Her answer started with the a throwaway comment that it was probably a moot point as the site probably wouldn’t still be earning money when I died.

Maybe, maybe not. After all, I’ve had some articles online for more than a decade now. And, at one of the sites I write for,  I personally know of royalty earning people who have died.

The rest of her answer was the important part: Yes, digital property IS property that can be bequeathed like any other.  Writers own their copyrights, and pass them to their estates, unless they have signed a contract to the contrary.  But without proactive action from the estate, the property becomes abandoned.

If you write in digital media, you need to organize your affairs to include this property, which can bequeathed like any others. Need to know more? I’ve written this article about literary estates to get you started.

Most of my work came back to me covered with blue pencil marks: corrections, margin notes, and suggestions for things to add.

My first  job out of college was as an assistant editor at a music magazine where I was encouraged to, or at least allowed, to write. Once again, every word was reviewed, first by another editor at my level (normal lead pencil), then by a senior editor (thick blue pencil) , and then by the publisher (thicker black marker). Some pieces came back looking like a kindergarten art project, more like something to be tacked to a refrigerator than to be published in a magazine.

Well, I’m dating myself: Paper copies, blue pencils, black markers.  And I haven’t even mentioned the White-out or the type-over tape; or Exacto knives, or  scissors for when the “cutting” part of “cutting and pasting “  involved  actual cutting.

Today, my pages came back to me with “track changes,” which can be every bit as colorful. If you haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing “track changes,’ each editor gets her own hue, so if you have four editors on a piece, you have four colors. And of course, there are those pesky author queries and requests for “tweaks.” (Such a harmless sounding word, tweaks. I HATE that word!)

Here’s the thing: Those colors? Those queries? Those scrawled margin notes (“Awk”,  “???”, or my favorite: “DRD” (that particular editor’s shorthand for “department of redundancy department”)?  Those damned tweaks?  THAT is how I learned to write.

Oh, my grammar was fine long before that. My syntax was competent. Sure, there were some mistakes; there always are, but the average English professor had no problem with my papers. I’ve always been a reader, and basic writing skills have always come easily.

But I had no idea what the difference was between writing correctly for a college term paper, and writing entertainingly and engagingly for a commercial audience.

Listen up here, because THIS is important:

My (and your) professors were paid to read what I (and you)  wrote.

Our magazine readers pay to read what we write.

Big difference. Professors can give you a bad grade and help you fix it; if magazine readers don’t like your work, they can  just turn the page. Or put it in the trash. Or write a nasty little letter to the editor.

And while we’re at it, let me put a possible objection to rest: Sure, your Internet readers aren’t spending money to read what you wrote. but they ARE spending their time. If you want them to stick around, you have to earn their attention.

I had a lot to learn, and I learned it from those multi-colored scribbles and irritating queries and endless tweaks.

Learning to Write in the Brave New World of the Internet

Today’s writing world has completely changed, and for beginning writers, it is both easier and harder.

It’s easier because the barriers to entry are non-existent. Wanna write? Start a blog. It takes 15 minutes.

Sure,  gatekeepers still zealously and carefully guard  the traditional bastions of old-style publishing.   I remember the nervous, excited, Cinderella-at-the-ball feeling I had when I first visited an editor at a New York publishing house, invited into to the sanctum sanctorum to pitch what would become my very first book.  Even now, 15 books later, the feeling of stepping through those glass doors still seems to me like being invited to the palace.

A few years later, visiting a  friend who was an editor at Knopf, I looked around the reception area. Could it have been any more intimidating, decorated as it was with the covers of Pulitzer prize winning books and iconic literary best-sellers? On the floor near the door was a sad stack of yellow 9 x12 envelopes, submissions in the truest sense of the word. Would anyone ever read them?  These New York agents, these prestigious old houses, those revered magazines with their Ivy League accents; they don’t need security guards to keep out the unworthy.

In yesteryear, if you didn’t have a connection, you had to bang your head against the palace walls until you broke through or someone took pity on you.

Tough Love is an Editor’s Job: The Tougher Their Love, the Better Your Work

Today, that’s all different. Today, you can start a blog. or write for a revenue share site, or for one of the thousands of sites that pay 10 cents a word…. or less. The Internet’s ultimate effects on professional writers and on journalism in general have yet to be determined. From where I sit, the Internet has surely done some damage.  But for beginners, it’s a godsend.

Print editors used to sniffily reject authors unknown to them with the rationale that they couldn’t tell from a clip whether the work was heavily edited or not.  And they were right.  The more prestigious the magazine, the less likely it is that the published version is what a writer actually turned in.

They can’t say that anymore: In contrast, online work is often unedited, and if it is edited, it is edited very lightly. My online work, for example, has appeared on sites ranging from MSNBC.com to Weather.com to corporate sites for General Electric and The Northface, to the revenue share site, Suite 101.com. I’ve written way more than 1000 articles on-line, and I can count individually — perhaps a dozen — the number of those that have been bounced back to me with requests for anything more than an occasional request for clarification or a questions that needed to be addressed.  I’ve never had to rewrite. If an editor is reading me online, that editor is, for better or worse, reading ME.

My experience in print has been quite different. Early in my career, in my early 20s, I wrote a few stories for the New York Times. I remember  when my editor (who, over the phone, had that stereotypically gruff old-time newspaperman’s voice) questioned a few details. Realization struck like lightning. THIS is what we mean by clarity. THIS is what we mean by specificity. THIS is what we mean by “Show, don’t tell.”  After writing a couple of stories for this one editor, my goal was to make my stories so tight and waterproof that he wouldn’t have to ask those questions anymore.

But I still had more to learn: My first book had to be entirely rewritten:  As soon as the editor started pointing out flaws in the first chapter, I realized that there were global problems all over the place.  It was an easy rewrite; he was a good editor who made his points clearly,and after a while, he barely had to make them at all, only circling or putting the odd question mark here or there to call my attention to a section that needed reworking. I guess we were on  compatible wavelengths, because I immediately saw not only what he needed and how to do it — but the value of it. There weren’t any egregious technical writing mistakes in my first draft. Nonetheless, the difference between that and the second draft was night and day.  My first draft may have been correct, but it was unpublishable. This was another key realization.  Correct does not equal readable.

If you are open to learning, THAT is what good editing can teach you. If you are NOT open to learning, you will continue to write and wonder why you’re not getting anywhere. In order to be teachable, you have to be willing to be taught. You have to be willing to act on what you don’t even want to hear.  Willing to rewrite the Whole. Damn. Book.

Misconceptions About Editing From On-line Writers and Why It Matters if You Want to Write for Print

I hear the following a lot from Internet writers:

That their writing is basically correct.

That they have written for a long time.

That changes an editor wants are all about that editor’s preference.

That it’s all a matter of opinion.

That someone else told them they were a really GOOD writer.

That writing rules rules and styles change.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes.

BUT: Good writing means more than agreeing nouns and verbs. It means more than scribbling something that passes your computer’s grammar check.

As an editor, I can tell in 30 seconds if your writing is what I’m looking for. A lot of writing I see has huge red flags screaming “I’m not yet a professional writer.” The fact that a writer doesn’t yet know what these red flags are and hasn’t learned to identify and fix them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

True, different editors will disagree about issues of style. They will suggest different solutions for the same problem. Some will hate passive voice; others will let it slide; some don’t care. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that there’s no foundation here. Nothing could be further from the truth. For such a subjective field, the agreement among editors (who, after all, are the ones approving your pay check) about  what is good writing and what isn’t  is remarkably consistent. We may not agree on the fine points. We may have different pet peeves and quirks (and yes, that makes it hard for new writers). But we know quality.

And it’s in working with editors — with many different editors, over time — that writers begin to find their own voice and develop a style that that holds up under the scrutiny of scores of editors, all with different training and predilections and preferences. We develop our preferences and our style, and we can defend it. I can answer *exactly* why I used *that* word if challenged  by an editor — but at the same time, I’m open to their interpretation of the issue, because guess what: Here’s an opportunity to have a dialogue with someone who knows and cares.  Maybe they’ll show me a new angle I hadn’t considered.

Internet writers often don’t have the benefit of this tempering experience. A writer who makes the jump from unedited online writing to professional traditional publishing is often shocked to see her work returned looking like the online equivalent of that children’s kindergarden project: Purple track change marks from one editor, red from another, blue from a third. One new-t0-book-publishing writer called me almost in tears when writing her first book. She’s a fantastic writer, with a great voice, and her book had more than 100 author queries and thousands of changes. Thousands. Which is not uncommon.

“They say they love me,” she sniffled, “But I don’t even know how to look at this; I can’t even see what I wrote under all these changes. How can they say they like me? It looks like they hate me. They’ll never want to work with me again.”

Well, no they didn’t hate her — as a matter of fact, they signed her on for three more books.

THAT is how the “real” world of publishing works. That is why experienced writers and editors can ID most self-published books after reading a couple of paragraphs. Because it hasn’t gone through three layers of edits and a knock-down drag-out between author and editor over the use of the passive voice or a split infinitive.

As a writer, I EXPECT to have to defend my word choices and syntax choices and weird little rule-breaking habits to any editor who asks. And I expect my editors to be able to defend THEIR changes, too.  However, the truth is that when I work with editors, the vast majority of the time, I don’t argue about their changes; I immediately see where they are fixing my inconsistencies, tightening flabby sentences, eliminating redundancies.

I’d like to end this with one final thought:

Soon after starting my first job, at the not-quite-mature age of 21, I learned that I didn’t HAVE to like the changes the other editors proposed.

I didn’t have to accept them, either.

What I DID have to do was FIX the problem that caused the editor to think that a change needed to be made.

The answer was NEVER, “But it was fine as it was.”

If the writing caused enough of a bump in the road that the editor had to stop and look around, there was something there  that needed fixing. Their solutions might have been the right ones, but they usually showed me what the problem was, and helped point ME to the right answer. Editors are stand-ins for our readers. We may be the experts on our topic, but THEY are reading for sense, for continuity, for holes, for illogical jumps, for questions that the readers will not be able to ask us.

These guys have our backs, and as a writer, I, for one, am grateful for it.

So here’s the question: If this sort of feedback is essential, as an online line writer, how do you go about getting it?

Some suggestions coming next post.

And my beef  has nothing to do with grammar.

It has to do with false advertising.

Now let me say one thing right up front: While I have cut my teeth (and, if I were a horse, they would now be very long teeth) on the very tough nuts of the traditional publishing world — 15 books published by such houses as DK, W.W. Norton, and Harmony (an imprint of Crown) — I believe that the new advances in e-book publishing and self-publishing in general are revolutionizing the publishing business and giving authors more options than they have ever had.

The waters are rough right now: There’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam floating around, the old-style luxury ships (that would be the high-end print publishers) are sinking under the cost of everything from paper to fuel to staff benefits, and on the high seas, there be monsters and pirates. I don’t know what the future of publishing will look like, but it’s going to look very different from it does today, and part of it is going to include self-published books.

For myself, I’m thrilled. I haven’t given up on traditional publishing just yet — I had a book come out this year, in fact — but I’m excited by the new options  digital and self-publishing platforms are giving authors who can try to reach niche audiences directly. I’ve got a list of projects it may take me the rest of my life to do. It’s an exciting time, not just in writing, but in music, too. My partner put out a CD a couple of years back (“Songs and Sandwiches;” that link has a link to some sample cuts; Check out “Saturn’s Moons,” which has me playing keyboards).  I also  just played keyboards for another friend’s self-made CD (Marilyn Miller’s Nighthawk; check it out).

So I’m not a snob about self-publishing or self-published CDs or self-made ANYTHING. Increasingly, it’s becoming a necessary first step to getting your work out there.

And I think that people who put that work out there — finish a book, or a CD, or whatever the thing is — have very right to be proud of their work and tell the world about it. So let’s get that out of the way.

But there’s this one little thing.

“I’m pleased to announce that my book Diary of Your Basic Good Guy was published last week.”

WAS published.

What does that mean to you? To me, it means that someone else — as in a publishing company — published the book. Someone else put the money into it, paid to have it developed, edited, proofread, designed, printed, bound, shipped, and marketed. Someone else — not you or your mother or your partner — some objective stranger whose job it is to pick books that will sell — took you in because he or she believed in your book and your writing and your ability to reach an audience. Not only took you on board  — but paid for your ticket. Invested in you. And did everything possible to make you look good.

And that still tells me a lot. Yes, the lines are blurring. Yes, a lot of crap is traditionally published. Yes, some great books are coming into the world via digital self-publishing and author-controlled print-on-demand and author-owned small presses.  Yes, the ways publishers and authors are working together are evolving and new partnerships are being introduced, especially in the digital world of apps.  But the tide hasn’t turned, yet.  There is still a stigma attached to self-publishing. Not as much as there used to be; people are certainly more and more willing to take a look at a self-published offering that has all the right elements.  But it’s got to prove itself.

The problem is that I’m seeing a lot of people, though, who are using “Was published” when what they really mean is “I published” and a lot of these books don’t look very professional. Not only aren’t they being published by someone else, but the authors aren’t putting the work and money and care and attention into their products that a traditional publisher would. (In a lot of cases, I don’t even think they know what those elements are.)

I think there’s a little bit of disingenuousness here in that word choice. Certainly, a writer — someone who supposedly uses WORDS for a living,  self-published or not, aspiring or experienced — should know the difference. Why, then, choose the word that implies that someone else fronted the bucks for your book?

Funny thing is, I can spot so many self-published books a mile away — on writers’ forums, Facebook, Twitter, you name it: Something in a 140-character Tweet about a  book tips me off as to whether it’s self-published, and if my radar goes off, I’m almost never wrong. That tells me something, too.

I think one of the biggest hurdles to self-publishing is precisely the fact that ANYONE can publish his or her own book. Many writers who do don’t put the kind of money into their work that a traditional publisher does. They don’t hire a professional copyeditor who can excise a serial comma from 100 yards. They go with cheap template designs. They don’t have an index.  And the finished product shows it.

With all those cut corners, those books no more resembles a finished professional book than that YouTube video of your cousin Max sounds like Luther Van Dross. To co-opt the language of professional publishing  and say “My book WAS published…” seems to add insult to injury, and shows a remarkable ignorance of what being published by someone else really entails.

As I wrote, I’m a  big fan of new media. I currently write three blogs and I fully intend to publish several e-books and some small-scale, locally oriented, print-on-demand projects in the coming year. But I won’t tell you they “were published” when it will, in fact, be ME who is doing the publishing.  I intend to do work I can be proud of, make the best publishing decision for it, and then promote the heck out of it.  I don’t intend to be embarrassed by self-publishing something, and I don’t intend to lie about it or imply otherwise.

In  my previous post about language and grammar, I called the passive voice “weasel words. I think this is a pretty good example of how the passive voice  can help writers avoid telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

Or do you think these writers really don’t know (and don’t care)?

Your thoughts?

I’m not necessarily talking about black and white grammar issues, although I do discuss a few of those in this article. Nor am I talking about AP style or MLA style or U of C style: how to footnote, when to use bold versus italics. I’m talking mostly about WRITING: That hard to define area where a sentence might be correct, yet still feel wrong. It’s this aspect of writing that makes editors say, “No way,”  “Ho hum,” or “I’ve got a live one here!”

I know some people think, “Hey, it’s only the Internet, I’m barely getting paid; I want to just post the article and move on.” I know some people think, “Who cares about quality, it’s all relative anyway, and my writing is good enough.” Or they think, “I’m an informal kind of guy (gal) and I don’t need to know all this stuff to share a recipe on line.” If that’s you, then stop reading now. I’m just going to get you mad.

But if you, like me, think that ANYTHING with your name on it is part of your brand, and can be seen and judged by someone who might want to pay you real money, read on. Correcting the mistakes I cover can help you kick your writing up a notch – and can help you get gigs that pay professional rates.

Getting Started on the Path to Good Writing

Before we get started with the specifics,  let’s  look at five broad-brush things we can all do to improve our writing right out of the gate:

• Read a grammar book from cover to cover. Yes, I know all about the recent revisionist views on the iconic Strunk and White (Elements of Style). I don’t care. The point isn’t to do what they say;  it’s to understand what they say. Read it, and think about it. Or read something else: Something — anything — that makes you think about how you choose and use your words.
• Use spell check and grammar check as a starting point, not an ending point. Use them, but use them carefully. Spell check doesn’t catch homonyms (there, they’re, their).  “But I used spell check” is never an excuse. Similarly, I ran some abominable syntax through Word’s grammar check, and the tortured sentences sailed through. The grammar check seems more concerned with contractions and passive voice than with much more serious (but less computer-identifiable) issues.
• Read aloud. The mistakes and awkward syntax pop up like Mexican jumping beans.
• Ask for help. I often suggest this to writers who have certain kinds of problems, and I fear many of them take it as an insult, no matter how gently I put it. But *I* ask for help — from fellow writers, from editors, from readers I respect. Why shouldn’t you?  The editing on the Internet tends to be cursory; we ALL need ALL the help we can get.
• Understand the rules. The better you understand the rules, the more effectively you can break them. I use an informal voice: That means *I* address *you.*  I use contractions and split infinitives (which I beg my editors to keep in place in informal how-to writing). I start the occasional sentence with “and” or “but.” I use sentence fragments for effect (although not as much as Annie Proulx did in The Shipping News; at one point, her fragments made me throw the book across the room.) I use too many parentheses, and my editors sometimes have to rein me in like a runaway racehorse. The rule for breaking rules is this: You have to know the rule you’re breaking, and you have to have a reason for breaking it.

Unless you’re a prodigal genius, in which case you are free to leave the classroom.

Everyone still here? Good.

What do We Mean by Good Writing?

Good writing is about good thinking: direct, honest, orderly, creative, original. It can be dry, straight, funny, quirky. Above all, it is about clarity. What is the intent of your piece? Who is it for? Is it clear? Do your words help get the message across or do they bury it so deeply under grammatical problems and stylistic tics that no one even knows what you are saying?

The following examples are representative of writing mistakes I’ve encountered as an editor. Some of them, such the passive voice, technically are not mistakes, but they are style issues that need to be considered and managed with intent. Others are writing problems that render the article awkward: Reading articles with these problems feels  like you’re riding in the back  of a pick-up truck on a bumpy dirt road. Sometime syntax is so tangled it obliterates the meaning completely.

Note: My sentences are taken from various writing problems I’ve seen over the last 30 years. But they are all in the literary equivalent of the Witness Protection Program. For example, if a  sample bad sentence reads “The cats and dogs being fed, it was a good day to go for a walk” the original sentence probably read something like “The children being lulled to sleep, it was a nice evening to talk about the future.”  Both sentences are equally nonsensical in the same way, but I don’t think anyone, even the author of the original sentence would recognize herself or himself, especially since some of these examples are many years old and come from a variety of jobs. (And PS: I made that one up.)

Ready? Here we go.

Avoid Passive Voice — or Use it Very Carefully

• “There are varying strategies that can be employed to build up the strength of a runner’s muscles.” 

This sentence is an example of using the passive voice unnecessarily and poorly.

Compare this less wordy, more active alternative (12 words instead of 17):  “Runners can use several different strategies to build strength in their muscles.”

That’s much, much better because it gets right to the point. And the point doesn’t need to be surrounded by all those extra words.

Use the passive voice carefully and sparingly: Yes, it is not incorrect. Yes, it can be useful. Yes, some elegant, wonderful, skilled, literate, lauded, award-winning writers use it. But those people are not reading this article to help them get published; you are. And unless all those adjectives apply to you, or you can explain why your use of the passive voice makes your sentence stronger, avoid it. For one thing,  it is frequently badly used and over-used by less skilled writers. And for another, the passive voice is a known editor-irritant, especially in consumer publications. Many editors will dismiss a writer out of hand who uses passive voice badly, or who over-uses it… and deciding where the line is between “use” and “over-use” is at the discretion of the editor. As writers, we have no say in the matter of an editor’s preference, especially when we are querying them and asking for work.

The passive voice is beloved by academics (who are allergic to first person). Passive voice avoids telling us who did what to whom. Often, it’s weasel-words.  Active sentences don’t have the luxury of obfuscation. (Love that word: it seems to do what it talks about!)

It’s true that sometimes the passive voice is the only effective way to write a sentence.  Sometimes, the most important piece of information in the sentence  is what was done, not who did it.  Sometimes we don’t want to say who did it, or we don’t know who did it. In those cases, the passive voice works. There will still be plenty of times where you have to, or feel you need to, use the passive voice.  Being judicious and sparing with this technique will make your writing tighter — and more appealing to most editors, especially of consumer publications.

Use “There Is” and “There Are” Correctly

• “There’s much more information in the second sentence than in the  first one…”

Okay, that sentence isn’t in the witness protection program. I wrote that one (it originally appeared later in the first draft of this article). It’s not technically incorrect, but I changed it to “The second sentence contains more information than the first.” Isn’t that spiffier?

Avoiding the various forms of the verb “to be” almost always strengthens a sentence. Overusing “there is” can be flabby and repetitive.  There are plenty of times you’ll need to use “there is” or “there are” in a sentence, so save them  for those occasions.

• “There’s lots of reasons why….”

If you must use “There is” and “there are,” use them correctly.

I don’t know how or when “there’s lots of….” or “There ‘s many ways to…”  snuck into the language, but it drives me nuts. I’ve even seen editors use it. Repeatedly. (Note: I am not complaining about the use of contractions here; that’s a given in informal writing. I’m complaining about the use of the wrong contraction.)

“There’s” refers to one thing: “There’s a tree on my lawn.”

“There ARE” refers to more than one thing. “There are many trees on my lawn.”

You wouldn’t say, “There is many trees on my lawn” would you? Jeez, I hope not. If you would, there is many careers you could consider other than writing.

Be Authoritative. Take a Stand. Say What You Mean.

• “Most people would probably agree that inflation usually decreases the value of money.” (footnoted)

This sentence was in a book proposal I read 30 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. Someone who is THAT insecure about a subject or who is THAT afraid to take a stand should not be writing about it. If something isn’t always true, SAY it isn’t always true, and give an example. I’m no economist, but just off the top of my head, I can’t think of an example of when inflation DOESN’T decrease the value of money. Can you???

Avoid Empty, Non-Specific Words

• “Many amusement parks are often offering free babysitting for infants these days.”

You need either the “many” or the “often,” but you don’t need both, and you don’t need the “these days” at all.

Not only that, but imprecise words like “many” and “often” are weak. It would be stronger to say, “According to Amusement Today, the newest trend among amusement parks is to offer babysitting services for infants during peak family-travel times.” The second sentence contains a lot more information than the first, including a reason for the trend, when those “often” times are, and a source.

Some more examples:

• “I have been to every single country in Europe.” As opposed to “every country in Europe”? What does the word “single” contribute to the sentence? Nothing? Then ditch it.
• “Each and every student will follow the rules.” If each student is following the rules, then every student is following the rules. If every student is following the rules, each is following the rules. You could simply say “All students will follow the rules.”  You MIGHT have a reason for “each and every” – but you should know what it is before you use an overused but usually unnecessary phrase.
• “For adults and children alike…” Is the word “alike” necessary? Be sure the answer is yes.

Untangle Mangled Syntax

• “European vacations have come down to an affordable choice for most people.”

This sentence has so many problems I don’t know where to start. First of all European vacations haven’t come down to anything. The PRICE of European vacations may have come down. But a price is not a choice. And European vacations is an awfully big category.

I‘d be a lot more comfortable hearing that “The price of the average seven-day European family holiday package has decreased from $xxxx to $xxxx in the last three years, making dream vacations in cities like Rome, Madrid, or even Paris a more affordable option.”  (You could easily break that into two sentences, by the way; I’d make that decision based on the length and complexity of the surrounding sentences.)

I’d skip the “for most people” especially if you are writing for Americans:  Most Americans don’t have a passport, and most can’t afford a European vacation.

• “What is the story about this knight and the country where he comes from?”

Here’s another syntactically challenged sentence. Think about your words and how they sound parsed together. This sentence isn’t a criminal assault against grammar, but it’s flat. First of all, “country where he comes from” is juvenile and awkward. Grammar check isn’t flagging it (to my never-ending disgust) but we could do so much better. Second, do we really want the knight and his country in the same sentence?

Wouldn’t it be better to say, “So what is the story of this tragic knight? And what do we really know about Avalon, that misty, mystical, misunderstood land where he spent his childhood?”  Note how we can get some actual WRITING into our question, not to mention a heck of a lot more information.

Use Correct Parallel Construction

• “Caravanning can be an awesome way of seeing the world, as well as being a nightmare.”

Parallel verb forms must match. This should read “Caravanning can be an awesome way to see the world; it can also be a nightmare.”

More nits to pick in this sentence:  I’d ditch the word “awesome:” Awesome in what way? Decide whether it’s educational, relaxing, comfortable, luxurious — then use THAT word. And you better give us some examples of how it can be nightmare, as well.

• “In hiking, the trick is to know what kind of things will be happening, as well as not having too many high hopes.”

Oh, dear. I don’t even think I can begin to fix this. There’s the verb problem (The phrase “to know what kinds of things will be happening” doesn’t match the phrase “not having too many…”)

But in addition, what kinds of “things” are we talking about? Good things, bad things, daily routines?  The “high hopes” business makes me a little worried. Why can’t I have high hopes?  Why will they be dashed? (The next sentence in this example didn’t tell me. The author just wanted me not to hope too hard.)

Another problem with this sentence is the use of “The trick is.”  It’s an overused phrase. But more importantly, in this case, it overpromises. Does this sentence really deliver on its promise to share a “trick” with the reader?

Avoid Poor and Clichéd Word Choices

• “Whether it be a guided adventure in Thailand, Turkey, or Tonga, there is a tour for everyone.”

First of all, we have the parallel construction problem here: “Whether it be” doesn’t parse with “there is a.” Better to say: “Whether it be elephant trekking in Thailand, digging in ancient ruins in Turkey, or scuba diving Tonga, an adventure tour offers fun for everyone.” See how much more info you get in there?

But I still don’t like it: “Whether it be” is one of those oft-used phrases that sounds kinda sorta elevated and “smart” but adds nothing. What is wrong with plain old “whether you choose an adventure tour in …”?

I’m also not wild about the gratuitous alliteration. Anyone can think of three words in a row that start with the same letter. There are clever, poetic ways to do this that tie in with the content, and there are clunky ways. I came up with the alliteration in that sentence, so I get to be the judge: My use of alliteration here is gratuitous and unnecessary and it doesn’t add anything.

In contrast, I used alliteration in a previous example: “misty, mystical, misunderstood land.” In that case, I chose the words for the poetic way they merged together, the rhythm of the sentence, and the meaning of the words.  I also liked that they not only began with “M,” but with “mis,” which emphasized the word “mist,” which I always associate with Avalon. And I liked that the most important word — misty — came first. Even better, “misty” has two syllables; it was followed by “mystical” (three syllables), then “misunderstood” (four syllables). That created a kind of  internal crescendo in the sentence as we moved from a tangible fog (mist) to the intangible fog of incomprehension (misunderstood). In contrast, in the example above, I just randomly picked the first three places I could think of that began with “T.” That is not a good reason. (P.S: We are all occasionally guilty of using an alliteration that doesn’t add much, me included, so the best thing to do is NOT over-do it, okay? Once in a while, fine. If it’s clever, by all means put it in there. It’s a judgment call, so use some judgment.)

• “The food is amazing”

(Or worse: “The food amazes.”  Amazes whom?  The lack of an object here is just plain pretentious.)

Even worse is the use of “amazing” in the first place. Or “awesome” Or “really beautiful.” Or “beyond compare” Come on, you’re a writer!  What’s amazing? The presentation? What about it? The decor? What about that? The flavors? The fusion?  Describe it so WE – your readers – say “Wow! That sounds like it must have been amazing!”

Make  Language Level Consistent

• “The perpetrator emerged from the edifice and gunned down the snitches.”

Okay, so I made this one up. The first half of the sentence is elevated bureaucracy-speak. We’ve all heard cops with working-class accents being interviewed on television (or on TV cop shows) using words that sound like they were written by a committee in the public relations department. The second part of the sentence  –  “gunned down the snitches” — is informal. A better-balanced sentence would be “The suspect left the building and fired his weapon at the informants.” Language level problems are often caused by poorly using complex forms of  words with Latin origins (words that came to English via the romance languages).  These words are perceived as more formal, somehow “higher-class,” and when you add prefixes and suffixes to these words — “ized” or “ated” or “atory” or “tion” – you make the tone more elevated, academic, and formal (not to mention, hard to read). Words with Germanic origins are shorter, blunter, harsher, more direct and plainspoken, and easier to understand. In writing, you need to choose your level based on audience and topic. Then stay reasonably consistent, except when you deliberately use a contrasting level for effect. Your suspect can emerge from the edifice, or he can gun down the snitches, but he can’t do both.

Got a writing pet peeve? A suggestion? A correction I need to make in the above article?  (Judging from my record with typos, I’m betting there are at least a dozen.)  Please use the comment box!

Guest Post by R. Michael Johnson

“Never put off for tomorrow what you can put off today!”

I’m pretty sure Ben Franklin did NOT say that.

One way that always gets me through – ALWAYS – sometimes goes by the term “brainstorming” in anti-procrastination screeds. You get a notebook and allow yourself free reign to write across the lines, up and down, doodle, but you’ve got some INTENT, however vague.

Write down a word or phrase or sentence that in some way addresses some interest or question you have. Then see how many “links” to that idea you can write down that have something to do with the original idea/word/phrase/sentence.

Don’t think, “I’m brainstorming so I can get over this procrastination and write an article.” Rather, at this point, think of it as a sort of game you’re playing to test how much of your notebook you can fill with linked ideas/phrases, titles of some book you’ve read that might have to do with your idea. Anecdotes you remember that may pertain. Websites that might yield something later? Write it down. Words you like that seem to harmonize in some way? Get it on paper. The audience is (probably) who? List at least three idealized audiences. What do you think “THEY” want to get from your ideas? How do you want to express yourself? Although tone usually gets dictated from the topic…

After the page looks more black than white, start drawing arrows and circles around ideas/phrases that seem to cluster.

Make a list of three or five tentative titles for this possible piece, a piece you may or may not write. Remember: you’re just brainstorming/spitballin’ it right now. You may file these ideas away for some other day, because you finally realize that you have some great ideas – too many, in fact – but will need to do some research on the French Revolution or the New Deal or the structure of hemoglobin first. When your brainstorming session is done, set the black pages aside for incubation and go for a walk or fold laundry or do something that doesn’t have anything to do with your article. Don’t purposefully think about the future article you’ll write. Your right hemisphere is at work on the Problem.

Just TRY and not be surprised when, unbidden, your brain suddenly says, “I see the article! What it’s about! How to proceed! What the main points are, and how to support it all!”

Whenever I use this technique/game I never fail to come up with something, but as they used to say when Internet was a baby in 1994, YMMV, or “your mileage may vary.”

I love an academic professor of Philosophy at Stanford, John Perry. He’s funny and has made procrastination one of his areas of focus. Here’s a sample.

(c) 2011 R. Michael Johnson.

I’ve recently started a new blog about music and music education, and today I’m going live with a blog on hiking.  I’ve also a started new Facebook page for music, and will soon be splitting my writing page into a writing page (for writers and other publishing pros) and an “adventures in travel” page (for readers and those interested in my actual travel writing).

The reason for this activity? (Beyond procrastinating other projects, of course): It seems that people who thought they were friending me because they liked my work on music are confused when they get a post about 10 best hiking trails, and no one except writers and editors wants to hear about publishing trends.

It’s a problem a lot of “complex creatives”  seem to have, and the advice I’m hearing is “divide and conquer.” So my content is creeping spider like all over the web, and I am dealing with the vagaries of blogging software that seems to think I want the same bio on my music page as my hiking page.

Like many self-employed creatives, I often have way more ideas than I can attend to, and sometimes things spin out of control. This fragmentation has all the hallmarks of a good idea getting away from me…. I just hope I can remember all my passwords.

Well, not exactly: I went to a high school so large that even the nerdiest science and math kids (that would be me) were numerous enough to form their own little groups and stride around thinking they were lords of the universe. My clique didn’t even know who the cheerleaders were, and we pitied the football players for their undoubtedly lousy SATs.  But I’ve watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I know how it (supposedly) goes in more typical schools:  The cool kids, the not cool kids, and the strict  social system that determines how important you are based on who your friends are, and who their friends are.

Now, well into middle age, I find myself confronted with the metrics of social media… and it’s looking a lot like the high school I didn’t go to.

As creative types, we’ve been told over and over and over that we have to Tweet, we must be on Facebook, we should have a Flickr account and a Youtube channel and spend all day sending links hither and yon to blogs, websites, forums, and videos. Some of us think this brave new world is rewarding and fun, some see it as a job we have to do, and some are dragged in kicking and screaming about the inanity of Tweets.

Regardless of what we think, social media reach is important. Decision makers we deal with now look at social media metrics when deciding who to work with: Publishers look at numbers of Twitter followers; so do PR people (who decide whether to help us with interviews, press trips, and product samples) as well as producers of films and records.

Just like in high school: It’s all about who you know — and who knows you. The cool kids. Although in this case, “cool” is defined by metrics the kids back in high school couldn’t have imagined.

Social Media and the New Metrics

Today, I finally got around to making pages for About Me (ME! ME! ME!) and Klout. I’m not  sure exactly how they interact although they obviously do, since one led me to the other. How I got there from Blogspot, I’m not quite sure; I guess it’s all somewhere in the Google universe.

My “About.Me” page (who says we don’t live in a world of narcissism?)  lets me gather together a list of all my social networking pages, blogs, and websites, as well as my Amazon.com author page and third party sites where I’m a regular contributor. About.me is ego building: I can pull all my stuff together and think about how productive I am.

But it’s also important because writer authority is becoming the hot new catchphrase online. Google is testing some new code that  will supposedly rate a writer’s authority across the web according to one of its mysterious algorithms. A writer’s expertise will be evaluated according to how much they have written on as subject and where their work appears: Their placement in the Search Engine Results Pages will be affected.

Klout evaluates social standing in the world of the Internet, judging members by who follows whom how often, who retweets whose tweets, who comments on whose  comments, and who clicks on whose clickables.  The result is a score, which you can think of as your “Internet coolness” factor, based on what Klout assures us is 35 numerical factors (Wow! Numbers! It must be true….)

Warning:  Klout is potentially ego-deflating. My scores vary wildly: On the issue of what Klout calls “Amplification Probability” my score began as a dismal 11, meaning that my readers aren’t especially likely to retweet and repost my stuff.  This may be because my stuff is not especially interesting to them, or because they aren’t heavy social network users, or because, to be quite honest, I am reluctant Twitterer, so I very rarely tweet anything for them to retweet.  (Gotta change that, Klout tells me.)

But then, my score on the subject they call “True reach” seemed a  robust 74; at least, Klout seemed to think it was okay and happily told me, “You have a small but tightly formed network that is highly engaged.”  A week later, both scores had tripled — could it be just because I signed up?  Confused much?

Klout advises that to get people to like me,  I need to engage more.  (Sounds like a high school counselor talking to an introverted nerd, doesn’t it?) I went to Klout’s  Facebook page, and like in high school, with unpopular kids groveling to get in with the “in crowd,” it’s filled with people comparing and worrying about their scores — especially if they drop a point or two.

Klout also has a dangerous little feature where you can compare yourself to all of your friends. It’s like an alternate dimension, where the nerdy math and computer kids watched the popular kids, decided to imitate them — and THIS is what they came up with. Sue has 268 retweets; Matt only has 1. Jane has 1893 followers, I have 200.  Bob is considered a “thought leader,” John is a “dabbler.” I accepted a bunch of requests on Linkedin and between the time I wrote this article (yesterday) and am editing it (today) my raw score doubled, my “true reach” score rose to 200-and-something, and even that dismal “amplification probability” is hovering at an acceptable level, at least I think it is acceptable (Klout now approvingly notes that I “generate a steady flow of actions and discussions.” Woo hoo.)  Be warned: If you’re prone to stats addiction, this is a very very bad place to go.

Klout also advises that to boost scores, users post “high quality” content, which is in part defined as content that other people will “like.” But I’ve got a problem with this. Not many people are going to “like” an article on how freelancers should organize their tax receipts. But we all know that people “like” videos of cute kids singing, or cats playing the piano.  I know that the algorithms are complicated and take a zillion factors into account; I’m just not sure that a big long mathematical formula produces truly relevant results, and I’m not sure you can compare the relevance of people liking momentary entertainments versus deep substance.

Regardless, it seems that social media status is going to be the next big metric everyone talks about. Is it meaningful? Who knows? When everyone in the Facebook universe has 1000 friends, and everyone on Twitter has 1000 followers, how much time will be left for anything else? Is there an overload point? How many cats can I watch playing the piano? Aren’t people tired (yet) of seeing what other people had for lunch? How many videos, posts, photos, and Tweets can one person click on anyway?  And who cares that Laurie likes Dunkin’ Donuts?

Why Do We Care About This Social Media Stuff?

Back in high school, I was lucky enough to be in a place where the “coolness factor” didn’t really matter all that much. I didn’t know what the cool kids thought, and I didn’t care. In fact, cossetted by my group of friends, I probably thought I WAS one of the cool kids.

But these days, it appears that I have go back and learn the lesson I missed in high school: I have to care about coolness, even if I don’t quite know how to recognize it.  At least, I have to care a little bit. Like it or not, we can’t just write our masterpieces and expect the world to care. There are too many masterpieces out there. We used to have gatekeepers — people like record producers and publishers — who said “yea” and “nay” and kept out the riff raff.  The Internet has blown all that to smithereens:  Today, we can all be our own publishers and producers, and the few surviving gatekeepers are spending most of their time polishing their resumes and worrying about the next round of layoffs.

But the job of the gatekeeper still needs to be done, and to do it, we need gatekeeper skills, plus skills that they never even dreamed of.  Somehow, we need to get through to the amorphous blob formed by the sum total of public opinion. If, that is, the public even has an opinion of our work: Without our ability to get our work in front of “the public,” the public is not going to care.

To get noticed, we used to have to please an unreachable executive sitting high in a tower. Today, we have to sell to the Internet equivalent of the homecoming queen and all her friends. We can’t stay in the online equivalent of a lonely writer’s garret: We have to go out an PARTY on the web. Engage. Chatter. Make jokes. Be liked.

I think I’m speaking for a lot of creative types when I say: “Blech.”

Still, it is what it is, right? It’s the world we live in. Can’t fight the tide. So we sign up for Twitter and fret about Klout. But before we get too obsessed with social media (which, face it, may be effective and important, but is also probably the biggest time-waster yet invented in this millennium), it’s important to remember that social media tools are just that — tools. They are not the product. They are not a substitute for good content.

I’m still exploring all the nooks and crannies of social media, but one thing I do know is this: It’s not going to change my content. If I can interact happily with my “small but tightly formed network that is heavily engaged,” I’m going to be very happy indeed.

Feels just like high school.

I’m starting a new website, and I’m in the very early stages of looking for writers to work with me on a revenue share basis. Which makes me, I suppose, an “editor.”  So I began my search for charter writers — a core group for the site — by tapping into a couple of my long-standing networks. I described (rather vaguely, because I don’t want to spill all my beans) the kind of articles I was looking to publish, and asked for links to writers’ sites and clips. And mostly, I got responses from fabulous, incredible writers with whom I will be proud to work.

No part of the process is all that surprising: I’ve been an editor (a real one, complete with blue pencil… oops, I’m dating myself) before. But it’s been a while, and revisiting the process, along with a few off-target responses, reminded me of some things I am going to remember the next time *I* approach an editor for a job.

Be careful of your online persona.

My introductory letter was posted on private forums where I know the writers well and trust their work, and I was delighted with the responses.

But I didn’t post on another forum where I am a member because the writing quality is uneven.  Instead, I opted to send personal letters in order to avoid forum members whose writing isn’t what I’m looking for, or whose posts often seem a bit self-centered or overly combative or super-sensitive — people who post 40 times a day, have a comment about EVERYTHING, and seem to take everyone else’s posts incredibly personally. Or those whose on-line personae include constant tales of conflicts with editors, blanket complaints about publishers, and the sense that they never seem to work with anyone they like. You know the type I’m talking about — people who are quick with snippy little comments about “another rip-off,” sarcastic glass-half-empty responses, and the assumption that the world is out to get them.

I also wanted to avoid writers whose posts indicated that they had a dubious grasp of journalism ethics (why not sell unmarked in-line links?). I didn’t want to have to debate the standards for my site with writers whose admitted practices included  using other journalist’s published work as their primary research materials rather than doing their own interviews and making their own observations. I didn’t want travel writers who thought it was okay to write a travel story about a place they’d never seen. And most of all, I didn’t want to deal with writers who thought that insisting on standards, even for a little Internet start-up, equaled snobbery.

Don’t get me wrong: Certainly, there are reasons for writers to be wary and even negative in the shark-infested waters of the freelance world. I consider myself a “call it like it is and spare the rose-colored glasses” type; I’m often the first in line to castigate publishers for poor pay rates, unfair contracts, rights grabs, and ridiculous editorial merry-go-rounds. But I see a difference between professionally identifying problems and discussing how to navigate them, versus posting negative knee-jerk reactions on virtually every topic. And quite simply, I didn’t want to work with people whose semi-public posts indicated that we shared very different ideas about standards and ethics.

Not everyone reads our posts the way we intend. I know that *I* irritate some online colleagues, and vice versa.  Not everyone likes each other in real life, and not everyone likes each other online, either. Posts that *WE* think are strong-minded, assertive, and direct may come across to others as aggressive, argumentative, and negative. What we imply may not be what our readers infer. Whatever we think of the “disagreeing with me means you’re flaming me and I’m running to the moderator” crowd, the thing is:  THOSE people might be in a position to hire us some day. They might be quietly reading and making judgments.

Lesson to me: Internet forums only FEEL like casual water coolers. Our words and the impressions we make may have a longer life-expectancy than we imagine.

Your ego is not your friend.

Some people seemed insulted that I requested links to specific types of clips. I guess they thought that knowing them online or as colleagues meant I shouldn’t need clips, or that I should be willing to comb through their websites to find what I was looking for.  Maybe they felt that they should automatically be “above the fray” for a dinky little start-up website. (I admit, I might well feel this way myself.)  In some cases I did know the writer’s work and didn’t need to see anything else; I was just glad they were interested. In cases where I didn’t know the writer’s style that well, and when the clips they sent didn’t represent the kind writing I planned to publish, I (politely) asked to see other examples.

Some — including people with higher-power credentials than I will ever have — sent clips right away with a cheerful “of course.” (The clips were great, and that was that. Hmmm… maybe that attitude is WHY they have such high-power credentials? ) Others ignored me, perhaps thinking I’m a PIA if I’m hassling their accomplished selves about clips, or thinking it wasn’t worth the trouble. But the bottom line is: I’m not judging or criticizing by asking for more clips: I need a certain type of writing. That’s all.

Lesson to me: No one is above the process, and if you think you are, keep it to yourself. Or stay away. It does no one any good to write for a market for which you feel contempt.

It really is overwhelming out there.

Editors receive hundreds of queries, bios, and clips and a LOT of them show that the writer and the publication aren’t a good match. Editors have to read a lot of stuff from writers; they can’t read someone’s whole catalog of life work.  Pick two or three really strong pieces, preferably pieces that match the style of the market you are approaching, and make them your focus. As an editor, here’s the kind of information in a clips list that worked best for me (I’m making up the details here):

“Touching the Sky in the Berkshires.” ( National BigShot Magazine, December, 2010): A first person account of navigating three new aerial parks in Berkshire County. Received the “best of adventure writing award” from XYZ group, 2011;  Contains interviews and service information.

THAT description tells me whether the article might be written in the kind of style I’m looking for, it and saves me clicking on something that isn’t a good fit, never mind wading through clunky PDF files.

Lesson to me: Don’t pick clips to demonstrate how great I think I am or how important the magazines I’ve written for are, but rather, select pieces that show editors how my skills, background, and style are exactly what they are looking for.

Any articles you write online are your ambassadors.

A lot of writers have been experimenting with blogs or with content mill sites such as Examiner and Suite101.  What these have in common is that they are very lightly edited, if at all. That’s great for me as an editor: Unlike, say, an Outside magazine piece, which I assume went through three rounds of painstaking editing and fact-checking, and which may not even resemble what you originally wrote, your content mill/blog pieces show the real you. Trouble is: A lot of writers think of those markets as fourth tier (rightfully so) so they don’t lavish the same attention on them that they give to their print pieces. To add insult to injury, if you get any editorial help at all, it’s often slap-dash and superficial.  No one is spending an hour on your prose. Too often, the result is like going to a business meeting in your sweat pants.

Because I need writers who don’t require much editing, I checked out clips on blogs and content mills. A number of pieces had great elements in them, but were sloppily written.  I’m not going to make a big fuss over a few typos (I can’t, being the Queen of Typos myself), and I have made far too many mistakes in my own writing to think perfection is attainable. But when I read something that seems like a first draft — flabby language, sloppy word choice, lack of specificity, and the sense that I’ve read it all somewhere before  — I’m left to wonder about either the writer’s skill (is this the best they can do?) or the pride they take in their work.

Lesson to me: If it has my name on it, it represents me, loud and clear.

Don’t try to sell an editor what she doesn’t want.

If I’m looking for a gourmet French meal, don’t try to sell me funky Asian fusion. I got a number of responses from writers who are specializing in niches so small that there will be only limited opportunities for me to use their work. In some cases they want to sell their niche to me. Okay, fair enough: if the content fits my site, I’m willing to try. But the fact is, my site requires a high volume of a certain type of focused writing, and my roll out plan is tightly planned. While I will be needing a dozen pieces on some subjects of general interest, I won’t be needing a dozen pieces on traveling with your great-grandmother, your parakeet, or trying every beer in Belgium.  Trying to convince me that I really want Jamaica when I asked for Cuba isn’t going to cut it — for me OR for the writer.

Lesson to me:  Not every market works for every writer.

Give them what they ask for.

In a couple of cases, I got replies explaining why clips weren’t available; could the writers write on spec? In one case, no matter how many times I read the e-mail, I couldn’t even tell if the writer planned to send clips, or did or didn’t have them. Writers with no clips? Easiest way to deal with this for me: Move on.

It’s never been easier for a writer to put up articles showing they can handle a certain type of writing. At a blog or a content mill, writers can often write on anything they want. So if I wanted to break into writing about precious gems (a subject about which I know nothing, have no qualifications, and have never written a word), I could do my homework, write a dozen pieces for a low-barrier-to-entry online market or a blog,  do what I needed to do to make sure they were top notch, and then use them to approach a gemstone publication.

Lesson to me:  Give the editor what they ask for. If you don’t have it, write it.

The Editor-Writer Relationship

Don’t get me wrong: The vast majority of responses I got were fabulous, professional replies from incredibly qualified writers, and I am thrilled they are interested.

But I’m also grateful for the few off-key responses, because we learn from those, too. They reminded me — and now they have reminded you — of some important editor turn-offs.

Oh: And just so no one thinks I’m putting all the onus of the writer-editor relationship on the writer, let me just say that I got dozens of responses to my initial announcements, and  — unlike MOST editors I have dealt with in the last decade –  I responded to all e-mails within 24 hours,  and most within minutes.  The relationship goes two ways.

Authors and editors – both of us, no matter which role we inhabit – I’m thinking maybe the Golden Rule thing might work?

Q . How many writers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Why does it have to be changed, it makes perfect sense the way it is.

Q. How many crime writers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. One as long as there’s a neat twist at the end.

Q. How many publishers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two. One to change the bulb and one to issue a rejection slip to the old bulb.

Q. How many editors does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Hold on – shouldn’t they get the author’s approval first?

Q . How many cover artwork designers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Does it have to be a light bulb?

Q. How many copy editors does it take to change a light bulb?
A. The last time this question was asked, it involved cover artwork designers. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.

Q. Okay let’s try again… put it this way, how many copy editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A. I can’t tell whether you mean ‘change a light bulb’ or ‘have sex in a light bulb’. Can we reword it to remove the ambiguity?

Q. How many proofreaders does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Proofreaders aren’t supposed to change light bulbs, they should just highlight the error.

Q. How many indexers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. See indexers

Q. How many printers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Three. One to wash the old bulb, one to check the colour match and one to call the client and explain the delay.

Q. How many cataloguers does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Only one, but first they have to wait to see how the Library of Congress has done it.

Q. How many literary critics does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Literary critics don’t know how to change light bulbs, but rest assured they’ll find something wrong with the way it’s done.

Q. How many plagiarists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Why bother? Wait for someone else to change it and claim it was you.

Q. How many plagiarists does it take to change a light bulb?
A. One, of course and he would immediately copyright the changed bulb to “plagiarisingloser.com” to prevent it being stolen by low life thieves.

Q. How many literary agents does it take to change a light bulb?
A. I’ll get back to you. Our standard response time is 4 months. Don’t e-mail or call us in the meantime. If after four months you do not hear from us, assume it is a rejection, both of the original light bulb and your proposed sequel

Q. How many editors does it take to change a light bulb?
A. Two: One to take the old one out, and one to put it back again.

Credit note:  These are a compilation from colleagues of mine at Suite101.com. The person who started the list doesn’t want credit, as she says she compiled and edited them from various sources and hearsay over the years.  Only the last one is mine!

This doesn’t mean it’s entirely reasonable to say “Love me love my art.” After all there’s a lot of crappy art out there, and some stuff that is not to everyone’s taste, or  is just plain weird). but it is reasonable to say “Love me, look at my art.” 

Listen to your artist’s song, look at their photographs, read the book they wrote even if you don’t usually read post modern horror fiction or free-form poetry. I don’t mean that you have to go to every open mic show your friend plays in or read a 7,000 page magnum opus.  But check it out, okay?

Better yet, buy something. Yes, BUY it. Don’t ask for a free copy. An author has to buy books from a publisher. CDs cost money to make. No, your purchase of a $10 CD is not going to make a huge financial difference in the long run, but believe me, the offer is appreciated. The artist is ALWAYS free to say, “Oh, let me just give you one.”  But let THEM make the decision.

Books are available in bookstores or through Amazon. ANY book published by ANY real publisher can be ordered by a bookstore, and almost all are available on  Amazon. So don’t tell an author you “don’t know how to find their book.” Now you do.

If appropriate, buy books, art, pottery, CDs, jewelry, and the like as gifts for your friends. I’ve had the pleasure of asking a jewelry maker to make a necklace in my mom’s favorite colors and then being able to tell her it was made just for her.

TELL the artist when you have bought six copies of her children’s book for your nieces and nephews. Get them to sign it for you. These little gestures mean a lot. Again, this isn’t about money; it’s about support, and validating what your friends do.  Think of it as the equivalent of them coming to your kid’s piano recital or birthday party or sending a wedding gift.  

Attend a performance or two. A fledgling artist’s ability to attract an audience means the difference between that person getting another gig and not getting another gig. Bring some friends along, and if there is food and drink available , buy some. 

If you enjoy your friend’s art, talk it up with your friends. Put a song on Facebook, link to one of their articles, let people know when they will be playing, use their gig as a time to meet up with other friends.  if you write for a website or have a website with a related topic, post a link or a blurb or even a whole post about it.

Does your artist friend teach (music, painting, photography) ? Do you know people with kids? Be a matchmaker, if it’s appropriate.

Introduce the writer you know to the other writer you know. Or to the editor you know. introduce the photographer to the graphic designer.

Buy local, buy handmade!   Every time you buy a creative product – A CD, a book, an artwork, a photo, a hand-made puppet, a wool scarf, or a simple little sock puppet — you are supporting an artist somewhere.

Do you have any more suggestions for how to support your fellow artists? Stories about how someone supported you? Post in the comments box below.