Twenty things I’ve learned as a freelance writer

Tags

career advice, Craig Miller, freelance writing, William Goldman, writing

Computer problems? RTFM.

Start with anything. You can always revise.

Orgasm can be a useful way to clear one’s head.

Read your work out loud. You’ll catch mistakes that way.

Nobody wants to hear your novel’s plot. Especially not in detail.

When you’re stuck, take a walk outside. Bring a notepad and pen.

Don’t expect sympathy. You’re doing what other people say they want to do.

Go back to work. Take breaks as you need them, but keep going back to work.

Editors and publishers lie. So do you, Mister High and Holy. (Not that you should.)

As Super Chicken said to his assistant Fred, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

No project is real until the contract is signed and the check clears, and sometimes not even then.

As screenwriter and novelist William Goldman wrote, the easiest thing to do on Earth is not write.

Original sources, always. So much of what you think is true has suffered distortion in passing through multiple minds.

Wherever you go, bring a notepad and pen. You never know when you’ll find something intriguing and want to remember it.

A comfortable, strong, high-backed desk chair can make you feel as masterful as a skipper at the helm or a concert pianist at the keyboard.

The most beautiful word in the English language is “Done.” (My colleague Craig Miller says, with good reason, that the most beautiful word is “Paid.”)

Bring into your workspace favorite foods, pets, music, videos or whatever else makes you want to stay there, as long as they don’t distract you from working.

If I ever reach the point where pressures from work lead me to hurt or neglect people I love, shoot me. If this directive leads me to do lesser work — well, that sucks and is to be avoided; but so be it.

When I write fiction, I yearn for nonfiction or journalism, where you don’t have to invent the incidents and dialogue. When I write nonfiction or journalism, I yearn for fiction, where you don’t have to unearth and verify facts but can simply invent everything.

Everything takes longer than you expect.

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Was news better in the old days?

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CBS Evening News, Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Time magazine, TV news, Walter Conkrite

People complain about how divided Americans are. The internet and other tech present so many viewpoints that we don’t have common ground. We’re not united as a nation the way we used to be.

Sure — but back then, a gripe about the U.S. used to be its sameness.

A plurality of Americans got the news from one of two sources: Walter Cronkite on CBS or Huntley & Brinkley on NBC. Their producers often followed the lead of the big New York and Washington newspapers, whose owners and leaders usually knew and often socialized with government leaders.

Whether in government, media, or other fields, America’s leaders — who usually were or tried to appear white, male, Christian (primarily Protestant), hetero, born in the United States, and educated in the Ivy League or its equivalent — imposed a bland, blinkered way of thought on the nation. So the gripe went.

Back to today, when the gripe is that we seek out news, opinions, and entertainment only from people and groups who confirm our biases. Thus we’re fractured.

Both gripes are oversimplified generalities. But they contain some truth, which makes me ask: Which way is better?

I vote for today.

You can say, as my colleague Patrick Block does, that we don’t actually have as many media choices as we used to, since fewer conglomerates own more news outlets. True enough, for old media like newspapers. But when you look at who owns what on a larger and more detailed scale, things get fuzzier.

Then add the internet, where everyone can speak out and find an audience, and where everyone can see every news and opinion source.

In the old days, if you wanted alternate viewpoints, you had to find a newsstand or library with a variety of papers and magazines. Today, a quick online search offers any news and opinion you want.

If you wanted to spread a piece of news or opinion widely, you’d have to convince grandees like the editor of Time or the executive producer of the CBS Evening News that you deserved air time or column inches. Today, just put your point online. If it’s clever enough and you promote it well, millions will see it.

If they want to.

I confess: I usually avoid seeing, hearing, and reading things that make me uncomfortable. But if I want to find them, I can do it instantly and easily. And sometimes (not often enough), that’s what I do.

Americans may often barricade themselves in their mental towers and engage with opposing groups only to shout past each other. But at least everyone can hear the shouts.

And some of us listen. Sometimes.

What is life?

Tags

Artificial intelligence, Biology, Computers

I shouldn’t do this. I really should leave the definition of life to the biologists.

But if I were to restrict myself only to subjects in which I have expertise, I wouldn’t have a blog. So let’s go. What is the difference between a living being and an unliving but active creation, such as a computer?

One key definition is that in the biological world, dead is dead. If you dismember a rose, a cow or a human being, or simply deprive it of water and food, it will die. And once it’s dead, it’ll stay dead, even if you reassemble it and fill it with juicy nutrition.

But let’s say you try to kill a computer the same way that you would kill a living being. First, cut it off from the nutrient that keeps it running — that is, electricity. Then dismantle it to its component parts. You could put the computer back together, plug it into a wall socket, and suddenly it’s alive again.

By that example, you might argue that a computer is not just alive but a superior form of life: one that can defeat death.

But there’s more to life than the ability to stay dead.

Bury a steel road plate under a tree, and the tree’s roots will go around the plate to find substances more nutritious. Put a strong light source near an amoeba, and the little cell will escape to an environment that it finds more comfortable.

These entities have no consciousness, as far as we can tell. Still, they try to get nourishment and live in a healthy habitat.

And so it goes with other living creatures. You can’t stop a dog from wanting to eat your steak; the most you can do is train him not to try. You can’t make migrating birds decide to fly north for the winter. You can’t stop a thirsty six-year-old from wanting to pour endless sodas down his throat. Their drives and needs are ingrained down to the cellular level.

If you could remove these drives from a kid or dog or bird, you would end up with a thing that doesn’t want to eat or drink or find a safe place to stay. In other words, it wouldn’t want to live. In short order, it would probably die. Take away its needs and drives, and a living creature won’t be a living creature anymore.

A computer doesn’t work that way.

Computers can do a lot of things that living creatures can do, and a lot that the living can’t do; but they have no volition. Living things follow their own internal needs, but the unliving follow nothing more than basic laws of physics.

We can program needs into computers, of course. Via Google, we tell our computer FIND NAKED PICTURES OF DICK CHENEY, and our computer does it. NASA scientists tell the Mars rovers to explore the red planet, and the rovers won’t quit trying until they conk out or their programmers tell them to stop.

But whether the computer is searching for smut or exploring Mars, they’re obeying our desires, not their own. We can change or remove the desires at will — our will. Take those desires away, and the machines are just as functional as they were before anyone put those desires into them.

Some day, machines may evolve needs that humanity won’t have programmed into them. But that’s not the case yet.

Sorry, machine world. That’s life.