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RANT 'O THE WEEK: Deanna Tiddle wrote in with a rant most of us can relate to:
Stephen, I thought you might enjoy the following piece that I wrote, and which was published on authornation.com. Something you said in the last newsletter reminded me of it.
Writers Don't Get No Respect by Deanna Hessedal Tiddle What do you do?
I’m a writer. Oh, you don’t work. Good! You can be on this committee I’m on. Most folks don’t have the time, so it’d be perfect for you.
You’re very kind, but I’m quite busy with my writing.
Have you written many books?
Well no, mostly I write children’s stories and articles for magazines. Just magazines? Which ones?
Playmate, Highlights, and ... Never heard of ‘em. I suppose when you get good enough, you’ll write for adults.
No, I want to write for children.
Sure, sure. Don’t give up. And maybe someday you’ll even write books. Anyway, I could write a book if I just had the time.
(If I killed this person, what are the chances I’d get a jury full of writers?)
HOLD ON, JESSICA, DON'T LET GO Story of a child's survival is at http://deannatiddle.com And for more on Deanna, read her FAQs page at her website. Thanks, Deanna!
SCHOOL
NEWS: Nothing new to report this week. But rest assured that we are all slaving over hot keyboards here to bring you more goodies.
(OK, if my keyboard is hot it's because it's choked with cat hair. But I'm slaving, slaving. Lift that bale, tote that manuscript....)
Writing one good eulogy can get you through a time of bereavement looking to the rest of your family like a knight in shining armor. Writing eulogies as a business can be a profitable sideline. This seminar is intended for both the person needing to speak at Uncle Fred's funeral day after tomorrow and for the person writing eulogies on a regular basis for other families.
Focus on how to plan your novel before you start writing it to make it as effective and intriguing as possible. By the end of the seminar you will have a variety of tools to help you in the writing process from character and setting sketches to scene outlines to a complete plot roadmap.
No,
we’re not talking about boring school tests or
those nasty “pop quizzes” we all hated. These
are the quizzes in magazines and in the Sunday section
of your newspaper most of us can’t resist taking.
They are fast to write—and fun to take. The two
main types of quizzes – lifestyle and “fast
factual” will be covered.
Being
able to take photos, or find photos, to accompany
your writing can help sell the story, keep control
over your work, and even earn you extra money.
ESSAY: The future of Journalism? I read a recent New Yorker article on the subject of the future of newspapers: The article took a rather dire tone. Newspapers are history, all is lost, civilization as we know it is ending.
In my part-time job as editor for the web site for the American Society of Journalists & Authors I read a lot of this because one of my daily tasks is to maintain a list of recent journalism-related news items.
Eric Alterman, the New Yorker article's author, did a great job of summarizing the changes of American journalism over three hundred years. The great irony, to me is that an article predicting the demise of the newspaper appeared in a magazine that is just as unlikely to still be around in 2042 as is The New York Times (or "the Times" as Alterman repeatedly refers to it, not specifying which Times he talks about and simultaneously poking at the Lippmanesque assumptions of a news/information elite.
Here is my own prediction: Newspapers will go first, followed by magazines. Television, both network and cable will not be far behind. And computers and the Web as we know them now are only a transitional model too. All of those will be absorbed into a combined internet/terminal/telephone infosphere.
William Gibson, in the classic SF cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, predicted, thirty years ago, a humanoid/world computer where we all "jacked in" to interface with one another through a cable running from our head to any convenient wall plug. He may have been onto something, he only missed the concept of wireless and, one day soon, "Blue Tooth" may refer, not to an ancient Scandanavian king (really, that's where the name derives) but to our dental work.
The great irony of this immense infosphere that provides all information to all people? It's too much information. Most people (I started to type "most of us" but I ain't gonna be around for it) will pick and choose the news they want to read, the new things they wish to learn, and most people will only interface with those parts of the infosphere that reinforce their current perceptions and opinions. The result is easily foreseen: Society will fragment as each person becomes an island, as each person relates only to like-minded individuals and receives less and less fresh and conflicting information.
Will some of the web sites we see today that coalesce the news for readers ultimately replace newspapers as centers of community attention, even if the community is now worldwide and not local? One would assume so. In the interim, they will expand reporting staffs and become newspapers/TV news bureaus online, doing what the newspapers and television networks should have done but could not see to do because when your head is in the sand it's hard to have foresight.
In the long run even that interim step, the newspaper/web site, will give way. To what?
One thing that is rapidly vanishing, having had its one hundred years in the sun, is any concept of independent, unbiased, apolitical journalism. My writing came of age in the era of the reporter as human tape recorder or video recorder. We heard. We saw. We did not speak. We looked, quite automatically and sometimes pointlessly, for all sides and all opinions and tried to present those facets of the story. For the most part, the newspaper or TV news reporter, or magazine journalist was just doing a job of cranking out words and didn't think much about, let alone insert opinions into, the stories he or she was covering.
But the public never really got it. They have always assumed a bias even if there was none, mostly because people assume a bias when what they read or watch is not their bias. Lean far enough left or right and even a telephone pole starts to look slanted. But today the public makes no distinction between a Rush Limbaugh and a Brian Williams, between CNN and Fox, or between a news story on CNN and the commentary of a Lou Dobbs. Worse, a considerable portion of the public gets its news from the supermarket tabloids or the Comedy Channels' news-parody The Daily Show (depending, more or less, on IQ level, but the accuracy is likely about the same).
And so who needs professional journalists in an age of rapidly-diminishing journalism-as-we-know-it? In an age where Joe Six-pack with a phone camera gets more play in the nightly news than a debate at the UN on Iranian nuclear weapons, when magazines won't run stories—from poodle care to the Darfur disaster—without working in a celebrity comment, is there any use or demand for unbiased or non-titillating news?
You tell me.
.
This essay runs also on my writers blog at: http://blog.stephenmorrill.com/
feel free to visit that and post a comment there. It's new so there's not much on it.
COOL WEB SITE: Actually, two this week because only one is writing-related:
Dancing is a heartwarming four minutes of Matt Harding dancing around the world—if we can call what he does 'dancing'. Click on the lower right corner of the video to make it full-screen. I have probably watched this thing a hundred times and it never fails to cheer me up. The song is a Bengali poem sung by a 17-year-old and I find her voice and singing ability as amazing as the video itself. Watch it, in full-screen if your computer has the chops to run it that way. Let me know what you thought.
On a serious professional note, here's a Norwegian comedy skit that features "Introducing the Book" to a medieval monk. The other guy is the monestary's "Help-Desk" person. I'm sure we can all relate.
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