I am preparing for my first transcontinental road trip, a weeklong journey to my new home in the San Bernardino National Forest, 6,109 feet above sea level, where I plan to begin a new long-term writing project.

Perhaps the most daunting aspect of this life-changing 2,645-mile trek is the distance itself. I dislike long drives. I get bored and impatient. I am prone to highway hypnosis. To distract myself, I am bringing along my favorite travel CD, an oft-played recording of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1994 musical, Sunset Boulevard. I also plan to listen, for a second time, to a recording of Jack Kerouac’s classic, On the Road, as read by actor Matt Dillon.

My route parallels Kerouac’s original 1947 journey fairly closely, especially the farther west I get, but how I will travel and what I will see could not be more different. Kerouc’s trip was rough-and-tumble and he encountered a ragtag collection of characters, sometimes big-hearted, often down on their luck. He carried a pitiful amount of cash with him and, if I recall correctly, sometimes spent it unwisely. My route has been plotted not by happenstance but by AAA and Mapquest. I’ll be cruising west in a red Honda Accord sport coupe, venerable but still supremely reliable, with A/C, sunroof, CD player, and, at the suggestion of my friend, novelist and short-story writer Allison Amend, a Motorola Motonav TN765T 5.1-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator.

Likewise, the machine Kerouac used to create his masterwork, an ancient black Underwood typewriter with the keys passing through a semi-circular faceplate that looks a bit like a demonic smile, is the antithesis of my gleaming twenty-four-inch iMac with its 1-TB hard drive. Kerouac typed his manuscript on a 120-foot scroll of paper; I cut and paste electrons.

How, I wonder, will these differences in travel and technology shape my trip and, more importantly, my observations? (I’m leaving the differences between Kerouac’s brain and mine out of the equation.) Is the romance of the road long gone? Have interstate highways, hermetically sealed vehicles, and voice-activated gizmos sterilized our landscapes, anesthetized our limbic systems?

There is much talk these days about the decline of publishing, the death of print. But is writing on a softly clicking computer different in some essential way than composing on a clattering keyboard? Can On the Road be read on a Kindle or Nook or iPad (or listened to on a CD at 70 miles per hour) without losing something essential, some contact with the paper that reflects the substance of the original manuscript? Who knows?

I wish I could be more like Jack Kerouc. At least I think I do. I’d like to think that as writers we share some instincts, some reflexes; that I might find a way to make my journey as spontaneous and adventuresome as his; that what I write about it might have even an iota of his insight and energy. Perhaps that is as remote a possibility as attempting to see the landscape through the eyes of Lewis and Clark. Perhaps not. Perhaps one day, I may turn off the Motonav and allow myself to just get lost in America.

Andrew W. M. Beierle is the author of the novels The Winter of Our Discothèque and First Person Plural. He will continue to serve on the board as AIW’s West Coast representative.

At noon on Saturday, May 22, I will be moderating AIW’s panel, The Writer’s Life: A Report from the Field, at the LitArtlantic Festival, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. The panelists are film maker David Taylor, novelist C.M. Mayo, journalist Alan Elsner, and biographer/memoirist Kevin Quirk.

Each of these authors is well established, but no one starts out that way. So, in part, we will, in our short hour, address how they got their starts and how their careers evolved.

Each of these impressive authors has worked and published across genres, not always an easy feat in these days of “specialization” and writers being boxed into a niche. We will talk about how they managed to accomplish that. Was there a plan? Did it evolve in an organic fashion?

And if there is time, it would be nice to hear a bit about their creative processes.

I will not, here, get into these authors’ accomplishments and awards, which are many and impressive (you can check our website or an e-mail that was sent to the list-serve for that). But I do want to tell you a little about some of their extraordinary work.

David Taylor has created both a film and a book on the WPA Writer’s project, entitled A Soul of a People. Though I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing the film, I have read the book and found fascinating the story of writers (Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Studs Terkel among them) collecting the stories of Americans of every cultural heritage, in every walk of life, and in every nook and cranny of our country. Also fascinating are the strong parallels between the New Deal political battles and those we face today.

While many historical novels use an historical period as the backdrop for fictional protagonists, C.M. Mayo’s novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, tells the stories of actual historic personages—the Mexican Emperor Maximilian; the Iturbide family; the American, Alice Green, who married into Mexican aristocracy and was half-bribed/half-strong armed into giving her infant son to Maximilian to raise as the heir to his “Mexican Empire.” Mayo has used extensive research combined with the imaginative leap to try to reconstruct the motivations—political, emotional, and psychological—behind their actions.

In my view, Alan Elsner’s Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons is straightforward, hard-hitting journalism at its very finest. Elsner is not telling sob stories, not playing on your sympathy, but hitting you with cold, hard facts—right between the eyes. I found this book painful to read, found myself getting angry, feeling that many of those running our prisons should themselves be in them.

Finally, Kevin Quirk’s book, Brace for Impact: Miracle on the Hudson Survivors Share Their Stories of Near Death and Hope for New Life, presents 25 first-person accounts of passengers and first responders from the January 2009 plane crash into New York’s Hudson River. Quirk’s focus is not the crash itself but on the ways in which coming so close to dying affects people’s faith and/or lack of it and their approach to their daily lives. Having worked as a ghost writer and with people who want to set down their own stories, Quirk is well-positioned to draw these stories out.

I hope this taste of these authors whets your appetite as their works have whet mine, and that you’ll join us on the 22nd to hear their stories!

Details: The panel will be held from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., Saturday, May 22, at The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, Maryland (just off Wisconsin Ave., a few blocks south of the Bethesda Metro station, Red line).

Further information: For information about the entire LitArtlantic Festival, of which AIW’s panel is a part, go to www.writer.org. The entire festival, including Story/Stereo: Hybrid Literature/Music Event (Thursday, May 20); Creativity Crossing Borders and Works in Progress Film Screening (Friday, May 21); Young Songwriter’s Showcase, Workshop for Children, and Hive@LitArtlantic(a resource fair) (Saturday, May 22), should make for an entertaining time.

Don't bore your readers with pompous writing

One really great way to make your readers go away is to sneer at them, write pompously. Works every time; they will make a point of avoiding what you wrote. And one great way to write pompously is to drain the energy of your sentences with “being” verbs, like this:

I am hopeful that that solution to your predicament will be an effective resolution to your problem.

What is this writer trying to say? The sentence was in trouble even before it appeared on the screen.

Look at it. It starts with a being verb and a latinized adjective: “am hopeful.” The writer could easily have replaced it with the action verb “hope.” Then we have “that that.” Grammatically it’s all right, but it’s awkward. Then we read “will be an effective resolution to your problem.” What’s that clause doing there?

The writer can write the sentence much more clearly this way:

I hope that solves your problem.

Technically, action verbs and their opposites, being verbs, don’t exist. What writers informally call action verbs, grammarians divide into transitive verbs, which move the action from the subject to the object of the sentence, and intransitive verbs, which sounds active but has no object.

Transitive: He drove the car.

Intransitive: She swam.

What writers call being verbs, grammarians call linking verbs, because they link the subject with the object to describe a state of being.

You are beautiful.

For the practical writer, though, it is enough to know that action verbs do things, but being verbs simply are. Since action verbs add energy to sentences and being verbs usually sap sentences of energy, good writers prefer action verbs.

Being (or Linking) Verbs

Being verbs are, or they were, or they have been. But they simply won’t do. Here’s an example:

Major League Baseball was the first sports organization to institute the concept of free agency for its players.

Major League Baseball created free agency.

Action verbs serve no greater service to English than when they replace a noun, one that just sits there.  In the next example, the verb “edits” takes the place of “the editor.” In the replacement process, we also manage to extract another freeloader, the preposition “of.”

He is the editor of two magazines.
He edits two magazines.

We can’t always depend on action verbs to eliminate words. Sometimes they actually add words but, as in the next example, allow a little paring later in the sentence.

Officials of the Air Line Pilots Association and United Airlines expressed satisfaction Friday with an almost unanimous vote by pilots in favor of a four-year wage agreement.

Officials of the Air Line Pilots Association and United Airlines said Friday they are satisfied by the pilots’ near-unanimous vote for a four-year wage agreement.

Some more examples:

She is a self-proclaimed renaissance woman.
She calls herself a renaissance woman.

Every year there is a race along the Inca Trail.
Each year a race takes place along the Inca Trail.

She is still in need of instruction and practice.
She still needs instruction and practice.

Creativity Killers?

Journalists and other nonfiction writers aren’t supposed to make things up, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be creative in the way they present their facts. And a slavish, literal adherence to rules like these can kill creativity.

Here’s how one of the 20th Century’s great wordsmiths, H.L. Mencken, put it in A Book of Prefaces for someone “with an ear for verbal delicacies” who searches “… painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said —there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

Such a dictum from a man whose fame derived from the way he wrote editorial columns — not unbiased reporting — might provide a quandary for nonfiction writers today. It would seem that content should reign, that the “thing said” should always outrank the “way of saying it.” But we can take some solace from the fact that rarely do the two collide.

Mencken — who admitted he was not a fair person — might simply be saying that writers should never get so picky with their content or their prose that they kill the great joy that can come from writing and discovering that they have indeed developed that elusive thing called style.

Few of the seemingly arcane rules of journalistic writing are so absolute that they cannot be ignored or broken. If you do break a rule, though, make it a conscious crime. Make sure you know why you’re doing it. One definition of professional non-fiction writers —or professional anythings— is that they know the rules well enough to know when to break them.

Next: An Appearance of Honesty

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Robert M. Knight is author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft, to be released this spring by Marion Street Press. As a freelancer, Knight has written for more than 40 publications and news services. He began his career at United Press International and is a former senior editor and broadcast editor of the City News Bureau of Chicago and a former adjunct professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Northwestern University in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.

This blog post is excerpted from Knight’s soon-to-be-published Journalistic Writing: Building the Skill; Honing the Craft

Like most people in the Mid-Atlantic, I found that more than two feet of snow blanketed my house and cars yesterday.  The Mayor and Governor declared emergencies for the city and state respectively; all cars were ordered to remain off the road.  By last night, the storm had passed.

The following morning, I took the dogs outside and was struck by the silence.  No cars passing by.  No flights that would normally land in or fly out of BWI airport, only the crunch beneath my dogs’ paws.  It a moment like this that as a writer one appreciates the sound of silence.

First, being in a relatively quiet environment helps us to hear the sounds that might normally be drowned out by the cacophony of everyday life – to observe.  Second, this silence helps us to organize our thoughts – think.  Third, the shutdown of the roads and businesses gives us the time to do our business – write.

Observe.  Think.  Write.  We don’t always have time to do all three, but take advantage of days like this.  So take some time for yourself early in the morning or late at night and let your best writing happen during the stillness.

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Claude Berube is the President of American Independent Writers and teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. The co-author of two books, he’s published over thirty articles in academic journals, popular magazines, and newspapers.

The use of active voice might be the least understood element in English that most people think they understand. They understand even less when they get the use of active voice confused with the use of action verbs. And many do. Many editors can’t keep them straight.

Fact is, they aren’t even related. They just sound as if they are. A sentence written in active voice can include a “being” verb.

Assam is an Indian state.

And a sentence written in passive voice can include an action verb.

Nicholas O’Herlihy was named after his maternal grandfather, a Russian.

Active voice and action verbs do have one thing in common. They contribute to strong, honest, direct writing.

If the subject of a sentence creates the action, the sentence is in active voice. Active voice is the exact opposite of the sentence-wrecker known as passive voice. Here’s an example of passive voice:

The truck was struck by the train.

The truck is the subject of the sentence. The train is the receiver of the action. That means the sentence is in passive voice. Here’s the same sentence in active voice:

The train struck the truck.

Now the subject has switched roles. No longer is it receiving the action. The train has become the subject, and it is creating the action. That’s active voice.

By switching to active voice we have eliminated a verb, was, and a preposition, by. Together they had made the sentence longer, 40 percent longer. This is not an unusual result of passive voice, and it is one reason good writers avoid passive voice when they can. But at least two other reasons exist for using active voice.

Take a convoluted sentence that seems to start off in several directions and ends up going nowhere. Now, take a close look at it. Chances are, the writer began writing the sentence in passive voice. Few other forms of sloppy writing produce such muddiness.

Another reason to use active voice is that it is more honest. It takes responsibility. Passive voice provides a way to avoid responsibility. At least three recent U.S. presidents—Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—have used the identical phrase in passive voice in an attempt to deflect criticism and embarrassment and to avoid responsibility:

Mistakes were made.

To the reader, that that means is, “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do it. Some [unnamed] official in my administration did it.”

In When Words Collide, Lauren Kessler and Duncan McDonald offer two situations in which passive voice must be used. First, passive voice is justified if the receiver of the action is more important than the creator of the action. They use this example:

A priceless Rembrandt painting was stolen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday by three men posing as janitors.

Here, the Rembrandt should remain the subject of the sentence even though it receives the action. The painting obviously is more important—more newsworthy—than the three men who stole it.

The second reason for using passive voice is if the writer has no choice. That’s when the writer does not know who or what the actor, the creator of the action, is. The example Kessler and McDonald use:

The cargo was damaged during the trans-Atlantic flight.

Air turbulence? Sabotage? Was the cargo strapped in properly? The writer doesn’t know, so the voice must be passive.

Active voice is direct, active voice is honest, active voice is economical. But mostly, active voice is considerate of readers, of their limited amount of time and of their need for clear, crisp, concise information. Passive voice is one reason many people swear off how-to books on computing, carpentry or cooking.

First, a pair of chopsticks is placed on top of a pot of water. Then, the asparagus is put inside a wicker basket and the basket is placed on top of the chopsticks. The water is brought to a boil, and the asparagus is steamed for no more than 10 minutes, so a slight crunchiness is retained.

It seems to take so long to get it out. But when you turn these instructions into commands, using active voice, they become much more crisp and clear. The writer addresses the reader directly, with “you” implied.

Place a pair of chopsticks on top of a pot of water. Put the asparagus inside a wicker basket and place the basket on top of the chopsticks. Bring the water to a boil and steam the asparagus for no more than 10 minutes, so it retains a slight crunchiness.

Next: Action Verbs and Imagery

This blog post is excerpted from Knight’s soon-to-be-published Journalistic Writing: Building the Skill; Honing the Craft

Think back twenty years, to 1989. The internet and email pretty much unheard of. Most did not have a personal computer, or a cell phone. Cutting-edge personal technology? A fancy answering machine.

Day-to-day life in 1989 was substantially different than it is today. One could almost say it was another era, the immediate pre-internet era. Those differences make it historically significant. Given that significance, it is crucial to preserve accounts of day-to-day life as it was lived back then.

Social historians, documentarians, and memoirists, among others, preserve these accounts of living. Yet fictional accounts are often more memorable and, given the flexibilities of art, more true to life.

In the fictional realm, movies may also do this do this, viscerally and sometimes movingly. The novelist and film reviewer Graham Greene once said that there is a certain feeling a film invokes that cannot be captured in prose.

That seems correct, but its converse does too: written description works on the mind in a different manner than a picture does. The visual that the mind forms after reading words is different than a perceived picture on a screen. It is more “of the mind,” and thus, in some ways, richer. The novel is memory’s canvas.

I thought about this after reading A Girl in Winter, a terrific novel by the British poet Philip Larkin. It is set in England during the 1930s and early 1940s. It captured the feel and depth of unhurried days, and the power of a mind left free to wander. Granted, the world of this novel was much more pre-internet than 1989; it was even pre-television.

Day-to-day life unaccompanied by a computer, device, or phone had a different feel to it, and Larkin’s novel captures this. In the sixty-odd years after it was written, the importance of that accomplishment has only increased.

There is more at work here then simple nostalgia. I think it is related to the old truism, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. I would add a corollary: Those who forget the past will be at a loss when trying to negotiate the present.

Obituaries for the book are fashionable these days. But the rise of technology, which some say endangers the book, actually makes the novel more relevant, and more necessary, as a means of transmission and a sanctuary of human experience.

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Mark Tarallo is vice-president of AIW and a Washington-based writer. His fiction and poetry have been published in a range of journals, most recently in the fiction anthology Cold Shoulders. His awards include an Artist Fellowship Award for fiction writing from the D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities, and the Washington Writing Prize in Short Fiction.

As a writer, I find myself perpetually at odds with the adage:  write what you know.  Too often it is taken literally, as an injunction to approach only subject matter that comes from one’s own experience.  Frequently, this results in fiction that is simply veiled autobiography.  Unless the life is extremely colorful, and/or the writer is extremely insightful, such fiction is, more often than not, narrow, self-absorbed, and emotionally shallow, rarely creating or even attempting to create that vital connection between the mundane and the universal.

Thus, we get stories about “how my boyfriend left me” or “my wife cheated” or “my uncle was a drunk” which lack the depth to express something broader about the nature of love or the nature of the relationship between men and women, or anything new or substantial about our common humanity.  Or we get stories by college professors about college professors who want to write stories.  Solipsism.  Some are quite adequately written, but they are “safe” and, ultimately, unmemorable.

I propose to turn the injunctive phrase around.  Don’t write what you know.  Know what you write.  That is, learn about the world, engage the world.  And then, in writing, make the empathetic leap.  Step into the body of the other, of someone different from yourself.  Live and write in their shoes.  Be them in your head until you have put them on the page.

Perhaps not everyone has the same natural degree of empathy or of ability to make the leap successfully.  But, to me, the interesting writers are those that write beyond their personal experience, who attempt that empathetic leap to other experiences, even to other peoples, other cultures.  And I am convinced that a deeper understanding of our common humanity, and a consequent deepening of the writing, will be gained by the attempt.

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Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle,Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.

It’s unruly, and harsh. Its spelling can be ludicrous. But English might well be the most beautiful of the dozens of languages and hundreds of dialects we call Indo-European. Depends on your definition of beauty.

That definition requires that we forget the sophisticated sound of French, the music of Spanish or Italian or the seductive sibilance of the Slavic languages. At its base, English is a Germanic language, as are Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Flemish and Norwegian.

English has accessorized itself with a myriad of words borrowed from about 30 other languages, mainly Latin, Danish and Norman French. Those words reflect when the Anglo-Saxons were invaded first by Roman Catholic monks, then by Vikings from Denmark and Norway and then by the Normans. The Normans were a Viking tribe who had settled in northern France about a century before the bastard son of a Norman duke, William the Conqueror, won the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Hence the unruliness of English.

But just because English carries the occasional dissonance, it is not without rhythm, music and grace. To write or edit English well, we need to listen to its tumble of words.

Celts—the Irish, Scots and especially the Welsh—could do little to influence the vocabularies that Germanic languages brought to what is now England. That’s because after they arrived in the 5^th Century, the Anglo-Saxons pushed the Celts westward and northward and refused to have daily contact with them. (By the way, “Celt” is pronounced with a hard K, not like a Boston basketball team.)

That doesn’t mean, though, that the Celts had no influence on English, period. Here we might use the cliché: “The English may have invented the language, but the Irish showed them how to use it.”

In Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, linguist John McWhorter maintains that only Celtic and English use a form of do when it really doesn’t do anything—he calls it the meaningless do. (“Do you have a bastard son?” as opposed to “Have you a bastard son?”) And no other language uses its version of ing to express present tense.

In addition, some pithy and poetic English has resulted from a Germanic structure twisted into Celtic rhythms. In “Finnegan’s Wake,” for example, James Joyce mixes Celtic rhythm, alliteration and puns: “Hootch is for the husbandman handling his hoe. Hohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to become Mister Finnagain.”

Another reason Celtic rhythms sound poetic to proper English ears is that the Celtic idioms display no true past tense. “I went to the pub” becomes “I am after going to the pub.” Nor do Celtic tongues have a true word for “yes.” To Celts, “yes” means “I understand what you are saying. “ To express affirmation, they would use “indeed!”

Celtic rhythms have contributed mightily to the mongrel quality of English. And that quality has led to three important ways that English differs from other Indo-European languages: its simplicity of structure, its disposal of the need to match nouns and verbs by gender and its huge vocabulary—three or four times the size of any other Western language.

During the 15^th Century, when Geoffrey Chaucer was ready to write in what we now call Middle English, English was ready for Geoffrey Chaucer. The French of the nobles, the Latin of the clergy and the “Englisc” of the peasants of “Angle-land” had begun to come together. This fusion of languages can be seen today; most words have at least two synonyms.

The Anglo Saxon-rooted ask, for example, corresponds with the French root question, and the Latin root interrogate. A random attack on a dictionary and a thesaurus reveals that the same occurs with dead-deceased-defunct, end-finish-conclude, fear-terror-trepidation, go-continue-proceed, gathering-society-community, happy-content-satisfied, help-aid-assist, hereafter-future-posterity, lovely-beautiful-pulchritudinous, lying-unverifiable-mendacious, mill-plant-factory, show-present-demonstrate, and thin-spare-emaciated.

These synonyms are not exact. For that reason, English provides more word precision than any other Western language. Writers need not worry about context or where a word enters a sentence; they can find the precise word to deliver a fact, opinion concept or idea, with the exact nuance needed.

It’s worth noting that of these randomly selected synonyms, Anglo-Saxon words average 1.5 syllables, French 2.3 syllables and Latin 3.1 syllables. The message? When in doubt, default to the Anglo-Saxon. It’s punchier and it sounds more honest. Latinizations make great accessories, they are invaluable to word precision, but the idiom of the Anglo-Saxon peasant that sets the tone.

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Robert M. Knight is author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft, to be released this spring by Marion Street Press. As a freelancer, Knight has written for more than 40 publications and news services. He began his career at United Press International and is a former senior editor and broadcast editor of the City News Bureau of Chicago and a former adjunct professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Northwestern University in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.

I’ve just returned from the Atlanta Gay Literary Festival, where I was invited to read from my second novel, First Person Plural. It was a sentimental journey: the first time in two years I have returned to the place I called home for more than a quarter century. A leisurely schedule allowed me to spend time in the neighborhoods in which I had lived and worked—Midtown, Virginia Highland, Druid Hills—each of which has a unique identity and a strong sense of community.

I also spent time among the community of LGBT writers who had gathered for the third such Atlanta festival, among them headliner Manil Suri, who teaches in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and is the author of the acclaimed novels The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva. Being surrounded by other writers, many of them young and exuberant about their work, energized me; being around old friends who asked me, “What are you working on now?” challenged me to think about developing new work.

As an aspiring writer in Atlanta, I labored for years in solitude on a personal quest for that elusive Holy Grail: publication. A journalist by trade, I knew plenty of other wordsmiths but not a single practitioner of the art of fiction. And so I felt my way blindly, gleaning what I could about the craft by reading voraciously, learning from my mistakes, accumulating rejection slips from an ever-increasing number of prospective agents. (One of them simply scrawled the word “No” on my cover letter and returned it to me in my SASE.)

My first success did not come until I acknowledged that I likely could not succeed on my own and reached out to another writer, the director of the creative writing program at Emory University, where I worked. He read my work and introduced me to his agent, who took me on as a client. Two years later (after no small number of rejection slips from publishers), she sold my first novel, The Winter of Our Discothèque.

Through that door I entered the community of writers and came to understand the value of developing relationships with others engaged in the pursuit of  personal artistic development and publication. I attended workshops at the Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Napa Valley, and Kenyon Review summer writers’ conferences, where I not only worked with such acclaimed writers as Alice McDermott and Claire Messud but also met authors—some unknown, some on the verge of literary fame—who have become friends, colleagues, and advocates of my work.

When I moved to Washington in 2008, I knew I would have to find new friends to replace those I had left behind in Atlanta. I became involved with Out and Equal, which advocates for LGBT rights and fairness in the workplace, I did pro bono work for organizations involved in national security and environmental issues, and, most importantly, I joined American Independent Writers, where I found a welcoming community which shared my passion for the written word.  Just as Atlanta is composed of diverse neighborhoods—from funky Cabbagetown to elegant Buckhead—so too is the AIW community an amalgam of interests: journalism and work-for-hire; literary and popular fiction; scholarship and a broad range of nonfiction; mystery, thriller, and romance writers.

As both a journalist and a novelist, I maintain a residence in two of these “neighborhoods.” But no matter where I am, I know that I am truly at home.

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Andrew W.M. Beierle is an AIW Board Member, a graduate of the AIW Leadership Program, and author of First Person Plural and The Winter of our Discotheque.

Photo Credit: Julia Freeman-Woolpert @ SXC.hu

Why do I write?  Today, I write because characters keep roaming through my head—characters with pasts and futures that I must put down on paper or no one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away.  Last year, or the year before, the driving motivation was often a Swiftian anger at the world’s ills and hypocrisies, which expressing to a public relieves.  But, when I began, in my teens, I just wanted to have fun.  To play.

There was nothing dramatic in the decision.  Reading, discussing literature, and writing were in the air all around me while I was growing up.  My father, my mother, and my brother (who is nine years older than myself) all read to me.  The three of them talked about literature around the kitchen table.  There were always books—history, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, art, dance, mythology, poetry and fiction, above all, fiction—read to me, handed to me, suggested to me.  Also, although neither of my parents published, my father wrote stories and poems.  My mother wrote witty, artistic letters that could have been short stories or the basis for them.  And she came to my father as one comes to an editor:  to suggest a small revision or flourish.  My brother also wrote creative fiction, pieces like his own version of The Odyssey, or a satire in which a poor country’s ambassador to the UN writes home to his president.

The attitude toward writing was that one should have a sense of play.  Not take it too seriously.  Just take in the technique of this or that writer, and feel free to try it out for oneself.  And that’s how I began.  Playing with styles, with words, with ideas.  I wrote a story in the style of Louis Carroll; a dialogue in the style of Tom Stoppard in which two actors argue about whether they should take bows for acting in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; a story in which Oscar Wilde’s entrance into heaven depends upon the literary assessment of his works by a jury of fellow writers.

Then two things happened.  I taught myself to draw.  And I became a lawyer.  (I blame the latter on my father, who handed me Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense when I was twelve.)  After writing legal decisions all day, it was easier to draw or paint than to sit again and try to write.  So, for many years I thought about writing but did little more than make scattered notes.

What got me back to writing?  There’s nothing like a few deaths to make you realize you can’t put things off forever.  My mother had said of my art, “that’s nice, Jess, but you should be writing.”  When she died, I thought, if not now, when?  I began again.  I had a world view and I used poetry to express it.

At the same time, I kept telling my father about an idea I had for a novel, and he kept telling me, “don’t tell me the story.  Write it down.”  Then he died.  And that was the kick to the backside that got me to sit down and write the novel.  That novel has now been completed, but the characters, and different, newer ones, still wander through my head, expanding their histories and adventures.  Somehow I’ve moved from playing with ideas to creating universes and, in some odd sense, living in all of them as well as the real one, simultaneously.  I suspect what keeps me writing is creating those worlds.  That’s why I write.  This year, anyhow.

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Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.

A long time ago, mainstream writing and journalistic writing said goodbye to each other, and English has been poorer ever since. Each has much to learn from the other, but I maintain that mainstream writers can learn more from journalistic writing than the other way around. I am after all a journalist who came late to the academic world and continues to try to straddle the gap.

Many English teachers seem to believe writing skills can be learned by osmosis, with no reference to how the language actually works. They refuse to address the mechanics of the language.

Maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps I only think journalists are the only ones who fail to see the king’s new clothes. Maybe we truly are the grubs among butterflies. But we journalists wonder if the gap between the literary and journalistic approaches to “good” writing isn’t getting wider. I for one am trying my best to prevent the spread.

Journalistic training provides bedrock skills for any kind of writing, from novels to poetry to ad copy to office memos to computer manuals. It’s worth noting that of the seven American Nobel laureates, four brought a journalistic background to their writing. (I’m not counting Isaac Bashevis Singer, who immigrated to the United States after plying Yiddish journalism in Poland, nor T.S. Eliot, who moved from the United States to England without pursuing anything journalistic that I know of.)

College composition courses tend to be taught in the spirit of “write what you feel.” Gratifying experiences; good for the ego. But that attitude isn’t quite enough.

Journalistic writing emphasizes skill.

Skill. Such a quaint term to many who teach English, who would have their students learn by analyzing, and often emulating, what successful writers wrote. Such an approach does have some value, but its effect is limited if it disregards the structure and flow of the language.

When we journalists use “skill” in the same sentence as “writing,” we’re letting ourselves in for ridicule from those who equate journalistic writing with Fun with Dick and Jane. Granted, much journalistic writing is abysmal. But when it’s good it sings.

All right, what are these skills? Well, one skill common to both types of good writing is the use of active voice. If students learned nothing else in a composition or journalism class, their prose would be 50 percent better.

Other skills do find their way into both forms of writing, among them:

• the use of action verbs,
• being specific; illuminating with color and doing so by describing in detail.
• using strong nouns and verbs at the expense of adjectives and adverbs,
• avoiding clichés,
• moving the story (or essay or narrative or poem) along. (If the fact. concept or idea just lies there, it only adds weight, so surgically remove it.)
• using word economy; avoiding unneeded words, phrases, clauses and sentences, and
• the use of word precision, finding the word that says precisely what the writer wants to say, with the exact nuance the writer intends.

It sounds simple and easy, I know. It is simple, but it isn’t simplistic. And it doesn’t get easy until it’s practiced and practiced and practiced, preferably on deadline. The catch: If it ever does feel easy, all that means is that your skills have grown to become merely the components of the glib.

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Robert M. Knight is author of Journalistic Writing: Building the Skills, Honing the Craft, to be released this spring by Marion Street Press. As a freelancer, Knight has written for more than 40 publications and news services. He began his career at United Press International and is a former senior editor and broadcast editor of the City News Bureau of Chicago and a former adjunct professor at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania and Northwestern University in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois.