Monthly Archives: January 2011

It seems that one of the most common questions asked of professional authors is: “Do I need to go to college to be a writer?”

The most common answer, of course, is “No.”

It may be surprising coming from me, a devoted scholar and academic, but I have to agree with the folks out there saying no. You don’t need college. You don’t need a PhD in English, especially if you want to write popular fiction. That education, in fact, may give you the erroneous idea that what you want to write is somehow invalid. That anything less than “Literary Fiction” doesn’t count. This is not the case, of course. Many a stodgy professor reads popular as well as literary fiction, and with the same sort of thirst for study.

But did a Master’s of the Arts in English make me a writer? No.  I was a writer before I ever started college. I was a writer at 14, with nothing but a pen and a notebook and the sort of boredom that can only come from being stuck in classes where you already know the lessons.

What college did was turn me into an editor. It refined my grammar skills. It helped me learn to analyze the faults in my own writing.  All of these things are tools that go in my writer’s toolbox, to borrow a metaphor from Stephen King. But these are the specialty tools, when you can do most of what you need with nothing more than a hammer and a screwdriver.

Or the words and the story.  I could tell a story that would hold children hostage at the age of 9 (this was, in fact, one of my favorite baby-sitting strategies).  I didn’t need college then to know what sort of elements made a good story, what sort of characters would most draw the attention.

For a while after college, my education actually hindered my writing. I spent too much time second guessing my own work and not enough time writing. I was trying to sand away the rough edges and apply the varnish before I’d even put the pieces together.  It took some time, and a lot of started but never finished stories, before I realized what I was doing.  You have to leave the editor outside while you write your first draft. Get it done, and then break out the sandpaper.

I won’t tell you not to go to college. I loved it and would go back at a moment’s notice if I could afford the tuition. I could happily spend my days collecting degrees in all sorts of subjects. And college has helped to polish my writing skills, there is no doubt of that.

But was it absolutely necessary to my writing career? Not at all.  If you have the words and the story, you are a writer, no matter how many letters you have after your name.

Related articles

• Should You Get a Degree in Creative Writing? (advancedfictionwriting.com)
• Why Criticism Matters: The Intellectual at Play in the Wider World (nytimes.com)
• Writers on Writing: On Writing by Stephen King (tor.com)

Once upon a time, when the internet was just beginning to be available to the masses, the internet was fenced in. If you dialed into the internet with AOL, you could only visit AOL hosted sites. The same with CompuServe and any number of other major providers.  Eventually, thanks to the demands of the customers, those walls were torn down. Now, they’re in danger of being put back up.

Many of the current ubiquitous features of the internet – websites that millions of people visit multiple times every day – could not exist in that fenced in world.  Facebook was created by a college student. Twitter by a few folks with a simple idea. The end of net neutrality would destroy that sort of invention. It would take innovation out of the hands of the individual and ensure that only mega-corporations could afford a place on the internet. Only they would be able to avoid the fees necessary to ensure that their content was accessible by the end-user, because the end-user would only be able to visit websites inside the fence that their ISP puts around the internet.

Now, this wouldn’t just affect internet startups and entrepreneurs.  There are real implications for creative professionals.  Independent musicians, artists, and writers would lose their ability to get their creative work out to the masses, without the benefit of having a major publisher backing them to pay those fees.  Likewise, the ISPs could potentially block websites they simply didn’t agree with – effectively applying censors to anyone with differing opinions or working with controversial subjects. They would be kicked outside the fence, their work left in the black hole of an internet unreachable by anyone.

This, along with certain legislation directed toward the Wikileaks scandal but with wide-ranging implications for freedom of speech for everyone, means that our first amendment rights are being beset on all sides. On one side, we have the greed of the internet providers looking for another way to make money, on the other we have politicians looking to destroy safe political dissent by removing the anonymity of the internet.

More and more, the internet is a place where even those from countries where freedom of speech is not guaranteed can have a voice.  The two things that make this possible are anonymity and the ability for almost anyone, regardless of the money in their pocket, to make a website. Take those two things away, and not only is the internet destroyed, but it will take one of our most fundamental rights with it. And let’s face it, that right is already tattered enough.

Let’s not go building those fences again.

Related articles

• Most don’t want the FCC to regulate the Internet (news.cnet.com)
• Apple the No. 1 Danger To Net Freedom (apple.slashdot.org)
• Net Neutrality Explained for Writers and Artists (craphound.com)

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It’s no great secret that I have a bit of a fetish for Snark. Show me a slightly-geeky guy or girl with a talent for well-placed sarcasm, and you can bet that I’m wiping drool off of my chin.

I blame Mr. Darcy.  From the first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I knew that in Mr. Darcy I had found the perfect characterization of all that I could want in a man. (I did, in fact, eventually find my Mr. Darcy.)

Of course, Mr. Darcy is only one of the characters that fit into this Snarker Character Type (TV Tropes Examples).  There’s both Benedick and Beatrice from Much Ado about Nothing.  In pop culture, there’s Severus Snape from the Harry Potter Series (or, let’s face it, any character that Alan Rickman has ever played anywhere),  Spock from Star Trek, and most of my favorite Doctors from Doctor Who.

This is also a character type that continues to appear in my own fiction.  It’s not always the tall, dark, and snarky love interest, as my adoration of the trait in real people might attest.  Most often it’s a peripheral character to the plot, important to what’s going on, but at the same time standing somewhat outside of it.  In the story I’m currently working on, Remnants, the Snarker appears as a robot librarian built of scraps named Dewey.

One benefit of the Snarker is that they are almost unfailingly honest, and though they may appear in some circumstances to be mean or petty, their well-placed barbs never fail to be accurate, whether the one being stabbed with it wants to admit to the accuracy or not. They are also unfailingly funny, though, again, the victims of their sharp tongue rarely can see the humor in their statements.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a character standing in the wings who will tell your protagonist that they’re being a complete idiot, even if you know the protagonist won’t listen.  In some ways, the Snarker can be a stand-in for the thoughts of the audience as they observe the actions of your main characters.  They can also serve to force your main characters into realizing their weaknesses and foibles – the things no hero wants to admit to when they look into the mirror.  These are often the things that the protagonist must overcome even more than any possible villain, if they are to succeed.

How about everyone else? Do any of you have favorite character types in literature or pop culture that keep popping up in your own writing?

Related articles

• Social Construct of Star Trek (socyberty.com)
• Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, Unveiled! [Books] (gawker.com)
• What’s In A Name? A Lot When You Want To See It In Print (blogher.com)

So yesterday the world froze.

We didn’t get any snow – two days of snow in one year would be really odd where I live – but we did get a lot of rain. And wherever the rain fell, it froze.

This resulted in giving everything a really odd look, as if it was covered in glass.  I live deep in the country, where there isn’t anything much other than trees, and those trees were almost entirely covered with ice, not in big chunks, but as if each individual needle on the pines were coated, and each tiny twig on the hardwoods that had long since lost their leaves.  Not only did it look like the forest was made of glass, it sounded like the forest was made of glass. It was unusually silent, except for the tinkling of the ice as it stretched and cracked.

Now and then, there would be a noise like a gunshot as a large branch or tree gave way under the weight of the ice. My first thought was “Who’s out there hunting on a Monday morning?”  Usually any gunshot sounds around my house really are gunshots, during deer season.

I got an unexpected day off from work, because we were told to stay off of the roads. (My Canadian and New Englander buddies were highly amused at this: “It didn’t even snow, and you got a snow day?”) I spent my day off baking bread, though it was questionable whether I would actually get to the baking part, because the power kept blinking.

Eventually that tree that had been leaning on the power line fell completely, cutting our electricity for most of the afternoon and night.  I read as long as I had enough light to read, and then I wrote until my laptop battery gave out, and then I went to bed at what was probably a ridiculously early time. I didn’t have any issues with staying warm. Thanks to the kitties, I actually got a little hot – we were all snuggled up under the blankets together, and you don’t get more effective hot water bottles than four extremely fuzzy and large felines.

Things I have done well today:

• Got a full 8 hours of sleep.
• Woke up at 7:00 and actually got out of bed instead of snoozing until 7:30 and having to rush to get dressed and out of the door by 8.
• Ate breakfast. A real breakfast: A bowl of greek yogurt sprinkled with fresh blueberries and granola. Not just a cup of coffee on the run.
• Put on makeup, not just a bit of powder so I don’t look like death warmed over.
• Fed and watered cats and made Norbert his buggy salad with vitamins instead of just tossing a handful of kale into his tank and waiting until evening to give him his bugs.
• Tracked my food and yesterday’s exercise on SparkPeople.
• Wrote a blog post on the day it was due!
• Got good and started on my day’s worth of editing, which I fully intend to complete once I hit “post” on this blog.

Now, if those things will just turn into proper habits and not just once in a while, I might actually get a handle on this whole “Life” thing.

Am I the only one that imagines Sims-like green bars over my head and a WoW-like Quest Tracker floating around about things like this? Bar fills up, task is complete, points are earned! Let’s see if I can cross the rest of my Quests off of my Tracker for the day.

Related articles

• How to Form Good Habits This Year [Mind Hacks] (lifehacker.com)
• Good Sleeping Habits With Bipolar Disorder (everydayhealth.com)
• Work out, get on scale…tell your friends? (news.cnet.com)