What a great conference we had this year!  After attending over six or so, I think this one was the best yet.

One surprise I had, regardless of the level of experience and expertise any of us have: how few people seemed to reach out to one another.  Example: If I asked someone what they were working on, the person did not ask me anything about my writing.  That could have led to all kinds of possible cross-fertilization for connections, content or just commiseration.

Another surprise: How few people were ready to summarize their interests or projects in a quick and juicy way.  Example: The short story writer at the agent’s breakfast table who explained the plot from beginning to end instead of synthesizing it when another seven people also needed air time.   Example: When asked about her project, a woman said, “Oh, I’m new; I’m not writing.”  However, when encouraged, she offered she is writing children’s stories.

Finally, what’s the lack of business cards about?  What keeps someone from saying something about their focus on a card, besides not yet having the confidence and commitment?  Perhaps act “as if” for while. Maybe call yourself a writer, consultant, or editor.  Or note content interests.  If the cost of cards, anticipation of changes or multiple incarnations hold you back, investigate the inexpensive or even free options at www.vistaprint.com.

Yes, not everyone is a extravert, and thank goodness.  Could you imagine the noisy chemistry or limited listening that would lead to?  If you consider yourself an introvert, though, and have discomfort in meeting new people, maybe this link on networking for introverts will help.  Or send me an e-mail and I’ll share a guide I’ve written about making good conversation.

I look forward to connecting with you!

***

Ruth Schimel, PhD, is a Career & Life Management Consultant and long-time AIW member who founded The Schimel Lode. The Schimel Lode is a component fund of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region. As of 2009, the fund offers an annual, $10,000-20,000 seed grant to encourage innovation and collaboration for the public good in the Washington, DC, area.

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.

As soon as the news came, Facebook starting buzzing away with tributes to Holden, Esme, and Bananafish. A not-so-perfect day of mourning for half the readers of the world, myself included. Rest in Peace, J.D. Salinger.

A day later, when Louis Auchincloss died, I felt grateful that I had spent some time (as a reader) in his Upper East Side world, with its elegance and moral compromise.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a friend about another writer’s passing, the poet Rachel Wetzsteon. Although I didn’t know her — she was a friend of a friend — the news seemed especially tragic given her age, 42.

My friend sent me the link to the New York Times obituary, and sure enough it included one of the poems, “Sakura Park,” the ending of which I will always remember.

Sakura Park, by Rachel Wetzsteon

The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter

like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on

and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles

a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
>> Continue reading the poem

The writer passes, the words live on.

***

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.

Word Perfect has at least one foot in the grave, if not both

It isn’t dead, yet. Not really. But I think it may have suffered the fate worse than death.

It’s become Word.

First, I must confess a dirty little secret. I think the epitome, the quintessence; of word-processing computer software was Word Perfect. To be more specific: Word Perfect 5.2 for DOS.
I work on a Windows XP platform at present, but long after I went to Windows (Windows ME, I think it was then) I continued to write with WP 5.2. Like many writers, I’m keyboard oriented. The only advantage of MS Word, as far as I could see, was its amenability to the mouse. And the mouse held little attraction for me.

Eventually, though, I found myself working in Word. I felt that I had to make the switch. All my clients, or virtually all, were working in MS Word. I wanted to be able to communicate with them, and send work to them, without going through the hassle of conversion.

But I wasn’t happy about it. Word is clunky and, worse, Word is capricious. It makes the decisions it thinks you ought to make rather than the decisions you want to make, and it stands by its choices despite your objections. Try changing the default document format, for example; it’s an exercise in frustration.

I know, I know. There are ways to change all these quirks. But there are no simple or easy ways. No matter how many times I pound it into its head, Word continues to insist on underlining every word. Every time I start a new document, it requires me to disable that particular eccentricity.

Who came up with the idea: “I know! Let’s set up the “Normal” template so that it underlines every word this sucker writes! Wouldn’t that be neat?”

You can go to the “Help” function all you want, but you may never discover how to do what you want to do. I can’t even figure out how to come up with the right question that will inspire the “Office Assistant” to give me the answer I need. It’s good at giving me answers to questions I didn’t ask, but lousy at answering the ones I did ask.

And don’t get me started on the spelling dictionary and grammar functions.

So – back to Word Perfect.

The other day I was frustrated trying to cajole Word into doing something I desperately needed for it to do – I forget what it was, now – and Word continued doing things in its own idiomatic fashion. So I thought: I’ve still got Word Perfect on this computer. I’ll just go to that and then convert the project back to Word when I’m finished. By this time, I had the Windows version, version 10, I think.

So I called it up. But it wasn’t Word Perfect any more. Oh, it said “Word Perfect,” but the old familiar features were no longer there. The interface was like

Word, except that it had a few additional quirks that didn’t track Word.

Worst of all, the most useful feature of the old Word Perfect – the “reveal codes” function – had become virtually invisible. In the DOS version it could be called up with a simple touch of a function key. In this new version, it was hiding . . . somewhere . . . that required a road map to find. And in this new no-printed-documentation era, there’s no easy way to find it. Certainly not through the “help” function, which was, of course, unhelpful.

Well, that’s my rant. I’ll shut up now.

Call me a Luddite, if you will, but I long for the old days.

The old days of, say, ten years ago.

***

Clyde T. Linsley has been a full-time freelance writer since 1986. He served two terms as president of WIW during the nineties. He is the author of four published mystery novels.

E-publishing carries pros and cons for authors

In the February 8 issue of “The Weekly Standard,” author James Gardner pointed out the up side of electronic publishing: access to the sum total of written knowledge available instantly no matter where you are (as long as you have an internet connection).

In addition to all the books he pointed out that are available for free (if published prior to 1923 when modern copyright law was enacted), a wide variety of new publications are available as e-books or pdf versions for a much lower price than hardcover or softcover editions.

To a writer, this may seem like bad news. How can we make a living in an already competitive publishing market when prices for e-books are dropping? Where will we find work? Will our job disappear?

To these concerns, I say a world of opportunities have opened for writers, editors, and even publishers. We can make a living with lower prices because the volume of sales for e-books on the internet is potentially exponential. Rather than a small market of those who browse bookstores or Amazon, you have the opportunity to reach the entire internet public – for decades.

We will find work because there will always be a market for current fiction and non-fiction. Those who read fiction want new stories and new characters – especially if it’s an interesting series. Non-fiction continues to be a growing market, and everyone is interested in learning something new about an area of special interest to them, such as history, biography, or self-help.

For publishers, the world of e-books solves a problem that has been around since Gutenberg printed the first Bible: the budget has only so much room for launching new books every year. However, in a world of online publishing, the budget can be stretched because of savings on paper, ink, and shipping (just to name a few expenses).

Most importantly, to me, is that research is vital for writers, especially in the area of non-fiction. Imagine the amount of research you can conduct when the world’s great libraries and books are open to you at the touch of a button. It is like finding a way to walk the universe.

Links to like:

• Project Gutenberg
• Online Libraries
• Bibliothica Alexandrina (the reincarnated Library of Alexandria)
• iPhone App: Free Books (small fee for app but books are free to download to phone or computer)

***

Cecilia Sepp is an association management consultant and writer based in Silver Spring, MD. She is currently in her third year on the AIW Board of Directors as Immediate Past President and chair of the Member Engagement Committee. She blogs at Association Puzzle.

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

**

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

On this day, when we in the D.C. area are having our second heavy snow storm in a week (the first having deposited upwards of thirty inches of snow in places), and I look out my window at the tree branches weighed down by a foot of the white stuff and at the wall of white blowing past at forty-plus miles per hour, I keep thinking of the Yukon I have never seen.  And I find it is a joy to sit in a warm, cozy apartment, drink a cup of cocoa, and pull out Robert W. Service’s collection of poems, Ballads of a Cheechako. (Copyright, 1909—yes, I like old things.)

Admittedly, Robert W. Service is neither Shakespeare nor Yeats, but, from the slightly gruesome humor of The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill to the desperate My Friends, he has a wonderful ability to make one visualize the isolation of the frozen north and the effect it has on men.  The down to earth quality of his characters reflects the elemental life they must live to survive in their environment, and the rhythm of Service’s ballad form accentuates the tongue-in-cheek humor or the intensity of his pieces.

For example, in The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill, the narrator has taken a contract to bury Bill MacKie, “whenever, wherever, or whatsoever the manner of the death he die.”  Bill dies in the far north; the narrator packs up Bill’s coffin on his sleigh and goes off to bring Bill back and bury him.   He finds Bill frozen to death:

Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;
Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at last I spoke:  “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.”

Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control?
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,
And that seems to say:  “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in?”
I’m not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue
As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I’d do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.

In My Friends, the narrator, suffering from frostbite and craving the release of death, is saved by a murderer and a thief who struggle with determination against the elements to take him to the Mounted Police, even though it will surely end in prison or death for them.  In part, the trip is described:

And the camps we made when their strength out-played
and the day was pinched and wan;
And oh, the joy of that blessed halt, and how I
did dread the dawn;
And how I hated the weary men who rose and
dragged me on.

And oh, how I begged to rest, to rest—the snow
was so sweet a shroud;
And oh, how I cried when they urged me on, cried
and cursed them aloud;
Yet on they strained, all racked and pained, and
sorely their backs were bowed.

I don’t know whether these excerpts can do the work justice.  Since they are story-poems, it may be that one needs to read them in their entirety to fully appreciate them.  But I hope that they give one enough of a sense of his work that those who do not know of him, or only know his ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, may be moved, on some snow-bound day, to look up these ballads and give him a read.

***

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.

If you write books, or ever considered writing a book, you have probably followed the stories about the dispute between Macmillan Publishers and Amazon.com. To quote President Kennedy, “I want to say this about that.”

The dispute primarily concerns the price that Amazon wanted to apply to ebooks, which exist in cyberspace and are downloaded by purchasers for reading on one of the various electronic devices now on the market. Macmillan felt Amazon was setting the prices too low, which would result in lost revenues for everyone concerned – authors, agents, editors and, of course, publishers.

Everyone, that is, except Amazon.

This may strike you, as it did me, as resembling a scene out of “Jurassic Park:” a struggle between Tyrannosauruses (Tyranosauri?), while all the lesser creatures scurry for cover. But there are serious ramifications here for all us “content providers,” a term I once heard a technogeek apply to writers.

I want to give you my take on the matter:

My wife and I are planning a trip to Boston in a couple of weeks, to visit my daughter and son-in-law. If we don’t want to drive the distance (and my wife is adamant on that subject) we have two options: Jet Blue to Logan International Airport or Southwest to Manchester Boston Regional Airport in New Hampshire.

My daughter and son-in-law live in the far western suburbs. Our decision required us to weigh the price of airline tickets, the relative proximity of Dulles International Airport (Jet Blue) or BWI Thurgood (Southwest), and the cost of ground transportation from whichever airport we chose to our daughter’s home in the western burbs.

I won’t go into the decision we finally made because the important point here is the process we went through. It took some time, as you might imagine.

To most people, books – like travel – are a discretionary purchase. When people consider buying something that they don’t have to buy, they inevitably go through a process rather similar to the process we went through in planning our Boston trip. And with discretionary purchases, price is most definitely a factor.

Price isn’t always the deciding factor, but often it is. We ignore this at our peril.

I’m in favor of everyone getting a decent-size slice of the pie – especially authors – but there’s more than one way to reach that end.

Which brings me back to Southwest and Jet Blue, both of which make their fortunes by underpricing the big guys in the industry, in order to develop new travel markets that may not have existed before. It seems to work: when other airlines were hemorrhaging money every year, Southwest perked along with a profit. They paid their employees, operated on time, and turned some previously moribund airports – think of BWI – into behemoths – and Jet Blue into an airline.

Maybe it isn’t possible, but as an author I’d like a slice of that. Could it be that the real problem with the book business is that we’re pricing ourselves out of the market?

I submit it for your consideration.

***

Clyde T. Linsley has been a full-time freelance writer since 1986. He served two terms as president of WIW during the nineties. He is the author of four published mystery novels.

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.

__

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.

Photo Credit: miamiamia

If I had ten lives, one of them would be lived as a linguist.

Language, phonetics, and the structure of the ways in which people speak their own languages and of how they carry that into English fascinate me.  Modern Irish (what the Irish call Irish and others sometimes call Irish Gaelic) was my first non-Romance language.  I studied it for two to three years, mainly in order to get a sense of how it affected the way in which the Irish speak and write in English.  (My pleasure in the structures and rhythms of Hiberno-English, along with a fifteen-year love-affair with Irish culture, eventually led to my writing of the novel Tinker’s Damn, a section of which was published in Ontario Review (Spring 2005).)

It is impossible, in this small space, to truly address the wonders and complexities that are the Irish language and how it has affected the ways in which the Irish historically have written and spoken in English.  But, perhaps, one can be given the merest taste, to whet the appetite.

Irish is one of six languages on the Celtic branch of the Indo-European tree.  One sub-branch contains Cornish, Welsh, and Breton.  The other sub-branch contains Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx.  (As I understand it, Manx originated in the Isle of Man and is now an utterly dead language.)  I don’t know enough about the other five Celtic languages to speak concerning them—but Irish is complex.  Some examples:  the nouns in Irish carry gender and are declined.  While the verb for “to be” is irregular in many languages, the various forms of “to be”—positive, negative, and question—are at least recognizably connected.  But, compare the forms in Irish:  I am: Táim.  I am not: Nílim.  Am I?:  An bhfuilim?  And Irish numbers may vary in form according to whether one is counting persons, objects, or in the abstract.  And as for phonetics, while most European languages have, for practical purposes, only one sort of sound for the letters b, c, d, f, etc., Irish has two sorts, defined as broad and slender.  One only knows whether a consonant or group of consonants is broad or slender by looking at the vowels they are next to.

What are some ways in which Irish structure has come into Hiberno-English?

In Irish, there is no word “yes” or “no.”  As a result, in English, the Irish have tended, traditionally, to repeat the relevant verb in the positive or the negative.  Thus, if one asks the question, “Did you go to town?,” the answer would come, “I did,” or “I did not.”

Irish verbs have a past tense, but not a recent past tense.  Therefore, in English, the word “after” has been used to indicate action in the recent past.  So, rather than say, “I have gone to the pub” or “I have just gone to the pub,” one might say, “I’m after going to the pub.”

The Irish language does not have one word for “sunrise” or “moonrise.  Thus, these terms came into Hiberno-English as “the rising of the sun” (éirigh na gréine) and “the rising of the moon” (éirigh na gealaigh).  It is a matter of translation, not of poetry, but it does tend to make one feel that Irish must be a naturally poetic language.

And finally, of course, there are the many words from Irish that have come directly, or nearly directly, into the English language:  Shanty, whiskey, bard, slob, slew (as in a slew of new products—sluagh)), gob (mouth), keen (as in keening after a death), banshee, smithereen ( in Irish, literally, a little nothing), galore (from go Leor, meaning enough, plenty).

What I’ve written above is, of course, barely even the merest taste of this subject.  For those who want to learn more, I highly recommend the following books:  English As We Speak It in Ireland, by P.W. Joyce, Wolfhound Press, ( first published in 1910; reprinted 1991); Teach Yourself Irish, by Myles Dillon and Donncha ó Cróinín, (copyright 1961); and Learning Irish, by Mícheál ó Siadhail, (copyright, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, first published 1980).

***

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.

Note: A special thanks to Eleanor Max, my former Irish teacher, for checking the correctness of what I have written here. -JS

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

Pubs. They took their name from Public Houses. When I lived in rural England, it seemed that every few miles there was a village of fifty homes, an Anglican church that dated from the 1200s and a pub that seemed just as old. There the regulars and even a few irregulars would gather where for centuries the pub served as a social center of the community. People met with their neighbors and traded stories about local news and gossip.

Before television, before radio, before telegraphs and newspapers and possibly town criers, pubs were the hub of information. The news made its way to the neighbors who carried it to other towns or vice versa.

Today’s version may be coffee shops. With their proliferation to the point that they seem to be on every street corner. Writers have been taking their laptops to the local coffee shop for several years now, typing away as they drank their white mocha, then using the wi-fi to get connected to the world and get ideas. But now they may provide writers new opportunities.

Are you looking for a meeting place for your writers group or book club? Local coffee shops offer a comfortable chair and nearby cup of joe. Or are you a blogger? Lately, I’ve attended a weekly local blogger’s Sip ‘n Blog. For one hour a week, the blogger discusses a topic of local interest with a special guest. During that hour, about a dozen local citizens have an opportunity to ask the guest questions. One guest was the publisher of the local paper. During the hour, the blogger also does a quick, regularly-scheduled five minute call-in to the local radio station. Imagine that hour as information reaches several media and personally reaches out to the citizens in attendance.

Have coffee shops become the new ale houses of old? Perhaps not yet, but as the print media industry faces growing challenges with diminishing returns, turning to an old establishment while employing one of the new media may be one way of getting your own blog started or revamped.

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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.

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.

For the past few years I’ve been writing fiction almost exclusively, but most of my 40-some-odd years as a professional writer were spent writing nonfiction. And mostly, it was journalistic writing.

I wrote for newspapers, radio, television, I edited magazines, and I wrote for various web sites. Nearly all of this writing was journalistic in nature. I still follow developments in the field, with an eye toward maybe returning to it at some point.

Lately, I’ve been wondering: Will there be anything to return to? (To which to return?)

Last year my alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism, celebrated its centennial. Since it was the first school of journalism in the world, the celebration was a Big Deal. I attended.

During the nearly week-long festivities, the school held a seminar on future technology. A number of entrepreneurs described, and demonstrated, a number of new approaches to delivering information to consumers in a digital age. Some, I thought, were half-baked. Some held genuine promise. But they all lacked what seemed to me an essential ingredient: Money.

Oh, there was money, or at least the promise of money. Entrepreneurs don’t get involved in a project that doesn’t show potential profits somewhere down the line. But the economic potential of all these projects was based on the widespread belief that their raw materials – their content – were free.

You can see how they reach that conclusion. On the internet, content looks free. I can read The Washington Post online without spending a dime. Same for The New York Times and for dozens – probably hundreds – of other newspapers. Television stations and broadcast networks have all established web sites, which carry news stories. Magazines routinely place much of their content online.  All the web portals have links to news stories. All of it free.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

The news has to come from somewhere. Right now, it comes mostly from newspapers and news services – such as the Associated Press – created to serve newspapers. If newspapers die out, as they seem to be, where will that content come from?

This could be a tremendous opportunity for freelancers, or it could be a catastrophe. Right now, I’m inclined to bet on the latter.

These techno-geek guys have grown accustomed to the idea that content is, if not free, at least a negligible expense, like the cost of acquiring a domain or a new piece of software. If we’re lucky, they’re in for a rude awakening. If they’re not, well . . .

Newspapers understand that they have to spend money to produce their product, but the internet has made most of those production costs irrelevant.

And the cost of producing content could become irrelevant, too. When I started in journalism, many smaller newspapers (and even a few big ones) relied heavily on unpaid “correspondents,” who rarely left home. They would write weekly or monthly columns that reported on which of their neighbors took a cruise to Bermuda, when the first robins of spring were spotted in the trees, or when the first crocuses appeared. The more adventurous souls among them might report that two members of the town council had resorted to fisticuffs in a dispute over a zoning matter, or publish the municipal leaf-collection schedule.

Some of this stuff was interesting. Most of it was crap. The publishers didn’t care. It was content, and it was free. I call this indifference to quality the “warm body” disease, and it is more widespread than H1N1. And it spreads faster.

Let’s face it: Nearly everybody thinks he can write. After all, it’s the first thing they teach us in school. And, of course, everybody could  write, if they were prepared to spend the time and effort required to do so. Not many are willing to do that, especially if they can get by with less.

Bad money, they say, drives out good. I’m afraid we’re about to find out if no money will even drive out bad.

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Clyde T. Linsley has been a full-time freelance writer since 1986. He served two terms as president of WIW during the nineties. He is the author of four published mystery novels.

I have worked as a freelance proposal writer for 10 years in the Washington, D.C., area.  During this time, I have encountered many wonderful clients and some not-so-wonderful ones.

The economic crisis has demanded much tightening of budgets and doing more with less.  It has also brought to the surface in many areas of business the not so savory side of people.  Perhaps the best known icon of this phenomenon is Bernie Madoff.  He and others like him also try to get more from less, but are willing to compromise others to achieve their personal goals.

Following are some of my experiences in encountering such people as clients, and the importance of letting go of such unsavory clients sooner, rather than later, to avoid wasted time and unpaid invoices.

Beware the client who:

• Uses overly dramatic words and tone to try to engage your emotions. Rather than dealing in a professional manner, such a client wants to elicit an emotional response from you, and the matter soon begins to looks more like a feuding family rather than a professional business relationship.  Often applying logic to solve differences only enrages such a client, and you may get a response such as one client sent to me, “It’s as though I work for you, or I feel that you perceive me to be a hostage where you call all the shots.”
• Touts him- or herself as a savior, and nobody would be anywhere without them. Case in point, a client once said, “I just came back after almost five years of being away from the day-to-day operations, and what I have learned, and the money I raised in two months is mind boggling to most people.”
• Uses guilt to manipulate you to do something that benefits them, but rarely benefits you. Case in point, a client said, “Until now, I thought it was about the mission of our organization.  But, was it ever about us, or was it only about you.  I fought against the former Executive Director and even the board when everyone but me wanted you gone, and now….”

Crotchety clients can be smooth talkers face-to-face.  They are great guests at parties – very animated, but they often resort to using convoluted correspondences as a weapon to get their way.  For instance, they rarely respond promptly to e-mails or phone calls – even when money or a deadline is at stake.  This type of client responds only when it suits them, and then their response can be so twisted, it can be hard to recognize what they are responding to from the original correspondence.

Sadly, in my experience and line of work, these clients are often revealed over time to be hiding things such as embezzling grant monies for personal use or using designated funds for non-designated purposes.  They are more times than not late in making payments on invoices, if they make them at all.  One cantankerous client took eight months to pay over $8,000 dollars owed, and another client simply declared a completed project incomplete and refused to pay.

The hassle, stress, and lost time on your part as a consultant are not reimbursable, so dump these clients early before they drain your pocket book and spirit!  One quote from an old-time radio show called the ‘Shadow’ that for some strange reason brings me solace when encountering clients and people such as these is this one – “Who knows what evil lies in the heart of men.”

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Deborah Wunderman has 20 years of experience in non-profit management and fund raising with close to 15 years specializing in foundation, government, and corporate proposal writing.  She first became a member of AIW while broadening her consulting practice in 2000 and served a year and a half term on the board in 2002.  Her work has brought in $7,635,669 dollars for non-profit and for-profit organizations that work locally, nationally, and internationally.  She has a BA from College of the Atlantic in Human Ecology with prior work experience in education, marine science, and the arts.