"Seven ways to improve your writing … right now"

James Chartrand is confident the following advice will make you a better writer:

1. Be concise and be clear
2. Keep it short
3. Stick to three
4. Watch your tone
5. Talk Food, Sex, and Danger
6. Break it up
7. Stay on topic

You may already be aware of some of the points on this list. What makes this post on Copyblogger interesting to read is the snappy writing. What James Chartrand preaches, James Chartrand practises.

Elaborating on "Watch your tone", for instance, Chartrand says it’s easy for writers to assume readers can pick up on our mood and tone from our writing:

After all, we certainly know our feelings, humor, intent, and state of mind at the time we write. But for readers, it’s clear as mud. They’re guessing at your tone — and they may guess wrong.

Here’s an example:

    Honey. Please.

Was I exasperated and rolling my eyes? Smiling and gently teasing? Acidly sarcastic? Or maybe just eating toast and reaching for the bear-shaped bottle?

As a reader, you have no idea unless the words around that phrase cue you into my written tone.

That's great advice. In fact, all of it is great advice. Not to mention, a treat to read. Go for it here: "7 Ways to Improve Your Writing … Right Now". Also scan the "popular articles" list provided alongside. Take a look at "11 Smart Tips for Brilliant Writing". Read "How Twitter makes you a better writer". Compare this post with mine: "Two benefits of Twitter I can think of".

• Are you curious to know more about James Chartrand? Would you like to know why James Chartrand wears women's underpants? Check out this post.

It took him just two hours to write a poem, half a day to finish a short story, and nine days for a full-scale novel.

You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.

This practical advice on writing, which I share every year with my students, comes from Ray Bradbury, the American author of more than 500 published works (so he knew what he was talking about).

For Bradbury, who died earlier this week in Los Angeles, writing was playing. "I don’t think I know what writer's block is," he said. "I never had it. My typewriter goes everywhere I go. I get up at 3 a.m. every day, head for the keyboard, laugh a lot, then go back to bed."

This gem of a quote is from The Writing Life, edited by Maria Arana, who tells us in her introduction to Bradbury’s essay in the book that it took him just two hours to write a poem, half a day to finish a short story, and nine days for a full-scale novel.

FULL OF LIFE: RAY BRADBURY AT A BOOK SIGNING IN CALIFORNIA IN 1997.

Zen in the Art of Writing, which he first published in 1990 (and which was my first Flipkart acquisition), also gives us a peek into Bradbury's enjoyment of his work. I remember taking a quote from Zen and posting it as my Facebook status update soon after I began reading it:

If you're writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you're only half a writer.... For the first thing a writer should be is — excited.

The book is packed with practical — that word again — tips on writing from a man who was clearly a master of the craft. If your aim is to write and to enjoy writing, I can't recommend Zen in the Art of Writing highly enough.

• The New York Times was exuberant, fittingly, in its praise of Ray Bradbury the day after he died. Read the obituary — and learn why more than eight million copies of Bradbury's books have been sold in 36 languages — here: "He Brought Mars to Earth With a Lyrical Mastery".

• The day before he died, the New Yorker published an autobiographical essay by Ray Bradbury, in which he described the influences that shaped his life as a boy and that later had an impact on his life as a writer. Read the essay here: "Take Me Home".

• Also read: "Remembering Ray Bradbury with 11 Timeless Quotes on Joy, Failure, Writing, Creativity, and Purpose"

• Also read: "If you love what you do, is it 'work'?"

• Also read: "In one place, everything you want to know about writing in English".

• Photograph courtesy: Associated Press.

When it comes to writing, experience is NOT everything

Here is a job ad in the latest issue of The Economist:

Vacancy: The Economist is hiring a finance writer to cover hedge funds, private equity and insurance. Experience is less important than the ability to write simply, insightfully and entertainingly. Applicants should send a copy of their CV, along with a 500-word article on this bit of finance, by June 15th to financejob@economist.com.

Now you know why The Economist, which was first published in September 1843 to take part in "a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress", is considered one of the world's best magazines.

• Also read: "Corporate role models: Mother Teresa and (gasp!) Lady Gaga".

The pleasure is all ours, Anjum!

Bangalore's very own Anjum Hasan will be celebrating the publication of her new book at an event at the British Council here on Tuesday. (Anjum spent her early years in Shillong and is now the Books Editor of the venerable New Delhi-headquartered Caravan magazine — but it is in Bangalore that, I like to think, she found her calling.)

Difficult Pleasures, the new short-fiction collection that was released in March, has already earned praise from critics. "The 13 stories ... are a good indicator why Anjum Hasan is widely regarded as a rising star on the literary horizon, as fluid in prose as poetry," wrote the reviewer in The Hindu earlier this month.

How did Anjum get her start? Who are the short story writers she admires? What does she think of short stories? Here, in an excerpt from an e-mail Anjum sent out along with details of the launch of Difficult Pleasures, she provides the answers to those questions:

As a child, I learnt the concept early — the name of the ingredient crucial to storytelling. It was a word my parents used often and approvingly for clever people, the word ‘imaginative’. I knew that if I had to count for anything, I would have to learn to make things up. From the tidy and well-stocked shelves in the children’s section of Shillong’s municipal library, one could pick out and immerse oneself in any made-up world one wanted to. Then there were the stories that one didn’t choose but loved all the same — the English high school reader khichdi of such supposedly immortal texts as an excerpt from John Buchan’s 1910s thriller Thirty-Nine Steps or that terrifying Chekov story, ‘The Bet’ or the highly sentimental ‘The Last Lesson’ by Alphonse Daudet — set in the French region of Alsace-Lorraine which, after the end of the Franco-Prussian war, is on the point of passing into Prussian hands.

When I got to university, one of my monthly pleasures was the arrival in the library of cracklingly new copies of American journals such as Partisan Review and The Southern Review. Before the poems, I would turn to the short stories. What would impress me were not so much the stories in the stories — in the sense of the chain of events described — as the texture — clothes, food, the way people spoke, how colours were named. I envied that texture; I wanted it. I started writing poems as a way of telling stories, trying to locate the specific, the expressible in my own world.

Many short story writers I admire, such as Qurratulain Hyder or Mahasweta Devi, are not writing individually distinctive stories as much as describing in each story a slightly different facet of the same world. Several recent collections of short fiction have been billed ‘linked stories’ because a single background runs through the collection, and characters recur. But that idea of ‘linked’ is often implicit without needing to be highlighted in the older writers. RK Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories is obviously a compact — stories about tradesmen and professional men who must undertake various minor and comic negotiations in order to keep going in an imperfect world.

Perhaps this is true of many short story writers. Raymond Carver’s stories can each seem to have a different quality of strangeness but aren’t they usually about people like himself, the unsentimental, the down and out, the working poor? I’m fascinated by this ability in a short story writer — to create a world in relation to which each story is but one expression.

But I’m also fascinated by the opposite — how a single story, or even a glimpse of a single character within it, does not necessarily have to rely on larger references for its appeal. My own characters are often solitary individuals whose choices are no longer so determined by older social mores, but who therefore have to invent their freedoms. They don’t draw on a world as much as try to locate one. Have I succeeded, therefore, in making things up? Is it possible, walking down a dark street and seeing a lighted doorway, to imagine the world beyond it? The mystery of that lighted doorway is what keeps the story going. You can never walk through it, every story is a just a means of trying.

I just love that phrase, "The mystery of that lighted doorway is what keeps the story going." Back in 2010, Anjum had visited Commits for an interactive session with our students, who were so captivated by what she had to say that two hours just whizzed by... and many students didn't even get to ask her their questions. So, later, I sent them to Anjum via e-mail. You can read those questions and her responses here: "A-1 advice from an author".

For more details about Anjum Hasan's works, visit her website: AnjumHasan.com.

• I have already bought a copy of Difficult Pleasures. After I finish reading it, I'll place it in the Commits library, next to the copies of Neti, Neti and Lunatic in My Head.

• EXTERNAL READING: "The long and short of a story", Open magazine's interview with Anjum Hasan.

"Yes man" redefined... and given a new sense of purpose

Find a way to say yes to things.

Say yes to invitations to a new country. Say yes to meeting new friends. Say yes to learning a new language, picking up a new sport. Yes is how you get your first job, and your next job. Yes is how you find your spouse, and even your kids.

Even if it's a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means you will do something new, meet someone new, and make a difference in your life, and likely in others' lives as well. ...

Yes is a tiny word that can do big things. Say it often.

— Excerpt from the commencement speech made last month by Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt (pictured above) at the University of California at Berkeley

• Also read: Wisdom and inspiration from author Neil Gaiman's commencement speech at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia and An uplifting commencement address by CNN-IBN's Sushasini Haidar.

A novel you will want to finish reading in one sitting

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO READ MY FACEBOOK STATUS UPDATE AND THE COMMENTS.

I first came upon The Devotion of Suspect X at the Crossword bookstore in Garuda Mall. I was intrigued by the tagline on the cover. "The Japanese Stieg Larsson" read the blurb from The Times.

When I next visited the Just Books library, a couple of days later, a quick search at the computer kiosk told me it was available, and I picked it up and began reading it as soon as I got home.

The last time I found a thriller "unputdownable" was a few years ago when I raced through Johnny Gone Down, by Karan Bajaj. Now I had found a worthy successor.

I returned Suspect X to Just Books after I was done but I wanted more people to read it, so I ordered a copy from Flipkart. My wife is reading it now — she is thoroughly captivated — and afterwards I'm going to place it in the Commits library so that my students can enjoy reading it.

I guarantee even non-readers will love this one.

• UPDATE: My young friend in the US, Ankita Maurya, wrote to say she doesn't really like the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. "Is this still a good book, even with the comparison with Larsson?" she wanted to know.
  
  "Ironically, Ankita," I replied, "this book is nothing like Larsson's books; that is why I found that Times blurb a bit of a mystery. I think what the reviewer meant was this book also is a cult favourite and a bestseller, just like the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the sequels. Go ahead and pick up Suspect X — you'll love it." 

• UPDATE (August 8, 2012): From the latest issue of Open: "At last, there is someone to satisfy an Agatha Christie aficionado’s longing for old school whodunits — Japanese author Keigo Higashino".

• UPDATE (March 18, 2013): Today, at breakfast, I began reading Salvation of a Saint, Higashino's follow-up to The Devotion of Suspect X. Now I can't wait to get home from work and be done with my gym workout so that I can sit down again with Salvation of a Saint.

• UPDATE (January 18, 2015):  Salvation of a Saint, featuring two of the main characters in Suspect X, turned out to be a page-turner too. So when another of my young friends, the Toronto-based Nasatassia Michael, told me that one more Higashino mystery had just been published in English, I immediately pre-ordered the book, Malice, on Amazon. I am glad to report that I was wowed by Malice. Once again, almost from the beginning, we know who has been murdered and by whom. And once again we keep turning the pages breathlessly, this time to try to learn why. With every Higashino book I read, my admiration for his writing skills grows exponentially. How on earth does he do it?

For a journalist's wife, trouble and strife

It can be exciting to be a journalist.

But to be a journalist's wife?

To have to wait up till all odd hours for your husband to return from work? To know that he can be called out on duty even in the midst of celebrations for your anniversary or for your child's birthday? To have to attend office get-togethers where all your husband's colleagues insist on talking shop and boring you to tears?

That can't be much fun. And it isn't.

I was reminded of what it means to be a journalist's wife (I can't speak for journalists' husbands) when I read Stephen Manuel's heart-felt tribute to "our better halves" on JournalismPakistan.com.

Steve, who was my colleague at the Khaleej Times in Dubai many years ago, and who is now the chief editor of JournalismPakistan.com, which he co-founded, begins his post on journalist's wives with a humorous reference to an incident narrated by another Khaleej Times colleague, Asif Ullah Khan, who hails from Jaipur and who is now the editor of Brunei Times. Steve then gets to the crux of the issue:

Looking back now I realise just how hard those times were for us that worked on the night shift at the Khaleej Times and just how much harder it must have been on our wives. I can certainly recall mine waiting up till 3.30 am for me, heating my "late dinner" and giving me a good cup of tea. She didn't have to, but she did.

Night duty is not easy on a journalist's family, Steve writes.

They [the wives] have to take the kids to school, get in household supplies, take care of the utility bills, cook, and even put up patiently with the office stories their husbands bring home.

Spare a thought for journalist's wives, is Steve's fervent plea.

Read the post in its entirety here: "Dedicated to our better halves".

UPDATE (July 30, 2016): Does it help if both partners are journalists? Perhaps it does. Read this piece by NDTV reporter Saurabh Gupta who fell in love with, and married, his colleague, Shivangi Shukla — Falling in love over a TV news bulletin.

When complaints from the public mean you must be doing something good

Those who work in the media have to know how to deal with complaints from the public. If you're a journalist, for instance, it feels good to have a reader (or viewer) writing in and commenting on what you have published (or aired), even if that comment is critical. You feel good because it means someone has read what you have written or watched your news show and taken it seriously enough to give you feedback. You don't have to get into a tizzy just because your work made someone angry. (You need to develop a thick skin early on, says CNN-IBN's Suhasini Haidar.) If the criticism is warranted, and there is an error in what you have reported, a correction may be in order. Otherwise, just read the e-mail and move on.

Would the same principle apply if you were a syndicated cartoonist? If you were Stephan Pastis, the creator of the laugh-out-loud Pearls Before Swine comic strip?

Judge for yourself from these excerpts taken from his introduction to a collection of Pearls strips, "The Sopratos":

Being a syndicated cartoonist means getting a lot of e-mail.

But the best of the best, the crème de la crème, are the complaints.

First, there are the just-plain-hate-filled folk, who load their e-mail with lots of exclamation points and keep hitting the “CAPS LOCK” button

“You think you’re funny, but you’re NOT!! You SUCK!!! Your comic has never made me laugh! Not even close! And you can’t draw worth SH*T!”

When I’m bored, I will sometimes send those people the following:

“Dear Pearls Fan, 

“Thank you for your kind words. Your support of Pearls is appreciated. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming popularity of the strip, Mr. Pastis cannot respond to each and every one of his fans personally, but he’s glad to hear you enjoy the strip.”

More than not, that will trigger a follow-up e-mail. Those look like this:

“&$%@ you, you #&$@#*. I am NOT a fan of your @*&@ing comic. And DON’T SEND ME YOUR %#*#ing FORM E-MAILS.”

This of course means I have to send him the same response a second time.

Then there are the more specific folk. These people write when a particular strip or series of strips has angered them. Ohhh, there’ve been a few of these.

Off the top of my head, and in no particular order:

• Greek people (upset at being depicted as dirty restaurant owners)

• Parents of kids with ADD (angry at my saying they shouldn’t be drugged)

• Palestinians (angry at the Jerusalem bus strip)

• Bisexuals (furious that I called a lonely man who would date people of either sex a “desperasexual”)

• Family Circus fans (angry over any number of things I’ve done — depicting the kids as grown-up alcoholics, having Dolly say, “I love my dead grandpa,” or having the kids shelter Osama Bin Laden for a week)

• Family members of people suffering with Lou Gehrig’s disease (angry at Pig for saying how coincidental it was that a guy named Lou Gehrig died from something called “Lou Gehrig’s disease”.)

• George W. Bush supporters (mad that I had Rat writing him a letter saying that if he was going to bomb all 192 countries, he’d better pick up the pace)

• Homosexuals (mad that Rat called Pig a “fairy”)

• Baby Blues fans (deeply offended that I would show their favourite characters being babysat by Rat, above, who sat alone at their kitchen table doing tequila shots)

• Turkish people (apoplectic over my naming a llama “Ataturk”, a former leader of Turkey. This one even triggered a letter from the Turkish ambassador to the United States.)

• Nuns (angry that I referred to a nun getting an enema)

• Abraham Lincoln supporters (offended that I showed Lincoln saying, “I need to see another play like I need a hole in the head.”)

Add to these the more general never-ending complaints about having the characters swear, drink, smoke, and shoot guns, and it’s easy to see:

I’VE GOT THE GREATEST JOB IN THE WORLD.

Also read: "You won't believe how this popular comic strip artist gets his ideas".

Want to be a journalist? Rejection is good for the soul (and other advice from a media veteran)

Two minutes after I published a post today on Neil Gaiman's inspirational commencement address at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, I was alerted by Commitscion Neelima Bhamidipati (Class of 2012), via Twitter, to another uplifting commencement speech. Veteran CNN-IBN anchor Suhasini Haidar, who spoke to graduating students of WMA (World Media Academy) earlier this month, has posted her speech on her blog.

Haidar told the students she was rejected seven times when she applied for a job as a television journalist. Then, while explaining how rejection can be a boost for aspiring journalists, she listed her five wishes for young people seeking a career in journalism:

I am going to hope for you that each of you gets rejected for a job in exactly the same way because if you don’t understand what your passion is, it helps to have an interviewer that does. Because in the profession you have chosen, there will be many reasons to quit, and only one reason to stay — and that is the passion to tell a story.

1. I wish for you a really mean boss, one who makes you cry. Let’s be honest. This is a tough business, one where you have to push and bully your way to a story, you need to develop a thick skin early on.

2. I wish for you many, many days spent in the heat. So much of our job requires you to stand on someone else’s footpath, waiting for the person who lives inside to come out or go in; it’s a great thing to get used to.

3. I wish for you many unwell colleagues. That does sound horrid, but honestly, it’s how I got most of my early breaks. You get sent on an assignment only because someone else is indisposed.

4. I wish for you assignments in places where telephones and computers don’t work, because the joy of heading out to a remote area, where you work on one story for three days without having to report back, no hour-on-hour deadline pressure is something you must do.

5. I wish for you interviews with many eccentric quirky people… because those are the ones who will give you the story.

Read Suhasini Haidar's commencement address in its entirety on her blog: "Dear journalism students, I wish you many job rejections".

UPDATE (June 16, 2014): Earlier this month, Suhasini Haidar delivered the convocation address at the 9.9 School of Communication, where she asserted that good journalism can change you. Read the address in its entirety here.

• Also read: Wisdom and inspiration in Neil Gaiman's commencement address.

Wisdom and inspiration from Neil Gaiman

He is the multi-talented, multi-award-winning author of brilliant works such as The Sandman and The Graveyard Book. He is also a hero to many young people. And that is why the commencement speech Neil Gaiman gave earlier this month at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia is drawing raves on the Web.

I watched the speech on YouTube this morning after receiving the link from Commitscion Natasha Rego (Class of 2014). She wrote she found it to be "beautifully inspiring". I agree, and I think you will, too.

YOU LEARN BY MAKING MISTAKES: NEIL GAIMAN

While there are many thoughtful and thought-provoking aspects to what Gaiman said, what I found striking was that he got his start as a journalist:

I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to simply go and find out how the world works, and besides, to do those things I needed to write and to write well, and I was being paid to learn how to write economically, crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on time.

Gaiman also makes a lot of sense when he speaks about learning from failure:

The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, and things go wrong. My first book — a piece of journalism I had done for the money, and which had already bought me an electric typewriter  from the advance — should have been a bestseller. It should have paid me a lot of money. If the publisher hadn't gone into involuntary liquidation between the first print run selling out and the second printing, and before any royalties could be paid, it would have done.

And I shrugged, and I still had my electric typewriter and enough money to pay the rent for a couple of months, and I decided that I would do my best in future not to write books just for the money. If you didn't get the money, then you didn't have anything. If I did work I was proud of, and I didn't get the money, at least I'd have the work.

Every now and again, I forget that rule, and whenever I do, the universe kicks me hard and reminds me.

To plug into Neil Gaiman's very original philosophy and to understand why what he said is such a hit, watch the full commencement address yourself here.

If you would rather read up on the six key points of Gaiman's address, go here.

• Also read: Neil Gaiman talks to the New York Times about his favourite books, his reading habits, and other book-related matters: By the Book.

• Neil Gaiman is not the only journalist who has gone on to do other things in the media. Read A marketing whiz and the lessons she learned from journalism to know why good journalists make good media professionals.

• Also read: "Want to be a journalist? Rejection is good for the soul (and other advice from a media veteran)" — An uplifting commencement address by CNN-IBN's Suhasini Haidar.