The Craft of Writing

Writing is a skill, but the word writing is a verb, an action. To write. One can dream about being a writer, but one must perform the action of writing to be a writer. All of us write. Sometimes we actually write letters, though it seems that advent of email is going to kill letters eventually. We write book reports in grade school. We write essays about what we did on our summer vacation. As we move up to higher grades, we begin to write papers. We could possibly call them research papers though that may be a bit of aggrandizement. We write essay answers on tests all the way up through college and generally by the end of our college years we have written at least one paper that deserves the research paper title.

But, there is more to writing. We blog, and we visit forums and though we may not think of it, we are honing our writing skills, or at least we are if we care about our writing. Maybe we take another step, and write fiction. More likely is that we get a job and do more writing. We write reports. We write emails and memos. Once again, most people don't really consider the craft of writing. It is just something that they do.

For a time, I earned my daily bread with my writing. I was doing email technical support for Dell, and then later graduated to working on the Dell Forums. Technical writing is a skill on its own, but I learned a few things that have helped me across all of my writing. These are two things to consider when writing.

First, you must consider your audience. When I was working on the Dell Forums, I was writing to the general public. I had to assume that my audience knew nothing about computers, except how to buy one from Dell. The problem is that some of those Dell customers are extremely knowledgeable about computers. I had to avoid any hint of condescension in my tone. I had to walk a line between giving the novice all the information he needed, and making the expert feel like I was talking down to him. It was also extremely important to say exactly what you needed to say, and no more. I got very good at stating the facts in a way that did not allow for alternate interpretations.

The second is voice. Voice in writing can be a little hard to explain, but it is easy to show what is meant by examples, though I am not sure that I have any handy, as I am writing this. I will see what I can do. Now the viewpoint taken in fiction has something to do with voice. When an author writes in first person, he writes as the character in the story, and he must fit the writing to the character, he must give the character a voice. One can hardly imagine the same story being told by Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, even if it were the same story that involved both of them. Now, that may seem a strange example, but I hope that you see my point.

But voice can even carry over into non-fiction writing. Imagine writing a how-to manual. If any of you have ever read a …for Dummies book, then you know that even a dry subject had be handled in a witty and humorous manner, but for every subject handled this way as part of the …for Dummies series you can find a hundred dry and mostly boring texts.

Some may confuse voice with tone. This is understandable, and they are related. Voice can certainly convey tone, but voice is both less and more than tone. The tone may be conveyed through other means, and the voice can present more than just the tone. I am trying to think how to explain that better, or provide examples, and I am drawing a blank. I will just have to ask you to accept this…or at least accept that this is my opinion.

Because this writing has drawn to a close.

Camp Taylor Memories

Late last night I got to thinking about Camp Taylor. Well, officially it is Samuel P. Taylor State Park and it is in Marin County, California. I grew up not far away in Corte Madera.

Camp Taylor was a family favorite for picnics and day trips. I remember many mornings, being bundled into the car while it was still not quite light. There would be lots of things to carry to the car, coolers, baskets, the camp stove. Then we would all pile into the car, and it was a pile. There were usually at least six of us and often more.

I remember being bundled into the car early in the morning. It would be quite cool, as Bay Area mornings can be, and once you got in among the Redwoods dawn could seem to take a long time, especially on the west side of the coastal range. We would drive out Sir Francis Drake Blvd. It goes out and into the mountains and through the little town of Lagunitus, and then out into the big trees. There is one huge hill on the way, I remember riding out once on my bicycle.

We’d pile out and setup on a wooden park picnic table and my dad would set to work getting the Coleman stone started up.

Now, you have to understand that this was not a fancy propane stove, this was one of the old stoves that ran on Coleman Fuel, the kind with a red tank that had to be pressurized. My dad would sit there and pump away at that stove for what seemed like hours. Sometimes one of us would help, but the job required a bit of a special knack, because the pump was a piston, and you have to hold your finger over a hole in the knob at the end of the piston, but only during the push in. You needed to release your finger as you pulled out, so that air could go into the piston, then close the hole and push in to force the air into the tank. My dad could do it easily, but I could never quite learn the technique.

It was because of this that when I bought my first camp stove, it was propane.

Once the stove was started, my mom would start on the Hot Chocolate. I was raised in the Mormon Church, and coffee was not on the menu. For camping mornings like this, my mother would make up a concentrated cocoa mix…from scratch, and mix it with milk to make Hot Chocolate. My earliest memories are back in the days before Swiss Miss and Hot Chocolate Mix in pouches…or at least before they had reached our stores.

My mom would get the cocoa good and hot. Now, she had a friend who liked hot beverages at a temperature slightly higher than the average human tongue can endure. In my family, this temperature is known by the moniker Bobbie-hot, named after that friend. We would each get our cup of Bobbie-hot cocoa, and after no more than an hour, it would be ready to drink.

Camp Taylor was a wonderful place as a child. There was one particular place that we loved to play. Only years later did I recognize that is was the stump of a truly enormous Redwood. It is hard for me to try to say exactly how large it was, but it seems to me that it must have been nearly twenty feet across. It had been cut some four to six feet off the ground, and generations of children climbing up on top of it had hollowed out the inside a little bit. To us it was like a castle tower and we would have mock battles in and around it. We would climb the tower and hide behind the parapet, even having what amounted to embrasures to shoot out of. Sometimes now, I feel a little sad to imagine the majestic tree that had stood there, but mostly, if I could, I would tell that tree about all the fun I had playing on what it left behind.

There was also a stream that wound its way through the park. I could not in good conscious call it a river. We built boats, and hunted for crawdads and generally splashed about a bit in the water. It wasn't really deep enough for swimming, though I seem to remember a few pools where you could get all wet if you wanted to.

Camp Taylor is not far, as the crow flies from Muir Woods. Both are full of majestic Redwoods, and yet my memories of those two places are totally different. From Muir Woods, I remember the dim light beneath the closely packed trees, the subtle damp, and the quiet. Muir Woods always seemed a little otherworldly and mystical, as if an elf or a fairy might come out from behind a tree.

It is mostly bright sunlight that I remember from Camp Taylor. Muir Woods was someplace you visited. Camp Taylor was a place where you played. To be honest I haven't been there in more than 30 years, but I remember it well. Maybe one day I will get to visit it again.

Oh, and only just last night, more than 30 years later, I found out why it was called Camp Taylor and not Samuel P. Taylor State Park.

Samuel Penfield Taylor struck gold during the California Gold Rush, and with his money, he bought the land that is now the park and went into logging. He built the first paper mill on the Pacific Coast on the property. In the 1870s the North Pacific Coast Railroad was built going by the property. Taylor built a hotel near the tracks and called it the Camp Taylor Resort. California took possession of the property in 1945 for back taxes and later turned it into a State Park.

Written on Windows Phone 7

I was sick last week and missed my usual Wednesday blog post. If anyone actually reads this blog they will know that it is Thursday at least as often as Wednesday and often even later than that, but I do try for Wednesday.

I hope no one is expecting anything profound this week. Profound and typing on a tiny onscreen keyboard do not go together but in my own going quest to put Windows Phone 7 through its paces I thought I would try typing a blog post right on the phone...gives a whole new meaning to phoning it in.

My blog has been pretty solidly Windows Phone 7 for the last couple of months but that is going to change. Windows Phone 7 has become a major thing in my life over the last couple of months, but I don't intend to let it take over. There is lots more to comment on in the big wide world and it is time I got back to it.

Now, I must say that using this keyboard is not the worst thing in the world. I can actually get up a head of steam and as long as I can keep moving I can get what I think down on the page...or screen. My thumbs do hurt after a while, but this is better than the physical keyboard on my old phone. I would still like to have Swype, but I think that this is easier fir real writing than Swype. I love Swype for text messages though.

Now there are a few annoying features. I just demonstrated one of them. I didn't type the period at the end of the first sentence of this paragraph. I tapped space twice and it added the period on its own. The problem is that if you are not crisp with pressing space you may find yourself with extra periods. This can be more than a little annoying, but it isn't a huge problem, just a small annoyance.

The excellent text prediction more than makes up for it. You get a line of words between the keyboard and the text area and you can click on a word in that line any time you want. Sometimes the word is bold and if you hit space or period while a word is bold then that word will replace what you actually typed. It works so well that you can actually type fast and most things come out perfectly.

This was entirely written on my HD7 in one afternoon during breaks at work. It wasn't an unpleasant experience.

I'll try to be profound next week.