Category Archives: On Writing

Aldridge Street Print & Media

The Greater Victoria Public Library (GVPL) has programs and talks galore! Tonight, Darin Steinkey, Director & Principal of Aldridge Street Print & Media, gave a talk: ‘Steps to Publishing for the Independent Author’. Here’s the blurb from the library’s website:

Aldridge Street Presentation Blurb

Thirteen attendees. The lucky number. Evenly split between men and women (well, 7:6 ratio). A grey haired crowd, average age maybe in the sixties? It seems that writers need time to be able to write. A lot of people with experience publishing. One fellow was a journalist. Another lady had published a textbook for a course she taught. Quite a few people had published multiple books. Some had self-published; others had gone through publishing houses. There were even some who had done both. Lots of talent in Victoria, BC!

After working at Trafford Publishing, Steinkey saw a niche that needed to be filled: editing for independent authors. With his background in literature and teaching, he became an editor and started up Aldridge Street Print & Media in 2008 to fill the niche. Aldridge Street Print & Media actually offers more: they’re a one stop shop for the independent author, offering book design, layout, and printing services as well. What they don’t do, however, is marketing. The genres Steinkey specializes in are memoir and history. He helped a WWII code breaker, for example, publish her memoir. Cool!

Layout, cover design, writing (Steinkey suggested Stephen King’s On Writing and Strunk & White’s Elements of Style), and editing were covered in tonight’s one hour presentation. The focus was on editing. Self-published authors do a good job of getting their books out there, but they do a poor job of editing. Spelling mistakes or glitches in the layout take away from the writer’s credibility: that was the main message of tonight’s talk.

There are three different types of editors. The developmental editor makes sure the story works. The copy editor checks spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The proofreader checks layout and any mistakes introduced in the other layers of editing. Independent authors need all three. And preferably, they are different people: the more eyes, the better.

The takeaway for me tonight was the fee structure for an editor. An editor charges from $50-$75 an hour. They can edit seven to ten pages in an hour. Pages are 250 words. So, let’s take the preface to Paying Melpomene’s Price. It’s eight Microsoft Word pages. Eight Microsoft Word pages equals 4645 words. 4645 divided by 250 equals 18.58 pages (250 word pages). Since Paying Melpomene’s Price is an academic type work, it doesn’t read as fast as, say, most novels. So maybe an editor will go through seven pages per hour. At seven pages an hour, it would take 2.65 hours. Let’s say an editor charges midway between the $50 to $75 rate. At $62.50 dollars an hour times 2.65 hours, the cost comes to $165.63. But that’s just one editor. Three are required (developmental, copy, and proofreader). So the total cost to edit my eight Microsoft Word pages would come to $496.88. Let’s say each of my chapters is about the same length and that there’s nine more chapters. The cost of getting the whole thing edited would then clock in around $5000.

Good to know. Time to start saving. Thanks to Aldridge Street Print & Media for the talk and the gentleman in front of me for asking about editors’ fee structures.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong, and I need a second job while I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work.

The First Draft, The Second Draft…

Newsflash: the preface is rewritten. Chapter 1 is halfway rewritten. Most of the preface was salvageable. It had to be rearranged and paragraphs added to reflect what was actually in the chapters. But most of it survived. Chapter 1, however, is a different story. It’s being completely rewritten. Not much of the first draft is going to make it into the second draft. The topic is the same: introducing the basic building block of the risk theatre. But that’s about it.

Normally, this would be a bummer. But good thing I recently read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. It’s a book on writing fiction. But it applies to all sorts of writing. The basic toolkit is the same. The process is also similar. Non-fiction is still creative: you’re presenting the facts in a ‘story’ to persuade the reader. King’s advice came to mind: the first draft is for the writer. The second draft is for the reader. No writer gets it right the first time. It is through the hard work of writing, rewriting, editing, coming up with the second draft, and the third draft that gets things done.

Now, what did King mean when he said that the first draft is for the writer and the second draft for the reader? This is what I think he means. The first draft isn’t really directed towards any sort of audience. It’s a proof of concept. It’s the writer talking with himself. Rambling. Or not even that. It’s the writer standing helpless as his words revolt against his ideas. There’s something of a Frankenstein in writing: once you’ve written it, it has a mind of it’s own. The idea can be beautiful. But the words can be ugly. The concept could seem perfect. But the words can prove the concept wrong. In the first draft, the writer is both active and passive. He is active in the sense that he is the one writing. But passive in the sense as he is helpless to where the story takes him.

If proof of concept takes place after the first draft is done, then the writer can proceed to the second draft. Proof of concept means that the words, verbs, and adjectives sort of square with the original idea. There is a congruence between idea and expression. It may not be perfect (and oftentimes is the opposite of perfect), but it works. If proof of concept has not happened, then, well, sorry to say, there is no need to proceed to the second draft. Time to start again. This has happened to me before. It is quite sad.

In the second draft, the writer is writing for an audience. He writes with the benefit of hindsight: he knows where the story is going to go. He can tailor the second draft so that it makes sense to readers. In all likelihood, the first draft just makes sense to the writer. For King, his ideal reader is his wife Tabitha. That’s who he writes the second draft for. My ideal reader is an old friend from grad school. The book is like a conversation or a chess match between us. A bit of agreement and some competition and disagreement as well. But no matter who the second draft is written for, it’s not written by the author for the author. That’s what first drafts are for.

In writing the second draft, the biggest lesson is that writing is just as much a process of destruction as it is of creation. You have to have the courage to throw out everything that doesn’t fit, no matter how much labour you’ve put into it. It’s like spring cleaning. It’s as difficult as throwing out old family heirlooms. But it must be done. Others do it. Of the really focussed and direct books I’ve read, I shudder to think how much writing, rewriting, and pruning must have taken place to achieve crystal clarity. Judging from my own experience, I would say a lot. Or, more than the writer cared to do. That’s probably where good editors come in… To tell the writer to put more fire into his work or put more of his work into the fire…

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work by putting some of my hard work into the fire.

WordPress: Absolute Beginner’s Guide – Hussey

How easy is it to set up a WordPress blog? With the right guidebook, it’s as easy as pie. My computer skills are limited: familiar with Microsoft Office, can back things up myself, not too familiar with Facebook and LinkedIn, no coding experience. But, with the right guidebook, I was able to set up Doing Melpomene’s Work. The guidebook in question was: WordPress: Absolute Beginner’s Guide by Tris Hussey. Published by Que in 2014. 410 pages. Lots of full colour screenshots. I read it in a week. After reading it, I was able to create the blog in an evening. You can do it too. BTW, as I write this in September 2015, the book is still very much up to date.

Hussey, WordPress: Absolute Beginner’s Guide

WordPress: Absolute Beginner’s Guide Back Blurb

More than 70 million websites and blogs run on WordPress: it’s the world’s #1 web development tool. Now, you can make the most of WordPress without becoming a technical expert. WordPress Absolute Beginner’s Guide is the fastest way to get comfortable and productive with WordPress and its most powerful tools. Whether you’re new to WordPress or not, this practical, approachable book will show you how to do exactly what you want, one incredibly clear and easy step at a time – all explained with full-color illustrations.

Leading WordPress instructor Tris Hussey provides step-by-step instructions for every task requiring more than one step. Screenshots and illustrations guide you through complex processes, so you’ll never get lost or confused. You’ll find friendly, patient, crystal-clear coverage that always respects your intelligence, and never patronizes you. Hussey covers all this, and much more:

Understanding the mechanics of a WordPress website

Installing WordPress yourself, along with the themes and plug-ins you want

Using WordPress.com if you don’t want to run WordPress on your own equipment

Setting up your site right the first time, to avoid problems later

Tweaking themes to make your site look perfect

Integrating images and media

Making your site mobile-ready

Using basic search engine optimization techniques to get your site discovered

Troubleshooting, maintaining, and performance-tuning your site

WordPress: Absolute Beginner’s Guide Author Bio

Tris Hussey was Canada’s first professional blogger, and has since become a freelance writer, bestselling author, technologist, and lecturer. His bestselling books on social media and technology include Create Your Own Blog, Using WordPress, and Sams Teach Yourself Fourquare in 10 Minutes. Hussey has taught social media, WordPress, and podcasting at University of British Columbia and produced the WordPress Essentials video collection.

Hmm, I wonder if it should read ‘Tris Hussey is Canada’s first professional blogger’?–he seems like a young guy!

The Book

I had originally planned to review a newer book that just became available at the library: WordPress: The Fast and Easy Way to Learn 3rd ed. by George Plumley. It’s part of the ‘Teach Yourself Visually’ series. The Plumley book is shorter (310 pages) and newer (2015). If you like screenshots on every page, go for the Plumley book. If you like a more detailed explanation, Hussey is the better option: there’s more text. If I were to start all over again, I’d go for the Hussey volume. The Plumley edition is even more basic than the Absolute Beginner’s Guide.

WordPress is pretty simple to use. The jargon is complicated though. WordPress today is like what computers were before Apple made everything simple: it’s not complicated but appears complicated if you’re not familiar with it. Hussey cuts through all the jargon. For me, that was a big help. For example, there’s wordpress.com blogs and wordpress.org blogs. And then, of the .org blogs, you can do install your own web server or you can find a host that offers an easy or one-click installation.

There’s chapters in Hussey’s book on both wordpress.com and wordpress.org but the book is more geared towards the latter. I imagine that’s what most people will be interested in. BTW Doing Melpomene’s Work is a wordpress.org blog hosted by GoDaddy. One-click installation. It’s been running just over a year without any major problems. The only problem was one time I changed pages while one of the plugins was still updating. GoDaddy helped me resolve the problem in about 10 minutes. Not bad.

In addition to chapters on setting up and installing, Hussey also guides you through the process of selecting the plugins you really need. Plugins are little widgets and tools that make your site more user friendly: social media buttons, comment boxes, and things like that. And then there are chapters on attaching media into your blog: video, photo, and sound files.

Usually I like the ‘Missing Manual’ series. But, after looking through the 10 or 15 WordPress beginner books they had at the Vancouver Chapters, I went with Hussey. It had the right blend of screenshots and text. Explanations were easy to follow. The writing was interesting (he relates how things have changed since he started blogging in 2004). If you’re thinking of starting a blog, this is a good place to start doing research.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and thanks to Tris Hussey’s help, I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

Now that the rewriting and editing process has started, it was high time for new dictionary. The dictionary that came with the laptop (MacBook Pro running OS 10.10.5) is good, but I wanted another one for a second opinion. I also wanted a reference dictionary to keep spellings and hyphenations consistent. Hyphenation is rapidly evolving: it’s no longer ice-cream but ice cream. And not bumble-bee but bumblebee. Hyphenation is like a double-breasted suit: out of fashion. As the stock dictionary is The New Oxford American Dictionary and I use British spellings, I was also looking for a specifically British dictionary. I thought about getting a physical dictionary, but if a suitable app could be found, that would be preferable. In the 90s and even 2000s the reference dictionaries were always physical. I was hoping that in the 2010s that has changed. It has: the search led to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary

The app was downloaded from the Apple app store for $28.99 CAD. This is the sixth edition, version 2.4, Oxford copyright 2007, updated February 28, 2015. It must be licensed out to WordWebSoftware, who put it together and copyrighted the software part of it in 2011. I wonder why Oxford couldn’t do it in house?

Here’s the online blurb from the Apple App Store:

Description

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary contains an incredible one-third of the coverage of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary and includes all words in current English from 1700 to the present day, plus the vocabulary of Shakespeare, the Bible and other major works in English from before 1700.

With new coverage of global English, as well as slang, dialect, technical, historical, and literary terms, and rare and obsolete words, the Sixth Edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 600,000 words, phrases, and definitions, with coverage of language from the entire English-speaking world, from North America and the UK to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and the Caribbean. It has been fully updated with 2,500 new words and meanings based on ongoing research at Oxford Dictionaries and the Oxford English Corpus.

This is a mobile dictionary with content from Oxford University Press and advanced search and language tools that have become the staple of quality language apps from MobiSystems.

SEARCH TOOLS – effortlessly find words using a clear, functional, and easy-to-use interface. The integrated search tools activate automatically the moment you start typing:
* Search autocomplete helps find words quickly by displaying predictions as you type
* Keyword lookup allows you to search within compound words and phrases
* An automatic ‘Fuzzy filter’ to correct word spelling, as well as ‘Wild card’ (‘*’ or ‘?’) to replace a letter or entire parts of a word
* Camera search looks up words in the camera viewfinder and displays results

LEARNING TOOLS – engaging features that help you further enhance your vocabulary:
* ‘Favorites’ feature to create custom folders with lists of words from the extensive library
* ‘Recent’ list to help you easily review looked-up words
* ‘Word of the day’ section to help expand your vocabulary every day

Sounds good! Now, you may be asking: why not just get the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary (OED)? Well, amazon.ca is selling the 20 volume set for $1447.04. That’s the 1989 edition. It must weigh a ton. And to get the latest (i.e. what’s happened between 1989 and 2015), you have to get all the supplemental volumes. No thanks. But doesn’t the OED come in an app? Not that I can find. There’s a cd-rom version for $295 USD (about $375 CAD). Most of the links to it from Oxford’s own site are broken. The cd-rom version apparently is designed for Macs with a PowerPC processor. Those are the Macs from 10+ years ago! Not about to drop $375 for a dictionary that probably won’t work and doesn’t appear to be supported. It surprises me that Oxford would even continue to sell such stone age software.

That’s sort of disappointing the unabridged OED isn’t available for download. I was prepared to pay up to $200 for it. You can subscribe to the online version for $295 USD a year. This seems like a ripoff. And you have to be online to use it, which is a turn off. At any rate, the Greater Victoria Public Library subscribes to it and you can access it FOR FREE by logging in with your library card. But you still have to be online and it would be a pain to login each time you wanted to look up a word. Imagine! Sheesh!

So, because the unabridged is too hard to access, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is the next best thing. At 600,000 words, the word-count is almost double the 350,000 words in the New Oxford American Dictionary, the dictionary which comes stock with my computer.

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary Versus Stock Dictionary

Let’s go head to head. Here’s works I’ve actually been using whilst writing Paying Melpomene’s Price.

Here’s aporia in the stock dictionary:

aporia |əˈpôrēə| noun an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory: the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars.• Rhetoric the expression of doubt.ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via late Latin from Greek, from aporos ‘impassable,’ from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage.’

And here’s the same word in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

aporia əˈpɔ:rɪə , əˈpɒrɪə noun. m16.

1Rhetoric. The expression of doubt. m16.

2 A doubtful matter, a perplexing difficulty. l19.

ORIGIN: Late Latin from Greek, from aporos impassable, from a- ¹⁰ + poros: see aporetic , -ia ¹.

I almost find the stock dictionary better! One nice thing about the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary are the pronunciations: press on a button and it says the word out loud.

The next word is Capitoline. That word is not in the stock dictionary. But here’s the entry from the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary:

Capitoline kəˈpɪtəlʌɪn adjective designating or pertaining to the hill at Rome on which the Capitol stood ; of or pertaining to the Capitol: e17.

Let’s see how they deal with the proper name Melpomene. The stock dictionary has:

Melpomene |melˈpämənē| Greek & Roman Mythologythe Muse of tragedy.ORIGIN Greek, literally ‘singer.’

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for Melpomene, only ‘melpomenish’:

melpomenish mɛlˈpɒmɪnɪʃ adjective. literary. rare. e19.

Tragic.

ORIGIN: from Greek Melpomenē (lit. ‘singer’) the Muse of tragedy + -ish ¹.

Shouldn’t it have Melpomene if the melpomenish entry refers back to the name?

Surprising: the stock dictionary outperforms and the Shorter Oxford in some ways underperforms expectation. It IS, however, nice to have both dictionaries. I’d make the same purchase again.

To sum up: The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a good buy at $28.99. The sound files are a big plus for pronunciations. 600,000 words is plenty. Besides proper names, haven’t run across any words it doesn’t have. The interface does the trick. If you’re looking for an authoritative dictionary with British spellings, this is your ticket until the unabridged OED becomes available for download.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I don’t like to be a spelling slob whilst Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Preface Released to Beta Readers

After a flurry of last minute activity, the preface has gone out to the eight brave beta readers last Friday. It’s a bit of a milestone as now, for the first time *drum roll* Paying Melpomene’s Price has GONE PUBLIC! If you haven’t received it yet, the spam filter might have put it into junk mail. Well…it might be junk but I’d rather the beta readers tell me than the spam filter!

Here’s the little blurb that went out with it. Thanks to MR and MA for ideas and suggestions on putting the blurb together:

Brave Beta Readers,

This is it! The preface of Paying Melpomene’s Price is attached. Two identical versions: a Microsoft Word document and a PDF. You can either comment right on the Word document (use a big font or colour) or markup the PDF with Adobe Acrobat. Alternately, you can comment in return email by citing page and paragraph (e.g. page 2, the paragraph that starts with ‘Two and a half…’). I can also deliver hard copies to those wanting to go that route! All sorts of options, use the easiest!

This is what I’m looking for: 1) parts you like (I should do more of this), 2) parts you don’t like (I should do less of it), 3) parts you understand (I should do more of this), and 4) parts that are difficult to understand (I should rewrite). Here’s a set of symbols:

Parts you like, put a checkmark

Parts you don’t like, put a frown

Parts you understand, write a capital U

Parts that are hard to understand, write a ?

Don’t worry about grammar and spelling. Those things will be caught down the line. Go with initial reactions. Right now, I’m most concerned with people’s reactions: what they like and what they don’t like. Don’t worry about offending me! Now’s the time that honesty is appreciated. Better to fix things now than later! There’s eight beta readers, so it’ll be interesting to see if some kind of consensus forms. I’m betting it will.

No rush. If things get busy, wait for the next instalment to come out (one per month, eight more sections). BIG thanks to everyone for participating!

Enjoy!

Edwin Wong

Writer – Doing Melpomene’s Work

It’ll be interesting to see if a consensus forms between the eight beta readers. Will they like/dislike the same things? It’s a diverse crowd of beta readers: artists, graphic designers, a doctor, a restauranteur, an academic coordinator, and some self-employed business people. No one (as far as I can tell) with a professional theatre background. That might be a good thing. One person moonlights as a bona fide editor (has edited articles for Science and Nature). Ages range from thirties to sixties. Three women and a five men. A good mix.

The preface is eight pages long. Before rewriting, it was ten pages long. Another page or two can probably get deleted somewhere down the line. But it’s as good as I can get it right now. After sending it out, I was curious: how long would it take to read eight pages? I timed myself reading it in 17 minutes. But that’s sort of cheating as I’m reading my own thoughts. For other people to read it maybe it would take 25-30 minutes? If you’re making notes on the page as you go along, that might add another fifteen minutes. So maybe 45 minutes or so?

Another things: Microsoft Word pages (and PDFs made from Word) are longer than book pages. I counted up how many words there are in several softcover academic type works and compared them with the word count in the preface. Word counts in books vary according to spacing, font, and page size. But it seems like you can convert Microsoft Word pages into average book pages by dividing by 0.6. So, eight pages of the preface in Word = 13.33 book pages (8 / 0.6 = 13.33).

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m glad there are brave beta readers out there Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Get Your Free Copy of Paying Melpomene’s Price

Wanted: Beta Readers

Any beta readers out there? For your time and helpful suggestions, you will receive a signed copy of Paying Melpomene’s Price: Tragedy and the Risk Theatre. What is more, beta readers will be individually acknowledged in the published version: I realize your time is valuable. C’mon, give it a go and take part in this happy and worthy cause!

As assiduous readers will recall, the first draft of Paying Melpomene’s Price is complete. The internal process of rewriting and editing started in early August. I am looking for some much needed feedback as I rewrite and edit before sending the manuscript out to the copy editors, structural editors, proofreaders, etc., next year. You see, the ideas in Paying Melpomene’s Price have been with me so long that they just make sense. I’m convinced. But convincing me is like preaching to the choir. I’m reaching out for different perspectives.

What’s Involved for Beta Readers

There’s a preface and eight chapters. Each chapter is about 15 pages. At the rate I’m going, I’m editing/rewriting a chapter a month. This is what I’m thinking: each month I’ll release a chapter. To do a cursory read and make some notes takes roughly two hours. To write out the notes in an email takes another couple of hours (some may be faster). So its a half a day per month for nine months, give or take.

The nice thing is, the heavy lifting of fact checking, close reading, and proofreading will be done at a later stage. Right now, the thing that interests me the most is whether things make sense. These are the sorts of questions I have for beta readers: where is the text clear? Where is it unclear? What are some of the things I do well (because I need to do more of it!). What are some of the things you wish I did less of?

Beta Reader Qualifications

The book is on literary theory and theatre. But this doesn’t mean that beta readers have to be experts in these fields (though experts are welcome!). In some ways, it even helps out more when beta readers approach the text from a nonspecialist perspective: I want the arguments to appeal to broad segments of the population. I want it to be accessible to students, academics, dramatists, literary theorists, and people just interested in theatre or literary theory. I believe it’s possible to write something simple and broadly appealing at the same time. That’s where the feedback from beta readers is invaluable. Is it something you would enjoy reading (if you were not beta reading)?

So, there are no qualifications for beta readers! If you want to contribute to the idea of tragedy as the risk theatre or just to be a beta reader, give it a whirl!

Back Blurb for Paying Melpomene’s Price

The back blurb is an ongoing composition. Here it is as it stands right now. It’ll give you an idea of whether Paying Melpomene’s Price is something you want to beta read:

YOU CAN’T BE A HERO IF YOU GOT NOTHING TO LOSE

Tragedy is a high stakes game where gamblers stake the milk of human kindness for a crown (Macbeth), the immortal soul for mortal glory (Dr. Faustus), or happiness for distinction (The Master Builder). By playing the game, heroes expose themselves to risk: a dead man’s hand or a queen of spades lurks in the cards. This is the idea of the risk theatre.

Paying Melpomene’s Price is about the risk theatre. The risk theatre sells heroes its benefits at a dear cost. Oedipus saves Thebes, but pays the price in doing so. Because relief is purchased by exile, love is purchased by blood, and power comes at the cost of the soul, tragedy is a valuing mechanism. It assigns a tangible value to intangible human qualities: the milk of human kindness may be exchanged for a crown. In an increasingly monetized world, tragedy restores value to humanity because its transactions are not measured in dollars and cents, but blood, sweat, and tears.

This book is written for students of tragic art theory looking for a philosophy of tragedy that celebrates the innate value of life. It is also written with dramatists in mind: in these pages is a neoclassical working model of drama. With its template, the dramatist can bring the idea of risk theatre to the stage. It is also written for those dismayed in the monetization of all things: the risk theatre puts the human back in humanity.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and today I’m looking for beta readers interested in Doing Melpomene’s Work.

What is Concision in Writing?

The other day CM and I were catching up. We hadn’t chatted in months. He’s been working on his yard. Landscaping. The big project was a picket fence. I betcha it looks good. As assiduous readers will recall from prior posts, I’ve started the rewriting and editing process. I shared with him the good news that the first draft of the book was complete and that the goal was to get the book down from 210 pages to 150 or less. ‘The writing has to be concise’, I said, parroting what the style guides were saying. Concision is everything. But then CM asked, ‘What exactly is concision in writing?’. Well, I hadn’t actually thought of that! Concise is to say as much as possible in as few words as possible. But what is ‘as much as possible’? How does one know? Is there a boundary between too little and too much?

How to Express Concision

Communication is a two way street. When attempting to get ideas across, it’s always helpful to remember how the other person is looking at things. It just so happens that me and CM share a construction background. In fact, years ago, when I was thinking of getting into the trades, I asked CM which trade I should get into. He said if he were doing it all again, he’d check out either electrical or plumbing: they’re paid well and you’re not outside working in the rain or on top of a slippery roof.

So, when asked ‘What exactly is concision in writing?’, I came up with the following: concision is like what you find on a blueprint. Tradespeople read blueprints when they build a house. The print tells them where the stairs go, the rise and the run of the treads, how many levels the house has. It tells them how to lay out the walls, where the bathrooms are, and how many bedrooms there are. It does not tell them where to hang the Monet, where to put the TV, or which pan goes into which cupboard.

The plan tells the tradespeople what they need to know to build the house. And in very exact terms: the shear wall will be screwed together with certain types of screws. The length and type of plating of exterior screws will be specified. But it does not go beyond what it is designed to do: it will not talk about where the TV goes, for example. This is concision: the state of expressing as efficiently as possible what needs to be said.

How Concision Works

If a set of blueprints for a house can be described as being ‘concise’, concision works because there is an understanding between the architect who drafts the blueprints and the tradespeople who interpret the blueprints. Through experience, the architect knows what to put on the blueprints and what not to put on. And through experience, the tradespeople know what to look for. A book then, must be like a set of blueprints: it must start off with a well defined goal. Just as the point of a blueprint is so a house can be built, the writer must define the purpose of the book.

To continue the analogy, once the writer defines the purpose of a book, the next thing to establish is the book’s audience. Just as an architect is making a set of blueprints for tradespeople, the writer must figure out who the audience is. That way, the right amount of information is conveyed. Once the architect defines the audience as an audience of tradespeople, certain things can be said which do not need further elaboration. For instance, if acoustic insulation is specified, it can be presumed that the tradespeople are familiar with how to install it: no need to give a lesson on the history and application of acoustic insulation. For the same reason, if a writer is writing about theatre to an audience of theatregoers, there is no need to give the background of each play under discussion: it can be presumed the audience is already familiar. There is no need, for example, to say that Macbeth is a play by Shakespeare in which an ambitious vassal assassinates his lord. That information would be superfluous. To include it would not be concise.

The Current State of Paying Melpomene’s Price

Now that the process of rewriting and editing the book has started, how does it look? To use the blueprint analogy, currently the book is like a glorious house built in the clouds. It has no foundation. Some of the stairs lead nowhere. Others are in the wrong place. It needs concision.

But even in this bad state, one can tell that the house has an interesting design. With the proper corrections, one could live in there. And comfortably. The crucial thing I can see right now is that what I have created is not yet a house, but, can become a house with the proper revisions. And that for now is good enough. Actually, in a way, I’m counting my lucky stars because I’ve started off a lot of projects where, looking back on them, they’re not even salvageable.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I’m Doing Melpomene’s Work many times over.

Editing & Style

Since the first draft is complete, it’s time to start rewriting and editing. The manuscript is at 126 Microsoft Word pages which is equal to about 210 softcover book pages (depending on size, font, etc.,). I’ve started rewriting the preface. The goal with the preface is to shorten it 20% and it looks like I might be able to exceed that. I’ve also started to put in the appropriate footnotes. And then it struck me: I can’t remember all the formats! It’s been eight years since I’ve done this sort of stuff. Same for editing. I haven’t edited anything in these last eight years either. Rusty. Of course, the goal is to get professional editors to go through everything. But the goal also is to get it to the very best of my ability before getting outside help. Junk in, junk out, as they say. And if you’re wondering, no, my ‘academic’ writing isn’t the same as my ‘blogging’ writing. Too bad. Because my ‘blogging’ writing actually has some good things going for it. It’s short. It’s fairly concise. It’s readily understandable. At least that’s what Yoast SEO reports: ‘The copy scores 70 on the Flesch Reading Ease test which is considered easy to read’. I’m pretty sure if I fed my manuscript into WordPress Yoast SEO it would yell at me for making things too difficult to read. Time to change that. I think I might try too hard to appear clever in my academic writing. This is where having a blog sorta helps me out.

Off to the Library to Find Editing Books

So, at the library I found four interesting volumes. And on the bookshelf at home, there was a good old standby. Here’s the library picks:

Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. I’ve never read this before. But everyone swears by it. It’s the only book to appear on every top 10 list. And it’s short. Actually, all these style guides are short. Maybe that’s some sort of hint to would-be writers. Some famous writers read this volume yearly. Wow. Here’s the back blurb:

Making ‘every word tell’ is what The Elements of Style is all about. This famous manual, now in a fourth edition, has conveyed the principles of plain English style to millions of readers. It is probably the only style manual ever to appear on the best seller lists.

Whether you write letters, term papers, or novels, the ‘little’ book, as it has come to be called, can help you communicate more effectively. It will show you how to cut deadwood out of your sentences; enliven your prose with the active voice; put statements in a positive for; approach style by way of plainness, simplicity, orderliness, simplicity.

The original ‘little’ book was written by William Strunk, Jr., late professor of English at Cornell, for use by his students. Years later, one of the most illustrious of those students, E.B. White, prepared an edition of the book for the general public, revising the original and contributing a chapter of his own that sought to lead the reader beyond mere correctness toward distinction in English style.

I like it. The goal of writing is to ‘communicate’ with readers. Put this way, I’m beginning to understand why simplicity and concision are desirable: it’s just like talking with people. Who appreciates a conversation when someone is hammering them over their head with huge words and sentences which never end?

Number two is the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. I used to have the 5th ed. Now it’s up to the 7th ed.! This volume has all the goods on the format footnotes go in, how to do abbreviations, and so on. Maybe it will even tell me how to differentiate between ‘which’ and ‘that’: that’s something I’ve forgotten how to do! Here’s the back blurb:

The MLA Handbook is published by the Modern Language Association, the authority on MLA documentation style. Widely adopted by universities, colleges, and secondary schools, the MLA Handbook gives step-by-step advice on every aspect of writing research papers, from selecting a topic to submitting the completed paper.

The seventh edition is a comprehensive, up-to-date guide to research and writing in the online environment. It provides an authoritative account of MLA documentation style for use in student writing, including simplified guidelines for citing works published on the Web and new recommendations for citing several kinds of works, such as digital files and graphic narratives.

Number three is The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. Here’s its blurb:

For over twenty-five years, The Canadian Writer’s Handbook has provided invaluable guidance on all aspects of the writing process, from the mechanics of building effective sentences and paragraphs to the intricacies of writing, formatting, and documenting full-length research papers. Building on the foundations laid by William Messenger and Jan de Bruyn, Judy Brown and Ramona Montagnes, both of the respected UBC Writing Centre, have updated this comprehensive and authoritative text.

This volume has MLA, APA, Chicago, and CSE style guides for citing references. I can compare it with the MLA Handbook to come up with a style appropriate for my book.

Last there is my own dog eared copy of Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams. Here’s what its back blurb has to say:

This acclaimed book is a master teacher’s tested program for turning clumsy prose into clear, powerful, effective writing. A logical, expert, easy-to-use plan for achieving excellence in expression, Style offers neither simplistic rules nor endless lists of dos and don’ts. Rather, Joseph Williams and Gregory Colomb explain how to be concise, how to be focused, how to be organized.

Filled with realistic examples of good, bad, and better writing, and step-by-step strategies for crafting a sentence or organizing a paragraph, Style does much more than teach mechanics: it helps anyone who must write clearly and persuasively transform even the roughest of drafts into a polished work of clarity, coherence, impact, and personality.

Wow! I am SOLD! And, believe it or not, I find books on style actually quite entertaining to read.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and I am editing and re-Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Done Like Dinner (well 1st draft!)

The weekend was quite satisfying. The best part was typing ‘THE END’ in big capital letters at the end of chapter 9, the final chapter. In a prior post, I had been writing on the finish line mentality: the closer to the finish, the more things seemed to drag on. Well, after writing the post and realizing the error of my ways, I picked up the pace! It’s only the first draft, so ‘THE END’ is just another beginning but, hey, it was just satisfying typing that. Actually, damn satisfying. Here.s how it looks:

‘The End’ on 1st Draft

What will I do? I’m going to Disneyland! Well, no. Not yet. Or maybe better yet never. I went for a walk down to Dallas road where the kitesurfers were practicing their arts and thought what to do after the first draft was finished.

There’s a list of short stories and novels I’ve been meaning to read but haven’t had the time. Most of the reading lately has been research. The common theme behind the list is that the titles all have to do with the unexpected. It’s been collected over the years from a multitude of places. I kept the list running at the end of each Microsoft Word document that I was working on. As each chapter got completed, I would paste the list onto the end of the next Word document and so on. In other words, I’ve been looking guiltily at this list for a long time. Here it is:

Hermann Hesse The Glass Bead Game

Shalom Aleichem Lottery Ticket

Matilde Serao Land of Plenty

Edgar Allan Poe William Wilson

Honoré de Balzac The Wild Ass’s Skin

Jean Cocteau Children of the Game

Stephan Zweig The Gambler

Wow, some of these titles are surprisingly hard to find. Looking at the Greater Victoria Public Library (GVPL) catalogue, couldn’t find the Balzac, Serao, Zweig, or Aleichem titles. Maybe some of the writers are obscure, but Balzac? C’mon!

What else now the first draft is done like dinner? Time to start rereading and rewriting. Let’s see how many pages there are as it stands:

Preface – 10 pages

Chapter 1 ‘Tragedy Equals Risk Times Time’ – 7 pages

Chapter 2 ‘The Power of Three’ – 10 pages

Chapter 3 ‘Forms of Tragedy’ – 18 pages

Chapter 4 ‘The Myth of the Price You Pay’ – 15 pages

Chapter 5 ‘Debemur morti’ – 2 pages

Chapter 6 ‘Elements of the Counter-Monetization’ – 8 pages

Chapter 7 ‘Taking the All-In Wager to the Stage’ – 21 pages

Chapter 8 ‘The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men’ – 18 pages

Chapter 9 ‘A Riddle’ – 17 pages

Grand total of 126 Microsoft Word pages. Now, I’m not quite sure how Microsoft Word pages will convert into the final product, but based on comparing number of words in Microsoft per page to the number of words per page in a standard type Penguin softcover, the factor is to divide by 0.6 to convert. So, 126 Word pages = 210 softcover pages. That’s a bit too many pages.

For what I’m doing, 100 to 150 pages should be more than sufficient. The ludic theory of tragedy is actually quite simple. This is no Critique of Pure Reason. I want the book to be approachable. Something a reader can finish in a couple of sittings, if not one. A lot of the best books are actually quite small. How to Do Things with Words by the philosopher Austin comes to mind. He clocks in just over 150 pages, but really short pages that you can slice through like butter. Same with another game changer, Abel’s Metatheatre. Seminal book. Only 146 pages. Big idea, small book. Let’s see what I can do.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong, and I have just finished the first draft in the never ending project of Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Time

Here’s an ‘around the water cooler’ post for assiduous readers today on time, that familiar stranger in our lives. How did the topic come about? Every so often-which is, at it turns out, once every couple of months-I pick up some donuts and head out to say hi to the boys at my old work, Bayside Mechanical out in Sidney. For one it’s fun to catch up on how everyone is doing. And then it’s a good excuse to jump on the bike. Pedal bike that is. If only they could make cars as dependable as bicycles. A bike can sit unused for years: just pump up the tyres (notice saucy British spelling!) and away you go. Built in climate control: if it’s hot slow down. If it’s cool, push the pedal to the metal! Beautiful machines. They make life efficient. No need for gym membership! But what was I talking about…ah…time.

‘What Do You Do With All Your Time?’

One of the things my colleagues say is: ‘Man, what do you do with yourself? I wouldn’t know what to do with all that extra time! I’d go nuts’. Well, that’s not quite what they say, but something along those lines. For those readers just hopping aboard, I used to work at Bayside Mechanical full time up till November last year. The routine was: out the door to catch the bus at 6:30AM and get in the door at 6PM. All-in with the commute (and I think that’s the proper way to calculate how long work takes) that’s almost twelve hours or half the day. So the way my colleagues are seeing it, well, I have a whole lot more time on my hands!

Accounting for All That Extra Time

Let’s see how things have changed. Before I used to go to bed around 11PM and get up 5:30AM. Now it’s more like bed at midnight and get up at 8AM. So I’m sleeping 1-1/2 hours more. What else? Grocery shopping used to be once a week. A big shop on Saturday at Fairway Markets. Now I go between Market on Yates, Fairway, and Fisgard Market in Chinatown for best pricing. This probably knocks 3 bucks off the weekly grocery spend of ~$55. It wouldn’t have been worth it to do this last year, that’s for sure. Milk and specials at the Market, meat and most staples at Fairway, and fruits and veggies in Chinatown. So shopping consumes another, say, 15 minutes a day on average (shopping is not every day but since everything is being calculated by day, keeps the numbers apples to apples). Then the library. Walking to the library and back again, coming home for lunch, going back… That’s gotta be another hour a day right there. Then blogging. That’s the amazing one. Blogging is actually very time intensive. This blog right here will probably take 2 hours altogether (I work on it on and off). Actually, maybe even more. It’s getting faster with practise though. Remember Seneca’s aphorisms? Witty things like ‘upon the author crimes come back?’. Well, these didn’t just ‘come’ to Seneca. In his educational treatises, he advises students of oratory to come up with one or two sententia each day. Blogging requires practise too. And hey, blogging is good for writers. Its an exercise to get your thoughts out there right here right now as opposed to labourious writing in the ‘academic’ style that is constantly written and rewritten. So, what are we at? Almost 5 hours. 7 hours of ‘regained’ time are still unaccounted for. That must be the time I’m writing and reading. Oh, and snacking. Good thing there’s time to work out because I snack a lot more. Also cooking more at home and eating out a lot less. But really, that should be time neutral: the time saved by going out is burnt by well, going and and coming back.

The Nature of Time

The strange thing is, it doesn’t seem like there’s all that extra time. There must be something psychological in how time flows. Actually, there is. And as project managers, we know this: give a worker a task, and he will fit his day to it. Time and productivity are like a gas in a container. If the container is small, the gas will fit but be at a higher pressure. If the container is large, the gas will also fit but be more ‘relaxed’. Operating at high pressures for too long, and something’s going to blow up. Operate at low pressures for too long, and the container might even implode out of boredom. The trick is to find a happy medium.

So, for those of you fearing that when you retire, there’s going to be too much time, well, don’t worry. That’s not going to be a problem. The one thing that is hard to understand is that once time becomes your own time why its considered to be time wasted or time off the grid. Why shouldn’t time be worth more when it is your own time?

There’s a really good book that I read years ago that shaped my thinking on work and time. It’s called Your Money or Your Life. It’s by Robin and Dominguez. It’s one of the few books that I’ve read multiple times. Do you know what actually happens when you get paid? Well, you’re actually trading in your life for money, which you spend on other things. By consuming, you’re actually consuming your own life. Ever talk to the old guys? You hear they say lots of things, but have you ever heard an old guy say, ‘I wish I had spent more time in the office?’. Betcha you haven’t. And if you have, I’d sure like to know why!

My Efficiency Rating

So, it would seem in hindsight that when time is my own time, I’m less efficient than before. Or that I’m underutilized. Grocery shopping in multiple places. Sleeping more. Walking more. But that’s an illusion. Sometimes you hear people saying we only use 10% of our brains. Well, that’s an illusion too, because if someone lopped out the 90% that is not being used, I’m sure the brain would not work at all! So, I’m at, taking a guestimate, 75% efficiency compared to before. But it’s in my downtime that the ideas appear: during walks, taking a break, hey, even in my dreams sometimes! And I think this is true not only of me, but also of a lot of artists and, dare I say it, scientists as well? For the Curies to have experimented enough to discover radiation or for Mendel to have come up with genetics, they must have had a lot of spare time. But really, its not ‘spare’ time! It’s ‘spare’ only in the sense of ‘we’re only using 10% of our brain’!

So, although from a purely quantitative perspective, my production is down, it is the way it has to be. A certain amount of leisure is necessary in the production of art, or *gasp* even science. But though the production seems down, my days are still too short. As Seneca said in another aphorism: no day is too long for the busy. It.s already 7:42PM and I still must finish Plato’s Phaedo and the Ion tonight and start on something else. Maybe finish Schiller’s The Robbers which has eluded me for a month now.

Until next time, I’m Edwin Wong and there is much to do when one is Doing Melpomene’s Work.

Doing Melpomene's Work

Writing on the Greatest Show on Earth