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Writing with a razor

April 22, 2012 writing
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As I get more comfortable with the process of writing my memoir, the question that has come up in the memoir writing classes I recently took, as well as the writing group formed from those classes, is this: How much do you tell?

Knife of the Artist, by Sigurd Decroos of Belgium

Behind that is the fear of recrimination, retribution or remorse from the people in your life who will by necessity appear in your story. While the fear of causing certain people pain does occasionally prick at me like a hard needle to the ribs, I find it easier and easier to dismiss such considerations in the drive to tell the story that is demanding to be told. The story is so ripe that I find myself writing it out loud during the day, narrating it to my iPhone, and organizing it in the margins of notes I take during meetings. I remember that this sole consideration is what kept Anaïs Nin from publishing her unexpurgated diary during her lifetime, and that this fear made her almost a lesser artist.

You have to be fearless. You have to write as if with a razor; excising extraneous detail and what absolutely must be removed for legal considerations, but honing right to the edge of memory. Otherwise the story will not be true. Truth may be a relative concept in the larger world, but inside the story, true is what you know intuitively. And it will be the white lies used to cover up feelings that will cut the story to pieces until it cannot compel. What is the point of writing it at all, if it doesn’t make a dent in the world?

Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.–W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge, 1943

I know my story needs to be told so someone will choose life instead of death. So some people in my story will have to understand, or deny me. I can live with denial, but I cannot suppress this story anymore.

Children were dying then

May 5, 2011 projects / writing
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Kier Hardie, 1905

Kier Hardie addresses a crowd in Manchester, 1905

And so were miners–over 250 of them up in a blast at Pontypridd in 1894, which pissed Keir off so fierce he stuffed his deerstalker on his head and proceeded to rage at the House of Commons. Five years later perfectly respectable ladies were practicing take-downs in their back gardens, collecting bags of stones to throw through shop windows, and smacking bobbies right in the face, when they weren’t spitting on them. But the ladies who were fighting and the miners who were fighting weren’t on the same side. And then there was the War, which was actually good for all of them.

Yes, it was the best thing that could have happened. Interesting story there . . .

Without leaving

September 7, 2010 writing
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Hope, a weather beaten boat photographed by Bern Altman

Hope by Bern Altman of Great Falls, VA courtesy stockXchng

I know my own luck. I know how rare it is for a person to be able to do this. And I know more and more what I’m doing it for. I feel a kind of strength starting to happen that is wholly legitimate, that is not some trapping I wear until it falls off. It is though the thing has roots, and seeks the sun with its face turned toward it. And I know I never would have found it without leaving. — Elizabeth Berg, from The Pull of the Moon (Random House, 1996).

Since I’ve been working in marketing writing, I’ve had four jobs, and each job has had something of a dramatic ending, followed by a period of some trauma or painful event, followed by a surge of skills growth and personal development.

So I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that the ending of my fourth and latest job should have been dramatic (soap-opera worthy, complete with tears and walking out with the contents of my cubicle in the biggest empty box I could find), abrupt (my contract was terminated at 7:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, over the telephone–oh the havoc I could have unleashed if I had been in the mood, with all those passwords active and the big Box none the wiser! but I digress), and painful (securing my unemployment benefits took almost 9 weeks).

What is surprising is the flow of speculative project work that has been coming my way, all of it enormously promising to my career in a make-it-now-and-don’t-look-back kind of way. I am working on a killer book project with a college friend; a potential booming new business with an old colleague is in the works; and just today, my sister asks me if I want to, um, I dunno, start a business with some help from an angel investor who looks like my brother-in-law? While I was navigating the perils of an unsteady contract, fearing every day that I would lose my job and oh by the way, starting to hate that place, I was frantically searching for a life preserver in the form of a new job. But if my contract had not been terminated, I never would have seen all those safety rings waiting in the water.

Most of my life I pursued “something else” because I believed writing was never going to pay off.  Now I sometimes mourn all that time I wasted, not writing. I supposed middle age is a fine time to realize I could make the very most of the lots of time left, if I get off my ass now.

Oh, and poems are coming back to me now. Poetry!–something I thought I’d never feel a spark for again! I had not written a new poem in at least seven years, and in the last three days I’ve written three. They suck, but still . . .! Poetry. Wow.

Usability Hell: A TechComm Primer for Yahoo! Search Marketing

February 24, 2006 writing
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Yesterday I signed up for a Yahoo! Search Marketing account. I neglected to write down the user name and password I chose. It was never e-mailed to me. I received a welcome message that listed the keyterms I had chosen for my first campaign, and an HTML-coded marketing message directing me to learn how to use the system. In the email was a login url.

At the login url I entered what I thought was my user name and password. It is apparently incorrect. This is when I entered the seventh circle of user hell. I received a re-loaded page with one new feature: a bolded red line of text that read:

Login failed. Try again (Note, it didn’t say please).

After three attempts, I clicked on the Forgot Password? prompt at the bottom of the login box. I got to a new html page with a two-line form that read:

Forget Your Password?

Please enter your user name and e-mail address below. If a match is found, we will supply your Password Hint.

I entered what I thought was my username and my email address. The feedback I received was this:

 

 

Username must be between 3 and 20 characters.

 

There is no option to insert my account ID. There is no help link.
I returned to the home page and clicked on help, and there is no link to anything that lists “password.” Help does not contain a search box, but only links to directory items. I clicked on “account management.” I got to an FAQ that seemed like it would help. It read:

What if I have forgotten my password and/or Yahoo! ID?

You can get a new password, a Yahoo! ID reminder, or both. Go to the Sign-in Problems page and supply some basic verification information, such as your birthday and the ZIP code you provided when you registered.

Make sure to provide the same information you gave during registration or when you last updated your account. Without the correct verification information, you will not be able to obtain a new password.

I clicked on the hyperlink for the sign-in problems page. The page only reloads. I tried this three times in frustration. I can’t login to my damned Yahoo! account. I don’t know if my ads are running. Someone is going to get very nasty letters from a very pissed-off law firm marketer. Tsk, tsk, tsk.


What we have here is . . .

October 2, 2005 writing
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The Raleigh News & Observer published the first in a five-part series today on regional rail in the Triangle, entitled “Triangle Trains: Off Track?” The gist of today’s article was that the project is under threat from increasing federal scrutiny of it’s ridership forecasts. It’s easy to see why this project is going “off the rails” when one looks at the proposed map of the trains. What we have here is an utter failure of imagination. It makes me sadder than I can say. Because the trains are being built right where the riders aren’t.

The Triangle is well on its way to becoming Atlanta. When 540 is completed, it will already be too late. The suburban sprawl will be crowding the borders of that freeway before all its asphalt is down and we’ll have to plan another loop. Next stop: annexation. Hell, ESPN anchors already mistakenly call this area “Raleigh-Durham.” What’s to stop the cities from merging? (Besides, as a State fan, I can’t help but feel the world can do without Chapel Hill, but I digress).

Only a blithering idiot can fail to see that the growth of our area is happening in South and East Wake County, Northeast Wake County, Johnston County, Wake Forest, and Creedmoor, and that the bulk of these developments are lower-to-middle class income settlements where the houses are actually affordable for real people. It’s also swelling south of Cary down Fuquay way. Just where 540 is going. Why didn’t the planners of the freeway get together with the planners of the railway? The railway planners planned a downtown-as-center model taking advantage of existing rail. I’m sure they congratulated themselves for doing so. They completed ignored the suburban-to-urban commuter model in which people park-and-ride. Part of the new system is supposed to be an upgrade of what I believe are five separate bus systems serving the greater metro area which makes getting from one part of this sprawl to another an exercise in absolute futility. I looked into taking the bus from home to class, until I found out it would take me over an hour and a half to get from Six Forks and Millbrook to NC State by bus. As my grandmother used to say, these are the same kind of people that put Christ on a cross.

Obviously the railway planners took the path of least resistance: existing rail lines, which run between the downtown centers of Raleigh and Durham, where richer people now live and continue to gentrify. If the cities manage to stop it I’ll eat my Durham Bulls hat, but I’m digressing yet again. There are few to no train stations planned where poorer people live and are moving in ever-increasing numbers. The rail is going straight through RTP, in order to take advantage of existing rail lines. It’s going to be a commuter rail for people who live in the nicer suburban areas (Cary, let’s just be blunt about it, shall we?). Instead of making a railline for probable users, the TTA designed a railline of least resistance, and is going to let the poorer people fend for themselves. They plan, apparently, to take the harder route of preaching to people who live close to RTP to abandon their cars and take the trains, while people who live in Northeast, Southeast and Eastern Wake who are more likely NOT TO HAVE CARS AND USE RAIL will have to continue to take a bewildering and time-sucking route on buses if they want to save money (or have to use public transport because they don’t have a car). I imagine most of the TTA budget will be used to market to the richer people the advantages of giving up their cars instead of to the poorer people the advantages of using public transport to get around: the poorer people who actually need the trains.

I believe the ridership estimates will sink the TTA project because they have to be based on the existing bus routes in the area of the rail, which SUCK and are practically non-existent because people there don’t want or need the bus; they drive Lexuses and Hummers, for God’s sake. Surely they did not take into account the bus routes in Northeast and Southeast Wake nor the commuters who live in Wake Forest, Wilson, Johnston county, etc., etc., etc., who might be persuaded to give up their cars if there were convenient stations NEAR 540 where they could park their cars, get on trains safely, and get to work. Somebody failed to see this among the trees and the land where 540 would go, and looked at the existing rail roping through the pricey land in Cary instead. Somebody saw today’s dimes, getting money out of the federal government by “taking advantage of existing resources” and left tomorrow’s dollars. Somebody had no imagination, and our reward will be concrete. I’m sad, because I liked taking the train to work in Chicago. It had benefits that I could go on about for several paragraphs: it was safer, easier, more convenient, cheaper, and brought me more of the city of Chicago than I would have ever seen had I gotten around it in a car. It had its downsides: there are always members of the public one would rather not get up close and personal with. But I think about how I miss it sometimes when I go to work at a personal injury law firm that deals with car accidents. There are an average of 600 car accidents a week in our metro area. Imagine a world without that to worry about. TTA didn’t, and now rail is going to fail. Imagine that.