Katie Cunningham: write badly to write well

Showing all posts tagged: writing

Katie Cunningham: write badly to write well

20 November 2024

Australian author and journalist Katie Cunningham:

My high school English teacher told me that good writing is the tenth draft of bad writing.

I saw this in The Booklist, a weekly newsletter by the Sydney Morning Herald, the other day. Sometimes I feel as if I rewrite everything I post here ten times before publishing it.

NaNoWriMo, NaBloPoMo, and WeblogPoMo AMA, November hots up

4 November 2024

National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo, is on this month, for better or worse.

But if you’re a writer seeking distractions from various November happenings — I’m referring more to northern hemisphere inhabitants facing the onset of winter — and don’t want to write a novel, there are other options.

National Blog Posting Month AKA NaBloPoMo, is a write-a-blog-post-each-day challenge, similar to Weblog Posting Month AKA WeblogPoMo, which ran back in May. NaBloPoMo was established in 2006, and for reasons I cannot fathom, have only found out about it now. A list of this year’s NaBloPoMo participants can be seen here.

Back to WeblogPoMo. While not holding another blog-post-a-day challenge this month, something called WeblogPoMo AMA is on instead. Here’s how organiser Anne Sturdivant, sees it working:

For this challenge I want to foster writer interaction: write a blog post starting with a question — the AMA — and then answer the question yourself in the blog post. Others will likewise write AMA/question posts, but also answer the AMA/questions from other bloggers, linking to their initial post.

I write here most days, but don’t know if I could do so every last day of the month. I think NaBloPoMo and WeblogPoMo are cool with people missing a day here or there, but it’s still a pretty big ask. WeblogPoMo AMA, on the other hand, seems like the sort of thing you can jump in and out of, as and when you’re able to.

If you’re taking part in any of these events though, all the best.

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blogs, events, writing

So long, thanks for all the blog posts: Microsoft cans WordPad

10 October 2024

Microsoft is doing away with their old basic, but useful, word processor, WordPad, which has been bundled with Windows Operating Systems for nearly thirty-years. It will not be a feature at all in Windows 11. Yet another reason to migrate away from Windows all together, perhaps?

Before switching to Word, I used to draft all my blog posts in WordPad. Now I use Writer. I did, still do, prep all the text and HTML tags when writing up a blog post, then copy and paste the lot into WordPress. When I migrated to WordPress in 2007, I used WordPad (heh, WP) to set out all the old blog posts from the old static, manually coded HTML webpages, onto an upload template. I later imported the template in the then new database on the WordPress install. So, WP to WP. The whole process took months, and I still look through the file today, which I’ve kept in an archive folder.

I expect the end game, on Microsoft’s part, is to push everyone onto Word. For a subscription.

Writing a book may be a health hazard, just ask a writer

23 September 2024

American writer and researcher, Gwern Branwen:

But how can I not want to write a book? And I get it: writing a book is sacred and unquestionable, the ultimate achievement for Western intellectuals — better than being arrested in a protest (because you don’t have to get sweaty), better than a PhD (because not so devalued), and better even than going to Harvard (because that mostly means you got lucky in admissions).

I’m no intellectual, but I’ve been banging away at a book manuscript for years, ten years actually. On the other hand, I’ve been writing here at disassociated, on and off, since the late nineties. But what do people I know ask about the most?

A book that may never see the light of day? Or a blog that is updated regularly, and has some sort of readership (excluding the neighbour’s cat)? Surprise, surprise, it’s not the blog.

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Ireland: home of some of the best literature in the world

2 September 2024

Publication of Irish author Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo, on 24 September 2024, nears. It promises to be quite the event. I don’t know about Australia, but in Ireland and the UK, some bookshops will open early on the day, so eager Rooney fans can get hold of her latest offering.

But Sally Rooney is only one of a cohort of popular Irish writers. The Emerald Isle* may not be the world’s most populous nation, yet it is up there with the best of them when it comes to literary output. Jonathan Swift, W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, and Edna O’Brien, are among Irish authors who are household names.

So, what’s the go? What makes Ireland a country of great writers? As Kate McCusker, writing for The Guardian discovered, the propensity to put pen to paper comes down to a number of factors.

One is the Irish love of entertaining and storytelling, of which I have some first-hand experience. Another is the diminishing influence of the Catholic Church. People no longer feel they need to restrain themselves, subsequently they can write about whatever they want, including divorce, gay marriage, and pre-marital sex. The things we all love to read about.

The Irish government is also arts-friendly. A few years ago they launched a three-year trial scheme that pays selected artists and creatives a basic weekly income. There’s an initiative that has to make a difference. Artists and writers can focus on being creative, and not getting distracted as they try to juggle day jobs and art.

* the term the Emerald Isle comes from a poem, written in 1795 by William Drennan, a doctor no less. Even non-professional writers make for great writers in Ireland…

Wanting to read more novels, versus trying to do everything else

21 August 2024

About six years ago I decided I wasn’t reading enough novels. Books sat on the side table untouched, gathering dust, and inducing a pang of guilt whenever I took notice of them. I wondered what I could do to get more into reading. One thing I am good at is meeting deadlines, and doing things I put on my to-do lists. If I could regard the period of a library book loan — being three weeks at my local library — as a deadline, maybe I could increase my reading rate that way?

So I took out a library membership, and began to borrow books. I had three weeks to finish a novel. Books could no longer sit on the side table indefinitely. They had to be back at the library after twenty-one days, or else I risked paying a late-return fee. But then I noticed the library offered a one-week loan for recently acquired titles. This so as many people as possible could read new books. And for a while, this is what I did. Read books in a week or less.

Sometimes it was a strain. But if I didn’t finish the book before it was due back, no problem: I’d make a note of the page/chapter I was up to on my online task list. I could then re-borrow the book later, and pick up where I left off. It was a plan, and it was working. I’d gone from reading no books, to sometimes, one a week. At that point I wasn’t really discriminating. I’d go over to the one-week loan shelf, and select any title I felt I could read in seven days.

But I knew it was too good to last. The first thing to come along and burst the read-one-book-a-week bubble, was the pandemic. The library shut its doors when the lockdowns commenced. Automatic three week loan extensions were granted indefinitely to anyone who’d borrowed a book prior. I think I ended up holding my then latest loan for about three-months, before pandemic restrictions eased sufficiently, so I could return it. But the pandemic wasn’t a problem of itself.

I could still borrow books through any number of library-book apps. By this stage, I’d been away from disassociated for three years (so much for the envisaged break of a few months…), and was looking at a return. But I wanted to try experimenting with the blogging format on social media. Instagram (IG) specifically. Blogging on IG was a terrible idea, and I knew it. The inability to embed links into posts being the primary drawback.

Since I’d been reading a lot, I started (a long since gone) IG page, dedicated to Australian novels. In the time the page was online, it garnered several hundred followers, and a surprisingly high degree of engagement. A little too high maybe. People sure wanted to talk about local books. Before long, I was spending most my time conversing with a regular group of followers about books, and everything else, leaving little time to read. A book was now taking several weeks, longer, to read.

I was beginning to run out of material I could write about. And not being able embed links into posts (link in bio, anyone?) was really beginning to annoy me. By this time, it was the fourth quarter of 2021. I quietly resumed writing at a temporary domain, while creating a new WordPress theme for disassociated. By late summer of 2022, I’d closed the IG page, and told followers where they could find me. But blogging, while working, while reading, does not a good blend make.

My book reading rate has slowed right down. The desire to write is in constant conflict with the desire to read, and it looks like the blog is winning. Yet, I see plenty of prolific book bloggers out there. People reading a lot, and writing a lot about that. Good for them is all I can really say. The battle for balance is without end, even if I get a chapter or two in each day. But I’m not the only one who struggles to read, as I discovered from this post at 82MHz.

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Happy birthday WordPress, twenty-one and going strong

30 May 2024

I’m a bit late to the party, but such is life in the twenty-first century. The other day WordPress (WP), the CMS that powers disassociated turned twenty-one (Facebook link)*.

I’ve been on-board since 2007. You’ll only find a handful of posts from those days though, I rebooted my website in 2021, after taking a slightly longer than expected four-year hiatus. The original WP blog (not to be confused with my original website which debuted in 1997) had over ten-thousand posts, many of them quite short.

When I returned in September 2021, so many of those posts had dead links, I decided the best way to deal with the problem was to start again. I deleted the old database, and started a new one. But I have been, ever so gradually, restoring certain posts from 2017 and before.

All sorts of other CMSs were there, or have emerged since 2007, but I decided to stay with WP. It might too powerful for my pretty simple needs, and I am not in with Gutenberg, but I decided to stay with what I knew. That way I can focus on what’s really important, and that’s writing.

So, happy belated twenty-first birthday WP, and thanks. Here’s to whatever comes next.

* yes, a Facebook post. I couldn’t find a write-up celebrating the illustrious milestone on the WordPress website, or even Automattic, the WP developers. Er, but surely posting on FB defeats the purpose?

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Creative environments, are they a place or a time, or both?

28 May 2024

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: write about creative environments. Let’s have a go.

A creative environment, as far as I can tell, is not necessarily a place. Not one I can put my finger on, at least. Nor is it a particular time. My creative ideas, if that’s what they can be called, arrive spontaneously. Without warning. My muse’s strikes are unpredictable, to quote Amelia.

I’d wanted to take part in Juha-Matti Santala’s creative environments themed blog carnival, since hearing about it at the beginning of the month. The first blog carnival I’ve participated in — since, I don’t know — 2008? Back in the day, blog carnivals were a great way to network, and discover the work of other writers and bloggers. With the return to the small web, personal websites, and blogs, gaining momentum, maybe they will be once more.

I feel like I’m constantly being creative. Be it devising solutions to problems at work, figuring out the best way to optimise the day, or writing here, it all seems a manifestation of creativity. It seemed then like an easy topic to write about. But with days left in May to act, and after weeks of futile brainstorming, this page remained blank.

Until yesterday, when as if by magic, the words took form at one of my hot-desking locations. With impeccable timing. Just as I wanted to pack up for a short break, take a stroll, and buy some lunch. But my thoughts were also on resuming my hot desk post-haste, before the afternoon grew too old, so I could indulge in another coffee.

I can’t then always be wholly sure what triggers my creativity, and subsequently leads me to my creative environment. On this occasion, it might have been the hint another cup of coffee was in my future. Or it could be the prospect of being mobile, and on my feet. I’m not sure about the coffee, but when it comes to walking as an incubator for creativity, the science is pretty definitive.

On some days when I start walking, the ideas almost instantly start flowing. Be that going home, strolling in the park, ambling about when we stay on the NSW Central Coast, or mall-walking at a large shopping centre, on what is a track spanning, by my estimations, two-and-a-half kilometres. But whatever the setting, solutions to problems begin presenting themselves.

Do that this way. Do this that way. I often stop, mid-step, to write something in my phone’s notes apps, or email myself a snippet of a thought I’ve had. But what a lot of us may not realise, is just how much goes into the mix, when it comes to being creative. There’s all sorts of stuff up in the air.

Random, scattered, diverse, subconscious, thoughts and feelings, swirling around, just waiting for the right moment to come along, and coalesce into a solution called creativity. And that eureka moment isn’t only a setting, a place, it’s also a time.

What that place is, I don’t always know. Ditto the time. Whatever, that’s my creative environment.

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A simple text editor named Tine, by Martin Dorazil

15 May 2024

A text editor without the bells and whistles, called Tine. A nice name for a text editor.

The main goal of this editor is to keep the focus on the text editing and not be distracted too much by buttons, tabs, menus, and animations.

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Do not comment on another website, when you can write on your own

29 April 2024

The more things change, the more they stay the same, perhaps? Manuel Moreale writing the other week about blog post comments:

I’m not a fan of comments in general and I think commenting on something should be done in one of two ways: 1. Privately via email or via direct messaging. 2. Publicly by posting a reply on your own website.

Back in the day, when the first inceptions of disassociated came online in the late 90’s, these were just about the only options for communicating with a personal website owner. There were of course guestbooks, which, contrary to popular belief, are still alive and well. Maybe I’ll bring one back here.

But if you wanted to respond to something someone had written in their online journal, writing a post in reply, on your own website, was the way to go. Blog post comments were unheard of in the nineties, as indeed, for the most part, was the term blog. But posts-in-response were a great way to build rapport with other website owners, network, and even collaborate.

You never knew what might come of some of these ongoing reply-to-something-someone-had-written-on-their-personal-websites confabs.

For a group of mainly Sydney based web creatives, including me, Jen Leheny, and Justin Fox, (sorry, I can’t find websites for the others), the result was the formation of the Australian INfront. And for almost twenty years from 1999, INfront brought Australian web design front and centre globally.

Blog comments were also a great way to build rapport and network, but I almost think the case can be made that they spelt the end of the personal website. Now that readers of a website/blog could respond to a post in the same place, many people no longer needed their own website to do so.

The likes of Twitter, when it arrived, a microblogging platform, where users only needed to create an account to get posting, hastened the decline of the personal website. But, thankfully, nothing resulted, so far, in their extinction.

Post comments are not unheard of here, but I rarely enable them. And that’s because I’ve long believed the best way to comment on something you’ve seen here is to either contact me, or, preferably, write a post on your own website.

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