I’ve watched this video a few times, marvelling at the elegant and deceptively simple mix of art, body, and media that creates the illusion of understanding movement.

To see it, it becomes obvious, what is seen, and yet, it never is. The invisible forces the artist plays with to investigate movement are as evident as air. The unseen or invisible relationships the artist Memo Akten investigates can be illustrated, suggested, described.

His desire to visualize the invisible reminds me of my desire to get what I sense and imagine, those unseen characters and settings, to get it in words and on paper clearly enough for the reader to just use words and get a picture in his or her head. And that is why revision 2 is at this moment sitting precariously on the chopping block; this novel will bleed out before it takes final shape. Revive, revise. One letter. A lot of work.

This installation is part of In the Blink of an Eye, an exhibition at the National Media Museum. At the museum web site, there is plenty more distraction for the procrastinating creative writer. No, not distraction. Inspiration.

More:

Memo Akten

National Media Museum Official Site + Link To Exhibition

Thank you for reading A Series of Studies.

These three links are simply the best of the best recipes, resources, and shops for the discerning writer who needs a good swift kick of inspiration and some chocolate goodness to power through another hair-tearing session of rewriting scenes as cooperative as a storm at sea. Whew! That was a breathless sentence.

1. Divinely simple and entirely sublime chocolate.

There is nothing more lovely than the kind of chocolate something you remember after just one taste. The Chocolate Oblivion Truffle Torte recipe at 101 Cookbooks months later is entirely unforgettable, popping into my mind like a husky three-note melody of butter, chocolate, and eggs.

With only three ingredients, I take extreme care with the quality of the chocolate, and the baking technique, reading all the footnotes to be sure this experiment won’t be discretely dumped into the bin. My accidental Montreal foodie education in French chocolate means that the more easily available Scharffen Berger chocolate isn’t an option. It might be fantastic, but it may not be to my particular tastes, so I chose Vahlrona Le Noir Extra Amer (85% cacao) Dark Bitter Chocolate Bar.

The creamy, barely sweet result produced Oooo’s and Ahhh’s, some eye-popping disbelief, and much heartfelt encouragement from my Belgian neighbours that my next career be in chocolate. High praise indeed. Thank you 101 Cookbooks.

2. A literary grail of writing resources

Is the Whidbey Writers Workshop MFA Library one of the web’s best kept secrets? I stumbled across the link after reading an interview with Kelly Davio, Editor of Los Angeles Review (also a great thing). Poof. All those hours of researching prospective literary journals for the submission-rejection game gone! Also gone is the excuse researching often becomes for avoiding rewrites. Hmm.

3. Arrgh, writes Captain Jack.

San Francisco has a pirate supply store with a secret mission: to inspire K-12 kids by taking them on adventures through the imagination and helping them craft their very own personal and creative messages in books, instead of bottles. Less wet and more rewarding. These kids, tutored by 826 Valencia volunteers and staff, are often published authors before they even graduate from middle and high school!

Aargh, says the struggling writer with an MFA in Creative Writing in a locker and school loans to pay off.

The above image (borrowed without permission) is the cover of exactly one of these inspired collections. Disclaimer: I am one of the volunteer tutors.

Thank you for reading 3 Great Things: Chocolate, Libraries, Pirates.

Many of the assumptions, attitudes, and ideas in the 1972 article Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence by William Labov  are prevalent today. If you’ve ever edited or read a college-level essay or dissertation, you know that verbosity is alive and kicking, and if you step outside the comfort zone of a middle-class university education, the diversity of speaking styles is awesome. But would you buy that the working-class may be more effective communicators than university students?Labov uses examples and argument to demonstrate that a middle-class style is not the best standard against which to measure, that working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than middle-class speakers:

There are undoubtedly many verbal skills which children from ghetto areas must learn in order to do well in school, and some of these are indeed characteristic of middle-class verbal behavior. Precision in spelling, practice in handling abstract symbols, the ability to state explicitly the meaning of words, and a richer knowledge of the Latinate vocabulary may all be useful acquisitions. But is it true that all of the middle-class verbal habits are functional and desirable in school? Before we impose middle-class verbal style upon children from other cultural groups, we should find out how much of it is useful for the main work of analyzing and generalizing, and how much is merely stylistic–or even dysfunctional. In high school and college, middle-class children spontaneously complicate their syntax to the point that instructors despair of getting them to make their language simpler and clearer.

Our work in the speech community makes it painfully obvious that in many ways working-class speakers are more effective narrators, reasoners, and debaters than many middle-class speakers, who temporize, qualify, and lose their argument in a mass of irrelevant detail. Many academic writers try to rid themselves of the part of middle-class style that is empty pretension, and keep the part necessary for precision. But the average middle-class speaker that we encounter makes no such effort; he is enmeshed in verbiage, the victim of sociolinguistic factors beyond his control.

The article cautions against assumptions that all experts are created equal, that certain different ways of speaking are inferior, that teachers’ attitudes do not influence the success of a student, and that socioeconomic status plays no role in educational outcomes.

They are not. They are not. They do. It does. Reminds me to question my long-conditioned response to what Labov calls middle-class verbosity, how I’ve been trained to associate it with intelligence because it signals formal education, which is frequently and wrongly conflated with intelligence. Degrees do not intelligence make. As a writer and editor, in academic writing, I should know better. I do. I chase persuasive argument, simplicity, and clarity daily. But what about the rest of the world? The ones who assume a degree or certain “cultivated” way of speaking signals smarts? Who use transcripts, accents, or dialects as a way to inflate or dismiss a person’s worth or value?

Revision no. 2 is moving slower than fat slimy snails.

Thank you for reading Middle-Class Verbosity.

Sitting in literature classes, I recall being bored out of my mind, absolutely unappreciative, and sometimes mystified by what was considered Great and Literary. Some works I embraced wholeheartedly, forever welcoming insights I could only hope to experience in “real life”. Others? Well. I remember thinking the editor for T.S. Eliot’s poems did a sloppy job. And that my grade ten Shakespeare class was taught by an incoherent incompetent woman who probably was a frustrated aspiring writer who hated the sight of our blank faces. (I omitted the commas in honour of her.)

Instincts about what good writing might be are ceded without hesitation to the authorities, teachers and others who decide what is best. Because they are older, spent money on an Education degrees, and have visited the grave site of Milton. There is always someone more qualified goes the tired story.

For everyone involved, it’s too easy to dismiss what is at the core of literature (the subjective evaluation and consensual acceptance) and confuse perceptive adolescent judgment with incomplete development of the prefontal cortex and neurons misfiring. By university, it’s a bit of Dante’s inferno, all about deferring to the great thinkers and tenured professors, not always one and the same group.

How do we forget this fundamental subjectivity when trying to be authors, staring at rejection notes from publishers?

I came across a link listing rejection comments for some of our Great Literary bestsellers, and laughed. They are mini cautionary tales for aspiring novelists.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

‘an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.’

Catch – 22 by Joseph Heller

‘I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.’

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

‘… overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.’

And laughed even more. Whoever the person rejecting Heller’s work, that person reveals the publishing industry’s dark poker-playing subjective heart: not only don’t they have a clue, when it comes to genius, it’s a safe bet to reject it; because even the experts don’t understand genius and therefore are absolved if they don’t recognize it. (But just because your work is rejected, it wasn’t genius. But, it could be. You may never know.)

Clear as SF bay water.

Back to one hundred more pages of Frank O’Hara’s poems, a case study in how literary greatness is purely subjective. My husband, a scientist with a poetic soul, listened as I read aloud one poem and then shook his head, asking, “How the hell does a poetry editor make that judgment call??”

Exactly.

Thank you for reading Thank You But Knots.

After checking my email and prioritizing replies, mornings typically involve a tour through internet-land, with brief stops at Google+ or Twitter or LinkedIn. Yes, OR. Each fills a well-defined need, and not very well, I would say. Filtering through the data is a time-suck and the current solutions to this, personalized search results, can’t read my mind or predict what I want. Sometimes even I can’t!

To minimize lost time on needless internet things and to maximize the life balance I seek in my career and my life, where time is precious and writing, reading, editing, and research dominates my day (as does fulfilling the need for daily daily sunshine and in-person face-time), I have begun to regulate my social network internet use based on a five-day work week. This means I might peek at all three, but only one on any given day gets to suck me in.

This morning was Google+ time, with a little bit of uncircling due to a spontaneous Add Circle moment weeks ago, when over a hundred users I didn’t know became part of my Google+ network.  As a result, in an effort to open my network, I lost time blocking and muting a lot of posts and people. To make Google+ relevant and even enjoyable, I need to be selfish (versus obsequious) and carefully curate my circle members. To that effect, just because someone adds me or is already in my circle can no longer be reason enough to join or remain in my network.

Yes, I am advocating you go against the tide of expanding your network to selecting each new person based on very personal and particular goals. Being an early adopter of social networks (hello MySpace) and choosing to skip the Facebook fervour, I learned an important lesson about time management and social networks: more of the former, less of the latter because there is always going to be more content, but not more time. Less is more, even if this mantra goes against general opinion.

Popular opinion is to keep all doors open because you just never know, you know? Uncircling, unfollowing, these acts are problematic in that others may perceive it as an act of personal war, if the uncircled or unfollowed is a tad sensitive. So be it. We all want to be friendly, nice, and fair, but at what cost?

As a writer, an editor, a person who needs to frequently prospect for new work opportunities or readers, this move seems risky. Will I lose potential future readers because there was that one person long ago who I uncircled, not knowing they could influence my career at a critical point? Will I narrow my prospects and damage my career?

I doubt it. This kind of worry or thinking is symptomatic of a particular disease, one that touches many in all kinds of careers. It’s fear: of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, offending the wrong person. It’s also a forgetting, that no one can please everyone so it’s a waste of time to try (unless your job description calls for it; I’ve decided mine doesn’t).

Writers, as we know, can be a particularly neurotic bunch, susceptible to incredible insecurities. For that reason, writers need to learn how to accept that others’ feelings and perceptions cannot be controlled. They can’t. We are each free agents living in a world of diverse ideas, tastes, and knowledge. Accepting this is a fundamental, preparatory lesson for dealing with unavoidable rejection when soliciting agents or publishers and then the sometimes harsh criticism that can follow public exposure without feeling as if the soul has shattered. Writers, however and to their detriment, often imagine that writing is precisely about controlling a reader’s experience. Depends on your personal philosophy about what writing is meant to do. I like to think the good writers look to open up readers’ experiences by inviting them into a newly created world of ideas and stories.

In writing, and in social networking, you can’t please everyone, so go uncircle and unfollow, and write with all your heart about the things you believe in without believing others will or must get it as you do.

There was a certain creative freedom that resulted when I decided to trust my instincts and do what I needed regardless of popular or expert opinion. I didn’t even realize how I was slipping into the mode of popular thinking that is often the internet (popular gets conflated with expert), subjecting myself to its norms without too much thought, because my thinking was rundown by information overload.

I think it’s come to a point where everyone needs an individual personal mission statement for how technology is included in one’s life. I’m formulating mine to accommodate frequency and quality of use, because increased quality of content means the time I use is more efficient. Quality can mean many things. For example,  I’ll uncircle you if you lack civility or humility when commenting, because I value civil discourse and people who recognize errors and can take feedback without going immediately on the defensive. I’ll also uncircle you if the content proves over time to be recycled and repetitive.

With a beginning strategy to manage internet-land time, I am less distracted, better informed, and less stressed about writing. And, now that I am streamlining my circles, the possibility of finding wonderful content during my Google+ time is increasing. This morning I was thrilled to discover an infographic on beginning strategies for sparking blog writing ideas.

Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.

Thank you for reading Creating Time and Sparking Writing Ideas.