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The popular abuse of creativity

Posted in Bruce Byfield, creativity, inspiration, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , on December 5, 2010| 1 Comment »

One of my minor irritants is the way that the word “creativity” is used in our culture. Too often, it is applied too freely, while other times it is used in a way that suggests that the speaker has little sense of what creativity is about.

These mis-uses matter to me, because creativity is central to my life and self-image. In fact, I might summarize my life so far as a series of movies closer and closer to the point where I could focus on creativity – specifically, writing – and make a living from it. I have an idealistic view of creativity, considering it one of the highest values to which humans can aspire, and the expression of all that is best in us.

Taking the subject so seriously, I feel the slightest pinch of annoyance when it is used too loosely. These days, “creativity” is used in all kinds of places where it shouldn’t be – not just of a craft (which is sometimes just an art with a low social status), but of marketing, business strategy, or simply lifestyles. Frequently, “creative” almost becomes a synonym for “skillful” or “interesting.”

I can accept this usage as an analogy. Like a Venn diagram, all these things overlap to a certain degree with creativity; for example, they all involve skill, hard work, and ingenuity. But, for the most part, to describe such things as creative seems to exalt them more than they deserve, just as comparing an executive to a Japanese samurai or Antarctic explorer does. The connection is a bit of a stretch and should not be taken literally.

What creativity has that these other things lack is sincerity – an aspiration to achieve the highest results regardless of effort or sacrifice. Instead, the motivation of such things is more mundane – utilitarianism, selling products, getting a promotion, or closing a deal, perhaps. The purity of intent I associate with creativity is either totally absent from them or secondary. A marketing campaign may be apt or clever, but if you insist that it literally creative, then I can’t help thinking that we need another word for what a musician or a writer does.

I have the same sort of annoyance when I hear people talk about waiting for inspiration to strike – or, as I recently heard, someone talking about the time of day when they are most creative.

To a large extent, I can see scheduling your work for a time when you are least likely to be interrupted (although as I write that, I can’t help reflecting that if many writers, especially women with family or social demands, like Jane Austen or Sylvia Plath, had waited for the perfect moment, they never would have finished anything). And I appreciate the rare gift that arrives fully formed in my mind that needs only minor touchups to the first draft to complete it.

But, in my experience, the correlation between when you feel most creative and when you do your best work is practically non-existent. At times, a passage that feels like a gift from the gods becomes, in the cold light of revision sloppy, incomplete, or worthy only of deletion. Even more frequently, the passages that work best in my work originate, not in an instant of inspiration, but in reworking upon reworking. Most of the time, creativity seems to reside not in some magic attunement with the sources of inspiration, but in the ability to take pains to get something right. Yet I doubt that most people — even many artists — can be persuaded of the fact.

I suppose that both these misunderstandings about creativity reflect the high value that we place upon it. In modern industrial culture, creativity is widely seen as the highest form of accomplishment (consider how we remember artists but rarely business executives, and the importance of musicians and actors in popular culture). Everyone wants to be seen as creative, and many of us seem to want the maverick image that artists have had in our culture for the last two centuries. But, as these examples also prove, most of us have no real idea of what creativity might actually be.

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The myth of writer’s block

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , on November 26, 2010| 1 Comment »

Writer’s block is a problem that writers discuss a lot. Wannabes discuss it even more, possibly because the problem is more dramatic than sitting down and writing. Personally, though, I tend not to use the term, because it suggests an obstacle, and I consider writer’s block a signal from my unconscious to which I should pay attention.

Not, you understand, that I have more than a passing familiarity these days with the condition. For one thing, I find that writer’s block always disappears when I have a deadline – when I am under pressure to produce, I don’t have time for doubts and blockages, so I just ignore them and push onwards. Contrary to what you might expect, the result is not much worse or better than when I feel inspired. By contrast, I was much more prone to writer’s block when I was an amateur, and didn’t write for food and shelter.

For another, I don’t consider uncertainty anything more than a temporary problem. If I have no topic, then scanning the Internet and brainstorming produces two or three within a couple of hours – often more. If I have trouble writing a particular passage, I have enough sense of structure – either from my scribbled notes or my experience in developing a topic – that I write another part of a piece and return to the problem area later, when I have a better sense of what I’m trying to express. There is almost always a factual, non-controversial part that is easy to write, and I don’t have to start with beginning, which half the time only emerges after the rest of a piece is written.

Occasionally, though, I find myself at a complete loss about how to proceed. I lose not only the words, but – more importantly – the idea or the argument, and find myself typing the same words over and over again. Sometimes, I re-type several previous paragraphs, hoping that the I will rediscover the continuity. I grab a snack or do a small household chore, or go exercise, and, when I return, I am still no closer to knowing what I should write.

Not long ago, this state would leave me frustrated. As often as not, I would quit work in despair, and feel the world unfair and rigged against me.

Then I was hit by one of my periodic flashes of the obvious: The writer’s block was not an obstacle that kept me from writing. That was a misinterpretation (and one I believe that most people make). Instead, it was the first sign of a recognition deep in my mind that what I had already written or what I planned to write didn’t work. Either I need to review my argument, or restructure it or reword it.

In other words, writer’s block was not a sign of my incompetence or lack of direction. It was my understanding of writing trying to get my attention. Instead of resisting it and trying to overcome it by brute determination, what I actually needed was to acknowledge it and actively work with it.

Exactly what the problem was might require a little trial and error. Perhaps I need to delete a passage, or reposition it. Perhaps what I thought was a minor point is a major one, and needs to be given more attention than I had initially planned. Or perhaps two points are really one, or something is missing from the argument or the plot, like an important point or detail, or I need to anticipate and argue against a viewpoint that otherwise would counter mine. But the problem is not lack of inspiration, an inability to concentrate, or any of the other explanations I had heard. It is a structural problem, and relatively easy to solve with some thought and effort.

Once I had found that perspective, writer’s block stopped being a problem, and transformed itself into an opportunity to improve my writing. Now, when I start to lose the sense of what I’m writing or of what I will write next, I treat that loss as a signal to rethink what I’m doing. I no longer worry about the state, because I’ve learned how to work with it.

Looking back, I am only puzzled that I failed to reach this conclusion sooner. A cabinet maker faced with a problem doesn’t stop and agonize over their plight; they try to design their way around it. So why should a writer be any different, except that they have greater tradition of self-dramatization? When you stop thinking of writer’s block as an external affliction that mysteriously descends upon you and start thinking of it as a sign that something is wrong, then it becomes a problem that you can solve by making concrete changes. Once you change your thinking, you may find writer’s block not only misnamed, but also more useful than you ever imagined.

 

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My strengths and weaknesses as a writer

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , on November 22, 2010| 9 Comments »

Having had over 900 professional sales in the last seven or eight years, I am starting to call myself a writer without feeling like a fraud.

To help me make decisions about what other kinds of writing I want to try, I have drawn up a list of my strengths and weaknesses as a writer as honestly as I can. Here they are, in no particular order:

Strengths

  • An omnivorous reading habit: I’ll read anything, and I read constantly. So far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t write if I hadn’t been in love with reading since I was four years old. I would also know much less about the possible choices when I write.
  • A reliance on a spoken vocabulary: I believe that the standard for any language is how it is spoken, so I rarely use words in my writing that I wouldn’t say aloud. I believe this gives a directness to my writing that it wouldn’t otherwise have. I can define far more words than I use in anything except academic writing.
  • An inner ear: I hear what I write or read in my head as though it were spoken out loud. Consequently, my writing has a rhythm to it that helps draw attention to it.
  • A belief in the importance of truth: I don’t believe in objectivity or absolute truth. But I do believe that truth exists externally, and that some viewpoints are more valid than others, and worth expressing as accurately as possible.
  • A difficulty in lying: Thanks to repeated exposure to George Orwell, I am convinced that a writer’s duty is state the truth, even when doing so means facing up to unpleasant facts about themselves or others.
  • An awareness of structure: While I am proud of my ability to reel off memorable phrases, I am prouder of my ability to see the structure in a piece of writing, and to give a suitable shape to my own work. This ability is rarer than the ability to produce striking phrases, and more important to successful writing.
  • An ability to draw analogies: In my experience, most people see differences around them. I see similarities, which means that I can often suggest something new to them.
  • A belief in the need for fairness, and for acknowledging other viewpoints: This belief has nothing to do with being friendly and everything to do with improving the development of my thoughts. I deepen the development of thoughts when I consider alternative explanations. I also give myself more to write about as I explain why my chosen explanation works and what is wrong with other ones.
  • A perception of multiple-causes: I do terribly on multiple-choice questions unless “All of the above” is frequently included. To pretend that one or two reasons are enough to explain most things – especially people’s motivations – is to introduce inaccuracies and falseness into your work. And, by acknowledging multiple-causation, I find still more to write about.
  • A memory strong on recognition, but not outstanding on recall: Often, I cannot dredge up a memory myself. But if someone or something triggers a memory, my mind is better than almost everybody’s. I suspect that recognition is more important than recall for a writer, because, when a memory is buried, all sorts of interesting connections are made to it in your mind. By contrast, I suspect that a photographic memory impedes this imaginative process, which is why I’m glad that I don’t have one.

Weaknesses

  • A reluctance to edit: By the time I finish writing, my mind is already moving on to something else. I can only edit myself by an act of will, and I’m still not very good at it.
  • An over-use of transitions: I’m so obsessed with structure that I would start every sentence with one if I let myself. As things are, one of my routine editing tasks is to delete most of the “first of all”, “on the other hand”s and other transitions.
  • A phobia about fiction: Above all else, I want to be a fiction writer. It means so much to me that it’s taken me years to actually be able to write it. Poetry? Essays? Articles? No problem. But, when I try to write fiction, I freeze up.
  • A straining after effect: I am far too fond of the original or striking phrase, perhaps because my first professional publications were poetry. I’ve taken years to learn that a really pithy expression might not be good for the work as a whole.
  • A handwriting that is indecipherable: In elementary school, I won prizes for neat handwriting. Then I became a university instructor, and wrote so many comments on student essays that my cursive writing became illegible. I switched to printing, and it also became illegible – even to me. I’ll write things down in the middle of the night so I remember them, only to have no idea come morning what I scrawled.
  • An over punctiliousness about references: Not only do I rarely leave “this” unqualified by a following pronoun, but I make a point of using names rather than pronouns. While these habits make for absolute clarity, they often sound awkward, especially when I use a name too many times in the same sentence or paragraph.
  • A love of weasel words: “Appear,” “seems.” and other qualifiers appear far too often in my work. I’m not sure whether they are a remnant of too many academic papers, or reflect a world view in which very little is absolutely certain..
  • An over-emphaticness: In compensating for the qualifiers I use naturally, I often go too far and sound too blunt, or even rude.
  • A tendency to write lists: (Enough said)

A few of these points are probably universal – for example, I don’t think I’ve met a professional writer who didn’t read everything they could get their hands on. However, others probably reflect that I mainly write non-fiction, and still others are undoubtedly idiosyncratic.

Still, I offer them for whatever they might be worth. They are not the formula for success (of a kind), but I hope they might be interesting as one formula for success. I only wonder what I’ve left out because I can’t perceive it.

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The definition of literacy

Posted in Bruce Byfield, literacy, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on September 19, 2010| 3 Comments »

As I write, a local newspaper is gearing up for its annual literacy promotion. The cause is hard to fault, especially if you’re a hyper-literate like me. I can’t help wondering, though, exactly what the organizers mean by “literacy,” except a vague, feel-good cause that everybody supports.

After all, there is something self-serving a newspaper promoting literacy. Is the newspaper really interested in the common good, or simply in ensuring a new generation of readers? In these days when obituaries are being written for beloved old newspapers in particular and the medium in general, I have to wonder.

The trouble is, no one ever seems to identify exactly what they mean by literacy. Even at a minimal level of being able to read street signs, ballots, and government documents, a definition of literacy runs into trouble. After all, exactly what abilities does minimal literacy include? The ability to use a colon or semi-colon properly? An ampersand? A hyphen or forward slash? The knowledge of when to use a list, and what a numbered list signals as opposed to a bullet list? When to use and how to pronounce the accents in words borrowed from other languages? By these standards, very few people would ever be counted as literate, even though all of these questions are relatively elementary.

Similarly, what level of comprehension is implied by the term? Does a person, for instance, need to be able to identify a literary effect? To be able to consciously use those effects themselves?

For that matter, is an awareness of language and how it develops required before someone is literate? If so, then thousands of grammar Nazis who condemn any departure from an artificial standard English would be horrified to learn that they were not literate themselves.

Also, sooner or later, a definition of literacy involves a familiarity with the cultural influences that shape a language. True literacy in English, for example, requires a knowledge of Shakespeare and Christianity (or at least the King James Bible), as well as several dozen other authors and cultural influences.

And what about idioms? Should a person who can write and read a language but not understand an idiom or a pun be considered literate?

Discarding any of these requirements is difficult, but that is only half the problem. The other half is what degree of knowledge or skill a literate person is supposed to have in each of these requirements. How can you measure a concept that, the more you consider it, the more complex it becomes?

No wonder that many educators stick to simpler goals, like standardized spelling. At least with spelling, there is usually a definite right or wrong answer, so long as you stick with official English. But including anything that makes reading or writing seem worth developing means entering a more complex world where right and wrong is qualified and weighted, where – horror of horrors – a student might even be able to question a teacher, provided they know how to construct an argument.

In the end, the concept of literacy seems to come down to what you are pointing to when you use the term. But I would be a lot more comfortable if the promoters of literacy did point to anything. For all I know, their concept of literacy – or, at least, what they are willing to settle for – is far different from my definitions.

I can’t help suspecting that authority figures are automatically hypocritical whenever they talk about literacy. Obviously, a technological society needs higher general standards of literacy than other cultures in order to function, but I always have the nagging suspicion that, when promoting literacy, the Powers That Be would vastly prefer that it not be promoted too far – certainly not to the extent that the average person can deconstruct official pronouncements and maybe question them. In the end, I suspect that the level of literacy they are prepared to settle for is far less than the level I would prefer, and that literacy can be a far more radical concept that everyone assumes.

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My privacy policy

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, Facebook, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , on June 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

If Facebook has done anything, it has helped make users more aware of privacy issues on the Internet. Personally, though, the issue of privacy has always seemed plain enough.

Like many middle-aged people, I’m sometimes appalled by what the majority of people seem willing to disclose on the Internet. Many people seem to forget that they’re not just having a one-on-one conversation, but leaving a trace that anybody – or, at least on Facebook, dozens or hundreds, depending on their number of friends – can read. They disclose not only their plans for the night, but even the details of their sexual encounters and relationships.

In some cases, this disclosure may be given because the person giving it is a genuinely warm person. In other, the Tom Cruise Syndrome may be in full play – you know, the idea that, if you declare your emotions publicly enough or loudly enough or often enough, you and everyone else will come to believe it. Mostly, though, I have the impression that people just don’t think of the audience to which they’re broadcasting; I’ve noticed the same tendency to get lost in a private world with people talking on their phones in public. But, whatever the reason, I think the term “overshare” becomes relevant here.

By contrast, I am more cautious about what I disclose. I’ve been using the Internet since 1991, so I’ve had more time to think about such things than the average Internet user. Also, writing is a burlesque-like game of alternately revealing and concealing your person, so writing as I do for tens or hundreds of thousands on a regular basis tends to bring privacy issues into focus. Moreover, I have got myself into trouble with an indiscreet email or two. All of this experience makes me cautious about what I will say online, so much so that there are some topics on which I simply won’t express my opinion. You can ask me in person or maybe on the phone if you know me well, but some things I want to keep off the record.

I don’t mind my contact information being available, so long as spammers can’t get hold of it too easily. It was long ago scattered across the Internet anyway.

My personal rule is simple: I imagine that I am speaking what I write online at a crowded party. Before I post, I ask myself if I would be embarrassed if a sudden silence fell over the party and everybody could hear what I was saying. If the answer is yes, then I don’t post it. Everything’s really that simple.

When I talk about other people (especially those closest to me), I may adapt the rule: If a sudden silence fell over the party while I was talking about them, would they be embarrassed?. But, often, I want to quote someone or mention what they are doing or how they affect me. In these cases, I generally try to anonymize them, removing any reference that isn’t strictly necessary so that the person I am talking about will be hard for most of my audience to identify.

Such a policy isn’t completely convenient. It limits what I talk about online. Often, a story is diminished if I remove the references. Once or twice, people have also jumped to wild conclusions about me because of what I haven’t mentioned; for example, because I rarely mentioned my partner, some people have assumed that I am a loner or accused me of being gay.

But these problems are rare enough that I can live with them. Certainly, they’re less of a problem than leaving a trail of embarrassing comments or photos that can come back to haunt me.



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Writing is writing is writing

Posted in genres, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on June 10, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Writers love to claim that their genre is difficult and arcane. I have heard poets claim that verse is the purest and most challenging form. Ditto for writers of short stories, plays and novels. I have heard diarists claim the superiority of the private journal over the blog, traditional journalists the superiority of the newspaper story over the online article, and mainstream writers the superiority of their work over science fiction or mysteries.

Maybe I am revealing myself as a hack, but I have trouble understanding why these claims are even made. Having published (if sometimes lightly) in a variety of genres, I fail to see much difference between them. So far as I have been able to observe, the task of writing is always much the same.

I suppose that writers make these claims to soothe their pride. Although writing is no easier than any other art, anyone who has even a few grades of education knows a few of its rudiments, so non-professionals think they know all about it. Moreover, unlike music or painting, it requires only items that can be found around most households, so amateur writers abound. Go to a science fiction convention, for instance, and you can probably start a conversation with anyone you meet simply by asking, “How’s your writing going?” Under these circumstances, perhaps many professional writers feel such a strong need to assert their expertise that they over-state the case.

Still, their claims sound false to me, because they are contrary to my experience of writing.

Generally, writing begins by an assessment of format. If you are writing a poem, you generally write in lines and stanzas; if you are writing a movie script, you need to follow rigid layout conventions before anyone will consider reading it. Similarly, online writing tends to use shorter paragraphs than writing that will be read on a printed page. Such assessments becomes automatic when you become experienced in a genre, but if you switch genres, you immediately become aware of the change in expectations.

The next consideration is your audience. For instance, vocabulary tends to freer and larger in poetry, because you can expect careful readings who are willing to take the time to puzzle out obscurities. The jargon (and what you need to explain) varies with the academic or technical audience. In online writing, exaggeration and hyperbole is more common, because online readers tend to be less engaged than print readers, and you want to keep your attention. In some cases, your subject matter might also change; if I remember correctly, Sylvia Plath said that she enjoyed writing fiction occasionally because in poetry she couldn’t write about things like toothbrushes.

And so it goes, for any type of writing I have done professionally. Any piece of writing requires that you adjust to the expectations of its stylistic or content genre. And, once you have, the acts of writing, revising, and editing differ only in the details.

Under these circumstances, claiming the superiority of one form over another seems unconvincing and downright desperate. Perhaps professional writing as a whole requires a different mindset or degree of talent and discipline than amateur writing, but at the level of process, where you spend most of your time, the act of writing remains constant. I can’t help thinking that those who insist otherwise do the art an injustice, and mislead everyone – perhaps themselves most of all.

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Spelling and writing

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Personal, spelling, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , on May 15, 2010| 5 Comments »

For someone who earns a living as a writer, I have a shocking confession to make: I am a good speller, not an excellent one, and I don’t greatly care.

Oh, when something of mine is published with a mis-spelling or typo, I wince. If the publication is online, I correct it as soon as I can. And, once or twice, when upsets in my personal life have left me distracted, and I’ve gone through periods where my copy editing was poorer than usual, I was left with plenty of self-doubts. After all, I’m supposed to be a professional, and part of that status means submitting copy ready to publish. The fact that editors are supposed to have my back when it comes to proofreading does not diminish my obligation to be my own first line of defense.

However, my concern is limited. I make the corrections as they come to my notice, and move on. I have no sympathy with the apparent glee with which some readers find mistakes and point them out, and only point out other peoples’ errors when they are unintentionally humorous. In my heart of hearts, spelling is not a great concern for me.

Part of the reason for this attitude is the way I read. I not only read phonetically, but hear every syllable in my head, even when I’m reading silently. Because of that inner voice, when I come across a spelling mistake, the only time that I have trouble understanding is occasionally when letters are transposed.

For another, I am well aware of how illogical English spelling is. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who claimed – not entirely accurately– that, under the rules of English spelling, “fish” could be spelled “ghoti” (“gh” as in “tough,” “o” as in “woman,” “ti” as in “attention”). While I doubt that the efforts to simplify spelling will ever succeed, I do tend to regard proper spelling as an artificial convention, slightly more useful than heraldry, but just as arbitrary. Moreover, like a knowledge of heraldry, a knowledge of spelling sometimes seems to serve mainly as an indicator of class.

If schools tend to focus on aspects of literacy such as spelling – as witnessed by the renewed popularity of spelling bees (currently, there is apparently even a fad for strip spelling bees among adults) – the focus has more to do with the easy of assessment than any usefulness. Determining who is writing well is partly subjective, but in the last two or three centuries, we have standardized spelling until we can easily say whether a spelling is correct. True, our ability to write has not improved, but, all the same, for those who need to assess students, the descent from the art of writing to the simple right and wrong of spelling must be a relief, and never mind that it serves only limited purpose.

I can even rally my bachelor’s degree in communication to rationalize my attitude. Basic communication theory holds that the signal – what you communicate – can still be transmitted with a high degree of noise – irrelevant or ambiguous information or errors. Often, you do not even need vowels or full words, as anyone who has used abbreviations while texting understands. In other words, not only does correct spelling do nothing to improve the quality of writing, it does next to nothing to improve the transmission of writing, either.

Similarly, I can use my degree to rationalize that, the more complex the concepts you are trying to convey become, the likelier that problems are going to arise. In the same way that a complex piece of technology such as a jet requires regular maintenance because its complexity means more can go wrong, so the more complex the ideas you are trying convey, the more that spelling mistakes and other errors are likely to creep in.

As I try to correct mistakes, only to find other ones (and, occasionally, to introduce new ones in my corrections), the image in my mind is of the cartoons in which a character is trying to nail down floorboards. No sooner do they nail down one board, than another one springs up behind them. At times, the idea of eliminating every error seems next to impossible.

But the main reason I have only limited concern about spelling is nothing more than personal preference. What absorbs me as I write is not producing flawless copy, but developing ideas and structuring and expressing them so that they are as clear as possible. Once I have done these things as well as I can in the time available – because, often, I am working to a deadline – my interest recedes sharply. Proofreading is an after-thought, much as bibliographies were when I was in high school and university: necessary, but dull. While writing is a creative act, and editing and revising is an analytical one, proofreading is simply rote work, and often repetitious. Even with a spell checker and macros to catch my most common errors, such as using two spaces where I only need one, copy editing my own work is still repetitious and uninteresting. I never have the satisfaction from copy editing than I do from finishing a draft that comes closer to expressing my thoughts.

If I have been writing all day and need to email a piece before I go to bed, I may also have little energy left for the task. Often, I become more careless than I would be when I am fresh. To a degree, then, part of my disinclination is undoubtedly the natural tendency that everybody has to disregard a task for which they suspect they have no particular talent

Having been afflicted with some of the obsession for spelling and grammar that infests North American education (although less than some, since I was in an experimental program for four years of my five in high school), I feel that I should be ashamed of my disregard. Yet, talking to other writers, I realize that my attitude is probably shared by most of them.

A reasonable ability to spell may be a basic skill for writers, but it is a minor one. In fact, I would almost go so far as to say that it is more a marketing skill than one fundamental to the craft of writing. You need to know how to spell so that editors will read your work easily, not because spelling polysyllabic words improves the quality of what you write. You could become a champion speller and still not have anything to say or the skills to express it. I would even go so far as to say that, if a would-be writer wants to improve their skills, then spelling should be one of their last concerns.

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Blogging is for practice

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , on April 13, 2010| 1 Comment »

A few days ago, I received an invitation to participate in a study about why people blog. I deleted it without a reply, partly because I never answer phone or email surveys on the grounds that I always have something better to do. Also, I suspect that, as someone who makes a living through writing, I am not a typical blogger, so my replies wouldn’t help the study much. Still, having recently written my 400th post, the question seems legitimate: Why do I blog?

In many ways, I can more easily explain the reasons that do not motivate me. I do not blog for attention. I get enough attention, positive and negative, from my professional writing, and, like many writers, I have enough of a love/hate relationship with that attention that I feel no need to find more.

For the same reason, I do not need to assert to the world that I am writer. Since 2004, I have written approximately 850 articles that I have been paid for. That makes me a journalist by any reasonable definition, even if one obsessive critic always likes to follow my name with “who calls himself a journalist,” as if to create doubts in people’s minds that I am one.

Say what you like about the purity of amateur writing – or of so-called “indie” publication or what we used to call vanity publishing in a more honest era – there is nothing like having other people pay you and asking you to write for them to make yourself think of yourself as a writer. After the first fifty or sixty publications, the truth starts to seep in. I still get a small thrill at publication, or when a story of mine gets picked up on Slashdot, but not as much as I did six years ago. Largely, I take publication for granted, since in six years I have only had one story rejected, and a couple heavily queried.

Nor do I blog for the ego satisfaction of building an audience. Although my blog sometimes touches on free and open source software (FOSS), the general subject of my professional writing, I usually only blog on FOSS when I have something to say that I could not turn into an article for which I could get paid. I know that I could easily get a couple of thousand visitors a day if I blogged about FOSS, because those are the sorts of numbers that I have when I do. But I don’t mind in the least that this blog lopes alone at one-tenth of those numbers. If anything, I prefer the lower numbers, because I can often tell when friends have logged on.

So why do I blog ? I mean as opposed to writing in general, which is an even more complicated and difficult question to answer.

Partly because I’m writing anyway. Most of my blog posts begin as an entry in the journal that I’ve kept for years. A few journal entries are too private to go out, and remain safely in their password-protected file, but many are transferred directly into the blog.

Those that are transferred to the blog are usually on subjects that I don’t generally get paid to write about – increasingly, on Northwest Coast art. Often, they are warmups at the start of my writing day, or what’s left of my writing energies at the end of the day.

However, there is one great difference in a piece of writing done for a journal and one for eventual blog publication: for a public piece of writing, I am far more concerned with structure. Nobody – I hope – will ever see my journal entries, so they can be unfiltered streams of consciousness, in which I pay little attention to how ideas are arranged. But, when I publish anything that other eyes will see, I feel an obligation – both to myself and to readers – to organize it.

Accordingly, I do not write what most people do in a blog. My blog entries are small personal essays, which is one reason why they are much longer than a typical blog entry. By following this rule, I make a journal entry not just self-expression, but an exercise in structure. By writing blog entries as essays, I force myself to practice the art I follow, and, I hope, become more skilled in it. At the very least, I write more easily because of this rule.

Of course, this orientation sets limits on my subject matter. I rarely write about my partner to preserve her privacy, and there are huge chunks of my life that are unlikely to appear in a blog because I won’t share them.

Yet, even so, I never have any serious problems finding a subject. Writing is one of those things that I do, and this blog, essentially, is for practice.

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Looking back at my first article sale

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Michael Moorcock, Personal, Runestaff, Uncategorized, Wargamer's Digest, wargaming, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 1, 2010| 4 Comments »

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by Robert Cleary, a member of an online group whose members collect copies of Wargamer’s Digest. I was not surprised to hear about the group, since the Internet has something for every interest imaginable. But what surprised me was that he wanted to hear about how I came to make my first professional sale to the magazine – a short article called “Fantasy – Battles for the Runestaff”. He sent me a copy of the article (mine not being easily locatable), and, once I had reassured myself that the article was not too badly written, I started to remember.

I like to say that I sold the article when I was fourteen. Strictly speaking, though, that’s an exaggeration. To be completely accurate, I pitched the idea when I was fourteen and it was accepted. I didn’t actually finish the article until I was sixteen, and it wasn’t published for several more years. Nor did I find out that it had been published until long after it appeared; I can only assume that the editor was as casual about such things as I was then. By the time I actually pocketed the $40 I made from the sale, the idea was well over five years old.

Fantasy readers might recognize a reference to a series of books written by Michael Moorcock. Set in the future, The History of the Runestaff series is the story of how a group of heroes centered around a kingdom in Provence resist the expansion of Granbretan, a feudal empire whose nobles wear metal animal masks and show a pathological fear of revealing their bare faces.

Looking back, I realize that to call the books in the series potboilers is to insult the kitchen industry. Even their author does not claim that they were literature. However, in my early throes of adolescence, they seemed heady enough stuff, and I re-read them at least three times.

While I was reading about the Runestaff (and every other fantasy or science fiction book I could find), I was also absorbed by board games and history. I collected at least a dozen Avalon Hill games, and was especially fond of Feudal, a chess-like war game that used 3-D figures of medieval warriors for pieces. Whenever the erratic magazine deliveries to the local hobby store allowed, I picked up Wargamer’s Digest. I painted countless figures for wargaming – mostly medieval, classical and fantasy – and devised the rules for games of my own imagination, in some cases even finishing them.

My one problem was that, if other wargamers existed in my neighborhood, I didn’t know about them. Today, a teenager like me could probably find someone to play against on the Internet, but, in the 1970s, my options were more limited. Occasionally, I dragooned a friend into playing, but those games rarely got finished. More often, I took turns playing one side then another.

Looking back, it wasn’t a bad education in how perspectives change with circumstances. But it wasn’t very satisfying. For one thing, I could never surprise myself.

At the same time, I had writing ambitions. What exactly I wanted to write, I was unsure, but, hearing how early some famous authors had begun, I thought I should get a move on. The summer I was 14, I knew, would probably be the last one I had free. With university starting to loom, I would almost certainly be working the next summer. I had one last chance.

Half-overcome by my own chutzpah, I submitted a query letter to Wargamer’s Digest. I chose the Runestaff series both because I was re-reading it when I made the query and because the magazine didn’t publish much about fantasy gaming, so I figured I had more of a chance with that topic than with one that was more mainstream.

My query was accepted, and I promptly had a failure of nerve for a year and a half. Then, timidly, after two or three false starts, I wrote to ask if the editor was still interested. He was, and over the Christmas holidays, I pounded my game notes on the Runestaff into what I hoped was a reasonable imitation of the magazine’s style.

Then – nothing. I received my first payment for my writing when a poem of mine took third place in the Alberta Poetry Yearbook. I graduated from high school and started university, and otherwise got on with my life.

Moving out of my parents’ house at the start of my third year in university, I came across my old stack of Wargamer’s Digest, and thought to query about the article. To my surprise and delight, it had been published some months before, and I had the profound pleasure of seeing my work in a magazine, and finding it, after all that time, not only free of typos, but more authoritative in tone than I had hoped.

I wish I could say that the experience was the start of my professional writing life. But the truth is, the experience was so fragmented and so drawn out that it proved to be a false spring. It was another seven years before I ventured into writing articles again (although I did sell the odd poem and story), and another decade before I started to make a living as a freelance journalist).

The fault was mine for not following up, I realize now. Still, I wonder what might have happened if I had. Would the early success have given me the courage earlier in life to freelance? Impossible to tell now, but I still get a small thrill re-reading my long ago article in PDF form and wondering how it fits into my early life.

Fantasy-battles-for-the-Runestaff

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The right to comment

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, censorship, comments, communication, Internet, journalism, Personal, time-management, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 15, 2010| 9 Comments »

Several times in the last few months, I’ve closed discussion on one of my blogs. Each time, some people have howled in outrage. Their anger makes them nearly inarticulate, but their position is apparently that I have no right to stop discussion. I am an enemy of free speech, they proclaim, a censor and cowardly, and downright evil as well.

I don’t see that, myself.

For one thing, free speech is not an absolute right, even if you believe that it should be. It is limited by laws against libel, hate-crimes, and terrorism, among others. Nor can you invoke free speech as a defense against mischief.

Admittedly, violations of these laws appear dozens of time each day on the Internet, and most of them are not prosecuted unless someone complains. Even in 2010, the Internet retains more of a frontier unruliness than other forms of media. But the point is that idea that free speech is unlimited is disproved with a moment’s thought.

Moreover, in each of these cases, some of these limits seemed to apply. Whether they actually would have been grounds for legal actions, I can’t say, of course. However, I think that erring on the side of caution is reasonable, especially since at least one determined commenter seems to have been required to close down his own blog.

At any rate, I have no desire to be involved, however indirectly, in a court action. And, in the case of one blog, I would be irresponsible if I exposed the company that owns the site to litigation. These motivations are not a matter of courage so much as caution. If I am going to be dragged into a legal action, it is going to be for something worth fighting for, and not because I provided a forum for the indiscreet and feckless.

However, my strongest motivation was that I simply lacked the time to either police my blog every half hour or to enter into discussions that were unfolding in which, so far as I can see, there was little to distinguish one set of claims from another.

I have been writing about free and open source software for five years now, and I have gained a limited amount of recognition. That recognition is not on the scale of a Linus Torvalds’ or a Richard Stallmans’, but it does mean that I get a lot of email and other contacts – so much that I can only answer some of it if I hope to get any writing done. Unless I am contacted by a friend or an unusually interesting stranger, I generally try to limit an exchange to a couple of communications.

I don’t always follow this rule strictly, but when someone is repetitive, abusive, and fails to address what I have to say, I am sure to apply it. By nature, I am easy-going and love to talk, but trying to hold a discussion with such people leaves a deadening feeling of futility. They are not going to sway me by bludgeoning tactics, and all too clearly, I am not going to convince them in a discussion. So why should I waste my time? A couple of exchanges is enough for them to have a say, and for me to know the type of people with whom I am dealing.

In other words, I choose to focus on the people who are interesting to have in a discussion, and/or can teach me something. So far as I’m concerned, declining to spend much time on the obsessive is not censorship, any more than refusing to publish bad writers in an anthology you are editing is censorship. It’s selection, plain and simple. i am hardly the only person I know who has to resort to this kind of selection in order to do what’s important to them, either.

Nor can I navigate the rights and wrongs of the feud that, in a couple of cases, is the reason for me shutting down comments. Both sides accuse the other of criminal behavior, and both sides claim to present evidence. However, all I can tell for sure is that I don’t want to be involved. Being hectored, abused, and threatened two or three times a day makes me even less likely to want to get involved; attempts to intimidate only make me stubborn, and, when people act like spammers, I treat them like spammers.

At any rate, to talk about censorship on the Internet is more of a rhetorical flourish than a reference to reality. If I refuse to post someone’s comments, that’s two out of – what? Several billion sites? If a commenter can’t find a place to publish what I won’t, they aren’t trying.

Under all these circumstances, you’ll excuse me if I find myself unmoved by the accusations when I close comments. I don’t do so quickly or easily, because I value freedom of expression myself. But I do so to create a space to work, and so I can focus on what’s important.

The peace of mind that results tells me, more than anything else, that I am doing the right thing.

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