A Week in the Writing Life, 29 July 2023
Some great conversations and some dubious writing productivity.
Hello, and welcome. Way too hot of a week this week, but I’m hopeful we’ll get some relief in the next couple of days. Let’s talk a little writing.
Home Front Stuff
Pretty much the only interesting bit of news personally is the whole family is getting together tomorrow and the next weekend to help my daughter Madeline move to a new apartment in Iowa City. It will be her new base of operations for her senior year at the University of Iowa as she continues to study chemical engineering. Thankfully, it appears it will not be as hot as it was earlier this week.
Otherwise, it’s coming to the end of July, and now I’m starting to get a bit antsy as I tend to do once it rolls around to August 1. That’s the official time when I start wondering and thinking about the new school year and new classes.
This coming school year will be my third at this school district. It will be a bit different this year since during my first year, I was half special education and half general education (English) and my second year, I was all English, and now I will be all special education, which was my hope. I’m cautiously optimistic about the upcoming school year.
What I’ve Been Writing
…not much.
I am in the midst of a pretty long dry spot - maybe one of the longer ones I’ve had for a long time. I think I’m at this point because recently I was writing and planning something quite a bit exciting for me to some previously begun works that just seem more like work to me.
"Into the Cave"
Call this a new experiment. A week ago I wrote about a new possibility for a fiction series about professional wrestling. It’s not like I don’t have enough to do during my summer break, promoting my newest book (The Yank Striker), trying to write the sequel to said book, and continuing to come up with new and interesting stuff to read here. But it’s like I said more or less in the article, you might be able to ignore an idea in your head, but when characters take shape in your head and begin to have conversations with you and each other, it eventually becomes something you have to pay attention to.
This is a mentality that I’ve gotten to recognize in my writing habits. However, I’ve found some ways to overcome them and get past them, which I really need to start putting into gear. For example, if I’m writing a scene that seems to have turned into a chore, or just seems like work, sometimes I delay writing the scene and move on to another scene. Other options include radically reordering or rearranging some of the events in the scene, drastically reducing the length of the scene, or simply cutting the scene altogether.
I find the last option often can be the best for eliminating unnecessary scenes and speeding along the story. If I’m finding it boring, I have a good feeling people will thumb right past it.
So, I am hoping one or more of these techniques starts getting me out of the slump I’ve been in this week. It won’t be happening this weekend, with me trying to get out this week’s newsletter and moving my daughter out of her old place. Hope springs eternal.
What I’ve Been Doing Having to do With Writing
I was busy this week with an appearance with
on The Culture Buzz in Des Moines on Wednesday and an appearance at Beaverdale Books in Des Moines the same day, one of three Iowa independent bookstores where you can find The Yank Striker in stock. I’ve set up links to recordings of both events on a new section of the front page’s sidebar called Interviews. Go ahead and click on the links if you wanted to hear me in person.I don’t have many things coming up recently, but there are a few events I’ll be at this coming fall when I’ll have to be more of the “weekend warrior” than I have been this summer. So far:
From 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 9, I’ll be at the Groundswell Cafe, 201 3rd Ave. SW, Cedar Rapids, for an Indie Author Book Expo.
From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14, at MERGE, 136 Dubuque St., Iowa City, I’ll be participating in the book fair as part of the Iowa City Book Festival that week.
And from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, I will be at the Elwell Building at the Iowa State Fairgrounds as part of the 8th Annual Indie Author Book Expo.
I hope to see some of you either there or around, and I’ll put any other events up as I confirm them.
What I’ve Been Reading/General Recommendations
This week, I learned two writers/journalists I’ve long admired have joined the Substack community.
Even though
might still be somewhat beyond introduction several years into retirement from his run as a CBS news correspondent and anchorman, but I’ve appreciated his writing ever since rediscovering him on Facebook. On his new page , he keeps writing up good stuff like this observation on events in the Donal Trump classified documents case. is an author I’ve followed for a long time. I’ve long been a fan of his novels like Dress Grey and Army Blue, and in recent years I’ve appreciated his journalism in various publications such as The Village Voice. I was hyped to see him on Substack, with such articles as this one explaining the difference between the political world and the judicial world when it comes to the Trump situation.
I’ll really need to do another string of recommendations for Substack Notes when I get a free minute.
Writing Advice for This Week
As promised, some writing advice based on my reactions to the writing advice of others. I’ve decided to try this method for two reasons. First, it can be quite difficult generating new and novel writing advice on a regular basis. At least, this is the case for me. And second, except for a very few obvious examples (always capitalize the start of sentences, use proper punctuation), I am of the opinion there are always exceptions to many “tenets” of writing.
For starters, I’ll mention two this week, selected from the editorial staff of Custom-Writing.org’s “11 Basic Writing Rules – Common Mistakes & Fixes.”
The first rule it mentions is “Keep Your Sentences Short and Simple.” The reasoning for this rule is as follows:
To leave your readers satisfied and give them what they came for, you need to act fast. You don’t have time to ramble about random things, so your sentences should be short and straightforward.
The golden rules are:
You need to be able to fit up to 35 words in it.
The main focus should be on verbs and nouns.
Right, let’s dive into this. To start with, I would hope when you are putting together sentences you are focused on verbs and nouns, because there’s no such thing as sentences without them.
But also, sticking to an arbitrary limit of 35 words is not always advisable. In a short journalism piece of only a few paragraphs, sticking to several short sentences might be the best policy. However, the longer a writer’s text becomes, the more those short sentences become monotonous to read and kills reader interest. In these circumstances, you should use a wide variety of sentence lengths. It is all right to use short sentences, long sentences, and sentences in between, just as long as you don’t use them all the time.
The third rule on its list is “Include Simple Words and Word Combinations.”
[…] what’s the point of having short sentences when they’re filled with words that a regular person would rarely use in everyday life?
No one will ever want to look up the meaning of a certain word in the dictionary. […] Especially when quickly scanning through an article.
It isn’t a grammar rule per se, but it can save you much trouble.
Again, keeping things simple by using these simple word combinations is not an inherently bad idea, but sometimes you have to wander outside that comfort zone for you and your reader for specific reasons. Maybe you want to insert some obscure words into a certain character’s dialogue to show they are a sophisticated, well-read person (or are desperate to make people believe this). Or, like in my short story “Into the Cave” I mentioned a bit ago above, maybe I want to not only use the somewhat obscure word “kayfabe” but also explain its definition because I wanted to give readers insight into the specific culture it relates to (professional wrestling).
As with this and the previous rule, you always need to take the writing situation under consideration before you make choices based on those rules.
Writing Quote of the Week
Decided to go a bit further back in time than normal this week with a quote from one of the greats about the purpose of storytelling.
I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?
J.R.R. Tolkien
Final Thoughts
Would you be interested in me doing some book reviews? I’m always interested in trying something new, although if I did, I’d probably post those as separate from the regular newsletter.
If you have any questions, concerns, advice, let me know in the comments or email me. Any feedback you have would be valued, especially all of you fellow writers on Substack.
And that’s a wrap. As always, check the sidebar and author page links for my work, and I’d love you to leave a review of my books as well wherever you get them. Thanks.