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Rant-'o-the-Week: Just
want to make one thing clear right off. I am not the
father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby. I
realize
that
makes me a rarity, and also that this wipes out any chance I
will ever
have
of being
on TV and interviewed by Larry King. And the fact that, when
first typing this, I had to substitute "xxxxx" for
Anna Nichole Smith because I couldn't recall her name, says
something
about
me.
(Not a problem,
incidentally. I usually turn on CNN first thing in the morning
and listen to it—the TV being in the living room, not the
office—until
the news people start to repeat themselves. It was not ten minutes
before they broke in with more news about Anna, perhaps they
had found a bag-boy at a supermarket who recalled once helping
her Grocery Purchasing Assistant. "Anna ate eggs! Anna
ate bread!" I can see it now.
I
understand that, as of last count, six men have claimed to
be the father. Of course they don't care a whit about
the kid; they want to get a corner of that money pot that Anna
became. But it does make me chuckle by reminding me of that
scene from the movie Sparticus, where the Roman commander
wants to find out which prisoner is the leader and ALL of the
men shout
out, "I am Sparticus."
I
was vaguely aware of Anna Smith because she was always on the
news. I had only two thoughts. (1) if she was a
Playboy model then Playboy has gone rather
Rubenesque since I last looked at one. And (2) I pegged her
as the latter-day Gabor
sister. I never knew what Zsa-Zsa and Eva Gabor actually DID.
Same with Anna. They all seemed to have no jobs, no careers,
other than being themselves and being so as publicly as possible.
I
used to wonder about the "All Anna—All Day" business with the
news networks. Why beat—to use a grotesque metaphor—a
dead horse? Why pick one story and repeat it, ad nauseam?
Then I heard a CNN executive interviewed on one of those "about
the media" shows. He explained that since the average viewer
could only be expected to follow one big story at a time, they
had determined that one big story—rarely two big stories—were
all they would ever run at once.
Now, this begs a number of questions:
They have 24 hours per day of time to fill. They cannot possible
do it. Instead, they run thirty minutes of news
48 times a day. So why not run a little more variety when they
have
a big story, just on the off chance that a few viewers have
IQs higher than their belt sizes?
Who decides what constitutes a "big" story, one
to receive the laser-like total focus for, oh, say 24/7 for
the next three weeks? Endless coverage of someone who once
married
an old geezer for his money is not my notion of important
news.
What
sort of morons actually sit and stare at the screen, bon-bon
boxes in their laps, all day watching this
stuff?
Why don't I cancel my cable subscription, which
I keep mostly so I can get CNN?
I'm not sure I want answers to all these questions.
But it does touch on a longtime pet peeve of mine and of all
of my freelance magazine writer friends: the Hollywoodization
of
the media. Next time you are in your local bookstore, look
at the magazine rack. How many magazines do NOT have a movie
star
on the cover? Its gotten so that when we query an editor with
a story idea, we need to think about which famous person we can
rope in to use as our primary example. Want to write about poodles
for Dog Fancy magazine? Perhaps Sean Connery
owns a poodle. There is breaking war news from
Afghanistan? Quick, locate Julia Roberts and get her take
on Afghan politics. Working on a boring service piece for Workboat
Magazine about the decline of the American ship-building
industry? Better
locate
a famous
person
who happens to own a shipyard.
I
don't know if Sean Connery owns a poodle and would not walk
across the street to ask him. I could not care
less about Julia Robets' take on politics. Her expertise is making
movies. But I once did that story on the shipyards and I actually
did happen to know a famous shipyard-owner. The first person to
e-mail me with that shipyard owner's name gets a free subscription
to this newsletter. He is not famous for the shipyard but for
an entirely different field of endeavor.
I
once worked
for the Reuters news agency as a stringer. Reuters is probably
the
most prestigious (and largest)
news
agency
in the
world and
known for its rather British hidebound insistence upon
absolute
accuracy and through professional reporting. Why they let
me
in, I don't know. But towards the end of my ten-year association
with them, they sent down a memo. They had just inked a deal
(only in Hollywood do we "ink" deals, incidentally)
with some celebrity-gossip tabloid whose name escapes me
now.
Henceforth we were to try to locate a celebrity to go with
each story,
so
that the story could be re-slanted and used twice, once on
the wire service that went out to 50,000 newspapers, TV stations
and radio stations around the world, and once for this Hollywood
tabloid. I read the memo, tossed it into the trash, and went
on as before and nobody ever said anything about it again.
But it shows how pervasive celebrity-worship has become.
Poetry
and Prose: The
lecture portion of the news. Pick up a copy of the April issue
of Writer's Digest magazine. It has a poetry theme
this month. Even if you do not expect to ever write poetry
there
are good reasons
to gain all the familiarity with it that you can manage.
You will find that useful in any kind of writing. And why did I
get the April issue on February 20? Magazines do that and,
for the life of me, I do not know why.
Poetry
is one of the few writing styles that I freely admit that
I
cannot
do.
Poetry,
writing
for
children,
romance, probably some others. I do love to tell poets that
my one and only poem was promptly published in a magazine.
I usually
fail to admit that I edited the magazine. I cannot recall
it now and do not have a copy. It was some rather dark bit
describing an ambush patrol in Vietnam that went bad. (Of
course, in my
opinion the only ambush patrol that did not go bad
was one where you sat there all night and saw nothing but
mosquitoes.) All I can recall was some rather clever sound-effect
writing
of bullets going through tree leaves and the part where I
punched out the chaplin.
I
once tried to write romance novels on the theory that there
must be gobs of money in it because
romance
writers cranked them out at two-week intervals and people were
sleeping in front of the bookstores to be first to buy the
new copy of Brawny Biceps or Heaving Bosom.
I hied myself to Big
Mary's Used Books where Big herself showed me the various sub-categories
of romance. I had not even known there were sub-categories.
She picked one book apiece from a half-dozen categories and I
went home and read those. Or tried to; I could rarely get past
page
10.
There
was
one that
was so graphic that I made it to page 15. I realized that (a)
I was constitutionally incapable of writing romance and (b) writing
romance was a whole lot more serious, time-consuming, professional
and difficult than I had imagined. I'll leave that to the experts.
But
what brought up poetry this week was a comment I made a few
days back to a client. She had called
me to work
on an award application for her architectural firm. Usually
I work on grants for her, but this was more or less the same.
Architects,
incidentally, are like writers in that they tend to wait for
the last moment to do things and then work half to death to crank
it out on time. She called me on Tuesday afternoon to be at her
office Wednesday at noon. Wednesday is my sailing day but since
I broke the trailer hitch the previous week I was at loose
ends anyway. So next day at noon I was there, with bells on,
brought my own laptop
and all. She informed me that the project had to be turned
in at
noon
the next day,
Thursday.
I looked
at the award specifications, it ran to four pages of requirements.
"Why call me now?" I said, rather petulantly. "We
could knock this one out tomorrow morning."
She
and I plunged in. There were descriptions of a historic district
to
write up,
site
plans,
lots of small stuff and some major writing. There were photos
to process and caption, all to be made to look really good
and printed out into five bound sets with pretty covers. "Remember,"
she said as she laid a Cuban sandwich and a diet Pepsi in front
of me, my lunch, "architects will be judging this. So it has
to look really good."
"I
understand perfectly," said I. This kind of job was routine
and appearance really does count. "We sell
the sizzle and the steak."
"Exactly,"
says she as she rather distractedly picks up my Cuban sandwich,
takes it with her to her desk, and
eats
it. I tell her the photos she took are worthless because she
had the wrong white balance set on the digital camera. It's
a non-fixable error. I teach a photography for writers course
and have some programs to fix photos but I can do nothing
with
these.
She sends out an employee to take more photos. When he gets
back I check his pictures at once. They are passable, though
I did wish he could learn to the traffic pass before shooting
across a busy street. He seemed to have more of a thing for
F-150 pickup trucks then for old buildings.
Five
p.m. rolls around and her staff leaves, not having completed
their work on the project, though at least we got better pictures.
One difference, I
noted about thirty years ago, between someone who has what it
takes to be a leader, a business owner, a freelancer, and someone
who will always be someone else's employee, is whether they are
task-oriented or clock-oriented. We work on. At 7 p.m. I order
us a pizza and make a liquor store run for a good cabernet sauvignon.
By ten p.m. we are beating this thing into shape and I'm editing
my work and hers. She watches and at one point stops me.
"Why did you change that sentence there?"
"I sounds better this way," I said.
"It
sounds better? Sounds? What difference does that make? You
said the same thing, only slightly
rewritten."
"It
rolls off the tongue better," I said. "It's not enough to
just write down the information. You want the words
to sing to the readers, to maintain tension and attention through
more creative use of language."
"It's
poetry," she said.
"Well...sort
of. We steal some concepts from our friends the poets. And
from novelists too. They know
what they are doing and they deal more with human emotions and
scene descriptions than we nonfiction writer/editor types do.
So I like to steal from
them."
"I
would have left it the way it was."
"Which is why you are paying me the big bucks here.
Which reminds me," I said as I handed her four invoices totaling
maybe $2000, "one of these is more than three months old. But
the pizza and cab-sav is on me."
"You're worth every dime I pay you,"
"Well, at the moment, I'm not sure quite how to
take that."
By
midnight we are even closer, slowed only slightly by having
to print out three different covers with different photos
on them,
for her to pick one she likes, and by two a.m. I have printed
out all the sets and we are three-hole-punching
them and putting them into the binders. By three a.m. I'm home
and still too wired to sleep, so I read for a half hour. My client
told me she, too had that problem. When you are in the groove
for so long it takes time to come down off it.
So,
want to be good at writing nonfiction for the business client
on a short deadline? Not a problem. Learn to
at least pretend to be a poet too. Read and internalize some
poetry and some novels, so as to know how those genres address
human emotions and problems and human reactions to problems.
Learn to write descriptively, which novels can teach you, and
briefly, which poets can teach you.
Oh, and not having a problem pulling all-nighters
helps too.
Book
manuscripts: Updating some literary agency
web site lists the other day and ran across this on one of them.
It's stock advice, but worth remembering:
"If
we have requested a full manuscript, please follow these
guidelines in preparing your work for mailing:
1 Use twelve-point type throughout the manuscript. Courier
or Times New Roman
fonts are acceptable. Editors prefer Courier.
2 Double space the entire manuscript.
3 Number each page consecutively, with each page number appearing in the
upper right hand corner. Do not separately number the pages for each chapter.
4 Start each chapter on a new page.
5 Place a header on each page identifying yourself and the name of the
work in the following format: "author/name of manuscript."
6 Do not bind the manuscript or place it in a three-ring binder.
7 If you want your manuscript returned in the event that it is not accepted
for representation, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope with
sufficient
postage to cover the cost of mailing. If you prefer that we destroy the
manuscript in lieu of returning it to you, please make such a request in
writing."
Now,
other agents or editors may have other preferences, and the
above applies to printed manuscripts. But, I would guess,
the vast majority of agents and editors would be happy with manuscripts
prepared as above.
In
the Bad Old Days, when I started out, we had to hand-type at
the top of each manuscript page, our name and manuscript
title and the page number. That was awful. And if you rewrote
something, the pages were no longer in sequence, so we did some
half-pages and some "page 263.2" stuff.
Today, with word processors, all is simple. Learn to use your
headers to add your name and book title to the left then tab
across to the right and add the page number. The program will
re-number pages as needed. One more thorn pulled out of the writers'
paw.
Responses from readers: When I told C.K.,
one of my old-time students, that I had expected a flood of
rejections
and was surprised at the
positive response
to my restarting the newsletter, she accused me of being a pessimist.
Well, I admit it. But, then, an optimist is often wrong and then
is disappointed. A pessimist is often wrong and is then unexpectedly
happy. I prefer the latter.
And last, let's go out on another rant/chuckle:
Your Tax Dullards at Work: It's that time of year. Past time,
in fact. So wrap your brain around this concept: Each year I
need to send out IRS Form 1099-MISC to various WritersCollege.com
teachers. This requires three items:
A dozen or so Form 1099-MISC.
One Form 1096 (the cover form for the 1099 copies sent in to the
IRS).
One set of instructions. Not that it really changes from year
to year.
Follow
that carefully. It will be on the exam. OK. So on December
27 I go to the IRS web site to get the phone
number to call to
order
the
forms.
But
this
year
they
have
a handy
on-line order system, basically the "shopping cart" system we
all use to buy anything else online—except that here it's
free. I
order the forms.
By January 30, I have not received any forms. I can place an
order for a 45-pound tent with L.L.Bean, entirely online, and
have it delivered within two days. But the IRS cannot send me
an envelope with some papers in five weeks. I revisit the site.
Now there is a large red notice to the effect
that
some
forms are not available online. I suppose that the ones I wanted
were among the missing. (They didn't say WHICH forms were
not available, which seemed, to me, a little less information
than was useful. I write down the phone number, as I had planned
to do the first time,
and
call.
I order
the
forms.
On February 8 I receive a package from the IRS. It has all the
requested forms, plus an order confirmation form on top listing
the forms I ordered and which are included. All is in order.
I process the forms and get that done and over with. The IRS
may
be slow.
They
may
be
web-challenged. They may be seventeen times slower than
a commercial business but, in the end,
they
came
through.
A few days later I receive a package from the IRS. The order
confirmation form says the package contains all the forms I
had ordered. It actually has the instructions and the one 1096.
No 1099s at all. Not that I needed them by now.
A few days later (yes, really) I receive a package from the
IRS. The order confirmation form says the package contains all
the
forms
I had
ordered. It actually has 14 copies of the instructions and
nothing else.
I can't wait to see what today's mail brings me.
Courses
mentioned or alluded to in this newsletter:
