My first real writing gig was as a reporter for a driveway-weekly newspaper. You know the kind. The kind that nobody picks up to read, that bake in the sun until they are stacked like kindling and threatening to catch flame. No one read the newspaper I worked for so no one knew the name of it or who to call to hold delivery if they took a trip with the kids to Disney World. In the summer, every other driveway in the suburban delivery zone would pile up with them because no one was there to feel the shame from being too lazy to toss them. The glory in writing for that paper wasn’t in the byline and certainly not in the paycheck. What should have sweetened the deal was that I had my own office, even if it was a storage closet with no view onto the quaint rivertown streets. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Journalism
During a typical workday, it’s hard to say how many words I write. For the page, it can be anywhere from zero (depending on my meeting schedule) to 2,000 or so. I have no idea where that number would stand if e-mail were factored into the final tally. I’m not sure I’d want to know. In the last 11 years as a professional writer, I’ve developed my own processes and theories to abide by in this trade, but in preparing for a recent presentation on writing instruction, I came across George Orwell’s rules for effective writing. I wasn’t aware that he’d shared his theories so plainly. I also wasn’t familiar with the exchange between Faulkner and Hemingway described in this article about Orwell’s approach. My thoughts on Hemingway have been mostly middling, but this story is literary gold.
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Tags: Thoughts on Writing
Back roads through the Kansas foothills wound us first past the Leavenworth military cemetery and then Lansing Prison, by hills raked with white headstones and haunted with barbed-wire shadows. The narrow streets were overhung with branches, bare, about to bud, and the sunshine covered the hills like a sheet kicked up and spread out on the flowing hills that rose and fell like dinosaur humps. By then, she’d gotten tired in the backseat and had given up on the scenery. She closed her eyes in trust and felt the climbs and the drops as her father drove on. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Kids
He knew one kind of man and that kind was lazy. So he followed the only example he had and worked seldom, He took a job every few years when he needed the insurance to cover a doctor’s visit – worked for a few months and worked hard – but would come home and collapse in bed or on the furniture, legs and arms draped over the pieces, nursing his shoulder or knee or whatever was sore, and he would complain until he finally talked himself into a depression each day or night on the loading dock or in the office cubicles would begin to wear on him until the pressure was his greatest task. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: Fiction
Last week, a friend asked me to visit the web site for a marketing agency she was considering an interview with in Chicago. She had questions about its legitimacy and whether it was a legitimate agency that provides actual services to clients or one that uses the word marketing loosely in job ads to attract applicants – usually intelligent ones, fresh from college – and then sell them on a career in hocking knives, hard-back book collections, cleaning solvents and anything that can be crammed into a suitcase and carried door to door. Below is the first sentence posted on the company’s home page. Judging by its length and lack of clarity, would you work for them? (I changed the company name to conceal its identity.)
“Luau Marketing is an organization developed on the premise that an approach to a successful business and marketing plan based on personal communication combined with a genuine interest in people will always be more compelling and meaningful than the latest technology craze.”
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Tags: Business
