As I’m sure you’ve heard, Mitt Romney released an iPhone app this week and misspelled “America.” The app allows people to take photos of themselves, choose an “I’m with Mitt” slogan, and share the final product across social media. The misspelled slogan read: “A Better Amercia.”

Some poor web developer probably lost his/her job. I imagine that the developer was too busy fixing some buggy section of code, looking for that missing end paren, while also helping one campaign staff member insert jpgs into word docs, explaining to another that he/she has to set up the virtual private network client before the remote desktop connection will work, and helping a third fix the display problem of his/her html e-mails in Microsoft Outlook Web App. Because Romney is Romney, that person probably got fired.

You should always have multiple people involved in the copyediting process. I guarantee that your web developer is more concerned about copyediting the code so that the thing works right and that your designer is copyediting the negative space created by alignment, kerning, etc. so the thing looks right. If your developer is your designer and copyeditor, you are cheap.

If you work in publishing, then you are lucky to have a dedicated staff working through multiple proofs.  You should always have multiple proofs and a little time between each proof. The process takes time, i.e. cannot be fast.

“Amercia” is a huge mistake. Not only is it hysterical and damaging to anyone’s credibility, but it reveals how Romney conducts business, which is his resume for  president and his blueprint for how he would run the country. The “Amercia” misspelling means Romney is fast and cheap.

This week, I started to think about “Amercia” as a kind of parallel America, the America that would exist if Romney were president. I went through some old photographs of abandoned buildings and approximated the look of the app for some mock versions of Romney’s “Better Amercia.”

Funny enough, it looked a lot like this.

Most importantly, however, is what I took out of the hour-long meeting and what it’s going to mean to me over the next fifty weeks of my life as I prepare to write, revise, and defend a significant body of work. I’ve detailed below what I learned, what I used to think, and what I think now. (Note: These decisions have resulted after the initial terror ceased.)

Sam Ligon Says: You’ve got to read a book a week over the summer. These aren’t books for your thesis, but will help you become a better writer, period.

What I Used to Think: LOL, but summer is for brain freedom.

What I Think Now: This is the difference between being a young writer and being a mature writer: I shouldn’t feel like writing or reading only during the school year. As Sam said yesterday, and many other brilliant people have said before, you can only get to be a better writer by being a more well-read person in general, which means reading all the time. When you read something that someone has done well, and you like the technique or are intrigued by the style, you are compelled—if you’re anything like me—to imitate it. In the process of reading All the Things, one book a week, you may also find those techniques you hate. This still teaches you how you write, and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Sam Ligon Says: Make a schedule for writing that works for you and stick to it.

What I Used to Think: Whateva! I do what I want!

What I Think Now: I need to write all the time, not only when I feel good about it, or when it’s easy, but when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. I realized that feeling super good about writing only happens to me once in a blue moon. It’s sporadic, powerful, but ultimately short-lived. Yes, it feels great when stuff is working and clicking and I can pump out three- or four-thousand words in an hour or two. But those days when it takes three hours to get two sentences are okay to have too. If I can power through the struggle (and I have before, when pressed, though I conveniently forget this more frequently than I’d like to admit), I might find those jewels that I think only happen when I’m on my game. No matter what my writing schedule is, I need to make one I can live and feel productive with. Even when the first hour is spent looking between a blank Word document and Avengers reblogs on Tumblr.

Sam Ligon Says: Your priorities should be: Writing, Money, Relationships OR Writing, Relationships, Money. But writing should always come first.

What I Used to Think: I don’t want to lose my BFFs!

What I Think Now: Those people in my life who know how much I love and want this are still going to be there after it’s all over. Will it be easy? Hopefully not, because things that are too easy are rarely worth the effort. I have a feeling that I will, at some point in my writing career (which Sam pointed out should end only when we die), lose friends over this. The ones that stick around even when I’m at my worst or my most distant are the ones I want to keep. I’m done worrying about if I pay attention to my friends enough, which is honestly a pretty big worry of mine. If they love me, they get it.

Meet my Hetero Life Partner (right). We've slapped each other before to see how it felt. More than once. I think she's a keeper.

Sam Ligon Says: You’ll know if you’re really cut out for this throughout the process. If you aren’t, that’s okay, but you’ll learn.

What I Used to Think: Oh God, what if I crash and burn.

What I Think Now: I’m going to get out of this degree and this experience what I put into it. If I want it as much as I say I do, I will get it. I was going to go on and on about how inspired I am to become a more mature writer, but I think this simplicity of thought speaks for itself. If I want it, I will get it. As Forrest Gump says, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

I want one of these that has only one option: Write Jen Write.

maybe i’m stuck in a ridiculous, wussy progressive, politically correct, liberal arts bubble.  by which, of course, i mean that’s precisely where i live.  with the caveat that i don’t necessarily devote a whole lot of time to consuming non-print media (i.e., radio, tv, the web, etc.).  but even given that little exposure, i was kinda surprised by the extraordinary amount of coverage given recently to the AP stylebook’s decision to amend their stance on “hopefully.”

my surprise existed on several levels, not the least significant of which was the fact that i didn’t know i was using the word “hopefully” wrong.  a lot.  and so was, basically, everyone else.  this has made me a little self-conscious.  for example, i now feel like there’s a pretty good chance i just used “basically” and “self-conscious” incorrectly.  this is somewhat troubling as someone who works professionally and volunteers as a writer/editor.

because i am a huge nerd, i remember with great fondness the galley meetings held for each issue of willow springs.  three successive meetings, each focused on a fresh draft and each lasting a looooong time.  frequently hours.  we adhered to style guidelines from AP, and chicago, and of our own making—but we used the american heritage dictionary specifically because it was “descriptive,” not “prescriptive.”

if you don’t already know the difference between descriptive and prescriptive, knowing the difference probably won’t make you care any more.  if you do know the difference, you probably have an adamant position on the issue and are prepared to defend it to the death (likely to come at the throttling hands of either someone on the other side of the argument, or someone who doesn’t care and just wishes you’d shut the hell up).

in any case, i always enjoyed the lively discussion in galley meetings over language and grammar, but in some ways it always felt like an exercise only we editors in the room cared about.  though i guess it’s easy to say our readers didn’t have to care about it, because we did the heavy lifting for them.  so i suppose i don’t mind that a fervent few take up the mantle as defenders of style & meaning & language.  we all benefit from their effort whether we know it or not.  i, for one, hope one of them can someday explain that use of “mantle” to me.

the ny times‘ city room blog suggested there was such an uproar about “hopefully” because

 Language, of course, is the soul of a culture.

a writer on salon.com said (on a tangential note)

 I die a little every time I see a “gonna” or “gotta”

i guess i fall somewhere between the hardliners & “slacking writers” bemoaned by the minnesota daily editorial board.  i go to absurd lengths to use a proper em dash whenever i’m typing.  i spellcheck my emails.  i have a barely controlled urge to correct others’ misuse of words and phrases.  and yet, i clearly renounce commonly held rules regarding capitalization when i feel like it.  my adherence to style rules is in direct proportion to my investment in the content i’m generating.  basically.

but i’m having a hard time getting on board with the grammar absolutists when they say things like this quote from geoff nunberg (the linguist contributor on NPR’s fresh air):

People get so worked up about the word that they can’t hear what it’s really saying. The fact is that “I hope that” doesn’t mean the same thing that hopefully does.

my response to that is, “well, actually, it kinda does mean the same thing (now).”  if the majority of language users understand a word to mean something, and use it that way, it shouldn’t be so shocking that the AP has formalized the will of the people, right?  because mob-rule is totally the way we should govern our language, just like our country.  (see earlier comment, re: defenders of style & meaning & language).

i don’t actually know where i’m going with this, so how about now i just turn it over to the master(s)?  enjoy this language usage showdown courtesy of dfw & humanities magazine author david skinner.

I love the jagged lines here; what the hell are they supposed to mean?

I’ve enjoyed my quarter of writing fiction, but I’m not going to miss plot. The nice thing about nonfiction is that I don’t have to figure out what happens next because it has always already happened. This is really convenient and a huge load off of my mind. In nonfiction we  get to babble on and on about our ideas instead of just embedding them subtly in our narratives and as someone who enjoys nonstop talking, this is pretty much my favorite genre. But what I am going to miss are the characters.

In nonfiction, we’re stuck with real people. Don’t get me wrong, I love real people; some of my best friends are real. They’re even fun to write about. Real people are great for nonfiction because they’ll do things I could never possibly imagine. I’m a limited person; my imagination is only so big. I can’t imagine going to war or sailing to Alaska on a whim, and even though these are things that are real and that I could do in this real world as well, I will never be able to do them in the way of people who are not me, if that makes sense.

Fictional characters, on the other hand, can do exactly what I want them to, which is only what I can imagine. But it’s loads of fun. I played with action figures and dolls as a kid, and I can tell you that this is pretty much the same thing. It’s better than video games, as in video games characters can stand around looking cool just fine but seem unable to go five seconds without the developers forcing them to say something stupid, or forcing me to choose something stupid for me to say. I would like to make my grumbly violent muscle men talk about the weather or feeling lonely since their cat died.

I love this part of fiction. I know that part of my resentment of plot is that my undergrad program, like many others of its kind, thoroughly beat notions of plot’s importance from my young head. I still feel, though, that I really would like to just watch them talk for hours about pointless things, rather than do anything productive or have anything interesting happen to them. I know that’s boring, and I also know that the point of plot is to get deeper into those characters, to let them reveal more and more about themselves. I know that. But I still don’t want anything interesting to happen to them.

Six-toed kitty is Hemingway's muse.

Look, I’m about to let you in on a little secret. Great writing isn’t achieved through practice or time or Master’s degrees or the study of craft or the possession of raw talent. Nope. Great writing is about having a great writing routine – that one weird trick that’s going to put you in the perfect mindset to write the perfect sentence. All you have to do is have one special thing that gets you to that space, that great writing space. Every famous writer has their trick. Unfortunately, one person’s trick might not work for anyone else. But then again, it might. So, here are a few you can try. Below is a list of writing habits of nine successful authors who also happen to be long dead and therefore, conveniently, unable to comment on the veracity of these claims.

William Faulkner – Shoe Hands

Faulkner preferred to type with his toes instead of his fingers. He kept his shoes on his hands while he worked.

George Orwell – Swimming the English Channel

Prior to writing, Orwell would swim across the English Channel, have a croissant and a coffee on the French side, then swim back. He did this almost every day of his adult life. Except during the war years. Because it was too dangerous then.

Ernest Hemingway – Talking to Cats

It is widely known that Hemingway, following years of work in his basement genetics lab, invented a new kind of cat, one with six toes. This is more toes than a regular cat has, in case you are unaware. Before he sat down to write, Hemingway would go over his writing goals for the day with these cats. He refused to share such things with other, normal toed cats, which he considered to be poor listeners.

Franz Kafka – Too Much Cake

Kafka really loved pineapple upside down cake. And so anytime he finished a story, he allowed himself to eat a whole pineapple upside down cake all by himself without sharing any with anyone else, not even a bite.

The Bronte Sisters – A Hearty Workout

Every morning, all the Brontes (how many of them were there? Three? Six? Nine? Who even knows?) would get together for four hours of vigorous step aerobics.

Mary Shelley – Pet Snake

Shelley kept a domesticated 23-foot-long boa constrictor in her writing studio. She would wrap the snake around her shoulders while she wrote. When the snake grew restless and began to squeeze, she allowed herself to stop writing for the day.

Ezra Pound – Deliberate Mouth Breathing

Normally, Pound preferred to breathe through his nose. But when writing, he would breathe exclusively through his mouth.

Virginia Woolf – Bikram Yoga

Although, back in Woolf’s day, it was just called “stretching in a really hot room.”

Rudyard Kipling – Perfecting the Look

Kipling did not actually do any writing, but instead delegated the task to a team of ghostwriters. Kipling himself spent his days sitting on his front porch smoking clove cigarettes because he felt they made him look artsy.

The Aurignacians disappeared 40,000 years ago. The whole of Europe has frozen over twice since they vanished. Their works predate the Lascaux cave-paintings by over 20,000 years.

I’m always amazed by how limited our shared sense of human history really is. Our species has existed in its modern form for around 200,000 years; our earliest historical records only date back 10,000. People think about this sort of thing and turn to wild fancies about lost cities under the sea, or contacts between ancient civilizations, but I tend to think that sort of thing rather silly. It’s only natural, I suppose — the human mind can barely envision things that happened a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand, so to talk in terms of tens of millennia seems impossible. We turn to our imaginations to fill the gaps.

Consider the response: here in America, for example, large sections of the population still maintain that man walked alongside dinosaurs — these are people who loudly proclaim that the earth is only six-thousand years old, while using their smartphones to post about it on Facebook. Me, I’ve wandered among Sumerian ruins that were at least that old, stood in the burial-spaces of kings and walked through the crumbled foundations of their palace gardens. I’ve stood face-to-face with the replicated bones of the hominin, “Lucy,” — I remember marveling at how tiny she was (barely as tall as my hip), and how relatively young she was when she died (maybe 20). Not surprisingly, I tend to take the long view.

People I meet are often incredulous that I label myself a skeptic — they typically confuse the term skeptic with cynic, and equate my default position of educated doubt with a craven refusal to believe in anything. Such people tend to ask me what happened to my sense of wonder, tend to ask me why can’t I just accept the world I see on faith. To which I respond: faith gets you a lot of ideas, most of them wildly wrong. All the same, though, I’m human. I still react to the mysteries of the unknowable. I still wrestle the nature of our existence, with the human fear of death. That sort of thing’s only natural. I just don’t feel compelled to dampen those feelings with fictions; I don’t see the need to accept wild fabulisms to explain it all. I don’t see the need for miracles, because oftentimes, the evidence of what actually happened is wondrous enough.

So it is, with a pair of bone-flutes.

What blows my mind about the flutes is this: not that they survived intact, not that they speak of a civilization four times older than our earliest known records, not that they speak to a human history far longer and richer than we’re capable of imagining. Rather, it’s that these people — an indigenous culture from a time we only associate with sloped brows, war-clubs, and crude grunting — had art. That sounds so simple, doesn’t it? They had art. They had art, and music, and spirituality. They were no different from us, really, either genetically or otherwise. They were born, they died, they had weddings and wars and funerals and all the things in between that we associate with the ordinary human life. And just like us, they felt the need at times to arrest the the rhythms of the ordinary world, to take pause and reveal that world — through music, through painting, through song — as something sublime.

As an artist, I feel a profound sense of connection with that.

In a world building story, often times our tension comes from discovering place. Characters seek desperately to make sense of an inconsistent, senseless environment. In a way this resembles the real world, with the exception that sometimes ghosts or vampires, or the apocalypse is injected into the pieces for those like myself with short attention spans. In your own work, world building allows a greater opportunity to play god. It might appeal most to those like myself who have control issues, and grow increasingly sacrilegious the more they drink. You get to determine the guiding perimeters of your world. Maybe the future has given way to a sub group of humanoids that live beneath the earth’s surface. Maybe everyone on the planet awakes from a dream aware that the earth is going to end the following night.

Most of my stories concern themselves and are driven by skewed versions of place. In this sense I’m following in a tradition (if poorly) of hundreds of authors who have spent their existences uncovering the truths of their own made-up places. I’ve included my favorite literary world builders below.

1. Kurt Vonnegut: Cat’s Cradle. I love this book for the scope of its world creation. Vonnegut creates his own made up religion and bible whose first line reads: “All of the things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” He develops his own fictional country, San Lorenzo, an alternate  history of the man responsible for the creation of the atom bomb, as well as the perfect doomsday substance. Vonnegut also develops governing laws and a caste system for the island of San Lorenzo, a place where Bokononist is both practiced and outlawed under the threat of death. Essentially most Vonnegut novels exists in their own linked universe where Tralfamadorians, and Kilgore Trout appear frequently.

2. Kevin Brockmeier: A Brief History of the Dead. Employs a braided structure. In one strand we are provided the city of the dead: A place where those who have passed exist as long as there is a living person who remembers them. In the other, we get the world, post apocalypse, where a virus has killed everyone except a lone woman surviving in the antarctic. The book is fascinating because of the way these two narrative speak to one another and eventually collide.

3. Haruki Murakami: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Also a braided structure. The world in “the end of the world” sections is actually a complex internal system that exists in the mind of our protagonist. As he draws nearer to being stuck forever in an anachronistic, dreamlike city housed within vast walls, a part of him within that place seeks desperately to save his shadow. As with A Brief History of the Dead, the way a futuristic strand concerned with corporate espionage and this internal kingdom merge serves as our key point of tension.

4. Italo Calvino: Cosmocomics, Invisible Cities. One details ageless men and women witnessing the formation of the universe and through observation of fundamental principals we get insight into universal human conflict. The other employs a frame where Marco Polo describes cities he encountered in his travels to Kubla Khan. In time these places seems to meld into one another. There are contradictory, flawed places that mirror one another. Calvino’s worlds are intriguing because even when he is detailing systems and ideas that are abstract or complex he speaks to very simple desires.

5. George Saunders: Civilwarland in Bad Decline. A series of simulation type theme parks and businesses that seem to reflect the changing landscape of our country.

6. Tom Robbins: Still Life with Woodpecker. Slightly skewed from our own reality. The appeal of Robbins world are his tragic, over the top characters, such as a displaced former princess under the watch of the CIA. Also, it has a list of the 12 most famous redheads which reads:

1. Lucille Ball, comedienne
2. Gen. George Custer, military maverick
3. Lizzie Borden, hatchetwoman
4. Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary
5. Red Skelton, comic
6. George Bernard Shaw, playwright
7. Judas Iscariot, informer
8. Mark Twain, humorist
9. Woody Allen, humorist
10. Margaret Sanger, feminist
11. Edna St. Vincent Millay, libertine poet
12. Bernard Mickey Wrangler, bomber

7. Kelly Link: Magic for Beginners. It has magic handbags, a man and his ghost wife getting a divorce and a flamboyant, constantly shifting pair of pajamas. Read it.

8. Aimee Bender: Girl in the Flammable Skirt. We know from the first line of most Bender stories that we are entering a different world. “My lover is experiencing reverse evolution.”

9. Stuart Dybek: Any collection. Dybek’s Chicago feels dreamlike, even otherworldly at times. Because of his lyrical prose and linked characters the city feels like its own world.

10. Franz Kafka: Collected Short Stories. The Trial. The Castle. Etc. His worlds would best be described as Kafkaesque. In them, you are trying to get to a place just out of reach. Any goal, or truth or desire you have will evade you ad nauseum just at the moment you try to put it words.

These are just a couple examples. I think the line between world building and a fully realized sense of place is blurry. Many narratives exists in very real corners of the world like Winesburg, Ohio but because of the scope of the fictionalized place, it feels much larger than that. What are some places you like to escape to in a book? Who are your favorite authors who play god with setting?

Marina Keegan, age 22, made these plans after writing a brief and upbeat address to her fellow classmates on Facebook.   In the post, she alluded to the “opposite of the word loneliness” as a way of describing her sense of community and blessing.   She also offered this poignant clause:  ”We have so much time…”

Over the Memorial Day weekend, this vivacious young woman died when her boyfriend’s Lexus rolled over on a highway in Dennis, Mass.   Michael Gocksch remains in critical condition, but Marina Keegan lost consciousness at the scene and never recovered…   And so, the promising author won’t be learning the craft at the prestigious publication after all.  The New Yorker will have to look elsewhere, and that’s sad on multiple levels.

First, as an undergraduate, Keegan had the nerve to contradict Mark Helprin, who rose at a collegiate event to discourage various would-be writers by telling them that genuine jobs in the field are few and far between.   That’s the first level of melancholy associated with this rising star’s fade into oblivion:  the fact that she won’t grow up and grow into her antagonistic polemic against the intellectual-property-rights twit of the year.   And the second level of profound grief for the young woman’s absence is like unto the first…

The second involves what she wrote about time, or about her generation having “so much time.”   Nearly everyone reading these and other words on this tragic episode might find them ironic, and cruelly so.   But what if Keegan’s notion of time carries more weight and more glory that we dare imagine?!!   That is, we do have time!

We have time in the sense that we may do more than pursue jobs and bonafides with it.   That mode of existence is measured with ticks and tocks, and with decay and dust, and in that sense, we don’t have it at all.   It has us.  The sovereign Chronos bears down hard on each moment and chastens us if we fail to regret or to rehearse what’s to be done for our future advancement.  Another realm, however, may give us pause:  Kairos.

Kairos is the pregnant moment of now, the eternal oomph that powers the best other-centered decisions of our lives, those instantaneous bursts of intuition that plant us in the ground of Being…  Are there roots of this kind of time exposed to Nothingness?   To be sure.  They make us doubt the value of reading and writing and passing on the dynamic art of those disciplines on a daily basis.  What’s the point of even addressing an envelope if every creative impulse might be torn like twisted metal?

I don’t know.  And I’m just guessing, just spit-balling here (not preaching in the slightest), but my hunch is that gifted people like Marina Keegan have eons and oceans of time.   And what’s more is–no one owns it like intellectual property!!!

Peace!

Don't you want to walk down this alley?

As writers, I think it’s important to always try and use words and language in new and surprising ways. I can’t say exactly how to go about this, but you always know when you hear a killer phrase that sounds exactly right, and also sounds like something you’ve never heard before. (Some examples for me are Kafka’s assertion that “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us” or Li-Young Lee’s description of “the barb / called world, that / tooth-ache, the actual” though there are of course endless others.)

That being said, it seems like everyone’s a writer these days, so maybe using     words in new ways isn’t enough. Maybe we need to re-purpose not just language but the things we associate with language. There are people out there making amazing pictures out of library date-stamps and incredibly intricate and beautiful paper sculptures that are left anonymously for others to discover. Other cool people are “poetry bombing”  local thrift stores and my only question is: why didn’t I think of that?

It’s probably because I’m not very good at craft-y things, and I’m especially hopeless at visual arts (for more on skills I don’t have, see here), but I’m all about this guerrilla art thing. I don’t know that it can quite be called a movement yet, since these artists aren’t, as far as I know, organized in any way, and most prefer to work alone, but I like the idea of a guerrilla art movement a whole lot. I propose we start one. Who’s with me? We can call it Artsault. (Too obvious? We’ll work on it.)  I mean, why not catch people off guard with beautiful and surprising things? Why not chalk the sidewalks or grafitti walls with lines of e.e. cummings and Bukowski? (Think what a kick they’d get out of it.) Hell, at least scrawl a line on the bathroom wall next time you’re drunk at the bar. Think what a kick you’d get out of seeing that later.

We all need more things like that in the world. I may not be as capable as Banksy when it comes to shoving art into the public’s face (even if he can be a cheeky bastard), but I’m sure there are still ways I can contribute to the movement. Next time you buy a box of Cheerios that has a poem taped to the back, you’ll know who to thank.

The Little One is Me: Taken this Morning

If I hadn’t buzzed the unknown person in, the washing machine would not be running now and I’d be using the last of my computer’s battery power. I would spend evenings in the dim flickering of candle light. How long would it have taken for the electricity to be turned back on? It’s difficult to say in a country in which I’ve waited three months for my internet connection to be completed (and still wait).

A sensible person in my position might not have buzzed the unknown person in. Dripping wet, pushing the shower curtain open, she might have thought, It’s probably someone who wants to put coupons in our mailboxes. But I thought, I have a seemingly endless flight of stairs between a visitor’s entrance into the building and my front door.

I was zipping my jeans as the bell to my front door rang. I had buttoned over half of the buttons on my shirt when I reached out to open the door. My hair was surely going every which way, like an abandoned bird nest. A tall man in black with long, blonde, slicked-back hair stood on my doormat.

I need 316 euros or I’ll turn off your electricity, he told me in German.

I had believed the energy company had our account number and automatically withdrew what we owe the way everyone else seems to do. I asked in German why this wasn’t the case. He said that wasn’t his concern and repeated that he would turn off my electricity if I didn’t give him the money.

Luckily I had enough cash on hand. He left me with electricity and a look—one part sorry, two parts confounded.

I had received a letter last week from the electric company. I don’t know what it said. I was too lazy to translate it. Instead I spent hours translating the first couple of pages of Mein Groβvater im Krieg (My Grandfather in the War, by Moritz Pfeiffer).

It’s difficult to stop thinking about World War II when you’re living on the battle grounds.

Recently I was talking to a German woman who is in financial negotiations with a Jewish man. She said, I don’t know if I can trust him. After all, he is a Jew.

I said, I’m not sure what you mean.

It’s a joke, she said.

I realized I couldn’t take the joke, she changed the subject, and we both pretended to move on.