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Witches of the Mind

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, Fritz Leiber, Personal, science fiction, writing on September 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?”
– Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3

If I am remembered for anything — which is open to debate — it will be for Witches of the Mind, my study of the American fantasist Fritz Leiber. So far, my only other claim to fame is my free software articles, but they have a brief currency, and I don’t expect anyone to remember my byline more than six months after the last one appears. But, among the half dozen or so scholars who care about the subject, Witches has enjoyed a modest reputation for sixteen years. Nor have its ideas been seriously challenged yet.

The book is an extended version of my master’s thesis in English at Simon Fraser University, in which I talk about Leiber’s development of the Anima and Shadow archetypes in his fiction. Early on in my graduate program, I had decided that, if I were going to spend eight months or more writing a thesis, I was going to do something original. Adding my ideas to one of the hundreds of articles written yearly about, say, Hamlet seemed both daunting and a waste of time. Getting the idea accepted required a little bit of lobbying by my thesis supervisor, but the possibility of a book and the then trendiness of popular culture was enough to get the topic accepted.

Writing the thesis was memorable for the thunderstorm that took down the motherboard of my first computer on the very day that I was going to learn how to do backups. I spent two anxious weeks, my defence date drawing near, before I could recover the files from the hard drive (unsuprisingly, I’ve been a fanatical believer in backups ever since). It was memorable, too, for my twenty minute defence, which was curtailed when its second reader suffered a petit mal attack that he tried to hide and so kept me from the drilling I expected from him. I also took away from it a love of research, and an exhaustive knowledge of the writings of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, much of which I read while developing my ideas. But, most of all, the process was memorable for my first meetings with Fritz Leiber and his second wife Margo Skinner, two of the extraordinary and eccentric people who have enriched my life from time to time.

The day after a drunken celebration over retsina and Greek food with my supervisor and external reader, I set about the task of reshaping my thesis for a book. Selling the idea of the book wasn’t difficult — there had been previous books on Leiber, but mine was the first scholarly one and the first, Leiber said, to offer any real insight into his creative development.

But the thesis title, “Divination and self-therapy: Archetypes and stereotypes in the works of Fritz Leiber,” was too academic. Perhaps in choosing the name, I was trying to subdue criticism by the conventional of my topic by hiding it under a thick verbiage of respectability. I had the idea of searching Macbeth, Leiber’s favorite Shakespearean play, for a pithier title, and found it in Macbeth’s hallucination of a dagger in Act 2. The phrase “Witches of the Mind” seemed ideal for conveying the idea that Leiber’s portrayal of women was a conceit that was never meant to be taken as a literal description. Leiber wasn’t writing about women as they were; he was writing about his own unconscious portrayal of them.

I admit that I was mildly disappointed when the book came out. I had added about twelve thousand words to the thesis, and, to keep the cost down, the publisher had set it in cramped pages. Even worse, the cover was a collage of images only vaguely associated with Leiber’s work, and featured a portrait of the subject with a jaw that looked as though it belonged on a stoic New England farmer, or maybe H. P. Lovecraft.

Of course, the important thing was to be published, I told myself. All the same, I took care not to let any of my academic colleagues actually see the cover of my main claim to fame.

And I worked that claim heavily, too. It was mainly on the strength of my book credit that I was allowed to teach at Simon Fraser University, despite my lack of a doctorate. The book also gave me a degree of recognition among fantasy scholars, particularly when it was nominated in both years of eligibility for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award.

I didn’t mind, either, the modest amounts of cash I got in the first few years of sales. It was never much, but enough to pay for dining out a few times.

Buoyed by these small successes, I started doing a sequel. Originally, I hoped to publish the letters of Fritz Leiber and his college friend Harry Otto Fischer, in which the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series began. But Leiber no longer had his letters, and Fischer’s letters, if they existed at all, were in the library of Clarksburg, West Virginia, and out of range of my travel budget. I had more success with Leiber’s letters to Franklin MacKnight, another college friend, and published some of those letters in the New York Review of Science Fiction.

I also used them for a debunking article entitled “Fafhrd and Fritz,” which was intended as a sequel to Leiber’s “Fafhrd and Me,” which gives a heavily romanticized account of the origin of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series. My article debunked Leiber’s, and pointed out MacKnight’s role in the series’ creation.

For a while, I considered a collection of stories by other writers in honor of Fritz Leiber. But then my life changed. Leiber died, and so did the story collection somehow. The English department had a new chair, who saw sessional appointments as a way to exchange favors with other universities, and suddenly my regular employment was in question. I considered a doctoral thesis, but didn’t want to spend the time and had trouble coming up with a topic. Unwilling to move for personal reasons, I became what I call a “recovering academic” and started working as a technical writer. Shortly, after, I suffered the greatest crash and burn of my life. By the time I started climbing out of that bleak period, academic concerns seemed far away. My research photocopies lingered on a shelf by the window of our spare room, gradually bleaching into near-illegibility in the sun.

For several years, I thought that Witches and the academic era of my life were things of the past. Then, a few years ago, I heard from Benjamin Szumskyj, a library technician and fantasy scholar from Australia with a love of Leiber’s work. He had some extravagantly kind things to say about Witches, and did an interview with me for a fanzine. He went on to edit a collection of Leiber’s early and small press work and a collection of essays on Leiber, cajoling me and shaming me with his enthusiasm until I actually managed to write my first academic paper in over ten years, “The Allure of the Eccentric.” Ben has far surpassed my own efforts, but, in my conceit, I like to think that I may have been a minor influence for him.

Since then, I have been thinking of dusting off the Leiber-MacKnight letter project. Some improvements in OCR scanning in GNU/Linux makes that more of a possibility than a few years ago.

And every now and then, I run across copies of Witches on the bookshelf, dust them off, and dip into a page or two. I feel as though it were written by someone else now, except that I remember writing the odd phrase or two. Yet the book holds up well, considering its years, and I still can’t resist a wistful pride in having written it.

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Freelance writers need subject expertise

Posted in Bruce Byfield, careers, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing on August 10, 2007| 2 Comments »

So far as I can determine, complaints about the rates for freelance writers first began in the 18th Century, when Daniel DeFoe invented the profession. Today, the complaints have some justification, considering that, in many markets, payments haven’t changed for a couple of decade. And when Writer’s Digest publishes a list, as it did a few years ago, about the best places to be published online and the rates for the top two sites are below $30 per article, you know that the list is aimed at hobbyists rather than professionals. All the same, as a freelancer who does make a respectable living from writing, I can’t help thinking that the complainers are approaching the problem the wrong way. To me, they always sound as though they expect to make a living because of their writing skills when what they really need is subject matter expertise.

The complainers remind me of the technical writers who insist that what they offer is writing expertise, not technical knowledge.These technical writers produce mediocre documentation, and, after a year or so, have trouble finding employment. Then these same purists complain that their profession never gets respect – even though the minority of technical writers who do learn their subjects have no trouble finding employment and command ever-increasing salaries.

In freelance writing, the purists are usually those with a literary bend, but the attitude is much the same. They feel that their language skills make them an elite, and they condescend to those who are experts and can make a living from their writing. To them, the experts are hacks, literary prostitutes who have sullied the purity of the written word.

Haven’t the purists heard the old dictum that you should write what you know? And, if they have, why should they imagine it doesn’t apply to them? Or to non-fiction as much as fiction?

As a former university English instructor who taught more than his share of composition classes, I am satisfied that most people can be taught to write a publishable piece of writing. Not a classic, you understand, but something comprehensible that an editor would consider publishing. Beyond a very basic level of literacy, what a freelancer offers an editor is an interesting topic, one that’s either entirely new or – more often – one that offers a different slant on an old topic. Editors appreciate fine writing, but they consider it a welcome extra, rather than a requirement, the way that originality is.

And to provide that basic requirement, you have to know what you’re writing about. Otherwise, the ideas won’t come. You’ll have no idea that what seems fresh to you is a cliche (For instance, hardly a week goes by when Linux.com doesn’t receive a query from someone wanting to write about how they converted from Windows to GNU/Linux). You won’t know what to focus on to develop a new idea, or the powers of observation to know what you might develop into a new idea. Just as importantly, you won’t have the contacts to develop enough new ideas to make your living by writing.

Nor will you learn the biggest secrets of all: Not only that editors will pay money for expertise in a way that they won’t for fine writing by itself, but specializing makes it much easier to be productive.

Take my example. Partly by idealism and partly by accident, I have become a computer journalist specializing in GNU/Linux and free and open source software. When I first starting selling articles as a sideline, I considered myself lucky to manage three articles a month. The writing itself only took a few hours, but gathering the information and finding sources to quote was time-consuming. I couldn’t imagine doing 12 articles a month, as Robin Miller, the senior editor at Linux.com, suggested.

Now, two years later, I average 16 articles a month for Linux.com and other online sites. What’s more, I get enough information that I could easily write three times as many, if only I had the time. Not only do I know my subject and where to find more information quickly, but people I’ve consulted before often let me know when they have a newsworthy item. Some even give me the scoop.

By contrast, consider the freelancer whom Russell Smith mentioned yesterday in his column in The Globe and Mail. It was hardly worth her time, she said, to do an article for $3000. She would have to do about twenty interviews, she said, and research would require intermittent effort over a couple of months.

No story is going to quote twenty people – that would be too confusing for the readers, and any competent editor would send such a story back for a rewrite. Five or six is more that most stories can handle. I can only assume that the freelancer was talking about writing an article on a subject for which she had expertise.

And a couple of months? Allowing for difficulties in contacting people, a couple of weeks is about the maximum a story should take – and, even then, you’d be normally doing several other stories at the same time. Moreover, between email and IRC, you shouldn’t normally need more than a few days if you’re actively assembling a story.

Yet if you’re relying on your writing skills rather than your expertise, the sort of effort and time-line described by this freelancer is probably unavoidable. You start from behind, so everything is harder and takes longer.

Some people might say that, by becoming a specialist, you narrow your subject range. Yet even that isn’t necessarily true. For instance, I started by writing articles on OpenOffice.org, the free office suite. For a while, I was worried enough about being type-cast that I went through a period during which I avoided the subject, but I soon found myself branching off into other related topics, such as other desktop programs. Before long, I had enough articles on a variety of topics that I had the credibility to write about almost anything.

Free software, recycling, the music industry – it doesn’t matter what your area of expertise is. But if you’re going to be a freelance writer, you need to find one. And if the literati call you a hack, just ask yourself which you’d prefer: Striking a pose and lamenting how you are misunderstood and underpaid? Or having the power to earn a living and be your own boss while doing something that interests you?

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The life of a freelancer

Posted in Bruce Byfield, editing, journalism, Personal, work, writing on July 29, 2007| 1 Comment »

So you think you want the life of a freelance writer? Maybe after you hear about my monthly ups and downs, you’ll think again.

Currently, I am under obligation to provide 16 articles – about 22,000 words – each month about GNU/Linux and free software. I may also do a number of other paying articles on other subject, depending on what other contracts I have going at any given moment. Unless I am working on a breaking story, most of this work doesn’t have to be submitted at a more particular time than by the end of the month.

I start each month by sending out invoices. Invoices are the part of my work that I enjoy the least, but are also the whole point of my efforts, so I grumble and force myself to send them out. Then, overcome by the effort and aware that a whole month stretches ahead of me, I am likely to take a few days to slack off. I may do a little research for possible stories, but, more likely, I run the errands that have been piling up for the last couple of weeks, and work on other projects.

By the end of the first week of the month, I start to get nervous and produce a few articles. Come the second week, I am producing steadily, but anxiety is riding me like a nightmare as I count the remaining number of articles I have to finish by the end of the month.

In the third week, the anxiety leaves me hag-ridden. “You’re not going to make it!” a mocking little voice seemingly just above my head starts saying over and over. At night, I have dreams of inadequacy and lie awake staring up at the dark as the little voice continues its chorus. “You’re not going to make it!”

In the day, motionless and cramped in front of the computer. I start scanning the Internet for possible story leads – any leads – and making the rounds of my contacts. I start writing furiously, sometimes even managing to submit two stories in one day.

It’s not, you might say, the ideal time to confront me with the unexpected, or ask me a favor. At this point in a month, I truly emerge as a geek — and by that I don’t mean a computer programmer, but a grubby refugee from a circus capable of biting chickens’ heads off for a living.

At times, too, in the middle of the month, I wonder if being a circus geek wouldn’t be a less stressful way to make a living. At least the job would get me out of the house and meeting people face-to-face.

By the fourth week, I can see the end in sight, but I hardly dare to hope that I will make my quotas. In fact, I’m a great believer in flop sweat, and have a half-superstitious belief that if I think I can make it, I won’t. But I plug away steadily, seriously over-dosed on writing, and then, miracle of miracles, it happens: I finish, usually with a day or two to spare. Sometimes, I even manage to finish ahead of times in months that have 30 days, or even in the cruelty that is February, with its punishing three days short of a normal month’s length. And, a day or two aside, I rarely have to pull any especially long hours to reach quota.

Part of me is chagrined by this work flow. In school and university, I always had assignments done well ahead of deadline. Common sense tells me that I should dust of those old habits, and write to a schedule, four stories each week, banged out in regular order.

Yet somehow it doesn’t seem to work that way. After my rollercoastering month, I usually need to rest for a few days at the start of a new month, and so the whole sorry cycle gets perpetuated. Maybe the stark, raving terror of deadlines is a great motivator, but it sure doesn’t make for peace of mind.

And you want to know the really sorry part of this schedule? The fact is, I set it myself. I don’t pretend that I am indispensable to any of the editors for whom I write regularly. I’m told that I write well and on-time, and generally need minimal correction – virtues that all editors appreciate – but, should I suddenly disappear or miss quota one month (and sooner or later, I’m bound to), my editors would survive the catastrophe far better than I would the shame of it.

You see, the trouble with being a freelancer – or a consulting editor, if you want to pretty up my position – is that you’re your own boss. And if you have the personality to be a freelancer, you also have the personality to be the most demanding and obnoxious boss for whom you’ve ever had to work.

So pity the poor freelancers. Not only are we under the worst bosses imaginable, but the only escape is back to the nine-to-five jobs we escaped. And nothing, not even our abusive management, is worth such a desperate move.

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Walking the seamy side of high-tech

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, careers, employers, hightech, officework, Personal, technical writing, writing on July 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »

As a communications and marketing consultant, I worked with over forty companies in eight years. They ranged from multi-nationals like IBM and Intel to startups and single-person operations, and from the reputable (if bureaucratic) to the fly-by-night. Three times, I was stiffed – – fortunately, for small amounts. Often, I was frustrated by lack of challenge or mismanagement that I was sure I could put right if I were in charge (and once or twice, I might have been right). But only once have I quit a job after three days of work, and that position remains, indisputably, the worst job I have ever taken.

Even my first job as a busboy, which I quit after the manager accused me of spilling water on a customer when I had been in the kitchen all shift can’t compare. As for the summer between university semesters that I spent drilling holes in wooden rods, I may never have learned what either holes or rods were for, but that was only for three months, and enduring acute boredom isn’t too bad when you earn union wages.

I took my all-time worst job in the weeks after I left Stormix Technologies, where I had my first experience as management (and awful I was, but that’s another story). I had quit in the sudden realization that the company could fold any time (and six months later it did), and repented my rashness at leisure. When a woman I knew from a consulting agency I sometimes worked through told me that she was now doing human resources at a company, I jumped at the opportunity to start at her new company. Never mind that it was a return to technical-writing after playing at management; it was a job.

The company was involved in online gaming, my acquaintance told me, leading me to believe that it was developing a world for role playing. Never mind that gaming seemed frivolous after working with free software; I told myself to be realistic and take the opportunity that was offered.

The first morning, I learned that my acquaintance had misrepresented the company to me. It was not involved role playing, but in developing casino games. In fact, the company had been the recent victim of a police raid for its activities, and had just changed its name. Otherwise, I would have recognized the name, because, in those days, I kept close track on all the high-tech companies in my area. I was dismayed, but I knew enough about the police to know that a raid didn’t necessarily mean any wrongdoing, so I fought down my misgivings.

The second day, I noticed a door that opened into a room larger than any I had seen in the office. It had well over a dozen desks — not workstations. If all those desks were occupied, it represented over a third of the company, yet no one was there.

“That used to be for our lawyers,” the guy at the next workstation told me when I asked about the room. “But they all moved to the Caymans after the raid.”

My dismay deepened. A company with almost as many lawyers as coders could only be a patent shark or one with serious legal difficulties, especially since they were all in the Caymans now. In fact, the company’s head office had relocated to the Caymans, where online gambling is legal in a way that it isn’t in the United States and Canada.

My resolve to be realistic slipped another notch or two.

I went home and spent a fitful night trying to bat my conscience down. Did I want to be part of such a company? I resolved to wait a week before making a decision. But, from the way I dragged myself from the SkyTrain and lingered in the nearest Starbucks on the third day, I knew that I was half-out the door already.

The final blow descended when my manager gave me a tour of the rest of the office.. It was on several levels of an old building in Gastown, and I had only seen one level of it so far.

The tour ended in the kitchen. “If you see the light on next door,” the manager said, pointing to a small red-tinged bulb above the door frame, “Keep quiet. They’re filming.”

“Filming?”

“It’s what used to be our adult movie division. They’re a separate company now, but we still share the kitchen space.”

As he spoke, I noticed some long bathrobes draped over the chairs around the table.

Back at my desk. I tried to focus on my work, but I couldn’t. I was never much for gambling or adult movies (which, more often than not, are actually adolescent), but I’m not a prude, either. I’d always taken a more or less feminist of pornography as exploitation, but did I have a right to judge people who were shooting -rated movies of their own free will? In the past, I had met all sorts of people that wouldn’t exactly fit in to the average suburb, so why was I so depressed by the situation I found myself in?

I thought of a photo that had circulated in the local newspapers when the company had been raided, showing the company’s employees standing around on the sidewalk. I could be one of them, I realized.

Stopping all pretense of work, I decided that part of the problem was that, while I might tolerate the company’s business past and present, I didn’t want to be active in it. But an even larger source of my discomfort was the conviction that I had been duped. If the company misrepresented itself to attract employees, what else might it do in the name of business? I thought I had enough evidence to make a reliable guess.

Anyway, the only thing worse than being manipulated would be an attempt to deny the fact. My situation was too depressing for words.

At 11:30, I marched into the manager’s office and told him that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and had been too optimistic to think that I could work regular hours. He was sympathetic, and even told me to come back if I got better, but there was not much chance of that.

A month later, I received a check for the days I had worked. I referred to the cheque as “my avails of vice,” and briefly considered not cashing it. By then, I had started at my highest-paid and most interesting job to date, and I didn’t need the money. But, in the end, I told myself that I had earned it, and rationalized that I deserved some compensation for what I had been through.

I still don’t know whether that line of thought was a copout. But I was glad to be out of that job before it made a gap in my resume that I would have to explain. And, in the end, I benefited from my decision to quit, because it raised me in the estimation of my in-laws. Yet, brief as the experience was, I’ll never forget the mixture of anger and chagrin with which I descended into the seamy side of high-tech.

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Learning to love the Harry hype

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, HarryPotter, Personal, science fiction, Uncategorized, writing on July 21, 2007| 1 Comment »

Yesterday, I went to the Chapters store at Granville and Broadway in the early evening. When I got there, the staff were preparing for the midnight launch of the new Harry Potter book. Watching them, I soon found myself changing my mind about all the Harry-hype.

Having read fantasy ever since I discovered it in the sixth grade I’ve always been cool to the popularity of the Harry Potter series. I’ve read all the books, but I’ve only been moderately impressed. J. K. Rowling shows flashes of invention and whimsy, but her books are far from the best children’s fantasy for those in the know. Personally, I’d rate dozens of children’s writers above Rowling – Joan Aiken, Lloyd Alexander, J. R. R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, Ursula K. LeGuin, Garth Nix, and Philip Pullman, just for starters. Her voice is too uncertain, her characters too stereotyped, and her books too much in need of editing (especially after they became popular) for her to equal writers like the ones I’ve mentioned. Her main innovation is to blend fantasy with the school story to create a sub-genre that is simultaneously new and familiar.

I’d put the series in the middle of the pack: neither outstandingly bad nor – for all the hype – outstandingly original or any sort of literary gem, not even one in the rough.

But if I haven’t been enthusiastic about the books, the promotion has thrilled me even less. For one thing, it seems unnecessary. Why bother to hype a book that you know is going to sell several million copies? Spend the money on some worthy midlist writer, and the publisher could have two bestsellers rather than the one.

More importantly, I had dismissed the midnight book launches and parties as simply another attempt by people to inject a little excitement and meaning into their lives. The attempt seems healthier to me than following a sports team, or seeing terrorists under the bed, but, in the end, the launchings of Rowling’s books have always struck me as being much the same sort of group event, carefully manipulated to allow people an emotional release – a modern update of bread and circuses, really.

But that was before I saw the preparations for the event. The store had put a castle and dragon painted on brown paper around the entrance, and most of the staff was dressed for the occasion. Some were in black, witchy costumes. One woman managed a severity that made her a perfect Severus Snapes – or would have, except that she kept grinning. A man was wearing a top hat and tails with a long blue and white scarf that seemed to owe as much to Doctor Who as Harry Potter. Another woman was wearing wings and a straw hat and layers of loose brown cloth, apparently meant to be a house elf or at least some supernatural being. Still another woman had a brightly colored snake pained on her face that ran from her right cheek across her temple and down to her left temple.

These people and more were rushing around setting up tables and putting out stacks of Rowling’s previous books and the Harry Potter action figures. Given the wages of the average book store clerk, you might have expected them to be complaining about the extra work and the longer hours.

Yet that’s not what they were doing. Instead, they were laughing and chatting animatedly as they worked, pausing to show their costumes off to each other.

That’s when I had a Scrooge-like conversion. If all the promotional events could give so much pleasure to those organizing them (let alone the children for whom all the effort was for), they couldn’t be all bad.

Yes, the object of this attention seemed unfairly singled out from among her betters, and the promotions seem needless, and the motives behind them cynical. Yet, all too obviously, they were a welcome break in routine, and a chance those involved usually didn’t have to exercise their creativity. From the unpromising origins of the launch, they had managed to make something approaching a holiday.

That’s why, for all my misgivings, I don’t really have the heart to criticize. Anything that brings such gifts to people can’t be all bad. So, while I’m not buying a Christmas goose and hurrying off to Bob Cratchit’s house loaded with gifts for the family, I am looking at all the activity with a far more benevolent eye than a couple of days ago.

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Learning to listen

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, interviewing, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing on July 13, 2007| Leave a Comment »

At school and university, I always dove headfirst into class discussions, excited by ideas and eager to express my own. I was probably a selfish beast, not overly interested in other’s people’s contributions unless they sparked new ideas in me. Although I eventually learned to be less egocentric and more restrained, I’m sure I carried the same tendency into adulthood.

That’s why, when I was interviewed last week about OpenOffice.org’s Calc spreadsheet by CFO Magazine, I was surprised when I had to struggle to give ideas and to say something interesting. The 8AM call had something to do with it, but only a little. Abruptly, I realized that being a journalist and interviewing people myself had actually taught me to listen.

For nearly three years, I’ve done anywhere from three to fifteen interviews per month — mostly on the phone, but occasionally face-to-face as well. By definition, an interview is not about the interviewer — it’s about the person being interviewed. And if I don’t draw the person out, then I am in the annoying position of having to craft an article with too little information. So, I suppose I’m been highly motivated to learn.

It helps, too, that I realized early on not to come into an interview with my own agenda. In one of the first interviews I conducted, I planned to debunk the common opinion about the subject and asked several questions while playing devil’s advocate. The approach made the subject so suspicious of my motivations that he tried to insist on having control over what I wrote — a demand that made the interview unpublishable, since it would have compromised my independence.

From that, I learned that it’s better to ask open-ended questions rather than ones slanted too strongly in one direction. Instead of getting too specific, I let the discussion wend its own way, asking more specific questions mostly for clarification, and changing topic only to assure that all the points I wanted to raise get covered.

The advantage of this tactic is not only that I have to prepare less for most interviews, but that I also consistently get information and slants that I would have missed if I had tried to control the interview more closely, because my subjects are more forthcoming. Even the very reticent, I’ve found, become more forthcoming when allowed to dominate the discussion.

This approach leaves me in the position of a tugboat to an incoming ship, guiding the discussion, but mostly leaving each subject to continue under their own power. About from a few navigational nudges, most of what I have to do is to utter the occasional comment to show that I’m paying attention or, if talking in person, to make sure that I lean forward facing the interview and focusing my eyes on them and keep my eyes on the interviewee to reassure them that I’m listening.

At times, too, I summarize or rephrase what I think the person has said, asking, “Could I say … ” or “Would it be fair to say that …” This tactic has the dual advantage of checking that I have understood and reassuring the interview that I’ve grasped the point.

Of course, often I do have to mention perspectives that the interviewee doesn’t share, so that I can get their reactions. But, instead of treating the interview as a discussion, the way I might have done a few years before, I raise the perspective as a hypothetical one, or observe that “some people say.”

I don’t have to mention the fact that I would be among those who would say what I’m about to mention. As enjoyable as a debate might be, an interview isn’t about me.

I round off these tactics by concluding by asking whether there is anything I’ve left out or that the subject would like to emphasize. Some interviews use these questions as a launching pad for pontifications, but, just as often, I get another two or three nuggets of fact that were previously half-concealed. Often, I get pithy quotes that I can use to attract reader’s interest in the introduction, or that can round-off my article’s conclusion.

When I come to transcribe an interview, another advantage of focusing on listening emerges. Having followed what the subject has said, I know how to punctuate what someone says in order to echo the way that they sound. In this way, the quotes in my articles give readers some sense of what the subject sounds like, although no doubt the experience is overlaid with a heavy veneer of my intonations.

The result of this approach is that, while I’ve often had errors of fact in the finished article pointed out by an interview subject, and people haven’t always approved of the opinions in an article in which they are quoted, I almost never have anyone complain that I misrepresented them. I work hard at being more than a conduit for other people’s ideas but I figure that, if I get what’s said wrong, then the conclusions I draw will be wrong as well.

In fact, now that I think, I realize that I could never do my job — or, at least, not do it as well — if I hadn’t learned a thing or two about listening. If I sometimes miss dominating the discussion, I figure that I was overdue for growing up anyway.

Besides, there are other times that I can be a more active participant. And, when I am, my enjoyment is greater because I’ve learned to pay closer attention to what other people are saying.

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Illusory Allusions

Posted in allusions, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, literary techniques, science fiction, Tolkien, writing on July 4, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I first caught a glimpse of the power of allusions when I read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in Grade Six. As much as I loved the characters and was swept along by Tolkien’s sense of timing, what really struck me was all the passing references to thousands of miles of geography and thousands of miles of history. I didn’t know, then, that Tolkien had built up this material over decades. What mattered to me was the illusion of added depth created by the allusions. You didn’t need to know all the details — in fact, as subsequent Tolkien publications of the back story showed, you were usually better off if you didn’t, because what seemed magically suggestive in passing became unavoidably disappointing in detail. But, even at that age, I recognized an effective literary technique when I saw one.

Later, I saw it in a number of other books, including The Worm Ourboros by E. R. Eddison, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (when unsolved cases are mentioned), and in the Dark Border series by my late friend Paul Edwin Zimmer. So it’s not a new device, even if you won’t find it taught along the memorized definitions of metaphor and metonymy that they teach in high school.

Part of the reason, I suppose, is that, despite the enduring popularity of writers like Tolkien or Conan Doyle, it’s a device used most often in fantasy, which literary critics still distrust because of the whiff of popular culture that rise from them. Moreover, it requires a deft hand, and is harder to observe objectively than something as straightforward as a simile.

Basicallly, however, the art of creating depth through allusions lies in striking the exact balance between suggestiveness and mystery. The allusion has to be comprehensible enough that readers can get some dim understanding of it, but no more.

That lack of detail may seem lazy, yet it’s essential. Because the allusion is incomplete, readers have to fill in the gap themselves with guesswork. By doing so, they are drawn into the story-telling, and become participants in the development of the background.

The idea is the same, I suppose, as Stephen King’s observation that a horror writer has to use the appearance of the monster sparingly. The monster may be scary, King says, but its actual appearance will never match what the reader imagined. The writer may show a ten foot monster, but what the reader imagined was a sixty foot monster, and the reality will disappoint.

In the same way, an allusion explained is an allusion lost. When Tolkien mentions Lúthien and Beren, you know that it’s an unhappy love story and somehow applies to Aragorn. The tale in the appendices or in The Simarillion may be interesting in its own right, but it’s not nearly as poignant as the tale you imagine when you first read the allusion.

In the same way, has anyone ever read one of the pastiches that explains the giant rat of Sumatra that is half as interesting as the passing mention of the unwritten story that Dr. Watson makes in passing?

The technique is used mainly in fantasy, but it can be used more conventionally, too. For example, in Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal, the title character explains that he is late for an event because he was attending the birthday party of a friend’s young daughter. As Zelazny himself observes, the line of explanation is technically unnecessary. All the same, he kept it in because it suggests that the character has a life beyond what is being told in the page, and that he’s the kind of person who, for all his toughness, would do such a thing. At the cost of maybe fifteen words, Zelazny gets an illusion of depth that enriches his effort. That illusion makes the allusion worth having, always.

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Using an objective in your resume

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, editing, grammar, Personal, resumes, Uncategorized, writing on June 16, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Of all the possible contents of a resume, the objective statement is by far the most controversial. Many consider it a waste of time, a piece of puffery that is as empty as a mission statement. Personally, I am in favor of using one, but only if it is written and regarded in the right way.

The major objection to using an objective is that it is too vague to carry much meaning. If you are referring to the sort of objective that most people write, I would have to agree. A single phrase like “a programming position” is wasted space on your resume, especially since you can put the same information in a title after your name.

Nor are hirers going to be impressed by “to be CEO,” a statement that I’ve seen at least a dozen times. This is the kind of objective that is passed around the office for its unintentional humor. It’s especially ineffective at a small company or startup where the person reading your resume is the CEO. Just what everyone wants to see — someone with ambitions to replace them.

The trouble with the kind of objective statements that you usually see are that they say nothing meaningful. However, if you view an objective statement as a kind of teaser, an executive summary that encourages those reading your resume to read more, then you can start to write a more effective objective.

And how do you encourage readers to continue looking at your resume, instead of scanning it and then tossing it among the discards? Simple: use the objective to summarize what you can do for the company. With any luck, the hirer will then read the rest of your resume more carefully.

Let’s take an example from one of my resumes. It has three parts: A statement of the general category of position for which I am looking for work, a description of the three main traits that I have to offer, and, finally, a description of how I can use those traits to the benefit of the company to which I’m applying.

The first part is simple: “A marketing and communication position.” I make it the first five or six words, so that readers know immediately what work I’m applying for.

The second part involves more thought. Before writing it, I made a list of two dozen job skills I could offer in marketing and communications, describing them in a phrase and polishing the phrases until they were as concise and precise as possible. Then, I chose the ones that I wanted to emphasize for this particular position: “defining and developing corporate strategy; building communication links; and marketing products.” These are general traits — if I had more specific information about the position, then I would try to use more specific ones.

The third part is crafted in much the same way as the second. I built a list of different ways that I could help a company, then chose the most appropriate ones based on what I knew about the company. Again, I didn’t know very much, so I kept the list general: “to enable a company to define and realize its objectives and production schedules and to create relations with business partners.”

The final version reads: “A marketing and communications position that involves defining and developing corporate strategy; building communication links; and marketing products to enable a company to define and realize its objectives and production schedules and to create relations with business partners.”

This objective isn’t perfect. It’s more general than I would prefer, but you don’t always have the information to do better. However, it does tell hirers what I am looking for. In a few lines, I’ve made clear that I am not looking for an entry level position, but a reasonably senior position (since I talk about shaping corporate strategy first and also mention defining objectives). It also suggests that I might be interested in product management, and that I have experience working with other companies. If I’ve done my research properly in looking for places to apply, with any luck I will have attracted a readers’ interest and he or she will be looking at my resume a little more carefully than the rest in the pile.

Also, since I use semi-colons correctly, I am signalling that I have a high degree of literacy. The implication, if anyone notices, is that I can be counted on to represent the company in a polished and professional manner.

Boiling down your career goals to a few lines isn’t easy. Realistically, you can expect to spend at least several hours coming up with an exact summary of your skills — and don’t be surprised if you spend even longer. But considering that the point is to interest readers enough to notice the details of your skills, then you’ll find that time well spent.

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What makes a writer a professional

Posted in Bruce Byfield, editing, English, fiction, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing on June 8, 2007| 6 Comments »

I’ve thought of myself as an aspiring writer for so long that I took several years to realize that I had become a professional. The regular checks from Linux Journal and SourceForge should have tipped me off earlier, but somehow my situation seemed more a fantasy than a reality. My change of status only sunk in when I tried to describe what was happening to an acquaintance from school, and – more importantly – when a couple of people emailed me recently asking how they could break in to professional journalism.

The first time, I didn’t know what to say, but, the second time, I started to codify the differences between a professional and an amateur writer, based on my own experiences and observations:

Professionals don’t wait for inspiration before working
Often, of course, profesionals can’t wait for inspiration because they have deadlines. But, even more fundamentally, professionals have learned that word done when you’re inspired is not necessarily better than work done when you’re not in the mood. What’s far more important is to keep in practice by writing regularly.

Professionals don’t obsess over grammar
Naturally, professional writer care about clarity and precision. But grammar is only one of the means to those ends. I’ve yet to meet a practicing writer who doesn’t cheerfully break any rule in the textbook if they can write more effectively by doing so.

Professionals submit work in readable form
Remember the story of great writers who submit work full of spelling and presentation errors and written on the back of napkins and paper bags? Some of them are true – but very few. And even in those cases that are true, the writers are often handicapping themselves by creating a reputation as difficult.

For anyone else, ignoring the advantages of a clean presentation that follows the publishers’ style guides is career suicide. The less work that editors need to do in order to make your work ready for publication, the more likely they are to accept it – assuming, of course, that it is at least minimally competent. It takes very unique content to make an editor accept the extra work required to correct poor presentation.

Anyway, you don’t want mistakes to distract from what you say. Think of the editors to whom you submit work as people with Adult Attention Deffict Disorder. Anything you can do to ensure that they’re not distracted from your content is only going to help you.

Professionals meet deadlines
At Linux.com, the editors regularly accept story pitches from amateurs. Yet a surprising number – maybe as many as two-thirds – never return with the finished story. For editors who constantly need content, writers who do what they promise when they promise are rare assets. In fact, writers who finish what they start are so valuable that editors may prefer them to people who write better stories but are more erratic.

Professionals accept editing (mostly)
Edit amateurs, and you are likely to get protests. They’ve usually worked long and hard to produce their writing, so they’ve become fiercely attached to the results. Professionals don’t like editing any better than amateurs, but they’ve learned to accept it. They know that publications may have style guides that differ from their personal preferences, and that writing may have to be edited to fit a given space. They’ve learned, too, that a trustworthy editor can make them look better, or at least keep them from making mistakes in public. Professonals may complain if an editior changes the sense of what they’re saying – but then they will try to respond calmly. Those who do otherwise rarely last in the ranks of professionals.

Professionals take the work seriously, not themselves
For amateurs, writing is tangled up with their sense of who they like to be. Accepted professionals, by contrast, don’t have anything to prove. They know that their work is going to be uneven, and that they’re going to make mistakes sometimes. Having done the best they could under the circumstances, they know enough to let the work go. They still find praise gratifying or abuse deflating, but they realize that their work is not them.

Professionals write
At some point or other, anyone who has hung around amateur writers has been cornered by someone willing to talk at great length about their plans for some great work. My own worst experience was a house guest who kept wanting me to read her fan fiction when the kindest comment I could muster was, “Oh. Typed, I see.”

By contrast, few professionals will give more than a sentence or two about their current work. Some are afraid that talking will replace writing – and, considering the example of amateurs, they might be right. However, the basic reason that professionals don’t talk about works in progress is that they are too busy planning or working. Writers, by definition, save their efforts for writing.

You may notice that I only talk about work habits and say nothing about the differences between how amateurs and professional use language. The reason for this omission is not that I’m a crass commercialist, but that there is little to say.

Many amateurs show that they have a love of language and some skill in using it, yet they never become professionals. Conversely, I know several professionals who have no more than basic competence in the way they use language. So, I conclude that talent alone does not distinguish the professional from the amateur.

Instead, the difference is your willlingness to work and your attitude towards the way things are done. Amateurs are unwilling or unable to adjust, so their love of language remains a part-time interest. Professionals work and adjust, and are rewarded by being able to do what they love for a living. In the end, the difference comes down to attitude rather than talent.

That suggestion is both good new and bad news to amateurs. On the one hand, it suggests that you don’t need to be special — or not very — to become professional. On the other hand, it does sugges that you need discipline and flexibility — and those may be even rarer than talent.

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The grammar neurosis

Posted in Bruce Byfield, editing, English, grammar, Uncategorized, writing on June 6, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Today, I received an email praising my recent article about the Kamloops School District’s conversion to free software, but taking me to task for alleged grammatical errors. On the Linux.com IRC channel, suggestions about how to respond ranged from “Bite me!” to “I don’t see your name on my cheque, so why should I care?” (the response I eventually chose when I got a second email from the same person) I was more amused than peeved by the brief exchange, but as I rode the exercise bike this afternoon, I started thinking about the grammar neurosis that grips the English-speaking world.

When someone becomes obsessed with grammar, they are worrying more about rules than about effective use of language. Of all the dozens of writers I’ve known, none worried about grammar beyond the basics necessary for clarity. If clarity was best served by an ungrammatical phrase, none of them hesitated to use it.

By contrast, I can think of only two English writers who could be described as grammarians: John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, neither of whom are considered major writers today. Yet Dryden frequently took Shakespeare to task for his poor grammar. So, whatever the concern with grammar is about, it isn’t about writing well — despite what generations of school children have been told.

Of course, learning rules is easier than learning how to write. Since we don’t even have the technical vocabulary for discussing writing properly, teaching someone to write even competently is usually difficult and slow. But rules are as clearly defined as writing is not. That makes them easy to learn, and even easier to test.

People tend to obsess about grammar for the same reason that a person I know once learned all about jazz: not because they have much appreciation for the subject, but because they want an expertise in an obscure subject so that they can assert their superiority over the rest of the world. In today’s case, this sense of superiority led my correspondent to contact a complete stranger and correct them on points that were debatable at best. Even if she had been correct, that’s as rude as accosting someone on the street with your fashion advice. Anything that causes such impoliteness, I insist, is dubious for that reason alone.

In Canada, another reason for becoming a grammarian is the idea that spelling like “honour” and “centre” are somehow expressions of national pride. To me, that seems a very shaky base for any sense of cultural identity. Besides, if Shakespeare could spell his name several different ways, why should other writers care about the spelling conventions that editors use in their published work? You might as well worry about the paper or the computer monitor that your work will appear on.

However, more than anything else, the self-appointed guardians of grammar fail to understand what their subject represents. Any language is constantly evolving, so how can it have any firm set of rules? The most you can do is what linguists do, which is to provide a snapshot of how a language is used in a particular place and time. And, although that is what grammarians are doing, most of them are unaware of the fact. What they present as eternal truths are, for the most part, the rules of language as they were used by the educated elite a few decades ago. The elite has the power to make this snapshot the official version of the language, but, for all their efforts, they are unable to do more than slow the natural evolution of language. They are trying to do the impossible, and they don’t realize it.

That is not to say that grammarians do no harm. In fact, if, like me, you had ever watched the agony of first year university students as they try to put their thoughts down on paper, you would soon realize that they do a good deal of harm. Not only do the grammarians in our schools emphasize a relatively minor aspect of writing, but, in the process, they instill such a fear of making a mistake that most students are almost paralyzed when asked to express themselves.

As a result, the average graduate of our school system struggles with even the simplest bits of communication, and loses a potential sense of aesthetic pleasure. Far from educating people, the grammarians convince most of us that education is something that we can never have, and that we are hopelessly ignorant.

Then, just to make sure that we never recover, they leave us completely misdirected and focused on a meaningless goal, so that we can only stumble free of the limitations with which they have blinkered us with patience or luck.

In fact, so early and deeply is the grammar neurosis embedded in our minds that the average person, faced with what I have said here will instantly leap to the defence of grammar. They will mishear, insisting that these observations mean that I am calling for the abolition of all rules. Unable to conceive that any alternative could exist, let alone what that alternative might be, most will simple retreat into their neurosis.

Yet the alternative is very simple. Just as Nelson once said, “No officer can go very far wrong who lays his ship alongside an enemy,” no would-be writers can go very far wrong if they forget about grammar when they sit down and focus on saying what they mean. It’s as simple — and as complicated — as that. And the real tragedy is that, in the reign of the grammar police, most of us forget it.

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