I Can’t Help It

I can’t help it that I look at the dark side of things. Or maybe a better way to phrase that is, I’m cynical. Tell me something’s perfect and my knees jerk up to my gut. Perfect? — not in this lifetime.

It seems like once a month I read a newspaper article that quotes this mantra: This doesn’t happen in our neighborhood.

My dark side rises up, screaming, why? Why do you think this doesn’t happen in your neighborhood? The questions pile on like a bunch of footballers. (Not a word I usually use, but I’m reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves and this word came up in the coverage of apostrophe uses. I assume it’s a British thing, maybe my British friends can let me know.) Anyway, the questions pile on:

• is your neighborhood filled with perfect people?
• do shootings, stabbing and murder only happen in “bad” neighborhoods? what is a “bad” neighborhood, anyway?
• drunks never careen through your neighborhood? because no one in your neighborhood drinks and drives?

The story that prompted this round of questions was a man fleeing the police who smashed his car into someone’s bedroom. If something like “this” doesn’t happen in your neighborhood, it’s because you’re lucky!

The similar quote comes after murder, usually: he was such a nice man. Really? You knew this because he waved at you when he brought in his trash cans? He brought in his trashcans on time? Is that what made him “nice”?

I suppose most people read comments like these and feel compassion (I do) or relief that it didn’t happen to them (I do), but those are fleeting emotions. Immediately my brain leaps to the dark side of life: murder, betrayal, hatred, lying, secrets, steeling, self-absorption, cruelty — the stuff of fiction, but especially the stuff of psychological suspense.

It might have a little to do with my job — I’m a competitive analyst. I’m always looking for flaws, for marketing claims and PR statements that can be poked full of holes and shown as half-truths. But it’s mostly just the way I’m wired. I can’t help it.

Bad News / Good News

They always say, which do you want first – the bad news or the good news.

I always like the bad news first. It never seems as bad when the good news follows quickly.

The bad news is, my lovely summer lull that allowed me lunch breaks to blog and write flash fiction have been sucked up by the day job monster. It’s back to eating at my desk, working after dinner. Yuck. Hopefully the after dinner part will end next week.

But there’s good news. I’m on track with my novel re-write. And this morning, I finished early — almost unheard of — and had time for a quick flash and a short post. I started the day feeling more like a writer than a marketing geek.

Market Research

Steve Jobs says Apple doesn’t do market research … “We figure out what we want.”

This intrigues me on several levels: market research is part of my day job and most marketing geeks consider it essential, I adore Apple products (clearly they’ve developed a loyal customer base), and I’ve lately been excessively concerned with market research for my novel.

Jonathan Ive, the leader of Apple’s design team states, “Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products“. This echoes what I’ve read on agent blogs — concern yourself with writing a great book.

What a great lesson for me as I head into a weekend dedicated to writing. As I  tighten scenes while enjoying the sensuous beauty of my MacBook keyboard and shut out the world with classical piano music pumped through my iPod, I’ll think about writing the psychological suspense novel I want to read.

Factoid

I love words, all writers do. Often I wish I knew more words and sometimes I think I should consider vocabulary expansion exercises, but I know that it’s not vocabulary per se that will enhance my writing, it’s specifics — using the precise word to evoke an emotion, to create a mental image.

Words sometimes appear in the flow of something I’m writing, and I realize I’m not 100% sure I know the definition, so I check. I like to be precise, I like to make sure the word is really communicating what I intend.

That’s how I found out about factoid. I used the word often. I liked the sound of it and I liked, what I thought, was the meaning of it — a brief and interesting tidbit of information. Then one day I was creating a few marketing slides for the boss of my boss and I decided one of the slides would have “factoids” about the technology arena where my company plays.

A quick click to Google led to a shocking discovery. Factoid means the opposite of what I thought it meant, the opposite of what many in the marketing field think it means. Factoid: “something resembling a fact; unverified (often invented) information that is given credibility because it appeared in print”. Ooops.

Factoid was reportedly coined by Norman Mailer. Depending on your view of the marketing profession, it makes sense that marketeers might consider factoids to be truth, but since then, I’ve seen it pop up in news, blogs and other online spots. Google it, you’ll see what I mean.

Although I enjoyed using it in marketing, it certainly didn’t do anything to enhance my fiction writing. Still, now that I have no use for factoid, I miss it — such a perky-sounding word.

WFH

Work from home isn’t just for writers any more.

My company allows, even encourages working from home. In a global corporation where most meetings have a least a few, if not all participants calling in from around the US and across the globe, it matters less where you’re located.

However, there are still dinosaurs roaming the halls, even in a high tech company. They want to see your face, if your face is located within commute distance. They’re nervous about WFH because, well, what if people aren’t really working?

Let’s see, when I’m in the office, I’m busy with the following: group strolls down to the cafeteria and back, gabbing at the coffee bar, drive by chats (oh, hi. Can you believe how clueless Michael Marketing was in that meeting?), people conducting meetings on speaker phones at maximum volume, hallway updates on the status of romantic relationships, dogs visiting the office, children visiting the office, collections for the baby shower fund, queries about whether my presentations are coming out of the printer, fire alarm tests and more gabbing at the coffee bar.

Okay, that doesn’t all happen in one day. The point is, at home, I work. I feel a sense of accomplishment. When I have to work late, it’s easy to take a dinner break and wrap up earlier than I would if I was slogging through at the office. And WFH does offers a freebie: that extra hour we all want in our days, thanks to avoiding the commute. The downside is that I miss all those interesting characters who might want to make an appearance in my novel.

I don’t know whether my co-workers glue themselves to their home office chairs like I do, but I guess writers have learned to glue themselves to chairs. It’s the only way to complete a novel.

Precision

A tap of the ball that sets it on a line that’s off by a quarter of an inch (apologies for showing my US myopia here) means a missed putt. Golf is a very precise game, and that’s part of the appeal for me.

In my day job, I do a lot of market analysis, and I work with numbers rounded to the tenth place, regularly fretting whether  6.95 will give the wrong message if it’s, correctly, rounded to 7.0 but is a lot further from 7.0 than 6.98, for example. I also manage my life via spreadsheets, but that’s another story.

I love the precision of golf, I love that if the stance and the grip and the aim and the movement of the back swing and all the planets are aligned, you can hit a perfect shot. If one of those is off by a quarter of an inch – disaster.

And I love the precision of words. I drink in the beautiful words of writers who take care to avoid cliches, resulting in fresh images and writing that’s elegant. I seek out writers who care enough to choose words that describe clouds as bruised so I can feel a sliver of what they feel, see a glimpse of what they see.

Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Oscar Wilde is reported to have said, in reply to someone who had asked him how he had spent his day: “I spent the morning putting in a comma; and the afternoon taking it out.” — a man I can identify with. (Yes, contrary to what I learned in school, apparently it’s acceptable to end a sentence with a preposition. If this new information from an English teacher is not correct, please let me know! All those years of haranguing my husband because the statement on his license plate frame ended in a preposition.)

Lesson six: precision matters.