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When I’m not hunched over my novel or sneaking you these blog posts from the depths of the Writer-Cave, I do in fact have a day job: Software Developer, Business Analyst, Computer Dude. In the course of said job, I read a lot of business writing: e-mails, product documentation, sales pitches, and so on. While much of it is fairly clear and understandable, there’s a good chunk that sounds like this (made-up) example:

This application provides visibility into the activities of the workforce. Going forward in the near term, an enhancement will be developed that grants the ability to access the application via the Internet.

When what they mean is this:

This software shows what your employees are doing. Soon we’re going to put it online.

Why do people write that way?

There are a couple of reasons, I think. First, some people believe that utilizing sesquipedalian verbiage results in a perception of intelligence – whoops, I mean, that using big words makes you look smart. They may not believe this explicitly, but there’s a sort of instict that says anything official should use official-sounding, multi-syllable Latin words. Surely, words like “show” and “help” and “fix” are just too simple for business writing, aren’t they?

But the deeper reason, I think, is simpler. People do it because other people do it. It’s what they’re used to. When writing is not your main focus, you are (understandably) less inclined to spend a lot of time thinking about it, so you just use the first words that come to mind. And if half the stuff you read sounds like that sample above, then the first words that come to mind may not be the best.

Of course, there are sometimes legitimate reasons for writing a little fluff. Let’s say you’re drafting an e-mail where your real message is “You’re lazy, and you haven’t done a damn thing for three months, so let’s get moving, huh?” Perhaps you want to soften that a bit; perfect clarity is not always best. Yet even in situations like that, there’s no need to put your sentences through the kind of verbal gymnastics we saw earlier. You can obscure your true meaning skillfully without sounding like the Architect.

I’m not the first person to rant about this. George Orwell framed the whole issue beautifully in his essay Politics and the English Language, which I highly recommend (though I quibble with a few of his minor points). My favorite part of the essay is when he takes this passage from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

…and renders it in official-speak:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Sad, huh? But people actually write that way. I’ll slip into it myself when I’m not careful.

Do the world a favor. To facilitate comprehension, employ the vernacular.

Be clear.

So we were talking about last Friday’s poll, in which most of you agreed that “good afternoon” is more formal than “good morning,” and I was saying how that means words have shades of meaning beyond their basic dictionary definitions.

“Wow,” you said, “that’s genius, Brian, genius. Have you told the Nobel committee yet? Do they give prizes for blog posts? Is there maybe an award for being obvi – ”

Listen, hypothetical reader, there’s no need to get snippy. I write these things on no coffee, at a time of day when all the windows are black with the darkness of ain’t no sun up yet.

But look, a few more things to point out here:

First, these extra shades of meaning will be different for different readers. A few readers said “good afternoon” and “good morning” sounded equally (in)formal, so if you were trying for a certain effect by using one or the other, it wouldn’t work on them. Same goes for referencing literature (not everyone will know the work you’re trying to evoke) and various other shades of meaning.

This stuff can be regional too, of course. A good friend of mine is in London right now. I understand that if he tried to take a “torch” on a “lift” with his “mate” over there, it might result in a lot less burning and jail time than if he tried it here. (Actual British people, feel free to mock my primitive understanding of y’all’s dialect.)

Another point is that you, as a writer, are not going to have all this stuff straight in your own brain either. One reason I did this poll in the first place is that I wasn’t even sure if “good afternoon” was more formal. “Is that right,” I said to myself in my cranium, “or is that another one of those things I dreamed up with my hash pipe, like bubble wrap armor, or the color magenta?” You don’t know! Some stuff you can look up (literary references being a good example) but a lot of subtle stuff, you have to just ask people, or wing it.

All of which segues nicely into my final point: don’t let it paralyze you.

Yes, everything you write (every – single – word) is positively dripping with subtle juices, and yes, people will judge you on all of them, and no, nobody will agree on what those subtleties are, and no, you won’t have a clue about half of them either. Don’t worry about it. I mean, do your best with it, try to manage the minutiae, but don’t get so caught up in it that you stop with the actual writing.

Actually, that applies to most writing rules, come to think of it.

Poll results! The vast majority of you (70%) said “good afternoon” sounds more formal than “good morning.” A few people didn’t have a preference, but not one person said “good morning” sounds more formal. For the record, I agree with the majority here.

Okay. So what was the point of that?

The first and biggest point is that words and phrases have many shades of meaning beyond what’s in their dictionary entries. Nothing about the words “afternoon,” “morning,” or “good,” suggests any particular degree of formality, yet somehow “good afternoon” does. Why? I don’t know. I’m sure there’s a history there, something that research could probably uncover. That’s not the point. The point is that the extra meaning is there, seemingly without reason, and you as a writer are responsible for knowing about it.

Other examples are endless. “Good day” sounds (to my ear) even more formal than “good afternoon,” though again, I couldn’t say why. If a character gets a phone call asking for Samantha, it says something different about her as a person if she answers “That’s me” versus “This is she.”

It’s not just about degrees of formality, of course. You evoke other stories and events by your word choices. For instance, you can never, ever say “final solution” – no matter how logical the phrase may be in context – without evoking Hitler. You can never use the words “gospel” or “crucify” without reminding people of Jesus. The word “columbine” means “dove-colored,” but for anyone born before 1999, it’s going to mean something else, too. If you start a chapter with the phrase “Call me [character name],” you’re referencing Moby-Dick. If you use the phrase “ineluctable modality” (as I so often do in conversation) then all of a sudden you’re talking about Ulysses.

If you use words like “proletariat” and “bourgeois,” people will wonder why you’re talking about Marxism. If you say “towards” instead of “toward,” you’re signalling that you prefer British usage to American. In the book Kraken that I’m reading now, the author China Mieville uses the nonstandard “alright” instead of the more proper “all right,” which is a sign to the reader that the book will be something a little different, a little relaxed and not bound too tight by convention (even though he uses words like “aleatory” later on).

Okay, this is turning into a longer post than I expected, and I’m running out of time this morning. I actually have other points to make besides just “words have shades of meaning.” Hold those thoughts! I’ll come back tomorrow and finish.

The red phone rang last night, its soft siren wailing in my cavernous lair like a jilted lover. Only one person calls on the red phone.

The Chairman of the Internet.

“Herr Buckley,” she said, in that thick accent I could never quite place. “It is very serious. The webs, they have plenty of cat photos, a surfeit of popups, an excess of indie rock album reviews. But by God, we need more blog polls, and we need them now.”

“It shall be done, Madam Chairman,” I said, because that’s what you say when you’re talking on the red phone.

So, here we go. Poll question. It may seem strange, but please give it a vote, and I’ll explain on Monday.

And if nobody answers, then on Monday I’m just going to look like a dumbass. So, electoral participation and all that. Otherwise, fascism wins.

And nobody likes a Mr. Fascism.

Have a good weekend!

Writing is hard, impossibly hard. We all know that.

I mean, look at what you’re doing. Just to get in the game, just as the price of admission, you have to follow literally hundreds of different rules about grammar, punctuation, and spelling – all the time. These rules are arbitrary, contradictory, vague, and ambiguous, accumulated over millennia as English wrapped itself around every other language it could find and absorbed little pieces, amoeba-like. What’s more, no one quite agrees on all the rules. So, you know, good luck with all that.

All the rules above get you no points if you follow them; you only lose points if you don’t.

Next, you need a story. You need to create believable characters, which merely means running the brains of a dozen other people inside yours like virtual servers. You need a believable world, which only means inventing a universe’s worth of specific, concrete, consistent details. You need a good plot, which just means architecting human conflict like a cathedral.

Grab the reader’s interest instantly, but don’t promise anything you can’t deliver. Unite your book with common themes, but don’t bludgeon the reader with them. No cliches. No info dumps. No Mary Sues. Nothing predictable. Nothing boring.

Now, do all the above, and also make it real and powerful and genuine and heartbreaking.

Oh, yeah, and everyone else is doing that, too; so make it different than everyone else’s books.

And if you get a chance, go ahead and wade through a multi-tier system of judgment and rejection in which – and I’m being charitable here – 99% of you won’t make it.

Yeah. Writing is hard.

But here’s the thing: writing is easy. You know why? Because you sit down, and you move your fingers. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Let me say that again: you sit down, and you move your fingers.

Specifically, your job as writer does not require you to do any of the following.

Running into a battlefield and getting shot at by the forces of Muammar Gaddafi. Relying on your own steady fingers to save someone’s life in an operation. Starving. Spending decades in a prison cell. Spending decades hounded by secret police. Jumping out of a plane with no idea what will happen when you land. Sifting through the remains of a town after a tsunami swept most of it away.

I’m not trying to be dramatic or depressing. I’m trying to make a point. If writing is monumentally, inconceivably difficult (and it is), it is also absurdly easy. You sit down, and you move your fingers.

May we all be lucky enough to find a challenge so easy, and so hard.

I am pleased to announce that my writing has ascended to a higher plane.

I used to do my novel revision downstairs, but we were painting that room, so we had to move all the furniture out. And we’re keeping everything out for a couple weeks since we’re going to install new carpet too. So my computer’s upstairs. See, when I said “ascended,” I meant I had literally taken my computer and…

What? You already got it? It wasn’t funny? You’re tapping your watch impatiently?

If it’s any consolation, this story has a point.

See, I have Internet access downstairs (which is how I’m posting this now, from my lap-top laptop) but not upstairs. I’m doing my writing on a disconnected computer.

I’m really surprised how much better that is.

I mean, I’ve heard other people talk about it. “Disconnect thy Internet,” they intone ominously, “lest thou be distracted by its sparkliness.” Pshaw, I thought. I was (and am) self-disciplined enough that I could still get my hour of writing time in. See, I use a stopwatch to make sure I write a full hour (or half hour, or two hours, or whatever time I’m shooting for that day, depending on how much free time I have) and if I get interrupted or feel the need to surf, I pause the stopwatch. That way, I’m sure that an hour really means an hour. And once I got into that habit, I wasn’t stopping my watch for surfing very much anymore. Writing time really was writing time.

But here’s the thing – there actually is a mental difference (for me, at least) between not using the Internet and not having the Internet. When I have the Internet, I still use it for little things, like looking up words and synonyms, and using Google for research. And those are useful tools, don’t get me wrong. But they always carry the temptation of doing more, surfing more, and it takes mental energy to fight that. And even these small disruptions, writing-related though they may be, are not actually writing. It’s a kind of distraction.

Having no Internet at all enforces a sort of mental austerity. It’s liberating. You’re here to write, and you write. You have a job to do, and you do it.

I am a fan of that.

Oh, by the way, I used to use Online Stopwatch for the aforementioned stopwatchery, and I’ve found it extremely useful. But that’s tricky now sans Interwebs. Anyone know of another smart way to do this, short of actually buying a physical stopwatch?

Second pass revision status: 59% (write faster, penmonkey!!)

I’ve been reading a lot about David Foster Wallace lately – old interviews, new reviews of The Pale King, old reviews of Infinite Jest, all sorts of articles. He’s made headlines recently because of The Pale King, but my interest in him isn’t new. I’ve been fascinated by him for a long time.

Hard to say exactly why. I’m much less interested in, say, Jonathan Franzen, who occupies a similar spot in the literary world. I haven’t even read any of DFW’s novels yet (have to remedy that someday).

Partly, I’m sure, my fascination comes from reviewers and authors who keep using words like “transcendent” and “brilliant” to describe his work. Partly it’s because I love what I have read – mostly essays and short fiction. (I recommend “The Depressed Person” and, most especially, “This Is Water,” which actually made me cry; your mileage may vary.) Partly it’s because of his own tragic story: his lifelong battle against depression, drugs, and alcohol, his suicide in 2008. Partly it’s his staggering vocabulary, which guarantees I will learn awesome new words like “fantods” every time I read his stuff. Partly it’s because, unlike so many other Great Men of Genius™, he seems to have been a warm, kind, and genuinely compassioniate person. And partly it’s because he was crazy, crazy smart, about everything from English to math to the game of tennis.

I came across this in one of his old essays that I stumbled across yesterday:

The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo’s “Mao II,” where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebo-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.

The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it — a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception — yes, understand: grotesque because _imperfect_. And yet it’s yours, the infant is, it’s _you_, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebro-spinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left…

This is so very true. I love it.

Currently I’m waiting on partial-manuscript critiques from two different people whose opinions I value highly. Both will likely be a few weeks yet. I’m both excited and nervous to hear what they say.

I’m also struck by just how much of the writing and publishing process is simply waiting.

Not a new insight, I’m aware, but still: waiting on critiques from beta readers, then waiting on agents to reply to queries, then to partial manuscripts, then to full manuscripts, then waiting on a publishing contract, then waiting on the long process of actually getting a book published. And then, waiting on the reviews. I’m getting far ahead of myself here (personally I’ve never gotten further than step 4), but I know where the road leads.

And then there’s waiting on yourself, to finish writing. Watching the progress bar move like frozen molasses at a How Slow Can You Move convention. This, at least, you can control. This, at least, you know exactly how it’s going (or you think you do). But still: waiting.

The antidote for waiting is, of course, to do other things. It’s been a good weekend for that. We painted the computer room, mowed the lawn, took out the recyling, ordered new carpet, and finished our income taxes this weekend. (And can I just say, Columbus, your tax forms fail in ways I didn’t think it was possible to fail. Line 9: Enter the amount from line 8. They’re right next to each other. They’re the same number. You know why they’re the same number? Because you told me to write the same @$#%!@$@ number!!)

So, lots of good things getting done in Chez Buckley, especially with weather that thinks it’s summer. (Though, this being Ohio, I am not surprised this morning to hear a storm blowing outside.) And thus the waiting is bearable.

But still.

Oscar Wilde’s philosophy on dealing with bad reviews:

Found via Nathan Bransford’s blog.

They should invent some kind of nerd detection system, to sift out our nation’s nerds at an early age, test them, and rank them according to nerdiness.

Ha! My mistake. This already exists, and it is called the National Spelling Bee. And ladies and gentlemen, I am very nerdy indeed. May I present Exhibit A:

…hm. Well, it seems that after several minutes of hunting, I can’t find the cover of the 2000 official spelling bee booklet to show you. But rest assured, my little face is on it. I made it to Nationals twice, in seventh and eighth grade, and the second time I got ninth place in the nation.

I know, right? Kick-ass. In the nerdiest possible way, which is pretty much how I roll.

I was thinking about all this once again because just yesterday, the company I work for sponsored a team for a local-area bee to raise money for literacy, and I was part of the six-person team. That was a lot of fun, not least because we won for the second year in a row. (Wooo!! Take that, other local organizations!!!)

Some interesting words, too. For instance, I had only the vaguest notion that there are two different words pronounced “sah-shay.” One is spelled phonetically, “sashay,” and means “to walk or move nonchalantly.” The other is “sachet” and refers to a small bag of potpourri. If you knew that already, well, aren’t you smart! But it was news to me.

All of which demonstrates a fundamental truth: English be crazy, yo.

Have a good weekend, everybody.