#62 - A Flowering Indivisible from Breathing
The Stylish Writer; Prodding the Uncreatives; Time Machine
Hello, my friends,
I sometimes talk about the small things one can do to improve life in a way that’s greatly out of proportion with the effort. Refinishing the relatively cheap tiles on my balcony is a recent example (#61), and I’ve got another one that the personal development gurus won’t tell you about: Get your knives sharpened! It is such a pleasure to smoothly cut into a crusty loaf of bread, a watermelon, the corpulent flesh of your enemies tomatoes, or anything else. There’s a knife sharpener (his company is called, ahem, Man of Steel Sharpening) that sets up his trailer at our local farmers market who is personable and highly competent. We took a lovely jaunt to the market as a family last week and dropped off a few knives. I’ve been marveling at their beautiful blades and chopping vegetables with ease ever since.
As it were, “Sharpen the Saw” is also Habit 7 of Stephen Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, a book I plan to reread during this quarter. The chapter starts with a story that is summarized well on the Real World Meditation website:
The story behind ‘sharpen the saw’ is about a novice lumberjack who cuts down a lot of trees on his first day but notices that the more experienced lumberjacks cut down more. So the next day he starts earlier but despite working incredibly hard he ends up having cut down less trees than the day before. The next day the same happens and he’s still working after everyone else has quit when one of the experienced loggers asks him how it’s going. He confesses that he doesn’t think he’s cut out for it because he worked longer on day 2, and then longer again on day 3 but he can’t match their output and everyday he is actually cutting down less trees. His colleague smiles and asks – ‘did you stop to sharpen your saw?’.
Is there a connection between getting your knives sharpened and Covey’s saw habit? Sure there is: They’re both good for you!
The Stylish Writer
My friend (and HMF reader), Steve, recently asked me what I would call my writing style. “Depends on where I'm writing,” I answered, “So, I guess you could say adaptable.” How about your newsletter, he probed. “Conversational,” I responded, “I want it to feel like I'm just talking to you.” Then he hit me with a question that really got me thinking:
It’s a great question because there isn’t a single, simple answer — entire books are written to try to explain an author’s opinion on the subject. It was more than I wanted to take on in Facebook Messenger, where we were chatting, so I asked Steve if I could bring his question here and he agreed. Despite the complexity of the question, my knee-jerk answer was one word: Practice. But that’s wholly inadequate, isn’t it?
If we’re talking about the conversational style of HMF, it bears mentioning that my first blog — the place where I first began “speaking” to an online audience — was on MySpace over twenty years ago. That means that the “voice” you’re reading now has had easily hundreds of thousands words of experience. In terms of development, that translates to countless cycles of writing, reading the writing, evaluating, reflecting, rewriting. That process helped me develop a feel for rhetorical devices I prefer, word choice, level of idiosyncratic and idiomatic expression, and the manifold other qualities stuffed into the sack labelled “writing style”.
If you’ve been reading HMF long (and carefully) enough, you know that I like maintaining a mix of colloquial language with highfalutin words and phrases, that a humorous device I often use is the non sequitur (which is why readers of HMF keep their trusty salad bowl hats at the ready), that I always use the Oxford comma, and that I’m a fan of lists. I also ask questions, don’t I? (See: Two paragraphs up) There are other characteristics of my personal style, I’m sure. Perhaps someday, someone will turn an AI loose on my corpus of writing and uncover further stylistic truths.
Returning to my initial conversation with Steve, a key aspect in discussing writing styles is that, as with actors playing roles in a movie, a single writer can take on as many as they have the talent for. Thus, while what you get here is probably the closest thing to how I normally talk, I’m able to adapt my writing “voice” to circumstance.
When I write for work I strive to use plain language,
My Medium pieces about libraries for EveryLibrary Magazine take on the character of a friendly expert sharing with a lay audience (something like “Oleg talks libraries at your family dinner”),
My contributions on Wikipedia stick to the house style (encyclopedic),
When I write slightly more academic stuff like my chapter on “library empowerment” (a term I coined) in Librarians with Spines, Vol 3., it’s dense and full of citations,
And when I ghostwrite…Well, it’s like I’m not even there!
I suppose that there is some invisible machinery inside that realigns my inner voice to change styles though I can describe the qualities of each (as I did above with my “personal” voice) if I consider it. In fact, the answer to the second part of Steve’s question — whether style is a conscious thing I’m always thinking about as I write — is no. I’d say it’s more akin to a jazz musician hearing a melody, picking up the key, and jumping in. What I do consciously think about when I’m writing is the audience; who am I writing for? Sometimes down to an individual person, real or imaginary. How do I want them to feel? What do I want them to take away? What elements of the writer’s technique should I use to make that happen.
Funny story: Back in 2018, Ashley and I went to the Santa Barbara Film Festival to watch the premiere of Emilio Estevez’s latest film, the public, about a stand-off between Cincinatti’s homeless, who wanted to use their central library as a makeshift shelter during a major storm, and the establishment figures who refused. When I was writing up a review of the movie for EveryLibrary, the audience member in my mind was Estevez himself, who directed and starred in it. Wildly enough, not long after the review was published Mr. Estevez sent me a nice message on Facebook and we had an in-depth conversation about various aspects of the film. It’s not every day that an article published for the general public is noticed by the exact person you had in mind when writing it, but apparently it does happen!
But back to the point of this ruckus: How does one develop a writing style? Do all of this:
Write a whole bunch of words in the style of your choice. If it’s your personal voice you want. Who are you? How do you speak out loud and how do you speak in your mind? It’ll be easiest to develop a writing style if you find some common ground there.
Read back your writing. Out loud is best. Does it sound like the style you’re attempting. If not, ask yourself, “How would I (or whoever you’re writing as) actually say that?”
Explore the writing of master stylists. Not every writer has a notable style. But a few most certainly do. David Sedaris, for instance, is absolutely masterful at using a “personal” voice. I’ve listened to his work as audiobooks and have read his pieces in the New Yorker and that man’s written word sounds exactly like his spoken voice! It’s uncanny and amazing! Long ago, I read the expatriate writer Vladimir Nabokov’s style when writing in English described as something like a bunch of surgical tools falling to the floor. I’d describe his writing in Russian as more akin to someone whispering soft indeterminate words into your ear. Returning to essayists, E.B. White was known for his neat, charming style (though not necessarily in his book, Elements of Style). The science fiction writer Ben Bova writes in a straightforward, hard-boiled way that one could also describe as a workmanlike non-style. Sherwood Anderson, a fav of mine (see #50), took on the persona of an old storyteller in his essays, novels, and stories. However, Anderson was an ad man for over a decade before turning to fiction where he employed a totally different style. In the late 1920’s, he bought two newspapers on opposite ends of the political spectrum and wrote both of them! Speaking of style, Anderson was also known for wearing snazzy neckerchiefs and floppy, colorful ties.
I’d be tickled to complicate things more, but the reality is that developing a writing style, much like most things in life, is mostly a matter of labor. It helps if you have talent, but not all that much. It also helps if you like writing. Otherwise, all that effort amounts to drudgery and the resulting accomplishment only means more of the same. The best advice I could give for a person who has important ideas or stories to share but doesn’t care for writing is to keep style out of it. Use plain language and get the idea across in as few words as possible. Bonus points for keeping the word short.
Prodding the Uncreatives
My strictly layperson’s definition of creativity is the [force, process, impulse] that brings about an act of creation — a re-jiggering of the material of existence, corporeal and not, to invent something that did not exist before. In the strictest sense, to be alive is to be creative. After all, everyone poops!
In a looser sense, though, pooping is less impressive than making up a new song about a completely unique feeling or experience that forges it’s own genre and uses a totally original tonal scale. Cooooool, the cynic in me says, but it’s still bound by the physics of sound so it’s not totally original.
The cynic in me may be a jackass. But he’s my jackass.
Are most people creative even in the middle-of-the-road way? Above #2 but below the song of the angels? At work, I often find that it’s hard for people to draw from their personal resources; a lot of “innovation” is carried out by looking online for something similar and copying it. That’s a little bit creative, it’s true, but I yearn to experience the beam of people’s uniqueness in it’s totality. Give me something from inside yourself that only you can create at this moment (or the next few days) since it’s due next week. I’d like to say this but it would scare too many people.
Michael had a recycling project to do for school so I asked him what he wanted to make and he wanted a Komodo Dragon, which is really quite a beast. Fine, I said, and drew up a plan, measured out parts of a large cardboard box we had around, and set to cutting. Michael colored the monster and we put it together. He’s in preschool so there was really no bar for this casual assignment. We didn’t even really have to do it. Nevertheless, this was an opportunity to further my ultimate goal of showing Michael that if he ever has an idea, he can carry it out. Want to make a poisonous, Indonesian, monitor lizard? Let’s go! Want to create your own table-top RPG game? We’ve done it. Want to bake a cake? Sure thing.
My wish for the world is for there to be someone standing next to each person who has a (non-hurtful) idea or needs to think of one whispering “Please try. Please try. Please try.” Because trying is the first step to “I can”. And I’ll die on the hill of everyone having at least some latent, unfulfilled creative potential even if it’s just following a simple recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich. In my imagination is the moment where they slightly diverge from the recipe by adding a pinch of pepper. That’s when the world starts becoming theirs.
Time Machine
Here’s what I wrote in HMF a year ago (in issue #9):
Come on, Jobbo: I interviewed for a job and (spoiler alert) didn’t get it. But I didn’t know it at the time. There, I’m talking about the unnatural dynamic of job interviews.
Balcony Scene: I bought tiles for the balcony and it’s a big improvement!
A Battle of Sentiments: A tribute to OrangeTheory, written upon quitting.
I yearn to play StoryGame, in which I tame a Komodo Dragon.
That was a very well written explanation regarding writing styles. I love the behind the curtain insight. Thank you. You're a walking Swiss Army knife of talents! Awesome!