Tag: writing

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Don’t Let the Quest for Gender Equality Hinder Communication

I’m all for eliminating bias, gender, religious, or ethnic, for our language.

Assuming, for instance, that the pronoun ‘he’ represents both, or all, genders is not only sexist, but it’s illogical. Even though the number of men and women on the planet is almost equal, albeit there are imbalances in some regions (There are, for example, far more women than men in the former Soviet states, and in Asia, the Arab world, and Northern Africa, men outnumber women), in general women outlive men globally. So, if we want to be fair, the common pronoun to refer to all people would be ‘she.’ Of course, we know that life has never been fair.

The war over use of gender-neutral language has been going on for decades, and I’m a total supporter—with a few exceptions.

Some of the made-up words being used make writing sound a bit silly and trivial, to me at least, and they often complicate writing, making it almost incomprehensible. I won’t even go into words like ‘ze,’ ‘hir,’ or ‘s/he,’ or the salacious ‘s/he/it.’ I would, though, like to address one of my pet peeves; the often indiscriminate use of ‘they,’ ‘their,’ or ‘them’ as a singular gender-neutral pronoun.

Now, I acknowledge that this usage has been more or less common practice since the 1800s, and in many cases is correct, and not really a problem. But, when used indiscriminately, they can be quite confusing—and, sometimes sound silly. Take, for instance, the sentence, ‘John put their new address on their Facebook page,’ or ‘The baby threw their bottle at me.’ In the first sentence, upon whose page did John put whose new address? In this case, it’s probably safe to assume John is male, so the use of ‘his,’ doesn’t strike me as biased in any way, and it’s much easier to understand the meaning. In the second, we’re clearly talking about a single baby, and although we don’t know the gender, couldn’t we just write, “The baby threw the bottle at me’? Doesn’t that communicate the same meaning?

The problem with universal use of these words as a substitute for gender-specific pronouns is that if you’re not careful it can lead to miscommunication. Allow me to give you a brief example:

‘The college president released their policy on academic freedom today. They stressed that they want students to be able to express their opinion without fear that they will punish them. They can be assured that they will zealously guard their rights under the US Constitution and the bylaws of their institution.”

I could go on, but I hope I’ve made my point. Is it clear who ‘they’ and ‘their’ are referring to in this passage? Imagine, if you will, if this went on for a thousand more words. I don’t know about you, but I would be completely befuddled.

Maybe I’m a traditionalist, or a coward, or just lazy; or, as some of the students in my professional writing workshop no doubt think; I’m an old codger resisting the inexorable and inevitable transformation of the English language to reflect changes in social consciousness. Actually, I like to think of myself as a practical person who believes that the objective of writing is to clearly communicate a message to an audience. To that end, my approach to the issue of gender neutrality is to eschew blatant and obvious gender-biased language. Policemen become law enforcement officers, and I don’t add ‘-ess’ or ‘ette’ to words to indicate femininity. A waitress is a server, and a stewardess is a flight attendant. I also don’t refer to ‘male nurses,’ or ‘female doctors,’ and a poet is a poet regardless of gender. This applies to my fiction as well as my professional nonfiction writing. If necessary, I’ll rewrite a sentence, eliminating the pronouns if there is no other way. For example, instead of writing, “I took my grandson to the zoo so they could learn about species conservation,’ I’ll write, ‘In order to impart information about species conservation, I took my grandson to the zoo.’

In my professional writing workshop, for Rangel Foreign Affairs Scholars, I have to deal with 15 college seniors each summer, and this is a constant debate. While I appreciate and applaud their commitment to gender equality, my main goal is to help them learn to communicate accurately and effectively in a government setting. I’m careful to emphasize that I understand and support their point of view, and don’t expect or want them to change it. But, at the same time, I urge them to remember why they’re taking the workshop; their goal should be learning how to write effectively and communicate accurately. They are there to learn how to convey an often complex message to a diverse audience. I want them to continue to strive for equality, but to do it without mangling or muddying their message.

I have this depressing feeling sometimes that I’m fighting a losing battle. But, you know what; I will never stop trying.

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The business side of writing

You’ve finished that book you’ve been slaving over for the past several weeks, or even months. Pulling just the right word or phrase from the depths of your mind was like passing a kidney stone, painful, but leaving you feeling like you’ve achieved something great. You think, now, the hard part’s over, and all you have to do is hit ‘publish,’ and then you sit back and wait for the accolades to come rolling in.
Well, I can assure you that, unless this is your first book, (in which case you already know this, so you can stop reading at this point), your work has just begun.
Writing is admittedly difficult, but it pales in comparison to the effort you must put into making sure your work gets read. Wait, you thought that writing it was what it takes to achieve that? No, like having a child, there’s a lot more effort required to make sure that child makes it in the harsh world that awaits. Writing is like procreation, it’s the creative part, the merging of sperm and egg to create that magical being. But, like a child, if you don’t do the nurturing and educating to prepare it for the real world, it will wither.
The really hard work for a writer is all that comes after—and sometimes, before—you put all those beautiful words on the screen. Those of you who have been at it a while know what comes next; the dreaded M word. Yes, marketing what you write. Your words mean nothing unless you get them in front of readers, and then entice those readers to . . . read them.
Marketing is the process of getting word of your words (okay, not very creative, but you get the point) to as many potential readers as possible, and convert those potential readers into not just readers of the specific book, but hopefully, customers for the next, and the next, and the one after that. Now, I’m assuming here, that you’re not a one-book wonder.
This won’t be a primer or guide to marketing—save the thanks, just read my books, that’s all the thanks I need—just a cautionary word to every writer out there. While you’re writing, don’t forget the need to get the word out.
You can do it in a number of ways. You can buy ads, give talks, blog, etc. Buying ads can get expensive, and unfortunately, until you become a known quantity, don’t offer much return for the investment. The talk circuit is not for everyone. Some writers are painfully shy, and like most people, fear public speaking more than death. Blogging is a relatively inexpensive way to get the word out, but takes time away from what you really want to do—write books.
Despite the problems, if you want to be known as a writer, want people to read what you write, you’ll have to take a deep breath, gird your loins, and dive in. I’d like to say it gets easier with time, but it doesn’t. It’s a slog. For every two months I spend writing a book, I spend an equal or greater amount of time promoting it. I also have to budget time to promote my back list, and in my case, with more than 60 books on that back list, this is not insignificant. In the end, though, it will pay off (and, I’m assuming here that you’ve written something people will want to read).
So, keep writing. Write every day. But, you will also need to carve out time each day to do the often unpleasant, and always grueling work of promoting, marketing your work.
That, my friends, is the business side of writing. If you want to know more details about my marketing activities, stay tuned. When I have time, I’ll do a short piece on my marketing plan, from which, I hope, you’ll get some ideas that you can use.

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The Schizophrenic Writing Life

The writer

I currently have over 60 published books—probably close to 70 right now, but I’m too busy to count them—and an editor friend of mine asked me how on earth I found the time to write so many. An interesting question, that; one I hadn’t given much thought to. Too busy writing, don’t you know.

But, it was a fair question, and I took a stab at answering her. As I was typing the email, recounting for her my writing process, a realization hit me—I’m something of an obsessive-compulsive, schizophrenic, anal-retentive, driven person; or, so would the writing routine I’ve been following for almost as long as I can remember seem to indicate. In the following paragraphs, I will outline it for you, and let you decide if I’m engaging in hyperbole or not.

First, a little background is in order. From the time I was 17, until I retired from the US diplomatic service in 2012, I was a government employee (20 years in uniform, but that’s also government employment). That meant, I moved frequently, had odd hours, and, while some of my work was exciting, I was mostly involved in repetitive, bureaucratic tasks.

During those years in government, I wrote. And, by this I mean, I wrote for publication. While I was in the army, I moonlighted on several occasions as a reporter for local newspapers—the only restriction was that I couldn’t write about things on the base where I was stationed. I also did freelance stuff for regional and national magazines. Now, this is called moonlighting, because you have to do it during non-duty hours. So, I pulled a lot of late-nighters, which isn’t a big problem, because for as long as I can remember I’ve only slept an average of 6 hours per night anyway. When I retired from the army and joined the US Foreign Service, I could no longer work directly for civilian publications, but I did continue freelancing, and again, I wrote early in the morning before going to work, and late at night after returning from work—seven days a week, holidays included.

Then, in 2006, I decided to take a serious stab at writing something longer than a newspaper or magazine article. I’d been secretly scribbling a couple of novels on occasion, thinking that I’d like to actually write a book, but hadn’t quite built up the nerve to finish one. A young man who worked for me when I was ambassador to Cambodia (2002-2005) suggested that I compile my leadership techniques into a book because, though they were a bit odd, they were effective. There was another thing added to my after (and before) work hours routine; scribbling out the chapters of that damned book, which took me two years. I finally got it finished and published in 2008. That was a traumatic experience, one that I’ll not repeat in this lifetime—but, that’s another story—but, it demonstrated to me that I could, in fact, write books in my spare(?) time.

So, from that point, I began to seriously engage in writing, making it a point to write at least an hour every morning before going off to work, and another hour or two in the evening before falling into bed. On weekends, when there was no official function, or the wife and I weren’t traveling, I wrote at least three or four hours.

I’d never given it much thought before, but I soon discovered that when you do this, and, like me, you’re a fairly competent and proficient typist (I do 60 WPM), you can crank out a lot of words each month, and I mean a lot. I had a target of 1,000 to 2,000 words a day, something an old country editor in North Carolina taught me back in the 1970s as good exercise for the writing muscles. Now, if you do the math, in a 30-day month, that amounts to 30,000 to 60,000 words—a novelette or a medium-length novel, and in one month. Of course, if you factor in proofreading and all the other stuff you have to do, it would take longer than a month, but, on the other hand, when you look at four weekend days per month with an opportunity to crank out 6 to 8,000 words, you can do it in even less. Once I discovered this, I was off to the races.

Frontier Justice After a not-so amicable divorce from the ‘publisher’ who’d issued my first two books, and the decision to immerse myself in the waters of independent publishing (which entailed learning layout and design and a few other skills), I began to crank books out in earnest. I started with a mystery series featuring a retired army special ops guy working as a PI in Washington, DC, soon added a western series about the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the US Ninth Cavalry, while still doing blogging and a little copywriting and content generation on the side. To my surprise, while they didn’t make any bestseller lists, my books actually began to sell—be bought—and reviews indicated people were reading and responding to them. Sometimes those responses were negative, but I learned from those negative reviews, and I think the books got better. Hell, I know they got better; I went from selling two to three copies a month to fifty or more, and some months I even managed to sell as many as 800 copies of one of my e-book versions. I even have a couple of books that are what I call my perennial sellers. My book on Bass Reeves, the first African-American appointed a deputy US marshal west of the Mississippi, which has been out for three years now, averages 10 to 15 e-book and 4 to 10 paperback sales per month, even now. That’s nothing to brag about, but with more than 20 books doing that now, it is significant. Last year (2016) my net income from book royalties passed the $7,000 mark. That doesn’t put me in the Fortune 500, not even the Fortune 500,000, but for an indie author, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

So, you might be asking, what the hell does all this have to do with schizophrenia or writing process? Okay, fair point. I guess I did digress a bit there. Now that I’m officially retired from government service and am the master of my own schedule, here’s my writing process.

I get up every morning between 5:00 and 7:00 AM, depending on how late I went to bed, and after showering and fixing my breakfast, I hit the keyboard. I write until 9:30 or 10:00, and then take a break. I watch a little morning TV—the oldies channels with series from the 60s and 70s—or go to my studio I’ve set up in my garage, and paint or take pictures. Then, after lunch, I hit the keyboard for another hour (1:00 to 2:00 PM). I take another break of an hour or so, and maybe work in the yard or paint some more. Supper for me is around 6:30 PM, and then I plan to be at the keyboard by 7:30 or 7:45, and I write until 10:00 or 11:00 PM. That’s every day, unless I have to go out for a consulting job, a speech, or to conduct the occasional workshop. When that happens, I take a notebook with me and write notes on the subway or plane, or in the hotel if it’s a long trip. One way or another I get that minimum of 2,000 words written each and every day.

It has become such a routine now, I don’t really even think about it. Hadn’t The writerthought about it, in fact, until my editor friend asked her question. But, that’s the answer to how I’ve done over 60 books in 11 years. The thing is, I wasn’t even counting them as I was cranking them out, and didn’t even notice it until a few years ago, a friend who was introducing me to speak at an event, mentioned that I’d writing a sh-tload of books. I still don’t stop to count them often, but every now and then, someone will mention it, and I’ll count. It keeps going up. I don’t have a target, maybe to have at least one book for each year of my life—no, I know, to have more than 100. That’s nice, round number, don’t you think.

Oh, and was I right? It’s schizophrenia, isn’t it?