Cell Phone Novels and Other Publishing Curiosities

So, off to school, but two things I wanted to link:

1. A fascinating article on CNN.com about how novels written on cell phones have taken off in Japan (Thanks to Brenda B. for the link).
2. The new catapult magazine issue, which explores the connections between Ash Wednesday, Lent, and spiritual and physical health. If you look closely at yesterday's post here and one of the articles, you might find a few small similarities.

That's it. Enjoy and have a great day!

Day 29: (Metaphorically) Out to Dinner with Derrida

Thought of the day: There is great irony in the fact that I feel I have least to offer in the way of amusing others when I'm at my most thoughtful, productive time of the semester. (This is when I've moved past the "slightly crazy but in an amusing stage" into the "truly focused on nothing but the writing I have to do" stage. I have not quite yet reached this latter stage this term, but feel it approaching.)

This doesn't mean that I have nothing to offer, I think, to others, during these times--just that such a large proportion of my attention is funneled into articulating some of what I'm learning in written form before I can articulate it orally to others once again.

It's interesting, I think, that I still catch myself viewing this attention to communicating in written form as a lesser form of communication than conversation with others, at moments like these.

Then again, it's more that when I'm busy being my most productive/creative, that creativity isn't always balanced between the different parts of my life, but put into primarily one kind of outlet. The same problem happens in a different form when all of my time is spent communicating face-to-face and I have no opportunity for written communication.

And these papers I'm writing ARE conversations: they're conversations with everything I've been reading. The fact that I feel myself narrowing in on the items I'm responding to, in order to prepare my written responses, is a reduction of ambient noise much like focusing in on what one's dinner companion is saying rather than listening to what's going on at the table next to yours at the restaurant (while in another circumstance you and your dinner companion might decide to go over and join in).

So yeah, I'm not trying to ignore all of you other bloggers out there at the next table right now by not mentioning you or linking to you in my posts. It's just that I'm mostly paying attention to the scholarly dinner companions whose words I've been reading, and figuring out how to respond to what they've been telling me for several months (in term paper form)....

In Which Her Internal Nerd Begins to Salivate...

For those of you keeping track, I handed in my rhetoric of conspiracy paper yesterday on time. In fact, I dropped it in the box a whole 5 minutes early, I think.

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So before I forget, Terry Whalin pointed out a great article about blogging at The Atlantic . Many great lines and insights (though I disagree with a few of the statements--for instance, the first blogs were primarily used as a navigational tool to supplement search directories, so I've been told, rather than as a personal diary-ish log).

But it's a good article. The best line, for my purposes as a media scholar and as a writer, is this, from near the bottom of the last page: "The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other."

He's talking about writing for different media--for the magazine, for the book reader, and for the screen--and I think it's just fabulously well-put. Delightfully non-media-determinist.

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In other news, I got word yesterday that, while I will not get a general reader's pass for the Huntington Library in California for my visit this weekend, they have kindly granted me access to view the three documents that will help me, hopefully, write a paper leading toward my dissertation work. I'm very excited about this, as I was a bit worried, seeing as how I could probably work from photocopies, but who knows, what with the potential smudging and such.

For those of you who fail to find your internal reading nerd salivating big-time at the prospect of going to cool libraries and burying yourselves in the marginalia of nearly-forgotten Kingsley Amis mystery novel manuscripts written in the 1970s, the grounds of the library are supposed to be amazing. If you've seen the chick flick The Wedding Planner with Matthew McConneaghey (awful movie but that's not his fault), there's a garden scene with nude statues that's I'm told was filmed on the grounds of this library. So I'm hoping to also hang out on the grounds a bit if I can (though I have no need of meeting a guy there--got one already, thanks).

I also have a couple other activities planned while I'm out there. There should be writing material gathering a-plenty, for creative stuff as well as the academic.

And I'm excited about getting a change of scene. The mid-semester doldrums within me have been crying out, and I haven't been to California since I was 9. Woohoo, I say! Woohoo!

Audience and Online Interaction Spaces

Lately I've been realizing how much participating as an author in online interaction spaces (like Facebook and this blog) is helping to deepen my thoughts about audience from the writer's perspective.

Take Facebook for instance. On my profile, friends and acquaintances from various stages of my life collide. I'm used to thinking about them differently, and now they're here, in one space. This gives new perspective to what "writing for a wide audience" means.

Or take the fact that I import this blog into Facebook as well as posting the items here. It makes me aware that others may also be reading this in a different context--e.g., feed readers--and that makes me try to keep those contexts in mind when I write things, knowing that, for instance, people might be seeing two different sets of comments on my posts, or none at all, depending on where they might be reading it.

These sorts of things make me aware of how much I modulate my communication on a daily basis depending on who I'm speaking to and how they're receiving that communication. And as a writer, these thoughts further sensitize me to the nuances of the idea about audience, which is such an important aspect of what we consider as authors.

Walter Ong* says that writers always imagine a particular kind of audience for their writing, and then give their readers roles to step into. It's fascinating to me how these online venues challenge, stretch, and concretize those imaginary audiences, potentially making both author and audience aware how much those roles are a shifting landscape, and how much the audience also creates roles for communicators to step into.

Anyone else have any noticings about audience, whether from online or offline venues?

*In his excellent essay "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction"

The Power of Syntax...

As a girl who spent a good chunk of my summer transcribing, I noticed something reading a CNN blog article just now.

See, ever since I had the experience of transcribing speech just as it's been said, I've realized how much we, on a daily basis, smooth out what others say in our heads. If you've been transcribing for awhile, you begin to notice that the inevitable fillers in newscaster's talk gets left out of the closed-captioning, for instance.

However, in the world of public speaking, there are expectations for a more polished syntax (sans fillers). And with our current president, people started noticing exact syntax. And I find it fascinating that this CNN blog entry, in reporting Governor Palin's exact words and word order, gives us transcript form rather than reporting the gist of what was said rather than smoothing it out, as reporters have so often done in the past.

Question: are our political reporters increasingly moving to the modern fiction model of "show, don't tell"? There is certainly an emphasis lately on non-verbals as well, in the debate coverage...Are these moves natural ones, highlighting the re-ascendancy of oral and visual culture? Or does it take the oral out of context, since we so often correct for the oral internally, emphasizing syntactical moves that look wrong in print (where we're not used to transcript style, as anyone who has tried to go back and re-read their IM conversations could testify) and therefore doing injustice to the person whose words were included? A little bit of both, perhaps?

Inquiring minds want to know...

On Publication, Fame, and Conversation

I wonder if for some of us, it's not just "we read to know we're not alone," but also "we write to know we are not alone," and more so now that mass-mediated forms are enabling more and more feedback.

Are some of us who grew up reading for that "a-ha" moment in which someone was able to express something about humanity we ourselves were unable to express now writing in hopes that someone will say back to us that they found the same experience in our writing?

Is that why we (or at least some of us) write? And with the spread of mass/interpersonal communication spaces, are we hoping for that sooner, and on everything we write? Is that part of the vulnerability factor, and part of the shift in expectations? But as things get more interpersonal, the audience size gets closer to interpersonal too, on average--are we still thirsting for mass reach in a mass/interpersonal world? Is this unreasonable, or is this part of the deal of trying to be a successful writer? Or do we just want to get people talking, not necessarily all directed toward us?

What does this desire for publication and success (whatever that is) amount to, anyway? Is it a desire to be talked about and remembered, or to be cool, or is it a desire to converse and bring people together, or what? All of those things? None? Others? How much impact is enough impact in a world that at least says it aims for democracy in communication, where the average blog has, I heard the other day, one visitor? (Talk about your "fit audience but few.")

On a lighter note, Kevin Alexander's written a delightfully tongue-in-cheek article on how to write a quick literary masterpiece, for those yearning for a wide audience and impact. And there's a more serious but delightfully opinionated (nearly cranky, but in a good way) post over at Good Letters on the importance of considering a word's etymology when considering its use.

On a related note, I wonder if the mass/interpersonal convergence thing is why reality shows and celeb gossip are at the points they've gotten to--seeing the "behind-the-scenes," more "personal" world of people on TV helps us feel like we're closer to having an interpersonal connection to them.

I wonder...what do you think?

On Journals and Journaling, Part 2: Vulnerability

So I'm diving through a bit of grad school trench warfare here, so I need to dive back down into the textual mud soon, but I wanted to complete this post, talking about the "reporting" aspect of journaling.

I became keenly aware of this aspect last week, when for my archival theory and practice class I had to treat some of my own papers as archival materials, and write an aid to guide them about it, and then write about both who might use them and reflect on the experience of having done that.

It's just interesting, viewing what is so often private as potential fodder for others in the future. I now totally empathize with T. S. Eliot's desire to have so many of his papers embargoed for so many years after his death. Makes sense when one thinks about being so vulnerable, or about hurting people in one's life through things said in one's less guarded moments when one was just venting.

All of this reminds me of the vulnerability associated with any kind of writing. I think this is because of the time-delay of response to written text (and the possibility of no response at all). It's often-discussed among writers, but seldom is discussed as the results of text in media studies/media ecology circles.

The thing is that this textual inheritance, I believe, has passed to much of our time-delayed electronic communications as well--without being able to see how our audience (intended, or unintended--as with future researchers) is responding to something like a Facebook status or blog post, we worry what they'll think of us, much like we did with pretty much everyone all the time in junior high. An age-old concern transposed to a new setting.

As electronic readers, I propose, we should keep this vulnerability in mind and respond accordingly, as much as we're able (considering the busyness of our lives, of course). As writers, I think we should chill out a bit, and keep our lives and our writings (of whatever kind) in perspective, and try to have a little faith, while still being aware that yeah, vulnerability is often scary and often has consequences, some of them good, some bad.

How Much Detail?

The 3 day novelists from TextFIGHT brought up a question in Monday's post comments that I wanted to poke at further, because it seems to be one of the key questions for writing today: how much detail do you dispense and when?

They were talking about this in the context of their characters, but the same problem presents itself in other kinds of writing too. It's a question anytime you're an expert on something and want to write for people who don't know as much about the subject as you do.

How do you figure out how to include just the right number of details, and which ones your audience will be interested in? I realized awhile back that this is why I was so intrigued in the writing of the TV series West Wing--at the time I started watching, I was profoundly ignorant of and disinterested in the very detailed subject matter it portrayed, and yet it kept me interested and taught me just enough about the subject matter to get me by in the narrative. If I could find that balance myself...

This seems to be to be an even harder question to answer today than it used to be, when, as they point out over at Good Letters in the commentary on the excellent post "Maybe Google Isn't Making Us Stupid", the taste of readership seems to be undergoing a sea change, though it's unclear to me exactly what kind of sea change. On one hand, people don't read long pieces anymore so much, we're told. But on the other hand, they'll spend hours reading all the info they can find on a subject they're interested in, wanting more and more detail. By the same token, many are addicted to watching or reading the same stories over and over again, or looking for more installments to a series to get more info.

It's hard, in this climate, to know where to stop. How to write so that people want to get to that "wanting more" point, and then how to keep them happy while you're trying to engage those who also want less and are easily distracted? Finding that balance sometimes gets harder now that I'm an academic that spends a lot of time writing for academics, who are also similarly intrigued by questions that don't so much interest the general populace. But what is the general populace with so many people interested in different niche topics?

I don't know. I only know that I find test readers to be invaluable in giving me feedback on what's interesting and adequately-explained and what's not.

Anyone have thoughts on any of this?