Going with the flow

“May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.” 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

It's hard enough to write without having to worry about whether you're "in the zone" or "in the flow." If you're fretting that, you're doing it wrong.

The concept of flow is quite real, but it has a specific meaning. It's not some blast of inspiration from above. Wait for that to write and you'll slip from this life at your keyboard, covered in cobwebs.

The chap who came up with this concept is a Hungarian psychologist with an impossible name -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Cheek-sent-muh-hy-ee). Here's how he sees it:

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate experience in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although flow is also described (below) as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one's emotions.

To achieve flow it is suggested that:

• One must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task.
• The task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows them to adjust their performance to maintain the flow state.
• One must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and their own perceived skills. One must have confidence in one's ability to complete the task at hand.

One writer suggests:

Perhaps the two most important ingredients for flow are motivation and ability in the person. If you can’t paint worth a lick, no amount of motivation will let you abandon conscious effort, because you just aren’t good enough. Conversely, a world-class author won’t produce anything of value if she has no desire to even sit at the computer, let alone write. The more you have of both, the easier reaching flow becomes.

The lesson, then, is to discover where what you love doing overlaps what you are capable of doing well.

More insight for writers comes from Romanian journalist Simina Mistreanu, who interviewed seven award-winning journalists and came up with this insights:

Reporting and being part of other people’s lives triggers flow. These journalists find purpose in shedding light onto difficult, often heart-wrenching issues. That connection — between mission and joy — was echoed by the seven accomplished writers who use longform narratives to cover sensitive social issues. 

I don't know that Csikszentmihalyi explicitly included a sense of mission as necessary for flow. It makes sense, however, in that how a writer views his work informs his passion and motivation. In other words, his writing has meaning.

In the end, the only way to find your zone is to sit down and start writing. "I write when I'm inspired," Peter De Vries said, "and see to it that I'm inspired at nine o'clock every morning."

We should borrow Martin Luther's secret

Martin Luther's 1534 Bible

Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) was a German priest and professor of theology who initiated the Protestant Reformation. His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin) made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language.

His secret?

Luther had to compromise between the many different “Germans” that filled the German lands in those days, hundreds of years before there was a single German state,  Ruth Sanders, a professor of German Studies at Miami University in Ohio, writes in her new book, German: Biography of a Language. Luther borrowed an emerging standard used by the Holy Roman Empire, “chancellery German”, as a base with some currency in different regions.

From a review in The Economist:

Luther’s genius was to infuse his translation with the words he heard on the street in his bit of Saxony, in east-central Germany. He obsessively asked friends and fellow scholars which dialectal words would be most widely understood. The common touch was so successful that a Catholic opponent complained that “even tailors and shoemakers…read it with great eagerness.” It was the bestseller of the century and remains the most popular German translation. Rarely has a single man had such a mark on a language. The German of Luther’s Bible was nobody’s native language in his day. Today it is so universal that it threatens Germany’s once-vibrant dialects with death by standardisation.

How much proof do we need before we start using the words and phrases most people use?

John Steinbeck on writing: getting it on paper

Steinbeck

John Steinbeck once said that writers are "a little below clowns and a little above trained seals" and that the writer "must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true."

When the comedian Fred Allen asked Steinbeck's advice on writing an autobiography, the master replied:

Don't start by trying to make the book chronological. Just take a period. Then try to remember it so clearly that you can see things: what colors and how warm or cold and how you got there. Then try to remember people. And then just tell what happened. It is important to tell what people looked like, how they walked, what they wore, what they ate. Put it all in. Don't try to organize it. And put in all the details you can remember.

You will find that in a very short time things will begin coming back to you, you thought you had forgotten. Do it for very short periods at first, but kind of think of it when you aren't doing it. Don't think back over what you have done. Don't think of literary form. Let it get out as it wants to. Over tell it in the manner of detail--cutting comes later. The form will develop in the telling. Don't make the telling follow a form.

Steinbeck echoed this advice in one of his final interviews: "Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on."

-- Richard Nordquist

Simplicity is difficult

"Simplicity is the characteristic that is most difficult to simulate. The signature that is most difficult to imitate is the one that is most simple, most individual and most free from flourishes…

The longest Latin derivatives seem necessary to express the thoughts of young writers. The world’s great masters in literature can move mankind to tears, give light and life to thousands in darkness and doubt, or scourge a nation for its folly,—by words so simple as to be commonplace. But transfigured by the divinity of genius, there seems almost a miracle in words."

-- From Self Control, Its Kingship and Majesty by William George Jordan, 1905

You don't want to be this way

sesquipedalianism \ses-kwi-PEED-l-iz-uhm\, adjective:

1. Given to using long words.
2. (Of a word) containing many syllables.

It is very true that when the experiment of dictating is first tried, the luxury of the ease it gives is apt to be so great, that it tends to looseness and verbosity of style; for there is no better check on sesquipedalianism than the necessity of writing down one's sesquipedalian words for one's self.
-- Christian Examiner, Volume 72

History: 1615, from L. sesquipedalia verba "words a foot-and-a-half long," in Horace's "Ars Poetica" (97), nicely illustrating the thing he is criticizing, from sesqui- "half as much again" (see sesquicentennial) + pes "foot"

-- Dictionary.com

Use short words

“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.” 

-- Winston Churchill

A style guide at The Economist has this to say:

Use them. They are often Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin in origin. They are easy to spell and easy to understand. Thus prefer about to approximately, after to following, let to permit, but to however, use to utilise, make to manufacture, plant to facility, take part to participate, set up to establish, enough to sufficient, show to demonstrate and so on. Underdeveloped countries are often better described as poor. Substantive often means real or big.

You really don't want to be this:

sesquipedalianism \ses-kwi-PEED-l-iz-uhm\, adjective:

1. Given to using long words.
2. (Of a word) containing many syllables.

It is very true that when the experiment of dictating is first tried, the luxury of the ease it gives is apt to be so great, that it tends to looseness and verbosity of style; for there is no better check on sesquipedalianism than the necessity of writing down one's sesquipedalian words for one's self.

-- Christian Examiner, Volume 72

History: 1615, from L. sesquipedalia verba "words a foot-and-a-half long," in Horace's "Ars Poetica" (97), nicely illustrating the thing he is criticizing, from sesqui- "half as much again" (see sesquicentennial) + pes "foot"

-- Dictionary.com

How long should your resume be?

About as long as a rope. That's an old joke, but I'm an old guy.

Jeff Hunter at glassdoor.com, a job site, offers this advice after surveying recruiters and HR types: "There is no single correct answer. But remember that the longer you go, the greater the chance of boring the reader."

And he offers these tips on getting it right:

1. Make sure your resume clearly and succinctly communicates your achievements. Avoid resume "filler"--vague language that doesn't precisely explain a skill or an accomplishment. According to Rusty Rueff, Glassdoor career and workplace expert, you should try to tie each thing in your work history to a measurable result you achieved.

2. Evaluate whether an achievement is best highlighted in your resume, in an interview, or perhaps in your cover letter. Rueff says, "The resume is an outline, or a storyboard of you. It tells a story of continued achievement and growth. Storyboards hit the high points; the interview is when you can introduce dialogue, drama, the overcoming of barriers, and so on."

3. Consider whether a long-ago job best supports your qualification for a job you're after today. For example, a valuable experience waiting tables at one of the busiest restaurants in your town may have taught you how to multitask, but does that job readily speak to why you would make a great software engineer at Oracle?

4. Look at the format of your resume with fresh eyes and consider whether a brief paragraph or five to seven bullets would more easily express what you managed to do in your last few jobs. Rueff explains, "Consider your audience. For example, if you're applying for a job that will require a lot of writing, consider developing a two- or three-sentence paragraph for each job that gives a hint of your writing skills. However, if you're in a technical field, brief bullets may best showcase your experience. The bottom line is that whether you bullet-point your achievements or offer more color in a paragraph format, everything should be tied to a result and tell a mini-story within the bigger career story of you."

5. Avoid cliffhangers or one-liners that extend your resume to a second or third page. Often that last hanger line will either be ignored or simply have the potential employer asking, "Why didn't they clean that up?!'

6. And last but not least, if you're concerned about resume length even after running through each of these considerations, do notshrink the font size to something barely readable. Recruiters, hiring managers, and others who can help get you a job want to actually read your resume, so don't make doing so difficult. While there is no rule of thumb when it comes to the overall length, one to two pages is still the average.

How many laws have you broken today?

Harvey A. Silverglate, a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer in Boston, has written extensively about vague language on college campuses and in the federal courts.

"The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one's true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.

"I would not approve of speech codes on campuses even if they were clear in specifying the language that could get a student tossed out of school, and even if the disciplinary hearings were fair and rational. But at least clear codes would have the benefit of giving students notice of what could get them disciplined or expelled. The combination of outlawing speech, doing so in terms that even an educated person could not understand, and trying the charge before a tribunal worthy of the court of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, is a particularly insidious stew.

"In the criminal justice system it's vagueness of federal law. The U.S. Department of Justice began prosecuting people, around the mid-1980s, under statutes and regulations that even I could not understand; what's worse, federal courts seemed not to recognize this obvious unfairness and convicted people of serious crimes carrying harsh sentences. Years ago I told my law firm colleagues, half-serious and half-sarcastic, that an average citizen could commit several federal crimes in any given day without even realizing it."

Writing our way to subliteracy

"One could draw reassurance from today’s vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, MySpace pages, and online conversations that characterize today’s Web 2.0 environment. One need not have a degree in communications (or anthropology) to see that the back-and-forth communication that typifies the Internet is only nominally text-based. Some of today’s Web content is indeed innovative and compelling in its use of language, but none of it shares any real commonality with traditionally published, edited, and researched printed material.

"This type of content generation, this method of “writing,” is not only subliterate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse. As early as 1984, the late linguist Walter Ong observed that teletype writing displayed speech patterns more common to ancient aural cultures than to print cultures (a fact well documented by Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages). The tone and character of the electronic communication, he observed, was also significantly different from that of printed material. It was more conversational, more adolescent, and very little of it conformed to basic rules of syntax and grammar. Ong argued compellingly that the two modes of writing are fundamentally different. Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills. New evidence bares this out. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that text messaging use among teenagers in Ireland was having a highly negative effect on their writing and reading skills."

-- Patrick Tucker

Wander about but don't be copious

expatiate / ik-spey-shee-eyt / verb

1. to enlarge in discourse or writing; be copious in description or discussion: to expatiate upon a theme.
2. Archaic. to move or wander about intellectually, imaginatively, etc., without restraint.

History: 1530–40; < L expatiātus ptp. of ex(s)patiārī to wander, digress, equiv. to ex-  + spatiārī to walk about, deriv. of spatium

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) expands on the meaning:

(n.)
The act of increasing in size or bulk, real or apparent; the state of being increased; augmentation; further extension; expansion.
  
(n.)
Expansion or extension, as of the powers of the mind; ennoblement, as of the feelings and character; as, an enlargement of views, of knowledge, of affection.
  
(n.)
Diffusiveness of speech or writing; expatiation; a wide range of discourse or argument.
  
(n.)
A setting at large, or being set at large; release from confinement, servitude, or distress; liberty.

A good writer will endeavor to not "increase in size or bulk" but will seek "an enlargement of views, of knowledge, of affection." And endeavor to "release onself from confinement" of thinking.

Try not to be prolix

prolix / pro-liks / adjecive

1. Extremely wordy or verbose, long-winded, bombastic (in speaking).
2. Lengthy, too long, overly protracted (archaic).

From Dr. Goodword: Prolix is one of the oddest words in English: an adjective that doesn't look or sound like an English adjective, native or borrowed. Adjectives just do not end on [x] in English but this one does. This fact makes the adverb, prolixly, sound even odder, though the noun, prolixity, has a nice lilt to it, probably because the accent moves: [prê-lik-sê-ti].

Prolix is rarely used today in the simple sense of "too long". It is most often applied to wordy writing by harried English teachers: "This paper is so prolix, I often thought myself reading a novel with no plot." However, prolixity also finds its way into speech: "Merewether's speech was so prolix that he actually choked on a couple of sentences."

History: English took prolix, like so many others, from Old French, this time prolixe. French inherited it naturally from Latin prolixus "poured forth, extended", an adjective based on pro "great" + lixus "flowed", the past participle of liquere "to flow, run". The same root, liquere, underlies liquor "fluidity", which English captured for a different use.

How Einstein wrote

Professor John Stachel, a former director of the Einstein Papers Project, believes the secret to Einstein's writing style can be found in his comment to an interviewer: "I am the acoustic type. I learn by ear and give by word. Writing is difficult." But his letters flowed easily in a clear stream-of-consciousness - he wrote the way he would have spoken, without pretensions.

"I think he heard the words before he wrote them, and only when they sounded right did he commit them to paper," Stachel says. "Many poets operate this way, but I doubt many scientists do." He speculates that this pattern may have stemmed from Einstein's childhood habit of quietly saying words to himself before repeating them out loud, a kind of self-echolalia.

Of a mind to write

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear." -- Joan Didion

"One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives." -- Arthur Miller

“Writing and learning and thinking are the same process.” -- William Zinsser

"The pen is the tongue of the mind." -- Miguel de Cervantes

"Writing has nothing to do with communication between person and person, only with communication between different parts of a person's mind." -- Rebecca West

"It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them." -- Isabel Colegate

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" -- E. M. Forster

"The only time I know that something is true is the moment I discover it in the act of writing." -- Jean Malaquais

Every writer should take this word to heart

"If I'd had more time, I'd have written a shorter letter."

-- Mark Twain

concise / kên-sais / adjective

Tersely expressed, written or spoken with the smallest number of words.

Dr. Goodword notes:

If a text may be concise, of course, it may be written concisely (the adverb). Although we attribute conciseness to such texts, concision is a much lovelier word that expresses the same sentiment: a memo written with such concision that it was a pleasure to read.

History: Concise is the English revision of Latin concisus, the past participle of concidere "to cut up", comprising com- "(together) with", used here as an intensive prefix + -cidere, a combining form of caedere "to hit, chop, strike down". We find this root in many words borrowed from Latin that imply cutting, incisor, the cutting tooth, incision, and decision, the act that cuts off debate. Since cutting and hitting were the primary means of slaying people prior to the invention of the gun, this word also came to mean "to kill". The same root produced a noun combining form, -cidium "killing", which underlies English words like homicide, suicide, and genocide.

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell."

— William Strunk Jr.
in Elements of Style

Writing = rewriting

"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."  ~James Michener

"The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction.  By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say." ~Mark Twain

"The wastebasket is a writer's best friend."  ~Isaac Bashevis Singer 

"Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."  ~Samuel Johnson
 

"The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.  This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it."  ~Ernest Hemingway
 

"Write your first draft with your heart.  Re-write with your head."  ~From the movie Finding Forrester
 

"Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially."  ~A. Bronson Alcott


"Sit down, and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer.  But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."  ~Colette, Casual Chance
 

"Proofread carefully to see if you any words out."  ~Author Unknown

 

Great rules of writing

From William Safire:

Do not put statements in the negative form.

And don't start sentences with a conjunction.

If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.

Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.

De-accession euphemisms.

If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.

Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

All ideas are second hand

On St. Patrick's Day in 1903, Mark Twain wrote a letter to Helen Keller, who throughout her life was plagued by accusations of plagiarism. He manages to deflate the pretensions of all writers:

"Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul--let us go farther and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances in plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them any where except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

"When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten thousand men--but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his but there were others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing--and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite--that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

"Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as the story itself? It can hardly happen--to the extent of fifty words--except in the case of a child; its memory tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the natural language can have graving room there and preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person's memory tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase. It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other to be mistaken by him for his own.

"No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and how imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dedication, without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Ten years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant ass--no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your "Plagiarism Court," and so when I said, 'I know now where I stole it, but who did you steal it from,' he said, 'I don't remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anyone who had!'"