Category: Thought

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action

There’s a story about the headstrong actor who was dead set on doing an audition for a prestigious theatre company’s production of Hamlet, against the advice of his manager.  “What, you don’t think I’m good enough or big enough for the role?” he raged at the poor woman, overriding everything she said without hearing a word of it.  “This is my big chance, and nothing will stop me from grabbing it!”

At the audition, he privately fumed about the shocked looks of the producers as he climbed to the stage– were they really so surprised that someone of his limited fame would dare to try out for the play?  But he was able to control his anger and channel it into the performance of his life as the gloomy prince of Denmark.  He stalked about the stage, spitting lines from Hamlet’s most famous monologue, contorting his face and his voice into different realms of agony as the prince debated suicide.

When he was finished, the room was quiet, and he thought to himself, I have awed them into silence.  “Well?” he demanded.  “What did you think of my Hamlet?”

“Very impressive,” said the producers.  “But we are auditioning for Queen Gertrude.”

Maybe there’s not always room for improvement, but surely 99% of the time there is.  That’s one of the principles of editing, that a work can always be stronger.  And as a freelancer, your work can always be stronger, and more in accordance with what your clients are looking for.  That’s why asking for feedback is important.  You will want to know that you are on track, both with the assignments that you’re completing for others, and with the way you’re communicating yourself, your professional conduct.  Getting feedback and adhering to it will satisfy your current customers and increase your likelihood of obtaining new ones.

Listen to me, I sound like a real live businessman.  Maybe I should start wearing a tie again.  But this t-shirt and hoodie deal is so much more comfortable.  Your intrepid freelancer is learning lessons along the way, though.  We can posit this one as:

Freelancer lesson #2: Feedback is your friend.  (Unless you’re a sound tech.)

New Frontiers, Once More

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Here once again at the precipice of something new, or rather, having already flung myself or been flung into the void.  I am now Jeff Deck the full-time freelancer, available for editing and writing jobs as you please, and continuing to speak on various word-related topics.  Perhaps even having the opportunity, from time to time, to actually work on the next book.  This maverick lifestyle will come with its share of knocks and bruises as I figure out the best methods of doing things– indeed there’s already a skinned knee or two– but that’s all part of the adventure, no?  I’ll try to detail what I’ve learned about the freelancing life, right here on the blog as I go along.

The event currently looming on my personal horizon for now, though, and on the horizon of Benjamin D. Herson, is the imminent release of The Great Typo Hunt in paperback.  For that I should post some buttons around these parts to encourage the purchasing of said product– for I am, as always, merely a greasemonkey for the engine of commerce– but for now you can find them on the main Great Typo Hunt page.  We’re also conducting a 50 Typos, 50 States contest in which several fabulous prizes can be won if you share your typo pictures.  Exciting stuff.

Meantime, if you find yourself in need of editing or writing services, turn to someone who’s been in the word-crafting game for a while now through various outlets, and… hey, where are you going?  I’m talking about me.  E-mail jeffdeck [at] jeffdeck.com with inquiries.  My rates are reasonable and my turnaround is swift, swift as a rushing brook.  Yes, this is one thing that I have learned already…

Freelancer Lesson #1: Be ready to promote yourself, especially with nature-themed metaphors and similes.

People love nature.  Thus people will love you if you compare your skills and business practices somehow with the aroma of fresh pine.

In debt and in denial

Early August:  You know it’s bad when even John McCain, he of the infamously rubbery spine in the last decade or so, has a few epithets for the Tea Party crowd. (Though his quoting of an article that referred to those folks as “hobbits” was a little off base. Hobbits are the good guys.) They gambled for their cause with the very economy of the country as their chits. And now we see the consequences of brinkmanship, as the nation’s credit rating begins to be downgraded and the stock market tanks, investors turning their fond thoughts to places like France and Canada as real rocks of solid return.

As a writer, it’s hard to mine this material, for the villains here are so cartoonish in their malevolence and their distortions and naked greed that they would make for less than believable characters. The impulse is still there; you have to use your particular skill somehow for the greater good, yes? Is that not a familiar theme? But how do you hoist these zealots by their own petard?

Late August:  I wrote the above a few weeks ago and forgot about it.  Since then, satire has shown itself to fail in the face of these absurd antagonists as well.  The Onion put out an article from Michelle Bachmann’s point of view that is easily one of their weaker efforts.  It just sounds angry and frustrated, rather than sharp.  Maybe the mushy brains of the Tea Party have an enmushening effect on even their critics.  Party on.

Waning Summer

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I have to say, Jane and I have done pretty well so far at squeezing every succulent drop out of summer. We’ve gone camping twice and to the beach numerous times (it helps to live on the seacoast!), not to mention family barbecues. I’ve been burned at least a few times. And there’s a block party tonight.

But you, gentle reader, are not as interested in what I’ve been doing as you are in what I’m thinking, I assume (if you’re interested at all). Summer, then, has been on my mind, as fiction setting and/or device. In the horror series I’m planning, which is set in the fall (as most of my horror attempts end up being set), the recently bygone summer is like a lost world, when all the tourists were still in town and before the trouble started. In other story drafts, summer is a skipped-over period mid-story, like in those TV shows that in their fall season premieres come up with some hasty sketch of what happened to the characters during the summertime (usually not much).

Sometime I’d really love to write a book that captures summer, because it can be a compelling setting if done right, particularly for adventure. Summer itself always seems to slip away imperceptibly, but an individual day or night during that time can stretch on forever. The physical dimensions of a summer night seem infinite. Maybe, when I feel that I’m finally up for the task, I’ll put on the Clientele’s God Save the Clientele album, refer back to Crowley’s Little, Big for instructions on how to cast a seasonal spell, and dive right in.

Two Masters

Entertaining versus informing– which is the primary purpose of writing? Certainly there should be room for both in any quality writing, but sometimes it feels as though these two impulses are contrary, pulling in different directions and demanding that one choose between them. I don’t want to have to make that choice, in my own writing or the writing of others that I read. I want the factual and analytical pieces that I consume to have some narrative sense to them, some style and color. I want my entertainment to have some goddamn fiber to it– informing me not in the same way that nonfiction would be, but in the way of the heart, and understanding this world we live in. And dare I say moral thrust, or will that relegate it automatically to the dreary Inspirational or Religious categories at the bookstore (while such a creature still exists)?

This may sound like a reframing of the style vs substance debate in writing, or literary vs genre, but it’s not quite that. It’s lacing our chocolate with vitamins, and adding sugar to the bran. Plenty of great, successful examples of each type exist. Entertaining information can be found aplenty in the pages of New York, or The Atlantic, or New Yorker, or Wired, not to mention nonfiction books that have the pacing of fiction. Informative entertainment comes to us via Battlestar Galactica, with its meditations on war and fear, or the works of Michael Chabon (treatises on our impulses, suppressed or not) or Neal Stephenson (always eager to show us how things work, or worked at some point in history). This stuff is out there. It exists. I guess it just disappoints me how much of the entertainment out there fails to even make an effort at informing, and how we gobble that shit up en masse. Or at the other end of the spectrum, how useful information and insightful analysis gets imprisoned behind dry and needlessly abstruse academic language, or impenetrable coded scientific texts. How did we get all tied up in our specialty niches, unable to communicate with each other? How much could we share if we could speak a common language?

I’m not blind to market forces and popular demand. A lot of people would rather not think about anything deeper while being entertained. Perhaps the majority of the American public, if we’re going to face harsh truths here. Maybe I’m just a snobbish elite who should leave the tastes of real folk alone already. But Christ Almighty, we are ignorant in aggregate. Last year, only 58% of Americans reported believing that Obama was born in the U.S., despite ample supporting evidence. In 2006, 36% of Americans stated that they thought 9/11 was an inside job. In 2010, only 57% of Americans thought that global warming is occurring, dropping 14% since 2008 (what, does Al Gore need to release a movie every year to keep people interested?). In December, Gallup reported that 40% of Americans believe in strict creationism– that God created humans 10000 years ago. Those are the fact gaps. And as far as maturity of human emotion and understanding of our fellow folk… well, you don’t need stats from me to know how piss-poor those are right now.

So how about a little more vitamins in the sweets? How about more sugar in the muesli?