Last week, I was invited to give a talk in my daugher's a second grade class. The students were doing a unit on careers, and I was invited to talk about  being an author. Here are some of their questions, and my answers:

How do you prepare for your career?

Get a little notebook. Start writing every day: describe the things you see, write down your most interesting conversations, copy down great passages from things that you read or wonderful quotes that you hear. Pay attention: look, listen, slow down. Pay attention to what is going on all around you; pay attention to the dreams that God gives you and the ideas that bubble up in your imagination. Don't go anywhere without your little notebook. Pay attention. Write it down.

Would you recommend your career to others?

Yes, I would. I also would say that being a writer is a great second career. Your daytime job might be being a teacher or a mom or a pilot or a lawyer. But you could still be a person who writes great stories.

What is the best thing about your career?

I get to use my imagination, and I get to read and write all day. [Looks around at all the little kids in the class]  I also get to travel a lot and talk to interesting people.

Wow, did you ever get to talk to Eric Carle?

No.

Did you ever get to talk to the President of the United States?

No.

Did you ever get to talk to Oprah?

No. But I published something in her magazine.

At this point, the teacher jumped up to take a picture of me holding a copy of O Magazine,

and absolute mayhem ensued.

*SIGH*

PW:  The theme of what it means to be/to have a dad in Cosmic is wonderful. Did that emerge on its own, or was it deliberate?

FCB:  No it emerged on its own, rather late in the day. People think that inspiration comes at the beginning but one of the joys of writing is the late moment of inspiration that comes after months of slog. Cosmic was just about cars and laughs and then I woke up one morning and thought, "Oh, THAT's what it's about" and started all over again.

Was it even clear to you what you were supposed to be getting out of that class?

As I am getting ready to teach another group of first year students in a Freshman Writing Seminar, I've been looking at the national guidelines for what this kind of course is supposed to offer. I've posted the guidelines below.

So here is what I want to know: Did you actually learn this stuff on this list in your first year writing class, however long ago that might have been? Was it taught well? Are there things here that you still wonder about and wish you understood?

Council of Writing Program Administrators: 

Outcomes (National) for First Year Writing Courses

 At the end of the Freshman Writing course, first year students should be expected to demonstrate ability in 4 areas. 

Knowledge 
By the end of first year composition, students should
            Focus on a purpose
            Respond to the needs of different audiences
            Respond appropriately to different kinds of rhetorical situations
            Use conventions of format and structure appropriate to the rhetorical situation
            Adopt appropriate voice, tone, and level of formality
            Understand how genres shape reading and writing
            Write in several genres

Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
By the end of first year composition, students should
            Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating.
            Understand a writing assignment as a series of tasks, including finding, evaluating, analyzing, and synthesizing appropriate primary and secondary sources.
            Integrate their own ideas with those of others.
            Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power.

Processes
By the end of first year composition, students should
            Be aware that it usually takes multiple drafts to create and complete a successful text.
            Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading.
            Understand writing as an open process that permits writers to use later invention and re-thinking to revise their work.
            Understand the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
            Learn to critique their own and others’ works.
            Learn to balance the advantages of relying on others with the responsibility of doing their part.
            Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences.

Knowledge of Conventions
By the end of first year composition, students should
            Learn common formats for different kinds of texts.
            Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics.
            Practice appropriate means of documenting their work.
            Control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

 Thanks to Dr. Thomas Allbaugh for compiling this information and sending to his faculty.

Complied by Thomas Allbaugh 2/04

I sipped my latte and explained that passive voice does not mean that your sentence is long and dangly, lacks action, uses abstract language, or is generally boring. Like a lot of grammar terms, "passive voice" isn't a very good name for what it happening here. It is easily misunderstood.

Passive voice is a phrase that we use to describe a certain kind of sentence structure. It does not refer to the meaning of the words, the kind of words you use, or the length of the sentence. It's the order of the words that matter. Here are some examples of sentences that are written in the passive voice:

Fred was punched by Bill.
The hilarious comment was made by James.
The ish was pubbed by Mike.
The book was read by Sierra.
A long, boring speech about traffic lights and turn signals was delivered at the national conference of the Australian Vocation Bureau in 1987 by Chairman Gloria Underpenny.

All of these sentences are grammatically correct; that is to say, there is absolutely no grammatical reason not to use them. As far as the grammar police are concerned, these are all perfectly legal. Or, to put it another way, no tickets will be issued by your English teacher.

So what's the problem? When we read American English, we are generally happier if the subject of the sentence comes first. We want to know WHO did WHAT.  And we generally want to know it in that order: first tell me who is responsible, then tell me what they did. If someone messes with the basic, common, ordinary, familiar order of  things, we tend to get a little nervous. Somehow, a sentence like "David compiled the index" feels clean, honest, and straightforward. But if you switch it up and say "The index was compiled by David," all of a sudden, it feels a little, well, sinister.

So the passive sentences listed above seem more trustworthy if we are more direct, if we use active voice, if we say them this way:

Bill punched Fred.
James made the hilarious comment.
Mike pubbed the ish.
Sierra read a book.
Chairman Gloria Underpenny delivered a long, boring speech about traffic lights and turn signals at the national conference of the Australian Vocation Bureau in 1987.

All of these have word order that basically has a person doing something with something or to something. We call that a subject-verb-object (S-V-O) sentence. So if I have a sentence like "The teacher cried" or "Jane is the new president," then the whole active/passive issue doesn't even apply. It only applies when you have this particular kind of three part sentence.

Here's the bottom line: In active voice, the person who does the deed is standing proud as the subject of the sentence. In passive voice, the person who does the deed is hiding like a shivering coward in the prepositional phrase at the very, very end.

But if passive voice isn't wrong, does that mean that there are times when it would be a good idea to use it? Yes, there are.

For example, when you are trying on purpose to hide the perpetrator:

The window was broken.
The motion was made and seconded. 
The building was finished.
The body was discovered.
The evidence was compiled.
The suspect was interrogated.

In things like committee meetings, official reports, scientific papers, philosophical explorations, scholarly treatises, and so on, passive voice is not only permitted, but can be downright useful.  Passive voice can also lend a sense of authority to a piece because it evokes this kind of official, hifalutin rhetoric.

There are a few other situations, too. Sometimes you just don't know who was responsible. Or you want to downplay that information, or maybe you just want to save it for later. Or sometimes you need the stylistic variation to improve the flow of  your story. But in general, passive voice slows things down and makes people think you've got something to hide. It can be a little hard to follow. And it tends to sound just a little off.

Here, look. Here's the first paragraph of this blog in active voice:

A colleague called me the other day.  He offered to buy me a latte if I could help him figure out what was so bad about passive voice. I met him at the coffee shop on campus.

Here it is again, using passive voice:

I was called by a colleague the other day. An offer was made by him to buy me a latte if I could explain to him what was so bad about passive voice. He was met by me at the coffee shop on campus.

See what I mean?

chicken, basket, bookshelf

Several months ago, I wrote about my ceramic chicken, the one I use to store projects that are on hold. Sometimes I am waiting to hear from a publisher, sometimes a piece is just plain stuck, sometimes I need to gather additional materials, sometimes another deadline interrupts. Sometimes I just give up. In all of these situations, I find it helpful to put the project in a flat basket on a bookshelf, and set a large ceramic chicken on top.

Yep. I really do. It serves as a visual reminder that sometimes things just need a little time. Even though I am tempted to fret or feel discouraged, when I see that a project  under the chicken it helps me to remember that it's not over, it's not hopeless, it's not ruined, it's not wasted. It's just not ready yet. It needs more time.

The hardest ones for me to deal with are those projects that have gathered up a stack of rejection slips.  When I am trying to pitch a book, I usually start with a list of 20 or so preferred publishers, then I put them in order of preference, then I print out a list of addresses and prepare a stack of envelopes, then I print out two copies of the proposal.

A rejection letter comes in; a new cover letter gets printed and slipped into the next envelope and a new proposal goes in the mail to the next address on the list the very next day.

But sometimes I run out of addresses. That's what happened in the case of my devotional book "Clay in the Potter's Hands." Stacks of rejection letters, hours of pitching it at writers conferences, all kinds of trouble and nary a nibble. So that particular book manuscript has been sitting under the chicken for a very long time.

Today it hatched.

Here's how it happened. I am working on two scholarly articles at the moment, one for a conference and one for a book. Both are due in a couple weeks. Today was a writing day: Wake up, take Sierra to school, come home, sit down, write, write, write, pick Sierra up from school.

The day was going great. Until I got to the "write, write, write" part. It wasn't exactly writer's block. It was more like writer's restlessness. I didn't mind sitting and writing. I just had absolutely no juice whatsoever for the projects I was working on.

I pushed words around for a while, took a walk, pushed, fiddled, did some laundry-- hey, if you've ever written anything, you know just what it looks like. Except underneath the "I don't wanna write" part there was another part that whispered, "I DO want to write. I just don't want to write THIS."

In frustration, I looked under the chicken, saw the pottery book, pulled it out, sat down. And started writing.

The whole process of re-reading and re-vising was so fluid, so alive, so engaging, so exciting. I was late picking up Sierra from school because I was having So Much Fun. I lost track of time.

A publising plan, a timetable, and a thousand and one other decisions are waiting in the wings. I'll get to them. Later. For now, I'm having an absolute blast watching as this new hatchling breathes the breath of life. And feeling the profound privilege of being present as it does.

"It surprises and satisfies," declares the cover, and it turns out the cover is right. The New Writer's Handbook: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career, Volume 2 is well worth your time.

I was concerned that the short chapters and multiple authors would mean shallow content and a bumpy ride. Largely due to the skillful editing of Philip Martin, the whole thing holds together very well. More than 60 short articles on a variety of writing topics are carefully grouped and sequenced. They are practical, clear, varied, and economical.

I tried a quick skim, and I found myself reading it instead. I thought I'd be restless, and I found myself immersed. I figured it'd be same-old same-old, and I found good information, strong voices,  and fresh perspectives throughout.

I should add that I contributed one of those short chapters, a look at Lewis and Tolkien as collaborative writers.

I like this book. I am proud to be part of this project.  

I'll add another post or two about apostrophes later; right now, I want to comment on the process that people used to try to argue their point and break the deadlock.

1. Some folks argued that one usage LOOKED BETTER than the other. That's making usage decisions based on aesthetics.

2. Others said that when they googled a certain word, MOST PEOPLE did it a certain way. That's making usage decisions based on consensus.

3. Then there were those who appealed to their fourth grade teacher, their best friend's first cousin, or some HANDBOOK or style sheet they dug up somewhere. That's making usage decisions based on authority.

4. Finally, there were a few stubborn stalwarts who insisted that whatever THEY HAD BEEN DOING for the last upteen hundred years or so had to be right because, after all, that's what they'd always done. That's making usage decisions based on habit.

Aesthetics? Consensus? Authority? Habit? When we are not sure what is correct when it comes to matters of punctuation or usage, what should we do? Or, more to the point in this post, what guiding principle do we use to make the decision?

This one:

5. The debate was broken when someone (dear old "anonymous") pointed out that what is correct depends entirely on what MEANING you are trying to convey. That's right. Punctuation, like other matters of usage, is intended first and foremost as a servant of meaning.

In short, it doesn't make any sense to ask whether it is better to say students' or student's: the question is, how many students do you mean?

Commas, semi-colons, periods, all that stuff: it doesn't have to do with needing to take a breath, to look good on the page, to pay attention to Ms. Turabian, to sound right, to fit in the the crowd, or do it again the way you've been doing it  for time out of mind. The first thing you gotta know is exactly what you are trying to say. Then you do your homework and get the best information possible to help you say exactly that.

One of the most important comments was the simple affirmation that everyone, and that means everyone, has a hard time committing to seat time, to actually getting into the chair and staying there long enough to actually produce text. The best advice? The last thing you do every writing day is to make sure that it is super easy to get started the next day.

One way to do that is to set it up so that you are twitchy to get back at it. Stop in the middle of a sentence. Deliberately typo a few words in the paragraph. Sketch out the scene in a quick draft so that all you are doing first thing next morning is siting down and filling in details.

For me, the key is to leave specific instructions for myself on a sticky note ("START HERE!"). To make sure that the first task of the day is small and easy. And to make sure that all of the materials I need (books, papers, calculator, sharp pencil, whatever) are set out at the writing desk.

When you know what the next task is, sliding into the writing day is like sliding into your comfy slippers. When all your materials are assembled, you are less likely to shatter the flow by rumaging around for some piece that you need.

Another good point that came out of the panel is that fiddling around (aka procrastination) can sometimes be good for a project. Instead of banging your head against the keyboard, it might be more productive to go for a walk, work in the garden, run an errand. The key seems to be to keep it short and also to avoid words: walking is good, tv is not; pulling weeds or taking a shower or organizing a closet is good; reading a magazine is not. Set it up so that the word-making part of your brain is still simmering on the project while your physical attention is turned to something else for a bit.

Just be sure that you are really clear about the difference between incubating an idea and avoiding one.