the word player 2.0

This past weekend, a friend said "So, I see you don't post very often on the blog anymore."

This is true. I feel like I'm lacking enough subject matter to post with any regularity, and waiting for inspiration to strike only provides me with sporadic bits and pieces to chew on.

"Inspiration is for amateurs," someone once said about writing. I agree to the extent that you can't rely on it on a day-to-day basis. It is, however, invaluable in creating a keystone around which other pieces of the puzzle can coalesce.

I can't bring myself to write movie or record or book reviews due to the sheer glut of material already out there on the subject. Besides, I want to continue progressing as a professional writer, and the paid critic is a dying breed.

When I started this blog, more than anything it was a new channel for me to funnel and explore my creative impulses after hanging up my screenwriting boots. For over five years straight I'd been constantly working on one script or another, often taking more than a year to "complete" one. I really, really enjoyed the immediacy of completing something short and sweet in one sitting. Blogging not only flexed new writing muscles, but I quickly discovered that it kept me limber in other valuable areas as well.

After a year or so, however, I got the feeling that I was writing only for myself and a small handful of friends. If you'll permit me to speak frankly, I'm at a stage in my writing development where I need to either be writing for an audience or writing for money. Writing for neither is simply unsatisfying (sorry amigos), and gives me the unshakable sensation that my time would be better spent elsewhere.



So here's the crossroads where I find myself today, the fifth Wednesday of 2009. In the four years I've been seriously pursuing copywriting, it has become the first career path in my life where I can genuinely see an intersection of ability, confidence, earning potential and job satisfaction. I love doing the work, I just can't seem to find enough of it on a consistent basis. In the last 10 days, I've had three jobs that I thought were in the bag fall through. Two of them were because the client decided to call in favors with friends of theirs who are writers and try to get the work done for free.

I can't compete with free.

I am promoting myself as a copywriter as best I can using other more traditional channels, but as of this morning (hell, as of this hour) I am determined to exploit this forum more vigorously and inventively. I need to draw more attention to myself in order to reach the pivotal demographic of people who have money to pay writers to write. This is not an easy pill for a mellow introvert to swallow, but them's the breaks.

Now, I realize that blogging about the internal workings of my mind (what I've essentially been doing since the end of the "Bend Me, Shape Me" series) is never going to draw a crowd (and is probably boring as shit to most of you). I also know that I have now reached the end of this post without inspiration striking me with a swell solution to my dilemma (damn).

So, over the next week or two I will brainstorm here "live" for an hour every day I can. I'll see if I can come up with a new central conceit for this blog that will not only engage me creatively, but also have a realistic chance to draw a much larger audience to the site than the one I currently enjoy (an average of 45 page visits/64 page views per day).

I encourage you to chime in. If you've never been here before, a quick glance at the Labels running down the right-hand side should give you an idea of what sort of subject matter I respond to historically.

I market myself as a concept-driven copywriter, so I should damn well be able to come up with a marketable concept for myself.

Right?

We'll see what the process creates. Lacking inspiration (so far), it's time to turn to perspiration.

Dog Ears #14: On Writing

I'd planned to take a break from Dog Ear-ing for a while, and had skipped the last book I read (Chip Kidd's The Learners- good, but not great). The next book on my stack was Stephen King's nonfiction On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, a book I'd picked from an assortment of giveaways in the basement of AB and UM over the holidays. When I began I wasn't planning on Dog Ear-ing it either, but there were just too many plums I couldn't resist picking... et voila.

It's always a pleasure when Mr. King leads you down into the cellar

Including On Writing I've now read 22 books written by King, far and away the largest number by any one author. In scanning his chronological bibliography, I also realized that I hadn't read any King since 1997's Wizard and Glass, the fourth installment of the frustratingly ambitious Dark Tower series. I'm not sure why I stopped reading King for so long, but my best guess is that he was just so damn prolific that I stopped trying to keep up and, kind of like a favorite band you veer away from after years of faithful devotion, I realized that I needed a break.

Even though On Writing is nonfiction, it's written in King's instantly recognizable voice, and I realized how much I'd missed it after such a long break. The book's more or less broken up into three sections- King's own personal history and evolution as a writer, his advice on how to manage the art and craft of writing itself, and finally a harrowing chapter on his near-fatal encounter with a

BLOGGER'S NOTE

Above, I stopped writing mid-sentence when Mrs. Word Player walked in the door. We decided to go out and grab some lunch, so I walked away from the computer and this post. What I had been about to write was that King, as a pedestrian, was struck by a car in a horrible accident near his home in the middle of writing On Writing, and didn't finish it for months.

In true, eerie King fashion, we got in the car to drive to lunch today and got in a car accident in an intersection not far from our home. We were both shaken up but uninjured and the other driver (also uninjured) was clearly at fault. As I was driving the rental car home after dropping our car off to get fixed the weird synchronicity struck me, and oddly made me feel a little better about the whole thing. At least no one had to be evacuated by helicopter for emergency surgery...

Fortunately, the other driver didn't hiss "Thinner!" at me while exchanging insurance information

That said, I'm a touch freaked out.

Anyway, here are some of the best Dog Ears from On Writing.

p37 "Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up."

p163 "... stories are found things, like fossils in the ground. ... Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible."

p249 logrolling: |ˈlôgˌrōli ng; ˈläg-|
noun
1 informal the practice of exchanging favors, esp. in politics by reciprocal voting for each other's proposed legislation. [ORIGIN: from the phrase you roll my log and I'll roll yours.]
2 a sport in which two contestants stand on a floating log and try to knock each other off by spinning it with their feet.

The boy that launched a million nightmares

Well, it seems that after I cut a few DE's that didn't seem as compelling as I thought they were laying in bed, this installment is a little thin. Let's insert the two DE's I couldn't resist making in The Learners to beef the piece up, yes?

p160 "'Lars once said there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and everyone else.'"

p175. "Miss Preech: 'Your five o'clock is here. The respondent to the shoe ad. A Mr. Harshbarger.'
'Send him up.' Tip rubbed his hands listlessly. 'Oh, I'm just filled with antisappointment.'
'Pardon?'
'Antisappointment. Anticipation colliding head-on with the certainty of its own doom."

I think we've all experienced our fair share of antisappointment, yes?

One final note- tomorrow is the one year anniversary of this blog. Feel free to take the day off from work and celebrate with me. To borrow once more from Stephen King, thank you Faithful Reader.

Getting Some Words in Edgewise

At last, I can finally add "blogger" to my CV.

The other purpose of this blog is to have some fun with words; written, spoken, performed, and otherwise. I read and write and research for work and for pleasure, and over the course of a day I usually come across a good quote or underused word or phrase or idiom that is new or interesting to me. Mrs. Word Player and I are also amateur neologists, but we are shy about introducing our new concoctions at cocktail parties.

Artist Trish Grantham's "Must Find Solid Ground"

Now, I have someplace to play around with these words of my day and record the moments we shared for posterity.

The first quote I'll share was almost repurposed for the name of the blog itself, as it's a longtime favorite.

"I hate water. Fish fuck in it."
W.C. Fields (comedian/actor/misanthrope)

Upon reflection, that one's pretty self-explanatory.