (back in 2015), abandon Twitter (totally, 2021) and now only very rarely participate on LinkedIn and academia.edu, mainly to announce a publication. While I agree with Lanier’s argument that social media is perverse and and toxic, and I sincerely wish that I had never signed up for FB and Twitter in the first place, the fact is, I did, and because of that existing online record and username, I am not ready to hit the delete button. Moreover, I am still digesting some parts of his argument (in particular, I do not accept his hypothesis that the problem is merely what he terms BUMMER).
And, yes, I know, this blog, on the Google platform, blogger, belongs to BUMMER. A better and paid platform is on my to-do list. [UPDATE January 2019: Here at last this blog is on self-hosted WordPress at www.madam-mayo.com]
As for using Google search– definitively
BUMMER– I switched to Duckduckgo as
my go-to search engine a good while ago.
What’s the specific strategy that would be right
for you? I would not presume to say.
But what is clear— and we don’t need Mr Lanier to inform us on this simple point— is that if you want to write anything substantive, and you don’t have the abracadabradocity to summon up more than 24 hours in each day, social media can be a lethal time-suck. The years will scroll by, as it were… and funny how that is, though you Tweet #amwriting often enough, you never wrote what you planned to write…
What’s more, the visibility you can achieve with social media, and the sense of “community,” albeit intermediated by proprietary algorithms of a corportation, are Faustian bargains: you will pay in the end, and on many levels.
P.S. For those who have the inclination and/or sufficient cootie-proofing to handle esoterica, I can also recommend philosopher Jeremy Naydler’s splendidly researched and elegantly argued In the Shadow of the Machine: The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness— also just published. You might find it worthwhile to keep in mind, if you read In the Shadow of the Machine, that in his Ten Arguments Jaron Lanier mentions (oh so briefly, blink and you’ll miss it) Waldorf schools. (More about that connection here.)
As of this year, the second Monday of the month is dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
While I increasingly rely on the Internet for reference—I’ll more likely type a word into my on-line dictionary or thesaurus than pull a wrist-breaker of an old tome off its shelf—there is still no substitute for a writer’s reference library: real books on a real shelf, at-hand. And among the most useful works in my own reference library is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style.
From the catalog copy:
“… Tufte presents—and comments on—more than a thousand excellent sentences chosen from the works of authors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The sentences come from an extensive search to identify some of the ways professional writers use the generous resources of the English language. “The book displays the sentences in fourteen chapters, each one organized around a syntactic concept—short sentences, noun phrases, verb phrases, appositives, parallelism, for example. It thus provides a systematic, comprehensive range of models for aspiring writers.”
But Artful Sentences is not only for aspiring writers. Having written more books than I’ll bother to count, I still find that an occasional review consistently yields inspirations.
Where, and for what effect, can I limber up my writing? Perhaps I need to work in shorter sentences. (p. 9) Bright little ones!
Or perhaps, I could play a bit with what Tufte terms “Catalogs of modifiers” (p.100)– basically, a bunch, a spew, an avalanche of adjectives.
Or perhaps, I might try “an adjective as an opener.” (p.160) Open doors, don’t they seem more inviting?
Artful Sentences elucidiates the immense range of possibilities we have in the English language to arrange our sentences, and within them, the sounds and rhythms of words, the better to sharpen and strengthen what we mean to say. And that, my dear writerly reader, is power.
YE ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND Yes, this was on my bookshelf and yes, I actually used to consult it.
I have previously posted on my favorite exercises for a fast-acting manuscript Rx, what I call “emulation” or “permutation” exercises, here. (Which one is it, emulation or permutation? Depends. That would be another post.)
The basic idea is to take a phrase or perhaps as many as a few sentences from another writer’s work or from your own manuscript, and play with it in some predetermined way. Sometimes the exercise might prompt a new piece; othertimes it might give you just what you need to brighten up the blah or smooth a rough patch in a draft. Moreover, for my wampum, permutation exercises beat crossword puzzles by a Texas section. (Yowie, that was an orangutang’s tea party of imagery!)
Yes, I am being silly. To play, you have to be
willing to be silly! Tell your ego to just take a long cool breath. You, dear
writerly reader, do not have to use the results of your writing exercises in
your manuscript, never mind show them to anyone else.
Simply, for any given permutation exercise, come
up with a bunch of things! Maybe elegant, maybe dorky. Maybe even dorksterly
dorkikins dorky. Then circle the one or two results that, for whatever reason,
strike your fancy and/or seem apt for your purposes.
In my experience, and that of many of my writing
students, doing these exercises is a tiny investment for a mega-payoff. The
more often you do these little exercises, the easier they get, and this ease
will greatly serve you in your endeavors to write, and in particular, to write
more vividly. You will also get practice in generating material you are able
to, la de da, discard. And discarding unworthy bits and pieces of a
draft, and even whole novels, without attachment, that’s a vital skill for a
writer, too.
“IT’S LIKE DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN”
There are as many permutation exercises as you
can dream up. This one, what I call “Blast Past Easy,” plays with
cliché.
How can you spot a cliché? If a phrase sounds
familiar and/ or it came to you too easily, it’s probably a cliché.
What’s wrong with cliché? For more discerning readers, whom presumably you would want to have, cliché signals a lack of originality and/or naiveté and/or sloppiness. In sum: mediocrity. There are exceptions– for example, a fictional character or the subject of biography might use cliché (and if they do, that tells us something about them, does it not?) And some essayists use cliché for comic effect. (I’ll be posting about intentional diction drops anon.)
“Like deja vu all over again”– well,
you can debate me, but I’m going to call that a cliché, except as used by
Yogi Berra, because he’s the one who came up with it.
Here are a few clichés I happened upon in recent
weeks’ reading, and my permutations– four each. If you feel so moved, a good
exercise could be to add more permutations of your own.
“Talk does not boil the rice” Talk does not shampoo the pooch Talk does not slice the pepperoni Talk does not iron the shirts Talk does not roast the turkey
(You might try a permutation of the noun,
“talk,” e.g., art; violin playing; texting
“Bet you dollars for donuts” Bet you deutschmarks for Dingdongs Bet you dinars for dinos Bet you dollars for diddlysquat Bet you pounds for peanuts
(Part of what makes “dollars for
donuts” such an appealing cliché is the alliteration, that is, the
repeating “d”s of “dollars” and “donuts.” You
might try varying the sound, e.g., silver for Skittles, or, pesos for pips,
etc.)
“Let the cat out of the bag” Let the cockroach out of the bag Let the bedbug out of the backpack Let the tarantula out of the pickle jar Let the worm out of the compost pile
(Another permutation could be to switch the verb,
e.g, Put the cat in the bag; stuff the cat in the bag; drown the cat in the
bag; swing the cat in the bag, etc.)
“The bee’s knees” The snail’s tail The donkey’s ankle The sloth’s toenail (doesn’t rhyme but, oh well, I like it) The kitten’s mittens (is that a cliché?)
“A fish out of water” A mole out of its hole A horse out of its pasture A sheep out of its herd A troll out of his cave A credit card nowhere near a department store
“Barrel, Mirror, Telephone” In three sentences or less describe the barrel. In three sentences or less describe the mirror. Where is the telephone? Describe what happens.
Without exception Taber’s works are superb, wondrous, must-reads for anyone who would explore the world from an armchair– and for anyone who would write their own. There is so much to relish and to learn from Taber’s daring, her mastery of the craft, her ability to see the most telling particulars, and the exquisite, sensuous beauty of her prose.
Based just outside Washington DC, Taber is also a long-time writing teacher, currently leading workshops both privately and at the Writer’s Center (Bethesda MD) and elsewhere. And now, for both her workshop students and for those at a distance, who cannot take her workshop, just out from Johns Hopkins University Press, and with lovely illustrations by Maud Taber-Thomas, we have Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars: A Writer’s Field Notebook.
I was honored to have been asked to contribute a blurb:
“Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars is at once a delicious read and the distilled wisdom of a long-time teacher and virtuoso of the literary memoir. Her powerful lessons will give you rare and vital skills: to be able to read the world around you, and to read other writers, as a writer, that is, with your beadiest conjurer’s eye and mammoth heart. This is a book to savor, to engage with, and to reread, again and again.” – C.M. Mayo
The following Q & A is reprinted from her publisher’s website (Johns Hopkins University Press):
Q: Why did you decide to write this book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: So that writers of any stripe—from travelers, to bloggers, to journal-keepers, to memoirists, essayists, and journalists—will know just what to note down so as to paint rich and vivid pictures of people and places, and create a lively record of their experiences in and responses to the world.
Q: What were some of the most surprising things you learned while writing/researching the book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: The writing of the book allowed me to put on all my hats—literary journalist, anthropologist, memoirist, essayist, journal-keeper, and traveler—and draw together in one place all that I have learned, from those various fields, about keeping a lively field notebook. Writing the book let me re-live the pleasure of field-notebook keeping and also offer the prodigious pleasure of the habit to others. It is a way to get to live your life twice.
Q: What do you hope people will take away from reading your book?
SARA MANSFIELD TABER: A sense of exhilaration—to stride out into the world, to experience it fully and observe it closely, and then to write about that world with all the richness and color they can muster.
Check out the trailer for Sara Mansfield Taber’s Chance Particulars:
As of this year, my posts for the second Monday of the month are dedicated to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, I am work on a book of creative nonfiction about Far West Texas, a subject distant indeed from children’s literature. But Russell Hoban’s 1964 classic, Bread and Jam for Frances, is bright in my mind because in the recent days of my mother’s final illness, I read it to her several times.
Bread and Jam for Frances was a great favorite of ours, a book my mother read to me when I was learning to read in the early 1960s. She always appreciated children’s books, and often gave copies of her favorites as gifts. Other favorites of hers included DuBose Heyward’s The Country Bunny and the Little Golden Shoes; Margaret Wise’s The Little Fur Family; anything and everything by Beatrix Potter; and many other titles about in Hoban’s series about Frances the badger and her little sister Gloria.
From 1939… still selling faster than little bunnies can hop…
In her last days my mother was unable to do more
than listen to TV news– and it pained me to sit in that room awash with
reports of shootings, bombings, crashes, the latest tweets from POTUS,
commercials for drugs and those breathlessly chirpy recitations of ghastly side
effects, and even such absurd “news” stories as– this one still
makes me chuckle– “Robotic Dinosaur on Fire!”* So I asked my mom if,
instead, I could read to her from some of her favorite children’s books and she
said, delightedly, yes.
*(Robotic Dinosaur on Fire!-– That’s the
title of my next book of poetry.)
What brings me to mention Bread and Jam for
Frances here is that, as I appreciated for the first time, the plot is at
once simple and unusually elegant.
GROKKING PLOT
No matter whether one is writing an adult
thriller, a romance novel, or a literary tour-de-force of an historical epic,
plot is something a writer needs to grok, before writing, during drafting, and
in the editing process. Where to go, what to cut? For many writers, particularly
those working on a first novel, plot can seem more difficult to wrestle down
than a wigged-out octupus.
The best and most complete craftmans’ treatment
of plot that I have found to date is in Robert McKee’s Story,
a book aimed at screenwriters, but almost every one of his yummy
nuggets applies to novels as well. That said, it’s a big, fat, doorstopper of a
crunchily crunchwich-with-garlic- sweetpotatoes-on-the-side kind of book, not
the most appropriate for a one day workshop, as I prefer to teach them.
These three and many more recommended books on craft are listed on my workshop page.
Gardner’s On the Art of Fiction is the
best introductory book on craft I know– over the past 30-odd years I have read
it and reread it more times than I can count (and bought new copies when the
old ones fell to pieces). However, on many an occasion, before I learned to
first give ’em ye olde cold fish of a caveat, the more sensitive among my
students would complain bitterly about Gardner’s arrogant tone. And to those of
you not in my workshop but who who have read and loathed Gardner, I say unto
you: Buck up, kiddos, or consider that Gardner did you a favor so you can quit
now because the literary world, like the whole big wide rest of it, makes
snowflakes sweat blood! Then flash-fries ’em to a crisp! Anyway, Gardner died
in a motorcycle accident years ago so you’re unlikely to ruffle his feathers
with your cranky review on Goodreads– which only makes you sound like a
flaming snowflake. SSSSsssss.
Seriously, have a laugh, shake off Gardner’s tone
like the peacocking silliness that it is; if you want to understand the art of
fiction, I urge you to read what he has to say. (Also, by the way, you can
ignore the subtitle, Notes on Craft for Young Writers. It’s for anyone
writing fiction, at any age.)
Of course, in a workshop it is necessary to talk about plot in reference to one or more specific novels. But one of the gnarliest challenges for a workshop is that reading a novel requires many hours– no time for that in a one day format– and even the most well-read writers may not have read the same books, nor share the same taste. Perhaps we have all read Edith Wharton, but for you it was Ethan Fromm, for me, The Custom of the Country. Willa Cather? Perhaps you read My Antonia and I read Death Comes for the Archbishop. And, Lord knows, there are perfectly intelligent and talented workshop students who have not heard of either Cather or Wharton. Lord also knows that, much as we may recommend our favorite novels to each other, even we roaringly avid readers may work but a fraction of the way down our towering to-read piles.
Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, masters of American literature– and plot. My uberly-uber faves. In an ideal workshop I would dissect the plot in any one or or more of their novels (I should like to think that these ladies would have been charmed by Bread and Jam.)
What a fine thing then to have found a little
book, so short and sweet, with such an expertly wrought plot as Bread and
Jam for Frances.
But I cannot bring myself to do taxidermy, that is to say, a synopsis. For those of you looking to learn about plot (and/or find a worthy children’s book as a gift for your favorite young reader), may I suggest that you buy a copy of Bread and Jam for Frances, then read it, which won’t take you more than about 10 to fifteen minutes. Then return here, just below the ampersand.
~ & ~
Bread and Jam through the FICHTEAN CURVE
Think of this as a triangle (curvy if you wish)
where your story travels, episode-of-conflict by episode -of-conflict, up the
hypotenuse to the big pointy CLIMAX. Then, with your denouement– pronounced,
raising your nose oh so slightly, day-noo-mahn— slidey-slide down
to…The End!
Episode o’ conflict: At breakfast Frances does
not want an egg; she only wants bread and jam.
E o’ c: She admits she traded yesterday’s chicken
salad sandwich for bread and jam
E o’ c: At lunch she offers to trade her bread and
jam for a sandwich, is refused
E o’ c: At snack time her mother gives her not a
special snack but bread and jam
E o’ c: For dinner there are veal cutlets but
Frances gets… bread and jam
Climax: At the next dinner Frances cries and asks
for spaghetti and meatballs!
Denouement: For lunch the next day Frances enjoys
a lunch of a lobster salad sandwich and much more. She agrees with her friend
Albert that it is good to eat many different things.
Bread and Jam
through Syd Field’s THREE ACT PARADIGM
I SET UP Breakfast at home: Frances does not want her egg, only bread and jam. She admits she traded yesterday’s lunch of a chicken salad sandwich for bread and jam
Plot point (what takes us to Act II): It’s time
for Frances to go to school
II CONFRONTATION Lunch with Albert, Albert has a nice lunch while Frances has only bread and jam.
Snack time, it’s still bread and jam.
Dinner, still bread and jam.
Dinner again, bread and jam
Plot point (what takes us to Act III): Frances cries
and asks for meatballs and spaghetti
III RESOLUTION Frances enjoys her meatballs and spaghetti
The next day, Frances opens her lunch box to find
a very nice lunch with a lobster salad sandwich and, with her friend Albert,
discusses how nice it is to eat many things
#
Perchance this sounds silly. Am I saying that we
can compare the simple little plot in Bread and Jam for Frances with
that of such literary heavyweights as say, The Custom of the Country? Death
Comes for the Archbishop? Or, for that matter, The Great Gatsby? Yes,
dear writerly readers, that is what I am saying– and moreover, that because
the plot of Bread and Jam for Frances is so compact and simple, it is
easier to see. And having seen it so clearly, you should then be better able to
see plot in your own work.
What does your plot look like through the
paradigm of the Fichtean curve? And of the three-acts?
Now your wigged-out octopus just might shed a few limbs, or at least, braid them together and sit up nicely and accept a cup of tea– and in between sips, calmly inform you, in his bubbly French accent, what’s to happen next. (Never a dull moment writing fiction.)
“What’s in the Kitchen Drawer?” This is a vocabulary expanding exercise— not about using new words, but rather words you already know but seldom use. List the objects in your kitchen drawer(s)— from the spatula to the grapefruit knife to the soup ladle.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell writes: “Love those books, and your essay! Hoban was featured in a display at Beinecke at Yale. I often think of Frances’s difficult experience with Thelma, the bad friend, who trades for her tea set.”
File this post under Future Reminder to Take My
Own Advice, and if some or all of these ideas also work for you, gentle reader,
verily I say unto you: Wunderbar!
Late last September, having finally rearranged
and set up my working library in my new office in Mexico City– the work in
question being a book on Far
West Texas— I had to pack it all back up again and ship it
across the Atlantic. (Why? Well, that’s a novel I’m not going to write, both
literally and figuratively).
Now that I’ve got my Texas books resettled on
their second set of new shelves in less than six months, I’m ready to take on
2018! But whew, I’ve got biceps after this job for a Hercules. The
thirty-eight boxes of books comprising what I now call the Texas Bibliothek– I
have landed in German-speaking Switzerland– arrived in mid-January. And a
couple weeks later, every tome and paperback and pamphlet and back-issue of Cenizo Journal
is in place, and I can carry my bike over head! I could scoop up and toss
dessicated Christmas trees, small donkeys and their Schmutzlis
out windows, too, should I take a notion!
ON ORGANIZING (AND TWICE MOVING) A WORKING LIBRARY: Ten Lessons Learned of Late with the Texas Bibliothek
1. Organize the books by topic– not as a
librarian would recommend, but as your working writer’s mind finds most
apt.
Ideas About Texas (Some, Anyway…)
After all, you’re the one who will be using these
books, not the general public. And even in a fairly substantial working
library, such as this one, there are not enough books to justify the
bothernation of cataloging and labeling each and every title.
If you have more than 50 books and if you do not
organize them in some reasonably reasonable way, why don’t you just open your
front door and let your dogs wander out and then you can go looking for them on
the freeway at four a.m., that might be more fun!
2. If any category has more than 30-40 books,
create a new subcategory.
Because trying to keep books in alphabetic order,
whether by author or by title, makes me feel dehydrated, RRRRRR.
3. Label categories of books with large,
easy-to-read lettering.
Because if you’re a working writer, like me you’re probably near-sighted…
Funny how book designers always have such unique
ideas about colors and font sizes and typefaces…. In other words, I don’t
want to have to look at the visual clutter of those spines to try to figure out
what this bunch is about; I let that BIG FAT LABEL tell me.
If you do not want to make labels, why don’t you
peel the labels off all the jars and cans in your pantry, mix ’em up, and then
try to find which one is the dog food and which one the canned pumpkin? That
would be a mile more hilarious.
4. When moving, before touching anything,
take photos of the whole shebang.
I do not have early onset dementia, but boy
howdy, moving house sometimes makes me feel as if I do. (Did I used to have a
working library? Was I working on a book? What day is it? Is Ikea still open?)
5. Then, before even touching those books, take a tape measure and write down the inches of shelf space required for each and every category.
I suspect that these things are in cahoots with pens and umbrellas.
A tape measure!
I realize this may sound very OCD.
But three moves ago, it did not occur to me to do
this with my working collection on Mexico’s Second Empire / French
Intervention, for my then recently-published book, The Last Prince
of the Mexican Empire. In the rush of moving
I allowed the moving company crew to pack the books,
willynilly-fefifo-rama-chillydilly, and then, on arrival, lacking space, never
mind bookshelf space, and so having to leave that particular library in a
half-unpacked, unsorted chaos, for the next few years more correspondence and
related research was bottlenecked than I want to think about. (That library now
has its home in Mexico City– that would be another blog post.)
The main thing is, you want to be certain you
actually have the bookshelf space you need plus ample wiggle room for
each category before you start packing– and then double
check the available bookshelf space again before you start unpacking.
And never, ever let anyone else pack them.
Sounds obvious. Alas, for me, three moves ago, it
was not.
6. Save those neatly made shelf labels to
reattach to the new shelves, and also label– with mammoth, easy-to-read
fonts– each and every box.
Geology, Energy, Box 1 corresponded to category 40, requiring 17 inches of shelf space.
7. Number each box, e.g., 1 of 32; 2 of 32, etc.
These can be cross-referenced with the master
list of categories, which has the measurements.
8. Don’t be stingy with boxes!!
For moving books I prefer the so-called banker’s boxes
with punch-out holes for handles. Banker’s boxes are large enough to take a
heaping helping of books, and the handles make them easy to carry, however the
weight of a book-filled banker’s box remains within the range of what I, a
50-something female whose daily mainly workout consists of walking two pugs,
and, la-de-da, whatever biking and yoga, can easily haul up or down a staircase.
Yes, you could snag a batch of free boxes at the
grocery store, and yes, you probably could, as I certainly could, lift bigger
boxes with double the number of books in them– and most men can haul a stack
of two or even three bigger boxes at a time. However, whatever the upper-body
strength you have and shape you are in, when you are moving house, unless you
for some reason enjoy showering hundreds of dollars on, say, your
chiropractor’s vacation home, lifting huge, ultra-heavy, and unwieldy boxes is
penny wise and dollar dumb. Ox dumb.
Goodie for me, I learned this lesson three moves
ago, and I had an excellent chiropractor.
9. Take photos of the boxes, labels included.
Because you never know! Seems I have good moving
juju. Knock on wood for next time!
On reshelving day, gather together before commencing:
Papertowels
Cleaning spray for the shelves (they will be dusty)
If you are missing any one of these items, you will probably have to interrupt whatever you are doing to go get it, and then in, say, the kitchen, because you have Moving on the Brain, you will be distracted by some zombie command from the dusty ethers such as, I must now go to Ikea to buy garbage bags and whatnotsy whatnots…
#
Meanwhile, dagnabbit, people just won’t stop writing books on Texas!! Two more, post-move, essential additions to the Texas Bibliothek:
Wish me luck, gentle reader. I aim to finish my book on Far West Texas this year. By the way, I host an associated 24 podcast series, “Marfa Mondays,” which is woefully behind schedule because of these moves, but soon to resume. I invite you to listen in anytime to the 20 podcasts posted so far.
P.S. Using the free blogger platform, I also
maintain an online working
library of out-of-copyright (now in the public domain, mainly linked to
archive.org) Texas books— books which I could not or did not want
to attempt to purchase but would like to be able to consult at my
leisure. It includes a number of titles that might appear bizarrely out of
place (one is on Massachusetts, for example)– but after all, this is not for
the general public, but a working library in service of my book in-progress. I
mention this because perhaps you might find it of use to create such an online
library for your own purposes.
P.P.S. For those wondering, what is my take on
ebooks? First of all, I delightedly sell
them! And yes, I have bought some, and as far as the Texas
book research goes, when I need a book urgently and/or the paper edition is
unavailable or expensive, I have been known to download a Kindle or four– or,
as above-mentioned, download out-of-copyright books for free from www.archive.org and similar sites. I
appreciate that convenience, and also the ease with which I can search within a
text for a word or phrase. Nonetheless, on balance, I find ebooks decidedly
inferior to paper. Morever, I doubt that my electronic libraries will outlive me
in any meaningful way, while I expect that my working libraries of hardcovers
and paperbacks, including some rare
editions, may serve other researchers well beyond the horizon of my
lifetime.
As anounced in the last post of 2017, in 2018 I will be posting on Mondays on the following schedule:
First and third Mondays of the month: New writing / news / podcasts; Second Monday: For the writing workshop; Fourth Monday: Cyberflanerie and/or Q & A with another writer, poet, and/or translator; Fifth Monday, when applicable: Whatever strikes my gong.
As writers, albeit human creatures of habit, we tend to use only a woefully limited portion of our vocabularies. Hence our first drafts may be stiff, dull, and vague. To add verve, freshness, and focus, it helps to loosen up our mental joints, as it were, and reach for a greater variety of words.
The challenge is not necessarily to expand your vocabulary –I am not talking about trying to sound fancy– though perhaps you or one of your characters may want to do that– but to bring more of your writerly attention to words you know but do not normally use.
Towards that end reading is vital– but not reading passively, as a consumer of entertainment, nor reading for facts and concepts, as would a scholar. Instead, read as a writer, with a pencil or pen in hand, noting down any words that strike you as especially apt or somehow, for whatever reason, attractive to you.
These might be simple words such as, say, brood; caprice; crackpot; pall; nougat; persimmon.
When I read I keep a notebook, PostIt, or index
card handy so I can jot down any words and phrases that I like. I used to worry
about keeping all these notebooks and bits of paper in some semblance of order,
but I now believe that most of the benefit is in simply noticing what it is
that I like; and second, writing it down. (In other words, when it comes time
to declutter, I will, as I have, and so what?) Of late I toss these index cards
in a recipe box that I keep on a shelf behind my desk. When one of my drafts
needs an infusion of energy, I pluck out a random batch of cards, shuffle
though them, and see if anything might be of use. Often it is.
From another card plucked out at random:
shrewd sagacious “intrigue and shifting loyalties” surmise astute console relentless do not relent never relent; pout nuanced verdict deadly banal banalities dejected munificence fail to grasp thieving toad
Thieving toad! I don’t know why, that
makes me laugh. And it makes me want to start (or perhaps end?) a short story
thus:
She failed to grasp that he would never relent,
he was a thieving toad.
I also note phrases and sayings I like, e.g.:
“Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.”
“Birds of prey don’t sing”
“the apostles of — ”
“camarón que se duerme amanece de botana” (the shrimp that sleeps wakes up as an appetizer– that’s a variation on the old Mexican saying, “the shrimp that sleeps is carried off by the current.”)
My first attempt at typing on a typewriter in nearly thirty years. From: Meteor.
My writing assistant denies any and all responsibility for slipshod typing or head-scratching sushi poetry.
Thank you, Typewriter Techs!My refurbished 1961 Hermes 3000 typewriter has arrived in Mexico City. Typewriter Techs, the Riverside, Illinois company that refurbished it, shipped it to California in a box so well padded it could have survived a Mars landing; having discarded the packing materials and box, I then grew some new biceps carrying it on board my flight home. I’d say it weighs about the same as a wet brick. It was a loooooong way from the security screening area to the gate. Jack LaLanne, watch out.
No, not the French scarf and tie and stupendaridiculously-expensive-whatnots company. This Hermes was of Swiss manufacture of yore.
The color is just as I had hoped, a foamy celadon (although it looks gray in this photo— too strong a flash).
LIKE TIME TRAVELING
I’m old enough to have had nearly two decades of experience with typewriters, both manual and electric, before I started using a computer in the late 1980s. It was an eerie experience to type on a typewriter again… like time traveling.
My first attempts at typing on this antique were clumsy, since I am, as are we all, so used to letting fingertips fly over a laptop’s keys and making scads of corrections en medias res and whatever whenever wherever and with the benefit of, after penicillin and sliced bread, the bestest thing ever invented: CNTRL Z!
Madam Mayo says, The Anti-Digital Revolution will be Youtubed! And blogged! And, when I get around to it, tweeted! Git yer iron-knee right here, on a spatula! But seriously, check out this fine trailer for philosopher Richard Post’s excellent and thought-provoking resource The Typewriter Revolution.
“The 3000 model is a Swiss segment-shifted typewriter with excellent alignment, smooth carriage return, and quality manufacturing, introduced in the fifties. You’ll find it in a wonderfully bulbous body, painted in a color that some call “sea-foam green”… Not the very fastest or snappiest typewriter, but “buttery” in its smoothness, as fans like to say… Users include Larry McMurtry, Sam Shepard, Eugene Ionesco, and Stephen Fry.”
A tip of the Stetson to my fellow Texan Mr. McMurtry. As for Monsieur Ionesco, voila l’entrevue:
Watch the interview with English subtitles here. No, alas, Ionesco’s Hermes 3000 does not make an appearance. Mais nous pouvons utiliser notre imagination.
My 1961 Hermes 3000 arrived in its original carrying case along with, LOL, total yay, a packet of jellybeans!!
Under the jellybeans, a message from Typewriter Techs…
The original 1961 Hermes 3000 instruction manual. (Ha! Will those websites and YouTubes still be available and playable in 55 years? You reeeeeeaaaaaaalllly think so…?)
The warranty, yay, from Typewriter Techs.
I WILL NOT PANIC ABOUT TYPEWRITER RIBBONS NO I WILL NOT PANIC
Although we now inhabit a consumersphere rife with such ecologically exploitative poppycock as single-serve Nespresso capsules… it is nonetheless easy-peasy to find typewriter ribbons that work for multitudinous models and makes of typewriters. I knew that from reading Polt’s The Typewriter Revolution, and a quick Google. Furthermore, Typewriter Techs included this with their shipment:
In case you cannot read the image and/or your
brain, like mine, goes into blur mode WITH ANYTHING WRITTEN PLEASEGODWHY
ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS, it says:
“ALL ABOUT RIBBONS
“In the 1950s ribbon sales topped 50 million annually, they were the toner of their day. But unlike toner most typewriters will take the same ribbons. There are several direct replacement ribbons available for most machines. If you cannot find one, don’t panic. The ribbon itself is identical, only the spool changes. We recommend you purchase the genetic black., or black and red ribbon and rewind it onto your current spools. This is the least expensive and guarantees a correct fit. You can also contact us we stock a large variety if replacement ribbons.
“Cloth ribbons will hold more ink than nylon. Cotton will soak up the ink, nylon it just lays on top of it. A typical ribbon should last about 900,000 characters or about 180,000 words… That’s around 500 pages. A good quality ribbon will transfer the ink without leaving excessive ink on the type bars or pages. If the entire type slug is covered in blue, it’s probably not a good ribbon to use again. Black only ribbons can be turned upside down and doubled in life.”
YE PAD
A related and most felicitous purchase was the Jackalope typewriter pad. Definitely it cuts the noise.
The typewriter pad. Land o’ Goshen, why didn’t I use one of these before?
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, YE LOVELY TYPEWRITER FABRIC
My writing assistant remains confused but pugfully blasé.
A most thoughtful holiday gift from my sister’s dog (yes, in our family the dogs give presents): this yardage of neat-o typewriter fabric and I do like it draped over the Hermes, just so. Nope, I am not going to attempt anything on a sewing machine, the typewriter is my own personal Mount Everest for the moment. Must get typing.
BIG FAT CAVEAT: If you have a job and/or family situation that oblige you to use your smartphone like a bodily appendage, dear reader, a shower of metaphorical lotus petals upon you, but this post is not for you. Perhaps you might enjoy reading this post from 2012 instead. See you next Monday.
The challenge in a pistachio shell: How to maximize the quality of one’s email, both incoming and outgoing, while minimizing the time and effort required to dispatch it— all the while maintaining the blocks of uninterrupted time necessary for one’s own writing?
What works for me may not work for you, dear reader, but I know that many of you are also writers, and a few of you are artists and/or scholars, so perhaps—and here’s hoping— my time-tested 10 point protocol for dealing with email will be of as much help to you as it has been to me.
A PRELIMINARY NOTE ON CONTEXT: EMAIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!RRRRRRR
How is a writer to cope with this snake-headed conundrum-o-rama that just about everyone everywhere has been wrestling with since it first emerged out of the DARPA-depths of this rapacious fabulosity we call the Internet?
I’ve been slogging it out with email for more years than I care to count. It was sometime in the mid-1990s when I logged on to my first account; I but fuzzily recall the roboty-dialup-and-connection sounds and an inky screen with neon-green text. A few years after that, I was using this cutting-edge thing called an AOL account. (Whew, AOL, Paleolithic!) Now I use a nearly-as-ancient yahoo account plus a pair of gmail accounts all funneled into ye olde Outlook Express inbox, into which pour… pick your metaphor…
(a) Rains! (b) Niagaras! (c) Avalanches! (d) Gigazoodles of emails!
As anyone who remembers the late 1990s will attest, it seemed that overnight email blossomed into a hot-house monster—or, I should say, a Macy’s Parade of monsters— and for me, by 2009-2010, when I was on tour for my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire at the same time that my father was in his last days, trying to cope with email, both professional and personal, had become a nightmare.
In 2011-2012 I was tempted to follow the example of “Swiss Miss” blogger Tina Roth Eisenberg after her three months of maternity leave: Declare email bankruptcy. Many a time I was also tempted to remove my email address from my website. Neither of those strategies appealed to me, however; I appreciated so many of those messages, and I also appreciated that, apart from spam and the occasional bit of nonsense, behind those messages were relationships that I sincerely valued, even cherished.
I also realized—and this is something I am writing about in my book on Far West Texas— that hyper-connectivity along with endless carousels of hyper-palatable distractions are now woven into the very fabric of modern life. As long as the electric grid continues functioning, I doubt these forces impinging on one’s experience of work, family, social life, politics, and travel, will diminish; on the contrary.
“hyper-connectivity along with endless carousels of hyper-palatable distractions are now woven into the very fabric of modern life.”
Over the past several years, chip by chip, I managed to whittle down that ghastly backlog (not to zero, but on some days it gets razor-close). More importantly, by trial, error, research, and mental muscle, I formulated a more workable strategy for dispatching the ongoing flow.
Again, that caveat: this post is not for those who need to be continually available to a boss, colleagues, clients, friends, or family.
IT STARTED WITH SOME ILLUMINATING READING… THEN THE FLOODLIGHTS SWITCHED ON WITH “THE MACHINE STOPS”
I gleaned many an insight and tip for managing email from:
For me the most enlightening reading of all, however, and strange to say, was a work of fiction from 1909: E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”Astonishingly, that short story written more than a century ago by an Edwardian Englishman best known for his novel A Passage to India, envisions email, texting, Facetime, and the like. It also seems Forster anticipated the American diet built around corn-syrup heavy fast food. The main character, cocooned in technology, has turned into a heartless, incurious, yet hyper-connected blob.
On reading this sci-fi horror, I realized that one needs to evaluate a technology not by its gee-whiz-what-would-Steve-Jobs-say factor, but by how it affects the body. I mean, by how it affects one’s human body, brains to toenails, now, here, on Planet Earth.
THE BODY AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE THEATER OF SPACE-TIME
(1) Assuming one can afford it, does a given technology help one realize one’s conscious intentions born of free will?
(2) Does using said technology cause one to serve or to neglect the body?
(3) Is there a better available alternative?
These are the key questions to answer for a sense of the true and full (both monetary and nonmonetary) net cost / benefit of utilizing a given technology because if your body, which by the way, includes the brain, ends up not working the way it was meant to, well, in terms of going anywhere or doing anything or interacting with other people, that more than kind of sucks.
Some metaphysicians argue that we are not our bodies, but in essence,immortal pinpoints of consciousness. It seems to me that if they’re right, after we finish up here on Planet Earth, we have forever and eternity to do what immortal pinpoints of consciousness do; and if those metaphysicians are wrong, well, then they’re wrong, and we won’t be here anymore to argue with them about it anyway.
Either way, as I write this and you read this, we are conscious, each in our place in the Theater of Space-Time. We did not arrive here encased in technology, but in our human bodies, with all their pain and joy and bones and squishiness and awkwardness and grace. Why then would we want machines to do everything and our breathing for us— unless, of course one has the crap-awful luck to require an iron lung?
I want to utilize technology not to supplant but to enhance living this life— this human life on Planet Earth. Or, to use my new favorite metaphor, to enhance my experience of being here now in the Theater of Space-Time.
Technology is not bad per se, of course; it can help us survive and even thrive. But last I checked, a quality human life requires being able to breathe, walk, see, hear, exercise, sleep, eat nutritious food and drink adequate clean water, soak up some beauty, and interact in multitudinous ways with other people. What good is a technology that turns us into blobs staring at and fiddling with screens all day, even as we neglect our relationships? (Or walk into oncoming traffic?)
On the other hand, email, like pen-and-paper-correspondence of old, is one technology, a powerful one, that when properly employed can help us work with / get along with other people. And like pen-and-paper-correspondence of old, for a writer email can be a joy.
Dead-simple observations, I’ll grant you, gentle reader.
Another dead-simple observation: Email is like any other tool in that it can be used to good or bad purpose. For example, you could use a hammer to pound down a nail that might otherwise snag your sweater, or, say, pulp your neighbor’s pet goldfish (not recommended).
And on the scale of expertise, one can use email poorly, or with world-class finesse. Let’s say, my very Aristotelian aim has been to employ email reasonably well so that it may prove useful— and without the mental drag of noodathipious flooflemoofle!
DOWN WITH NOODATHIPIOUS FLOOFLEMOOFLE!
Finally, after years of frustration and experimentation… drum roll…. I am no longer overwhelmed by email. I have not arrived at “inbox zero” because….drum roll… I am not dead!
And knowing that I am not dead, other human beings in the Theater of Space-Time continually send me emails, and I, in turn, write them back. Ping, pong. And that Medusa’s hair of a conundrum-o-rama about pinging the pongs and pongings the pings, and which pings to pong, etc., is now wrestled down, at least in my own mind, to a pretty little pretzel.
YEAH, PUT SOME MUSTARD ON IT.
Now I can sincerely say that I welcome my correspondence (ahem, email). I love to hear from friends (lunch, yeah!), family (weddings, yay!), colleagues (congrats on your new book, lotus petals upon you!), and from readers, known to me or not, I always appreciate a kind and/or thoughtful word about my books / some subject of interest / relevant to my work. I even appreciate cat videos! (Just kidding about the cat videos. But cousin A., I don’t mind if you send me a cat video.)
Herewith:
1. SCHEDULED BATCHING
For me, of all the 10 points in my method, processing emails not one or two or three at a whim, but in scheduled batches was the game-changer.
I usually do 20 minutes of email processing with a stopwatch. It’s not that I am trying to hurry through my email, but rather, I am respecting the limits of my brain’s ability to effectively focus on it. I’m a speed-reader and I can type faster than lickety-split, but on most days I can deal with email for only about 20 minutes before my brain cells run low on glucose and I end up scrolling up and down the screen, dithering, feeling scattered— in short, procrastinating. (You might be able to do 10 minutes, or, say, an hour in one go— of course, not everyone’s energy to focus on their email is the same, or the same every day and in every circumstance. One can always set the stopwatch for a different amount of time.)
Don’t believe me about batching? Check out the extra-crunchy research at MIT (PDF).
By processing email in 20 minute batches, when the sessions all add up over the arc of the day, I find that I accomplish more in, say, one hour of three separate 20 minute sessions than I would have had I plowed on for an hour straight.
When the stopwatch dings, I do not expect to have finished— “inbox zero” is a fata morgana! And that’s OK, because I have another email batch session already scheduled (a few hours later, or five minutes later. It’s important to take a break, at the very least stand up and stretch.)
Above all, because I am focussing on email at my convenience, on my schedule, my attention is no longer so fractured. I need not attempt to wrestle with each and every email as it comes in; and of course, some emails cannot or should not be answered immediately. I aim to dispatch the average daily inflow. In other words, if, net of spam, I receive an average of 30 emails per day, then I should be averaging 30 emails dispatched per day— they need not be one and the same emails. One day I might dispatch 50, and another day, 10.
The point is, there’s no there there, as long as my email account is working, barring volcanic explosions of a geological nature, I’m probably never in this lifetime going to get to inbox zero. What matters is maintaining a consistently adequate dispatching process.
The easiest way to keep track of the process is to keep a running tally of all undispatched emails as of the close of the last session of the day. (In Outlook Express, for each folder of undispatched email, select all, go to the main menu, click edit, select “Mark all unread,” and it will automatically generate a tally for that folder.)
(And by the way, when the batching session is done, I close my Outlook Express. I never, ever leave it open. And would I never, ever, use any alarm for new email.)
I used to download email into an undifferentiated inbox at random moments and, oftentimes, even as email was still downloading, start answering willynilly. How about that for an attention-fracking technique!
Now I begin each email session as I would with a haul of paper mail: first,by taking it all in; second, deleting the junk; and third, organizing the correspondence I want to look at and/or answer into precisely labeled files.
Files are easy to create and, when emptied of their contents, to delete, or rename or whatever— a powerful tool within a tool. And I cannot overemphasize how effective a simple and flexible filing system has been for helping me focus and more quickly dispatch my email.
Of course, just like a paper filing system, too many files can be counterproductive. For me, the best filing system is one that holds 15 or fewer emails per file. So if I have a bunch of files with one or two emails, I might consolidate those; if I have, say, 50 emails in one, I might to break that up into, say, two to four more files.
My filing system changes depending on what I’m working on or dealing with in my life. This week, nearing the holidays, it looks like this:
INBOX (this has whatever I’m going to tackle now, preferably never more than 11 emails)
BACKLOG: TEXAS (anything to do with my book in-progress) BACKLOG: FAMILY BACKLOG: FRIENDS & COLLEAGUES BACKLOG: FINANCIAL BACKLOG: OTHER
I do not respond to rude or certifiably ultra-weird messages, and as with businesses that spew spam,* I add those email addresses to my “block sender” list. Happily, there are not many of those, and happily, once I’ve blocked them, with lightning ease, I never see their emails again!
Out of sight, out of mind.
*(Phishers tend to use one-time only emails; those I just delete.)
Many of my writer friends agonize over emails (as well as social media comments) from trolls and nuts and spammers. I tell them as I tell you, dear reader, it really is this simple to make them all go away. The challenge is, your ego, prompted by its its arch sense of justice, might jump-up-and-down-insist on responding to them, but your ego, if it’s like most people’s, including mine, should not be in driver’s seat here. Surely you have better things to do with your time and attention than engage with emotionally stunted, social-skill-challenged, and possibly dangerously disturbed individuals. (If you lived in a big city, would you leave your kitchen’s back door open to the alleyway 24/7?)
If you relish unnecessary fights and pointless thrills, well, as they say in Mexico, dios los hace y ellos se juntan (God makes them and they get together.) I prefer the Polish saying, Not my circus, not my monkeys.
[ VIDEO ]
Viva Moti Nativ! (Seriously, I took Moti Nativ’s Feldenkrais workshop, it was a blast.)
4. PRIORITIZE & TACKLE
Stopwatch ticking, after having done the DDO, then I prioritize emails (and other related tasks as noted below), and then I tackle them.
There’s no magic formula here: I might think about it for a moment or three, then decide what should come first.
(Once dealt with, I archive each email by year. Some people just delete them; in my repeated experience, however, that is not a good idea.)
5. SWEEP OUT THE SPAM FOLDER ONCE PER DAY
I check the spam folder once per day because that is precisely about how often I find an important email in there. These days floods of spam are coming from phishers (easy to spot for many reasons, also because they vary their email addresses); those I don’t touch, I just delete them.
(I remain perplexed by correspondents who do not check their spam folders. On the other hand, checking too often wastes time—small amounts, but they add up.)
.
6. APPLY & ADJUST “SENDER FILTERS” AS NEEDED
I’m not talking about an app or programming or anything complicated. By “sender filter,” a concept I grokked an eon ago but a term I first encountered in Cal Newport’s Deep Work, I mean some specific information on one’s contact page that, ideally in a kind and generous spirit, encourages potential senders to not send email— so that, for the few emails that do squeeze through, I am able to respond quickly, politely, and thoughtfully.
My contact page includes a long lineup of sender filters: First, a newsletter signup (mainly for those who want to know when I will be teaching a workshop or post a new podcast); then it answers FAQs, such as “where can I find your books?” (I am ever-amazed by that question in this day of amazon and Google, but I do get such emails fairly often); for book club inquiries; the best way to reach me for media and speaking inquiries; answers to writerly questions (“how to find a publisher,” etc.); rights inquiries; press kits including high res images; and finally…
… (few indeed seem to have the attentional snorkel gear to arrive there at the bottom)….
… if someone still wants to email me, he will find my email address.
Like many other writers, back in pioneer days, once I had a live website showing my email address, I found myself receiving so many messages from people seeking my advice about / feedback on / encouragement of their writing, it would have been impossible to answer them all individually. As a solution, many authors have opted for what I think of as “The Wall of Silence”— no email address at all—and/or what seems to me a snotty-sounding third-person notice along the lines of “Wiggy Blip is so famous and busy being fabulously famous, he cannot possibly deign to acknowledge your email.”
Cal Newport’s various sender filters conclude as follows— I quote from his book, Deep Work: “If you have an offer, opportunity, or introduction that might make my life more interesting, e-mail me at interesting (at) calnewport.com For the reasons stated above, I’ll only respond to those proposals that are a good match for my schedule and interests.”
Of course, some emails, even from perfectly civilized and well-meaning people, do not merit a response— they presume too much, they’re eye-crossingly vague or, as in a few cases, they clearly neither expect nor invite a response. But as for myself, because my own sender filters work beautifully, my stance is that I will do my darnedest, most reasonable best to answer everyone, whether family, friends, students, literary colleague, or mysterious Albanian, who takes the trouble to write to me a civilized email.
On occasion a sender blazes past or perhaps never saw the relevant sender filter, so I reply with the link or paste-copy the text of my long-ago posted answer to their question. (For example, I am often asked by students, friends, relatives, neighbors and utter strangers if I will read their manuscript. Here’s my answer to that one.)
If you want to comment on this blog, which I sincerely welcome, click hereand what you’ll see the simplest of sender filters, stating that I read but do not usually publish comments. It works blazingly well. Trolls and their ilk took a hike, never to return! (As for my fierce-looking writing assistant, I assure you, dear reader, Uliberto Quetzalpugtl only bites cheese.)
P.S. Cal Newport’s take on some industrial-strength sender filters. Personally I would not want to use such forbidding sender filters, but for some writers, and some people, that might be the right strategy. In any event, a sender filter beats the daisies out of the Wiggyesque Wall of Silence.
UPDATE: For a good example of a strong but both friendly and polite sender filter, see publishing consultant and blogger Jane Friedman’s contact page.
FURTHER UPDATE: For a Groucho Marx-esque example of sender filters by someone whose religious ideas seem to attract trolls like bananas do fruit flies, see John Michael Greer’s page for his Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn.
7. FUNNEL IT ALL INTO MOOOOOOOOOOOORE EMAIL!
Over the past year and some I have freed up chunkoids of time and energy for email by deactivating my Facebook account, minimizing Twitter and LinkedIn (including turning off email notifications), and closing this blog to published comments.
In other words, I have reduced the number of channels for people to communicate with me, funneling as many communications as possible into ye olde email.
I tell everyone who asks, the best way to find me is by email.
Yes, I receive more email as a result, but interestingly, many of my “friends” who were so chatty & likey on Facebook rarely if ever trouble to send me email. I have also found that many of the younger generation do not respond to email. Hmmm, also interesting! (Have a nice life, kiddos!)
Well, at least we still have telephones. But sorry, don’t count on me to retrieve my voicemail, I am too busy answering email!
(What about texting and Whatsapp? Ask me again after I’ve lugged home my taxidermied hippopotamus.)
8. BE QUICK & CLEAR, MY DEAR, BUT ADD DETAIL TO CUT THE CLUTTER
The emails I send myself have a clear subject line and the text clearly calls for or implies expected action or inaction. For example, some of the younger generation in my family prefer to text rather than use email, and getting them to answer an email, such has been my experience, requires laser-like focus in this regard. Hence, subject lines like this:
Re: Super Quick URRRRRgent Question about X—
or, say:
Re: Confirming dinner at at 9 PM this Saturday
What do I mean by “add detail to cut the clutter?” Minimize the number of emails needed to arrange things by politely making specific actionable proposals and provide websites, addresses, phone numbers and any other information that your correspondent might need, and hence avoid further emails. For example, instead of blah blah blahing about when and where to maybe kind of sort of meet for coffee, go ahead and make a specific proposal, e.g., “How about if we meet for coffee at 4:30 PM this Tuesday or, if you would prefer, 5:30 next Wednesday at Café Thus-and-Such, 123 Avenue ABC.”
Cal Newport offers more detailed advice about this brain power-saving email tactic on his blog, Study Hacks and his book, Deep Work.
9. WHEN CALLED FOR, FOR HEAVENSSAKES, JUST APOLOGIZE (BRIEFLY)
10. AT THE END OF THE LAST EMAIL SESSION FOR THE DAY, REPEAT AFTER SCARLET…
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It is a fact that for me, as well as for everyone who uses email, night falls in this Theater of Space-Time… and falls again, and again…. Funny how that happens once every 24 hours… until it doesn’t. I guess. In the meantime, some emails fall through the cracks of all good intentions.
Anyway, as Cal Newport writes in Deep Work,
“[I]n general, those with a minor public presence, such as authors, overestimate how much people really care about their replies to their messages.”
Newport’s bluntness may sound cruel. I don’t think it is; rather, he points to a cruel fact: that even when surrounded by other people, in fundamental ways we are each of us in this Theater of Space-Time alone. Writing is a technology that permits us to send thoughts from one axis of space-time to multiple others. And this is precisely why I write books— and why I read books, and why I welcome correspondence, albeit in electronic form.
And no, I am not worried that one day, should my one of my books be made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, or something, I might need to raise the Wall of Silence, or else bring on a bucket brigade of secretaries to cope with cannon-hoses of incoming emails.
Why am I not worried, pray tell?
(1) Because my 10 point system works splendidly well.
(2) Furthermore, should the need arise, it would be a simple matter to add more sender filters / templates, and perhaps, now and then, an autoresponder.
(3) Moreover, I need only note the numbers of smombies I see on city streets to conclude that, alas, the world of those of us who still have the cognitive focus to actually read the sorts of literary books I write and to engage in thoughtful correspondence is, and seems destined to remain, a cozy one.
And if I turn out to be wrong, so what? Then I will get a secretary! In the meantime, I shall make do with my writing assistants (although, alas, with emails, those two are all paws).
