Writing Advice

Writing Lessons from a Boneless Phone

And why not to follow Finngelo’s advice.

I named my first smartphone “Webster.” It brought the entirety of the World Wide Web to my pocket, along with the contents of Webster’s Dictionary. Eventually, I bought a new phone. I wondered what it’s name would be, and asked for suggestions from friends on Facebook. At some point during that conversation, my phone named itself “Finngelo.” I have no idea where it came up with that, or why it tried to change whatever I was typing, at the time, into “Finngelo,” but the name has stuck.

My current phone is a descendant of the original Finngelo. It is Finngelo IV. Finngelo III and I once co-wrote an entire blog post:

Finngelo IV does not imagine itself to be a writer, but it has a wicked sense of humor. I have a deal with close friends: If my Facebook statuses are ever rife with weird word choices, typos, or grammatical errors, they’re to ask me, first, if I’m composing them on my phone. If I don’t answer in a reasonable length of time, they’re to assume I’ve had a stroke, or that I’m being held ransom, sending out a coded SOS, and they’re to act accordingly. But they know Finny, and some are getting to know my phone almost as well as they know me — to the point where they can identify its almost-sentient attempts to make it look as though I’ve been abducted by a malevolent, alien life force.

One friend, who knows that I set “Do Not Disturb” hours on my phone used to talk to it — yes, to the phone — while I was asleep. I’d wake up and find these random messages, addressed to Finngelo. If I noticed, in the middle of the night, my friend would tell me to go back to sleep — he was talking to my phone! I think some of my friends do like Finny better than they like me.

I thought of this, today, while conversing with Maïa Belart about one of her recent stories here:

Avoid the Trap

Never mistake marketing advice for writing advice. And never assume this advice is benign; this is how marketers sell their web-based, get-rich-in-your-sleep schemes for just $497, or how vanity press reels in the naive novice writers with tales of how the world absolutely needs to read their words but just can’t find them. “Vanity press” is a misnomer, in my opinion; it thrives on the hopes and dreams of writers who lack the self-confidence to submit their work to real publishers. It thrives on the jaded, who’ve tried and failed and refuse to admit that writing is hard work and that rejection means they’re not working hard enough, or producing the kind of work others are interested in buying. There’s nothing at all wrong with real self-publishing, provided a writer has the skills to wear all the hats and possesses enough respect for readers not to fob off dreck to flood the market.

But back to writing advice. I’ve shared some here — specific, technical advice on how to improve trouble spots.

No one, absolutely no one, can tell you how to be more popular than Stephen King or J. K. Rowling or Diana Gabaldon or George R. R. Martin. Nor should they try. Nor should you listen to them, if they do. The trick is to write for the readers who love what you’ve got. And make no mistake: you do still have to figure out how to give those readers the breadcrumbs to follow, in order to find you and your writing. Where do they hang out? Go to them. Invite them to the dance.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter if some of my friends prefer Finny’s style to mine; if I try to imitate Finngelo, they’ll think I’ve suffered a stroke or that I’m being held on the high seas by pirates. I’ve spent most of my career as a professional writer, both as a freelancer and in corporate marketing communications or technical writing, eventually earning enough to retire early. Even there, I always tried to write as if the reader were a friend — someone who needed to read and understand what I wrote, right then. When you stop caring about the reader, you might as well stop writing for others altogether.

I could follow a formula to “succeed on Medium,” but if I write slick, click-baity dreck with some sort of soulless determination to become a Top Writer in a topic I care nothing about, just to make $17,623 a month on Medium, my friends and regular readers will smack me in the nose and call me a “sell-out” to my face. Because that’s what real friends do.

In 1949, Walter Winchell wrote:

Red Smith was asked if turning out a daily column wasn’t quite a chore. …”Why, no,” dead-panned Red. “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”

I think that there’s truth in that; the slick and superficial writing is easy, but to write something that will leap off the page and grab the reader by the throat requires scraping bone. Our own.

That is the essential difference between “content” and a “featured article” in a publication that only accepts a small percentage of submissions. It’s the difference between enduring poetry and greeting card verse.

When readers say, “I could really relate to that,” are they smiling? Are they waving as they skim the surface and float on by? Or are they sitting there, staring at the page, open-mouthed, wondering how on earth you, the writer, reached deep into their subconscious mind and crystallized that half-formed thought, or baked a meal from the raw, disorganized emotional ingredients they couldn’t name, themselves?

When I say “scrape bone” I don’t mean “eviscerate yourself on the page.” I mean get down below the surface, to the hard truths, to the “bone” that we all share beneath the surface of our skin. That’s where the writing becomes “relatable.” That’s why it endures.