DITCHWALK

A Road Less Traveled

Topics / Books / Docs

About / Archive / Contact

Copyright © 2002-2026 Mark Barrett 

Home > Archives for Writing

The Year of the Elm

By Leave a Comment

If I had to pinpoint when I finally decided to head down the self-publishing road, there is no question that impetus occurred as a result of writing this collection of short stories. I wrote the first story decades ago, with no thought to writing a second, but then a second story showed up, and a third, and after a while I had a dozen contemporaneous stories about the same little boy. When I contacted agents and publishers about the collection, however, I invariably received the same response. No one published short story collections, and if I wanted anyone to sign me as a client I would have to convert those episodic stories into a novel to satisfy the demands of the market.

While I was grateful for that insight into the brute realities of the publishing industry, I also believed in the structure of the work as it was, and I didn’t want to lose the effect that my authorial choices had on the reader. I have never written under the flag of art because that banner is itself routinely co-opted by the whims of the marketplace, but I am a firm believer in craft, and I could not convince myself that a novel was the best form for those stories or that character. In another era my conviction would have consigned the collection to a desk drawer, but with the advent of self-publishing — as differentiated from what was then known as vanity publishing — I could finally convey the work to readers as originally intended.

The first edition of The Year of the Elm was produced in 2010 on CreateSpace, an entirely distinct subsidiary of Amazon. If you dig around on this site you’ll find all sorts of posts exploring and debating every aspect of that initial foray into self-publishing, from pricing to cover art to ISBN registration and everything in between. And that would have been the end of it, save two related events which transpired over the past few years. First, and most importantly, Amazon killed off CreateSpace as an independent subsidiary and converted the entire CreateSpace catalogue into KDP titles. Second, while I was thinking about moving The Year of the Elm to a new self-publishing platform, I made the mistake of reading through the collection to see if there were any formatting or publishing changes I might want to make. Which is when I also discovered several glaring and hilarious botanical errors that had previously escaped my notice.

Now, if you’re not a writer yourself you won’t know this, but no work is ever really finished. Instead, you just get to a point where you either stop or go insane, and for that reason, if you’re smart, you don’t ever revisit old texts. Having proven myself not so smart with The Year of the Elm, I went ahead and fixed everything that was broken, adjusted the formatting, tweaked the cover, and otherwise improved the work and book in a dozen little ways that most people never would have noticed in the first place. And hopefully that will prevent me from making the same mistake again — at least until the next round of corporate upheaval in the self-publishing space.

Despite all of the time and effort over the years, however, I don’t regret any of it because I learned a lot. I’m also glad I decided to protect the integrity of the collection, whatever that may or may not have meant in terms of writing as a career. And I say that because one of those short stories is probably the best piece of fiction I ever wrote, and if I had smudged and smeared the stories into a novel I think I would have inevitably diminished the effect of that story, and of the collection overall.

— Mark Barrett

Homestead on the Range

By Leave a Comment

My maternal grandmother, Pearl Mirich, had a significant and enduring positive impact on my life.

When I was growing up in Iowa City, Iowa in the 1960’s and early 1970’s, I simply knew her as Grandma, and that she was a long-time Cedar Rapids junior high schoolteacher who enjoyed playing bridge with her friends on weekends. The older I got, however, and the more I learned about her life, the more I came to realize that we also instinctively shared a similar spirit and outlook, even as the context of our formative years could not have been more different.

Like many Americans who lived through the Great Depression — and later, the long and lingering toll of World War II — Grandma Pearl could be tough and even uncompromising, but her stoicism was more than a cultural convention. In the early 20th Century, when she was born, the world really was a much more dangerous place, and not just because antibiotics had yet to become commonplace. Survival often hinged on resolve and strength of will, and left little time for processing or even acknowledging traumatic events.

I didn’t know much about my grandmother’s upbringing until late in her long life, when she set down her memories of several summers spent on her older sister’s Wyoming homestead. In that text — which was passed around in the family in manuscript form for over a decade — I was able to see young Pearl finding her way in life. Later, following her death, I produced a self-published volume of that book which was given to friends and members of her large extended family.

From the consistent positive response to her simple personal history, one of the tasks I set for myself in my own old age was producing a publicly available version of her memoir. Now, after plenty of dawdling and fits and starts, that version is available. (Click the image here, or on the Books page.)

There are a lot of things I like about this particular work, but I think it’s also an important reminder that everyone has a story to tell. If you know of people in your own family whose history might be of interest to others, consider this book a testament to the value of such homespun tales. (Self-publishing isn’t trivial, but it’s worth it.)

In any event there is a lot of interesting history in this little book, including a a compelling story of sisterhood and family. And family came first for Grandma Pearl.

— Mark Barrett

The Assumption of Point of View

By Leave a Comment

Imagine a grand old stained glass window in a grand old house. It is imposing, arresting, defining. From the wooden trim surrounding the window, to the pieces of colored glass held by the snaking, soldered cames, every aspect of the window shrieks of mastery. As futile as it may ultimately be, you are so possessed by what you see that you decide to communicate your amazement to others through inherently feeble words. And so you begin to write….

As long as I have been writing — and that is now a very long time — I cannot think of any aspect of craft that has caused me more consternation than point of view. And here I mean point of view broadly, across all mediums and writing types. Whether fiction or nonfiction, the choice of point of view is not only critical to the effects you aim to achieve, but often seems inherent in the original conception. So much so, in fact, that at times you may not stop to consider whether the point of view you have chosen is the best point of view to use.

I mention this because I recently went through a frustrating period in which I had to deconstruct a complex nonfiction argument that originally seemed self-evident. When I revisited what I had written, however, I realized — after pages and pages of failed revisions, beseeching questions and aggravated comments — that I had instinctively adopted the wrong point of view. What I had originally said was that because the issue at hand was poorly defined, the people advocating for that position were objectively wrong. What I needed to say was that while the issue at hand was narrowly correct, the people advocating for that position were effectively blinded by that truth.

In the first instance the point of view I adopted meant that I wrote myself into a logical corner from which I could not extricate myself. In the second instance the point of view I adopted opened up all of the logical avenues I wanted to discuss. As for what it cost me to belatedly come to that realization, that was a few weeks of complete insanity as I went around and around restating and reformulating the arguments I made, without once stepping back and questioning the authorial point of view from which i made them.

That said, I’m not convinced that I could have reasoned my way to the proper point of view in advance. In fact, I think there are times when the only way to find the best point of view in fiction or nonfiction is to make an educated guess and get to work. And no, it’s not fun if you go down the wrong path and have to back up, but from that work you will likely be certain about your final choice.

If you’re relatively new to writing you have probably only wrestled with point of view at the higher levels, including choosing between first-person and third-person in fiction or nonfiction. It’s probably also best to stick with one point of view or the other in a given piece, both to keep your writing on track and to avoid confusing the reader. At some point, however, you may find yourself struggling with everything from the overarching conception of a work to a specific passage or chapter, and then you may profit — as I ultimately did — from questioning any assumptions you made about point of view.

And by way of example, consider again the grand old stained glass window in that grand old house. When you were imagining that window, were you outside the house looking in, or inside the house looking out? Because I’m willing to bet it was one or the other, even though you didn’t think about it at all.

— Mark Barrett

Authors, Publishers, Thieves and AI

By 2 Comments

Among my eclectic, self-directed writing projects I have several books I intend to self-publish sooner rather than later, then make available by some yet-to-be-determined means. In book culture the publication of those titles would be cause for various forms of genuine and transactional celebration, from in-person launch parties and book signings to online ask-my-anything interviews and marketing blitzes. While I don’t plan to do any of that, even at my most excited — and here we are talking maybe a three on a ten-point scale of delusional euphoria — I don’t even find myself thinking about potential sales or profits or reviews, or even the quiet joy of providing a single reader with a moment of entertainment or enlightenment. Instead, what I always find myself thinking about is the technologically sophisticated black market which exists solely for the purpose of exploiting the work of authors, and the abuses of which that have only worsened over time. And when I say abuses I’m not only talking about criminal conduct, but corporate practices which are legal but also clearly designed to usurp power, authority and profits from authors and their works.

To publish or promote any writing anywhere these days — even on widely recognized platforms in the United States — is to provide fresh content for rapacious, voracious thieves, who are, ironically, likely faster and more efficient at distributing pirated and knock-off titles than the best commercial publishers will ever be at making the content of their own authors available to the paying public. Along with outright theft of content, however, there is also money to be made by providing a marketplace for content thieves and their purloined wares, in much the same way that Craigslist and eBay became known as the local and national/international distribution centers, respectively, for stolen and counterfeit goods. And of course in the book world the unquestioned king of for-profit abuses aimed at authors of every rank is the perpetually, willfully and preposterously credulous Amazon.com.  [ Read more ]

LibreOffice Writer — Cursor Position

By Leave a Comment

If you use the free, open-source word-processing program LibreOffice Writer, and have discovered that the program does not save the last cursor position when you close a document, I can confirm that noxious behavior.

If you have searched for relief you may have come across a variety of proposed remedies, including claims that the last cursor position can be recovered by pressing the Shift+F5 key combination. You may also have tried that solution and found it did not work, or read responses from others indicating that Shift+F5 does not move the document view to the last saved cursor position.

When I press Shift+F5 on my keyboard as configured by default, that solution does not work. Like many keyboards, however, my keyboard requires that I press what is literally labeled the ‘F-Lock’ key to enable the functionality of the ‘F’ keys. If I do that — effectively turning on the ‘F’ keys on my keyboard — then Shift+F5 does indeed move the cursor and document view to the last saved position.

If you try this solution yourself — turning on the ‘F’ keys (which may also turn on an indicator light on your keyboard), then pressing Shift+F5 — I would like to know whether it does or does not work, and which version of LibreOffice you are using. And if it doesn’t work, keep reading.  [ Read more ]

Nodding and Shaking — A Primer

By Leave a Comment

A long time ago, in an undergraduate writing workshop far, far away, I read a story in which a character shook their head yes. When the workshop met for discussion I pointed out that people can either shake their head no or nod their head yes, but it wasn’t clear from the context which error the author had made. What genuinely surprised me, however, was not that the author didn’t know the difference, but that a handful of the other members also did not.

At the time I assumed I had stumbled into an aberrant cluster of people who were not well verse in the obscure art of describing head movements, but in the intervening decades that has proven not to be the case. In particular, there seems to be a persistent percentage of people who believe that nodding and shaking of the head both mean yes when they are decidedly not. So let this post — abetted over time by the long reach of search engine algorithms — stand as a corrective.  [ Read more ]

Whoa Stop and Woah Wow

By Leave a Comment

On more than one occasion over the past — *checks notes* — half-century, I have been moved to look up the proper spelling of the word people say when bringing a horse to a stop or expressing stoner surprise. Until fairly recently I was sternly advised that the only such word was ‘whoa’, and in no civilized context would one write ‘woah’. Meaning even though there were two available spellings for two distinct usages, there was only one proper spelling for that word regardless of the intent or context.

Over the past year or two, however, ‘woah’ seems to be gaining steam, and some sources are now grudgingly acknowledging that — as language is wont to do — we are witnessing the evolution of the spelling of that word. What does not seem to be happening, however, is any disambiguation between the spellings and definitions, and I think that is a missed opportunity. If we have two completely different usages, and a new alternative spelling is gaining legitimacy, that would be the perfect time to differentiate between the spellings and definitions, forking them into homonyms.

To that end, and in service of clarity forever more, I am advocating that ‘whoa’ continue to be used to indicate a literal or figurative command to stop, while ‘woah’ should be used to signify low-key surprise or shock. As to how to put this plan into action, just put the plan into action. When you mean stop, write ‘whoa’. When you mean wow, write ‘woah’. The word police will catch up.

— Mark Barrett

Annual Pink Wristies BOGO Sale

By Leave a Comment

As fate would have it, while I was drafting a post about writers and keyboard comfort an email arrived reminding me that October is buy-one, get-one month for pink Wristies.

If you’re not familiar with Wristies — and most people are not — they are soft glove-like coverings for the wrists and palms, which leave your fingers free to do nifty things like press keyboard keys or buttons on a remote control. And yes that probably sounds like a product of interest only to people who have perpetually cold hands, but I am here to tell you that if you spend a lot of time typing on a computer keyboard you should definitely give Wristies a try. (Also good for working reporters who have to venture outside in colder weather, but leave their fingers free to take copious notes.)

[ Read more ]

Ed Wasserman: As If By Design

By Leave a Comment

Paying close attention for almost six years to administrative machinations at the university I attended in my youth proved to be perpetually dispiriting, but as a compensating balance I also became aware of the individual academic and educational contributions of members of that community. One such example is a book which was published earlier this year by UI Professor Ed Wasserman, titled, As If By Design: How Creative Behaviors Really Evolve. Situated like a traffic cop at the crossroads between cultural narratives and behavioral evolution, Wasserman’s book not only reveals the concept of a eureka moment to be unfounded in many celebrated instances, but fills in critical context which was excluded over time to bolster the romantic concept of individual inspiration.

Although Wasserman is a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and as such is certainly familiar with statistics and the rigors of the scientific method, his book is accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, if you’re in secondary or undergraduate education, and looking for a text that will not only spur discussion but engage your students, you would be hard-pressed to find a better current example — and that’s particularly true if you are located in Iowa. (There are a number of Iowa-centric examples which will be broadly familiar to residents of the state, yet for those who believe they are in the know that only makes the missing details that much more compelling when Wasserman fills out the story.)

To be clear, you don’t have to be from Iowa to connect with Wasserman’s examples, many of which will be familiar to most Americans. Personally, as an Iowan I found the section on Iowa’s blackout license plates to be both hilarious and absurd, but if I had to pick a favorite vignette it would unquestionably be the section on Florence Nightingale. Although I already knew a great deal about Nightingale’s importance to the practice of medicine and profession of nursing, I knew nothing about her contributions to what we now call data visualization.

In short, an enjoyable and informative read, and an important corrective on the all-too-human tendency to create and celebrate idols.

— Mark Barrett

How Writers Write Fiction 2015

By Leave a Comment

This year’s free fiction MOOC from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program is just beginning, and you can register here.

(Look for the ‘Sign Up’ link on the right side of the header.)

More info on the course here. Info on IWP MOOC’s past, present and future, here.

If you’re interested in the approach that the IWP takes to writing, and you would like to put together a workshop where you are, you should also check out the new MOOCpacks, which are designed with that goal in mind.

The MOOCpacks are available to anyone, anywhere in the world who wishes to use them in a group study, classroom, or workshop setting. The MOOCpacks provide course content and teaching tools for your use, but you can structure your group in any way you would like.

If it works in Kazakhstan, it should work anywhere. More about MOOCpacks here.

— Mark Barrett