Topic: Writing

Wiki started as this weird idea that seemed to work against all odds. And then it seemed to really work. And now wiki is just a way to make and host a website without taking full responsibility for the generation of all the content. To say wiki is to say “collaboration” and “distributed authorship,” in some vague handwaving way.

But clearly, getting a wiki “right,” is more difficult than just throwing up a wiki engine and saying “have at it people.” Wiki’s need a lot of stewardship, and care, that I think people don’t realize off the bat. Even wikis that seem to be organic and loosey-goosey.

I have this wiki project, at the Cyborg Institute Wiki that I’ve put some time into, but not, you know a huge amount of time particularly recently. Edits have been good, when they’ve happened. But all additions have come from people who I have asked specifically for their contributions. I don’t think this is a bad thing but this experience does run counter to the “throw up a wiki and people will edit it” mindset.

I’ve started (or restarted?) [a wiki that I set up for the OuterAlliance][oa-wik]. You can find out more about the OA there (as it gets added) or on the OuterAlliance Blog. Basically, O.A. is a group of Science Fiction writers, editors, and critics (and agents? do we have agents?) who are interested in promoting the presentation and visibility of positive queer characters and themes in science fiction (literature).¹

In any case, the group needed a wiki, and unlike the C2 Wiki, the people who are likely to contribute to this wiki are probably not hackers in the conventional sense. As I’ve sort of taken this wiki project upon myself, I’ve been trying to think of ways to ensure success in wikis.

Ideas, thoroughly untested:

Invite people to contribute at every opportunity, but not simply by saying “please add your thoughts here.” Rather, write in a way that leaves spaces for other people to interject ideas and thoughts.

Create stubs and pages where people can interject their own thoughts, but “red links” (or preceding question marks in my preferred wiki engine) are just as effective as stubs in many cases. The thing is that wikis require a lot of hands on attention. While stubs don’t require a lot of attention and maintenance, they require some. My favored approach recently is to make new pages when the content in the current page grows too unwieldy and to resist the urge to make new pages except when that happens.

Reduce hierarchy in page organization unless totally needed. You don’t want potential collaborators to have to thing very much about “where should I put this thing.” The more hierarchy there is the greater the chance that they’ll have to either think about it and/or that they’ll not find a place to put their contribution and then not contribute. This is undesirable.

Hierarchy is problematic for most organizational systems, but in most wiki systems, it is really easy and attractive to divide things into lots of layers of hierarchy because it makes sense at the time. The truth is, however, that this almost never makes sense a couple of weeks or months down the road. Some hierarchy makes sense, but it’ll take you hundreds of thousands of words to really need 3 layers of hierarchy in most wikis.

Leaders and instigators of wiki projects also, should know that creating and having a successful wiki represents the output of a huge amount of effort. There’s a lot of figuring out what people mean to say and making sure that their words actually convey that. There’s a lot of making sure people’s comments really do belong on the page where they put them. And more often than not leaders put in the effort to write a huge amount of “seed” content as an example to contributors in the future. It’s not a bad gig, but it’s also not the kind of hting you can just sit back and let happen.

Other thoughts? Onward and Upward!

I didn’t write a novel last month.

I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian about NaNoWriMo, the project where writers and people who don’t think of themselves as writers attempt a novel writing sprint during the month of November. Well, it’s a 50,000 word “novel,” which is in the end a bit short for a novel and a bit too long for a novella, but we’ll call it a novel for the sake of simplicity.

My basic gripe is that NaNoWriMo is a fun gimmick for people who aren’t used to turning out huge volumes of writing every day anyway, it doesn’t do a lot to really ensure or guarantee success. At it’s heart NaNo has a very democratizing idea: anyone can write a novel, I fear that it does more to impede success than encourage it.

My reasoning:

• November is the worst month, with the holidays and the time change, potentially. November also tends to be bad for people who are in school or who teach school, as the semester draws to an end. December might be even worse in these respects. Here are some arguments for other months: February or March, (in the northern hemisphere) are cold months where you just want to stay at home, and what better time to write a novel? May is upbeat and fresh. June has no major holidays and rides a wave of Summer euphoria. Defenders of NaNo say “There’s no good month, so we might as well use November.” I reject this logic. Picking a bad month of the year can do a lot for the success rate of the people who attempt the project, I figure.
• The novel is too short. While it would probably also decrease success rate to make the NaNo Novel a publishable length (60-80k or so), I think having people end up with a piece that’s sort of unusable in the “real world” can be discouraging as well. If they get something they like from NaNo, and they want to publish it, they have to write at least another ten thousand words and possibly as much as 50 thousand words. Digital distribution helps these things a bit, but the size is an issue.
• What “real writers” do, is write every single day. The trick to being able to be a writer isn’t the ability to turn out a quantity of prose on demand. It’s the ability to sustainably work on projects all year round. To turn off the internal editor long enough that you get something on the paper, and then turn it back on so that “something” doesn’t suck. They’re able to take experiences and turn them into texts.
• I’m not sure that the fetishization of the novel form is particularly productive. I think there’s a lot of power and future in shorter forms. For learning how to be a writer, writing shorter works is probably a more effective way to learn to tell stories and create characters anyway.

Having said that, congrats to the people who did NaNo. Keep writing. You’ve probably found a few extra hours in your day that you didn’t know you had. Keep writing and doing awesome things with that time. And if you’re a huge fan of NaNo, don’t worry too much about me, I’m just an ornery guy with too many opinions.

It’s true: I’ve been working on a Novel for more than a year, and while I’m closing in on the end of the draft. Its now done yet. Soon, perhaps. Also, I think I should probably do some blogging here about learning to write, and teaching writing given that I got here by way of a strange path and feel so strongly about these things.

It’s a weird thing, this “being a writer” stuff. I’m sure I’ve written about this here to some extent. As a kid, I think--at least I tell myself now--that I wanted to be a writer. There was something about writing that mystified me and challenged me and had me totally entranced. I had a hell of a time with writing in high school, enough that I really shied away from formal training as a writer in college in almost entirely. I took two English classes in college, sort of (they were cross listed as something else), and I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to be a writer.

Right.

And then I got out of school, and something clicked. Actually, the revival of my blogging efforts that stuck hit during my final semester of college. And one thing lead to another and, here I am. I write this blog, that’s you know… fairly prolific. I have job where I write things day in and day out. I write fiction a fair piece, though not as much as I might like.

One might think--I certainly did--that getting a job as a writer would put to bed all of my insecurities and doubts about being a writer. But it doesn’t. I’m not complaining, mind you, but it’s still weird.

Fundamentally, writers have a peculiar way of being in the world that is always a bit unsettling and alienating. Certainly we’re all different, and the experience of being a poet is different than the experience of being a technical writer is different from being a science fiction, but I’m convinced that there are some common features.

Writing, at least for me, is sort of about turning experiences into words. This isn’t some wishy washy practices of translating the feeling of moments into words; but rather a pretty simple observation about practices. No matter if I’m writing science fiction stories or systems administration documentation, my ability to write is always dependent upon doing things in the world and gathering experience. Without this, I run out of stored experiences, of “mojo” and my writing becomes flat and painful, if I can manage to write anything at all.

Now the writing part, after a while becomes pretty straightforward: Sit down. Figure out where you need to go in a given text and about how long you have to get there plus a few other variables, like voice and audience. And then you just sort of let the “experience,” part flow out onto the page¹ as you sort of mold the thoughts into the path you need to follow.

And this leaves the walking through the world part. It’s reflexive and feels normal, until you realize that you are instinctively collecting images, snippets of speech, moments, situations, little stories, and other bits of miscellany, in some master database in your head. Every conversation becomes an experiment in expressing an idea or a theory. It’s not so overt that it makes “living” difficult, or conversations awkward (though it does sometimes), but I sometimes have to remind myself that what’s going on in my head isn’t what’s going on in everyone’s head. No really.

Another problem with being a writer is that, everyone writes, or knows how to, at least in the abstract. Some folks don’t like it, and some folks aren’t particularly “skilled written communicators,” but we all know how to do it. This isn’t the case for a lot of professions, disciplines, or even hobbies. Not everyone can write a computer program, not everyone can knit a sweater, or cook a meal, or analyze great amounts of data, engineer more advanced agricultural technologies and crops, and so forth.

This creates some tension: since so many people know how to write, and yet most people don’t as a matter of course, there is some mystification around what writing requires. “What are you doing this weekend,” they’ll ask. “I was thinking of staying home and writing, and maybe going for a walk or two,” I say gleefully. “That sounds dull, and don’t you " they say. “Well, yes, but it sounds amazing. I wonder if I have enough food to get me through the weekend,” I say. Welcome to my life.

Despite all this I nearly always feel like a cheat and a fake. My fiction is totally unpublished, and I’m not sure I’m writing in the correct direction, or doing the right things to be able to really have an active fiction writing career in the next 7-10 years. I’m constantly unsure about the success of the blog: it’s self published, sometimes it feels like I don’t have any reviewers outside of friends and readers-who-have-become-friends. And while I’m quite pleased and proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish at work, and I think that We/I’ve been able to be pretty successful, I’m really part of a team and what I write is so terribly niche.

I think that’s the other part of being a writer that’s so strange. No matter how much of it you do, no matter how much of your income is the direct result of the way you commit words to paper (or emacs buffer): you’re still just another hacker.

But maybe this is true for everyone. I can accept that. I hope you all have a good day.

I’ve been, perhaps without good reason, trying to establish a tie between the (for lack of a better term) critical writings I’ve been doing here, and the kinds of things I try to accomplish in my creative work. I think my contact with and involvement in the Outer Alliance is probably responsible for this bit of introspection, but blame isn’t really required.

I’m a very political kinda of guy, right? I mean, I think about things very politically, I think there’s a lot of worth in thinking about how class, economics, and power dynamics (probably in that orders of priority.) I think that talking to people about political ideas, about how to change the world, and share these ideas with people is really a rather huge core of what I’m doing with this blog, and related projects.

When talking with OA people, I’ve realized how, at least superficially, my writing isn’t terribly political. I think I’m bold about addressing some of the intellectual ideas that I think are important, and there are ways in which the stories I tell are political on some level, but for the most part, I think

This gets me into all sorts of “art is apolitical” and “art transcends politics,” trouble, and I don’t think that’s exactly what I mean. Of course art is political, even my stories--which can’t omit to having overly complex political thoughts during the writing of the texts--are quite political. But I think the politics is the kind of thing that happens to a story when people read it, not during the moment of writing. When I’m writing, my experience is usually much more along the lines of “how do I get this character out of, or through, this scene,” and not how do I resolve this political crisis. As it were.

I think a few OA folks probably read this from time to time, and I’d be interested in hearing what they think about the juncture of “politics” and “writing fiction.” Thoughts?

Onwards, and Upward!

From the file of “things I would like to be writing if I had more time.” Please, if you’re inclined or would like to use one of these ideas for the basis of a story, please feel free to.

1. A distributed space opera

I’ve been telling very tight space opera stories for a while now. Stories set within the next 1000 or so years that revolve around our sun, where the civilization shares much of our cultural background. Stories set in the future chronicles of “Western Civilization” as it were. I’d like to get away from that and tell stories that are bigger than that, stories with less ubiquitous communication between worlds.

2. An Alien Story

As a kid who grew up with ubiquitous bipedal aliens in Star Trek, I’ve been wary of alien stories, as I worry that the aliens will be too campy or too human like. Or I’ll fall into the exoticisism trap and have my aliens be too wondrous, and that’s not good either. Despite this avoidance, I love alien stories, and I love stories that can take advantage of this additional spectrum of difference and diversity, to mention nothing of the potential communication issues.

3. A Planet-bound Space Opera

Back to space opera. If this is my thing then, I’m happy for it. One of the things that I like about the forum are the ways in which it forces us to expand the limits of possibility and difference, it makes us thing big. The distributed idea above makes the world huge and vast by disconnecting the story-world from ours. I think setting a story on a planet or outpost, in a world where there’s a interstellar economy/culture, I think it would be interesting to explore the vastness and world view from the perspective of people who don’t actually travel between the stars very much.

4. Cyberpunk and Internet Networking

I’d like to write some sort of story that addresses some of the problems with managing “big data.” Which is to say, we’re collecting so much data right now and there’s so much raw information that it’s difficult to keep track and store it reasonably, much less find a way to make use of it. I think this is a hugely interesting problem, but I think as we begin to expand a little bit the there’s going to be technological limitations to the accessibility of data in some locales based on distance and local capacity. Exploring how this plays out practically in cyberspace is I think important. There will clearly be massive shared data collections, and computers will be networked, but will there be one data network in the way that there is now, or will there be many data networks? And where are the breakpoints socially?

5. A Story about Death and Closure

In my psychology major days I was very interested in development processes and moments around death and dying. Maybe I read too much Irvin Yalom, but I think a science fiction story--perhaps a sort of claustrophobic inmate story about the death of a civilization/society/planet (i.e. a “Cultural Fugue” to borrow an idea from Delany) handled in an optimistic sort of way, but not terribly sentimentally, to be fair. Because I like that kind of thing.

Onward, and of course, Upward!

I wrote a while back about wanting to develop a “fact file” or some way of creating a database of notes and clippings that wouldn’t (need to be) project specific research, but that I would none the less like the keep track of. Part of the notion was that I felt like I was gathering lots of information and reading lots of stuff, that I didn’t really have any good way of retaining this information beyond whatever I could recall based on what I just happen to remember.

I should note that this post is very org-mode focused, and I’ve not subtitled very much. You’ve been warned.

Ultimately I developed an org-remember template, and I documented that in the post linked to above.

Since then, however, I’ve changed things a bit, and I wanted to publish that updated template.

(setq org-remember-templates'(
  ("annotations" ?a
    "* %^{Title} %^g \n  :PROPERTIES:\n  :date: %^t\n  :cite-key: %^{cite-key}\n  :link: %^{link}\n  :END:\n\n %?"
    "~/org/data.org" "Annotations and Notes")
  ("web-clippings" ?w
    "* %^{Title} %^g \n  :PROPERTIES:\n  :date: %^t\n  :link: %^{link}\n  :END:\n\n %x %?"
    "~/org/data.org" "Web Clippings")
  ("fact-file" ?f
    "* %^{Title} %^g \n  :PROPERTIES:\n  :date: %^t\n  :link: %^{link}\n  :END:\n\n %x %?"
    "~/org/data.org" "Fact File")
  ))

What this does, reflects something I noticed in the way I was using the original implementation. I noticed that I was collecting quotes from both a variety of Internet sources and published sources. Not everything had a cite-key (a key that tracks the information in my bibtex database,) and I found that I also wanted to save copies of blog posts and other snippets that I found useful and interesting, but that still didn’t seem to qualify as a “fact file entry.”

So now there are three templates:

• First, annotations of published work, all cross referenced against cite-keys in the bibtex database.
• Second, web clippings, this is where I put blog posts, and other articles which I think will be interesting to revisit and important to archive independently for offline/later reading. Often if I respond to a blogpost on this blog, the chances are that post has made it into this section of the file.
• Third, miscellaneous facts, these are just quotes, in general. Interesting facts that I pull from wikipedia/wherever, but nothing teleological, particularly. It’s good to have a place to collect unstructured information, and I’ve found the collection of information in this section of the file to be quite useful.

General features:

• Whatever text I select (and therefore add to the X11 clipboard) is automatically inserted into the remember buffer (with the %? tag)
• I make copious use of tags and tag compleation which makes it easier to use the “sparse tree by tag” functionality in org-mode to just display heading which are tagged in a certain way.) So that I can see related content easily. Tags include both subject and project-related information for super-cool filtering.
• All “entires” exist on the second level of the file. I’m often sensative to using too much hierarchy, at the expense of clarity or ease of searching. This seems to be particularly the case in org-mode, given the power of sparse trees for filtering content.

So that’s what I’m doing. As always, alternate solutions feedback are more than welcome.

I’m unique among my coworkers, in that I’m not a developer/programmer. This is a good thing, after all, because I’m the writer and not a programmer; but as a “workflow” guy and a student of software development one thing that I’ve been particularly struck by since taking this job is how well I’ve been able to collaborate with coworkers who come from a completely different background/field and furthermore how helpful this as been to my work and development as a writer. This post is going to contain some of these lessons and experiences.

For starters, we’re all pretty big fans of git. As git is one of the most interesting and productive technologies that I use regularly, this is really nice. Not only does everyone live in plain text format, but they mostly use the same version control system I do. I’ve definitely had jobs and collaborations in the past few years (since I made the transition to pure text) where I’ve had to deal with .doc files, so this is a welcome change.

I’ve long thought that working in plain text format has been a really good thing for me as a writer. In a text editor there’s only you and the text. All of the bullshit about styles and margins and the like that you are forced to contend with in “Office” software is a distraction, and so by just interacting with text, by exactly (and only) what I write in the file, I’ve been able to concentrate on the production of text, leaving only “worthwhile distractions” to the writing process.

Working with programmers, makes this “living in plain text” thing I do, not seem quite so weird, and that’s a good thing for the collaboration but--for me, at least--it represents an old lesson about writing: use tools that you’re very comfortable with, and deal with output/production only when you’re very ready for it. Good lesson. I might have taken it to the extreme with the whole emacs thing, but it works for me, and I’m very happy with it.

But, using git, with other people has been a great lesson, and a great experience, and I’m getting the opportunity to use git in new ways, which have been instructive for me--both in terms of the technology, but also in terms of my writing process.

For instance, when ever I do a git pull (which asks the server for any new published changes and then merges them (often without help from me) with my working coppy) and see that a coworker has changed something, I tend to inspect the differences (eg. diffs) contained in the pull. Each commit (set of changes; indeed each object, but that’s tangential) in git are assigned a unique identifier (a cryptographic hash) and you can, with the following command generate a visual representation of the changes between any two objects:

git diff  6150726..956BC46

If you have colors turned on in git (to colorize output; only the first line affects diffs, but I find the others are nice too):

git config --global color.diff auto
git config --global color.status auto
git config --global color.branch auto

This generates a nice colorized output and of all the changes between the two revisions, or points in history as specified. The diff, is just the output of the format that git uses to apply a set of changes to a base set of files so it displays a full copy of what the lines used to look like at the first point in time, and then new lines which represent what the lines look like in the second point in time, as well as contextual unchanged lines to anchor the changes to, when needed. Colorized the old content are darker (orange?) and the new content is brighter (yellow? green?), contextual anchors are in white.

The result is that when you’re reviewing edits you can see exactly what was changed, and what it “used to be” without needing to manually compare new and old files, and also without the risk of getting too wound up in the context.

Not only is this the best way I’ve ever received feedback, in terms of ease, of review and clarity (when you can compare new to old, in very specific chunks, the rationale for changes is almost always evident), but also in what it teaches me about my writing. I can see what works and what doesn’t work, I can isolate feedback on a specific line from feedback on the entire document.

While I’ve only really been able to do this for a few weeks, not only do I think that it’s productive in this context, but that I think it might be an effective way for people to receive feedback and learn about writing. People involved in the polishing of prose (professional editors, writers, etc) often have all sorts of ways to trick themselves in attending to the mechanics of specific texts (on the scale of 7-10 words) stuff like reading backwards, reading paragraphs/sentences out of order. Reading from beginning to end, but reading sentences backwards, and so forth. Reviewing diffs allows you to separate big picture concerns about the narrative from structural concerns, and some how the lesson--at least for me--works.

Programmers, of course, use diffs regularly to “patch” code and communicate changes, and the review patches and diffs are a key part of the way programmers collaborate. I wonder if programmers learn by reviewing diffs in the same sort of way.

This will probably slowly develop in to a longer series of posts, but I think that’s enough for you. I have writing to do, after all :)

Cheers!

I’ve been writing for weeks and weeks about co-ops, authentic exchange and commerce, the practice of openness and business models, and other related topics. Between the crashing economy, my ongoing contemplation of open source, and a new project that I’m almost ready to announce, thinking about the substance of economies and the power of economies to define other aspect of our social experience has seemed really appealing. And it has been.

I came across this article by Jason Stoddard a while back, and I’ve realized that I would be remiss in these posts, if I didn’t somehow tie it into writing and science fiction, and Stoddard’s post provides a great hook into this connection. He’s also, basically spot on right.

Interestingly, the beginning of this series grew out of my experiences reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy,” which spent a lot of time (particularly in the last two volumes) contemplating corporations and capitalism. Indeed, in the Mars books, Robinson posits what some readers (without careful examination) might think of as the typical “evil mega-corporations.”

Though I think he succeeds at avoiding the traps of having as villains “scheming business people in suits,” by making sure that none of the executives appear in the stories. The closest we get to having a “corporate villain,” is a character who allies themselves with the corporations for personal advancement. The result is that, the corporations lumber around, always doing the wrong thing, always getting in the way of the main characters, but they never loose the extra-human nature of being corporations.

Maybe that’s part of the problem with writing fiction about corporations. Fiction tends to revolve around people and social systems of comprehensible complexity and corporations are shaped and steered by a great number of people, and there’s too much complexity in corporations to really capture accurately in fiction.

While Stoddard’s argument (Corporations exist to make money, they’re not evil by nature) is factually true and good advice to anyone writing ‘corporate drama’ fiction, I think writers (and the rest of us) might benefit from thinking about some other “nitty gritty” aspects of corporations. Just because corporations may be “generally a bad thing in the world,” difficult to write about, and “not simply evil for the purposes of fiction” nonetheless I think it is important to think about the social/political effect corporations and to write about them in fiction.

The following list is rough, and incomplete, and I encourage you all to help me out in comments!

• Corporations have a few overriding drives: to grow, to make profit (both by minimizing expenses and by increasing revenue), and to continue to exist. All actions and strategies undertaken by corporations should make sense in context of one or more of these drives.
• Corporate cultures are largely self selecting, so “radicals” in corporate settings are really unlikely, either because they’re likely to leave or because their self-interest eventually falls in line with the company’s interest.
• Corporations employ huge numbers of people, but we can assume that the number of people at any given company doing things that support the main mission of a company but that aren’t “the thing the company does.” Phyisical Plant “things,” clerical tasks, human resources, “infrastructure,” operations/financial tasks, internal legal work, and so forth. Probably as much as a quarter or a third of the staff probably falls into one of these categories.
• Corporations are rarely unilateral. Ever. They have many operations, many projects, many divisions, and thus can be resilient to things changing “around them.” This also means that coorporations are less likely to take umbrage at potentially threatening individuals and companies, than a single individual would in a similar situation.
• Career advancement, in companies or elsewhere, generally happens to some greater or lesser extent by moving horizontally between companies rather than “through the ranks.”
• The bigger the corporation the more specialized the roles of the workforce would tend to be.
• For the most part, I think it safe to assume that most corporations don’t have a great deal of “classified” information, or information that’s heavily embargoed. This comes as a great blow to conspiracy theorists, but secrets are hard to keep with regards to projects that a lot of people need to know about, and if all the other things we know about corporations are true (size, attrition, etc.) “great secrets” are unlikely to remain great secrets for long.

In light of all these things I think there are a lot of opportunities for realistic story telling, but it’s not always so straight forward.

In anycase, I look forward to thinking about this some more with you.