The Difference Between Good and Well

This is going to be another short (and late) post due to the fact that I am moving, but one that I feel very passionately about.

Here’s a bit of information that might be a bit of a shock to some of you.

The word “good” and the word “well” are different.

And sometimes you want to use one instead of the other.

Shocking, right? Who would have thought?

I’m not usually a big Grammar Nazi, but there are certain grammatical mistakes that drive me up the wall. This includes but is not limited to “funner/funnest”, “I vs me”, and “good vs well.”

And before anyone start arguing about not needing your novel to grammatically perfect that’s what editors are for, just don’t. Most editors don’t even deal with grammatical or spelling errors or anything of like. They’re mostly focused on your characters, or your plot, or your flow. Some of them will correct stuff like that, but most editors, especially in a big publishing company, won’t bother at all. In big companies, they can usually get copy editors to go through and fix all of that.

So to a degree you’re right. But more to the degree of “Worry more about your plot than your grammar”, not “Who cares about being grammatically correct?”

No one wants to read something with horrible grammar or spelling. I’ve never been employed by a publishing company to read, edit, and oversee the publishing of a book. I’ve never had to read a ton of manuscripts. But I have read and edited a lot of stories and essays… and it’s painful when they make a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Believe me when I say that it automatically makes you think certain things about the author and those certain things are not always kind. That is a really bad way to start of a relationship with anyone, let alone someone who has to really like something you wrote over the dozens/hundreds other submissions s/he’s gotten in the past few weeks.

Also, when there are a lot of grammatical/spelling mistakes, it’s hard to focus on fixing those rather than issues that might be more important like characters and plot.

Not to mention that if you ever want to consider self-publishing, that you have to make everything absolutely perfect yourself.

So yes, you do have to pay attention to this when you’re writing.

(The easiest way to avoid making the mistake in your writing is by avoiding making the mistake when you talk. That also has the added bonus of not annoying people like me.)

The easiest way to tell the difference between the two is that good is an adjective and well in an adverb.

Good always refers to a noun and well always refers to an action.

I did a good job.

I did my job well.

See the difference?

Job is a noun, and the job was good.

Doing a job is an action. To do is a verb. The job was done well.

In math the other day, my friend told me that she thought she was going to do good on the test we have next week.

This was incorrect unless she was planning on using the test to do some act of good in society like teaching a high school dropout off of it.

Do is a verb. Use well.

She runs (runs is a verb) well.

Fun fact: Disney teaches children incorrect grammar.

At the end of Mulan after Mulan has saved China and been honored by the Emperor, Shang runs up to her and says what? “You… you fight good.”

Wrong. He should have said you fight well.

There are a few exceptions. When you’re talking about your or someone else’s health, always use “well”. When talking about emotional state, use “good”.

I don’t feel well today. I feel sick.

I don’t feel good about cheating.

Please, please make an effort to keep these correct. Believe me; it will make you look a lot more intelligent in your writing and talking to other people.

(Here’s a little secret though: To avoid having to make a decision about good vs well, use the word fine or great ;))

Be Wrong As Fast As You Can

It's only week two and I've already failed on my Resolutions.

But you know what, that doesn't meant that it's over! If you give up after one mess up, you're never going to accomplish your goals!

And I do have a legitimate excuse. 

I had to move this week/end. 

The landlords kicked us out for renovations, so we had to get out and get out we did.

Guys. Don't ever move. It's not worth it.

And because of the move, this post is probably going to be a little lame. It's a reblog. We had to read this article in English and I think it's absolutely brilliant and worth the read. I think there are more than a few of you that will really be able to connect with the author and take his advice to heart.

"Be Wrong As Fast As You Can"

by Hugo Lindgren, for the New York Times, January 4 2013

Here’s a partial, redacted-for-the-sake-of-my-dignity list of stuff I once aspired to write but never did: a “Mamma Mia!”-esque rock opera called “Bastards of Young,” based on the songs of the Replacements. A sitcom set in Brooklyn that inverts “I Love Lucy,” so that the wife plays the stable, amiable breadwinner while her lovable loon of a husband hatches ridiculous schemes, often involving the production of artisanal goods. A thriller about the ultimate rogue trader who concocts a single, diabolical transaction to blow up the financial system. An HBO show, called “Upstate,” about a burned-out corporate raider who returns to his hometown outside Buffalo to save his father’s failing liquor store and ends up trying to rescue the whole town from the double scourge of unemployment and alcoholism. Too depressing? How about this: A reality show in which retired hockey greats like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier compete against each other coaching teams of — ready for the deal clincher? — inner-city kids who’ve never been on ice skates.

If you had the time, believe me, I could flesh out these ideas for you, explain their origins, describe in fine detail my vision of the characters and plots and how it would all coalesce into something awesome.

Or not. For at least 25 years, I’ve been serial daydreaming like this, recording hundreds of ideas in a sequence of little notebooks that I have carried around and then stacked in a shoe box in my closet, a personal encyclopedia of undone to-do’s. Sometimes, when I’m searching for something in my closet and I see the box, I have a flashback to my first-grade report card: “Hugo has the gift of a rich, active imagination, but needs to work on his follow-through skills.”

My situation, I know, is not unique. Who doesn’t have big plans they never get around to acting on? Everybody swaps ideas with his friends about the excellent TV show they’d make or the groundbreaking movie they’d write. And a couple of my grand schemes got an inch or two off the ground — an agent lunch, a pitch meeting, a trip to L.A., a flurry of e-mail filled with exclamation points — though never much higher than that. And along the way, I also became editor of the magazine you are now reading, so it’s not as if I became mired exclusively in a world of delusional ambition. It’s just that for way too long, I held on to the fantasy of a completely different professional life, and I can’t help wondering why certain creative endeavors just seemed impossible to make happen.

I know, writers have been complaining for eons about the weight of their burden, and it’s not attractive. But I’ve been around it long enough to know that writing anything good that’s longer than a paragraph isn’t easy for anybody, except for maybe J. J. Abrams. You can’t explain how people do it. Some of the most successful screenwriters, novelists, television producers and rock-opera librettists I know are about a hundred times lazier than I am. They take long afternoon naps, play lots of pickup basketball and appear to accomplish little or nothing for months at a time. And let me tell you, their ideas do not all crackle with scintillating originality.

So what am I missing? What is that elusive thing that turns some people’s daydreams into their next novel for F.S.G.?

#

Earlier in my professional life, as I began to do all right as an editor, I naïvely discounted it as something I never intended to stick with. A respectable occupation, I thought, while preparing myself for the Masterwork of Spectacular Brilliance that would eventually define me.

One of my pet theories about why I could never actually produce anything of brilliance was that I was cursed with a comfortable existence. What might have been my creative prime was spent in New York City in the 1990s, a flush time for the young and college-educated. Magazine-editor jobs paid O.K. and were relatively easy to get, especially compared with now. Maybe I would’ve been better off in the 1970s, when a young person with ambitions like mine had to take a hard job as a means to his artistic ends. Would such sacrifice, I wondered, have sharpened my desire to make it as a writer?

All you have to do is read Mark Jacobson’s classic New York magazine depiction of cabdrivers in the 1970s to know that’s a joke. The story is about nighttime cabbies who aspired to be actors or poets or playwrights. Jacobson was one of them. His original plan was to drive three nights a week, write three nights a week and party one night a week. But as he watched his fellow drivers get sucked in to the working life, he realized how the daily grind slowly robbed them of their dreams.

“The Big Fear,” Jacobson writes, “is that times will get so hard that you’ll have to drive five or six nights a week instead of three. The Big Fear is that your play, the one that’s only one draft away from a possible showcase, will stay in your drawer. The Big Fear is thinking about all the poor stiff civil servants who have been sorting letters at the post office ever since the last Depression and all the great plays they could have produced. The Big Fear is that, after 20 years of schooling, they’ll put you on the day shift. The Big Fear is you’re becoming a cabdriver.”

My big fear, of course, was that I was becoming an editor. I won’t lie. For a long time, I considered this an unacceptable outcome. I don’t know if anyone ever told me, “Those who can’t write, edit,” or if I made that up on my own, but that little aphorism haunted me. Meanwhile, my grandiose writing projects were all going nowhere for the same tedious reason. The minute I tried to commit them to paper, or otherwise turn them into something tangible, my imagination coughed and sputtered like the cheap Renault convertible my girlfriend drove in college. I’d write a bit of dialogue using that miraculous software that automatically formats it into a screenplay for you, and I’d be instantly paralyzed from the neck up. Here was incontrovertible evidence that I wasn’t half as good as I imagined myself to be. The voices I heard so clearly and powerfully in my head became inert and alien on the page. I was surprised by how mortally embarrassed you can be by writing something nobody else will ever read. Even looking back over those one- sentence descriptions of TV ideas in the first paragraph of this essay, I am humbled by how inadequately they convey the vividness they had as I conjured them. It’s like hearing a recording of my own voice. That can’t be how I sound. Oh, but it is.

#

I recently saw a Charlie Rose interview with John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar, about the creative process behind his movies. Pixar’s in-house theory is: Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are an inevitable part of the creative process, so get right down to it and start making them. Even great ideas are wrecked on the road to fruition and then have to be painstakingly reconstructed. “Every Pixar film was the worst motion picture ever made at one time or another,” Lasseter said. “People don’t believe that, but it’s true. But we don’t give up on the films.”

Hugely successful people tend to say self-deprecating stuff like this when they go on “Charlie Rose.” But I heard something quite genuine in Lasseter’s remarks, an acknowledgment of just how deep into the muck of mediocrity a creative project can sink as it takes those first vulnerable steps from luxurious abstraction to unforgiving reality.

I could never forge through this. My confidence always collapsed under the weight of my withering self-criticism. I couldn’t bear the awfulness and keep going. Even as I’m writing this essay, I have to stop myself from scrolling back to previous parts and banging my forehead against the keyboard as I see how short I’ve fallen of my expectations. My mind goes uncontrollably to whether it might be better to scrap the whole thing and write a different Riff — like, I’ve got a few stray ideas in my notebook here about the glassy office tower they’re building next door to where I live and how it obliterates what’s left of the spirit of Greenwich Village. Or about this ’80s band called Talk Talk that started out making bland pop hits like Duran Duran but then rejected fame and made a couple of crazy, weird, beautiful records until mysteriously vanishing. That Riff will practically write itself, I just know it.

A promiscuous imagination like this is dangerous for writers. As an editor, I can see that clearly. I know that the next brilliant brainstorm is never going to be the one that will just write itself, any more than the last one did. Ideas, in a sense, are overrated. Of course, you need good ones, but at this point in our supersaturated culture, precious few are so novel that nobody else has ever thought of them before. It’s really about where you take the idea, and how committed you are to solving the endless problems that come up in the execution. The more I experienced this frustration firsthand, the more I came to appreciate how naturally suited I am to the job I used to think I never wanted to have when I grew up. Magazines give me a healthy, satisfying amount of creative license, as well as a very defined responsibility. Journalism keeps my imagination from flying off into the ether. At the core of everything is reporting, a real event. And editing allows me to collaborate with people whose talents make up for my weaknesses, especially writers who don’t seize up at the sight of a blinking cursor.

At the same time, the protracted period of realizing all this has been necessary. Struggling with my own creative process has helped me appreciate the difficulties that others go through, while fighting to subdue my own self-criticism has left me open to the possibilities of fledgling ideas that look wobbly out of the gate. Daydreams, weirdly enough, have made me a better editor.

Plus, if I’d understood this all perfectly when I started out, embraced editing right from the beginning, I’d be ready to move on to something else now. Like maybe I’d open a civilized sports bar that served only bourbon and sold vintage Pendleton shirts —

But now I must contend with my editor for this story, who just stopped by my office to see when I’ll stop beating my head against the keyboard so he can get this to the copy desk. There’s no chance of backing out now. He insisted it wasn’t as dreadful as I feared, gave me good advice on how to end it, and also remarked that my reality-show idea is not bad, but does it have to be about hockey? Well, no, I said, suddenly diverted into fantasy land, the conceit could be broader, maybe about how to coach amateurs more generally, so that the competition changed season to season — badminton, bobsledding, roller derby, square dancing. Rock operas!

We had a laugh and then got back to work.

Special Effects Budget

Happy Friday Post Guys!

I hope everyone's doing well on their New Year's Resolutions so far. It's only the third day of the New Year, so I hope that you're still going strong. If not it's not too late to pretend like it's a new resolution and you never messed up! Start today! It's never a bad time to make a resolution to be more productive!

This is actually a post that I wanted to make a few months ago and just never actually got around to doing. As some of you probably know and some of you might not, the movie "Enders Game" came out in November last year. I was really excited for that movie because it was an adaptation of one of the best Sci-Fi novels ever and it had Harrison Ford (whoot whoot) and Asa Buttefield whose parents were divinely influenced to meet so that he could be born to play Artemis Fowl.

End of story.

But, a story for another time, yes?

Sometime around the movie's release, my mom discovered an interview with Mr. Orson Scott Card and decided to email it to me. I read the interview and one answer of Card's really stood out to me. The reporter asked him if he wanted to make movies out of the rest of his books and he said, essentially, that if Ender's Game was a success sure why not, but if it wasn't no one would ever produce it even if he did. Then he said this:

"But, you know, whether that happens or not, my career is in books. There I have an unlimited special effects budget. And I can cast however I want." ~Orson Scott Card in an interview about the Ender's Game movie

Amen. AMEN. 

Can I just say amen again?

Amen.

Movies tend to have a lot of advantages over books, especially when it comes to appealing to the public. There's music, actors, movement, pictures, colors, explosions, it;s a lot shorter, and it takes a lot less brain power to watch than it does to read.

However, as Card so eloquently put it, in books, you can do a lot more. You can explore more. You can go places you can't with movies. You can create things you wouldn't be able to replicate (well or cheaply) with special effects. You can cast whoever and however you want and you don't have to actually hire anyone or deal with any fussy agents who want their actor's name first on the advertisements. It's great!

But as with anything in this world, it does come with a catch.

You have to be your own special effect's department.

You don't have to deal with money or how much it'll cost to make whatever crazy thing you're putting in your book, but you do have to describe well enough that  if someone did ever try to turn your book into a movie, fans would get mad at the special effect's division for messing it up.

The same goes for actors. You don't have to deal with fussy agents, or actors, or feeding them M&M with all the green ones picked out,  or dealing with their make up crew... but it also means that you have to bring them to life. You have to make them as real and substantial as a trained actor or actress can do.

So you do gain a lot by writing instead of creating a movie... you just have to make up for it later!

New Years Resolutions

Happy 2014 everyone!

I hope everyone's 2013 was a good one, and I hope that 2014 will be an even better one!

There are a lot of things that come with a new year, perhaps the most common of which is New Years Resolutions. If you live in my life, you're probably going to get hounded about making them just about every day for the next two weeks. The people in my life are highly supportive of New Years Resolutions and goal setting and such.

But you really can't blame them.

Harvard once did a study, and I really wish I could find the exact study, but I couldn't find it, where they interviewed one of their classes. These are Harvard students, so they're all already really smart and hardworking. They asked each of the students whether they had made New Years Resolutions. This is one of the reasons I wanted the study, so I could give you the exact number.

I think about two thirds of the class or something had made resolutions, half of them had written them down, and ten percent had written out a plan for how they were going to accomplish their goal.

Ten years or later, the students who had made goals were making some percentage more money that the group that hadn't. The one that had written the goals down were making even more money than them and the group that had written out plans was generally making more than twice the group that had written their goals down.

Now I know that this is a young writers blog, but I want you to take this and apply it to anything that you want to accomplish this year.

1. Think about what you want to do or accomplish. Actually think about. Then:

2. WRITE IT DOWN. Type it up or write it down and put it somewhere where you're going to see it. Don't type it up and hide it in a folder on your computer you never look at like I did last year.

And then, especially if it's a vague resolution like "Lose weight" (The number 1 resolution for Americans in 2014) or "Get organized" (Number 2) 

3. MAKE A PLAN FOR HOW YOU'RE GOING TO DO IT.

Don't say "Lose Weight", say

"Every Monday, after school at 3:30, I will go jogging for 30 minutes. 
Every Tuesday, after school at 3:30, I will do Pop Pilates for an hour. 
Every Wednesday, after school at 3:30, I will go jogging for 30 minutes. 
Every Thursday, after school at 3:30, I will do Pop Pilates for an hour. 
Every Friday, after school at 3:30, I will go jogging for 30 minutes. 
Every Saturday, I will get up at 8:00 and go jogging for an hour. 
Every Sunday, I will rest."

Use specifics and repetition. 

• Every Monday
• 3:30
• Jogging on some days, Pilates on others
• Half and hour or an hour
• I will go jogging, not I will try  ("Do, or do. There is no try.")

I use exercise because it's an easy one to plan out (though so hard to actually execute... I'm a couch potato... Exercise is icky.) There are some that are harder to plan out, I'll give you that. It's hard to plan out a goal like "Enjoy life to it's fullest" (4th most popular resolution). It's really hard to plan out a resolution like "Get a book published".

However, it is not hard to make a resolution to write a blog post every Friday, which just so happens to be one of mine.

It's not that hard to make a resolution to write 500 words a day. 

That's it. 500 words. Just sit down and write 500 words. You're not allowed to write 499. It has to be 500 or more. Even if you have writers block and you have no idea what you're going to do or what you want to write, just write them. EVERY. DAY. Even if you hate them, go back, delete those 500 words the next day and rewrite them if you want to or have to. But write 500 words every day.

By the end of 2014, writing 500 words every day, you will have written 182,500 words. That's easily two novels. So even if you delete what you wrote the day before every other day, you've still written a sizable novel by the end of the year.

Set a time. Right when you get home, before you start your homework. Right after you finish your homework. After your shower. Pick a time and most importantly STICK TO IT. 

If your goal is to edit your novel (that would be me ladies and gentlemen), make a resolution to spend 20 minutes or more either thinking or editing or rereading or rewriting your novel a day. 20 minutes. Even if it's just sitting there and debating with yourself whether you really need this chapter in there at all or something else. 20 minutes.

DO IT. Set a time and stick to it.

If your goal is to get it published, spend that same 20 minutes or longer working on query letters or looking for agents or editors you think might be willing to take you on. 20 minutes a day. That's it. That's not even the length of a sitcom. 

And finally

4. Do whatever you have to to remind yourself. 

• Write sticky notes to yourself and put them all over the place. 
• Tell a friend. I'm actually really good at making sure other people make their goals. A friend of mine once wanted to finish this book that she needed to finish for a project and I bugged her every single day about it until she finished. Friends can help you. 
• Put reminders on your phone. 
• Reward yourself. 
• Guilt trip yourself. 

Whatever works for you. Use a couple different methods at the same time.


Don't put it off or ignore it. If you take it seriously, you'll do it.

And I hope you will, whatever your goal is, literary or not.

Wishing you the best success and see you on Friday! Happy New Year!

- The Vinshire Sisters

Steal Like an Artist

Today, I would like to introduce a concept that my AP English teacher likes to call “Stealing Like An Artist”.

In truth, when he talks about “stealing like an artist” he’s really reminding us to cite every single thing we ever add to an essay… ever. However, I’m stealing his phrase and using it for my own purposes, which coincidentally related to what I’m talking about.

I want to air out the dirty laundry right now. I am not talking about plagiarism.

Plagiarism is, in a simple phrase, no cool.

If there is anyone among my audience that hasn’t had their head bashed in hundreds upon hundreds of times by their English teachers about what plagiarism is and to never do it, plagiarism is when an creator, typically an author of some sort, uses someone else’s ideas or concepts or characters or what not and passes them off as their own.

It’d be like me writing a book about a girl named Beth and her best friend Marie who find out that they have magical powers and have to go to a school to learn how to control their powers where they attend classes every day and learn how to do magic and find out that they're destined to fight an evil wizard who's trying to take over the magical world.

The saddest part is that I actually did try to write that book in the 3^rd grade. Marie could breathe under water. I don’t remember anything about Beth which is funny considering she was the character based off me.

Does this mean that you will never be able to write a book about a teenager discovering they have magical powers?

Of course not. It’s certainly hasn't stopped someone yet.

Does this mean you will never be able to write a book about said teenager going off to learn how to control their magical powers?

No, probably not.

Does this mean you will never be able to write a book about said teenager going off to a magical school to learn magic from a wise old man and perhaps fight off a Dark Lord?

… yeah. Unless you are severely clever and tactful, which would be extremely hard.

This being said, are there still authors who write very similar novels? Yes. Many people have accused Suzanne Collins of plagiarizing Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale for her novel Hunger Games. Both novels are about a dystopian world where teenagers are placed in an area of some sort with lots of weapons and told to kill each other until there’s only one survivor. She claims that she had never even heard of Battle Royale until after her book was published.

Is this true?

I think only Collins herself knows. A lot of people think that she’s lying. I’m personally inclined to believe her. There have been more than enough times in my life where I’ve come up with some idea or done some project that I think is completely original only to find out that someone else has come up with the same thing.

It happens. Especially in writing.

It’s one of the biggest problems that any creators face. Trying to create something new.

I’m not going to claim that everything’s been written, every genre created, every character flaw explored. I’m sure people thought that when some crazy English lady named Mary Shelly wrote about a scientist named Frankenstein that used electricity to create life, a monster named after himself, and the science fiction genre.

However I am going to venture to say, and I’m sure many Literature professors would agree with me, that there are only a handful of stories that have ever been told and will continue to be told as long as humans exist to tell or listen to them.

Some people will tell you that there are only two stories, some four, some thirty-six.

Explaining all of these is a post for another day though.

So, if every story has been written… what are we supposed to do?

That’s the fun part that ties in with stealing like an artist.

Literally almost any major plot device you can come up with has been used before, even if you don't know it. Whether by the Greeks, a French writer in the 18^th century, Shakespeare, or in past ten years.

So basically no matter what you write you’re stealing from someone else.

The trick is doing it well enough that no one cares.

You can do this by mixing and matching plots and devices and character traits and such. That’s one of the best ways to create a character in my opinion; mixing and matching character traits until they become a real person. Take a plot device here, a plot twist there.

Then, perhaps most importantly, you put your own flair on it. Whatever it is that makes you different, your idea different, your novel different. That’s what really makes a story unique. That’s the part that you’re really selling to an agent, or an editor, or readers. That is the answer to their question, “why should I read your book and not one of the thousands of others?”

I will quote myself in this regard. “All the good plots have been taken. So be discrete when you steal.”