Category: Writingthoughts

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And This Was The Day Job, June 2012

It’s invoice time, which means I have to go back through everything I’ve written for money in the last month, counting up what I did and where it is and then asking people for said money. But, in the process of coming up with that list this month, I thought I’d share with you what I got up to last month, in terms of output:

Newsarama:
64 blog posts
3 Top 10 features
Contributions to another 3 Top 10 features
1 news story that never saw print for some mysterious reason

Digital Trends:
44 news stories

SpinOff Online:
18 op-ed pieces

Comics Alliance:
42 news stories

Robot 6:
4 op-ed pieces

Time Entertainment:
4 longform essays

Maybe it’s just me, but that feels like a lot of stuff for a month. If nothing else, it’s having to write anywhere between, say, 200 and 2000 words on 183 different subjects. Yes, there’s a lot of overlap (and a little repetition) in those subjects, but still. I am a little bit in awe of myself, and also finally giving me a break for (a) constantly feeling overwhelmed and (b) slacking off on this here blog when I do.

(For those wondering about word counts, it’s at least 19,800 for Digital Trends, where stories have to be above 450 words, and I’d guess somewhere in the region of 6,000 words for the Time pieces, which tend to even out somewhere in the region of 1,500 words all told. You’ve got me for however many words I write on average for the other outlets, though.)

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I Wanna Be Free

Here’s David Brothers writing about the Internet’s perception of him as “a negative guy”:

I went all in with comics journo and I realized a while back that that was a mistake. I got into news, covering conventions, interviews, and all this other smokescreen stuff when all I really wanted to do is have a place to talk about these stupid, amazing comics. I’m trying to correct my course now, I’ve been trying to correct my course, because I realize that doing all of that brought me dangerously close to burning out, and then I burned out anyway.

I understand why people like to see hit pieces over gushing. There’s a thrill in seeing something get taken apart, and it turns out that the same mind that makes me good at gushing also makes me pretty good at hit pieces. But I hate the fact that this short attention span-having internet looks at me like I’m that dude when I’ve worked so hard to not be seen as that guy. I hate that guy. But it is what it is, and here we are.

I have a personal troll over at Newsarama. Seriously; someone created a comment account called “The Anti-Graemator” (or something really similar; I can’t be bothered to check, but I’m pretty sure that’s right) that exists purely to comment after articles about how I suck. It was a weird discovery, that one, and even now I can’t quite believe someone was that upset/bored/a combination of the two to actually do it, but it’s also good in a way because it’s a reminder that there will always, always be people on the Internet who don’t care what you write because they know what they think of you and that’s the narrative they keep in their heads. Content is less important than perception, for a lot of people, even people who should know better. I don’t know if it’s really the “short attention span-having Internet,” or whether it’s the selfishness and self-centeredness of the audience as a whole these days, but still. It’s amusing, depressing and exhausting, all at once. I’m not sure how to react to it, sometimes, and so I find myself ignoring it and keeping on keeping on. One day, I think, maybe they’ll see something that so obviously contradicts their construction of “who I am” that they’ll start to look past the prejudice.

Ah, misplaced optimism. What would I do without you?

(David is, it’s worth pointing out, not a “negative guy” at all; another short-sightedness of the mass audience is to confuse “This is bad, I have problems with it and here’s why” with “I hate that thing you like, I hate everything.” But you knew that already, right?)

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Director’s Cut Material!

And here’s the paragraph I took out of this week’s Time piece before I even submitted it:

It’s not as if Marvel hasn’t worked hard to keep Spider-Man’s popularity up; every couple of years, a storyline will ensure enough outrage to get the hardcore fan base complaining and driving attention to the series. Last year, the publisher gained mainstream attention for the character by killing Peter Parker (Don’t worry, he’s fine; it was the Peter Parker of another world), just three years after doing the same by having the Devil undo his marriage, which itself came two years after he unmasked and revealed his identity to the world (This year, things are relatively quiet aside from accusations of torture porn). Despite everything, however, the character seems to have settled into a permanent lag behind Marvel’s bigger franchises for some unknown reason. Unknown, that is… until you remember the ol’ Parker Luck.

In the end, it didn’t really fit into the piece, and I suspected that certain Marvel bodies would’ve taken offense at it, giving me hassle that I didn’t really need or want. But, you know, I’d written it so here it is.

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A Rainy Day Idea For All That Free Time I Have, Somewhere

Put out here as much as a reminder to myself (Unlike David Brothers’ similar, more-thought-out post here), and short because I’ve not thought this out at all; it’s literally something that popped into my head as I was thinking about the work I still had to do as I wandered back from the gym on Friday. But!

I think I want to do a series of interviews with writers. It started with me thinking about my experience at io9, and the things I did and didn’t like there, and the way it changed me as a writer for better and worse, and then it turned into my wanting to talk to Laura Hudson about what she’d learned as editor-in-chief of Comics Alliance. I mean, that took over her life for years; I was on the periphery of that, insofar as she was my friend and I could see her never stop working, but also that the work wasn’t writing. I imagined talking to her about what she’d learned about writing through editing other people’s work for years, and how it affected her writing, and what she wants to do post-CA, and what she thinks about blogging as a format and an outlet and and and, and then I found myself thinking, wait, I could talk to other bloggers/journalists I know about that kind of thing as well.

I don’t know if there’s an audience for it, other than myself. I don’t know if there’s a reason for it, or whether anyone would say yes to even being interviewed/talking about this kind of thing (I haven’t asked Laura or anyone, I should point out; I just thought about it, then settled in to do more work because that’s what had to be done at that moment, and then life moved on until this came back to me, just now), but still. But still.

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On Ana Marie Cox (Briefly)

I have long found myself identifying with Ana Marie Cox; I loved her writing when she was Wonkette, but since she left and went off to do her own thing, I’ve found myself following her from outlet to outlet and wondering whether I am destined to follow in her footsteps by accident (We both have the Gawker Media then Time thing happening). She was interviewed by Talking Points Memo this week about her media intake and output, and there are bits in there that just keep buzzing around my head:

What’s your writing day like?

I still appreciate all the things that are still cliche about the blogger. I do wear draw-string pants all day. I get up, I read, I email with my editor. I have a quota of about three pieces a week. The Guardian is not very rigid about what that looks like. I’m very lucky. I get to kind of pick the topics I’m passionate about. I’m most productive in the middle of the day or the end of the day. It’s been a kind of hard thing to learn about myself.

When I talked to The Guardian, blogging didn’t make sense anymore. It’s 140 characters or it’s something more thoughtful, or longer. People don’t really have an appetite for that 200-to-150 word post, I don’t think.

What’s the future of the “blog”?

I was an American history major, and leaned heavily on Marxist interpretations of history. Means of production determines what it is we trade. The technology supported the kind of short form, but not shortest form, posts of classic blogging. And technology now supports something different. It will depend on what technology supports, and what can be profitable. The blog format was not profitable. Who knows what is? I still think we might go back to nailing up signs on telephone poles.

One thing that can’t be undone: we will never go back to a period where only a privileged few get to put their voices out. I think journalists are finally coming to terms with that.

What use is Twitter?

Besides the news speed, I guess as a writer, my personality as a writer has always been that I like working within a form. If I was a poet, I’d write haiku. The restrictions and constrictions fit me, they bring out the trouble maker in me. Definitely Twitter does that. The trick of being able to say something in 140 characters is something I get satisfaction from pulling off. In a way Twitter is the area of writing where I am truly doing writing for its own sake. I get a lot of satisfaction knowing that I have added something to a conversation.

Should journalism be entertaining?

Of course. Not always, but it’s not bad to be entertaining. I sometimes think, there are journalists and writers who, when it’s convenient, call themselves entertainers. I’ve been guilty of that myself. Sometimes you practice journalism whether you like or not.

At what point does humor get in the way of a serious point? Does it ever?

It doesn’t have to get in the way. What I’ve learned the hard way is that if you offend enough people, they will lose sight of the point you are trying to make. There’s a way you can use offense to make a point. It’s an area that I can’t give you any boundaries about. It is a risk that I’m obviously willing to take a lot of the time. It’s what passes for maturity in my world that I try to sometimes rein it in because I feel like the point I want to make is more important than shock value.

There’s a lot there that I’m still unpacking; I feel like I totally agree on the use of Twitter as “pure” writing, as well as the line about offending enough people that they lose sight of the point you’re trying to make. I got the funniest brush-off from someone I’d reached out to on Twitter today for a Time piece, and it just made me think that he was one of those people; he’d decided that I was “the enemy” and had better things to do with his time. Ah, well.

“It’s 140 characters or it’s something more thoughtful, or longer.” I keep coming back to that. I don’t think she’s wrong.

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“When Words Don’t Do The Trick Anymore”

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing— when words won’t do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern. In the pilot of The Newsroom, a new series for HBO, TV news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) emotionally checked out years ago, and now he’s sitting on a college panel, hearing the same shouting match between right and left he’s been hearing forever, and the arguments have become noise. A student asks what makes America the world’s greatest country, and Will dodges the question with glib answers. But the moderator keeps needling him until…snap.

I really like this breakdown of a speech in the new Sorkin show, by Sorkin. The idea of the dialogue as music appeals to me, especially seeing how it affects Sorkin’s construction of said speech. “To resolve a melody, you have to end on either the tonic or the dominant. (Try humming ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ right now, but leave off ‘snow.’ You’ll feel like you need to sneeze.) So Will ends where he started.” Makes me want to try and get better at everything I write; I want to claim music in my writing, even though it’s just words.

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No Time, No Time At All

Most of us journalists have one great idea every few months, maybe two if we drink industrial levels of caffeine. For professional thinkers like Gladwell and Lehrer, the key to maintaining a remunerative career is to milk your best ideas until there’s no liquid left and pray you’ve bought yourself enough time to conjure up new ones.

Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired.

– From Josh Levin’s Slate piece about Jonah Lehrer’s self-plagarism coming to light.

I’m too filled with deadlines (Blogging deadlines, of course) to respond to this story the way I want right now, and my brain is too scattered to come up with the coherence that I’d need anyway, but I wanted to pull out that above quote nonetheless. I find it particularly compelling because it points out the weird unforgiving cycle of blogging versus fresh ideas, and how exhausting it is; talking to Kate this morning about everything that lay ahead today, I told her that I owe Time a new set of pitches for next week’s essay, even though this week’s only went live this morning. “You need to do that already?” she asked. It is, admittedly, a strange and exhausting rhythm to find yourself in.

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“You Need To Give Your Thought Process A Break”

You need to give your thought process a break between first and second draft.  Ideally this is a couple of days, but even 15 minutes of playing Angry Birds or talking to your spouse about where to put the new climbing roses breaks your thinking process enough that when you go back to it, you’re much better able to see whether your narrative arc holds together, and what you don’t really need.  Read it aloud to yourself before you start rewriting: What sounds wrong?

That’s Megan McArdle, senior editor for The Atlantic, talking about the best self-editing advice she knows. For years, I operated on a “Write it and get it out there!” plan, just churning out material; I’ve started re-writing and re-working material recently, and the “you need to give your thought process a break between first and second draft” thing is so amazingly spot-on for me; even just something as basic as having dinner can allow me to break through a problem that seemed insurmountable before.

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Spoiler Warning

Okay, this one needs a little backstory. Every week for Newsarama, I do a top 10 based on… Well, whatever’s in my head as the deadline approaches, really. This week, based on the plot developments in a particularly popular superhero comic, I decided to do one about the brothers and sisters of superheroes, characters whom have a tendency to become supervillains. In discussing this idea with Newsarama’s boss, I said “I don’t know how we can do this without spoiling [this week’s superhero comic in question].” “Don’t worry,” he replied, “we’ll work something out.”

Here’s how the story is presented on the front page:

The best part is, I wrote the story, and I don’t know what all of those “[Spoiler]”s are replacing. I think it’s “Top 10 Sibling-Superhero Super Villains,” but I could be wrong (Wait, I just checked the URL; it’s “Top 10 Villain-Superhero Sibling Rivalries”).

Is it wrong that I find this quite as amusing as I do?