Stephen King on Writing

An article he published in 1986 in The Writer -- Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully – in Ten Minutes -- is largely devoted to advice on publishing fiction [hat tip to @AkshatRathi on Twitter].

By sheer coincident, Jessica Lahey's interview of Stephen King on how he teaches writing to high school students also showed up in my linkstream.

If you are into this sort of stuff, both are worth your time. Let me post a couple of excerpts from the first article. Here's how he defines success for a writer:

... For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may as well be defined as eventual success – publication and money. If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented. Now some of you are really hollering. Some of you are calling me one crass money-fixated creep. And some of you are calling me bad names. Are you calling Harold Robbins talented? someone in one of the Great English Departments of America is screeching. V.C. Andrews? Theodore Dreiser? Or what about you, you dyslexic moron?

Nonsense. Worse than nonsense, off the subject. We’re not talking about good or bad here. I’m interested in telling you how to get your stuff published, not in critical judgments of who’s good or bad. As a rule the critical judgments come after the check’s been spent, anyway. I have my own opinions, but most times I keep them to myself. People who are published steadily and are paid for what they are writing may be either saints or trollops, but they are clearly reaching a great many someones who want what they have. Ergo, they are communicating. Ergo, they are talented. The biggest part of writing successfully is being talented, and in the context of marketing, the only bad writer is one who doesn’t get paid.

He ends his piece on a highly quotable quote:

If it’s bad, kill it

When it comes to people, mercy killing is against the law. When it comes to fiction, it is the law.

More links

1. Dhimant Parekh: Of Rains, Cows and a Picture: "For that moment, we four [three men and a cow] were all in one world, in one picture."

2. G. Lakshmi: Handwriting:

   I hated articles that expounded the relationship between handwriting and character/future/talent/life. According to all these articles, I was a potential criminal, utter failure and possibly not worth living.

3. Anil Kumble's Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Memorial Lecture: Perception and Practice:

   He first led the team at 21, when every other player was senior to him. He must have worked hard at appearing almost casual in his stroke play, as if to suggest that cricket was the easiest game in the world— in fact so easy that he could play the best bowlers with just one good eye. The effect on his team was phenomenal. The perception of ease communicated itself to the many who were inhibited, diffident and under-confident.

Academic Writing

Two links from my G+ stream.

The first one is a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

The second is Josh Freedman's piece in McSweeny's: I fear my dissertation is not having the world-changing impact I thought it would. Money quote: "I still don’t get this Twitter thing, which turned out to be a huge impediment. My dissertation title itself happens to be more than 140 characters, so there were additional difficulties."

Neal Stephenson: "Why I am a Bad Correspondent"

In his post, below, Arunn talks about Neal Stephenson's preference for pen, and his love and passion for what he does -- writing novels. It reminded me of a short piece Stephenson once wrote to explain "why I am a bad correspondent". His website doesn't have it; but, thanks to a good soul who saved it, you can read it here [Update: Thanks also to Archive.org, which has a copy]. These two paragraphs stand out:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.

Do it Write

Today morning -- a weekend day -- I open my email and read this. Flowstate -- a paid app for the iPad to make you write without distractions.

The app launches with a full-screen editor and a countdown timer. You select the amount of time you want to write and start typing away. Sounds like a pleasant experience until you stop writing to look at your tweets and gasp in horror as your wonderful prose is deleted by the app.

First you buy an iPad or one such tablet with a screen full of iconized distractions -- distractions for writing at least. Then you go about finding apps to close off all such distractions in order to write in it. Why buy a tablet for your writing needs? How we go about inventing ways to complicate our lives; and try to simplify them back through more complications.

Another gentleman wrote a book on such distractions. The Shallows. And blamed our 'pronounced jumpy nature in these browsing times' on our online activities as it 'rewires our brains'. Let online activities 'rewire the brains'. But if it is distracting, why not simply pull the plug instead of over-analyzing such distractions. And get on with what you love to do -- writing, in this case (for my kid, it is reading; she doesn't come near the computer; period).

Is it that we don't want to agree on our lack of self-control so invent ways to shift the blame on the distractions -- online activities. I am reminded of the 'time management' books. Book length schemes and suggestions to manage your -- *your* -- time. When in principle all one needs to manage time is to wake up early; early enough; daily.

When we are passionate about and love to do an activity, we find ways to do it amidst all such 'distractions'. A Neal Stephenson -- one of the tech-savvy fiction writers I have read -- had written one of his (actually a three volume set) thousand and odd pages books with his bare hands -- ink on paper. All in our internet times, as tablets and distractions rewire our grey cells. A proof (from here) that he loves what he does? Coming to think of it, you don't see him on the internet more. Doesn't blog; tweets occasionally; and doesn't blame the internet or 'distractions'. But writes thousand-page delectable fiction as staple.

Years back there was a movie called The Piano; after watching it I wondered how such a simple feeling called Love can be transmogrified by the human mind to such complicated feelings and actions.

Links

1. Daniel Hamermesh in VoxEU: Aging and Productivity: Economists and Others.

   Is economics still a young person’s game? If not, what is changing? This column argues that although top-level economic research in the 1990s was very much a young person’s game, the last 15 years has been kinder to older economists. More and more economists over 50 are being published in the top journals. Why? Because technological change in economic research is slowing, giving young researchers less competitive edge.

2. Geoffrey Pullum in CHE: Being an Adverb. Yet another take-down of a columnist/blogger advising the removal of adverbs from one's writing. Great stuff. Pullum also has a link to his earlier take-down of "Strunk & White’s toxic little compendium of misguided maxims."

3. Interesting column explaining how to prune this paragraph:

   It is important to recognize the fact that every subject, given that its content is not totally reducible to some other subject area, presents a special set of pedagogic problems arising as a result of the distinctive character of their contents and their essential nature. The problems may be regarded as particularizations of the general pedagogical considerations which must be treated by any and all teachers who seek to seriously discharge his or her educational responsibilities in a highly efficacious manner.

   into this:

   Every subject presents its own pedagogic problems.

4. BBC: awesome pictures of Kumbh Mela from space.

Inner Life of Stuff

The Up-Goer Five tool challenges you:

Can you explain a hard idea using only the ten hundred most used words? It's not very easy. Type in the box to try it out.

More about the tool here from its creator, Theo Sanderson. I saw it in action first at Suvrat Kher's post describing his research. Here's my attempt, a possible abstract for an upcoming talk on "computational modeling of microstructures and their evolution."

Inner Life of Stuff

We study pieces of matter. Each such piece, called stuff, could be water-like or rock-like, and we are especially interested in what goes on inside rock-like stuff. From the outside, such stuff may look as if it is the same at every place inside, but it is not! It turns out that, much as a house is made up of rooms, stuff is made up of lots and lots of small things, called parts. But, while rooms in a house can't grow bigger or smaller, parts inside stuff can! Some parts may grow bigger while others grow smaller. All this happens, quite easily even, when stuff gets hot.

So, here is the Big Idea: though stuff has no life to speak of, it enjoys some seriously beautiful inner life!

Why is this inner life of stuff important? Because it decides how well stuff works -- some kinds of packing are better than the others. So we need to understand how the parts come to be packed the way they are, and to figure out other ways of packing that make stuff work better. With this understanding, we can do some pretty cool things. We can take soft stuff and make it hard (or go the other way). Or, we can decide what, and how much, can move through it. Many things we use in our lives today -- lights, cars, flying air buses, computers -- are possible because we know how to control and change the inner life of stuff.

So, how do we get to understand the inner life of stuff? By building ideas about how parts change their form. Actually, we take a slightly different line: instead of focusing on parts, we focus on the walls between the parts. When a wall moves, the part on one side grows bigger, while that on the other side grows smaller. By watching walls move, we figure out how parts change their form.

While this is all easy to say, it is actually very, very hard to pull off. Instead of trying to crack the problem by writing on paper (and feeling let down!), we build make-believe stuff inside a computer. Just like real stuff has real parts and walls, the make-believe stuff has its own parts and walls. We then ask the computer to let its not-so-real walls move around just like real walls do. By watching changes in the make-believe stuff brought about by its moving walls, we get a good idea about changes in real stuff.

This talk is about how we study the inner life of stuff, and about what we get out of our studies. We start with walls, and why and how they move. We then show how we build make-believe stuff in a computer to watch moving walls and form-changing parts. We then talk about two very different kinds of stuff to show how our ideas work. Near the end of the talk, we have some things to say about looking at and studying stuff using computers, and about how it is not very different from studying stuff using things (such as focusing glasses) other than computers or paper.

Links

1. G.B.S.N.P. Varma in Caravan: For Song’s Sake. "A man’s crusade to prevent Telugu film songs from fading into obscurity"

2. Fëanor at Just a Mon: Rice -- a delightful tour of rice varieties from many parts of the world.

   In another post, he describes his participation in a BBC show on the novelist-poet C. K. Stead.

How to Write a Lot

Another book on how to write; this time, a lot. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J. Silvia is short, light-heart-ed throughout and good. It primarily attends to academic writing in the field of psychology but also contains essential advice that holds true for any science writer in academia.

By 'writing', Paul means not only the act of putting words onto a medium but includes any and all tasks related to generating those words. Thinking, analyzing data, drawing graphs, reading related literature, making notes, editing and re-writing, revising a manuscript, writing rebuttals... activities that makes you progress in a particular project involving writing. However, it doesn't include doing peer reviews of research, chatting up with colleagues even on a research problem, discussing research with your students, teaching, committee meetings and so on...you may be already doing "a lot" in any or all of these, but these are not writing activities. Not surprisingly, 'blogging' doesn't feature at all -- neither in the 'writing' nor in the 'not writing' group of activities. Perhaps, one should neither schedule nor feel distracted about pastimes.

The first two chapters -- if not the rest -- are worth the price of the book. The second chapter on Specious Barriers to Writing a Lot hits the mark with humor. It correctly identifies some of the 'lies' we tell repeatedly until such time we start believing them as 'reasons' for not writing more. Complaining about 'not finding time' is one such. One should not 'find' time to write; one should make time to write.

Here is another sample from that chapter:

When unproductive writers complain that they don’t have fast Internet access at home, I congratulate them on their sound judgment. A close look at Figure 2.1 (where Paul shows a picture of his writing desk with an old laptop and few other rudimentary stuff) shows that there’s no Internet cable plugged into the computer. My wife has fast Internet access in her home office, but I don’t have anything. It’s a distraction. Writing time is for writing, not for checking e-mail, reading the news, or browsing the latest issues of journals. Sometimes I think it would be nice to download articles while writing, but I can do that at the office. The best kind of self-control is to avoid situations that require self-control.

“In order to write,” wrote William Saroyan (1952), “all a man needs is paper and a pencil” (p. 42). Equipment will never help you write a lot; only making a schedule and sticking to it will make you a productive writer.

I could immediately relate to the above advice. A not so different sentiment is discussed some years back in Disconnecting Distractions essay by Paul Graham. He uses two computers, one with the internet and the other where the real work gets done, without it.

At the end of the second chapter Paul Silvia provides the remedy for thwarting such 'writing barriers': Schedule your writing and stick to it. That is the only way one could write a lot; at least in academia (non-fiction). Sounds too simple? Scheduling a task means hermetically sealing oneself from the rest of the tasks and thoughts that life's juggernaut generates at any instant and doing only that task, come what may. From my limited experience, I would agree with him.

The rest of the book, in my opinion, is an overstatement of this idea. If you can take my 'blogger' words for granted, close this book at the end of the second or perhaps third chapter (Motivational Tools). And make a schedule for your writing and stick to it. OTOH, go ahead and read the book and then schedule your writing; the results should convince you that you should have taken my word.

Write to the Top!

How to go about prolific publishing in academia? If prolific writing can be learnt through profligate reading, here is a book on the topic: Write to the Top!: How to Become a Prolific Academic by W. Brad Johnson and Carol A. Mullen. As the book title suggests, it provides tips, advice and suggestions on how to become a prolific writer in academia; to write better non-fiction like research publications, books and book chapters on technical topics, grant proposals. Non-fiction is our intent in such writing, not necessarily their final content.

In all sincerity, there are sixty four elaborate tips segregated into relevant chapters, on how to become prolific. Beginning with how to establish a well honed writing habit, the book discusses pertinent issues like systematic writing from start to finish, when to collaborate and when to cut losses, tackling thoughts and emotions that block productivity and so on up to cautionary remarks on how not to lose perspective about our life in our pursuit for being prolific; You are the writer, writing is not you.

Although most of the academic publishing aspects mentioned in the book (how to fumble with, write, edit, edit and edit a research paper, how to submit, peer review polemics, dealing with rejection and success etc.) were apprenticed from an excellent adviser, I did enjoy reading this book. It provides a comprehensive, and at times inspiring, reminder about academic writing, its purpose and prominent-but-not-pervading place in a balanced academic life. The book is not set in a lighter tone, if you are looking for such sugar to make you read the medicine, but meets its goal, which is fine with me.

From one of the tip, here are some “scholarly irrationality” in academic writing

• I must be successful in getting all of my work accepted for publication.
• I ought to be an outstanding scholar, clearly better than other writers and professors in my department, university, or discipline.
• I have to be greatly respected and loved by colleagues and editors.
• If a reviewer or editor caustically denigrates my work or rejects me, he or she is obviously worthless and should be removed from the position of power.
• If a reviewer or editor caustically denigrates my work or rejects me, it just proves that I am worthless and will always fail.
• I should find writing easy and enjoyable like other scholars in my college and field.
• If the audience at a professional conference should react negatively to my paper, it would be catastrophic — so awful I would probably vomit, faint, and be barred from ever attending the conference again.

According to the authors, if you are in academia and cannot relate to any of the above then you perhaps are either unproductive or too far on the wrong side of tenure.

In this context, the only 'inspiration' I could end this with is, there is no such thing as good luck in research publication. Painstaking work, coupled with careful risk taking, is required for success. Success; not necessarily -- as the above "scholarly irrationality" warn us -- significance.

Links

1. Charles Simic in NYRB: Why I Still Write Poetry. Simic had me hooked right in the first paragraph:

   When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

2. Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit. Worth reading to get some insights into the online culture at two sites that depend totally on contributions from their users.

3. The Oatmeal (comics): Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Warning: Don't click if you are a fan of Edison. [Update: This post attempts a fact-check (Via this comment; thanks, Anirban!) Update 2: A rebuttal from The Oatmeal (thanks, Priyank!)]

Blood and Gore in Book Reviews

John Sutherland has a terrific piece in The Guardian: Which book reviewer will win the 'hatchet job of the year' award? Not only does he have links to some of the juiciest of them, he even links to a review that demolished one of his own books!

I should make full use of this opportunity to link to demolition jobs that are pure fun: Matt Taibbi and Mihir Sharma. But they reviewed non-fiction, while Sutherland's piece is about reviews of fiction, poetry, anthologies, and the like.

Some excerpts:

Give someone a hatchet and, quite likely, they'll get bored of clearing the literary undergrowth and sink it in some luckless writer's skull. More so in a hothouse literary world like London's. And it's fun to watch, so long as the hatchet isn't descending on your own cranium. Every sport benefits from a bit of blood. Personally I stop reading reviews at the first mention of words such as "splendid", "magisterial", or "meticulous". Gore beats puff every time. [...]

I've published some 28 books ("Splendid", all of them), over what some unfriendly reviewers have recently been implying is an overlong career (notably that young stripe Sam Leith, damn him, who I see is one of the hatchet judges). Most reviews of my books have been friendly. But there's always been a couple of stinkers. And those are, inevitably, the ones you can – 40 years later – still recite by heart. More so as, when time passes, you begin to suspect your assailant may have got some things right.

My most recent effort, Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, has received the kinds of review that would please my mother in the Spectator, the Times, the Financial Times, the Independent, the Evening Standard. But it got the loo read of the year award in Time Out ("top of the world, Ma!").

It also got a review of such savagery in the Telegraph that, if I were a betting man, I'd go down to Paddy Power and put a tenner on Jonathan Bate walking away with the 2012 hatchet of the year award, still dripping with my warm blood and brains. (That's the one link you clicked on, isn't it? Point proved). Forget loo read of the year. As far as Bate is concerned my luckless volume wouldn't even qualify as toilet paper.

D. Balasubramanian on Democratic Societies in Animal Species

In the latest column in his fortnightly Speaking of Science series in The Hindu, Prof. Balasubramanian does a great job of presenting in a popular format a bunch of studies of social lives of animal species -- wasps and cockroaches, red deer and chimpanzees. Fascinating stuff!

Here's the section where he talks about the work of Prof. Raghavendra Gadagkar, a colleague in the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc:

Professor Raghavendra Gadagkar of the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore is a well known “eusociologist” who specializes in insect group behaviour of wasps and bees. He recently described to us how a colony of wasps or bees organizes itself and optimises resources. He points out that while the colony has a queen, workers and drones, this is no monarchy. The queen does not proclaim what the colony should do. (We call her the queen, rather anthropomorphically, since all she does is sit around and lay eggs, and is pampered by a retinue of ‘assistants').

She too is just a worker, a special type of worker whose job is just to keep on laying eggs. There are no palace intrigues, and she too can be, and is, overthrown or displaced by another ‘egg laying machine'. When the colony is divided into two, the second queen-less part makes its own queen.

The “queen” is of course more important than the average worker, but she is not a dictator whose order the colony must obey. It is a group activity, with each member playing its role by common agreement.

How do scientists design experiments to answer questions such as "Do members of species X "practice a ... form of democracy"? Balasubramanian gives an example from the work on cockroaches:

How does one devise an experiment to arrive at such an important conclusion? Halloy's experiment was simple and decisive. He placed the group of cockroaches in a large dish that had three shelters.

The cockroaches did much “consultation” among themselves by touching and probing each other through their antennae, and after such consultation, divided themselves into groups and ran towards the shelters, away from the light (recall they like dark and no light).

The surprise was in the result. Each shelter could hold 50 insects. Yet when 50 cockroaches were used in the experiment, they divided themselves into two groups — 25 went off to shelter 1 and 25 to shelter 2, leaving shelter 3 vacant. When the researchers brought far larger shelters, each housing far more than 50, the cockroaches formed a single group and all went into a single shelter.

"Bill, honey"

Just a quick link to William Zinsser's charming essay on being chosen by Woody Allen to act in a couple of scenes in Stardust Memories. [BTW, Zinsser's On Writing Well is a fantastic book with great advice and practical tips. Highly recommended!].

The year was 1980, and I was sitting at my typewriter in New York, plying my writer’s trade. When the phone rang I had no great expectations; freelance writers answering the phone tend to be braced for negative news.

“Bill, honey?” said a young woman’s voice. “This is Sandra from Woody Allen’s office. Woody wondered if you’d like to be in his new movie.”

That was something new in phone calls. I had never done any acting or dreamed any theatrical dreams. But who didn’t want to be in a Woody Allen movie? I knew that he often cast ordinary people in small roles. What small plum did he have for me? I hesitated for a decently modest moment and then told Sandra I’d like to do it.

“Good,” she said. “Woody will be very pleased.” She said that someone else would be calling me with further details.

A half hour later the phone rang again. “Bill, honey,” a voice said, “this is Stephanie from Woody Allen’s office.” How wonderful, I thought, to be in a line of work where I was called “Bill, honey.” Stephanie said she was calling to get my measurements. Measurements! I caught a whiff of greasepaint over the telephone line. She needed my jacket size, my waist size, my trouser length, my inseam and my collar size, and I gave them to her gladly. I would have told her anything. I wanted to ask what role I was being measured for, but she was gone. I called my wife to tell her I was in show business.

And this, from the last paragraph:

... as I look back on my movie career I have a larger regret. I never got called “Bill, honey” again.

Geoffrey Pullum's battle against critics of the passive voice

He has been at it for quite sometime now, and here's his latest: Mistakes Are Made (but Using the Passive Isn’t One of Them):

... do the writing tutors of the world really think we should not report that a politician has been shot until we can specify the gunman? Do they honestly think it’s wrong to say that the lights are left on all night in an office building without supplying a list of the individuals who controlled the switches? We really have to get over this superstitious horror about passives. It’s gone beyond a joke.

Links

1. Animesh Pathak: Oops for Indian Voting Machines.

2. S.R. Darapuri IPS (Retired) at Counter Currents: Who Is Afraid Of Caste Census And Why?

3. Laura Miller at Salon: Bad Writing: What Is It Good For?