Category Archive

I just got hooked on MeFi and Ask MeFi. I blame blogfriend Fliss.

Here’s my debut as commenter: Need recommendations for artistic non-fiction writing classes.

I’m looking for recommendations for low cost (e.g. community college) writing classes to improve the artistic aspects of my non-fiction (essay, blog entry, resume, website content, etc.) writing.

Click the link to read the responses, including mine.

Attention conservation notice: This is about my new summer internship writing science movies for NEMAC, a science outreach organization based in the campus of the college I attend.

From my NEMAC Student Researcher/Intern Project Description Form:

Jennifer is part of a 10-member team creating a series of all-ages educational science movies about water issues in Western North Carolina. Her team includes two animators, earth science profesionals, the French Broad Riverkeeper, a professional storyteller and an immersive cinema designer. Jennifer is a script intern helping create screenplays for four short films exploring WNC-specific water science and conservation issues including drought and the effects of runoff and impervious surfaces. This film series will be professionally voiced and animated and shown to people and policy-makers all over the area in an immersive half-dome cinema.

Check out the half-dome, yo:

Cool, huh?

The guy who designs these works not far from me. I have followed his career for years; my impression is that he’s really admired among Asheville’s technorati and new media types for running a successful and incredibly cool business involving the ground-up creation of immersive/unusual film experiences.

Check out his company’s amazing client list.

Anyway, he’s the one we are making the movies for in part, to showcase a half-dome cinema like the one above. We’re also educating people about water issues, a growing concern everywhere including NC where drought and record-breaking heat have hit us yet again, after a miserably droughty 2007. (We just went through a beastly bout of 90-degree weather that felt like the worst of August — and it’s still springtime.)

This internship started back in April/May when I was still in school, when I got an email telling me about an Americorps job working for The Media Arts Project, an Asheville new media organization that I have long admired.

But I couldn’t work full-time, much less at Americorps rates; someone with my level of experience deserves better pay. I deleted the email wistfully.

A few days later at school I decided to look over my required departmental competencies, a list of things students need to do or have before you can graduate that largely lie outside of taking classes. Stuff like having a portfolio and getting a two-week gig shadowing someone at work.

Lately my friends Rowan and Heather are really starting up the fascinating extracurricular things college students are SUPPOSED to do, but that older students make excuses to avoid. Heather’s doing medical volunteering and Spanish immersion in Bolivia; the world-famous Rosie is interning as the first person hired by a local hospital’s multi-million dollar alternative healing program, and came within a hair of traveling to Ireland to do research.

Me? I was planning to spend summer working and sitting on my ass in the evenings with a DVD and a string bag. It was time for me to do the things college students are supposed to do. All of them, like exploring new things and not getting paid much for it, all summer long.

An internship, a REAL one not taken to just check a box on my yellow competency sheet, sounded like exactly what I needed. I mean, traditional college students don’t intern so they can graduate. They intern to try something new, to go somewhere new, to see if they like something they think they might want to do forever. Without these experiences you might end up at the mall selling handbags. With them, you might end up blogging from an internet cafe in Bolivia about how now you are absolutely certain that medical outreach is what you want to do for the rest of your life.

I thought of The MAP and how they were hiring. I couldn’t work full-time…but did they need an intern?

I emailed the exectutive director of The MAP and said I was a professional freelance writer looking for an internship, and that my interests were in documentary screenwriting, scientific visualization and science writing. Her reply pretty much boiled down to “Have we got a job for you.”

When we watched the first movie the team had produced, it surprised me with how well-done it was. I had quietly expected local work to be sub-par, but it soon became clear that I was working with Asheville’s cool kids.

When I was in my early 20s a friend auditioned for a band. They were older than him and a lot cooler and a lot more experienced playing music. We called them “the cool dudes.” They tolerated my friend hanging around, but never asked him to play with them. At this meeting I felt like I had lucked onto the cool dudes, and they wanted me to play.

On my second day I met with the primary screenwriter, a professional storyteller. He knew so much about narrative and used intriguing phrases that made my mind explode with curiosity, like “charismatic image” and “involvement device.” At the end of our meeting he asked what I wanted to do and I said that I would just punch up what he was writing and since I wasn’t good at coming up with images, I would just write text.

He laughed. And he pointed out that people don’t do internships to stay in their comfort zone and do what they always do.

So that week I wrote my own screenplay draft, coming up with images, voiceover, the works. It was very well-received and everyone at the meeting loved it.

So of course at a later meeting my work was picked apart! No one was rude; I just got an honest critique of some very real problems with my work and got some serious insight about how not to present screenplay text.

It’s been awhile since I was an inexperienced newbie, and I was down all that day until I realized I was back at the start of a profession again, back to not knowing, fumbling, flailing, learning. And that there was no other way into these new things than to slog through ignorance, listen to others and ask questions, let myself be helped, be unexceptional.

At 39 I am an intern, a proper intern. I am being paid $10 an hour, having my picture taken for a bulletin board, turning in a bio, filling out a timesheet. I am new and I am allowed to be ignorant. It takes experience, confidence and competence to recognize that ignorance can be OK sometimes. This is one of those times.

I welcome my ignorance as part of giving myself a strange new skill in a strange new world where a writer is both robbed of her power by being forced to say less, but given a new and numinous tool: visuals. I am learning to write multiple streams for eye and mind and ear all working together.

I filled out my NEMAC paperwork with an absolutely beautiful tall woman in sandals who wore a long red scarf. She was intelligent and charming and genuinely concerned that I learn and experience new things. My whole intern experience has been permeated with a strange flavor that tastes of kindness and science and other new things I don’t always get to taste at work and had never expected to any more than I expected to find a $50 bill in my shoe this morning.

Walking out of the small NEMAC office it hit me what I was searching to understand, the strange new factor that was making this job so different: This is the first job I have ever had that is not driven by profit.

NEMAC must work to stay alive and thrive but its goal is not to further itself financially but to work with and impart scientific knowledge. The constant tension of money is here, but it’s not in every transaction of word and deed.

I walked down the hall of the chemistry department where NEMAC is housed feeling such a strong attachment to and happiness with the world of academia and nonprofit that for the first time UNCA started to feel like a forever place, like an intellectual base of operations one could base some of one’s life work out of.

I walked back to my car. Outside a summer downpour had begun, complete with crackling lightnings and such wet and pounding rain that it soaks the exposed part of my backpack not covered by my umbrella. The water rushes along the sidewalks and washes over my feet, covered only by flip-flops. As I walk, my pantlegs get wet almost to the knee from soaking up water from rivers of runoff I walk through, flowing over the campus streets and sidewalks.

I cross the street and stand in the middle of the road right on the yellow lines in the middle of a clear, shallow sea of rainwater that rushes at my ankles and thunders down the three storm drains I can see.

I am stilled here because the movies I am writing have let me know that the runoff that rushes down the drains is fast-tracked into my local river, the French Broad. This makes the river’s water level rise far faster than it would otherwise in a storm. Without the impervious surfaces of human life, rainwater falls on earth, leaves and branches and makes its way to the river very slowly.

But storm drains, the ones that choke down those silty orange rivers that flow down your street so deep you can barely drive through them, they send all that water to the river as fast as it can go.

Impervious surfaces and storm drains don’t cause flooding. They just give it a major artificial assist and deny the ground the water it soaked up for centuries before asphalt.

Knowing things I never knew before, I walk back to the car under my pink umbrella and drive home, kicking up orange rooster tails as I plow through the worst of the water, thinking of floods.

All-Asheville collaborators:

Klein Digital

Booksmuggler

David Novak, kind to interns

The Elumenati

The Media Arts Project

RiverLink

The Colburn Gem and Mineral Museum

Categorization (women’s writing, gay writing, Illinois writing) inflicts upon art exactly what art strives at its best never to inflict on itself: arbitrary and irrelevant limits, shelter from the widest consideration and judgment, exclusion from general excellence.

- Richard Ford

(Come to think of it, I think this really does apply to art in general. I note that Ford refers to writing only in parentheses.)

Leave it to Neil Gaiman to write a writer’s prayer made for a humble craftsperson and not some kind of Pegasus-mounting fool. I would add to this, May my deadlines not sting, and may those who draw those lines have warm hearts.

Writing is very cool. It is also a job of work like any other.

A Writer’s Prayer

Oh Lord, let me not be one of those who writes too much;
who spreads himself too thinly with his words,
diluting all the things he has to say,
like butter spread too thinly over toast,
or watered milk in some worn-out hotel;
but let me write the things I have to say,
and then be silent, ’til I need to speak.

Oh Lord, let me not be one of those who writes too little;
a decade-man between each tale, or more,
where every word accrues significance
and dread replaces joy upon the page.
Perfectionists like chasing the horizon;
You kept perfection, gave the rest to us,
so let me earn the wisdom to move on.

But over and above those two mad spectres of parsimony and profligacy,
Lord, let me be brave, and let me, while I craft my tales, be wise:
let me say true things in a voice that is true,
and, with the truth in mind, let me write lies.

Free Mp3 here!

* final Blue Banner article Turned out well. Turned in Sunday evening, as per my usual reporter’s deadline of Sunday at midnight.

* A 10-page (double-spaced) humanities research paper, 20% of my final grade Turned in this morning! A huge hassle over and done with!

This morning our instructor read the topics of the class’ freshly submitted papers from the thick stack we made on his desk. Burke and his God. The impact of the industrial age on health. Westernization in Japan.

Mine was Lin Zexu and traditional Confucian models.

To his credit, our professor seemed to look forward to reading them.

* My newswriting final project, an 800-1000 word news article on communal housing, is due Thursday at 9 a.m.

It’s going moderately well, with 800 words written last night, but no sources yet because I am having trouble tracking down interviews, and this article requires four.

But I got a nice flow from the information I gathered, and I am learning the trick of choosing a focus and writing economically to that focus, rather than writing a big sprawl and seeing where you focus lies as you finish your first draft.

Since I am wooly minded, I now write out my focus first thing, and write notes to myself IN CAPS to remind me what each transitioned paragraph is supposed to cover.

While both approaches may have their merits, a news story is the place for the former technique. And surely a timesaver overall.

* My humanities final is December 6 at 11:30 a.m. It is comprehensive. Which sucks because a few weeks ago I managed to lose my humanities notebook. I’ve looked everywhere. It’s gone. Note to students: Put your contact info in your notebooks. I wish I had.

* My political science final is in early December sometime. I don’t think it is comprehensive, but only covers Marx and Grieder’s/Hobson’s critique of global capitalism. No word yet from my professor as to when our final is.

Days left in the semester: 14

Lately I feel like when I am happy and involved in my work, no matter how many hours my workday lasts, and no matter how tired I get, there’s some kind of furnace of joy inside me that keeps me going like a star. I never get sick and I find time for everything, though heaven knows I miss a lot of fun.

And I feel like when this furnace goes out, when work doesn’t stir me and classes lose the intellectual glamor I savor, I swiftly become befuddled and ill.

I go from competent and industrious to confused and headachy. Over the past two weeks, I have missed 1 1/2 humanities lectures, completely due to forgetting that on Fridays I have class at 11:30.

Last weekend some weird bug kept me on my back all day Sunday, unable to keep food down and most grateful for my Netflix subscription. And this week I seem to be one of the first at the college to come down with that unwelcome seasonal visitor, the common cold.

You know the deal. Dry, gaping mouth and stopped-up nose, sneezing wetly into the quiet of the bedroom as the minutes tick by, closer and closer to the time your alarm will usher you into breakfast, classes, the morning hustle you are in no way ready for.

I admit it. I’m in a rut, and a very bad one.

I am missing classes, flubbing tests, rarely leaving the house due to constantly being ill and out of sorts. A good day feels like a sort of compromise between misery and hope.

It’s been a long time coming. The first real sign of it that I remember came this spring, when I lost my taste for caring for my garden, previously a hallowed activity in my life. The garden looks like shit this year, having received the bare minimum of care to not be a total wreck.

And I must also admit that my sweet house, which I once loved with all my heart, no longer brings me joy. I am more and more overwhelmed daily by all the constantly increasing little matters of repair and upkeep that I don’t have the time, knowhow, money or mental focus to deal with right now.

Leaf-stuffed gutters. The mysterious, growing dark stains under the linoleum near the bathtub. The damned bloody leaking skylight, the Moby Dick of my household existence. The tree that needs to be pruned. The broken locks. The dust that gathers in the corners. Cobwebs. Dirty windows too high to reach from the ground. The little things bug me, and the big things, the leaks, are legitimate possible threats to the value and structural integrity of my home.

My old enemy, the forces of decay.

And as I mentioned before, as I have never painted the interior of this house the colors of my choice, nor furnished it properly (my office especially is done in Early Target). Five years on, I still feel that I have never quite moved in.

I used to tell myself that someday, when school was done and I had a proper full-time income and proper not-a-student-anymore free time again, I’d address all these things, and wasn’t I just happy to have this house at all, never-quite-decorated as it is?

Now I think I’m done with that idea. I think I’d take less and find it suited me more.

I’ll likely be in school for years yet, and I need to either creatively start work on turning my house and yard around, or try something new already.

Changes need to be made. The dreaded thing we all must face, the need for change.

My house, my lifestyle, my life, all very likely need to be reworked. And just like my house overwhelms me with all left undone and gone to pot, so too does my life.

My health’s in the toilet. My asthma, aggravated by stress and lack of exercise, got so bad earlier this week that I couldn’t draw a deep breath without a shooting pain in my right shoulder. I figure my lung capacity, which for some reason dwindles when I don’t exercise and let myself fall back into the slough of isolation, is probably close to 60 or 70 percent.

Eat right, exercise, sell my house and start a new house somewhere else. Turn my whole bloody life around when most days I am doing well just to go through the motions. Is that what I need to do?

I feel like I need to have a closeout sale with my own life. Everything must go.

Today I am going to my mom’s pumpkin-carving party, which I’ve been looking forward to for weeks.

I will tell my little East Tennessee fam that I am thinking of selling beautiful Jen Manor for future homesteads still unknown, and also that I cannot get the Peace Corps out of my head. Dr. Allison says their foreign language training is impeccable.

Nice way to pick up a new language, globalize myself a bit, finally see more than my home country. (What I’ll do with my four dear cats, whom I truly love, is a very real concern. But I wonder if a cohousing situation might make it easier to pull up roots for a few years.)

Today the sun is shining after days and days of rain. This weekend is looking to offer the first really cold days of the year, with temps on Sunday night going down to that magic number, 32. Time to bring in the plants.

Last night I went outside just to visit with the moon. Changed and reduced as I am, I am still me. Beautiful Carolina moon, so bright it made sharp-edged leafshadows on the white fabric of my shirt. The night sky that curious blue-white.

I love to step outside and be struck at how bright it is under full moonlight. How well the world is revealed, how bright and strange and rare full moon nights are, how I never tire of them though I get one a month for life.

I am a child of this planet, bred to wonder it at forever, I suppose.

So. I’ve accepted that I am in a terrible rut, no getting out anytime soon, no magic cure, and the three butter rum muffins I ate last night really did not help. Muffins only temporarily relieve me of the knowledge that my choices are A. capitulation and B. making nearly everything different.

While one is certainly easier it stinks like death, or at least like the stack unwashed dishes that accumulates weekly, which I have neither time nor energy to address.

But in life as with dishes, sometimes the only way out is straight through the mess.

Attention conservation notice: This post is about why I think Harry’s story is everyone’s story, and contains spoilers. Also, it is very long.

The latest and last Harry Potter novel came out in summer. I’m a fan, but I waited to buy my own copy until just a week or so ago.

I had made a deal with myself. Summer felt too active to me, too hot and eventful, not a reader’s season especially for a book like this which is special in the life of the reader. And I (who love for things to have themes and seasons into which they fit) thought the cozy world of Hogwarts would be far, far better suited to colder weather.

So come autumn and the first cold nights of the year, I bought the book at last.

I loved it, though — no Hogwarts this year, until the end! I missed Hogwarts, which was in many ways my favorite character. The one thing I think the movies truly got, as far as my own vision of the books is concerned, is the richness and grandeur of Hogwarts. From the crimson and ebony of the Gryffindor commons to the sun-streaked darkness of Snape’s tense and musty classroom, where motes of dust moved in long streaks of sunlight over the bowed heads of young witches and wizards…the movies got that one right in a big way.

Why do we love these books so much?

We all love a book about a chosen one, don’t we, with a big destiny and plenty of adventure along the way to fulfilling it.

Destiny stories grab us, I think, because they are all our own story. Hidden worlds grab us because we all enter hidden worlds.

I think we all have a magical destiny of sorts. We know the story of the chosen one, because it’s just a grander version of our own story.

We start out as helpless children, but we receive constant intimations of a world beyond our own, of sex and power and actually buying our own possessions and choosing our own lives. Do you remember how exciting it once was just to go to a restaurant, and sit and eat at the table, like the adults? Magical worlds thrill us because they light up that part of the brain that remembers the magical world we once watched and felt from afar, and finally, almost magically, gained entrance to.

Eventually, we all ascend. We drive cars, drink alcohol, experience intimacy and sex, forge alliances, find power in our skill and enter a strange world called adulthood where we may act as we please, decorate our rooms as we want, take on huge challenges and conquer them and be utterly free to do with our lives exactly as we please.

Don’t you sometimes thrill to lay out of work when you deserve to? To drive a car? To live in a space that’s yours? To eat pretzels for lunch when you’ve had a bad day?

Of course there is plenty of needful added seasoning; Harry’s story also makes it clear that there is evil, and betrayal and bravery, and great suffering and injustice, and that there are causes worth dying for.

But many of his lessons are homelier. Friends are the family you choose, choose well! Powerful helpers — mentors — are there for you and are commonly called teachers. Education is magic in its power to make you into something better, something other. Belonging is there for you, among friends and the extended family you can build for yourself.

I find the book totally pro-education, what with mega-nerd Hermione saving everyone’s skins so often with her preparedness and knowledge, all gained through ardent study. And so many of Harry’s successes come from doing research (or having Hermione to do it). Books, learning, school and knowledge are magical in Rowling’s world.

One of my favorite passages happens when Harry rides a broomstick for the first time, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Here, in an old movie review of mine, is how I describe the scene as it happens in the movie, and a problem I had with the movie’s depiction of the scene as opposed to what I got from the book:

…when Draco makes off with Neville’s remembrall, it is one of the book’s most telling, involving and important scenes. As Harry pursues, riding a broomstick for the first time, he finds something he does well without even trying. He discovers the thrill of mastery, all the headier for being an immediate mastery. Harry has probably just taken his first major step to adulthood.

He zooms over to Draco, who is not sitting quite as well on his own broom, and orders him to return the remembrall. Draco notes Harry’s confidence and skill and quails a bit, flinging the remembrall at the ground rather than continuing to challenge someone who is obviously the better flier. In the movie, Draco makes off with the remembrall and Harry gives chase in a chain of unoriginal technical events that titillate the eye but deaden the heart.

Where is Harry’s discovery, his exhilaration, where is Draco’s capitulation to Harry’s power? Why were the visuals so slavishly copied, but all the meaning excised?

Learning to be really, really good at something is always an entry into the adult world. It’s so powerful it will fast-track you into the adult world even if you are not an adult yet.

This part of Harry’s journey spoke strongly to me at the time because I was learning a new grown-up skill myself. Although I was 31 years old or thereabouts, I was learning to be a writer. That review quoted above began as a long email to friends. A friend suggested that I submit it to a new local entertainment site. And my long, thinky email about Harry Potter became my first published work of movie criticism, and my start as a writing professional.

Putting your hand to something, finding yourself quite remarkably good at it out of the blue… For me it was exactly, exactly, like climbing into some very fast vehicle and finding your ordinary self augmented beyond belief. Doing this new thing, you are better, stronger and more powerful than you were before, and it all comes easily. Jesus, what a thrill!

No matter what age you are when this hits, and it hit me rather late, you are in the middle of a transformative life passage — and one of the good ones, too.

So Harry’s story is my story (I even used to call my beloved old community college Hogwarts), and Harry’s story is everyone’s story, everyone who is willing to put effort into her life, or willing to start trying. His power comes as most of ours does, by entering a hidden world where unknown powers and talents are revealed to him, by surrendering to the process of education, by being hammered into adulthood through a series of trials.

Harry finds and cultivates mastery in a field of interest, chooses a profession, makes the friends who support him… These are all familiar passages.

The story of the chosen one is one of the most compelling and attractive stories to us humans. We must like what it says about us, how it guides us and flatters us and is somehow more true than truth.

Or as Jane Espenson said,

The Chosen One paradigm is the most positive, most comforting, most affirming metaphorical version of change, of growing up, that I can imagine.

Yes.

My generation had Star Wars. (I don’t know what the ’80s/’90s kids had, heaven bless them.) But the milennials have Harry. I frankly SHUDDER to think how utterly obsessed I would have been with this series 25 years ago.

I suppose my generation’s co-optation of these books, which are purportedly for children and young adults, is the psycho-mythic counter to the sheer dreadfulness of everything George Lucas has done since he kidnapped the psyches of millions with Episodes IV-VI.

Ha. I call that fair.

(My favorite diatribe on the awfulness of latter-day Lucas is here.)

I moderate a listserv for professional freelance writers. As the group’s gatekeeper, I try to discourage people who have needs outside of what the group offers, e.g. people who want help writing fiction or memoirs. (I don’t keep out newbie freelancers because I find that groups like this are the best resource a newbie can have.)

And I got an email the other day from a person who wanted to join because, she said, all her friends tell her she should write a book.

Oy.

I emailed back, explaining that the group was for nonfiction writers, asking if she was sure she wanted to join.

This was a very stupid move. I was tired (it’s been a rough week) and in a rush and should have said the group was for people looking to do non-creative writing for hire, something like that that better explained the freelance world.

But I wasn’t thinking. Freelance writing is oddly hard to explain, and even bright, educated people hear “freelance writer” and think “novelist.” My own mother still does not understand that I cannot and do not write fiction. (This week, actually, I am writing about community college and golf carts.)

And she emailed back saying yes she wanted to write nonfiction, and yes she still wanted to join.

I got my act together and emailed one more time to make sure she understood what our group offered, as I explained above.

And I got a nasty email back from her.

To her, clearly I was just trying to keep her out. And, well, she didn’t even want to join, didn’t want to be part of our little “cliche” (clique)? We’d only posted 15 messages this year, anyway. So there.

The fragile human ego.

While I admit to suspecting from the start this woman wasn’t right for the group, all I’d done was ask two harmless, if slightly repetitive, questions. Newbie freelance writers are welcome to the listserv, but they have to want to be freelancers, not novelists or short-story writers.

In many ways, there’s nothing like an insult to our writing ability to make us feel bad. One’s writing is a piece of oneself like little else.

But professional writers learn to take criticism, because we get it a lot. I’ve learned to let go of my creations, and no longer feel violated and furious at little changes (even bad ones) made in my precious, precious copy, stained with my heart’s blood.

My writing is still me, but it’s just got fewer nerve endings now, I suppose. Because when I had time to examine my foolish hypersensitivity, it went away. There was, I quickly realized as a beginning professional writer, no good reason to cling to the foolish idea that many beginners seem to hold: That their words are somehow above improvement.

I also quickly realized how much and how quickly brutally honest editorial comments improved my fledgling efforts.

I enjoy good editors and good editing. But when bad editing happens, I sigh and move on. And when good criticism happens I listen. There are few better ways to improve your writing than to have someone who knows what she is talking about spell out everything you are doing wrong.

And liking someone’s writing is always a matter of taste. If I am attracted to someone and he is less than attracted to me, I might be sad. But I also know that chemistry and connection are about many odd little buttons being pushed, and if one person doesn’t like me it doesn’t mean that I am deficient somehow, or completely unwanted by any and all. It just means one man doesn’t like me that way.

And if someone doesn’t like my writing, the same principle applies. My soul won’t wither if you don’t like what I write. I like it, and someone else will, too.

Writing is such an odd profession.

If you want to be a writer, you don’t have to take a test like lawyers do. You don’t have to study for long years like doctors do. You don’t have to get certified, like massage therapists do. You just call yourself a writer.

But being a real, successful writer means being part of an exclusive club not joined just by calling oneself a writer. And we in it are mostly not snobs. And we in it mostly love to lend a hand to newbies. And we who discourage you from sitting at a certain table with us ask only that you earn your place here, just as we did.

We are special, but so are all specialists. To be a writer I think you just have to write, and pay the bills with what you get from writing.

As far as I’m concerned, you do that and you’re in.

Attention conservation notice: The Blue Banner faculty sponsor critique was today, Tuesday. This is how it all went down when my error-packed professor profile got publicly critiqued in a room full of mass comm students.

(Dang, do y’all remember when I used to write about math all the time? Now I write about writing all the time. Feel like I’m finally getting the blog’s title right.)

My first Mass Comm classes continue to sock it to me everywhere I need it. Already in the paid professional work I’m doing this week there’s a big difference in my writing. It’s tighter and less trite.

You may not think of me as a trite writer, and in this blog I try hard not to be. But some editors and some publications have actively encouraged cutesiness, and I’ve picked up some bad habits. Not to mention that triteness is a form of writerly laziness, and a symptom of lack of formal training.

Today in class I sat next to a young writer named Jon who took newswriting in high school. He knew I was a professional writer, and asked me if I was bored with the Newswriting class. BORED???? I am only reinventing myself as a no-bullshit grammar badass. I can’t say that I’m bored, Jon.

But he was. He’s had all this before and is acing every quiz. At this point I’d just like to thank the universe for handsome, self-possessed young men. It’s nice to have someone to talk to as an equal, and interesting to hear that what is transformative and vital to me is ho-hum to my young classmate.

So. Tuesday, today, was the weekly critique of the college paper. It’s done in a lecture hall by the paper’s faculty sponsor, a very cool ex newspaper guy. I grabbed a copy of the paper to review, and to look at my profile of Cynn Chadwick.

I wasn’t happy with the changes made in the Chadwick profile. I’m used to bad editing, so I can handle it.

And I could easily see why the changes made didn’t always serve the article.

Sentences got cut, reordered and chopped up to allow the editors to work around errors I’d made. The editors moved a quote out of its context, making the article read like Chadwick may have been serious when she said an education saved her from being a “crack-addicted prostitute in Weehawken.” If we’d worked together in a newsroom, the editor and I, I could have spotted the problem and made changes that served the article as well as the AP Stylebook. But I don’t get to see or talk to the editors, and the unfortunate changes they made that I could have helped them do better, stayed in.

And so the article was free of my ignorant AP style errors, but some of the changes involved the insertion of generic, listless writing I’d never have committed to paper, and  making it sound like Chadwick narrowly escaped prostitution when in fact she had financial and emotional support all through college, and came from a loving family.

Sigh. LOL I hope someone that loves her is enjoying the hell out of all this. And I hope more students learn about a very unusual and interesting writing professor.

So I went to the newspaper critique not quite nervous, but well aware that my article was the work of a journalistic amateur. I am not nervous about being criticized. I’m not so much thick-skinned as I am confident and very used to being critiqued. It goes with the profession, and it almost always makes you better at what you do.

My first writing mentor really kicked my ass over the bad writing I did as a beginner. He actually almost made me cry. And I am actually very grateful, as he made my writing much better, very quickly. And the faculty sponsor, while honest, is never cruel.

And of course he raved about the article to the point of starting “who wrote that?” chatter, and even declared that my sidebar question (”What kind of student impresses you most?”) should be asked in all future Banner profiles. Which of course is much more the kind of thing that I am used to, but let me tell you, was NOT what I was expecting today.

So far in my college career I seem to be the writer that readers love and copy editors have had to take aside for retraining twice in two weeks. An accidental diva.

Go figure.

PS: I am tired lately, y’all, and working hard all day. I don’t know how interesting my blog will be this semester, or how much I’ll post. We’ll find out together.

Attention conservation notice: A roundup of my week and some interesting things going on in my life.

I slept until 10AM this morning. Lately my insomnia’s back, caused by turning my brain all but white-hot with all the things I have to write, study, read, finish and think about beginning as early as 9 a.m. and finally winding down as late as 11:30.

Twelve credit hours and a mentally demanding part-time job can take it right out of a person, and my writing for the Blue Banner in particular is a huge strain. But already things seem to be leveling out.

The Cynn Chadwick profile (which BTW is now over at BlogAsheville with Professor Chadwick’s permission) really was a turning point in my life as a writer.

It was well-written enough, but trite in parts and packed with errors. The work I have historically done as a writer has tended either to pose no grammar or punctuation challenges (ad copy and web copy are bloody straightforward) or to belong to a world where content and story just mattered more (writing for teens, alternative weekly writing, city guide writing).

Now I feel like everything matters. I feel like I am finally starting that Black Belt in grammar/punctuation I always thought I had and didn’t at all. Two weeks — a mere two weeks — of writing for a well-run college paper has shone a harsh light on my writing weaknesses as nothing ever has before.

I tried to take apart my whole Chadwick article in a blog post and explain all my errors, but it ended up being 2,300 words long and very difficult to present, so I shelved the idea. But here’s two highlights, just in case you’re asking yourself what on earth was wrong with that perfectly good article.

Here’s your answer. A lot:

Some sample text cut from the article that I turned in:

That was more than 10 years ago. Now her kids are grown and she spends her days spicing up the lives of her students, who find themselves with a professor who once revealed that after her divorce she threw her wedding ring from off the top of a mountain. She might have a fondness for informality, profanity and dryly delivered outrageousness (”I would have become a homeless, crack-addicted prostitute in Weehawken, New Jersey was it not for getting an education,” she says. “It’s obvious.”). But she’s also a literature professional.

Errors:

Execrable punctuation: How many periods are in that third sentence, anyway?

Italics are not used in print journalism.

Fixed:

That was more than 10 years ago. Now her kids are grown and she spends her days spicing up the lives of her students. “I would have become a homeless, crack-addicted prostitute in Weehawken, New Jersey was it not for getting an education,” she says, “it’s obvious.” Chadwick might have a fondness for informality, profanity and dryly delivered outrageousness, but she’s also a literature professional.

Ahh.

On my first day of class my newswriting class the professor asked us to tell a little about ourselves. I said I was a freelance writer. She said, “Well, I guess you already know a lot of what we’ll be learning.” And I said, “No, I bet I won’t.”

The class laughed, and she looked confused. But newswriting is its own strict world, and its ways are new to me, as I felt certain they would be. I have the art but not the craft.

So far, despite my previous aversion to that kind of writing, I find that these new rules are a delight to my mind and heart. I doubt I’ll ever enjoy doing interviews or tracking down quotes (both of which are time-consuming and annoying as hell), but I like being asked to provide only well-presented facts and not opinions.

I don’t care to go out and forage for facts, but once they’re all in the basket I like the logic-game of arranging them and seasoning them with quotes. You know, maybe it was really magazine-writing and alt-weekly writing that I was calling “journalism” when I said how much I disliked journalism. Because it really would be cool to be a foreign correspondent, is all I’m saying.

:0)

All my classes are going well. I attend a liberal arts college, and while I’m a huge fan of the liberal arts approach, some classes are still bullshit. Like my Humanities 324 class, which is exposing me to Great Ideas, but is such a scattered, 1/4-inch-deep way of learning that it leaves me feeling unfulfilled.

But my newswriting class is challenging, useful and interesting. My writing for the Blue Banner has initiated me into the real rules of journalism (AND PUNCTUATION) at last, making me a far better and more powerful writer than I was before. And my International Relations class is just an endless intellectual delight. It’s like a wonderful nourishing meal for my mind, three days a week. Delicious!

I’ve made nothing but A’s all semester, and the work delights me and comes easily. Which isn’t to say I don’t have to work for it; I do, and very hard. But unlike when I studied math and science, my studies now reward me with flow, skill and mastery, not failed tests, a C+ and endless nights of despair.

Before I go start my day slaving in the yard I’d like to thank the people who nominated me for two categories in the BlogAsheville awards put on annually by Asheville’s extremely welcoming, talented and active blogging community, which I am very happy to be part of. My nominations are for Best New Blog and Blog Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. My sincere thanks to Gordon, Shad and Uptown Ruler (?) for the noms.

In a happy surprise, I recently learned that I sort of know a local blogger and didn’t even know it — Pixiedyke of What the Hell? is a river companion and shares my dear friends Laura and Katie with me.

What the Hell?, thanks for the State Fair quotes and congrats on your loads of noms for Blogger I’d Most Like to See Naked.

(Photo: Edgy Mama’s Flickr stream, via BlogAsheville)

BTW I’ve seen Pixiedyke in a red bikini lolling drunkenly on a raft, and I support her nomination.

Today was the weekly meeting of the staff and reporters of the Blue Banner, my college newspaper. The paper’s copyeditor, a no-nonsense young woman with freckles, stood at the head of the room with arms crossed and delivered a knowledgeable and withering lecture on Banner guidelines and AP style. (So far at least two young Banner staff members have been impressively professional in their roles at the paper.) I took notes nonstop, guiltily realizing how much I still have to learn. I am a generalist and business writer, not a journalist. I even asked to have the prerequisite class for writing for the paper, Newswriting, waived, as I am taking it this semester, concurrently. But I am just now learning how to write a lead, just now learning the inverted pyramid. I am learning fast, but still out of my depth.

And all I can say so far about what I have learned so far is this: How did I make it this far without this information?

Until today I didn’t even really know how to use quotations journalistically, which really just means effectively, for maximum impact.

I’m not having a crisis of confidence. But I do see that perhaps one of the reasons that I have secretly sometimes felt like a fraud as a writer (a common human condition, I think, one that haunts even reasonably confident and experienced people) is that while I am experienced and naturally talented, I am not yet fully formally educated in my field of expertise. The more I learn, the more I formally understand why my instincts lead me certain ways — and also how limited my knowledge is, and how many kinds of writing there are, and how richly the styles might inform each other when the writer is conversant in several of them.

After the meeting we broke out into groups to talk to our editors. I’m a Lifestyles writer, so I walked to my group in the corner of the room to get my latest assignment. But instead of giving me one, my editor, a twentysomething blond woman in jeans, said only that we needed to talk. I told her that I’d meet her in the Banner office. The others were handed notecards with their assignments and drifted away.

Oh my GOD. Honestly, I was afraid. Nothing in her manner led me to believe she was going to meet me to hug me and tell me that my profile of Professor Chadwick was the most amazing thing the paper had ever seen. And from the copyeditor’s succinct and well-delivered lecture knew I’d committed quite a few sins, such as using italics.

And indeed, the copy of my profile that my editor carried as she lit a cigarette and we stepped outside to the courtyard (outside! was I really that bad, that we needed privacy?) was covered in red marks. My heart hammered. I felt real shame. I held my notebook humbly, ready to listen and take my lumps.

I pride myself on going above and beyond what my clients expect, on bringing real satisfaction and providing value, even on occasionally blowing people’s minds. I’d never walked out into a sunny courtyard for my corrections.

But it wasn’t so bad, really. I just got a brief and friendly lecture on proper newswriting style. I was told not use periods of ellipsis. I quickly pointed out that I’d only used them to show that I had snipped words from a quote, and wasn’t that OK? It was, but I had also used them to end a quote. And she was absolutely right, I had. I’d used says and not said. I’d used a person from the college paper as a source for a quote, an ethical no-no. I’d editorialized, giving my opinion on the professor’s image as it appeared on her faculty web page (however my editor liked that, and kept it in despite the copywriter’s red scrawl).

And though she didn’t call me on it, only today in the cafeteria lunchroom did I learn how one properly closes a quote, often with a comma rather than a period. I had known that, but hadn’t known how to apply it in one tricky instance and had done the wrong thing.

These are all tricks from journalistic bag. And as an information and news junkie, I deeply appreciate good journalism. But I have no taste for the work. In fact I stayed away from a formal writing education for years because I dislike the field so intensely. But while it is bad-tasting medicine, nonetheless it seems to be curing ills I never knew I had.

In writing about Professor Chadwick, I assumed that as a single mother of two attending college, she endured years of poverty. I was committing another big no-no, making assumptions. (Turns out her family had helped her out, and while times were hard, she and her kids got by in safety and support.) I was also projecting my own financial struggles as a student (and those of all the students I know who are not in some way subsidized) onto her. But I was also being a draftsperson, an arranger, imposing order rather then seeking story.

I do no create well. I do not care to dig for information, for the world of information is huge and I don’t have the instincts to sift through it. I am creative, but my creativity is best exercised as an arranger.

And journalism disappoints me because so often the reporter is given a story that seems to me to be far too complex for 70 lines’ worth of words. Professor Chadwick isn’t just a funny lady with a cool office door who let me talk to her; she is a human being with amazing worlds hidden inside her. I feel I could never do her and her story justice, and I’ve felt that way before, during my early work of writing features for the alternative weekly market. I feel that the medium is not so much limited as it is too troubling for me. I find journalism exhausting. I feel like I only skim the surface of the surface of the surface, or, in the other extreme, am given an assignment to write about a local fair or suchlike and find it a simplistic exercise that interests me very little. So I feel either overwhelmed or bored.

But I’m happy to learn my way in this new world. I think that my writing is lively and readable enough when I work for it to be that way, but I tend to make overlong constructions and love my dashes — you know those dashes I love so, that I put my asides in, a choice which does not always serve communication well; also I am overfond of long sentences glued together with the semicolon.

These aren’t really habits I want to hang on to.

I don’t like to feel ignorant, but I love to know what I am doing. And that takes work and the passage through the uncomfortable feeling of not-knowing. I am sure the professor profile that will appear in the paper next week will be perfectly fine. But again Darmok’s fine truth comes home: Ancora imparo. I am still learning.

I am picturing that tough little copywriter angrily scrawling on on my article. On my italics, on my periods of ellipsis I would later deny as Peter denied Jesus, on my editorializing. And having every right to do so. Oh my god, someone turned in some defective writing, and that someone was me.

Can I find my kinky streak of loving to be corrected, for I know it makes me better at what I do? Oh yes. Right there it is.

PS: I have removed my entry about Professor Chadwick, since it was posted here most rudely without her permission. Bloggers: You don’t need an ethics class or a cross copyeditor to know that simple manners dictate that it’s nice to ask first.

Poem: “After Reading T’ao Ch’ing, I wander Untethered Through the Short Grass” by Charles Wright, from Appalachia.

Via.

Dry spring, no rain for five weeks.
Already the lush green begins to bow its head and sink to its
knees.

Already the plucked stalks and thyroid weeds like insects
Fly up and trouble my line of sight.

I stand inside the word here
As that word stands in its sentence,
Unshadowy, half at ease.

Religion’s been in a ruin for over a thousand years.
Why shouldn’t the sky be tatters,
lost notes to forgotten songs?

I inhabit who I am, as T’ao Ch’ing says, and walk about
Under the mindless clouds.
When it ends, it ends. What else?

One morning I’ll leave home and never find my way back—
My story and I will disappear together, just like this.

****

My post on an NYT op-ed by Jesuit priest James Martin, SJ drew some interesting comments, including one from Father Martin himself. This marks the second time that a post of mine that was hastily dashed off in the minutes before class has drawn attention. And me with my typos showing. (At least my header looked good — the blogger equivalent, I suppose, of having clean undies on when you get in a car accident.) Not to mention that my self-interested intent to use Mother Teresa’s long crisis of faith to my own ends (as ammunition against that group that annoys me, people who think that only God-believers have morals, and that nonbelievers have no reason to act with fairness towards other) and my use of some NYT-generated verbiage weren’t very fair to Father Martin’s intent.

I am too practical to concern myself with belief much; I am an agnostic and a truth-based, proof-based being, so I see no reason to worry (yet) with the matter of God-belief and afterlife-belief. At least not as young and immortal-feeling as I am now, at 38. And as I have no gifts of the sort that shed light on these matters, I leave the work to those like Father Martin, and my fellow agnostic and co-religionist of sorts, Chet Raymo, who do have them.

Coincidentally, Dr. Raymo has blogged for the past few days on the matters of faith and religion, even posting a nonreligious personal creed as his blog entry for today.

It’s not the first time that I have resonated with Dr. Raymo, who, on the day of a deep, dark crisis of belief in myself as a person who had anything to contribute to the world, sent me a short, friendly email of thanks for support of his site. So on the day that I, with great uncertainty, decided that dropping science and studying writing would actually bring me closer to the natural world, not farther from it, I received an unsolicited email from my great philosopher-hero, a novelist/astronomer.

It was as close to a miracle as a nonbeliever could ask, and I could not help but take it as a sign that I was doing the right thing. Check out Rayno’s site and his credo here.

I haven’t blogged much lately because I am taking 12 credit hours now, a full-time load for the first time ever, and as Week 2 of the fall semester ends I think I dare to say that I can handle it. Things are going well. I am studying things I am good at now, and am less rushed, happier, and have even had a few evenings free to rest, pet the cats, watch a documentary. I adore my political science class and am perfectly happy with all the others. Even writing for the college newspaper, a requirement for all Mass Comm majors, turned out to be an unexpected pleasure when a pain-in-the-ass professor-profile assignment ended up becoming a lovely encounter with a most interesting woman, Cynn Chadwick.

(Look at the character in her face.)

Much of the reason I haven’t posted much this week is that I have been writing about her. My deadline for the completed profile is Sunday at midnight, so I hope to post it here over the weekend, and also plan to market it to the local alternative weekly once Professor Chadwick’s new book comes out next year.

I live my life so that I never quite have to choose between writer, student and blogger, but nonetheless my block of blogging time is done. Jen out; I’ve got an article to write.

“A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens — second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day’s events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.” — Reynolds Price

Quote via a sad story from Boing Boing.

In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up. The act of writing is godlike, omnipotent, infantile. Your piece is a statement delivered from on high, a pronouncement ex cathedra, as egotistical and unchecked as the wail of a baby. Then it goes out into the world, to an editor, and the reality principle rears its ugly head. You are forced as a writer to come to terms with the gap between your idea and your execution — and still more deflating, between your idea and what your idea should have been.

This isn’t easy. You have to let go of your attachment to the specific words you’ve written and open yourself to what you were aiming for. You need enough confidence in yourself to accept constructive criticism, some of which can feel like your internal organs are being more or less gently moved around. More than just about any other non-artistic activity — therapy and, yes, sex are possible exceptions — being edited forces you to see yourself, or at least what you’ve written, the way others see you. It is a depersonalizing process in some ways, yet having to stand outside yourself deepens you as a person. You need to grow a thick skin in order to have a thinner, more sensitive one.

Via the Sunoasis Joblog journliasm blog for employment trends, more here of an excellent salon.com article by editor Gary Kamiya.

A very clever and funny short vid about proofreading and spellcheck by Taylor Mali.

(Via Making Light.)

Writing jobs are moving offshore? Writing jobs?

According to this Barbara Ehrenreich article, even local news is now being shipped off to reporters in India. Whoa. All that time in Subramaniam’s Globalization and Its Critics class I truly thought myself safe, that my writing skills might not be so easily farmed out overseas, lending me a special job security the rest of the class might not be so lucky as to enjoy.

I should have known I was wrong.

On the face of it, I have no problems with news being reported in this way. I myself have covered events remotely, and did it better, I think, than a lot of local journalists could have done. I guess it’s just time to prepare myself for the future of my chosen profession, which it seems will, as with so many other professions, involve work spreading entropically out over the globe.

Frankly, to me this really just sounds kind of exciting. I mean, I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a sweet job in India, so long as I could take my cats. I remember Subramaniam saying very emphatically that someday there’d be an American migration to India, with people following new jobs there, raising families there, becoming people of multiple cultures. Becoming, I suppose, a multicultural enclave based around India’s growing job market.

Some call it globalization but I call it a fine excuse for an extended working vacation overseas.

And in more writing news, blogs are good, and actually help you develop your writing skills and market yourself. I totally agree.

It occurred to me just the other day that I found my writing voice through this blog. It’s the only place I get to write and really be me at the same time, and it has really affected my style in a rich and positive way. Doing writing that you deeply enjoy is a wonderfully healthy activity for the writer, and there’s a lot of writing that I do that I am not paid for in dollars, but in pure pleasure. I’ve found that my blog also keeps me connected to interesting people, lets me share my opinions with a group of interesting and thoughtful readers, and even, quite pleasantly, keeps me connected to an old friend in Massachusetts. Hell, it’s even given me some good science clips. I can hardly imagine life without this tool anymore.

BTW all of the articles linked in this post are from the Sunoasis journalism jobs blog, which I liked so much I plan to start checking it out daily.

And it occurs to me today that I have three teachers to thank for three big things.

My Women and History professor Randee Goodstadt, for showing me my past — the history of women in America.

My Foundations of Chemistry teacher, Glenn Ratcliff, for showing me the present — the natural world all around me.

And Surain Subramaniam for showing me a piece of the puzzle of my future, what I think might be the last thing I needed to understand to know what kind of writer I truly want to be: The kind that is willing and prepared to move across countries and cultures in search of cool information to serve up to the world.

This one’s for the writers. And for the people who have so kindly begun using me as an information provider (a role I relish).

Richard Preston is the author of seven books, including The Hot Zone, The Cobra Event and The Demon in the Freezer, which are his “Dark Biology” series. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. From his online bio:

“Today, when I write about something, I try to capture the feeling of wonder that comes from opening the doors of a mystery. Writing, as with science, is about seeing the world differently and slightly more clearly than anyone has ever seen it before.”

DAMN.

“I was rejected by every college I applied to.”

I like this guy already.

“I do a lot of fact-checking. I read passages aloud to my subjects on the telephone while asking them to correct facts and tiny details. This lends an extra fineness of focus to the story. Fact-checking is like sharpening the focus of a lens, revealing new detail. It is especially important with scientists, who expect and need accuracy from journalists. I rewrite passages based on what my subjects tell me. In this way, I try to maintain respect for nature, for narrative, and for the integrity of human achievement.”

I like his style, too.

More here.

Of all the things that I have written that are archived online, there’s one that people love the most. I’ve gotten emails from all over the world about it. Not many emails to be sure, but I just got one again last night which reminded me of this piece’s strange and enduring appeal to people from Australia to South America.

It’s been so long since I wrote it that I can read it with a cold eye, as if it was someone else’s work. And it always pleases me to do so. I was young, I was untrained, and I had far to go with my work. But there is a writer in there, yes there is. A good one.

Here is my 2002 ArtSavant review of Y Tu Mama Tambien, the first good thing I ever wrote.

My writing for the online entertainment publication ArtSavant, including that piece, was my first writing work. It wasn’t even paying work — I did it all for free. I was unemployed and I loved to write, and was in fact was at the time seminotorious for sending out long emails about movies. I’d written a long email to friends criticizing the first Harry Potter movie, and when somebody said that I should write for the new arts website in town I actually sent in my Harry Potter email, asking the editor if she wanted anything like that. I didn’t think she’d want that rant particularly, but I sent it as an example of what I could do. She published it, my first submission.

I’d struggled with writing for years, somehow drawn to it, yet never able to write creatively. When I lifted my gaze from my PC screen after writing my first naive piece of amateur film criticism and found that three hours had passed by like nothing, I knew I had found flow. I had discovered that you didn’t have to make things up to be a writer. And everything started making sense at last. I never did get another day job after that.

For awhile there I wanted to be a professional movie critic. David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. blew my mind so hard that all I thought I could ever want from life was to watch amazing movies like that, and write about them, and think about them. That love affair ended, but I remain fascinated with movie writing. It’s a Faustian bargain to read a movie review — sure, you get some knowledge about whether or not the movie might be worth your while, but not without sacrificing your precious ignorance about the plot. Me, I have my favorite critics that I turn to to help me figure out if I will like a movie (I like A. O. Scott of the NYT). And yes, I am a big fan of Roger Ebert, whose bloated and snide TV presence seems to have nothing to do with the sensitive and sophisticated writings produced by the person of the same name.

It really makes a writer’s day — or anyone’s day, I’m sure — to have a total stranger be so moved by your work they send you an email out of the blue. Y Tu Mama was a hell of a movie, wasn’t it?

I’d like to send out a special thanks to Sean, who totally wrote that amazing last line — and who helped shape me into the writer I am now. You know, I realize I have forgotten part of the story of my own life — John Scalzi really never was a mentor for me, just a semi-stranger who answered my emails in a prompt and helpful way. My first mentor was my old friend Sean — whom I went to kindergarten with!

Thanks, Sean — and congrats again on your M.F.A.!

(Dimensional Interface, acrylic on board 14″x18″, copyright © 2007 Pyracantha)

Well, I’m now a Mass Comm major, and even my old chemistry prof is wishing me well. And I’ve begun to dissect why on EARTH I didn’t do this sooner. My God.

And I think that it’s because I have no desire to become a print journalist, and to my mind, a major in Mass Communications was a major in journalism which meant a life in print journalism, which doesn’t appeal to me at all. If I wanted to become a journalist, with my background I’d probably just point my work in that direction. But I don’t want to focus on  that kind of work. I’ve tried it and I don’t like it as much as I do other things. And I wonder if this isn’t a fundamental problem of many people who are interested in writing — thinking that journalism, freelancing and fiction comprise the whole of the world of writers.

I am coming to realize that writing is richer and stranger and gnarlier than that. That’s just not all that there is. I avoided a formal education as a writer because I thought it was preparing me for a life of print journalism. Newspaper writing. Magazine writing. The complex world of writing, it seems, is easy underestimated and misunderstood.

In fact, I was confused for a long time in my twenties because I loved writing and I knew was good at it and others encouraged me at every turn, but I had a terrible time as I struggled into my field, because I first had to learn that writing is more than fiction. I honestly didn’t really understand that. It didn’t really occur to me for some time that there was anything else to do with my talent other than write novels and stories, something I have no talent for.

It took me a long time to realize that the world of freelancing even existed, and that “writing” didn’t mean writing novels and prose. When I discovered nonfiction writing and freelancing, I was reborn.

And here I am reborn again! After six years of professional writing, I see that “nonfiction writing” is more than freelancing and print journalism, the staples of my income. It can be television writing — documentary writing and educational writing. It can be scriptwriting for the very sophisticated educational videos being made nowadays. I am very excited by the advances in computer animation and their applications in scientific visualization, particularly as it pertains to education. I think I’d do well writing scripts for CGI animations that explain things to people, to students. I myself would have benefited tremendously from being able to learn in this way.

And here’s my big scary dream. I also want to explore writing TV fiction — writing a series. I used to love books and literature, but as I grow older, it’s my romance with TV that deepens. Which is an odd development for someone who lived her life in books for a decade or more, and who doesn’t have cable or even network TV (but not really a strange development for someone who has seen every episode of Star Trek: TNG). You can watch a lot of TV online, and rent a lot on DVD, and that’s what I do. Experiencing TV in this way keeps my watching very intentional, very mindful, very nutritious. Very choosy, very respectful of the best that the medium has to offer, like Deadwood, and Six Feet Under, and Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who. I can’t write prose fiction, but could I write television fiction? I really would like to try.

When I look at writing as being all of these exciting things — writing for a quality cable series, writing documentaries like the Walking With… series that I loved so, writing for moving and meaningful nonfiction television like the BBC genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are?, writing becomes a very exciting enterprise again! Thank God. Much more enticing than working on newspaper or magazine articles, which I have done but which I don’t care to place my career focus on.

Science writing romanced me, so much so that I was able to put aside my trepidation about print journalism — I mean, print journalism would have gone down pretty well with a spoonful of nerds and learning interesting science as part of the job. Science sugar-coated and opiated my disenchantment with print journalism. So that’s how I ended up as a science writer — quite logically, as a writer who loved science. And this is how I ended up as a Mass Comm major — when my science education fell apart, what I at last faced my distate for the world of journalism, when I overwhelmingly began to remember the worlds I loved even before I loved before science, the worlds of of art and theatre and performance. Of science fiction and literature.

My nice chem prof tells me that he was a music major, then a physics major, and then a chemistry major. Sometimes there is pleasure in not being unique. All you who struggle as I do, I’ve always got you on my mind. This blog is a public record of one person’s life meant to help you, whoever you are. Call it Contentment, Satisfaction and Happiness in Several Thousand Extremely Difficult Lessons.

My name is Jennifer. I am a writer, but I do not like print journalism that much and don’t plan on making it a focus of my working life. My one sweet life, so much of it spent working. I think that I am going to try to be a slippery guerilla writer, and come at writing from strange angles, and find a way maybe to involve CGI, dinosaurs, science fiction, music and other things I like way more than working in a newsroom or grinding out a science article.

This is the change I felt rumbling in my soul all winter long, sending out thermonuclear vibrations I sensed for weeks, making me nervy and miserable and half crazy with strange new hopes that seemed like hatefully impossible dreams. It was my soul being fed up with its life, imprisoned in the cold machine of my dead ambition. It was rebellion from within.

Today just after lunchtime I filed the paperwork to change my major here at the college.

I am not a Physics major. I have left Isaac Newton’s posse, probably for good. My three-year journey into a science degree is over.

I am now a Mass Communication major and I am seriously considering a Creative Writing minor. Next semester my classes will not be Organic Chemistry and Gen Physics II, but Screenwriting I and Newswriting. My God.

Today is the day that I decided, for what feels like good and all, that I have been stupid to study for so long from my places of weakness and not from my place of strength. As I wrote to myself in the little box on my desk that holds all my good ideas, “You are a writer. Who are you kidding?”

My advisor is now an 84-year-old former television professional who has written for The Mary Tyler Moore Show and who still has contacts in the television industry. And as I met with the head of the MCOM department, strange words left my mouth:

After a long period of reflection, I have decided that I no longer want to be a science writer and that I no longer want to be a science major.

I think about writing for television. I think about writing for cable. I think about writing television fiction, a series. I also think about writing television documentaries.

Writing’s a great job for someone like me, who’s always changing her spots. Being a writer is a sort of insurance that I can reinvent myself by doing very different kinds of writing, yet have the stability of sticking to my field. I may have left Isaac’s posse, but I hope to visit them to write about the worlds I still and will always love, math and science. If anything, really, I am not so much changing my focus as widening it to hold possibilities of so much more than science writing.

God, would I EVER love to have been part of the writing team of the Walking With... series! Ooh, I can see myself happily writing BBC documentaries. (I really am obsessed with BBC programming recently.) I feel excited about my future and my studies in a way that I have not felt in a very long and very unhappy time. The thrill died over winter break but I kept slogging on, miserably and in one of the most dreadful ruts of my entire life.

There were many signs it was time to change. My mental mailbox was stuffed with unopened letters from the universe. I wrote a research expectations paper for my chemistry prof that was little more than a list of my weaknesses as a scientist, clearly the work of a person in a crisis of confidence. I went to a friend’s ping-pong party that I’d been excited about for a week and sat at the table in a heap, too tired to play.

And I went to the Physics Lab, a place of physics homework help, and it was there I realized I was doomed to fail and doing the wrong thing. I asked for help from the young tutor, and she explained the problem, and her explanation dripped onto me and not into me, an alien substance my body could never absorb. And I had done everything right. I’d tried to work my homework problems, read my textbook, watched the little java physics movies, never missed class, listened, taken notes, studied hard… All for failure. All for failure.

I began to wonder what on Earth was so wrong with formally studying writing. Why had I turned from it with such condescension? I had said I’d study science to see where it could take me, to see how far I could go. Could I not do the same thing with something that I was actually good at?

Today I feel very writerly in a way I never have before in six years of writing professionally. I feel like I am coming out of the closet somehow. I suppose it’s a classic case of coming back to where you started from and knowing the place for the first time. I don’t know why I have always felt vaguely fraudulent and unworthy at calling myself a writer, as if it was an honor that I never quite deserved, despite the fact that I have been one for years and plan to keep on being one. I finished a new knitted scarf last night and wore it today, thinking of it as The Scarf I First Wore the Day That I Decided to Quit Fucking Around and Actually Accept That I Am a Writer .

Because I think that’s what I am.

I noticed my RSS feedcount go up when I actually started talking about my writing. But as you may have noticed, I don’t often talk about my writing career on this blog. I don’t expect that will change.

If you started reading for freelance writing tips, I’ve got two suggestions. You can skim my RSS feed, and just delete entries that don’t interest you. Or you can just head over to the Whatever, the personal blog of my first writing mentor, John Scalzi. Unlike me, Scalzi is a fulltime freelancer, and he writes about his job all the time. His site is full of great tips for writers. He comes personally recommended by me as a good advice-giver, a talented and seasoned writer, and a very funny blogger. I think you’ll like his site and his writing.

I doubt he’s open to be your personal mentor. He wasn’t really mine, he just gave a shit about my questions and is my (very, very distant) cousin.

Anyway. If you’re here for knitting, science, student life, feminism or math — stick around.

Today I thought about how this blog is named Jennifer Saylor, Freelance Writer, but I never talk about my freelance writing in it. I thought of changing the name to Jennifer Saylor, Freelance Anxiety Attack Victim, but that just isn’t very catchy.

At the moment I am doing most of the copy for a new real estate website based out of a local community that is gaining a reputation as a resort and retirement area. And the next time I take on an assignment like this, I will inquire as to what extent the client is selling ridgetop lots. Before accepting the work, I hadn’t considered the moral implications of helping to sell real estate in the unspoiled mountains. Live and learn.

I just finished a list of the best Valentine’s Day events to enjoy in Miami, FL (I write for an online entertainment pub that’s based there), and I am considering taking an assignment writing brochure copy for a business that offers golf tours of Japan.

I’d say that these are all pretty typical freelance assignments. I read a blog entry the other day where the writer — a very successful, well-known freelancer and novelist — would soon be writing about cornflakes. Cornflakes. For good money.

I’ve met so many people who think that there’s no money in freelancing, which is a huge untruth. If you want to know how much money a freelance writer makes, ask one. Preferably a successful one. You’ll find that it can be very, very lucrative. I know someone who found short-term work at bursts of close to $200 an hour editing math textbooks. I myself have made $100 an hour or so for many pay-per-project assignments (note to prospective clients — that’s not my typical rate). In my opinion the people who make no money as freelancers typically only want cool, creative work (or think that freelancing only covers fiction), and are unwilling to go where the money is, which is in writing about things — real estate, travel packages — that are not exactly the route to full creative expression. Writing short stories and poetry exclusively is lucrative for only a tiny, tiny percentage of the writing community. And no amount of hard work can assure you the level of fame one needs to make a good living writing nothing but fiction. However, if you have talent and you work hard at writing about unglamorous things, you can make a good living doing nothing but writing. (Which is not to say that I make a lot of money — I spend half my life as a student, and can’t always take on the amount of work or the number of clients that I’d like.)

So I write about travel packages for the money, and for the very real pleasure that I receive both from pleasing my clients beyond their expectations and also from exercising my greatest talent in life. It’s not boring wage-slavery. It’s honest work well done. And then I write about the Kuiper Belt or Roald Hoffmann to please my heart and soul. I have no idea if I will ever get any money out of the science writing that I do for my blogs, and I really don’t care. I don’t do it for the money. I do it so that some part of my life and my talent is expended in pure pleasure and self-satisfaction.

One of the first things that my first writing mentor told me was to always have some writing project that you do just for yourself. Of course, I disregarded this stupid-sounding advice immediately. Just being a paid writer was PLENTY cool enough at the start.

But the years went by and I found myself a real-life pro, with clips, clients, and a real career. And damned if I didn’t soon see what good advice he’d given me. If you’re a good singer, sing jingles for cash and sing for pennies at the bar. The jingles will pay your way in the world; Irish ballads at the bar will keep your heart singing at your mastery of your craft, at the things that your gift can do that bring real pleasure to you and to others.

It seems kind of silly and greedy to me to think that your whole life should be devoted to nothing but creativity. As late as my mid-twenties, I idiotically scoffed at “day jobs,” as if the depth and breadth of a long human life didn’t offer plenty of time for both working and making art, as if there was some shame in supporting yourself with honest work that wasn’t creative. As a more mature and experienced person, I don’t think that the ancient hunter-gatherers, or the farmers working their fields from dawn to dusk, had time for such navel-worship. Creativity is sacred to me, but I so is enjoying a comfortable, happy life that includes managing heating bills, vet bills, expensive textbooks, and car problems. And I have this weird desire to eat food, to pay my way in life, contribute to my society, pull my own weight, and live comfortably and well.

I work as creatively as I can. Think of me as a commercial word-artist, with an identity as a crafter (knitter) and performer (singer). And gardener. And student. And blogger. A lover of science and logic and critical thought. Shit, I also like ping-pong. Like I think everyone should be, I am a lot of things. And I am always changing. Why must we all define ourselves through our jobs, anyway? Let’s start a revolution, you and me, and starting defining ourselves at least two other ways. I choose knitter and student.

I give part of my life to creativity, and part of my life to making a living semi-creatively. I do the last one gladly, and the first one with joy.

“Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.”

-Cyrus Favriar

(Thank you Boing Boing and Asher Sarlin.)

What makes a writer? I’m not really talking about what makes a good writer. I’m talking about what qualities drive a person in the direction of writing professionally: what qualities we writers seem to share, and what qualities made me a writer. What qualities point a person in the direction of writing so strongly that it’s hard not to head that way — whether you understand where you’re going or not.

Based on my observations of myself and other writers, here are the qualities that I think that many writers share and that help make us what we are.

1. Writers have remarkable powers of recall.

Ray Bradbury also believes this to be an important commonality among writers, and like me, he has memories of infancy. I’m pretty sure I have pre-birth memories, too. I have a photographic memory and can remember events, names, places, and faces from earliest childhood.

A strong memory helps you to write because it gives you so much material, a lifetime’s worth, all inside your head and accessible with a single thought. There are whole worlds inside you. Whole worlds of memory: of what people wear, how they wear their hair, how they smile, how it felt to drive to play rehearsal with the wind in your hair when you were 17 and in a good mood for no reason at all… I have strong sensory recall too, and can remember smells, sounds and sensations exceptionally well.

All this helps you become a writer because it sure makes your job easier… So much of life is stored inside you.

2. Writers make sense of the world through writing; they process life by writing about it.

Even before I became a professional writer, I was writing. I was infamous for sending long emails: reviewing movies, telling about something that happened to me, sending long philosophical blah-blah, you name it. I still do it now. I’ll never stop.

I saw a play last night, collapsed into my bed exhausted at 1AM, woke up this morning sick and headachy and totally blogged about the show before breakfast (and I was hungry this morning). Writing isn’t only how I make a living. It’s how I process, digest and understand what happens to me and to others.

3. Writers have an innate ability to describe things well.

If you have this skill, you’re well set up to become a good writer and you’ll find the call of writing that much easier to obey. I don’t know that it’s something one can learn. I think it’s something that you have or you don’t have, and while you can certainly develop it, IMO you won’t go too far as a writer unless it comes to you readily.

There’s a delicious feeling to landing the phrase that says exactly what you want it to say. And you know it when you’ve done it, which is to say I know it, with a profound and pleasing certainty. And I know it when I don’t do it. With almost all of the writing that I do for this blog, I don’t use that ability so much. I’m willing to make compromises. Blog entries go up quick, usually contain errors, and never get a proper edit like paid work would. In my recent post about the storm, there are a few phrases that don’t sound quite right to me (I don’t love the leaves leaving their stations). But I do like my description of the lightnings as “great white camera-flashes that turn the sky into a pale backdrop for the black tree-branches.” I don’t love it, but I like it.

When the phrase is right, you just know. You feel the tendrils of your mind go searching out into the mindscape, into every word you’ve ever learned. You are like a mighty octopus at the center of the universe, with a million infinitely long arms, reaching everywhere. And when you seize the right words, and you know they are the right ones, the feeling is electric.