What should I write about?

I remember being a young would-be writer in my twenties thinking, Aren't all the topics taken?  Haven't all the great stories been told?  Perhaps it was the result of being an English major and feeling hopelessly inadequate.

Of course, I gradually learned that, with knowledge doubling every few years and the range of information seemingly infinite, there is no dearth of material to write about, of people to quote or comment on, of experiences that can be turned into stories.

In my writing workshop recently, a student submitted a piece on visiting a laundromat (launderette) for the first time.  She assumed that everyone in America was like her: able to afford their own washer and dryer. But, facing a heavy, stained blanket, she decided that a larger washing machine was needed. She felt out of place at first, unsure what to do.

What she observed was a revealing cross-section of society: of people who avoided her gaze; they did not want to be seen publicly doing private things (folding their underwear).  She began to wonder what led a twelve-year-old boy to sort, wash, dry, and fold the family's laundry. She wondered about class distinctions, the haves vs. the have-nots.

The result was a subtle narrative that resembled a short story but was, in fact, non-fiction: it had happened to her. Since it was brief, I suggested it be revised and submitted as flash non-fiction. I had recently read about Dinty W. Moore, who edits Brevity, an online journal devoted to flash non-fiction and who has written widely on this new genre.

I hope my student's work is published there or elsewhere; if not, it showed us that concerns and fears (writer's block) about being original are unwarranted if we just look around at our daily life-world: there are stories everywhere. We don't have to create them from scratch or wait for divine inspiration.

This, I hope, is encouraging to anyone who resembles my younger self many years ago or anyone who is stuck with "what will I write?"  After all, it's the approach, the angle and style that we take to the ordinary that can make it extraordinary. What is personal is often universal (maybe always).

Understanding your audience

Understanding who makes up your audience is fundamentally important for any writer or speaker. I was reminded of this today in an otherwise boring talk on a topic far from boring (Sherlock Holmes) because the speaker read, verbatim, to an audience of non-experts a lecture designed to be read by scholars. It was written to be published in a journal, not delivered orally.

This practice is all too common at academic conferences. Instead of talking in clear language, scholars generally write a paper that is really an article in disguise, full of long sentences and abstract language ("narrative strategies deeply informed by hermeneutics....") that seems designed to put people to sleep within fifteen minutes.

The speaker's problem today was that he had no idea to whom he was speaking. He wanted to sound impressive, I suppose, and ending up wasting our time, or at least mine.

The lesson is something I always consider in communication. I cannot write without deciding, Who will read this? Where can I send this (for publication)?  If I picture certain readers I know, or imagine someone like myself as the ideal reader, I have an audience, and the communication process works. I have a reason to write.

Without an audience of readers, I am lost as a writer, unable to do anything.

Consider this blog: Who is my audience? I get only hints since so few readers ever leave comments.  The fine people at Goog'e BlogSpot give me a tally by country of those who have clicked onto one of my posts, and I am amazed to find readers in China, Russia, Europe and the U.S. (rarely in Canada or Australia, for unknown reasons). 

Beyond location, I know nothing much about these readers except that certain topics elicit more attention than others. I have to imagine who they are since a writer's audience is always a fiction, as Walter Ong once wrote n a famous article.

Just knowing taht at least one or two people "out there" in cyberspace might read what I write gives me the motivation to communicate. So I remain grateful to Google for this service and to the presence of unseen readers who make possible what I do on Writing in the Spirit.

'Open Wider'

As I prepare to teach a six-week writing workshop, I decided to repeat a few comments from an earlier post, "In praise of long sentences."

Pico Iyer, among many other prose stylists today, has written in favor of long sentences that are expansive: they open the reader, he says, to various levels of meaning, enabling him or her to go down into herself and into complex ideas that can't be squeezed into an "either/or."

I was glad to see Iyer sing the praises of the long sentence, something I regularly do with my students, even if they are puzzled or turned off by sentences (like this one) that seem to ramble, like speech, or even if they fear that a long sentence like this might be ungrammatical (it ain't) or worry, in the way every writer worries, that such writing is confusing, artificial or pretentious, which it may be if it isn't done carefully, with balanced clauses and phrases and perhaps a dash of humor. And if it isn't balanced by shorter sentences.

Am I showing off? Yes, for good reason.

It's not that I want students of writing to imitate the sometimes unreadable sentences of Henry James; it's just that I want them to have options.

So much depends on a writer's purpose. A descriptive sentence, if it opens a travel article, might be suitable for a long, cumulative sentence (which begins with the main idea, then accumulates modifiers). It would catch the reader's attention. Or it might suggest simultaneous action in a story in a way that a group of shorter sentences could not.

No one would recommend using a lot of really long sentences, just as no one would use James Joyce's Ulysses as a model of prose style.

There are times that a writer might prefer a trailing, expansive sentence that tells the reader, "open wider, please," like a dentist, "so I can more fully explore this thought with you."  But we have to be careful not to overdo such long, trailing sentences and to balance them with simpler ones to allow readers to catch their breath.

Writers at all levels learn a vast amount from reading carefully and paying attention to how skillful writers shape their sentences.

P.S. Here I want to put in a word for my wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, who has her own blog: startingfromthesky.blogspot.com.  You might like to check out her style and see how it differs from mine. She has written a number of books for children, available on Amazon Kindle.

Reading is Creative

We all know that writing is a creative act, but many of us overlook the fact that reading, which is such an inseparable part of writing, also involves the reader's imagination in ways that literary theorists and neurobiologists have been studying for some time.

I was reminded of the work of Norman Holland of the University of Florida and others when I encountered a blog by Nicholas Carr a few months back. He writes about how narrative literature "takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways."

It seems that, as we read a story, our own experiences and knowledge join with the narrative to create something like a dream of the work we read, and we inhabit that dream as if it were an actual place, Carr says.

You might be thinking, "Of course, I know that reading, like immersion in a film, is emotionally engaging and absorbing, that we lose ourselves."  But did you know that experiencing strong feelings from a fictional work can cause alterations in brain functions?  I don't know how the reactions a reader has can ever be measured in a laboratory, but the mounting evidence from various researchers about the social and psychological implications of reading is impressive.

Quoting Keith Oatley as well as Holland, Carr says that "a book is rewritten in the mind of every reader, and the book rewrites the reader's mind in a unique way, too."  An astounding statement.

Does reading literature make us more attentive to the real-life feelings of others around us? Do we become more empathetic?  Such are some of the imponderables as we consider what happens when the reader withdraws from his or her own world into a fictive world, which can be a way to connect more deeply into the inner lives of ourselves and "others"--even if these others are imagined characters.

If reading fiction can alter the reader's personality in various ways, imagine what happens cognitively to the writer, who both creates alternate worlds and, in revising his work, becomes the first reader of this work--and is changed in ways yet to be determined.

The Future of Textbooks

I should know something more than I do about the future of the college textbook is, having co-authored one that was published last month: The Practical Handbook for Writers, the 7th edition of a book by Donald Pharr, Ph.D. and myself and available from Yololearningsolutions.com.  This new publisher of a book that goes back to the first edition I did in 1979 has an online version, a printed version, and even an iphone version.

As a conventional teacher, I have always avoided online teaching and use as few online resources as I can--at least for serious work. I benefit greatly from articles and reviews on the Internet, but for a textbook, I could not recommend that students merely download chapters of our book, cheaper though this is.

Why? Because having a spiral-bound source of reference as the student writes is simply handy. But I'm old fashioned.

Just recently I found a piece (online) by Meredith Broussard, who doesn't allow e-books in her journalism class.  She has tried them and found them more trouble than they're worth, with students needing charging cords and outlets and complaining about tech issues.

All the two-minute interruptions were adding up, she writes, and she did not want to spend her time in tech support.  She finds e-texts "disruptive technology," and I can see why.

Still, for those who are working online exclusively or who write independently, I am glad that our handbook in its new edition is available in a way that can be downloaded. End of commercial.

Whether printed textbooks will soon (ten years?) be a thing of the past in U.S. education is possible, though regrettable. Options are desirable just as the reading of any printed text must remain an option. Much has been written on this topic.

When I read about a college library that has gone digital, eliminating all the books, I cringe in horror. I do not want to live in such a world.

Hyped Language, Bad Writing

As a teacher of writing, I usually show students examples of good prose style in the hope that they will learn from the masters what makes a memorable sentence.  I rarely exhibit examples of awful writing.

This week, however, in editing a thesis on the education of nurses, I once again encountered an example of the worst kind of academic prose, the kind of pompous, inflated, jargon-filled sentences that seem designed to impress one's colleagues.  Even English professors, alas, resort to such writing to be current. And their work needs to be exposed as dangerous and fraudulent.

The thesis in question exhibits the type of deadly language that George Orwell memorably deplored in 1946 (his classic essay "Politics and the English Language"). There he noted the linguistic fog that tends to obscure clarity and fresh thinking because writers tend to rely on ready-made phrases, not just in political discourse but in most fields. If only he were still around to see how educators themselves pass on bad writing habits to their students!

How else explain my nursing student's reliance on articles and books that are filled with passive verbs and sentences that seem designed to deaden the brain. Consider:  "A database must be created though the use of multiple sources of evidence by preceptors in their perceptions...."  Can you imagine 112 pages of this?

This piece is all about the perceptions of preceptors (a repeated phrase) and the preparedness of student nurses: simple ideas dressed up in the most tacky style imaginable, a style in which simple verbs (measure) are converted into windy verb phrases (perform a measurement). Why? Because that is the way the experts write, and my poor student is afraid to deviate from the style advocated by her professors and the scholars admired by those professors.

This is the Read, Write, and Regurgitate School of Writing, just as widespread today, if not more so, than when Orwell criticized it. It led me to a dramatic decision today: I will edit no more theses or dissertations.  I do so not for the money, which is negligible, but to be helpful to students, many foreign-born, who need guidance in their use of idioms and grammar.

The type of jargon-filled prose I so strongly oppose has little to do with grammar. It has to do with an inflated type of writing so far removed from the way English is spoken as to constitute a foreign language, a dialect spoken by many--too many--who consider themselves elite. 
What can I do besides refusing to read such stuff? Like chemical pollution, it will always be with us; it won't go away, and any effort to rewrite awful sentences more effectively is met with resistance.

So I must try my best to keep writing clearly and honestly, to read only the best writers, and to encourage those I know to do the same.

Doing What Comes Naturally

Ethel Merman, known for belting out Broadway songs for forty years in a voice that never needed amplification, was a big star.  Along the way, apparently, a musician told her, "Ethel, never let anyone teach you to sing."

Why ruin natural talent?  Of course, some who remember Merman singing "Doin' What Comes Naturally" from Annie Get Your Gun and most of the songs from Gypsy, may question the quality of that talent.

When I heard this anecdote, I immediately thought of the teaching of writing and how, all too often, it has intimated rather than encouraged students, who grow up feeling they cannot write.  As one colleague once told me, "I don't remember the rules."  A friend in his fifties, who yearns to write, worries about punctuation, as if his hand will be slapped if he makes a minor mistake. The computer's Spell-check frustrates him, tells him he doesn't know enough to write.

I tell him that the "rules" have little to do with generating ideas and tapping on his rich experience in producing interesting sentences.  What he needs is freedom from the opinions of others, especially ones stored in his memory.

Is there such a thing as too much instruction? I suppose in music, the answer might be Yes.  Writers, who are more familiar to me, need guidance and helpful readers and practice; they do not need more prescriptive advice on what is wrong with their work.

It takes a patient teacher to nurture a writing student so that he or she is not prevented from using his natural talent, from remembering that he in fact has such talent. Good writing involves a confidence in oneself along with liberation from the old voices of past teachers and editors that haunt us by saying, "You don't really know enough."

If I waited to write until I "knew enough," would I ever write anything?

Finding Yourself as a Writer

"How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey," Thomas Merton asked, "if you take the road to another man's city?  How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading someone else's life?"

In his finest book, New Seeds of Contemplation, the source of these arresting questions, Merton the monk is very much, as always, Merton the writer and the individual finding his own existential path to God, even though he lived within the confines of an ancient monastic tradition.

What do his questions say to writers? That no matter how much we owe to others, how much we read and absorb, we must to our own selves be true, following our own individual path.  Style, as I discover each time I try to teach it, is a unique reflection of each writer. It emerges out of the material of life deeply lived. It is a matter of the heart as well as the head. Like our lives, it is not about imitating others but making our own choices.

One contemporary poet and memoirist, Mary Karr, has found a singular voice, even though anyone reading her amazing 2009 book, Lit--an account of her progress from "blackbelt sinner" to Catholic convert--can see her indebtedness to those who have gone before her.

In a style that is smart, funny, profane, and intense, Karr describes leaving home (with its violence, abuse, alcoholism, drugs) and her mother to find a new home. Her memoir is about overcoming a life of terror and gradually discovering a community of prayer--and she does it her way.  The past becomes vividly present and alive, even though the reader can tell that something positive will come out of the gritty horror of her narrative.

Karr has discovered her own path from the harrowing darkness of alcoholism and rage to a realization that "nothing we truly love is ever lost." To feel (not just think) such a truth after much pain is, I think, a key spiritual insight. That she has found prayer as a source of power does not meant that the demons of the past are forgotten.

They are very much alive in this memoir, which manages to take street talk to a lyrical level.  Much of this book is not for the squeamish, but its unique style reflects Karr's journey, the hard choices she has made not only as a writer but as a woman of intelligence and strength who has moved beyond living someone else's life. It is good to know that, in her new life as a professor of English and acclaimed author, she is far from the end of her journey, which is very much her own.

Writing and Being Still

A recent piece in the New York Times, "The Art of Being Still," by novelist Silas House caught my eye. Especially his comment, "too many writers today are afraid to be still."

Or they are unable to unwilling to be quiet with their busy lives in which writing time is sandwiched in between parenting, earning money, maintaining a home, etc. House does not mean that writers have to sit still in a lonely garret. He means their minds have to be quiet.

His piece includes much sensible advice, especially for emerging writers who spend a lot of time talking about or planning to write or reading about writing or attending conferences. His advice, like mine, is to do the reading and networking in a limited way to keep your mind open.

How do we become still so that we "achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened"? In writing extensively about silence, I have talked about the need to slow down and find spots of contemplative time.  House is practical in recommending that writers use every moment they have to think about the story or article they are working on. And nothing else.

The issue is not, How many hours a day must I write?  But: How can I use my driving, shopping, chore time to reflect on one thing (my writing) only, without distractions?  He recommends what my wife, Lynn, has always done: writing constantly in her head.  In her periods of silence, she is actively thinking about her characters and what she wants them to say or do.  Little of this is written down in the initial stages.

Writers can go for weeks without putting words onto paper, but, if they follow House and many, many other authors, "they write every waking minute."  They do so by cultivating an inner silence that blocks interference (cell phones, etc. off) and opens the channels of observation.  The quiet mind comes when we turn off our overly busy thought patterns and remain quiet, open to what may come as we focus on living in the present moment.

Silence and writing seem to be opposed; yet silence and stillness are more than the absence of words and activity. They relate to a disciplined habit of listening to and observing what the universe has to reveal. And it can be done amid all the no-mind duties we must daily perform.

The value of writing

Andrew Sullivan's blog "The Daily Dish" has an amazing diversity of links, making it an ideal internet site. Today, readers are directed to a brief but very valuable bit of advice on writing by James Somers.

He says, in no uncertain terms, that more people should write. Like me, he has friends who are thoughtful and intelligent, who read a good bit, but tend to keep their ideas to themselves.  Somers' thesis is that "you will live more curiously if you write." 

You will be more open to nature, people, and the world around you. You will pay closer attention and also remember what you observe. I might add that the writer cultivates an interior life, a kind of spirituality that many of us unknowingly long for.

He reminds us, as I always do to my students feeling nervous about committing anything to full sentences, that writing need not be formal; you can "just talk onto the page."  If you can talk, you can write. The rest is revising and editing. Don't be crippled by old fears of not knowing "the rules" or of remembering your high school English teacher's red marks.

As Somers says in his post, writing emails in which we share our thoughts and feelings with others might draw out from them a similar type of thoughtfulness and interiority.  I find talking on the phone personal and immediate, but I would rather engage with my far-flung classmates and old friends in writing emails since it is in this medium that I can explore my thoughts more thoroughly and express them more clearly.

So I am grateful to Mr. Somers (jsomers.net blog) for this fresh bit of encouragement to the many people who want to write but are reluctant to do so.

Read to Write

I don't often read brand-new novels, but when I saw several glowing reviews of Peter Cameron's "Coral Glynn," and when I found it by accident in the public library where I am teaching my annual writing workshop, I decided to give it a try.

Somehow, I was hooked; maybe the length of the novel (about 200 pp.) suggested that I could read it in an hour or two; maybe the clarity and intelligence of the style appealed to me, along with the fact that the story was set in England in 1950.

The remarkable thing about this is that the author is an American and is one of those insightful and brave male writers who is able to create a credible female heroine in the tradition of Jane Austen and Barbara Pym. Or the Brontes, since the title character, a nurse, is rather like Jane Eyre--alone in the world, nervously reacting to the complexities of a society she knows little of.

So we have a novel of manners, a social novel whose tone is made possible--and this is the main point I want to make--by his years of reading novels of this type and listening to English people talk in print, in movies, and in real life, too. The result is a singular achievement for an American: an authentic-sounding English novel that captures the nuances of class, the awkward nervousness of an employee in an upper-class family sixty years ago.

It is not, of course, a novel in which much happens in the sense of action; yet a great deal happens in the inner lives of the characters, which is why I read fiction to begin with. How did Cameron learn to create such a fictional world? How did he develop such a fine ear for style?

It is said that all writers borrow, consciously or (more often) unconsciously. We absorb the language and idioms of a place and people and an awareness of our debt to all the writers that have preceded us. This point has been made by T. S. Eliot years ago and later by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence. In saying that Cameron has a pitch-perfect ear for language, for example, I am borrowing a term, perhaps trite already from overuse by reviewers, that I have read somewhere.

We all are products of what we hear and experience, and this is especially true of writers. So it should surprise no one when I tell my students that, along with daily writing, there must be wide reading, especially in the genre they aim to write, whether it's non-fiction or fiction.

I am not suggesting they become derivative and avoid originality; rather, that they develop an ear for language that comes after a long immersion in well-crafted prose in which they pay attention to the word choice and sentence style of skillful authors. Then they can move from being writers to being authors themselves.

Robert Louis Stevenson spent three years reading the masters before trying to get published; it was time well spent.

Reading Raymond Chandler

People like me who have a Ph.D. in literature, who are professors of English, are thought in some quarters to have read nearly every well-known author's works. It comes as a surprise to many that every day I continue to discover all the things I don't know and all the books I never read.

So it is with Raymond Chandler, whose style and art were praised by W. H. Auden among many others as the best of the hard-boiled crime novelists, surpassing even Dashiell Hammett, from whom he learned a great deal. Yet until now I never thought of either crime writer as worthy of my time.

A basic academic question, interestingly posed in last week's New Yorker, is whether the wall that divides serious literary figures, the big guns, from the popular writers is still solid. In the case of writers like Chandler, whose style is wonderful, the question is moot.

Chandler was among those "escapist" pulp writers, as they are often called, who had a great respect for his sentences. He re-wrote huge blocks of his stories rather than edit them, thus spending a lot of time that the publishing world might call wasted. I would call this time well spent. He only produced seven novels, but his dialogue and descriptive detail provide models for any aspiring writer.

I am reading the 1939 classic The Big Sleep, where the weaknesses in plot (two stories sort of welded together) are more than compensated for by the ironic narrative of Philip Marlowe, the private eye in L.A. Or I should say by the master stylist who created Marlowe.

Chandler, raised and educated in England, well read in the classics and foreign languages, was part of the sizeable British colony in Hollywood in the thirties and thus something of an outsider to American society. This alone is remarkable, for the tone of the cynical detective who has seen it all is something Chandler had to learn, mostly by reading, also by interviewing cops and steeping himself in the seamy side of L.A.

Consider the opening descriptions in which Marlowe is summoned by a dying oil tycoon, who "dragged his voice up from the bottom of a well." The old man "spoke slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work showgirl uses her last pair of stockings." We then meet the two lascivious daughters of the tycoon, one whose teeth "glittered like knives."

This is the kind of writing that makes me turn the pages despite the sordid details, the sensationalism and the shaky plot structure. Some of the imagery is strained, but each scene is so well done, with lively descriptive details, that I can see why Chandler is so highly regarded; and I can see that the line separating highbrow lit from popular fiction often disappears.

He is a writer who takes his time with each sentence, each paragraph, while moving the story along at a decent pace. I am sorry it has taken me so long to discover him.

What Writers Need

When I sent a recently-completed story, one of my rare pieces of fiction, to two friends to read, I received two totally different kinds of responses.

One friend apparently read it hurriedly, and out of a sense of obligation, because his comments were a bit off the mark, as if he had read a different story from the one I sent him. His suggestions were not helpful. I felt I had wasted his time.

My other friend read it carefully, several times, and met with me to go over specific things he liked and those he thought needed improvement. He made some good suggestions about the way some of my dialogue needed to be updated, to suit a 40-year-old man today. Nearly everything he said and wrote in the margins ended up being helpful in my revision. He was concerned about not offending me by his comments, and I was grateful for everything he said.

I learned, again, that asking people to read anything I have written is, for a writer, like a land-mine. Unless carefully handled, it might explode.

Of course, every reader wants and deserves to hear something positive, some appreciation of (at least) one aspect of the story or essay. And it's important for me as the writer to ask, upfront, for a general comment: what did you like and what did not work for you? In that way, I am more likely to get a balanced reaction. I know how easy it is for those who critique to be negative; after all, they have received a lot of negative criticism from teachers and others.

A writer wants, craves, needs, yearns for acceptance and can easily be hurt when he or she feels rejected or ignored.

If my characters are not believeable, if the setting is vaguely described, I should be told this in a context of support and general appreciation, with the encouragement that, with some revision, the piece will be stronger. This is what I tried to do with my university students, few of whom aimed for publication, and what I do now, as I work with older adults aiming for publication.

So it's up to me, the writer, to set forth the guidelines of what I expect in a critique; otherwise, there might be unpleasant surprises, such as a generalization ("good job") or, as in the case of my first friend, rambling comments irrelevant to me as a writer since they focus more on him than on my work.

So I have to choose readers who know something about the creative process, preferably what it means to write something for a reader. My second critic met this criterion; the first did not.

My wife, Lynn Schiffhorst, a poet and writer of fiction for young readers, has often been disappointed, even hurt, by the lack of response she gets from people she expects will appreciate her work: are these readers too busy to pay attention? Are they so far removed from what a writer does that they can't take in what a writer needs to hear about her own work? Probably.

But in the case of editors and fellow writers at literary conferences who fail to notice a comic tone or an original idea in Lynn's work because it does not fit their pre-conceived idea of what a good story should have (action, for example), the issue is deeper than being busy or being self-absorbed. They may be "professionals," but they are not good listeners, I suspect, in conversations because they lack patience, empathy, and open-mindedness. They may work for publishers, but they are not good readers.

I believe many people who agree to critique a work lack the patience of my ideal (second) reader, who was willing to devote considerable time to appreciate what I had done, and to appreciate me. He paid me the great compliment of attention.

Writers need readers, but often finding good ones isn't as easy as it might seem. It's a challenge to write well; it is also a challenge to be a good reader.

Fear, part II

How could I write about fear not long ago and not include the ultimate fear that most of us have, death?

In this connection, I like the following statement by George Bernard Shaw, a playwright and wit whose work I don't usually care much about. But his statement (source unknown) captures some of the peace I have come to feel about the inevitable coming of the end of my earthly life because of the optimism I strive for about life itself. I aim to live as fully in the present as I can, learning and helping others as much as I am able....

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die,
for the harder I work the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no brief candle to me.
It is sort of a splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment;
and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible
before handing it on to future generations.

Interestingly, this would seem to sum up the feelings, too, of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose life of suffering and triumph in spite of pain comes through so well in the biography by Ian Bell that I've been reading. He was at death's door repeatedly, traveling incessantly in an effort to be comfortable or get aid for his tuberculosis, yet when he wrote, he came alive and was able to surmount his pain, enjoy his family and surroundings and be at peace. The harder he worked, the more he truly lived because he found himself in his writing.

Advice on Writing

Since returning from Edinburgh, I've been reading a fine biography by Ian Bell of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author who grew up there. He heard what he called the "horrible howl" of the cold wind as it whipped the clouds and the gorse on the Pentland Hills, and he was motivated to get out of the place, to travel to warmer climes. I can see why.

But the old city with its narrow, cobble-stone streets remained in his imagination, even when he went to and wrote about London, Paris, Menton, San Francisco, Samoa or one of the other places he went, seeking the sun or freedom. Even in his early years, he carried a notebook and knew that to be a writer, he had to describe things. Like so many would-be authors of the past, he thought of himself as an artist in training.

Before seeking publication, the young RLS spent three years in his early twenties reading. He would study the style of the masters. He would imitate passages he liked, listening to their rhythm, and his own work underwent countless revisions until he was happy with the sound and tone of what he had written.

This traditional method of learning one's craft seems, sadly, out of fashion, yet it seems to me essential: how can anyone write unless he or she has read a lot, absorbing at a deep level the various types of sentence patterns writers use, considering how they describe and structure their work? When I tell my writing students that they can learn about writing not only by writing a lot but by reading, they are often surprised. They are too eager to leap into print; to wait three years is unacceptable to many of the wannabes I meet.

With his frail health, RLS must have known he would not have a long life, yet he could not send out his work until it was ready. He was willing to wait. And he wrote out of his pain and misery, trying to overcome the suffering of tuberculosis.

Reading, travel, and fever-induced dreams shaped his imagination and led him to become a recognized writer known throughout the world for his "strange case" of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as for Treasure Island and other tales.

Anyone who wants to write can learn a lot from the habits of other writers. Their patterns tend to be remarkably similar: reading, jotting down carefully observed description, and the daily discipline of re-writing. There is no easy path; writing is hard work. But the rewards are apparent as soon as one person reads and enjoys at least one short thing we have written.

As a side note, I am grateful to the many readers of this blog. Until yesterday, when I happened to check the stats on the past two years, I had no idea that 70 people in Russia had checked out these pages; that's more than in the U.K. or Canada. I was astounded that I have had readers (or viewers) in China, Kuwait, Latvia, Iraq and other places far from the USA.

I had thought my audience was essentially a handful of people, including two or three friends in Florida, who kindly left comments on the blog. I now feel part of the global village made possible by the Internet and Google.

Grammar,Etc.

Greetings!
Although I have been writing and teaching writing for years, this is my initial foray into blogging. My aim is to help other writers either by sharing ideas that have inspired me or by offering advice on writing.

But you don't have to be a writer to read this new blog--you might just be on a spiritual journey similar to mine.

I have two immediate goals, two immediate projects to share. They seem totally unrelated, but of course they are connected. I will save the second one, the spiritual one, for a separate post.

The first is to announce an exciting new venture--a free online writers' guide. At a time when college textbooks have gotten way too pricey, I have found an outfit that makes quality books available free of charge.

My recently published textbook for writers, GRAMMAR,ETC.: THE HANDBOOK FOR WRITERS, which I have written with Donald Pharr, is now availabale as a free download. This book is the 6th edition of a textbook last published by McGraw-Hill in 1997 and now made available by Freeload Press. So if you want to download this book and have it as a handy reference to punctuation, usage, grammar, and style, read on.

Before doing so, you should know that, although this book is written with college students in mind, anyone who writes can benefit from it, and anyone can download it. The informaton is confidential, and the process takes 6-8 minutes. Here's how:

1. Go to freeloadpress.com
2. Go to Booklist
3. Select GRAMMAR, ETC. by Schiffhorst and Pharr
4. Register (as student or instructor). If you are neither of these, when asked to select the state where you attend school, scroll down to bottom of list of states and select OTHER; this will lead you to life-long learner and other non-student options.
5. Download (it comes in groups of chapters since the book is lengthy).

I would like to hear from anyone who has done this. Tell me not only if the process was OK for you but if you found the downloaded book helpful. You can also purchase a printed copy of the book from Freeload Press for $14.95. There is no advertising in the print version, as is there online: now you see how such a book can be marketed gratis.

If you're struggling with writer's block, maybe I can help. If you have questions about usage or style, send them on to me at schiffhorst@yahoo.com.

My students either call me Dr. S or Dr. J (for Jerry) since my last name is unusual.
Cheers!
Gerald Schiffhorst