I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

I bumped into this little gem via MyLot – a paid-to-participate forum I frequent (yes, that’s a referral link, for full disclosure). We’ve had some fun with it, testing it with text taken from famous authors’ works, and it seems pretty accurate.

I tried it with three texts of my own: the first chapter of a sci-fi time travel thing (result: Mr. Poe), the first chapter of a fantasy story (result: Neil Gaiman) and the much more poetic prose I did as the prologue to the fantasy stort (result: L. Frank Baum).

And you can even click the green text to see examples of what they wrote.

Who do you write like?

Now, re-read that paragraph and tell me what’s wrong.

Yup, you got it – I said that the freelance work has settled down. That means I’m no longer pushing myself in my writing in any way. I get up, I do my chores, I sit down and do a bit of work, I entertain myself for the evening, I go to bed. Same old, same old.

So I’m thinking… if I don’t want to risk adding piles of work (since there’s responsibility to others involved and my schedule has a tendency to violently reject such steps), why not consider NaNoWriMo this year?

That’s the National Novel Writing Month, usually November, in which aspiring (or established) writers set themselves the challenge of producing a standard-length novel in one month. Well, the content, at least – the editing and re-reading and all that can come after.

I still have two partial novel ideas on the back-back-back-burner. I could finally get one of them done. Hmmmm.

While I was thinking of this, I noticed that my old blog, Wordophilia, has a new owner. OK, so she’s been there a while – hey, I was busy dealing with a death in the family and I didn’t notice!

Michelle’s an author, so a lot of the posts are pointed much more at the “creative writing” and “getting publishing” subjects – one caught my eye about creating plots. Excellent advice, though I would disagree slightly on always having the denouement so far from the end (at least outside of the romance genre) – hey, it’s “one way” to plot, as she says.

Anyway, pop over and read. She has a lot of useful info if you’re aspiring to be the next Shakespeare, Dickens or Danielle Steele.

Being an IT geek who’s far too logical about life and understands machines much better than humans, passion is somewhat alien to me. It’s something I’ve always been intrigued by, since I find it lacking in myself.

Where do those people who seem to have a never-ending love of a particular subject get the energy for it? And the concentration? Don’t they ever get fed up? Don’t they sometimes just want to eat pizza and watch bad movies?

I mean, it’s one thing to enjoy a hobby, but quite another to enthuse about it all the time. Are they really that thrilled about their subject? Is it all fake? Is it psychological compensation for something missing in another part of their life (cf. Crazy Cat Ladies)?

Since I’m a bit of a geek myself, I can understand obsession. I did, after all, once spend 36 hours in EverQuest. But when it reaches the point of taking a year off work to play a video game, spending all your time and money building stuff out of Lego or picking up a pen and writing while you’re eating breakfast with your off-hand? That’s all pretty extreme.

So it intrigued me yesterday when, in a conversation with my muse, she said “tu bouffes la vie“. It was a compliment about what it’s like to live with me (and no, I don’t think it ‘s that great to live with me, before you ask).

“You eat life.”

Apparently, she sees me as someone who is passionate about life. Not about any particular thing, but the whole of life. Bird song. Work. Sunlight. Movies. The cat. Cooking a full English breakfast. Hoovering. Whatever it is, she tells me, I throw myself into it and exude optimism and fun.

I think she has a distorted view. On the other hand, wouldn’t it be great if I found out, after all these years of believing I have no passion, that life itself is the thing I love most?

How are we supposed to know if we’re passionate about something? Where’s the border that we cross from normal to obsessive? Is there passport control? Can I bring luggage or just a carry-on bag?

I’d love to know what you think.

Image from WCL (click)

As a sometime-editor, I have a tendency to pickiness. Well alright, so I’m obsessive about spelling, grammar and those other little cogs that make up a smoothly-functioning language machine. Unfortunately, this finicky approach extends to any form of writing, which means that I self-edit constantly.

If you travel across the landscape of writing blogs, you will almost certainly have passed those offering advice for people like me: “Just write”.

Now, quite apart from this making me think of the quintessential capitalist brand¹ and the wonderful parody poster that I can’t seem to find anywhere (“Just Vom It”), that particular advice has always stressed me.

“Just write,” they say. “Worry about the editing afterwards.”

But I’m psychotic about my grammar. I’m obsessive about my spelling. Syntax is better than chocolate. Vocabulary and punctuation are ice cream and fudge cake! How can I just write and not worry about what I’m putting on paper?

As chance would have it, this week has given me precisely that opportunity.

Back at the end of last year, I had the good fortune to find a great client. We’ll call him Mr. Reliable². Regular work, regular pay, a few too many urgent deadlines but always grateful for extra commitment – for what more could a freelancer ask?

Normally, I create web content and edit documents written by his other writer (and temporary people in an offshore team), but Mr. Reliable’s main producer has gone missing for Easter. Two weeks’ holiday, right in the middle of a project. Guess who gets to carry the baton?

So over the last few days I’ve had so much to produce on such a short deadline that I’ve been “just writing”. 36Mb of content arrives in an email and off I go. Like verbal diarrhoea, but coming out the ends of my fingers onto the keyboard.

Engage brain, connect direct to hands, press “Start”. Let the ideas free-fall through synapses, unhindered by reason. Forget rhyme, thyme, lemon and lime . Do not pass “Go”, get out of jail free, you sunk my battleship. Thank you very much, Elvis has now left the building.

Surprisingly for one such as myself, it’s been quite a successful experience: the content is finished, the client is happy and I just need to go back and edit.

Whodathunkit?

Have you tried “just writing” or are you an edit-as-you-go person?

¹ In my opinion Nike ranks roughly at the level of slave traders, drug dealers, terrorists and politicians. Slapping a brand on everything conceivable to make a buck and finding new and interesting ways to cut costs (cough, sweat shops, cough) while pretending you’re a lovely, friendly, care-about-your-sporting-anatomy shoe company disgusts me.

² Which, by the way, is also the name of an excellent Australian movie based on real events. Watch it. It’s definitely worth the time. Freelunch says so, and he’s right.

He was a philosopher, thinker and liberal. He lectured. He did important things like creating an entire college at Oxford and wearing a hat. He was considered by some to be the Socrates of the modern world, even though he never sported a toga (or if he did, it was in private).

The essay was called “The Hedgehog and The Fox” and was based upon a fragment from an ancient Greek poem – “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. In it, he divided the world of writers and thinkers into two types of people.

The hedgehogs are those who see their work and the whole world through the lens of a single, dominating idea. Everything they do is influenced by this singular focus. There are plenty of better (highly classical) examples but I always think Tolkien is an easy one to see, since his entire output centred around Middle Earth.

The foxes, on the other hand, view the world through a kaleidoscope of ideas and influences. They change subjects, digress, follow ideas around wherever they go and regularly take new concepts on board. They’re like intellectual stalkers, always on the lookout for an attractive thought to sneak up on and have their way with. Shakespeare fits the bill here – not because of his dodgy flasher-in-a-trench-coat goatee but because of the vast array of different subjects  he covered.

Of course, the foxes and hedgehogs thing has been applied to a bunch of different subjects, from writing to business, art to politics and plenty more. But I wanted to ask you today…

Which do you think you are – a fox or a hedgehog?

Zo, tell me... how long hef you been feelink like zis?²

It’s NaNoWriMo this month – that’s the National Novel Writing Month – which means there’s a load of people trying to write a complete book in 30 days. I’m not taking part myself, but some of my online friends are. And some of them are struggling to find inspiration and determination.

If you search for motivation and creative ideas on the web, you’ll find an enormous number of blogs and other sites with practical ideas of how to beat writer’s block. Very few talk about why it happens, though. Since my lady happens to be a clinical psychologist, I thought I’d ask her.

It has to do with libido¹.

Freud is, as one would expect, the source of the original studies of libido. To summarise his work is an enormous task, but at its simplest (as I understand it) libido is the fuel that drives our motor: it’s the energy we use to do things that interest us. Most of the time, that energy is directed to the exterior – to things like writing, meeting people, working, playing, creating and so on.

Sometimes, though, the libido changes focus and is directed to the interior instead. This is the narcissism that Freud talks about: our energy turns inwards and makes us want to do less productive things. We want to sit back and relax, be looked after, to huddle inside our little psychological cocoon and hide from all the stresses of life.

In its simplest form, this is a good thing. It’s an alarm signal that we’re not looking after ourselves enough, that we’re pushing all our energy out into the world when we need to keep some. A good example of healthy narcissism is when we’re ill and want to snuggle under the duvet and eat comfort food (preferably prepared by someone else), or when we kick back and relax with a good book, a movie or the company of friends. A bit of me-time and we’re refuelled, raring to go again.

Of course, if the libido remains internally focussed for too long, it can be dangerous – this is the source of many psychoses, as in the example of Freud’s analysis of Dr. Schreber. Megalomania, paranoia, schizophrenia and other such problems can arise in severe cases.

Writer’s block is one form of the libido either moving to a different target or turning inwards. The energy needed for new ideas, to be wildly creative and invent stories has burnt out and we need to recuperate a little.

Unfortunately, the libido is not like a pet dog: we can’t just order it to do what we want. A large part of it is subconscious and, although it’s possible to grit our teeth and force ourselves to do something – thus redirecting the libido somewhat – it has a habit of going wherever it wants.

To continue the analogy, it’s like a pet cat. We can encourage it in a certain direction, but if it really doesn’t feel like going that way, it’ll just ignore us, find a comfy spot, sit down and lick its rear end.

So what’s the message for the NaNoWriMo writers (and anyone else suffering from writer’s block)?

It’s this: if you’re finding it tough going, it’s worth pushing yourself to see if that works. If it doesn’t, you may need to take a little time to redirect your libido somewhere else, before enticing it back to the book you’re writing.

Watch a movie, talk to friends, listen to music or go for a walk along the beach – any of these things can refuel the energy stores. But don’t leave it to its own devices for too long, or the libido will find a new target on its own and you’ll still be stuck.

Prod it back in the right direction. We can’t have it licking its nether regions, after all. It’s just not hygienic.

¹ Depending on whether you side with Freud or Jung, libido isn’t – or is – entirely sexual. Me? I don’t know doodly about it.

² I doubt Freud actually spoke like this – it’s just one of those stupid jokes we all do.

I have a feeling he meant something different, since I’m far more polite online, but I took the question as a desire to know whether I’d struggled with writing for a young audience.

The answer is most definitely “Yes”.

The original story for My Name Is Pie came from an article called Memoirs Of A Rescue Cat, which is a true story (with some very minor changes) told from the point of view of the rescue cat. Consequently, the language was already a little simpler than it would be in an academic article, for example, but was still a long way from a child’s level.

Converting that text into a story for kids was much, much tougher than I had imagined: a subjunctive would slip through here, a complex sentence there and an overly long phrase somewhere else. I must have re-read the text at least twenty times. I’ve never had to consider the tone of a piece of work so carefully before.

The thing that worked for me, though, was taking some good advice – I read it aloud. Not only that, but I read it with my eyes closed so that I could imagine being next to a child’s bed and reading it to them – you know, in the style of Princess Bride. Only without the incredible screen presence of Peter Falk. And with a less-annoying kid.

Every time the imaginary child said “What does that mean?” or looked confused, I knew I had a problem that needed sorting out.

It worked for me then, and I’ve found that it works in most circumstances. Now, whenever I write something important, I re-read it while pretending to be a person in my target audience, as best I can. I try to imagine how they will react and take out the bits where they roll their eyes.

Do you have a way that you check the tone of your writing, or do you just check for accuracy and trust that the content will suffice to reach the audience?