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Archive for the ‘writing’ Category

I am not a-mused

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comedy, humor, Personal, poetry, Romantics, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I never did care much for Wordsworth. But the rest of the Romantic poets – Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Coleridge, in that order – taught me the rudiments of poetic technique when I was a teenager. What’s more, I learned well enough to have a dozen or so published poems to my credit without trying too hard. But one aspect of Romanticism that I never managed to accept was having a muse.

That wasn’t through lack of trying. Having a muse is potentially convenient when you’re an adolescent boy and not sure how to approach girls. You can play out your infatuations in your attempts at poetry, and not risk actually talking with the object of your affection. Better yet, if – as happened to me – you are grief-stricken at the focus of your infatuation moving away, you can dramatize events until you feel better. I think of this as the Dante gambit, after the Italian writer of The Divine Comedy, who found a muse in a woman he had met only once, and was never around to casually disillusion him, as a real person might.

That was the trouble, really, with the whole idea of a muse. The closer you actually were to a girl or a woman, the less likely she was to act like a muse. She wouldn’t hang around inspiring you by looking soulful or sighing with bliss as you recited the poems you dedicated to her; she had school or a job and would insist on straying from your side on her own business.

I suppose the difficulty of reconciling the projection of a muse on to a woman’s life is part of what is behind Robert Graves’ White Goddess, and his attempt to cast the poet-muse relation in a myth — a myth that inevitably ends in the muse’s betrayal of the poet’s loyalty and aspirations, only to start again with the next woman he elevated in his mind. Graves was dramatizing the fact that any woman would eventually tire of being his inspiration, and find some other lover who wasn’t playing so many games.

It seemed to me a form of selfishness – especially when I learned from Graves’ biography that while he was enjoying the masochism of living his myth with a succession of muses, he also had a wife who raised their children and oversaw his household.

I thought much the same about Shelley, playing guitar with Jane Williams while Mary Shelley was nearing a nervous collapse, mourning the death of their child, and trying to run a villa in a foreign country without enough money. Having a muse sounded suspiciously like an excuse for flirting.

After a while, another point started to nag me. If poetry was the result of a literary-minded man’s (mostly) chaste infatuation for a woman, what was the explanation for Sylvia Plath? This was a matter of real concern for me as Plath became one of the first moderns from whom I learned.

Robert Graves did have a throwaway line about women’s poetry drawing on different sources than men’s. But he never explained what those sources were, being uninterested in anything outside his own personal mythology.

Obviously, though, women didn’t have muses in the way that men like Graves did. A new lover might inspire poetry – a lot of it in the early stages of a relationship – but no published woman that I could find seemed to view any man in her life as mystical or even temporarily mythological.

It was all very puzzling, especially since the idea of running off to some modern Missolongi  and dying prematurely had limited appeal. I was tolerably certain that dying of consumption wasn’t on the agenda, either.

Gradually, I came to realize that the idea of a muse was only possible in a culture where men knew few women, and had to fill in the blanks in their knowledge with their imaginations. It was a form of projection, really, not much different from pornography – just prettier. Neither was reconcilable with the real relationships I was starting to have.

Later, my readings in feminism would give me the concept of objectification, and encourage me to condemn the whole idea of a muse as something fundamentally unfair. But, even before then, I had abandoned muses as a concept that was not so much false as mentally exhausting. Trying to believe in muses, I found, only made me affected and self-conscious.

On the whole, fiction writers got along without muses. So, a few years after I discovered poetry, I decided that I could too, no matter what genre or style I wrote.

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Hunting for work space

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, office space, Personal, Uncategorized, work, working, writing, tagged , , , , , , on October 2, 2012| 1 Comment »

The last time I worked in an office, I couldn’t wait to work from home. I had lost what little tolerance I ever had for endless meetings, and HR managers dragging everyone from their keyboards to play morale-building games of charades. Yet no sooner had I started working from home that I started looking for other places where I could sometimes work. The search continues, eight years later.

The trouble with working from home, especially when you live alone, is that you can easily spend days with no human contact. Yet finding the right work space elsewhere is difficult, too, since I would prefer to walk or cycle, and, although I want people around me, I don’t want so much noise that work becomes impossible.

Less than twenty meters from my door is a gazebo surrounded by flowers. Unfortunately, it’s in a courtyard where children are playing at most times of the day. Their parents are usually in the courtyard, too, idly chatting, and while I’m glad enough to talk to them when we meet at other times, I have been unable to convince them that when I’m carrying my laptop I prefer not to talk.

The same problem exists with the pool in my townhouse complex. I’d love to sit by the water on a deck chair, and dive in to do a few lengths while I’m working out how to word something, but, when I try, neighbors persist in asking what I’m doing.

Less than a kilometer away, there’s a rec center. It has an open area full of tables, which is often used by ESL tutors to meet their students. Unfortunately, it’s right beside the gym, where troops of adults and children are constantly passing. Also, every now and again, the staff decides to discourage people using the tables, so I can never be sure that the tables are available.

Not much further on are coffee shops. Unfortunately, one is too quiet to bother with. Another is wedged into a corner of the supermarket. A third has glass down one side, and by early afternoon feels as comfortable as a greenhouse, even on cloudy days.

Besides, I feel like a dilettante working at a coffee shop – and more of a bit of a freeloader, even if I buy something every couple of hours.

The best solution I’ve found is to sit in the shade under a tree in the local park, where I can hear the nearby stream and watch people pass on the sidewalk. However, when I do that, I usually drowse, leaving my work half-done.

Usually, the off-chance that I might get work done in any of these locations seems to small to gamble on. Instead, I stay by my work station, half-convinced that I am missing something somewhere, being productive, but convinced that by staying I’m one day closer to a curmudgeonly and lonely old age. Yet even that seems a brighter prospect than returning to an office job.

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7 Specific Skills of English Majors

Posted in Bruce Byfield, English majors, Personal, rhetoric, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on September 8, 2012| Leave a Comment »

At university, I declared an English major for no other reason except that I needed to specialize for my last two years. Three-quarters of my way through my bachelor’s degree, I panicked, and took a couple of extra semesters to get a double major with Communications. However, looking back, I realize that my time in English was better-spent than I thought at the time. Basically, I learned the skills to prepare, structure, and present an argument – skills that were not only invaluable for me as a journalist, but also for the time I spent in management at IT companies

Or, to break down the skills more exactly, thanks to my English courses, I can now answer all the questions in the following categories:

Preparing an argument: How do you take notes as you research? How do you scan sources accurately? How do you evaluate sources? How many sources do you need? When should sources qualify your original ideas? When do you know that you have done enough research to begin structuring your argument? Why should you acknowledge them in your argument, and how?

Deciding the appeal of your argument: When should you appeal to logic, emotion, or ethics? When can you mix them? When do any of them threaten to become invalid? When is there a sub-text, detectable but not fully adressed in your argument?

Structuring an argument: What do you need to explain before beginning your argument? When do you need declaimers? How many points can you develop fully in the space available? How should the points be arranged? What alternative tactics might also work?

Recognizing invalid arguments: When is the evidence too general to support the conclusion? When are points being left out? Is an issue really a matter of one thing or the other, with no other alternatives? What’s wrong with a personal attack? Does one point follow from the other? Did something that happened first cause things that happened later? What are the limits of an analogy being used? When is an argument depending on popular prejudice or belief? Is an authority being cited to shutdown discussion, rather than as an acknowledgment of sources? Is an argument being associated with desirable qualities, outcomes, or events that have no real connection with it?

Considering other opinions: Why is your argument strengthened by considering other viewpoints and interpretations? How do you show respect for an argument while arguing against it? How do you consider other opinions without weakening yours? When should you grant limited validity to another argument? How do you avoid being so fair that you end up being neutral and saying nothing? Where in your argument should you consider other arguments? How do you present them?

Summarizing and quoting accurately: Why should you summarize or quote accurately? What constitutes “accuracy”? How to you fit a quote into your own sentence, making allowance for differences in person, tense, and subject-verb agreement?

Understanding your audience: Why should a change in audience affect your argument? How does the audience affect your argument? How do you access what is suitable to a particular audience?

If an English major has made a formal study of rhetoric, they could also give you the appropriate jargon as they answer these questions. However, even if they haven’t, they should have enough practical experience to be able to answer most of these questions (as well as any similar ones that I may have left out), and make a reasonable guess about the others. They should also have little trouble applying these questions to any argument that is presented to them.

In particular, they will know that most of these questions are not a matter of memorizing a set of facts, but of of knowing the possibilities and knowing which ones might be useful in a specific context. All these are useful skills in any situation in which you need to communicate with others, or to persuade them – in other words, in just about any circumstances that you can name.

The next time someone tells you that an English major is a waste of time, ask them to answer these questions. If they can’t, you are completely justified in telling them that they have no idea what English majors learn — in fact that, in the most literal sense, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

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Scene transitions in fiction

Posted in Bruce Byfield, fiction, Personal, transitions, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on September 1, 2012| 3 Comments »

For years, I’ve maintained that the secret of writing well is understanding structure. Most people can learn to write a pithy statement or paragraph if they are willing to put in the effort, but developing a sense of how ideas fit together is much more difficult. Nor is learning helped by the fact that we have little analysis of structure and consequently can only talk about it with considerable difficulty.

Take scene transition in fiction, I’ve always added. We can sometimes use analogies from movie making, but, being different media, both fiction and film have transitions that the other lacks.

Finally, after years of waiting for someone else to analyze scene transitions, I thought it was time to approach the task myself, studying several dozen of my favorite novelists and short story writers for examples:

1. Continued Narrative: In the most common transition, the story simply continues. The main artistic choice is how much time elapses between scenes: A few minutes, so that what is saved is only a few sentences of narration about something mundane, such as walking from a house to the car? Or a much longer period of hours, days, or years?

2. Flashback: The second scene happens earlier than the first. Sometimes, the first scene introduces the second. Usually, the flashback scene is shorter than the first, because readers are apt to see a flashback as a digression from the main character.

3. Infodump: Giving background information can slow a story down. One way to minimize the slow-down is to take advantage of the boost in interest created by a new start and begin the second scene with a few paragraphs of infodump before returning to the action.

4. Collage: A variation of the infodump first developed in John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy. Short pieces of information, such as newspaper headlines or quotes from imaginary books are placed between scenes. The information informs either the previous scene or the next one, possibly both. Seemingly random, the pieces of the collage need to be carefully chosen and arranged to be effective.

5. Establishing shot: A variety of infodump in which the setting is described before anything else, even the characters. Victorian novelists made heavy use of establishing shots, but modern audiences have less patience with them, especially if they are longer than a few paragraphs.

6. Starting in the Middle (in media res): The second scene starts in the middle of the action, and what is happening is only gradually revealed This transition is handy for restoring readers’ interest – with any luck, they’ll wand to continue reading to know what’s going on.

7. Change of viewpoint: The transition also marks a change in viewpoint character.

8. Parallelism: One scene ends with a thought or image that is mirror, sometimes distorted, in the next scene. For example, one scene might end with knife chopping down at a character, and the next with another character using a knife to chop carrots.

9. Dramatic irony: What one character thinks or states in the first scene is found in the second to be incomplete, inaccurate, or wrong. This transition might be considered a variation on parallelism.

10. Comparison / Contrast: The opposite of parallelism. The second scene is markedly different or similar in setting, time of day, tone, or action. For instance, the first scene may be set at night with a lone character, while the second features multiple characters in the sunlight.

11. Cause and effect: The second scene happens because of the first. For example, because Hamlet doesn’t kill his uncle in Act 3, Scene 3, he is harsher to his mother in Act 3, Scene 4, which follows immediately afterward.

In addition, there are at least two transitions which connect a variety of shots:

12. Tracking shots: A series of scenes in which a character moves through a variety of settings or completes a task. For instance, the start of Fiddler on the Roof shows the milkman on his daily rounds, while he sings about his culture and the inhabitants of the village are introduced.

13. Panorama: A series of scenes in which each on gives a different perspective on the same event. Usually, the event is something complex, like a battle or a disaster. However, it can also be used with more subtlety. For instance, Paul Edwin Zimmer’s The Lost Prince begins with characters within a few miles of each other looking out on various parts of the same city. As the scenes progress, the sun sinks lower in the sky and finally sets.

Almost certainly, there are more possible transitions, although the majority fall into one of the categories given here. In fact, the first three listed probably account for the structure of the majority of short stories and fiction. At other times, two or even three transitions can be used at the same time.
Transitions are worth thinking about because they are one of the important aspects in story-telling.

Often, writers use the same types of transitions over and over. American fantasist Avram Davidson, whose later stories were usually intricately crafted, started nearly two-thirds of his scenes with an infodump, while science fiction writer John Brunner would use the collage to suggest the fast pace of the information age. Similarly, Shakespeare, whose plays continue to influence English-language fiction, was fond of contrasts, particularly in the first acts in which characters are being introduced. As these examples show, transitions can form a major part of any writer’s style.

That alone makes them worth a closer look. If we can identify the different types of transitions, we can talk about them with greater ease, and learn more about how to put a story together. If nothing else, on a practical level, when we are unsure how a story should continue, we can scan the possibilities and maybe see the way through – or, at least, some possibilities with which to experiment.

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Receiving compliments

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comedy, humor, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , on August 23, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I never have learned how to accept compliments gracefully. With insults, I know where I”m at; self-defense kicks in and I turn icily cold and dryly cutting. But one enthusiastic word, even from a lover, and a blush warms my cheeks and I start to stammer.

Part of my difficulty is that compliments are rarely delivered at the time of whatever they are praising. Meanwhile, I’ve moved on to some other project. I’m no longer engaged by whatever is being complimented, so much so that it could almost have been done by someone else.

That is especially true when someone compliments a piece of my writing. The facts that I crammed into my short-term memory and the arguments to structure them are no longer there, having been nudged aside by the facts and arguments for the next piece that I’m doing. I imagine that writers on tour to promote a book they finished a year ago must feel the same way.

Another part of my difficulty is that I am convinced that compliments are not healthy for me. I know that those delivering the compliment are being enthusiastic or polite, but part of me regards their kind words as the equivalent of a plate of cinnamon buns that’s being pushed under my nose – however enticing, the compliments seem unhealthy, like far too much of a good thing.

But the main reason I squirm is because of a bit of my own hypocrisy. From all my childhood heroes from King Arthur to Robin Hood, I’ve learned that modesty about my own accomplishments is a virtue (an attitude that makes my years as a marketing consultant more than a little inexplicable).

Yet, at the same time, I can’t help hoping that someone is noticing those accomplishments. Receiving a compliment forces me to confront this contradiction – and, since I am even poorer at lying to myself than I am at receiving a compliment, the whole experience leaves me in confusion.

While part of me thinks that I shouldn’t enjoy the compliment, another part of me is secretly wallowing in delight. Since the two impulses are completely irreconcilable, what I really want to do is make my escape as quickly as possible.

Tell me that learning to accept compliments is part of being an adult, and I would agree with you. But in practice, I’ve never achieved complacency. The best I can manage is a “Thank you” that would rival the Duke of Wellington for curtness, followed by a quick change of subject.

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My answers to 10 common negative comments about my writing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, negative comments, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on August 22, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Generally, I limit the time I spend responding to negative comments about the articles I write. For one thing, by the time an article is published – even on the web – I’m already thinking about the next piece I want to write.

For another, such discussions tend to be endless. There’s usually little common ground in our basic assumptions and motivations, so if I leaped into the discussions the way I’m sometimes tempted to, I wouldn’t meet my next deadlines. Generally, if I respond at all, I limit myself to two emails, then leave the discussion. Personal attacks may sometimes sting, but I don’t feel any overpowering need to verbally pummel anyone else to the ground.

Besides, over the years, I’ve heard the same comments so many times that they bore me. However, if I were to respond to the most common negative comments that I receive, here’s what I would say:

1. “You’re wrong!”: Disagreeing with you is not automatically wrong or evil. If you see a factual error, by all means mention it, especially if it is part of a logical chain of thought that falls apart without it. But general issues, with multiple aspects and causes are a matter of interpretation, and you don’t disprove a viewpoint simply by condemning it.

2. “This is garbage!”: In all humility, probably not. While editors have schedules to meet, they are rarely going to publish anything that is not competently written and argued. Most of the times, calling something worthless only shows that you don’t understand the distinction between your opinion and intrinsic standards of argument and writing.

3. “You’re a troll!”: A troll is not just somebody who expresses an opinion with which you disagree. Unlike a typical troll, a journalist is not anonymous. A journalist may respond to readers’ comments, but they have no particular interest in controversy, because the time they spend responding is time they could be writing something for which they can be paid. Moreover, unlike a troll, if a journalist wants to continue working, their statements need to have some tenuous connection to fact.

4. “You’re just saying that to get page views”: Sorry, you’re confusing me with an editor. Past page views may determine whether an editor will accept a story on a particular topic. Otherwise, though, what a journalist wants is a story that interests them long enough to write it.

5. “That’s an opinion!”: Opinion pieces have a long tradition in journalism. Often, they are called columns or blogs. Generally, opinion pieces have a lower standard of evidence because they are talking about more abstract things than a news story, such as trends or impressions.

6. “I’ll complain to the editor!”: Unless you can prove that a piece is libelous – that is, false and deliberately meant to harm – don’t bother. The expression of an opinion with which you disagree is not libelous. Anyway, if an editor continues to publish articles expressing an opinion you dislike, chances are that for everyone who objects to the opinion, there’s one or two people expressing approval of it.

7. “That story makes them money”: Actually, in modern journalism, content is almost completely divorced from profit. Ads, not content, is what makes money in modern journalism. In theory, you could threaten to boycott an advertiser, but in practice you would need a lot of agreement to persuade a company to pull its ads from a particular site or magazine.

8. “I’m going to write an article to get the truth out”: Good luck with that. Besides strong writing skills, you need to understand the ethics of what you are doing, and show a willingness to work with editors by being on time and accepting corrections and suggestions. You also have to find an editor who needs more contributors and can afford to pay them. I’m not saying that you won’t succeed, but I will say that if writing were as easy as many people imagine, far more people would be doing it for a living. In the free software field, for example, no more than a dozen people manage the trick.

9. “You’ve got a vendetta!”: Some journalists occasionally do, but most couldn’t be bothered. For the most part, their interest lies in reporting what people are thinking, or what they should know. They may pursue a story if they perceive untrustworthiness or a lack of response, but, believe it or not, most journalists see themselves as pursuing the truth. Getting personal doesn’t fit with their self-image or their busy schedules.

10. “You”re lying!”: Get serious. Do you honestly believe that someone who publishes several articles a week could get away with outright lies? They would be unemployed in a matter of days. The statements you object to may be inaccurate, or, more likely, based on a different interpretation of events from yours, that’s all.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I’ve heard that Richard Stallman has a number of Emac macros available at a keystroke so that he can make a standard argument without having to type it out again. I suppose this blog entry is a rough equivalent. So, in future, if anyone gets a message from me with this URL followed by a #5 or #9 or whatever, they’ll know that I’ve heard what they’re saying before.

But, then again, I’ll probably be too busy to do even that much. I’ve heard rumors that, beyond the keyboard there’s something called life, and I’d rather explore that spend my days satisfying people who only want an argument.

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Committing Sonnets

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, poetry, sonnets, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on July 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I have written and sometimes published more than my share of free verse. However, whenever I am tired of my professional writing, in which deadlines can be as important as quality, I like to retreat into the restrictions of the sonnet. Its rigid structure makes lingering over the exact word a necessity rather than a luxury, and positively encourages small experiments with words. These days, I don’t write much poetry, but, when I do, the result is almost always a sonnet.

Sonnets betray their origins in Italian with their intricate rhyme schemes. In English, which is far more rhyme-impoverished than Italian, the rhyming alone makes sonnets a challenge.

But the strict rules are not just in the rhymes, nor even the iambic pentameter. By tradition, the sonnet is about a serious subject – usually, but not always love (another sign of their origin, since sonnets played a role in the late Courtly Love tradition). The development of a sonnet is also fixed: the first four lines introduce the subject, the next four lines develop it, and, somewhere in the last six lines, the subject is commented on or given a new perspective. In many forms of the sonnet, the comment begins in or near the ninth line, although in the Shakespearean form, it may not appear until the last two lines, when the discussion is hastily brought to an end, often with a declaration of some sort.

To say the least, this structure can be challenging. You might say that the sonnet is like a bonsai tree, twisted into shapes that it would never have naturally because of the confines of its container. The result can be grotesque, but also surprisingly beautiful, provided that the poet takes the time to learn how to work with the form, rather than against it.

One reason I’m so fond of the sonnet is that the first poem for which I received money was a Spencerian sonnet, heavily influenced by Shelley. It was called “Zephyr,” which is pretty much a warning of the excesses to come. It begins:

With weary steps I plodded across the world,
And watched the moon illume, with waxen wiles,
The far-flung reaches of the golden isles.

Which is sufficiently embarrassing that I can’t bear myself to give the rest. The most I can say is that it shows some understanding of poetic technique, which it slaps about like runny plaster on the wall.

Slightly less embarrassing (so far as a love poem can be unembarrassing) are some of the infatuation-based sonnets I have written over the years, either because of a momentary feeling or in the early stages of a relationship. At times, I have written them as an exercise, with nobody in particular in mind.

For instance, in “Love and the Uncanny,” I equate the early stages of love with a sense of eerieness, shamelessly stealing Shakespeare’s habit of using the same parallel structure over and over again and hastily trying to end things with a killer-couplet – a structure that I’ve always thought close to cheating:

You trouble me with hints of the uncanny —
Like depths of silence where somebody waits,
Like houses flexing every beam and cranny,
Perturbing me with omens and strange fates.
I sense you now, just at the edge of eyes,
Like scurryings through leaves beneath my feet,
Like hunts that bay above me in the skies,
Like lightning just before it unrolls in a sheet.
Like wolves’ wild wailing, drawing down the moon,
Like presences that walk behind the trees —
Around midnight half-seen, half-guessed by noon,
You trail the hush and grace of mysteries.
And all that thrills with awe, awaking fear,
Must pale and fade when ghosts of you appear.

In “The Trackless Land,” I combine the old metaphor of the wasteland with an effort at a modern tone, deliberately breaking up the lines to see what I can get away with:

All maps agree: This is a trackless land
That lacks you. Here, the needle swings in riot,
Each GPS runs antic. Nothing’s scanned,
And, looking round, the horizons disquiet.
Old cartographers doodled monsters here;
I conjure from my footfalls strange pursuits,
Here lurk the hulked regrets and stalking fears,
And I am lost and long strayed from the route.
Departure was definitive, I know.
You stay away, from cowardice or choices,
I come across your camps, sometimes,
And breezes people sleep with dooms and voices.
So why, when doubting binds me like a rope,
Am I perverse, and persevere with hope?

I like to think this is the first Shakespearean sonnet to mention geo-tracking – a tawdry piece of immortality, but my own.

As for “Almost,” I think I had been over-dosing on John Donne, considering the tortured structure of the sentences:

We teeter on the edge of almost, spooked
By love’s allure and possibility,
Both hesitant and forward, self-rebuked,
Our diffidence our disability.
This is the tragedy of old regret,
I brood on you and on my ancient traumas,
And you are taut, long taught by fret,
And so like ghosts, we act our separate dramas.
Still drawn together, by decency kept dumb,
We meet in wit, then warily retreat;
A smile, and we advance to what might come
And then – guess what? Repeat, repeat, repeat.
So we dissemble, learn the art of lies,
Endangering our friendship’s lesser prize.

Other times, I’ve declared my own small rebellions against the sonnet’s traditions, as in “Academic,” which not only isn’t about love, but uses a vampire theme – decidely lowbrow material by the standards of sonnets. I wrote in grad school, punning all the way, while taking a course I thought especially reductionistic:

Come, splay the word and stake it to the page.
No need to fear; we have indulgent priests.
Remember in our light its strength is least –
Seesaw the knife through meat and cartilage.
Who cares how it might cadge, or plead its age?
All of us here have catered to its feasts –
Strike, I say, and when the damned thing is deceased,
Lower it to lie, our blood its hemorrhage.
We will not cross ourselves, nor keep a wake;
Dead’s dead, and needs no eulogy again.
Our undertaking over, in this vein,
This time there’s no inevitable mistake:
No innocent admits the thing again;
There’s nothing, nothing tapping at the pane.

I attempted much the same but with a more editorial tone in “The Kingly Ones,” a comment about how official versions of events are used by those in positions of authority and influence:

The kingly ones who send assassins out
Can order innuendo or abuse
As calmly as from a catalogue, or accuse
Anonymous by cell, and never doubt.
A curbing’s committed; they’re not about,
Kneecapping’s done while they sip morning juice.
No animosity is their excuse,
Everything’s convenience and clout.
Just cross them once, and you’re left with a label,
– The law is theirs, you see, to cut and paste –
Complain, and you’re perverted and unstable,
Persist, and you’ll be lonely and disgraced.
To their bland lusts, we’ve lost our innocence,
Our rapes revised for their expedience.

Looking at these sonnets, I’d say that their main problem is that they don’t quite escape their influences. Even after years, I have no trouble picking out which poets influenced which of these sonnets. In particular, several have a mock-Shakespeare tone, especially in the final couplet.

But, then, none of these were written for official publication. They were written for myself, as opportunities to luxuriate in language for a change. And, in that sense, they have served a useful purpose.

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Writing opinion pieces

Posted in Bruce Byfield, commentaries, editorials, journalism, opinion pieces, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , on July 7, 2012| Leave a Comment »

To my bemusement, I realized recently that over a third of the articles I do in a month are opinion pieces. Back in 2004, when I first started full-time journalism, I wouldn’t have believed that was possible. I believed then that I had no talent for editorials, and the thought of doing one intimidated me so much that I barely knew how to begin.

My background as an academic and a technical writer had a lot to do with that belief. Ask me to summarize or quote accurately in an news story or interview, and I could draw on my experience writing academic papers. Ask me to write an accurate how-to, and I could depend on my experience writing manuals and tutorials. Even a review didn’t seem impossible, because, while it gave an opinion and was shaped by an opinion, the opinion was based on clear facts.

But a commentary on free software-related events? That left me much more exposed. I had only been involved in the community for a few years, and I was all too aware that dozens of people –maybe hundreds or thousands – had more experience than me. So why would anyone be interested in my opinion? I’d be shredded as soon as I opened my mouth.

Besides, years in a university English department had conditioned me to avoid giving a firm opinion whenever possible. I had got used to softening my opinions with words like “almost” or “seems” to lessen the possibility of an attack.

Fortunately, writing at Linux.com and hanging out on its IRC channel every day, I had some strong role models. The late Joe Barr was the master of the attack piece – of angry diatribes full of sarcasm and humor, the kind that is read less for insight than for entertainment, like a review of a play by Dorothy Parker (“And then, believe it or not, things get worse. So I shot myself.”). By contrast, Robin “roblimo” Miller, the senior editor could write editorials just as forceful, but milder in tone and more thoughtful.

These models were important to me, because, when I came to write my first opinion pieces, I had some idea of what I could manage. While I admired Joe Barr’s expression of anger, I knew there was no way that I could match it for more than a sentence or two. I would have to assume a persona that was mostly foreign to me, and would feel foreign – maybe dishonest – to me.

By contrast, my academic background made the thoughtful editorial seem a more attainable goal. While writing academic papers, I had discovered I had a knack for getting to the core of a matter and stripping away irrelevancies. I knew how to anticipate opposing views, and disarm them by answering them before anyone else could make them. I knew that, even if I didn’t always respect opposing views, reporting them fairly made me appear to do, and that the effort improved my own argument. I might still shoot off the occasional one-liner caked in sarcasm, but, most of the time, I had a better chance of managing a thoughtful tone rather than an outraged and witty one.

What I didn’t anticipate was how my style would add to my voice. My model for style was George Orwell, with clarity and simplicity my main goals. In particular, I got into the habit of ruthlessly deleting all the qualifiers that academia had taught me to use to soften my opinions. Add a tone that is partly a reflection of my own speech-therapy influenced conversation and partly the influence of Orwell’s very English tone, and the result is that I come across as more forceful than I initially realized.

This combination of habits and tone meant that, as I ventured into writing opinion pieces, I had a more distinctive result than I realized at first. Not everyone liked it, of course: to this day, I still have critics who claim that my ability to look at all sides of a discussion mean that I will write anything, even for shock value (not true; although I do sometimes write to explore the possibility of an idea). Others find my tone patronizing (usually when they disagree with me). At times, too, I have been called disloyal to free software, or worse.

I can see where these views originate, so I don’t feel much need to argue against them, except to say that they have as much to do with readers’ expectations as anything I actually do.

At any rate, over the years, I have grown much more accustomed to hostile responses than I was when I started writing opinion pieces. If people disagree with me (or with what they think I am saying), they are at least reading me, which means that editors will pay for my opinions.

As for myself, I’m content to express an opinion that I either hold or am considering. So long as I can do one of these two things as thoroughly as possible, writing an opinion piece has long ago lost its terror to me. I sometimes need half a draft to know just what my opinion on a subject happens to be, but opinion pieces have long since settled into being a familiar part of my repertoire.

At times, I can even imagine that I have a talent for them. When Carla Schroder tweeted, “Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flame wars,” I couldn’t have been more satisfied. That is exactly what an opinion piece should be and do, and someone, at least, was saying that I was succeeding in doing exactly what I was trying to do.

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Writing a list story

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, list stories, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on April 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

List stories are one of the most heavily criticized forms of journalism. According to detractors, list stories show a lack of thought, and are simply a lazy way to produce an article. However, I believe that, with a little planning, list stories can be as legitimate a form as any other. They simply have different considerations from most types of journalism.

Not that the criticisms aren’t justified. The structure and logic of list stories are different from the typical story. Instead of offering an obvious path of development of the central idea, list stories are constantly starting over again.

It’s also perfectly true that list stories often feel easier to write than an in-depth story that builds on a single point. Instead, list stories rarely have room to go beyond the general. As a writer, you just start to get into the discussion when it’s time to move on to the next item in the list. Rightly or wrongly, this can feel much less demanding than sticking to one topic throughout the article.

Still, I like list stories – maybe because one of my strengths or weaknesses as a writer is that I’m always tempted to make lists. Instead of squeezing the lists into conventional paragraphs, sometimes it just seems easier to give in and acknowledge the point by putting list items into a bullet list or using sub-headings.

If nothing else, a story divided by bullet lists or sub-headings looks more approachable online. Its blocks of text look smaller because they are divided. There are fewer formidably long paragraphs, and readers have more natural places to pause and return to the article later. Particularly on-line, you have more chance of being read if you organize your thoughts in a list than a conventional story.

Besides, list stories are a good place to use random thoughts and observations that are too short to make stories in themselves. All you have to do is generate some related points to go along with them – which is easier than it sounds, because often one point suggests another.

Developing the story

The trick of writing a successful list story is the same as with any article. You need to find what William Goldman calls “the spine of the story:” The central, unifying idea that justifies talking about all the points in the same story. Without the spine, a list story is just as bad as critics contend that it always is. With the spine, a list story can be as meaningful as any other piece. State the central idea in the introduction, and you’re well on the way.

Then there’s the question of the points themselves. For the article to work, all the points in the story need to be as strong as possible. Since you don’t have much space for each point, any that are vague or obviously padding are going to stand out.

At the same time, for some reason — call it the unspoken numerology of popular culture – some numbers of list items seem to be more widely read than others, such as 7, 9, 11, or 12. Any fewer than seven items looks more like a teaser than a story, while some numbers, such as 6 or 8, simply look wrong somehow.

But, in reaching one of the magical numbers, you need to be careful to avoid padding. Instead, you need to think more deeply, or perhaps see if any of the existing list items is complex enough to be divided into more than one section. If so, as a bonus you have at least two items than can follow one another, the second maybe referring back to the first and thereby increasing the unity of the entire article.

Pay attention, too, to the order of the list items. I always think in terms of what I call “relay order,” based on the order of runners in a team race in track and field. Typically in a four-runner relay race, coaches would have the second fastest runner begin, followed by the third and the fourth and ending with the first. By approximating this order, you start off strongly and end strongest of all. The middle might sag a little, so you want to mix the stronger points with the weakest so that there isn’t a downward descent in interest.

By the time readers reach the end, the original statement of the unifying theme may have grown vague with the details, especially with a longer article. For this reason, a list item needs to end like any other story, with a re-emphasis of what you want readers to take away. Nor does it hurt to explain why what readers have just read is interesting or worthwhile.

 More than a list

Done thoughtfully, a list item is more than a collection of random thoughts. It may look simple and unassuming, but, behind the scenes, a conscientious writer needs to have a good idea of what the points add up to, and be ready to experiment with the order of items as they write. Often, you’re only know the most effective order after you write.

But that’s another part of what makes list items so suitable for online articles. Text editors and word processors are all about rearranging blocks of text – and, with list stories, you’ll have plenty of opportunities and needs for rearranging before you’re done.

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Literal-mindedness

Posted in connotation, denotation, writing, tagged , , , , , , on March 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

In a joke that circulated on the Internet some years ago, a man in a hot air balloon is lost. He asks a person on the ground for help, and is told he is fifty feet off the ground, and at such and such a longitude and latitude. “You must be an engineer,” he replies. “Everything you told me is technically true, but besides the point.”

The joke goes on to compare the balloonist to management, since he doesn’t know where he’s going but now he blames the person on the ground. Both comments strike me as all too true, but, since I spend my working life with developers without being one myself, I appreciate the first one the most.

Not that all developers are so literal-minded, or even most. If anything, many free software and open source developers are not only fiercely intelligent, but formidably well-rounded, their brains roaming all over the contents of Wikipedia. If, like me, your idea of a good time is a wide ranging discussion over a couple of drinks, you couldn’t ask for better company. Personally, I am happy to call such programmers friends and friendly acquaintances.

Occasionally, though, you come across one who is so literal-minded that talking to them is not only frustrating, but also an exercise in keeping your temper. Some are lacking entirely in perspective, and will fix on a point that is minor or irrelevant.

Often, they fix entirely on denotation (the meaning you find in a dictionary), ignoring entirely all connotation (meanings and implications that come to be associated culturally with a word or concept).

Recently, for example, I came across a person who became fixated on the meaning of “innovation.” Although the topic was at best secondary to the discussion, they insisted that “to innovate” was not necessarily synonymous with “to improve,” and, although no one was arguing, quoted a dictionary definition as proof. They were right, and had we been living a few centuries ago, they would have been even more correct, because, before the Industrial Revolution, “innovator” was very nearly synonymous with “meddler” or “trouble-maker.”

However, had they looked at a thesaurus, they would have found that the word has always meant both “to change” and “to improve.” Had they looked at the Oxford English Dictionary, they would also have found that “to improve” has been the dominant meaning for decades.

For that matter, they could have looked to the context of the discussion, which left no doubt how “innovate” was being used. But they were so literal-minded that they were utterly unable to judge the relevance, let alone the correctness of their point.

Similarly, another developer recently suggested that free speech was really a reference to the American First Amendment, and that free speech was only concerned with government censorship. The argument is ethnocentric, free speech having been an issue long before the existence of the United States, but, like the reply to the balloonist, is only technically correct.

Because of legal rights like those granted by the American constitution, “free speech” has been expanded culturally into what might be more accurately called “free discussion.” From a completely literal perspective, there is no reason why free speech should be used to argue equal time for opposing views on television and radio. However, in modern industrial culture, making sure that all voices are heard has become an important value, so the concept of free speech has been extended beyond basic human rights. You are not going to silence those who throw about accusations of censorship by insisting as the developer does that the concept applies only to actions by the government. In our modern sensibilities, it applies to anyone.

What these two examples have in common is that they assume that connotations are not part of meaning. Probably, the people making this mistake had no idea of what they were doing, but the result was that they invalidated what they had to say because their arguments were incomplete.

I have no idea why such people believe that they can argue without taking connotation. I can only guess. Maybe because sticking to denotation is simpler and more definite? Or are they unable to perceive connotation, and not willfully ignoring it, as I sometimes conclude in my frustration with their limited viewpoints? I have no idea, but either way, their viewpoint seems both unusually cramped and often beside the point. Probably, they are endlessly frustrated because so few others are will to concede what to them seems a straightforward point.

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