"Write now is good."

A defense of novels

Image: "Book sale loot" by Ginny

I tend to go through reading-genre phases. Recently, I have read all short stories for awhile, followed by science fiction, a short stint in realistic fiction, and then a leap to adolescent fiction.

Adelle Waldman's well-reasoned “An answer to the novel's detractors” in The New Yorker will have me picking up a Victorian classic in my next reading foray. She writes:

 ...good fiction doesn’t tend to console but rather to complicate, to baffle our desire for easy explanation, to give us not what we want but what we suspect is more meaningful, more akin to the complexity we encounter in life.

I also appreciate Waldman's points about two benefits (variety and perspective) that made-up characters offer their readers. (Read her essay here in its entirety.)

What is the last great novel you read? How would you defend it to fault-finders?

Resources for multimodal data collection and analysis (for writers, teachers, and artists)

Image: Multimodal transcript from "Analyzing layering in textual design: A multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video" by Myrrh Domingo (2011)

Last week, I gave a workshop on multimodal analysis. I presented my data of subjects taking notes and writing essays in an online space as a case example, then attendees worked to identify modes in their media pieces as a start to developing an analysis methodology.

Thinking more broadly to the writing and composition process, I thought it may be useful for writers, writing teachers, and artists to know about the tools I have used to record the multimodal data and begin to analyze them. These can be used for looking more closely at our own composition process and those of our students. This is a broad topic of which many books and articles have been written, so please leave any questions in the comments, and I'll answer them as best I can.

Following are links to resources useful for multimodal data collection and analysis:

Software

1. Camtasia ($99 for Mac, $299 for Windows, from TechSmith):  Screen recording and video editing software
2. ELAN (Free, from Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): “ELAN is a professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources.”
3. InqScribe ($39 for active students with coupon, from Inquirium): Transcription software for video and audio with ability to hotlink timestamps from transcription to source file
4. IShowU Studio ($79, Mac only, from ShinyWhiteBox)
   “Easy screen recording & editing on your Mac: that’s the core idea.”
5. Jing (Free, from TechSmith): Screencapture still images or screen record videos up to 5 minutes in length, saves as Flash file (.swf)
6. NVivo 10 (Prices vary with licensing): Qualitative data management software

Articles

1. Damiana Gibbons: “Rural Places Meet Media Literacy: Representing Truth and Self in Rural Social Space.” from Journal on Images and Culture of the VASA Project
2. Transcription Bank: Deborah Swinglehurst / MODE: Multimodal Methodologies
   from Swinglehurst, D., Roberts, C., & Greenhalgh, T. (2011). Opening up the “black box” of the electronic patient record: A linguistic ethnographic study in general practice. Communication and Medicine,  8 (1), 3-15.
3. Transcription Bank: Myrrh Domingo / MODE: Multimodal Methodologies
   from Domingo, M. (2011). Analyzing layering in textual design: a multimodal approach for examining cultural, linguistic, and social migrations in digital video. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 14: 3, 219-230.

Books

1. Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor – Lynda Barry (2014)
2. The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis (paperback) – Carey Jewitt (Editor) (2009)

Fuel for writing

Writing is a cognitively demanding activity. When the brain is working hard, the brain needs energy.

I virtually stumbled across this poster, "Snacks of the Great Scribblers", by illustrator Wendy MacNaughton via her other artwork featured on Brainpickings.

What sustenance supports your scrawls?

What it is: Questions without immediate, singular answers

Books find me.

I'm usually doing something else, like walking or writing or running around or researching something. And then there is a book in front of me, in my gaze, while I am in the midst of doing something else intensely.

My gaze will stop at a book among a sea of books: on shelves, in piles, at the top of a stack, in a bookstore window (both brick-and-mortar and virtual). 

When a book stands out to me at these unexpected moments, I will usually pick up the book. If I hesitate and I still feel the book's pull, I will definitely pick it up, if I can (much easier to do with a book on a metal shelf than one on a computer screen).

Often these books are ones that I know, and I'll leaf through them looking for a word or phrase that catches my eye. Sometimes I'll reread a favorite passage or find new meaning in one that I hadn't really understood in that way on the prior pass.

This time, a book new to me stood out. I saw it on a library shelf, and I checked it out. Then its return date arrived, and I had to return it. Then I bought my own copy, and I keep reading it. It is full of questions that have no simple answers. Many of the questions are phrased in ways I never thought of. The pages are rich with collaged snippets of words and images, of colored drawings, paintings, pen-and-ink sketches, all combined on the same page. 

I don't want to say any more about it because I don't want to spoil any of the mystery and surprise in the book, in case it finds you, too, and you feel compelled to pick it up.

However, I think I can feature a few of my favorite questions without giving too much away:

1. What is an idea made of? (p. 4)

2. (What) Where is a story before it becomes words? (p. 44)

3. Why do some images come back again and again? (p. 96)

These questions, and the time I am spending with this book, are triggering so many interesting ideas and thoughts. (I just discovered there is an "adjustable activity book" in the back. This has been very fruitful book serendipity.)

Book: What It Is by Lynda Barry (Drawn and Quarterly; 2008; hardcover; 209 pages)

On beginning to write

Image: "Jamie wrote this book" by STML

During the past couple of weeks, I have been immersed in reading about what the cognitive processes of writing are like for children.

Today, I stumbled across the following:

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.

- as told by Pip in Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (via Project Gutenberg)

Be part of a global writing community, this Friday, October 19th

Image: "Miss A Writes a Song" by mrsdkrebs

The National Day on Writing takes place on Friday, October 19, 2012. This year, its creator the National Writing Project (NWP) is being joined by the National Council of Teachers of English, the New York Times Learning Network, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Edutopia, Mozilla Hive Learning Network NYC, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to expand the day’s reach.

For 2012, the NWP’s focus is on what people write. (Last year’s campaign highlighted why people write.) To participate this year, post your writing online and then share it via social media. From the NWP site:

We're encouraging everyone to share their actual writing in all its forms via Facebook , Twitter , Google+ , Instagram , or NWP Connect.

When tweeting out links to your compositions, include the hashtag #whatiwrite. If you have space, consider including the hashtags #nwp and #dayonwriting. Also include the #whatiwrite hashtag on Google+ and Instagram posts, and as a tag for your own blog or NWP Connect posts.

By using hashtags, anyone can find and then read or join the conversation. As the use of these hashtags increase, the topic trends on Twitter and more people read about it and can join. A community of self-identified writers grows from the communication.

Why join this community? The National Writing Project believes that "...writing, in its many forms, is the signature means of communication in the 21st century." To write well in the many online forms available today means to be heard and acknowledged. Posting writing online and getting feedback from the community helps writers hone their craft, spark new ideas, and create connections with other writers. All of this leads to more writing, and the more anyone writes, the better at it he or she will become.

Having the power to express oneself well through writing, in any community, has become a vital life skill in this digital and social-media-driven age.

This is my post for the 2012 Blog Action Day conversation on "the Power of We". #powerofwe #bad12

Searching for tweet-blogging

Image via Hjem

As I microblog (tweeting here) when I have a lot of non-blog writing to do, I've been looking for a way to feature choice tweets (of mine) on my blog. I tend to tweet interesting links I find, and I've been thinking about having a function to incorporate more lengthy discussion around a tweet.

At this point, there is no fluid integration which allows tweeters/bloggers to pick a tweet and have it automatically published on their blog. The tweet/blog conversation space I would like to see — and I think many others would, too — doesn't exist yet. If anyone knows of this functionality, please drop a comment. Based on comments I read at Get Satisfaction, I think TypePad may be working on this.

A tweet of 140 characters or less is a completely different way of communicating from a thousand-word blog post. A tweet, however, can be a conversation starter, but only if a space exists for users to carry on digitally, instantly, and easily. Also, I'd like to archive some tweets and present them later for further discussion, which is a blog's function, not that of a Twitter account.

Yesterday on Twitter, I followed a link from @anildash's tweet on his blog post "If you didn't blog it, it didn't happen." If you tweet or are simply interested in microblogging, I recommend reading it, as it brings up many issues for writers and technologists to consider about digital publishing in any format.

I also learned from Anil's post that Twitter will let users retrieve only their last 3200 tweets. While my tweet amount falls far below that threshold now, it will continue to move towards that limit. What do I do once I reach it? While I don't need to save all my tweeted minutiae, there are some that I'd like kept. Perhaps Twitter should incorporate an archive function within it, much like the "favorite" function, and a warning to users once they are within their limit, much like an email account (i.e., "You are using 80% of your allotted space. Please consider deleting files."). Anil also mentions ThinkUp, a social issue media app that "captures your posts, replies, retweets, friends, followers, and links on social networks like Twitter and Facebook." For archiving our social media lives, this is definitely on the right track.

When tweeting fluff becomes microblogging short-but-important missives, users will want a way to keep them. My homemade solution is to choose tweets I want to feature on my blog and then manually (not automatically and integrated between sites) make a post around them. This will help me extend the conversation my tweets have started while I'm doing lots of non-blog writing but still want to blog.

If anyone has any other ideas, please drop a comment. Meanwhile, my first tweet-post is in the works.

In preparing to write

Photo: "The Writer" by Michael Hirst

Discovered a new-to-me and noteworthy poem today.

"Advice to writers" by Billy Collins

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

Found at swissmiss, who got it from bobulate, who saw it in a tweet by robinsloan

Busy writing

Hello, Readers! I have been writing much lately, but not for my dear blog.

As I wrap up a big project tomorrow, I'll be blogging again by this weekend.

Autumn is an industrious time for me. The back-to-school, cooler-air, leaves-about-to-change shift always propels my to-do list to seriously industrious proportions. (Plus, I have consistent deadlines every fall, so they add to this.)

Hope this post finds you all creative and inspired.

Image above: Time-saving "What do you mean I'm always too busy?" stamp found at SwissMiss.

Which writers have inspired you? And who has inspired them?

Photo: "rough first draft" by nuanc

Early spring this year, I posted about Opium Magazine's Network of Writers Experiment. If you have not sent them a quotation from a writer who has taught you something valuable about writing, you can still do so ... now, with a twist.

Opium (creator of the East Coast/West Coast Literary Death Match) would like you to send that writer's quotation ... and also requests that you to contact the same writer to ask them for a quote from a writer who taught them something. It works like this:

...if I quote Tobias Wolff, now I will go and ask Tobias Wolff for a quote, something he's learned from a writer. In this way, the network concept will be a) more amazing, if possible, and b) nearly impossible to design in print, but Opium design mastermind David Barringer will take care of that.

Send any quotes here: [email protected]. Also, if you don't know how to contact a writer, or would rather not contact them yourself, we can likely help, so don't hesitate to ask.

Deadline is quick: August 4th (this Monday!).

These submissions will go into Opium's next print edition. And, as offered, they'll be happy to help you contact your writer if you'd like.

If you send in a quotation, drop a comment and let us know!

NOTE: I sent them a quotation from a very popular writer, and I'm crafting my email to him now. We'll see if said-famous-inspiring writer sends me a quotation, too. One of life's little adventures, and I'll post an update when I get a response.