Starting Over

Happy Friday, everyone!

In explaining my absence, I also get to talk about something that not many writers or editors want to admit — that sometimes, there is benefit in simply starting over.

Over the course of the past month or so, we’ve been moving house! We weren’t looking to move, particularly since it hadn’t been long since we rounded up the last of our renovations on our old house following a flood, and were at last getting to enjoy them. But, as often happens, an opportunity presented itself that we simply couldn’t pass up, even if it meant that we were back to the days of living out of boxes while we transformed yet another house from top to bottom.

I use the word ‘transform’ deliberately to highlight the attitude we chose to take with such a daunting project. When we think of starting over, it’s incredibly easy to be discouraged and focus solely on the negative — all the reworking, how tired you’ll be, and so on — rather than the positive end result and moreover, the possibilities inherent in being given a blank slate.

For example, our old house was subject to several restrictions when we renovated: size, budget, who was available to do what at which stage, what materials were available, and even small cosmetic things like the hardware and hearth stone colors that were already there that we didn’t want to change. With our new house, however, we didn’t have as many restrictions — we had much more freedom to create the home we wanted.

The same is true of our projects, including our written ones. That document you’ve been working on relentlessly for the past few months, that never seems to turn out how you want it? Perhaps it itself is restricting you. But how do you know that starting over is really what you need to do? Here are some potential reasons:

  1. The presentation of your thoughts is not as clear as it could be. This is often the case of first drafts written without an outline under the ‘just get it onto the page’ method — a perfectly valid method. If on reading through you seem to jump around a lot, with one subject being cut off by another and reappearing three pages later with little to no warning, this may be a sign that a rewrite is in order. Frequently this is easier rather than trying to untangle the original.
  2. The format of the piece isn’t suitable. It may work, but it may not suit. This is more often the case with creative projects — a traditional stanza-ed poem working better as a prose poem, or a novel really wanting to be a script, for instance — but can crop up in others, such as classroom activities being more effective as interactive rather than a lecture.
  3. External restrictions or changes. These are frequently unexpected, such as a client (or instructor) changing a deliverable, or can be simple oversights such as initially misreading instructions and having to correct oneself.
  4. Project loss. Whether a harddrive crash or something more catastrophic, this is the most obvious (and unfortunate!) reason you’d need to restart.
  5. Something incredibly intrinsic to the project is faulty. Usually, this presents itself as a single component that influences the entire project, and to try to force it to work is either too difficult, would take too much time, or will negatively impact other aspects of the project. For example, no evidence to back up one’s thesis proposal, or a plot hole in a work of fiction.
  6. The overall idea itself simply isn’t working. This is of course one of the hardest and most frustrating reasons to accept, because it often feels like a personal attack. However, it can be the most freeing. Unshackling yourself from a limp idea opens you to far stronger ones.

Even if you’re not encountering problems, experimenting with rewrites — particularly with smaller projects — can not only be useful practice, but can yield unexpectedly good results. A great exercise I remember from college was to write an initial piece, and then cover it and attempt to rewrite it purely from memory. The ideas or images that stuck were clearly the strongest ones, and thus could inform a strong third draft.

Remember, no matter the reason one is faced with a restart, being open to as transformative an opportunity as starting over should be looked on with enthusiasm. You may be surprised by how much you like the new end result compared to the original!

What are some of the reasons you’ve had to restart a project? Did you embrace it, or was it a struggle? What was the end result compared to the original?

 

~ Taegan

New Year’s Resolutions You Can Keep

Happy Friday, everyone, and welcome to 2018!

You haven’t heard from me in a while, I know. If like me you’ve been buried under the holiday season ever since the run-up to Thanksgiving, you can empathize with me as I welcome the crisp cold weather and beautiful blue skies that pronounce our new beginning — and let’s be honest, do you know anyone who had a good 2017?

I’ve never been one for making resolutions. Although they work for a lot of people and I encourage that, for me personally they’ve always set me up for failure. Perhaps I’ve just set too high of expectations for myself. Consequently, the past few years I’ve endeavored to take smaller steps in the right direction, and to that end have subscribed what I feel is a much more feasible motto — start as you mean to go on, and end. No grand gestures that I then beat myself up for not achieving, no massive exhausting overhauls, no cold-turkeys that last for maybe a fortnight tops.

Regardless of whether you’re an all-or-nothing or little-by-little type, small changes that you start now can make a world of difference. One easy resolution is to polish your daily communications. Think of it as ironing your shirt, or investing in new business cards.

Firstly, though, what should be your target? Look at things that enter the public eye, like:

  • Your business cards, speaking of.
  • Your emails, including signatures and out-of-office messages.
  • If you run a blog or online store, check their pages / posts / item descriptions, and things like your invoices.
  • Social media posts, and pages if you have them.
  • Your resume.
  • Forum posts, product reviews, etc., if this is something you regularly do.

Got some ideas? Good. Now here’s the little fixes and good habits you can work on:

  1. Spelling errors. No one’s perfect, but try your best. So many programs and sites nowadays have at least a crude built-in spellchecker — use it! If you’re not sure, copy-and-pasting your text into Word or even Google will quickly find them for you. Always do a read-through before you send/post/submit.
  2. Misuse of the apostrophe. Part of my 2018 post plan is a detailed series on punctuation, but for now, here’s a rule of thumb: apostrophes show ownership, and are used when there’s a letter missing (in other words, to make two words into one, AKA a contraction). Example 1: If you want to make DVD plural, you’ll want to write DVDs rather than DVD’s — at first glance that last one tells me that the DVDs are owning something. Example 2: if you want a shorter version of they are or David is, you’ll want to write they’re or David’s.
  3. Following from the above, the difference between contractions, possessive pronouns, and in some cases directionals — your/you’re, there/their/they’re, etc. Practice with the apostrophe will help with these. Make sure you mean that place (there — a directional) versus they are (they’re — a contraction) versus belonging to them (their — a possessive pronoun).
  4. Misuse of capitalization. Capitals are mainly for the first word of a sentence, names and titles, and acronyms (e.g. — CD or OMV). Only rarely are they used for emphasis — and only as ‘all-caps’ rather than simply Capitalizing Every Word or random Words — and quickly lose their impact if used too much. Haphazard incorrect use tends to look sloppy.
  5. Excessive exclamation marks. One is enough where it is needed — an entire string does not make your point any stronger. In fact, it looks amateurish. And while we’re at it, consider whether you need one at all and if your point isn’t powerful enough using just a period. Every time I’m tempted to use one I tend to ask myself whether I want it for volume or to express emotion (in both cases, shouldn’t my words themselves make it clear?), or to emphasize that last word (in which case, try italics or bold).
  6. Lack of punctuation altogether. The linguistic evolution of lack of punctuation on the Internet as a means in of itself to suggest tone or as a form of humor is a conversation for another day. There’s also a time and a place for that and work emails isn’t one of them. Leaving off that period or question mark suggests hurriedness, laziness, or that you simply don’t respect the recipient enough to give them good communication, none of which are good.

To nurture these little habits, the first thing you have to do is get accustomed to slowing down and looking for them. Recognizing them is half the battle. The more often you correct them, the more practice your brain will get in writing them correctly the first time. Better yet, if you extend this practice to writing that does not necessarily enter the public eye — your personal journal, greeting cards, storage labels — the stronger the good habits will grow.

Naturally, old habits are hard to break, and of course correctly using the apostrophe won’t get you that dream job — but it’ll certainly stop an eyebrow being raised. Polishing these little tell-tale signs of clumsy writing not only means that your reader’s eye is distraction-free, but that the impression you’re making is far more professional and confident. And who doesn’t want that?

What are your writing New Year’s resolutions? What are some of your communication pet-peeves, or bad habits you can’t quite seem to shake?

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

Editor Vs. Author – Finding the Balance

Happy Friday, everyone!

I don’t normally talk about the specifics of projects I’ve been working on, but today I’m going to nudge that habit aside just for a moment, because it brought up some interesting food for thought. One of my recent clients works as a translator in addition to her own writing, and I was contracted to look over a short story that had been translated into English. The nature of the job and a friendly peer discussion on our freelancing careers subsequently brought up the topic of how to keep the integrity of the originals we work with — or in my case with this contract, an original translation of an original.

Of course I can’t speak for the challenges translators face, as I myself do not have fluency in a second language, but I have always held them in awe. Not only is there the technical accuracy aspect of translation, but to then balance that with equally-accurately translating the intent of the author and the subtleties of connotation is mind-boggling to me. Seriously, hug any translator you come across, or  anyone using a language outside of their mothertongue to any degree for that matter. Having worked with several clients for whom English is not their first language, my admiration remains undimmed!

Editors encounter this balancing act to a lesser degree. While of course our primary job is to ensure readability and technical accuracy of a text, we too seek to preserve the integrity of the original, particularly when it comes to more creative texts. Otherwise, many would run the risk of sounding the same and your favorite authors would not have their unique voice, nor some of your favorite stories or poems their boundary-stretching (or convention-breaking) forms. For example, anyone who has delved into Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves will tell you that if an editor had gone through the (arduous) task of revising the novel to a typical layout and style and it had been published as such, then it would not be House of Leaves. Likewise, we would not have the technically-grammatically-incorrect but stylistically-significant punctuation and syntactic choices of e e cummings.

Herein lies your editor’s challenge: to determine whether you have set additional stylistic rules for yourself (and perhaps then broken them, deliberately) on top of the rules of the language (and form) in which you are writing. Then, once this is determined, to decide whether the breaking is worth it. Although I’m not familiar with the initial publication history of either cummings or Danielewski and thus how long it took their unconventional style to be accepted for publication, it’s safe to say that although they eventually found an editor and publisher that believed it was worth it, that this is not something that happens every day. Often, it will not be worth it because the rule-setting and -breaking has been done inconsistently, or weakly, and ends up crippling an otherwise perfectly decent text. Other times, the form in which you are writing simply cannot allow additional rule-setting or -breaking, such as a civil report or legal document with set styles. The key to helping your editor out in this regard — as well as being good advice for your writing in general — is as Picasso said: “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

We will do our best to retain your unique voice as long as it is worthwhile. While this may sound cold, remember that if a text is ultimately unreadable, it is useless — and surely that is the endgame for any writer in any medium?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject!

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

Pros and Cons of Using Local Vernacular

Happy Friday, everyone!

I may have mentioned that I was born and currently live in the Southern US; I may also have mentioned that I had a twelve-year stint in the UK. While naturally I haven’t encountered all the dialects either of them have to offer, I’ve seen and heard a good share. Local vernacular is close to my heart right now, too, because of the novel I’m working on that’s set in New Orleans in 1916, which is why I wanted to take today to talk about the talk, a.k.a. local vernacular.

What do I mean, exactly, by local vernacular? It’s slang, essentially. An ingredient of local or regional dialects. What can readily link a person to a geographical area in addition to (but not the same as) an accent. Why should it matter to you? Because yes, there are some occasions where it’s good to be linked to a region, but there are other times that you’ll want to avoid it.

Local vernacular in writing is ultimately a tool, and the better you understand how and when to use it, the better. We see it all the time in marketing (whether we realize it or not) where it’s used to inspire loyalty from a certain customer base, make a product or service recognizable, or support/create an image of belonging. If you’re one of the crowd, you’re trusted as a businessperson. For example, pseudo-French signage and packaging is understandably rampant here in Louisiana because of the pride in French and Creole heritage – if your product or service utilizes it, not only are you understood, but you are seen as belonging and friendly. Meanwhile, we also see local vernacular in fiction to enrich characters and impart flavor and realism to the setting. There’s a little more flexibility in fiction since we can set and play with our own rules. If you get the details right, you’re trusted as an author.

So if local vernacular is pervasive and useful, why would we want to avoid it? There are three main reasons:

  1. Geographical limitations. You can only take a piece of slang so far before, frankly, it may not be understood. For instance, the South will have a ready grasp of lagniappe — ‘a little something extra’, for those of you not from around here — because it’s familiar. Head north, east, or west, however, and while they may have heard it before, they may struggle to define it. Head outside of the US and use it, and you may not be understood at all. If something’s not understood, it’s ineffective. If you’re trying to market yourself, a service, or a product outside of the locality that uses that language, you’re going to struggle — it’s incredibly rare for a business with a name or slogan that uses local vernacular to be successful in a larger national or international market.
  2. It’s ultimately slang, whether you like it or not. Slang falls into the informal language category and as you know, there are occasions where informal language is appropriate and where it is not. It’s unfortunate but true that outsiders to a dialect, upon hearing/reading it, will — because of point #1 — feel at a disadvantage, which usually translates to seeing that dialect as lesser. Not all the time, but often. A more common example is that we all know that we shouldn’t be casual in an interview, and speak formally and clearly.
  3. Consistency problems, which mostly applies to writing. While there may be a few words that have a widely-understood spelling, when you get into the less obvious representations of dialect (e.g. — using apostrophes everywhere to contract words or drop a final letter) the fact of the matter is that it can be difficult to keep track of how you write something and when. I know I do. Also, though punctuation is a beautiful thing, if you have apostrophes everywhere eventually your manuscript is going to look like a spider skittered through an ink pad and then over every page.

Readability is key: too much vernacular and your reader will be exhausted by the time they get through a couple of paragraphs. You want your text — whether it’s a resume, a novel, or a business card — to be easy for your reader to understand, and appropriate to the audience and your intentions.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with local vernacular, be it when writing or reading!

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan

Ten Ways to Build Writing Confidence

Happy Friday, everyone!

In previous posts, you may remember me mentioning the importance of creation before you can even begin to contemplate editing. Sounds obvious, right? Maybe even easy? A second glance, however – or a second sit-down at the desk to stare at a blank page – reveals that often, it’s the exact opposite. In today’s post I want to take a little detour from our usual fare of editing and the like to talk about writing.

First, let’s get a misconception out of the way – there’s no ‘magic cure’. There will be days where the words just don’t flow, and everyone has them. There’s no hard science that will instantly make everyone prolific. Much of it boils down to practice, experience, and discipline. Yet there are some factors that you can influence in order to make practicing – and thus discipline – come more easily, and lead to experience. Many of these will overlap with those I’ve mentioned in ‘When Editing Is Bad’.

  1. Give your writing – and yourself – due respect. Recognize that this effort is just as important as any other pursuit. Often we become inhibited by thoughts such as “I’m not good at this, so why should I bother?” or “But this has already been talked about.”. They’re often grounded in falsehood and sabotage you before you even begin. Own what you’re doing.
  2. Following on from the above, build an environment that will best cultivate this fledgling habit. This could include setting aside a particular time/day, setting deadlines or goals if they help you or removing them if they don’t, finding a dedicated space in which the writing happens, noise levels, and so on. You may find that this is a work-in-progress in of itself, or that it varies depending on what you’re working on.
  3. Find a support network. There are an unbelievable amount of writers out there and just as many readers, but instead of finding this daunting, know that there are a nearly equal number of groups where you can share your writing and get feedback and encouragement. Likewise, enlist the help of friends and family for additional encouragement (I promise you, I get more encouraging remarks than sneers when I say I’m a writer). No one does this alone, and feedback will be crucial to your improvement.
  4. Find a method that works best for you. You could be a plan-it-out-to-the-last-detail writer, with oodles of notes and bullet-pointed frameworks, or you could be a “I’m going to start in the middle and see what happens” sort. You could prefer writing by hand or by typing or by dictating and transcribing. Everyone works differently and no method is better than another.
  5. Gather what external resources you need for the particular work. If you need to write webcopy for a client, make sure you know what they want; if you’re contracted to write an article on growing tomatoes, read up on tomato-growing; if you’re writing a historical novel set in Jamaica in the 1800s, do your research; if you’re experimenting with ghazals as a poetic form, study lots of ghazals; if you’re writing the next best sci-fi novel, watch a bunch of sci-fi movies or spend an hour or two on Pinterest to get inspired.
  6. Practice. Scribble thoughts in a notebook or on post-its as you go about your day. Keep GoogleDocs open. Write down all your thoughts at the end of the day. Journal. Whatever works best for you. The idea is that the more accustomed you grow to physically articulating your thoughts and seeing them there on the page, the more normal the action will become for you.
  7. Read widely. The truth of the matter is that, if nothing else, reading widely will show you what’s possible.
  8. Try not to pigeonhole yourself – or be too strict – in the beginning. Started a romance novel that ended up wanting to be a mystery? Got halfway through your essay and ended up changing your own viewpoint? What was supposed to be mere tangential evidence in your thesis becomes the thing you’re actually interested in? It happens! The important bit is that you wrote.
  9. Try not to get too caught up in making it perfect the first go round. Editing can come later. Just get it out for now.
  10. You cannot make everyone happy. There are going to be people who love your work, and others who can’t stand it. Building up a thick skin is part of being a writer. The most important thing is, as Philip Pullman says, to write to please yourself. Write the novel, or poem, or critical article, or biography – whatever it may be – for you.

I know not everyone is aiming to make writing into a fullblown career. Some folks just want to be more confident when it comes time to write up that quarterly report for the boss, or feel pretty good about their college entrance essay. All of these are valid reasons to improve one’s writing skills – humans are social creatures that, introvert or extrovert though we may be, need communication in order to feel fulfilled. Writing is just one of those ways, and it opens so many doors.

In a year, you’d wish you’d started today.

Warm wishes,

~ Taegan