Apt. 11D

Making Shit Up

Tom Kreider writes about how audiences want writers to be smart and expert, but really they are just making shit up. 

Alicia’s an artist, too, and understands how audiences tend to ascribe magisterial intention and control to artists, when more often we’re just making it up as we go, doing the best we can by deadline.

Daily Blogging and What It Does to Us

This July will mark my tenth anniversary of blogging. For ten years, I've written at least one blog post every single weekday. That's a long time. I've written nearly 5,000 blog posts. I did it during leisurely mornings like this one, but also during times when I had two hours of sleep because of work and family obligations. 

I'm not entirely sure why I blog. It really doesn't bring in much money. Sometimes I get aggravated. I suppose that I had proper reasons for blogging when I started, but those reasons are long forgotten. Now it's just a habit. 

Blogging is a community effort when it's done best. It's a conversation between other bloggers and the peanut gallery. Between all of us, we've logged nearly 44,000 comments. 1.6 million unique pageviews and 2.9 million total hits. It's strange and nice to see so many people who started blogging ten years ago are still at it. Some do it only when inspiration strikes; others went pro. Some migrated to Twitter. And it's strange and nice to see that so many blog commenters have stuck around here for so many years. 

What has all this blog writing and commenting done to us? It's an intense activity after all. It must have some impact. 

Does blogging make us better writers? In some ways, yes. I can shoot out 500 words in less than fifteen minutes. My sentences are definitely better than they were even two years ago. I am better at picking topics that interest people. If you know that readers are showing up and looking for new content, you get stuff done. You finish things off and accept that imperfection is better than nothing. 

On the other hand, blogging makes it difficult to write other things. A person only has so many words in them in one day. If you use up that quota on a blog, it is difficult to do other writing projects.

Also, blogging is a highly ADD activity. We careen from topic to topic. To write something that's worthy of publication, you need to plug away at the same topic for days at a time. You have to edit and re-edit and edit again. I may not be able to do that anymore. 

And what about the conversations? If you are a regular reader on this blog, I assume that you are also participating in conversations on other blogs as well. You're also probably participating in similar chatter on Twitter and Facebook. What has this conversation done to us? 

You all know that you're not regular people, right? People who participate in online political conversations are more educated and more political active than the regular population. I think we're in our own little bubbles, not necessarily organized by ideology, but bubbles of intellectual privilege. Sometimes after there's a big hoopla going on the Internet about the topic of the day, I'll call a real life friend and ask her what she thinks about the hoopla topic.  It's a nice little reality check for me, because I'll realize that most people don't know about the hoopla topic and really don't care. 

There are also many little surprising gifts that have come from blogging. Virtual friends have become real friends. People gave me support when things were rough or helped out professionally. Now, I'm going to become all weepy and sentimental, so I'm going to walk away from this post. Because in the blogging world, a rough, sloppy, sentimental conclusion is okay. 

30,000 Words of Crap

A couple of years ago, I decided to write a book. I figured that I had read just about every book about autism and had tons of personal stories about it, so I should I write a book. Piece of cake. I wrote a dissertation after all and had years of blogs posts that could be stitched together. In a month, I would have a best seller! Guest spot on Letterman! A country house by the beach! That how I roll. It's only a matter of seconds between the idea and the country house and Letterman. 

I actually hammered away at the project for about six months. I have files of documents in Dropbox. Chapters  are organized in Scrivener. Because electronically organizing words is much better than writing words. 

I retired this project back in 2011. Writing little articles was much more fun and provided immediate gratification. Also, the book-writing process was becoming more and more painful. It was probably painful, because the whole thing sucked. 

I opened the files this weekend for the first time in two years. Boy, was it awful! I was unable to commit to one type of book, so I tried to do everything at the same time. It was part memoir, part academic, and part tips and tricks/humor. The memoir was overwritten and melodramatic. Nothing salvageable there. The academic stuff was ok, but could be boiled down to an article about how kids with special needs received no public education until the 1970s, and now special education takes up about 25 percent of all education money. The tips and tricks stuff could be brushed off. Maybe I'll do that. 

You know, it's really hard to write a book. Hats off to all my friends who have done it. It's more than just stringing together some words. Spewing out words is not a problem for me. I think that to write a book, one needs a commitment to tell one story. That's not a easy task. 

Working From Home: Should Do and Shouldn't Do

I have had 9-5 desk jobs only sporadically in my life. I successfully avoided that fate by hiding out in grad school and in academia most of the time. I certainly never did a job like Steve, which involves being glued to a chair for nine hours per day. Darling husband is a martyr to our mortgage. 

Working from home has its advantages, but it also involves a great deal of discipline and internal rules. Deviate from those rules, and it's a slippery slope down to crazy-land. 

One of my rules is that the paying gig comes first. I write best in the morning, so now that Ian's gray van has picked him for school and Steve has driven Jonah to school for extra math help, I really should be working on the freelance article. 

I dashed off 500 words yesterday about the impending cuts in education. The article really demanded some fucking pie charts, but I sent it off without the fucking pie charts and a note to the editor to tell me if wanted some fucking pie charts. He wants the fucking pie charts. I spent an hour searching the web  for some pre-existing pie charts and couldn't find anything that was accurate, so now I have to put some numbers in Excel and make my own fucking pie charts. 

I'm stalling here. And violating one of the rules, which is the paying gig comes before blogging. 

Other rules that have developed over time include no reading novels during the day, no TV watching, no video games other than really dumb ones that only take up five minutes here and there. All writing and Internet surfing must end up noon. The three hours before the kids come home are for the gym and chores. Once a week, I must have lunch with my sister or friends, because you need interaction with real people, so you don't end up in crazy-land. 

I've been doing a lot of rule breaking lately. Yesterday, I read Angela's Ashes all day. I haven't been to the gym in several days.

I need to get myself together here and make the fucking pie-charts. 

Writing For Free

There was a big kerfuffle in the Internet yesterday about a writer who was asked to repurpose an article for the Atlantic for free. 

I've been writing freelance articles for the Atlantic for the past year and would like to continue to do so. Therefore, I have to be very measured in this post. Actually, I probably shouldn't say anything and just link to others. 

Check out New York Magazine, Felix Salmon, Timothy Burke, Matt Yglesias,  ...

Freelance writing does not lead to great riches. Freelance anything doesn't lead to great riches right now. My best friend is a freelance book editor, and she's had to scramble quite a bit in the past couple of years.

My advice? It's worth writing for little money, if you get something else out of the deal. For me, I've learned a ton about writing for a mainstream audience and gotten some street cred, so it's been worthwhile. If you already have street cred and really need cash, then you have to get a staff position at one of the many online news sources. They are hiring and expanding. 

BlogHer

I'm part of the BlogHer advertising network. It provides a little income to this blog and other blogs that are written by women. 

They highlighted the post that I wrote on Monday about Steve's fabulous lunches and asked if I could send a little traffic their way. 

The New Essayists

There's been lots of drama about Chris Hughes putting his stamp on the New Republic. Martin Peretz is not pleased. Whatevs. I think the online content looks fabulous. 

I particularly liked Adam Kirsch's article about the new essayists. 

The self, then, has always been at the heart of the literary essay. But the new essay is exclusively about the self, with the world serving only as a foil and an accessory, as a mere staging ground for the projection of the self. Formally, one might describe the work of Sedaris, Crosley, Rothbart, and company as autobiographical comic narrative: short, chatty, funny stories about things that happened to me—weird things, or ordinary things that are made weird in the telling. What we now call an essayist used to be called a humorist. Sedaris’s books are sold as essays, but he is plainly trying to be Thurber, not Addison.

Writing Tips

I took this week to read a bunch of random things and come up with new ideas.

I wasn't happy with the types of things that I've been publishing lately. Too journalistic-y. Straight journalism isn't a practical career choice for me. The field is crowded with too many 20-somethings living and working in DC or NYC, and I'm not there. It doesn't pay enough, and it isn't my strength. Essays bring me more joy, so I'm writing something long and rambling that brings in some of the reading that I've been doing lately --Young Adult dystopian novels. It's fun enough to justify the crappy money. 

I meandered over to Veronica Roth's blog this morning. She's the author of Divergent and Insurgence, two books that I read this week. She has some useful writing advice that could apply to non-fiction topics, too. And I see she uses my favorite writing software, Scrivener. 

Respect the Classics, Man

I had a little crisis this morning as I reviewed the three open articles on my desktop and decided that I didn't care about them. They were taking me to a very boring place that I didn't feel like going, so I stepped back. When you don't like what you're writing, it's best to read stuff that you love to remember where you are going.

And that's what I'm doing for the next week. I'm not worrying about blogging or deadlines or the pressure to publish something really soon oh God I haven't published anything since December I better hurry or else I am a huge stupid failure and i haven't kept up with the chatter on twitter i am going to lose followers.

Yeah, I went to that place for a moment this morning. So, I'm stepping back and reading. I'll share some goodies as I go along, but I'm mostly unplugged for a week. 

Memoir Writing and Writing In General

After some severe ripples in the force that began last November, life is finally returning back to normal.

The kids go to school. I sit at the computer for four hours. I wash my face and go to the gym. Do a couple of errands. Shower. Collect the kids from the bus. Help them with homework. Do a load of laundry. Make dinner. Then return to the computer to answer e-mail and such. It's very boring, but boring is absolutely necessary to get work done. 

I've written a couple of articles in the past couple of months, but I could do more. For the first time in ages, I thought about a book that I started a while back and put down in the midst of a different set of crises. Maybe I should look at it again. 

I started writing something that is very like what I do here at Apt. 11D - a mixture of memoir and politics. The crises were the major reason that I put it down, but I also had doubts about the whole memoir thing.

Have we been memoir-ed out? Why should I give a crap about a middle aged woman's  Brooklyn brownstone and her self tranformation through yoga? Why should I care about Naomi Wolff's new orgasm? Why are the best women writers of our time telling us about yoga and orgasms and their parenting choices? Why have women put themselves in the memoir ghetto? Can't we do something else? I still don't have answers to those questions. 

Elizabeth Wurtzel's piece in New York magazine is a prime reason that I stopped working on the memoir. I didn't want to write something like that. 

But Katie Roiph steps up to remind us that there are good memoirs and gives some examples of quality writing in this genre. 

Michael Berube's latest MLA speech (a good speech, btw) refers to a passage in Patrica Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child: A Memoir of Unexpected Joy (a good book, btw) which talks about her decision to leave academia and become a writer. It struck me that a good memoir shouldn't be about me, me, me. It should make some points about the world or politics or life. It should make an argument in there. I don't think enough memoirs do that. 

Well, this morning I'm going to work on a new article proposal, not the book. But I may open those old files and just to remind myself where I was. Maybe I'll start working on it tomorrow. 

UPDATE: Katie Roiph linked to DFW's "A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again." Just reading now for the first time and loving it.