Everything is fast these days. Fast downloads, rapid exchanges of text—delivered at lightning speed—and messages written and read on the run.

All that convenience, or pain in the arse in-your-faceness—depending on how you look at life—comes with a hidden cost.

We are simply not communicating properly. Words are abbreviated or misspelled, punctuation is generally ignored (except for the ubiquitous exclamation mark, which has gone from the rarely used and effective to anything up to fifteen of them slammed at the end of one sentence), and messages have unintended multiple meanings.

Perhaps we don’t have to be perfect. Or do we? In one recent case involving a legal document, one misplaced comma in a contract cost Rogers Communications Inc., a Canadian Company, C$2.13 million dollars. That one comma allowed Aliant Inc., a cable laying company, to terminate a contract with one year’s notice, rather than the five years Rogers Communication thought they’d signed up for.

We may not be negotiating million dollar deals every day before lunch, but we do need to be clear, and punctuation helps. Let’s look at the following:

We invited the strippers, Mum, and Dad.

or

We invited the strippers, Mum and Dad.

(Interesting parents whichever way you read it.)

How about:

Let’s eat, Grandma.

Or

Let’s eat Grandma.

(Yum!)

And:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.

A woman: without her, man is nothing.

One of the best ways to test your punctuation is to read your words out loud. In this era of flashing, whizz-bang everything, how you communicate is more important than ever. Punctuation isn’t there to torment us. It’s there to add clarity to what we want to say. Just take two more seconds to reread what you’ve written before pressing the button.

Freddy Krueger

In my last blog we looked at how much fiction was based on real life experiences. Since then my wife, Jane Teresa, wrote a blog about A Nightmare on Elm Street, a theme she had been asked about on a radio talk-back show. We had to watch the original 1984 movie, hailed as a landmark in the ‘slasher’ genre, because neither one of us had seen it.

Jane Teresa—who was ready from the start to leap nervously into my armpit—and I actually found the movie quite tame. It was the titbit in the little bit of research Jane Teresa did afterwards that really caught my attention.

Freddie Krueger, the evil phantom who plagued a bunch of high school kids (one of whom was the incredibly young looking Johnny Depp), was named after a real-life character who bullied the writer and director, Wes Craven, in the school yard.  His name was Fred Krueger.

Now, how would you feel? You’ve grown up. You’re in a respectable profession. Maybe you’re a kind-hearted teacher with three gentle children and a lovely wife. And then you’re thrust into the limelight as the influence behind a blockbuster slasher movie, and not in a good way.

A Happy Family

Worse still, the movie is franchised, making Freddy Krueger a household name world over. There are eight more movies (grossing over $455 million), a TV show, and more merchandising than you could wave Freddy’s stick at.

I wonder where the real Freddy is now. And how does he feel? Has he changed his name, been chased out of the neighbourhood, and lost his family and his job?

You never know what’s going to happen when you point the finger, do you?

Childhood memories

How much of our fiction writing is drawn from real life? How often do we base our characters on people we know? And are those places we invent actually drawn from childhood memories, or somewhere we’ve once visited, or a bit of both?

Imagination

Writers of speculative fiction can create whole new worlds, races of people, social structures, weaponry, even entire languages that come straight from their imaginations. How they do that is beyond me. Like most of us, I have to have points of reference. If I write about a bunch of little kids having a fight, I have to remember a schoolyard altercation I was involved in, witnessed, or heard about, and develop the scene from there.

World domination

So, when someone asks me if a character in a piece of fiction is actually me, it’s hard to respond with an unequivocal, ‘No!’ even when the character is about to do something really despicable—not like me at all, I assure you. I certainly base my characters on elements of real people, and my own experiences, but that’s where the similarity ends. I’ve no desire to embark on an evil mission of world domination, thank you very much, but it is fun working out how it can be done. In fact … oh, forget it, that one’s already been tried.

How much of you and your experiences goes into your writing?

The Antidote

There are a couple of books by Oliver Burkeman that I became acquainted with this month—yes, I do tend to find authors I really like and read everything they’ve written: Help!, an interesting search for the best aspects of self-help, and The Antidote, where Burkeman renounces positive thinking in a droll search for happiness.

They were both interesting reads, however in Help! I came across the term ‘interstitial time’ coined by blogger, Merlin Mann. Now, I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve our writing opportunities, adding them to my list of possible solutions for time-poor clients. Or, in some cases, to parry some of the devilishly clever excuses some will come up with not to write when they can—and should.

Burkeman’s point is that it would indeed be marvellous to have large chunks of time devoted to writing in our idyllic lakeside cabin, although I’ve found there are certain realities here which shouldn’t go unappreciated (see my Lonesome Ghost, or near-death-by isolation blog here), and to wallow in some of the writing rituals we hear some renowned authors indulge in: starting at the right time, lucky pen stationed just so, faithful dog positioned by the hearth, inspirational music played at the optimum level for, well, inspiration, I guess.

The writer's view

However, in our often rat-racy existence we are beset by less than inspirational small chunks of time: sitting in doctors’ surgeries, travelling by public transport, waiting at airports, or contemplating the kids’ music teacher’s car park wall for an hour in the piddling rain. What do we do? Check everything we can on our smart phones or tablets, read a book, or stare meaninglessly at some point in space until our eyes grow heavy and close?

Or, can we use these times to write, make notes, and formulate ideas— anything that will stimulate the progress of our book? Try it! There’s an edgy feel to using this ‘stolen’ time. And, more importantly, there’s a lack of expectation—and therefore pressure—to make anything worthwhile come of it. After all, it’s merely a bit of interstitial time. It can also become extremely habit-forming, and that’s not a bad thing, is it?

What do you do when you aren’t doing?

It's here. It's now.

2013. We’re here. It’s another new year and a time to reflect. Not on what we haven’t done or intended to do over the last twelve months, but on what we will do. And that doesn’t mean setting unreasonable goals—the ones that will guarantee failure. It means singling out one major undertaking and focussing on how to engineer its success.

Over the years, the one constant with both book coaching and ghost-writing clients is the surge in good intent at this time of year. However, that urge to write, or have work written, is sometimes swamped by the overwhelming pressure of other ‘noisier’ resolutions on the New Year to-do list: giving up smoking, going on that perennial diet, signing up at the gym, and much, much more.

Is this the year of your book?

Writing, or having your words written for you, cannot remain just an intention. Both undertakings require serious input, either in writing or in time spent meeting, talking and resolving. But the first step is commitment; taking your intention and turning it a decision. Believe it or not, the rest is a whole lot easier.

Are you ready to make 2013 the year of your book?

Book covers made me wonder

Ghost-writing some fiction just the other day, I tapped out those exact words. Of course, the expression is a common English idiom and the meaning a metaphor for not deciding the worth (or lack thereof) of anything, or anyone, by its outward appearance. Good advice, perhaps.

However, rereading and editing the text, I found myself wondering about book covers—you know, how long they’d been around, which are the oldest, the most famous et cetera. Before long, I was berating myself for falling into a trap I constantly warn my book coaching students about—losing focus (the ugly term for it is procrastination) yet also fascinated by a few interesting facts that emerged. I decided that this was, after all, essential research.

Did you know, for example, that with the advent of the mass press during the 17th and 18th centuries, book covers (or dust jackets as they were referred to then) were nothing but plain and functional? At first they were cloth, and then paper. Sometimes holes were cut in the front covers to display the title and author’s name, but it wasn’t until around the turn of the twentieth century when the obvious advantages of decorating book covers became apparent. And then it was on for young and old.

Girl with Leica - Alexandr Rodchenko

Avant-gardists like Alexandr Rodchenko and El Lissitzky of the Soviet Union produced some of the first radically modern cover designs during the 1920s. Aubrey Beardsley with his striking covers for the first four volumes of The Yellow Book (1894–5) was also an early influencer.

Of course, there is always an exception. Way back around 810 BC, an illustrated manuscript—the Lorsch Gospels, a collection of the Four Gospels of the New Testament—was produced. The cover was made from highly decorated, carved ivory plates. I’ll bet the guys who put it together hoped like hell it wouldn’t become a best-seller.

James Joyce - Ulysses

And can you tell a book by its cover—literally? How about James Joyce’s Ulysses? That amazing cover designed by Ernst Reichl in 1934 in no way relates to the book’s actual contents. But, there again, could any cover symbolise the contents of Ulysses?

Today the book cover is regarded as one of the critical selling points of a book. And with e-publishing, book cover design has taken an even more complex turn. What can look highly attractive on the rapidly disappearing bookshop shelf may look pretty banal as a website thumbnail. So, there you are. Even as we speak, it’s no longer a book cover; it’s become a ‘thumbnail’.

What do you think?

Yup, you guessed it—I like that book. But what I like about it most of all is the way Barnes has the reader believe the lifetime memories of the protagonist, until they are eventually completely shattered by someone else’s recollection of what happened.

Ask a law-enforcement officer

Isn’t life just like that? Separately ask a number of witnesses to remember what happened at a particularly memorable event in the past and they will often come up with wildly differing accounts. Ask any experienced law-enforcement officer and they’ll confirm that obtaining corroborating evidence is extremely difficult. And how often does an after-dinner story become a lively discussion—OK, argument then—about whose version of that holiday incident is the more accurate? Let’s face it, the ways people remember things are, well, different.

So what’s this got to do with writing? Apply the exercise of recalling memories to writing a memoir. Which author gives the right version? The first one into print? The most famous?

When was the last time you totally disagreed with a version of events, and knew—just knew—you were right?

Writers' retreat

At one time, every piece of advice you would have received about writing for either the market, or your own personal passion, would come down on the side of passion. The question is: does that hold true now?

If you want to sell your book, is there any room in the marketplace for something uniquely yours, from the heart, bashed out with searing anger, tears, and heart-felt bitterness—oops, was that the passion I was talking about before?

If we want to write a best-seller, do we study the market to determine what is doing well and then try and emulate that particular genre? Many writers do, and it works well for them. Do we adapt our unique novel to suit the popular market?

Or, do we put another piece of kindling on the meagre fire, rub our frost-bitten hands together, sit down in our windy garret—I mean writers’ retreat—and stay true to ourselves?

What’s your opinion?

What does it mean?

I’ve become a little irritated in this era of modern communication where folk (even older generations) regularly, if not persistently, omit capitalisation from emails and text messages.  Why? Is it because it’s easier for our hard-pressed fingers to move more speedily, saving time so we can rush off to the next fifteen second activity?

The problem, of course, is that the message recipient, who clearly hasn’t got the busy and interesting life of the sender, is left spending considerable time deciphering the garbled information. What with truncated words and a heap of misspelled and therefore meaningless acronyms, we’re left wondering WTF.

The following quote landed in my inbox via my fellow ghost, Grant McDuling, a couple of months ago.

“Capitalisation is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.”

Perhaps we should all be a little more considerate with our capitalisation. Otherwise we can look really busy, but way too uncool.

Had any strange messages lately?

Scrivener - a lifeline for writers

I purchased and downloaded Scrivener the other day. It’s been a long wait, so let me tell you about it.

To me Scrivener wasn’t an indulgence—it was a necessity. As a writer, I have some fairly complex projects, some of them running at the same time, albeit at different stages of development. I’d heard of Scrivener and its write-minded ability to provide an excellent platform for organising writing projects years ago, and seethed. It had been developed for Macs, and I’m not a Mac owner.

The company, Literature and Latte (don’t you love that name?), recently released Scrivener for Windows and I was in. I haven’t been so excited for years and, despite their promised two hour in-depth tutorial dragging on for over four hours, the program went well beyond my expectations. And all for $40.

The Literature and Latte website has an active forum which I dropped in on recently. I can’t remember why. Alright put it this way, I’m not ‘fessin’ up to wasting a teeny weensy bit of time sniffing around their site for fun. You have to remember how excited I was to have the program.

In my travels there, I came across a post from a writer who was bemoaning the fact that the Windows version of Scrivener failed to have a very, very minor function that the Mac one had. A technician answered the post, explaining that it was something to do with Mac’s OS having an inherent feature that Windows OS did not possess, and that was that. Or so you’d like to believe.

Well, the discussion about this deficiency went on for weeks until one comment stopped the whole ridiculous performance dead in its tracks. ‘Surely,’ the writer said, ‘the purpose of this program is to assist in organising and tracking various complex aspects of the book writing process—something, by the way, we’ve never had before. By endlessly discussing the omission of an almost insignificant detail, aren’t we getting away from our core objective—to write?’

When was the last time you were bogged down in chasing minor and irrelevant details instead of getting on with writing?