First, the zombies

I’ve never been particularly drawn to the zombie genre in film or book, though I admit that I am morbidly fascinated by recent bestsellers like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Zombie Survival Guide, or World War Z. Last week while perusing the shelves at Barnes and Noble, I picked up Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion. Exclamations and accolades adorned its back cover as a story worth reading. In spite of the tired subject matter, the first page hooked me:

“I am dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it…My friend “M” says the irony of being a zombie is that everything is funny, but you can’t smile, because your lips have rotted off.”

This is a popcorn book. It will not increase my social standing nor will it make the world a better place, necessarily. What has kept me reading is that the book has given a different life to zombies.  Sure, the main character, “R” keeps a piece of brain stuffed in his pocket, so there’s still a lot of that going on. What’s different is that R the Zombie has been given humanity and identity.

Now the Man From Mars

Robert Heinlein’s story Stranger in a Strange Land always places high among science fiction classics, and it is certainly best known on Heinlein’s resume. I’m listening to it as an audiobook, and the sexist language like referring to women as “little girls” or “sweet things” is awkward and outdated. Still, his female characters always carry spunk.

The story is old, the characters familiar. It is a fish-out-of-water story that pits an alien against the rest of the world; a small band of “water brothers” are sympathetic to the cause and fight to protect the strange creature. Heinlein is known for his ability to tell an old story in a new way. Heinlein’s defamiliarization is how he describes each scene. Here’s an example. The scene is non-sexual, even though the Man From Mars asks Jill, the main character, to take off her clothes.

Instead of a flat refusal, she says, “I won’t peel  for you.”

This phrase “I won’t peel for you” jolted me. If only for a second, it reminded me why I enjoy reading Heinlein. It wasn’t just different – it was out of the ordinary, and it has been these kinds of linguistic gems that has kept me listening through his platitudes and diatribes about government and religion.

A short history of defamiliarization

Officially, defamiliarization is a literary technique first coined by Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky, ”of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.”

How defamiliarizing can help you

Every book, article, essay, newspaper column or even technical document should be sprinkled with snowflakes and marked with fingerprints. Words and phrases breathe, creating not just life – but a soul to the idea you’re trying to communicate.

Whether you describe the chomping sound and dead flesh or the mannerisms from a man from Mars, you must defamiliarize if you’re going to be memorable.

Copyright (c) Lifehacker

This post on LifeHacker.com gave me one of those yikes! moments.

I’ve heard of commuters traveling three hours for a seventeen-mile commute. Take advantage of the time you have to wait in the car. Listen to audiobooks. Record stories while you drive (while driving safely, of course).

Your commute doesn’t have to suck the life out of you. Comment on how you take advantage of the time.

http://lifehacker.com/5855550/the-true-cost-of-commuting-you-could-buy-a-house-priced-15900-more-for-each-mile-you-move-closer-to-work

My new favorite nonfiction book is called Quitter by John Acuff. Here’s from the back cover:

“Have you ever felt caught between the tension of a day job and a dream job? That gap between what you have to do and what you’d love to do?

I have.

At first I thought I was the only one who felt that way, but then I started to talk to people and realized we’re becoming the I’m, but generation. When we talk about what we do for a living we inevitably say, I’m a teacher, but I want to be an artist. I’m a CPA, but I’d love to start my own business.

I’m a _____, but I want to be a ______.

All too often, we hear that dreaming big means you quit your day job, sell everything you own, and move to Guam. But what if there were a different way?”

His opening line ironically was, “Don’t quit your day job.”

Instead of chasing our dreams without a plan, he encourages us to tackle our day job with a better attitude. Learn, he says, to live with comfortable discontent and use cubicle time to fund what we’re most passionate about. In other words, learn to live where you are. Work diligently and disciplined. Success and peace will follow.

Breaking away from chronic quitting

Acuff was a chronic quitter, averaging about a year per job, following his passion of writing and speaking. He was finding an audience as a blogger, a book deal was imminent, and he was discovering moderate success.

Still, he didn’t quit. Day-job contentment followed when he didn’t have to choose just any speaking or writing gig. After all, he wasn’t using this side gig to pay Joe Plummer or the mortgage company. He spoke at conferences and gatherings for free, but he could do that only because he wasn’t worried about paying the bills.

Refreshing advice

Acuff defamiliarized the “chase your dreams” approach and genre.

Learn more about John Acuff, his blog and his book. Visit johnacuff.com

1. Learn to play violin.
2. Pay off the mortgage.
3. Write a second novel.
4. Own a muscle car
5. Run a marathon.

Here’s a status update: I ran the marathon, or half marathon. I still have a mortgage, I’m still working on the novel, and I won’t ever own a muscle car until the kids are in college. I did learn to play the violin, but I quit after six months.

Retirement came after playing in a recital with my seven-year-old daughter, a violinist who had already surpassed me in skill and performance moxie. I forgot  the notes to the song, and she played while I only occasionally chimed in.

My son’s recent academic experience has been a little like my violin experience. The teacher asked him to write sounds on paper (“q” makes a sound like “qu,” in the word quilt). He answered correctly until number five. His confidence crumbled at number six. Out of twelve, he missed the final six questions.

Ironically, this happens to us grown-ups, too. (See first paragraph.) When something goes wrong, panic ensues, and our confidence sinks.

My violin experience and my sons’ “deer in the headlight quiz” helped me remember about what success really means. It’s about enjoying the journey. No one will select me to play in the Philharmonic, but my goal was to develop things in common with my daughter, so my string stint was a success. As my son learns to take one question at a time,  as he learns to enjoy music and art and story time, his confidence will grow. He won’t allow one bad grade to shape or define his identity.

Success, leadership guru John Maxwell says, is the journey, not the destination.

“Success is …

knowing your purpose in life,

growing to reach your maximum potential, and

sowing the seeds that benefit others.”

My daughter experiences her own version of not digging deep. As a budding violinist, she works hard (mostly) to learn notes, to place fingers correctly and to learn new songs. Tonight I witnessed to that. She just didn’t have it. Get this, she made lunch, cleaned up clothes and did abnormally grown up things that I would love for her to do at other times. School was tough (Swinging on the monkey bars repeatedly takes a lot out of a little girl.), and she just didn’t have the energy. I kept pressing her because, well, sometimes we have to do things we don’t feel like doing.

It’s a hard lesson to learn, and one that I’m still learning how to deal with.

How do you dig deep after an eight or ten hour work day and after the kids to bed and after helping with laundry and …. (the list goes on)? I don’t have the answers, by the way, I’m asking you.

My son wants to race. Badly. His eyes light up; sometimes he jumps up and down with excitement; other times, he’s mesmerized. He wants to race, but his biggest problem is training wheels.

“You just can’t race other kids when you use training wheels,” I tell him, expecting his little 6-year-old mind grasp this concept.

Load-balancing the mangled training wheels

Before the grapple fell, I took off the training wheels. Honestly, only one side has what you’d call a wheel. The other wheel looks like a dog chewed the heck out of it. Our dogs are dead.

So wrench in hand, I unscrewed the nuts and brackets, just hoping to make his ride a little smoother. Much to my surprise, he wanted to practice riding without the device for the unelegantly balanced.

“I want to practice, Daddy. I want to race.”

Great, I said. But also to my surprise, he didn’t want my help. He wanted to do it himself. Alas, it didn’t end well for him. He ran into the fence, then a tree. Then he became “angwry.”

So we took a walk. I hoped a little sunshine would calm him. Alas, it did not. Expert mechanic that I am, I did not ”load-balance”  the training wheels, and he lost his balance.  Temper flaring again, he kicked the handle bars and cried when he hurt his toe.

The lesson about training wheels

Here’s the lesson I learned from my six-year-old son. Sometimes we need help. Friends, family members, colleagues or strangers may want to give us exactly what we need. Instead of accepting the assistance with gratitude, we shun them.

If you are a believer in Christ, this is how we treat God. If you are a writer, we do this by ignoring all the great “lessons learned” by wiser, experienced folk.

Seek out advice. Look for mentors, find someone who can make you better, faster, stronger. Then go and offer that same help to someone else.

I’m still working on this. You might say I’m still wearing training wheels myself. Maybe one day I’ll get to take them off.

• Exercise. Check.
• Stop smoking or drinking so much. Check.
• Get in a relationship with the opposite sex. Check.
• Improve your relationship with spouse or friend. Check.
• Get a better job. Check.
• Recycle & save the planet. Check.

As a writer, you probably already have decided on what commitments to make for the new year. Maybe it’s never to use a split infinitive again, to write that novel – even if you never get published, or to write every short story with that beautiful fountain pen.

Writing letters to your family

Here’s a suggestion for 2012. Get your daily word count by writing letters to your kids and spouse. You could make it formal and write on notecards or you could write it on a scratch paper. They don’t care. They’ll be happy that you took in the time to tell them how much you loved them or appreciate them.

Don’t have a wife or kids?

Consider sponsoring a child from a third world country. Compassion International and World Vision encourage sponsors to write letters to their kids. Military families (overseas or stateside) or sick children appreciate letters. You can probably brain storm your own long list.

What’s in it for you

Lots of things.

First, you can discover your voice, practice word choice, experiment with rules of grammar, practice writing with structure, or just free form writing; discipline yourself to write without Larry the Lizard distracting you. The list goes on. Most importantly, you’ll have a stronger family, and they’ll love you for it.

Lifestreaming, or social activity streams, “is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream,” according to Wikipedia.com.

Lifestreaming services are emerging as a viable way to tell a story. Snip.it and Storify.com are two different types of aggregators that are gaining credibility in the mainstream media.

Here’s a storystream about the Wall Street protests as journalists practice with Storify:

These kinds of tools allow you to engage your creative chops. Poetry or prose can all emerge.

Enjoy!

We should write that first novel, we could start our own business, we ought to rid ourselves of patterns and behavior we think holds us back, and we fret after realizing it isn’t just a single bad habit but a thousand.

Instead of should or ought, why not focus more on could, wish or choose?

What you can learn from Annie Dilliard

I like this quote by famed author Annie Dilliard:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

A highly recommended book Dilliard wrote is called On Writing. Watch this video to learn more:

Life is made up of small chunks of time. How we use that time is what will define us.

When you write a headline on the Web, what are the two most important words?

Answer:

The first two are the most important.

Why?

Usability studies show that when writing headlines, taking a passive approach is more effective because users read in an F-shaped pattern like this:

Gasp! Writing With a Passive Voice?

Body text should always take an active voice, but when writing headlines, taking a passive approach is much more effective, studies by the Nielsen Norman usability group show.

Writing for Different Mediums

Writing headlines with a passive voice is just one of the nuances when writing for different mediums. Search, e-mail, mobile, and social media have their own flare. Become a student of communicating with different tools. A creative writer writes differently than a copywriter. Common demoninators exist like mechanics and usage, but knowing the nuances can set apart the wheat from the chaff.

Resources for Web Writers

It not always easy to find a comprehensive list of links to other articles, but I wanted to pass along. While not a complete list, it does give you a good reminder that help is out there for you.

• How Users Read On The Web
• How to Write for the Web
• From Print to Web: Tips for the Transitioning Writer
• Writing Style for Print vs. Web
• 10  Tips on Writing the Living Web: A List Apart
• 5 Rules for Better Web Writing
• Reading on the Web (Alertbox)
• How Web Is Different from Print
• Traditional Writing Skills Don’t Work on Web 
• Blog Users Don’t Read, They Scan… Write Accordingly
• 5 Simple Ways to Open Your Blog Post With a Bang
• “Inverted Pyramid”: How to Write for Social News &  Blogs
• The 6 Cs of Killer Web Writing