Assignment: Choose one of the archived articles from Writers on Writing and create a blog post that describes the author’s perspective on the writing process. Do you agree or disagree with the author? Has your thinking changed throughout this course regarding a writer’s perspective in the social media environment? Explain your answer by providing examples.
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I chose Carolyn Chute's article after reading the funny and irreverent Vonnegut and the directness of Mamet because her article resonated with me on two different levels -- the mundane workaday reality and the political landscape that surrounds it.
There are days when I feel I get no writing done despite waking up and answering the question of what needs to be done. So I make a list:
1. Writing.
Then there's the other things that get in the way. The leaking faucet, mail and bills, laundry, broken vacuum, friends and family needs, wants, knockings, pokes and pings. So I wake at 4:00 am and make time from an age-old recipe handed down from elder to neophyte, from author to writer.
The best time, the quietest time to write is in the earliest part of the day. I wake up by default at this time anyway; it is probably genetics from Irish farmers waking me up to tend the fields. But the fields have been stripped from our Irish heritage. Mine, the OFeargal's of central Ireland were respected Kings and Celtic Queens. The possibilities of stolen crowns and lands ends up as a scrap of paper in the To Do list of phantom short stories. But as Chute says, stuff happens. Everyday stuff, people can't-pay-the-bills stuff, people running-out-of-food stuff. And still we write for nothing other than love of the written word, to be paid $2 an hour, for a published book among billions of others. To claw at the dirt-truth and prop it up on a pedestal for all to see, waving its limp hands around like a puppet on a stick.
I love writing.
My boyfriend is a poet. There's no money in poetry. As Ms. Chute writes, he, and I and Carolyn, and Kurt and David are unmarketable in the post-industrial world. It is only with the help of braver publishers and tabloid owners, those willing to take a gamble on what is now 'unmarketable' and make it, form it and market it as commercial. Even when there is no call for that product, no call for that unwritten poem, or idea for that experimental film. Prior to the Gutenberg press, writers and poets were revered, the smartest of the land. Today they are the paupers because everyone has a free press in the internet and can write their own news, tell their own tale.
So I decided to become 'marketable' and take this graduate course to properly learn the professional nuances of writing in a changing media environment where anyone with a computer can showcase a blog like an ever-changing business card on steroids. How to source material, what other writers and journalists are adhering to ethically. How I measure up in the craft of the wordsmith, the politics of writing and public relations, and my prospects for actually getting paid for doing what I love in a down market.
Carolyn Chute has published many novels, she is a local writer in Maine and she struggles with time, bills and everyday activism. Many of the other writers warn of being unmarketable, embracing the spirit of the unembraceable -- the written word -- while still making time for our ethical, our humdrum, our ordinary and commonplace lives to "tell the story of the diversity and magnitude of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular", unwise, nonpaying, and perhaps even criminal to do so. (SPJ Code of Ethics)
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/092799chute-writing.html
http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp
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