Fiona Lehn's Blog
Posted by Fiona Lehn
In honor of our German site and their fabulous football team (in case you haven’t heard, Germany made it to the EURO 2008 final after beating Turkey Wednesday night) this week’s blog focuses on the Zen of writing and football.
What do writing and football have to do with each other? I’m afraid that’s the wrong question. If you really want to be a professional writer, the question is, how well do you know yourself?
"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine,” says veteran writer Ray Bradbury in his inspirational book for writers, Zen in the Art of Writing (Bantam, 1992). “The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!" Anyone who thinks writing is as easy as picking up a pen ought to consider that statement for a while.
The passion and intensity etched into the faces and expressed through the bodies of the European football championship competitors remind me of the land mine. “Zest,” says Bradbury. “Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used…Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up…I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.” These championship players, like the best of writers, are doing just that.
In Simon Hart's June 25, 2008, interview with Turkey football coach Fatih Terim, Terim described his tough pack of underdogs as “a team who work hard and believe in themselves. Everyone enjoys watching us – we send a message about life as well as football” (accessed on the EURO website). Turkey lost against Germany Wednesday night, but they “kept on fighting and had nothing to lose,” according to Germany’s Lukas Podolski in an interview yesterday with Matthias Rötters ("Too Close a Shave for Klose's Liking", (accessed on the EURO website). That's the (Zen) mindset of a professional.
Know yourself, trust the power of what you do, and believe in your readership’s ability to “get it”.
Then, go forth and publish!
-- Fiona
Posted by Fiona Lehn
So you’ve got some writing classes under your belt and you want to start your freelance career. You start pitching and writing but you soon find that writing for a living is not the same as writing as a hobby. You spend a lot of time alone. You cover the facts, but pieces lack life and luster. It takes inspiration. So, how do professional writers stay inspired?
Suite101 Feature Writer and published author Guy Lecky-Thompson has several strategies, like “keeping on reading, and seeing what others have to say…I find that at least, if you start, you'll get something done. Even if you just start editing titles, or re-reading a chapter, the hard bit is starting.”
Gertrude Stein said that it takes a whole lot of doing nothing to be a genius. Guy concurs. “Whether it's my publisher, or Suite101, or some freelance work, there are always times when, no matter how lucrative it might be, you just don't feel like writing. The trick is not to do any. To sit down for one half-hour and not do any writing at all. Do some reading, editing, or diagrams for a work in progress, but stay away from writing. After 30 minutes, you're itching to get started, tweaking bits here and there, and then the magic takes over!”
With 7 published titles under his belt, Guy knows how to keep that fire of inspiration burning.
What’s your strategy?
-- Fiona
Posted by Fiona Lehn
Do writers write by choice or by divine mandate? I recently had a conversation with a friend on this topic; he argued that writers choose to write, while I feel that writers are compelled to write in order to make sense out of life – whether through a novel or a local news byte -- to ignore the call is to go insane. (Some heed the call and still go insane, but that’s another blog entirely).
Freelance journalist and Suite101 Feature Writer Sarah Canice Funke received the call early on in life. “I think it happened sometime when I was 8 or 9,” she says, ”I had a number of stuffed animals, but instead of playing with them like any normal child, I would write illustrated stories of their adventures. The stories were short, the drawings cartoonish, the sentences simple and the plots rather uncomplicated, but they formed the basis for my future love of writing.”
Perhaps Sarah was too young then to make a conscious choice about writing, but as she grew older, her choices consistently propelled her in the same direction, towards writing. “In high school, I took an English Lit class and in college, I took so many Philosophy classes that they just turned into a second major. These classes taught me how to think on paper, offering a logical path for the reader to follow from beginning to end.” Thus, she continued to write.
And now, years later, what keeps Sarah writing? “Even if I have nothing to say, I still like to string words together until something comes out. Occasionally I get stuck trying to find ideas and need to take a break, walk away and get a fresh perspective. Yet I find that if I stay away from writing too long, I get antsy and need to go back to it.”
Choice or compulsion? What do you think?
--Fiona
Posted by Fiona Lehn
Everyone wants to be a writer and many believe that all it takes is desire. Friends who work in the sciences, medical and educational realms have all revealed to me their secret desires to write a novel or a column, say, in the NY Times. Dreams carry us through life, and maybe some folks will write that novel. But the thing is, writing is work, and like any other job, it takes training and practice. Those who choose the writer’s life and succeed pursue it as they would any other career. But what kind of training works? Is a Journalism degree mandatory? Not necessarily.
Suite101 writer and freelance journalist, Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen holds degrees in Psychology and Education. She has taken one professional writing course. “I don't believe you need a degree in English Literature or Journalism to be a full-time freelance writer,” she says. “In fact, my editor at Reader's Digest told me that what she's teaching me about writing isn't stuff you learn in Journalism class.”
When she embarked on her freelance career, Laurie found that “learning on the job - and reading tons of writing books - is the best way to learn how to write.” What works for you? Life experiences inform and feed one’s writing, but the skill of writing comes from practice and figuring out how you learn best, be it a through a degree program, online classes, or self-education. The important thing is respecting the trade enough to learn it. Then, go forth, and publish!
-- Fiona Lehn
