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Alternative headline: Newspaper reports that no one cares about what they're reporting on.

Sitting through the news at the moment, I imagine I feel like parents of children performing in school plays and presentations must feel, waiting as I am through 90% of the bulletin so I can get a few seconds of actually relevant content somewhere toward the end.

The fact that all the other news is dire hardly makes it seem worthwhile, I have to admit.

7 Ways to tell you need a damn break from writing

1. You find yourself using "damn" in every damn sentence you write.
2. Every email wants you want to stab yourself in the damned eye. Even—nay, especially—the ones advertising cheap flights.
3. You delete all your damned bookmarks because everything you read seems like it was written by a complete phoney.
4. You start to feel a deep and abiding empathy with Holden Caulfield. Deeper and more abiding than usual, dammit.
5. In the moments spent not trying to fashion sentences—which has by now become damn-near impossible—your mind is an utter, utter blank. 
6.  
7. Um. Damn.

On rejection

I hadn't heard of Michael Hastings until he died last week, which is merely more evidence of how exceedingly poorly read I am.

But I found this post, which contains his advice to would-be journalists. Apart from reminding me why I'll never be a journalist, it included, almost as an afterthought the one thing that I've come to believe is more important than pretty much anything else in creative endeavours.*

"Learn to embrace rejection as part of the gig. Keep writing/pitching/reading."

The words "embrace rejection" seem wholly paradoxical at first reading. And the second sentence seems almost glib. But this final note in his list struck me. Hard.

Embracing rejection isn't about loving a knock-back. It's about understanding why the publication or person didn't want your work, and assessing your ideas in light of that. Maybe you'll come out the other end saying, "yeah, okay, but I'm still hot on this idea for reasons x, y and z. I'm gonna keep shopping this one." Or maybe you'll change tack slightly, reflect and alter the plan on the basis of the new information you've got. (That is, the rejection.)

There is nothing more freeing than ceasing to be emotionally tied to your output in a way that doesn't allow for anyone not to like it.

When I stopped instantly rejecting criticism, I realised that everyone really does see everything differently. And when I realised that, I understood that a rejection told me something about the person (or a publication, or an organisation).

If I wanted to, I could use that information for good—perhaps by shaping my next idea to reflect what I'd learned. Or I could use it for evil, clutching ever more tightly to my own idea, willing to die (or wind up living in a cardboard box) to protect its integrity from detractors.

And when I realised that, I (largely) stopped being afraid that my "creativity" wasn't enough, that my ideas might be no good.

Then I really started enjoying writing for people.

*By which I mean not just creative work, but, you know, "life".

Release early, and release often

Writers (among others working in creative fields) have this idea that their work must be perfect before it's seen. This notion probably stems from the idea that writing is a kind of art. In some cases, writing is a kind of art.

But let's face it: few of those cases are mercantile.

If you're writing for a client, or writing as a contribution to a bigger communication that involves others—designers, marketers, etc. etc.—then hiding your precious prose from prying eyes until you've spent ages refining it to a state of perfection is counter-productive. Almost entirely so.

If someone else needs to approve your work, your best bet is to take the developers' advice: release early, and release often.

This doesn't mean you should give your client half-baked garbage. What it means is that they need to be on the, shall we say, creative journey with you. They need to know what you're thinking as you're thinking it, so that they can contribute to it, and help you shape it to their needs. And if you're working with other creatives, the same logic applies.

Spend days polishing a draft, and you're wasting time. Write your draft, go away, check and refine, and then just present the fucker.

Don't present it as a finished article. Call it a prototype. This gives your work boundaries (people expect prototypes to be a bit flimsy, to wobble and sway a little) and a sense of testability: the whole purpose of a prototype is to see how its key functionality stands up to experimental use.

This will incline your clients to think about the copy, take it for a spin, run it past some colleagues, and maybe even sleep on it for a few days. It encourages a broader scrutiny and more thoughtful, more thorough feedback. It also consolidates client relationships and builds rapport.

Ultimately, releasing early and often lets you write better copy, and produce better communications.

Oh, and as a bonus, it also takes the angst out of copy presentation.

Fist-shaking at Facebook

I imagine, that, like me, you've spent much of your time crafting your very existence so that you avoid the things that you know frustrate you.

Facebook, however, seems so intimately woven into the fabric of social exchange and engagement now that I find it difficult to avoid. Hence my daily fist-shaking.

Today's gem?

If by using inverted commas around the mysteriously all-cap-sed fish, you mean fantastical, pretend fish—things masquerading as fish, or simply entirely made-up fish—then let's name four:

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.

Fuck you, Facebook, and all the banal, soul-crushing stupidity you stand for.*

*Yeah, I probably feel a little too strongly about this.

Mind-blowing lines #30

In No Country for Old Men, Moss gives a hitchhiking runaway this advice:

It's not about knowing where you are. It's about thinking you got there without taking anything with you. Your notions about starting over. Or anybody's. You don't start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.

Every step you take is forever. So many people are paralysed by that thought. What if we make the wrong decision, take a wrong step? Or, we think things are so bad that if we can't get another start, we'd rather be dead.

But for some reason, it galvanises me to action: is this my forever? Lord no. Is what I have what I want as the sum total of what I can't make go away? No.

Time to make plans.

Letters—the writing of

Of these two stories, I should have clicked the one on the left. But of course I didn't.

Who needs to read what the future is for books? There will be more of them. End of story.

What's more intriguing is the matter of the love letter. Who writes love letters now? No one. No one I know of. People can barely bother to use entire words in a text message (myself all too frequently included), let alone concentrate long enough to write an entire letter.

And to put one's most intimate feelings into print—even the handwritten variety? It seems old-school, outdated, something from a distant, half-forgotten epoch when people had both the time to meditate on such things, and the balls to put those tender sentiments down on paper.

But I am all for love letters—the writing of, the reading of, mine, yours, a former PM's. And ordinary postcards and letters and emails as well.

What's not to write? What's not to love?

Fluking it

Most of the time, I forget what I've written as soon as it's on the page. So if someone gives me good feedback about something, I have to go back and open the file and actually look at it again. Even if—as in the case of a recent piece—mere days have passed since I did the work.

And usually I can't even remember constructing the sentences. Heavens, I think. Can't remember writing that. Sounds ok though. Oh well. Fluke, I guess.

Putting pen to paper professionally is one thing. After years writing for commercial entities, I've managed to extract every ounce of myself from the work—except a commitment to what I think is quality, and to having fun—so the pleasure extracted from clients' recognition of success is superficial, short-lived.

They're all happy accidents.

But a recent post on a friend's blog got me thinking beyond commoditized copy. When was the last time I put myself into something I wrote, without the fear (or: goal) of assessment? Aeons ago, and more aeons.

But as Mme Canada and I agreed in conversation today, if you don't have that thick skin—if you actually do put yourself into something—and then it is good, well, shit. How the hell are you gonna pull that off next time?

It seems like the ultimate fluke: to find that something within yourself has managed to conjure something good. How can that be? What did you do? Can you do it again?

No wonder novelists are all alcoholics with bitten-down fingernails who kick their cats.

Labours of love

I read this today, and remembered the thrill of seeing the first little book I ever had printed.

It was an illustrated story book for a particular friend. I wrote it, obviously, and edited and proofed it, and I paid to have a friend of a friend—who's an illustrator—do the pics.

Finally I had it printed and leather-bound with an embossed cover, all in time for my friend's birthday—a sort of extreme love letter, I suppose.

The thrill of having this thing in my hands was unbelievable, and unexpected. I'd had a chapbook printed in the States by a little publisher who was selling it through his site, but that was printed on a home printer and stapled together and, well, it looked like it.

But this, this was a proper book. And it was glorious. Delightful. Mind-blowing.

True, I didn't finance a print run like the Brontes. But I did take a story and make it into a book. Even if it was just the one. Forget online self-publishing services, I say. Get the thing bound by a human and you'll be much happier.

After that, I made a couple of other books the same way. Most of the thrill came from going right to the edge and standing on the self-made precipice, saying, "this thing is good enough to justify illustrations and binding."

Saying, "I hope you like this" as you give something you made to someone you love.

I've been coauthor on a couple of commercial print books since, but who cares? There's no thrill in that: dispensable publications, written to a brief for an unseen audience. They were the kind of thing you might read, then leave on the shelf to collect dust for years to come.

But a real story, written and produced just for you? That's something. To make that for someone? That is something too.

A little library-induced terror

Today when I tried to put a hold on a library book, like it was 1980, I got a message saying my membership had expired. Perhaps because I hadn't used the library since approximately 1980.

The problem with libraries is the pressure. You borrow a book, you need to take it back. Or renew it, or pay fines. There's no scope for the kind of ponderous reading in which I now specialise. There's no scope for getting tied up with something else—or several something elses—when you're halfway through the borrowed book.

Where's the pleasure in that? I currently have five books on the go—well, four, since I finished one this morning. Each is different and suits a different mood. Only one of them (which I won't name, since I'm sure you can guess it) was compelling enough to demand daily reading.

So why am I returning to the library after all this time? Because the book I wanted costs $50 second-hand. That's it.

Of course, it's not impossible that this renewal of my borrowing privileges might inspire some additional reading. A little something more from David Sedaris, whose back catalogue is too numerous to purchase? Perhaps the latest from Jared Diamond?

Time will tell, friends. While the thought of borrowing, and having books overdue, and paying fines, fills me with an inexplicable terror, goddamn it, I want to read about bunyips.

What can you do?

Possibly the best book I've ever read

I know: enormous call. But I'm making it: Bastard Tongues is the best.

It's a swashbuckling, world-touring, gung-ho tale of one linguist's adventures in researching and understanding Creole languages.

So far he's been to Ghana, Guyana, places in South America and the Caribbean too numerous to mention, (England) and now, Hawaii.

He's also intrigued this little reader as to the nature and grammar of Creolese—and as to the meaning of whatever the hell it is he's about to unearth in Hawaii.

I have some inkling already, having read his later books. But I don't know the details, and this particular  backstory is a fabulous one.

This book is literally unputdownable. I'm not kidding. Buy it, buy it now.

Incidentally, I'm also working up to write to him, as I'm wont to do.

Q and A (or, Obsession)

"...but I look at these topics. I mean, you're thinking about aspects not many people are thinking about. What's your experience in this field?"

"Well," I pause. "My thing is basically communication. Everything I've ever written, from a review of a co-working tool to a piece on email etiquette, all the work I do is really focused on communication. How can we improve communication? How can brands communicate better with their audiences? How can we communicate better with the people we need to work with?

"That's my thing. People communicating. Communicating better."*

*A sentiment expressed with what's probably the least eloquence, ever. But then who doesn't love a paradox?

Just the one

Ah, the light-chested relief at only having one book on the go. Even if that book is Mabanckou's African Psycho.

It's a joy to have finished everything else, especially The Divine Comedy, which had taken a while, and, in its glorious end, run me completely dry.

To be at that point where the bookshelf is your oyster, the options are endless, is an enormous indulgence. It reminds me of Christmases as a kid, when I'd tear open the Cadbury's lolly stocking and prepare to choose the first item—knowing full well that there were days and days of other lollies to come, and that this, friends, was just the beginning.

I haven't heard from Steinbeck in a while. Or Godden. Or Diamond, for that matter, or even Winchester. Shall I revisit them, or choose something new? Something someone's lent me?

Such an indulgence. I've decided not to choose, not tonight at least. Instead I'll stick with African Psycho for now, and see what strikes me tomorrow. For now, though, just the one.

Too much to ask of today's content?

I'm formulating a theory at the moment that there are basically two kinds of informational content on the web.*

The first is the 800-word how-tos and listicles we've all been glancing over for the last few years. The second is high-brow longread content that's so rarified it makes you want to throw your device out the window.

All that said, boy, am I over these same old titles you see all fucking over the educational web. Here are some of my pet hates, in no particular order:

• N things that [What] X can teach us about Y
• NNN top things
• How to [action] / [Action] 101
• N reasons why you're failing at X
• The N mistakes you don't realise you're making

There are plenty of variations on these themes, but basically, this is all we're ever confronted with. Honest to god, can it get a little less formulaic? Is it that too much to ask?

*I never stick with any of these "two kinds of" theories I come up with, so don't worry. It'll pass.

Because we can't talk

"...so in lieu of talking, I'm writing."

I wrote this in an email today, a day of much writing. As soon as I hit that full stop, I thought, woah Nelly, is this my MO?

Yes, this is my MO. This is why I'm here. This is why I'm writing this to you, now. This is why I spend so much time typing.

Because we can't talk.

What torture is not talking. Writing is never the same, but at least it offers some solace in the cold, bitter face of silence.

The Chess Piece

[This piece was written for a friend, about a friend, and was intended as a gonzo-style venue review. I hope you like it.]

Richard rolls up the marble steps of the State Library, chessward and chilled. As if the fritzing, fizzing fluros of The Chess Room (official title) don't matter, as if the heavy-levying of the SL goons who line the very walls ain't happening, pardner.

Pardner? Pah! Player. Pussycat. Pawn.

Richard is here to crush me like the slightly-more-mediocre chess chump that I am.

Up the stairs, up again, and left into the bowels, what passes—ahem—as the very large intestine of "recreation" in this hell-hole of hallowed highbrowety:

The Chess Room

These chess pieces,

I tell him, having lurched into a wonky wheelie-chair near a perilously high dropoff into the AV "space",

are blunt.

Blunt? 

He cocks a crazy eyebrow.

L-l-look at them! 

I stammer, waving a rook frantically before his eyes. It's big and plastic and white and an insult to the sensibilities not just of these esteemed halls of uni-student z's, but also to the coiled-spring temperaments of the players who surround us.

(There's a couple of rows of shelves behind us, housing what I glance out of the sweaty corner of one eye to be books on chess. Just to, you know, keep with the theme of the place and all, like we could ever forget where we are. As I await his reply, a couple of kids clearly wagging some tedious lecture on post-modern-modernism or, I hope, something even more brutal, gaze longingly into each other's eyes over their unplayed pieces. I stifle a gag…)

Blunt!

I scream, the room spinning, the scent of the plastic sheeting they use to wrap the countless mountains of tomes in that place finally making me crack.

Hey, 

Says a low, meancing voice.

What's going on here?

A shadow deep as time casts our board into a totalitarian gloom: Security Guard.

I reel back in my seat, bugeyed and green.

We're playing chess, 

says Richard, all nice-as-pie, all sweet-as-you-please, and I know, I just know his next move will start the sweeping, brakeless carve-up that will clear the board of half the pieces in the next three minutes. I wanna buy time.

Yeah, 

I squeak, trying to control myself.

Ahem, yeah. We're just playing, boss.

Glowers from on high. This guy's frown is neanderthal in both stature and sensitivity. Oaf! I scream silently;

Boss.

I say again, aloud.

Well, keep it down, or you'll have to leave. This is a quiet area.

Richard's gaze crackles with electricity; the lights dim again (or am I losing consciousness?) and the henchman skulks off elsewhere. Before I know it, the kid has castled and the queen is dead.

Checkmate.

Better luck next time? There is no next time. My glorious, gorgeous, gobsmacker of a plan is to confuse him.

Rico, 

I tell him.

The Library's out, pal.

His face registers nothing but ethereal calm. Gaze? Unreadable. Shoulders? Set. Breathing? Level.

Match Bar!

I scream. He follows.

It's similar—steps, seating, a view of the curious circus on the State Library lawn—but different from The Chess Room.

For one thing, the rum is better. Hell, the rum is present. So is anything else you care to drink, along with imported Japanese ice-chillers in which, presumably, Rich will collect the corpses of my soon-to-be-slayed regiments.

My secret weapon? The tiniest travel-chess set in existence. A hand-me-down heirloom from the dimmest reaches of my flayed family tree, it boasts a magnetic board (I suspect ol' Rich has been knocking the board while I'm otherwise, shall we say, engaged—in talk, you understand. This will put us on an even, ahem, playing field…).

He orders the city's thinnest French fries as a distraction and has, it seems, had them import Britain's most charming barmen, who, along with the black-and-white bastion of the board, now vie for my bleary-eyed attentions.

Damn him!

We have an entire lounge to ourselves, acres of it, and the waitresses keep bringing drinks to the low table on which blood is spilled from the first.

Another ploy, fair boy?

I curl my lips into a maniac grin and strike!

Take that! 

I cry, slamming a tiny black pawn down between the board and my Mojito.

One of his knights is damaged, yet he steers this headless horse around the board as an apocalyptic oracle, threatening pieces left and right until I manage to get him into a corner and hang him, greasy-fingered, from the disco ball that Match Bar, on non-Mondays, presumably sets to a slowly rotating shimmer.

Stalemate, sucker!

Rue Bebelons

This time, this time, I'm determined.

To the home turf, homey! 

I yelp, dragging him westward, pulling him wayward, into the bloody red Rue Bebelons we both know and love.

No chips, but dips; no matt-sheen cocktail list, but decent house red and that cosy-as-an-old-pair-of-jeans feel that soothes the beleaguered chess player all the way back from the brink.

There's a half-booth in the corner and we take it. Rico chooses black. The bar tender changes the record, vinyl being, of course, the stock-standard at Bebelons.

Here, then, is a bar where you can wear a beret or a bassoon, play chess or play the field, and no one raises an eyebrow. It's a bar for anyone with a brain who's over eighteen, a bar where hipsters need not apply. Why it doesn't support more obvious alcoholics is beyond me, but kids, I'm not paying attention to my chic cohabitants right now.

What matters here are Richard's nimble fingers, and how he shuffles those pieces among the squares.

I eye his moves, a singular, spasming portion of my brain toying crazily with the idea of tearing down the string of dried red roses from above the bar and throwing the dusty blooms at my opponent. Or bribing the bar tender to play something a little less relaxing, a little more threatening. Anything to beat Richard. Anything.

Then, it happens: Reggae. Bob Marley. My formidable opponent is for the moment distracted; I am too. Delirious and seeing only the chalky red of the Beblons walls, I counter his move, whatever that was, slamming a sequestered piece onto the checked red tablecloth.

His eyes swing back to the board.

Checkmate! 

he cries. Only this time, it's mine.

The little things

Writing for money is sometimes less about the writing.

People who want to write for money get caught up on the idea of writing. But in some ways, the writing—cultivating a flexible style, getting the tone and voice right, putting coherent sentences together—is the least of your worries.

Frequently, much more pertinent are the other things. The little things.

Taking a brief, for instance.

This isn't about filling in a neat proforma. It's not about stroking your client's ego. It's about amassing the information you need to write something that not only pleases the client sufficiently for them to use it, but, most importantly, will succeed with the audience to achieve the client's goals.

What about researching?

Wait, what? Yes, research. Research that goes beyond Jimmy Wales's Wikipedia is a bit of a conundrum for many would-be writers. Whether it's your own personal experimentation, or research you do through interviews, reading, and observing the subject of your writing, research is essential.

Without research, what will you have to say?

Then there's writing to deadlines.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, try writing to deadlines for a week, or a month, or a decade, and let me know how you go.

Actually, if you get to a decade, you'll be peachy: over time, writing to a deadline becomes a doddle. Why? Because at some point, the writing—the putting of words on a page—becomes a natural and necessary precipitate of all the other things in this list.

Once you can write to deadlines, step up to the next challenge: writing to budgets. It's one thing to get paid to write. It's another to make writing pay.

Understanding that writing is communication? Also a big deal.

In these days of blogs and content marketing and banner ads and print mags in their bajillions, it's easy to see writing as creation—work whose point is the production of sentences: something to publish, something to sell.

That might be "writing" but it won't make you worth paying.

What will make you worth paying is the results your writing produces. And to produce results, your work has to communicate with actual human beings. To do that, you have to:

1. have something to say
2. know who you need to say it to
3. know why it matters to them
4. have the sense and sensibility to formulate that message in a way that speaks to those people.

Providing a rationale: critical.

Being able to explain why you've done something the way you've done it is essential. Only then will you be able to give the client factual reasons as to why you don't believe a particular change should be made—and give them in a way that makes sense to the client and has more than a shadow of a chance of convincing them.

This point could probably also cover weird grammatical and cultural hangups your client wants to apply to the copy.

Oh, and taking and making amendments. That's a thing too.

There are worthy amendments, and there are poor ones. How will you tell them apart? By intuitively using your "art"? See the point above. Once you've mastered rationale, how will you make sure that the amendments you do make protect and enhance what you believe to be the integrity of the client brand's communication with its audience?

These aren't lofty pro writing goals; they're the little things. They're what make a writer worth paying. Anyone can put a sentence on a page. The question is: why that sentence? Your facility with most of the items on this list will enable you to answer that question with competence and certainty.

Something to think about

If you could judge a book by its cover, you'd never read Language and Human Behavior by Derek Bickerton.

But you can't, and you should.

Among the many, many thrilling ideas in this book is the suggestion that we all think largely in words. That we need words to think. That these concepts are linked, and that language produces thought.

I don't know about you, but to me, that's a thrilling idea. I naturally want to conclude that by extending our language, we extend our ability to think. I've found this to be true myself, as, I expect, have you.

But there are languages that encompass different concepts from our own—concepts that are inexpressible in English. What are we missing by not having words for those ideas? How much are we limited by this? And to that point, how much are we limited by the vocabularies we do have, which certainly represent only small portions of the total the language has to offer?

If you're going to concern yourself passionately with some issue that's completely beyond your control, and reasonably ethereal to boot, Derek Bickerton will give you something to think about.

Paradiso

Remember this? It's been a while, but since then I've read the Inferno and Purgatorio. Now I'm in Paradiso, and brother, is it sweet.

To be honest with you, I began reading the Inferno when things were indeed hellish. Not as hellish as they'd ever been, and not as hellish as they got, but on the whole, they were hard.

You know what I'm talking about.

It's not inconceivable that I dreamed, on some level, that things would change as I read through the cantos, threaded my way through the seven circles of hell and up the spiralling mount to Paradise. Because sometimes books do mirror life. Coincidentally, sure. But it happens.

As in this case.

Paradise doesn't look like I thought it would. This isn't what I fought for. Now I know how Dante felt when he found himself unexpectedly in Eden. How did everything get so pretty so suddenly? When did the sky lift, and what's that light up ahead?

So my trick seems to have worked. Here we are in a glorious place where all faces show love, and a calm beauty prevails. Let it last, Alighieri.

Such pretty words

In The Grass Harp, Truman Capote conjures a little girl who calls herself Texaco Gasoline, "because they were such pretty words."

Sometimes, words are pretty. They feel good in the mind, in our ears, on our tongues.

For me, one of those words—on a par, I think, with Texaco Gasoline for mundanity—is telephone.

To think of the thing in my pocket taking the same name as an object that sat in small squadrons on office desks the size of tennis courts, with rotary dials, multi-coloured so you knew which one was for what, is crazy. To call the thing in my pocket by the same word as something with two horns attached to walls in English manor houses, which would connect you to an operator, is equally crazy.

The word telephone is so much more indulgent than the clipped, expedient, modern "phone". Telephone is luxuriant. Telephone takes time to say and to listen to. Three glorious syllables, which I like to draw out, instead of one.

Grown adults snigger when I call my phone a telephone. Friends chuckle. It's just a phone! Right?

Well, shorter isn't always better. And telephone is such a pretty word.

Unintelligible

Today's incredulousness is brought to you by a major web brand:

What's the problem? The dulled out scribble beside the Live Chat alert, friend. Can you read it? I couldn't, and it doesn't get any bigger when you enlarge the text.

Beige on beige tinytext. I'll keep that little gem in mind for the next time I don't want to communicate something.

Resolution

My professional New Year's resolution is pretty simple:

Don't write anything you don't want to read.

This could be rewritten as "Don't write anything you don't want to", but I think the extra word will add validity in the face of crushing, soul-destroying client requests which, though they're few and far between these days, do still come in occasionally.

The precipitate of those final weeks prior to Christmas, this resolution feels useful. While I'm hardly a literary snob, there's a fair bit I don't want to read. Fortunately, most of it is actually dross.