Writing Advice—Critical Hardness

tiredcat

There’s a part of writing that’s generously difficult—giving and taking criticism.

It can be very difficult to give criticism. You have to employ tact. Unless you’re slightly sociopathic, you want to employ tact. You have to employ specifics, and that without going over the top with your criticism. You don’t want to break the writer. When you’re giving writing advice, you want to enhance the writer’s will to achieve, not enhance their introversion. A writer, given the wrong kind of criticism, will curl up inside themselves and stop interacting with the outside world. This might be a stereotype, but all the writers I know agree. They all say they’ve felt the desire to be a hermit at one time or another.

A scathing piece of criticism rarely puts someone in the mood to follow any advice given with it. Usually this method works in the opposite direction. If a writer hears some rotten insult, they don’t agree with it, they defend themselves. They fight back. If they’re too intimidated by the criticism, or the critic, they might become withdrawn.

So “HOW?” is the great question. How do we give writing advice without being a Darth Vader about it? Instead of threatening people with telekinetic strangle-holds, we can learn some things to say that prevent the bad feelings and promote the correction. Of course the best way to correct someone is by looking directly at their writing. Then you can see a specific instance, such as a typo or a grammar flaw, not all of them, just one instance, and point it out.

There are times when that’s not possible. At times the criticism has to be general because you can’t immediately see the work. In those cases, it’s best to let the writer hunt down the specifics for themselves. Encourage them to find typos by reading the work out loud to themselves (or, if they’re brave enough, to someone else). Encourage the writer to look at specific parts of grammar (noun, verb, adverb, adjective, conjunction, preposition) and make sure those words are doing their job properly. If not, then the writer needs to place the words in the right spot so all the words work together. Encourage the writer to make sure there’s variety in their writing. Too much of anything can make the writing piece dull. You can’t have action all the time or people get desensitized by it—and desensitized to it. Dialog has to be interrupted at times. Adjectives can’t come in all-consuming waves. Variety has been compared with a spice. That’s a cooking metaphor. Chances are, you wouldn’t cook something to eat with only one ingredient. A meal, a dish, an entree, is certain to be better with some variety.

On the flip side, a writer needs to be able to receive criticism. Is that tougher than giving? Not if you’re me. I give myself criticism. I think it’s a valuable tool though. If I didn’t criticize my own work, I wouldn’t get better. Anyone who’s done it long enough can go read some of their earlier work. Only the oblivious wouldn’t see where the writing is weak, and where it has improved, and where the new stuff could improve. A benefit from that too, is the ability to receive criticism from others. You start to see where a piece of writing can be improved, but you also see how any scrutiny is worth hearing, worth having, and worth investigating.

I once got some criticism from an editor. He pointed out how many times I used certain words, how often I used the main character’s name, how often I used dialog interrupts. One time he pointed out where I managed to construct a passive sentence. I replied, “The passive sentence was written by me.” He verbally patted me on the head and pronounced me fit for public places.

“Good boy. Go play outside.”

Don’t get me wrong. Accolades are nice. Kudos feel better than chides, corrections, and slashes on our work. Adulations, however, don’t promote progress. The problems have to be recognized before they can be fixed, and you can’t fix a problem unless you can recognize it. If you’re too married to your own work, it can be difficult to see the mistakes. When that happens, an objective point of view is absolutely necessary. But that leads us into another topic with another question: How should a writer pick a proof-reader or a beta reader? I’ll detail some thoughts on that some other time. For now, remember criticism is difficult. It’s also totally, one hundred percent necessary.

Questions for Friends

babymanface

Questions to get to know your friends:

What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite movie? What’s your favorite food? What do you plan on doing after you graduate from high school? What did you do right after graduation? How many children do you want to have when you get married and be a suburban clone? How many miles do you drive to work and back home each day? Do you ever ride a bicycle? Do you ever take mass transit?

Questions to scare your friends:

When was the first time you saw porn? What did you do when you saw it? How many people in your family have died? Were you involved? Have you ever witnessed a death? How do you feel about it? How do you feel about your mother? What’s your deepest, darkest secret? If you had to psychoanalyze yourself, what would you say your greatest mental obstacle is? Have you ever prayed? Do you know what repentance is? Have you ever done that? Can you do math? Want to buy my book?

Daylight Saving Time Fools Pranks

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1. Find someone who speaks a foreign language: French, Urdu, Japanese, whatever. Tell your pet DST Fool that you suspect shifting clocks has put you in a different time zone. Have the foreign language speaker call them on the phone several times during the day. Sit back and watch your Fool get super confused.

2. With the kind of salt and pepper shakers with the screw-on caps, take the salt shaker and remove the cap. Get a napkin. Get some clear tape. Place the napkin across the open top of the salt shaker. Place a piece of clear tape over the holes in the cap of the shaker. Fill the cap of the shaker with pepper. Carefully tip the cap back on the shaker over the napkin and screw it back on. Some parts of the napkin should poke out from beneath. Tear it off until it’s no longer visible. With the shaker upright, remove the clear tape. When the DST Fool tries to get salt, they’ll get pepper.

3. Change all the clocks in your house or place of business to different times. Ten minutes fast. Ten minutes slow. Eighteen minutes ahead of the time in Hong Kong. Forty two minutes ahead of the time in Cork. DST Fools have an obsessive-compulsive need to adjust clocks. It will drive them crazy trying to synchronize all the clocks near them.

4. Get some raisins. Get a magazine and roll it up. Palm a raisin. Go up to a DST Fool and slap the magazine down on a table or counter or desk near them and pretend you’ve swatted a fly. Pick up the “fly” (the raisin from your hand) and eat it.

5. Get some POP-ITS brand fireworks. Any mild fireworks that make noise when crushed will work, but POP-ITS are best. Place them where the toilet seat comes down. Gently lower the seat on top of the POP-ITS. When your victim sits down they’ll hear a Pop! You’ll laugh. They’ll laugh. It’s all in good fun.

6. If they drink coffee, switch their caffeinated grounds with decaf, or their decaf with caffeinated grounds. They’ll love you for this one, either way.

7. Get your hands on one of those one-million-lumen searchlights. Set it up outside your DST Fool’s bedroom window and aim it in. Find out what time they’ve set their alarm to wake them in the morning. Turn on the searchlight one hour before their wake-up time. Brilliant!

Pets on Skateboards

catskaters

 

Threw my one-legged dog in the pannier on the back of my bike. We were going out for one of our rides. He loves to go along with me. I know his emotions because they show on his face—and in his tail. I don’t read his mind. I’m not a dog-mind reader. I just read his body language.

In any normal situation, his tail goes pretty fast when he’s excited. When we ride, his tail goes the speed of light, which is just about the fastest speed there is. His tail moves back and forth so fast you can’t see it. His ears perk up too. They stand up like little quivering antennae, trying to catch every possible sound in the vicinity.

I wonder if he can hear anything at all with the wind passing by so fast. Does he hear some of what’s going on? Oh, for sure. One time he was about to jump out and chase another dog he heard barking off in someone’s yard. I stopped him with a warning. “Hey! You can’t chase it with only one leg! Sit back down.”

He sat down.

We rode on.

One other time, we stopped at my friend’s house. He was out in the driveway teaching his rabbits to ride skateboards. He used to have cats, but he trade them for rabbits. The rabbits were all getting really good at it. I noticed one of them was goofy-foot. It was the best of them all. Don’t make the mistake of thinking anyone is lesser-than because they shoot left-handed, or left-footed. In fact, a lot of times, in sports, the left-handers have the advantage.

While we were there watching the rabbits, my friend’s neighbor came over and told him he was crazy. He said something ridiculous like, “Silly neighbor. Skateboard tricks are for kids, not rabbits.”

In sync, my friend and I both said, “Pffft!” and waved him off, so he left.

There are only two kinds of people in this world. One kind are the kind who spout chestnuts all day. The other is the kind who come up with clever, original things to say like, “Pffft!”

And before this story degenerates into clever anecdotes about life and how to be, I’ll relate the last time I ever saw my one-legged dog.

He was in my backyard whining. He didn’t often whine. He was toughened by life. It didn’t really matter what happened to him after he had lost his legs. Everything was just like, “Whatever.” You know? He didn’t whine about anything else after that. Except that one time. He was sitting in the yard, next to his house with his name on the door: Squatty. His bowl was on the ground, full of food, and bearing the name of my previous dog: Mustain. I never bothered to remove that name. I figured Squatty couldn’t read it anyway. How would he know?

His tail wasn’t wagging that time. His ears were perked up, but it wasn’t other animals he was trying to hear. He wasn’t listening to me, even though I tried to reassure him, “Calm down Squatty. I’m here.” It was something bigger, more ominous. It was something coming our way. Not just his. Ours. Only I didn’t know it yet.

It was a death toll from below. It was an earth-shattering earthquake. You see, dogs have senses different from ours. They know when earthquakes are coming long before we do. So pay attention to your pets. If they start worrying about something, you better start worrying too. The earth opened up and took Squatty that day. I should have taken him for another ride. He would have been safe in the pannier probably. But I wasn’t fast enough. And Squatty wasn’t fast at all. He just whimpered and fell in the crack that opened up, took him, and closed again. My solace is that he’s no longer suffering the torment of being a dog with no run. He can run after other dogs in dog heaven. Thank God.

As for me, I couldn’t handle the pain of watching him disappear like that, so I curled up in my pannier the rest of the day and waited for aftershocks.

Dichotomies are Enemies?

downorout

To present it simply, dichotomizing is the practice of trying to divide the human race into two categories. If you try to separate the human race into two distinct groups, you’re dichotomizing.

You’ve heard it before. Someone says, “There are two kinds of people in this world: ______________and_____________.” Fill in the blanks with the current trends. Does the person saying this think a human couldn’t possibly be something in between, or, even harder to believe, further along the abstract spectrum?

Some examples of dichotomies are these: Aborigine/Immigrant, Idiot/Maniac, City/Country, Common/Extraordinary, Sane/Psycho, Patriot/Traitor, Moron/Genius.

I’m sure you can look at these examples and see that there are not only degrees between the two, but also separate possibilities that break the so-called mold. Not everyone fits in an oversimplified stereotype. In fact, some people manage to live their whole lives outside of these categories.

Dichotomies tend to be oversimplified and illogical. They’re not always about people. They don’t generally benefit an argument. Avoid using them in a debate because they’re highly transparent.

Politics and political debates are saturated with dichotomies. For instance, if you tell someone you’re not a Democrat, what do they think you are? A Republican! As if there couldn’t be any other way. How do politicians and the media rate a state? It’s either a blue state or a red state. Why can’t there be green states and purple states? Because the people who rate them are so limited in their views. Limited thinking is the antecedent to limited vision.

Dichotomies are enemies to lucid, critical, logical, and especially creative thought. Isn’t that what we need more of these days? Creative thought? Our leaps in technology didn’t come from people being stuck in a funk about “impossibilities”. The leaps came from people believing there was another way. Then they sought and discovered the other way. Don’t we need more flexible thinking in our police departments and our judicial systems? If everyone judges by the fake limits of a stereotype, or a false dichotomy, then we’ll be doomed to repeat the misjudgments of the past. Couldn’t we use more creative thinking in our politics? We can quote the politicians of the past because they had creative notions on life. Today? Not so much.

Dichotomies are difficult to avoid, because they’re everywhere. Sometimes we use them without knowing. It’s not impossible to remove all of them from your everyday words. If you’re careful and selective you can eliminate most of them from your presentations and conversations. Point out the illogical dual divisions for others, so that they’ll see them too. Eventually we may get the whole world to make sense. Sound ideal? So, you’re either an idealist, or you’re not. And that last bit, well, that’s between me and my psychotherapist.