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Note Cards

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Over the past few years, while initiating two personal non-fiction projects each running hundreds of pages in length, I found myself struggling to structure coherent wholes from the dizzying sums of the respective parts. I knew generally what I wanted to say in each case, and I had no shortage of content to work with, but in contemplating the structural expression of my ideas I became overwhelmed both by the complexity of the issues and the amount of information on hand.

Having learned to write in the pre-computer age, when every word had to be hand-chiseled into a block of marble, and having been liberated by the amazing technological advances in word processing that continue to this day, and generally being the kind of person who believes that software is a better medium for grappling with ideas than stone, I invariably tried to use computer programs to wrap my mind around each project. Unfortunately, each tool I tested proved more trouble than it was worth because visibility of the whole became obscured by the inherent limitations of the computer screen — by which I mean an old-fashioned desk-top monitor.

It’s a given today that the only thing worth holding in your hand is the latest-and-greatest smartphone, but I’m going to suggest you may want to expand your arsenal of helpful physical objects when you’re writing something that can’t be adequately communicated with your thumbs. And yes, as you undoubtedly surmised from the title of this post, I’m talking about note cards. What you may not yet realize, however, is that I really am talking about real paper note cards just like your grandparents used when they were structuring their long-form projects.[ Read more ]

It’s Not About the Money

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Last week author Tony Horowitz wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing his tragicomic experience writing an e-book:

Last fall a new online publication called The Global Mail asked me to write about the Keystone XL pipeline, which may carry oil to the United States from the tar sands of Canada. The Global Mail promoted itself as a purveyor of independent long-form journalism, lavishly funded by a philanthropic entrepreneur in Australia. I was offered an initial fee of $15,000, plus $5,000 for expenses, to write at whatever length I felt the subject merited.

At the time I was researching a traditional print book, my seventh. But it was getting harder for me to feel optimistic about dead-tree publishing. Here was a chance to plant my flag in the online future and reach a younger and digitally savvy audience. The Global Mail would also be bankrolling the sort of long investigative journey I’d often taken as a reporter, before budgets and print space shrank.

Alas, things did not go well. If you’re eying the e-book boom Horowitz’s piece is a must-read because it comes from someone in the trenches, not someone selling you a shovel that you will eventually only use to dig your own grave. Based on the totality of his experience I don’t begrudge Horowitz his eventual retreat, but if you’re new to the writing game I think it’s important to understand what has and has not changed during the past few years of publishing upheaval.

Making money as a writer — to say nothing of making writing a career, even for a few years — has always been brutally hard. If you’re passionate and lucky and plucky and willing to do whatever it takes, and you meet the right people at the right time, and you have the chops, and you’re less trouble than you’re worth, you can, maybe, get a gig. If you do a decent job and meet your deadline you might get another gig, or even an actual job with regular hours and benefits and somebody else paying two thirds of your social security taxes. But it’s hard. Always.

While the e-book craze is in large part being driven by people who hope to profit from doing so, and it’s always nice to make a buck, the real value of e-books, and by extension, self-publishing, is the fact that you no longer have to ask someone for permission to write what you want to write. You may not make any money following your bliss, but when was that ever guaranteed? The best you could usually hope for was to write for hire, to get someone to pay you for services rendered, then use that income to cover the cost of personal projects. Even if you were a literary lion your high-dollar advance came with expectations and limits.

If you want to make money as a writer you’re looking at a hard life, but it was always thus. What’s changed — what the e-book revolution and self-publishing are really about — is that everyone now has access. So while you’re right to think about how much money you can squeeze out of the marketplace with your talent and guile, take a moment to ballpark the opportunity cost of the self-publishing and internet distribution options currently available. What would it take to replicate those opportunities if you had to pay for them yourself? A billion dollars? Ten billion? A trillion?

The e-book market will sort itself out in time, at which point it will become just another market you can sell your services to if you aspire to be a working writer. What you no longer have to do is wait for someone to say yes if you’re willing to bet on yourself, and I see that change as priceless.

— Mark Barrett

2 University of Iowa Creative Writing MOOC’s

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Two free creative writing MOOC’s are now open for registration at the University of Iowa. The first course, How Writers Write Poetry, begins June 28th. The second course, How Writers Write Fiction, begins September 27th. Both courses run six weeks.

One of the great obstacles in learning to write, compared with most of the arts, is that it’s impossible to observe another writer’s process. You can watch a sculptor sculpt, you can watch a painter paint, you can follow a photographer and observe the composition of endless images, but when it comes to writing it’s all cerebral except for the tap-tap-tapping of keys. After hours you can learn to drink by hanging out with writers, you can learn to do drugs, you can even learn to be a cynical, jaded hater, but when it comes to craft and technique there’s nothing to note except perhaps a preference for hardware or software, as if that ever meant anything.

Whether you’re merely curious about how writers write or you’re worried that you’re doing it wrong, these courses are an invaluable opportunity to check in with people who, somehow, despite the odds, found their way. And as I’ve mentioned before, that’s literally — if not literarily — half the battle.

Spread the word. Enjoy.

— Mark Barrett

The Uncertainty Principle

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Following up on the previous post, it’s worth mentioning that while journalism can make use of storytelling techniques and still maintain its ethic, the routine crime committed by for-profit news outlets is the same as that committed by duplicitous authors: exploitation of audience uncertainty. This basic dynamic in communication between two people — one who knows and one who does not know — can be harnessed for good or ill by anyone, which is why the real test of a journalist is whether questions an audience has (or would have if they were more informed) are being answered, or whether audience uncertainty is being fed, led, and otherwise exploited as a means of generating ratings or sales.

Exploiting uncertainty (and its sibling, fear) is the modus operandi not of writers, storytellers and journalists, or even advertisers, attorneys and politicians, who often stoop to that level, but of con artists, propagandists and fear mongers. As a technique uncertainty is commonly generated by entertainers in all mediums precisely because it’s effective, but even then there are standards to such practices. The power of any fiction turns on withheld knowledge because the author could simply reveal all outcomes at the beginning, but as audience members we understand that the best experiences necessitate going along for the ride. What we will not forgive, however, is finding out at the end of a story that the uncertainty at the heart of a work was contrived: that information was withheld from us unfairly or that we were lied to in service of outright deception.

In the case of the missing Malaysian airliner that CNN has been exploiting for profit, simply understanding the context of such a search was and probably still is outside the cognitive capacity of most human beings because the scale of the search area is so vast. While anyone can confront how big an ocean is by going sailing on the high seas — or, alternatively, by looking at a globe and extrapolating — it’s not up to patrons of the news to do this. Rather, it’s up to purveyors of the news to anticipate or detect confusion and uncertainty and work assiduously to defeat it. Doing so, however, obviously shrinks the number of nutso conspiracy theories that can be sourced from the internet and debated by a panel of paid experts. (Here’s one example of how it might be done for web-centric news junkies.)

The test for whether you’re being honest or not in your communications with others is simple: how are you handling audience uncertainty? If you’re authoring a work of fiction, are you being honest in the telling? If you’re a journalist, preying on your audience’s lack of information means, by definition, that you’re not honest. You may get away with it for a while — you may even be able to make an Orwellian career out of misrepresenting yourself as an arbiter of honesty — but you’re still dishonest.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and Journalism

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What is the overlap, if any, between storytelling and journalism? Well, that’s a tricky question. There should obviously be no overlap between fiction and journalism, because journalism is concerned with truth. If you profess to be a journalist but your reporting is a lie then at best you’re a propagandist and at worst you’re a fraud.

Storytelling is a murkier issue because the techniques that define storytelling are portable to almost any medium of communication. Not only do fiction writers tell stories but so do we all. Even children relate experiences not in a factual sense but as a narrative, picking and choosing among events, ordering events so they’re more compelling, and embellishing events so they’re more exciting.

It would seem, then, that journalists would be free to exploit storytelling techniques as well, but in fact they’re not — and they’re one of the few professions about which that can categorically be said. If you’re a journalist your first responsibility is to the truth of the facts you’re reporting, not to storytelling techniques that make those facts exciting at the expense of your professional obligations and ethics. (I know, I know, you’re blowing coffee out your nose because you know there are no journalistic ethics any more, but play along anyway.)

Yesterday, in announcing a new slate of programming, CNN’s new chief marketing weasel, Jeff Zucker, had this to say:

CNN President Jeff Zucker called [the new shows] “the foundation of our new prime-time lineup.”

In a statement, Zucker said, “The best journalism is, at its core, great storytelling. We are so pleased to welcome some of the finest storytellers in the business to CNN, the home to this kind of quality programming for more than 30 years.”

Coincidentally, as you may or may not know, for the past month CNN has been ruthlessly and brazenly exploiting the unsolved disappearance of a Malaysian airliner for the express purpose of making money. Using every storytelling trick in the book, including some of the most childish means of fostering speculation, morbid curiosity and lunatic thinking, CNN and its cast of purported journalists has turned an ongoing news event into an obsessive pursuit aimed not at the truth of the airplane’s disappearance, but at generating cash from the corpses of several hundred human beings.

Is that storytelling? Probably. Is that journalism? Not hardly.

Whatever CNN used to be, it’s noble heart died long ago. What’s left is not only an embarrassment to journalism as a profession, it’s an embarrassment to every storytelling profession as well. On the other hand, if you want to know how to make yourself rich off of other people’s tragedies, it’s easily the best example going.

— Mark Barrett

The Importance of Technique

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This is acrylic paint on a canvas:

While that aggregation of paint probably meets the definition of art in some way, and by virtue of its constituent parts is perhaps also a painting in some sense, relative to my intent it is neither. Rather, what that canvas represents is a variety of painting techniques I have tried over the past few months as a byproduct of exploring that medium.

Each time I work on a painting, which I tend to do in small pulses rather than sustained pushes, I take any paint I have left over and the brushes I’ve been using and I apply the paint to that canvas in various ways. Sometimes I work in a directed fashion, trying out a technique I’ve read about in a book or learned about online, sometimes I act impulsively or instinctively, but the goal in all cases is to explore and learn. And I’m learning.

Because a canvas can be apprehended at a single glance it’s much easier to see how individual techniques add up to both a whole and to an arsenal that can be used in future works, but the same applies to writing. The more you explore what you can do with words, and the more you learn how you yourself approach language and writing, the more likely it becomes that you will be able to realize the works you envision.

It may seem problematic to compare images and ideas because words are more logically connected than paint, but I mean the above image to be a direct analogy. That canvas is to painting what a notebook is — or should be — to writing. You are not obligated to practice techniques in the context of a coherent whole when you write any more than when you paint. Write a sentence fragment if that’s where your head’s at. Note an interesting detail, then express that detail in different ways. Write a single sentence that appeals to you, then rewrite it twenty times by adding or removing a single word and changing the order of the other words. What works? What’s muddy and dull, what’s clear and sharp?

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, comedy or drama, the power of your work comes not from conception but from the techniques you employ. If you can be funny or incisive or searing in fifty words then it probably won’t be hard to write five hundred in the same vein, but the reverse is not true. That’s the importance of technique in any medium.

— Mark Barrett

The Gatekeepers Are Dead

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It has long been sanctimoniously asserted by the mainstream publishing industry that it alone can be counted on to ensure the quality of writing and discourse in society. While I have previously reduced that assertion to rubble on multiple occasions, it’s worth nothing today that the industry itself has thrown in the towel at the highest levels, openly trading its tattered reputation for cash from sources whose stated intent is to deceive, then abetting those same funding sources in that fraud.

That this is happening in journalism in companies that purport to hold themselves to the highest ethical standards tells you that the game is over in every other corner of publishing. This realization came to me, ironically, from news stories about PBS and the New York Times. The PBS story, which I happened across a few weeks ago, concerned the funding of a new series by its news division:

On December 18th, the Public Broadcasting Service’s flagship station WNET issued a press release announcing the launch of a new two-year news series entitled “The Pension Peril.” The series, promoting cuts to public employee pensions, is airing on hundreds of PBS outlets all over the nation. It has been presented as objective news on major PBS programs including the PBS News Hour.

However, neither the WNET press release nor the broadcasted segments explicitly disclosed who is financing the series. Pando has exclusively confirmed that “The Pension Peril” is secretly funded by former Enron trader John Arnold, a billionaire political powerbroker who is actively trying to shape the very pension policy that the series claims to be dispassionately covering.

I can’t say I was surprised that PBS sold its soul for money, but I was disappointed. I was surprised, however, when I read today that the New York Times is planning to use what are euphemistically called native ads in its new paid app, NYT Now:

The new, paid mobile app for iPhone and iPod, debuting April 2, will cost $8 per month, and will focus on aggregation and curation, with editors selecting stories from the NYT and the wider Internet for a “fast and engaging news experience.” It also marks the NYT’s biggest move away yet from regular display advertising, with all ads on NYT Now in the form of “Paid Posts,” NYT’s term for native advertising — or advertorial, as it used to be called.

If you’re not familiar with native ads, advertorials, sponsored content or paid posts, they are essentially the same thing: attempts to deceive an audience that what’s being presented comes from the editorial or content side of a business when it’s really coming from marketing weasels inside and outside the organization. As always, there are plenty of good people working in publishing who don’t support such tactics and who really do believe in standards — at least until their own paychecks are threatened.

Which is to say that if you still think you need to wait for or even ask for someone’s permission to write whatever you want, you don’t. So get to it. Because even if you write the worst thing that’s ever been written, you won’t be a fraud.

— Mark Barrett

Online Education and the Commitment Problem

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There’s no question that the internet is a boon to learning. It’s a rare day when I do not pop open a browser and look up information that helps me solve a problem or move a project along. Compared with life before so much knowledge was available there’s also no question about which reality I prefer, even allowing for the inevitable costs and tech headaches that accompany such momentous change.

Given that others seem to share that preference it’s not surprising that there are widespread efforts underway to turn the internet toward education in a more directed fashion. From online courses that can be taken for continuing-education credit to the explosion of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and even the appearance of online-only ‘universities’ offering full degrees, there seems to be a genuine hunger for virtual academics, and why wouldn’t there be? Instead of having to alter or uproot your life to go where the knowledge is you can now simply log on and learn.

It’s probably also not surprising that some of the jazziest online schools and programs are for-profit. While making an honest living is a laudable goal in life, some of these for-profit online schools — like their for-profit brick-and-mortarboard kin — are nothing more than a skimming operation aimed at federal student-loan dollars. Couple premeditated leeching with administrative efforts to heap for-profit debt onto students at abusive interest rates and the worst of these schools are little more than a gussied-up Craigslist scam looking for student suckers.

Standing in opposition to the for-profit paradigm are fully accredited non-profit and governmental schools offering free MOOC’s. While academically laudable, it’s also true that some of these staid institutions are getting into MOOC’s for branding and marketing reasons, some are using MOOC’s to up-sell students on fee-based courses, and a few are acting as incubators in order to spin off for-profit start-ups that will eventually help enrich already bulging endowment coffers. Still, cynicism aside, a free course is a free course, and if a MOOC gives far-flung students a chance to learn at a distance I think that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, even if we narrow our attention to free MOOC’s and impute only golden motives to institutions hosting them, there’s a problem with this most benevolent form of online education. And as a recent New Yorker article points out, it’s a big problem:

An average of only four per cent of registered users finished their MOOCs in a recent University of Pennsylvania study, and half of those enrolled did not view even a single lecture. EdX, a MOOC collaboration between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has shown results that are a little more encouraging, but not much. And a celebrated partnership between San Jose State and Udacity, the company co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor turned MOOC magnate, also failed, when students in the online pilot courses consistently fared worse than their counterparts in the equivalent courses on campus.

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2 Literary University of Iowa MOOC’s 4U

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Like many institutions of higher learning, the University of Iowa (my alma mater) has begun offering Massive Open Online Courses. Given that Iowa is home to both the Iowa Writers Workshop and the International Writing Program it’s not surprising that the initial offerings play to those strengths.

The first course, which began in mid-February but is still open for registration, features an in-depth look at Whitman’s A Song of Myself. If you’re interested in poetry, the roots of modern poetry, American history, the roots of American individualism, or Whitman himself, you can’t go wrong here.

The second course, which begins in June, is called here, or run this search. The original site/pages seem to have been relocated at least once, making them hard to find.

— Mark Barrett

On Being a Successful Writer

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If you have an interest in writing, and at some point you feel you’ve become a writer, is being a writer success in itself? If not, why not?

How should writers measure success? How should non-writers measure the success of writers? Should writers pay attention to what non-writers think about success? Should writers pay attention to how other writers define success?

Can the success of a writer be measured objectively? In judging your own success are there specific metrics that matter to you? The number of fans you have? The amount of money you make? The number of awards you receive? The nature of the awards you receive?

Are all award-winning writers successful? Can a writer be successful without winning awards?

If you make money as a writer are you successful? Is your measure of success tied to how much money you make? Can you be successful as a writer if you don’t make money writing?

If you never win an award and you never make any money but you have devoted fans are you successful? If you don’t think you’re successful does that make your fans wrong?

Are subjective measures of success more or less valid than objective measures? Is that true for all writers?

Is your definition of a successful writer fixed or does it change over time? Is your sense of your own success fixed or does it change over time?

Do you measure success relative to your writing or how your writing is received? Both? If you write something you don’t respect and it makes a lot of money or wins a lot of awards or pleases the public, have you been successful? What if you write something that garners no interest but you believe to be your best work? Is that success? Failure?

Is it possible to objectively prove some writers are good and some writers are bad? Do you believe good writers eventually succeed and bad writers inevitably fail?

Is there such thing as a failed writer? Is that something writers decide about themselves or something non-writers say about writers? Is a failed writer someone who failed at the craft of writing? Someone who failed to make money writing? Someone who failed to turn writing into a career?

Does writing itself sustain you, or do you need feedback from others? Are you driven by the process of writing or the outcome? Both? If you could choose only one, which would you choose?

When it comes to defining success as a writer you get to choose what success means to you. Choose carefully.

— Mark Barrett