Of hubs and blogs and sealing wax

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
Lewis Carroll, "The Walrus and the Carpenter"

"Write what you know," they suggested, and so I'll write about writing. Specifically, I'll write about some pitfalls that are common when writing you use a computer to write.

The first is not using your spell-checker. Why anyone would spend money on a decent computer, and then spend more money on a word-processor and not bother to use the spell-checker? Even worse, most computers come with a decent word processor, so you don't even have to spend any extra money.

The second is over-reliance on your spell-checker. All right, so you spell-check everything you write, and you know every word is spelled correctly. But surely your aware that their are many words that are similar in sound but different in meaning and spelling? You're spell-checker won't catch them, even if it is your wont to use it religiously.

That's where a decent grammar book is handy. I recommend "The Little Book," more formally known as The Elements of Style. This book, written in 1918, remains to this day the single best guide to usage and grammar you can find anywhere. Buy a copy and keep it next to your computer. Better yet, use it.

The third potential hazard is not being comfortable with writing. If you're not comfortable when you write, it will show, sometimes in long, rambling sentences that seem to run on and on forever and never coming to a point, or that seem to make no sense in the end because they never reach a conclusion, thus leading your reader down the garden path and wasting her time, thus guaranteeing she won't come back.

Enough said. Next time, a few more of my pet peeves.

Dylan Thomas referred to "my craft or sullen art." Every writer has a name for it, and every writer approaches it differently. But no matter what we call it or how we approach it, it is work. All art is work, and writing is no exception.

Writing takes time, and it takes practice. Just as you wouldn't jump on a motorcycle for the very first time and expect to be an expert, so you can't expect to pick up a pen or pencil (or sit down at a keyboard) and produce the Great American Novel.

Part of what I'm doing here is scraping away the rust. I haven't been writing as regularly as I would like, and so I've rusted. Words don't come so easily. I'm out of practice and like a ballplayer on the first day of spring practice, I need to warm up before I can start.

And that's what you need to do, too, if you're just starting to write. With rare exceptions, whatever you write won't be any good. But that's only to be expected! While Rome wasn't built in a day, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wasn't written quickly, either. Expect failure. No, let me rephrase that: Allow yourself to fail.

You've probably read at least one book in your life that made you want to be a writer. A book where the words flowed, where the characters seemed so real, the plot so credible. But what you read wasn't the author's first effort. You didn't see the warm-ups, the drafts, the failures that were neccessary steps along the road to the final work.

So practice. Warm up. Scrape away the rust. Write and write and write again. Allow yourself to fail, and learn from your failures. Don't get discouraged. James Michener, when described in an interview as one of the world's greatest writers, corrected the interviewer and said, "I am one of the workd's greatest rewriters." He knew how much work he put into a novel, and how many times he rewrote it until it was ready to be set free.

And so I write, and throw away, and rewrite, each time scraping away a bit more of the rust until the clean metal shines through and is ready to display. So allow yourself to try, allow yourself to fail, and allow yourself to succeed.

How many times have you started to read a book, magazine or newspaper only to toss it aside angrily, saying to yourself, "She doesn't know what she's talking about."? You can't be a successful writer if you don't have knowledge of your subject.

There are exceptions, of course. I once had to write a paper on recurring themes in William Faulkner's novels. As I started my research, I ran across several anecdotes about the time he spent in Hollywood as a movie writer. After the paper was finished, I went back and did more research with culminated in a second paper about Faulkner's Hollywood days.

The point is, I didn't know much about the Holywood aspect of his career when I started, but I did my research and then wrote about it.

Here's another example: tea. How many varieties and flavors of tea are there? How many colors? I bet you could sit down and write all day about tea right off the top of your head, and when you were finished, I could point out the factual errors in your work. How many varieties of tea are there? Only one. Every true tea is brewed from the leaves of only one plant: Camellia Sinensis. Everything else is a tisane, or infusion. Want more information? See my website at http://home.comcast.net/~robynsheppard/index.html

Of course, this doesn't mean you have to commit murder if you want to write a murder mystery. It does, however, mean you need to know about murder and murderous techniques. I once threw away an otherwise promising book when three pages into the story, the killer screwed a silencer onto the barrel of his revolver. Because of the way a silencer works, it won't work on a revolver. Simple laws of physics.

Write what you know, research what you don't know, don't make basic mistakes, and don;t try to fake it.