I’m not sure whether to consider this statement merely stupid and misinformed, or downright malicious and intended to undercut the ability of professionals in all fields — not only photography — to earn a living.
When did access to tools become equivalent to professionalism? When were talent, skill, experience, and training made irrelevant?
Using the same reasoning, everyone who owns an electric saw or other woodworking tools is a professional carpenter. Is anyone who owns a few rolls of electrical tape and a few gauges an electrician? Is a plumber anyone who can afford wrenches? Is everyone who owns a computer and a printer, who has a blog or posts on Facebook a professional writer? Since anyone can buy paints and an easel, that means I’m a painter, right? Everyone who has a digital camera can make movies, so are we all professional filmmakers?
If ignorance is bliss, I believe Marissa Mayer is the happiest woman on earth.
What do you think? Does access to professional equipment and/or professional tools make a professional? Does ownership of tools convey professional status on anyone with a credit card? I’d like to hear from you. Personally, I find this highly offensive. Am I overreacting?
Adverb, one of the most misunderstood parts of speech, was laid to rest yesterday following the Red Sox post game show. I’d seen it coming for more than five years. Quickly had turned into quick or even fast. Well became good. Poorly devolved into poor.
Last night, for a solid half hour, sportscasters on a major sports channels, NESN or maybe, ESPN — honestly, I do not remember which station it was, but all of them massacre the language with equal verve — talked about the game. At no point did any of these professional announcers use an adverb, regardless of context, nor how appropriate an adverb would have been.
“Where have all the adverbs gone?” I cried, despair in my heart It was like chalk on a blackboard. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I ached to reach through the screen, shake them, and scream:”USE SOME DAMNED ADVERBS, YOU MORONS. HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD OF ADVERBS?” No. They haven’t.
In my heart, I know it is too late. Adverb is dead. All that remains is to hold his funeral.
Adverb was predeceased by Semi-colon and Subjunctive Tense. I fear for Colon . The population of remaining Colons may be reduced beyond the point of no return.
Please donate generously to the Save Grammar for Future Generations Foundation. We need to preserve the few remaining parts of speech lest our descendants never experience the richness of a properly constructed sentence.
A friend asked me why I do this, why I blog. So I asked her why she plays golf.
We do what we do because we love it, need to do it, or both. Writing is like breathing. If I don’t write, I suffocate. My friend needs to compete, to be active. To play golf or she will suffocate.
I can’t begin to count the number of people who have told me they want to be writers, but don’t know how to start. They want me to tell them how. Because they asked the question, I’m reasonably sure they will never be writers. If you are a writer, you write. No one has to tell you how or when. You will write and you will keep writing because it is not what you do, it is what you are. It is as much a part of you as your nose or stomach.
I started writing as soon as I learned to read, which was about 45 minutes after someone handed me a book. It was as if a switch had been thrown in some circuit in my brain. Words felt right. Putting words on paper was exactly the same as speaking, but took longer. I didn’t mind the extra time because I could go back and fix written words. Being able to change my words and keep changing them until they said exactly what I wanted them to say was the grail.
I was awkward socially and my verbal skills were not well suited to my age and stage in life. I was not good at sports and no one wanted me on her team. In retrospect, I can understand why. But when I was a kid, it hurt. Games and other social activities let you become popular, make friends, and do those other things that matter to youngsters. I couldn’t do the regular stuff … but I could write and I could read and that gave me wings. I might be a klutz, but words let me build my own worlds.
I was consuming adult literature when I was so little that my mother had to run block with the librarian to make sure I was allowed to read whatever I wanted. I had to be told to stop reading so I would eat, sleep, or go outside. If I was writing, nothing could stop me. Some things never change.
If you are going to be a writer, you know it. Practice will make you a better writer, can help you understand how to build a plot and produce books that publishers will buy, but writing itself is a gift. If you have it, you know it.
Writers have words waiting to be written, lining up for the opportunity to get put on paper or into the computer. It may take quite a while for you to find what your special area will be, fact or fiction. However it sorts out, you will write, professionally or as a private passion.
There are many gifts. Talent comes in an endless number of flavors. If you have the soul of a musician, you’ll find a way to make music. The same with painting, photography, drawing, running, hitting a baseball or throwing one so that it just skims that outer corner of the plate at 96 miles per hour. Mathematics, engineering, architecture … creativity and talent are as varied as the people who use it.
Gifts are given to us. It’s up to us to use our gifts as best we can. Not everyone is gifted, Plenty of people would give anything for gifts that you may take for granted. What is easy for you may be impossible for most people.
So my advice to all hopeful writers is simple. Write.
Don’t talk about it. Do it. Write a lot, as often as you can, even if most of it is awful and you never show it to anyone. Sooner or later, you’ll find your way to where you should be. If you don’t write, it is your loss, but it may also be the world’s loss. You will never know how good you can be if you don’t try.
This blog is my way, in retirement, to find an outlet for the millions of words stuffed in my head, seething restlessly through my brain. Blogging is freedom in every sense. I have no deadlines to meet other than those I set myself. No editor is looking over my shoulder, I can write about anything and I have no word count to meet.
I hate golf. I can’t figure out why anyone would want to walk or ride around an enormous lawn hitting a little white ball. I can’t think of anything more boring … but I know a lot of golfers and they live for it. The rest of the week is just a pause between tee times.
So, if you don’t get why I write, that’s okay. You don’t have to get it. That I get it and can do it and other people actually read it … that’s enough for me. You do your thing, I’ll do mine. If I believe in anything, I believe with all my heart that we should all be what we were meant to be because that is the only route to any lasting happiness.
One of the oddest adjustments one has to make in retirement is how everything transforms into “hobbies” and “activities.” No matter if you spent a lifetime doing something professionally, our society has specific definitions of “professional,”which is you have to earn money doing it. Professional equals paycheck. No matter how hard one labors, it’s not work if you don’t get paid.
Whereas in the past, I got paid to be a writer, writing is now favorite pastime or activity. I think it’s rather a bit past “hobby.” I am no less a professional now than ever. I no longer do only what I’m paid to do, but work harder to be a better writer than I did when leashed to an office and bosses. Deadlines are no less rigid because I set them. My standards are no lower. Just no one sends me a check. Pity. I could use the money.
How do you define a thing that is an essential part of you? Something you need to do or you feel like a piece of you is broken or missing? Is that an activity? A hobby? That seems a trivialization, doesn’t it? The best part of writing now as opposed to then is freedom. I can be playful or serious, topical, timely, or ramble off into the mists of obscurity.
The only one with authority to rein me in is me. As a blogger, I get direct input. If no one likes what I’ve written and no one reads it, that’s a hint I’ve strayed or at least need to rethink my presentation.
I’m stubborn. If I’ve written a piece I believe is good, I will keep redoing it and putting it back up until finally, it gets the notice I think it deserves. I tweak it with each pass but fundamentally, the story stays the same. If nothing else, these long years have given me enough confidence to know if it’s a good piece or not. It is one of the painful ironies that many of the pieces I don’t like are much more popular than the ones I know are better. C’est la guerre.
Photography really is a hobby. I’ve been taking pictures nearly as long as I’ve been writing. My first camera came into my life when I was a young married woman with a baby. I had been painting and experiencing more success than I could handle. I don’t have any paintings left because I sold every one of them. I often sold them before I was halfway done. Friends and their friends would come, look and buy. It sucked the fun out of it. It was also logistically difficult. I didn’t have a studio and having cats, dogs and a baby, I couldn’t leave projects around unless I was actively working on them. It’s hard to lock up a painting in progress.
When I was 23, a friend gave me a camera, a couple of minutes of instruction and a few rolls of black and white film. Off I went on vacation. I had no idea it would be the start of a love affair with photography that would never end.
Unlike writing, my forays into professional photography were brief. I quickly realized I didn’t want to do baby pictures and weddings. Luckily, I had other professional choices and could keep photography as a thing of love, unsullied by commercial considerations.
Forty years later, I continue to strive for some kind of perfection, trying to grow my technical skills (always my weak point) and to try new and different forms. Photography is a perfect hobby. You never outgrow it. It never gets boring. It may empty out your bank account from time to time, but many hobbies cost more and return less satisfaction for the investment.
What was the question? Oh, right … what activities and hobbies do I pursue. And here it is: I write. I take pictures. I put them together and call them stories or blogs. I will continue doing this until they carry me away.
Well I did actually, and I even pursued my dreamy aspiration to be a scriptwriter for stage and screen. I never fancied being a novelist as my mind wanders after three pages of prose and I just lack the focus and attention to detailed descriptions of the everyday – for me the chair is just in the room waiting for someone to sit on it, it isn’t positioned at an eerie angle, casting an inky, black, shadow that looks like anything, it’s just a fucking chair in a room.
For a short while I thought I was actually developing what could be called a ‘career’ as a writer. I had my own UTR number from the taxman so that I could pronounce myself ‘Self Employed’ and Self Assess myself each year and declare my lack of income. I got a few commissions for work, including one from the BBC to write a radio play. I also wrote… sorry, I also ‘developed’ a few stage plays and received handouts from the Arts Council via projects via organisations via funding pots via a fair and unbiased commissioning process, to ‘develop’ work. I hobnobbed with arty, theatre people and learnt to smoke rollies and talk about people’s ‘work’ or ‘piece’ (real theatre people don’t make ‘plays’, that’s too narrow a definition) and use the words ‘conceptual’, ‘exploration’ and ‘aesthetic’ quite a lot in serious conversations with people who dressed exclusively in ironic references. There were some theatre people I spoke to who looked like they just didn’t really bother making an effort dressing at all, probably because they didn’t want to be simply defined by their clothes, and because dressing is a submission to Westernised doctrines of status and is inherently politically incorrect because all clothes are made by slave children in Third World countries that are oppressed by corporations; whereas rolling tobacco by Golden Virginia, expensive coffee by Starbucks, overpriced cheap wine and designer beer by whoever got the stock in at the venue’s bar, isn’t. There was one theatre person I recall who refused to even be defined by a gender, but I’m not going to talk about that person because I really don’t know which pronouns to use. She/He/It was boring anyway – and quite angry as I remember.
During this period whilst I thought I was developing a career as a writer I wrote lots of spec scripts and was really motivated because I thought that one day soon all this hard work I was doing every evening out of creative compulsion was soon going to be rewarded by production. But whilst I watched lots of shit on stage and TV, I couldn’t get my own work beyond ‘development’. Whilst I was telling myself and other people that I was a Writer, I was actually just a person on ‘the arts scene’ who earned the occasional wage doing workshops for short projects, usually involving kids or Black people. You see this period when I pretended to myself that I was a Writer coincided with a period when England had a hip and trendy Labour government who liked culture and arts. Young people and ethnic diversity (dark skinned ethnicity only) were the most popular beneficiaries of their political charity, so it was a purple patch for Black writers and those of other non-white ethnic persuasion, as well as anyone doing anything creative to get kids off the street. So whilst I thought I was developing a career, I was really just spending public money to develop work that was unlikely to be ever made but would somehow add to some politically useful statistics. Even my one proper commission from the BBC doesn’t feel like that much of an achievement anymore because it was part of an initiative to get more Black, Asian and Disabled writers making radio. As for writing for film and television; aside from the occasional no-budget community short made with non-actors, the closest I got to a real commission ended in failure. It was a pilot episode I wrote for a new series that was being pitched to Bravo. Unfortunately Bravo didn’t pick it up so my 27 minutes of inspired genius and three weeks of enthusiastic, optimism, sadly ended in disappointment.
When England won the bid to host the 2012 Olympics the Government had to find £8billion to add to the £3billion that they told everyone it was going to cost. This meant raiding the coffers of every non-essential public money pot, so in one fell swoop the Arts Council of England lost 50% of it’s funding. Then the coalition [Tory] government got into power and that signalled the end of the arts funding money train and the beginning of the end of my illusory career as a Writer. I wasn’t stupid, I knew that I couldn’t buy shopping, pay rent or bills with pieces of paper that said ‘My writing is really good, everyone says so’. I tried to do it once and if it wasn’t for the fact that the security guard couldn’t catch me, I would have surely got arrested. I think that he may have been fitted with one of those special devices they put in shopping trolleys that make the wheels lock when you try to push them beyond the parameters of the supermarket car park, because he suddenly gave up the chase after about 20 yards. It was either that or the combination of carrying his weight whilst running against the pendulous rhythm of his large stomach and the lack of motivation when only getting paid a minimum wage that stopped him. It didn’t stop the spritely, middle-aged, woman from the customer services counter, she required a firm punch in the face – jobsworth.
After the supermarket incident and breaking my electric meter by trying to push pieces of paper with the words ‘My writing is really good, everyone says so’ written on them into the card slot, I knew the dream had ended. I didn’t want to become bitter and cynical and homeless, so I decided to get a job and just write for fun. So I satisfy my creative urges by writing this blog. Here I can vent my spleen and unleash my creative beast, unedited and without the empty promise of a fee if a producer picks it up at next years Edinburgh Fringe. I don’t have to pretend I like the work of my contemporaries, or drink vinegar flavoured red wine to the point of wanting to shag the lesbian stage manager with the green and fuchsia hair and multi-pierced face, in order to enjoy press night gatherings for new show’s that aren’t very good. I just write whatever the fuck I like and just give it away for free. I’m actually considering applying for charitable status and putting in a bid for some funding. I just need to find a connection with the Olympic legacy and I think I could be onto a winner.
I started this blog in February 2012, but it wasn’t until the end of May that I started to write regularly. Before that, I posted erratically and rarely.
In September, I tossed off a very short post about Criminal Minds (the TV show, not politicians) that somehow wound up the first result in a Google search. It has stayed in the top 5 search results (out of 4,100,000 possible results) for more than a month. I have no idea how that happened. That single post has gotten more than 3,500 hits and keeps going. It took me 5 minutes to write and was a response to something that bothered me about the show. Who knew that so many people cared about a television series about profilers and serial killers?
The ups and downs of popularity remain a mystery. Immediately after that post, my numbers went way up, then as I expected, began to drop, then level out. Even so, I tripled the hits I get each day. Folks came for that post and stayed for others. I also have an unknown number of followers on Bloggers, Twitter, ScoopIt, Pinterest and StumbleUpon.
I am, as my blog title suggests, eclectic. By profession, I’m a writer. By inclination an historian. My hobby is photography. I have distinct audiences for writing and photography. I haven’t figured out how much these groups overlap. Even within my writing, subject matter varies quite a lot. Amongst philosophical ramblings, discussions of whatever current events are on my mind, and so on, I write a lot of stuff about movies and TV. There is a specific audience for the media posts.
Posts I labor over may be barely noticed; others that I just drop on the page get lots of hits. I have learned, through trial and error, a few things worth mentioning. I’m sure I’ll learn more. I need and want to learn more. Meanwhile, here are 10 things I’ve learned that seem to be true:
Less really is more. More than 1000 words is too long. 500 words is plenty, especially if you include pictures. Sometimes, just a caption is enough.
Use more pictures, fewer words. Everyone likes pictures especially nature, pretty girls, children, dogs, and for some peculiar reason, Arizona.
Funny gets more hits than depressing. Being serious is appropriate for serious subjects, but you can use a light touch even with heavy material.
Popularity is nice, but it’s your blog. Do your own thing. That’s the point, isn’t it?
Digress but remember to come back. When I tell stories, I ramble. It’s my style. I wander before I get to my destination, but there’s a limit to how far and how often you can roam without losing your reader.
Be economical in how much material you use per day and per post. If you set yourself an unsustainable pace, you’ll burn out.
Have fun. Have a lot of fun. Enjoyment is contagious.
Do what you love. Blog about the things you find beautiful, important, amusing, or interesting.
If you aren’t having fun, give it up.
On the graphics side, leave white space. At least 50% of the screen should be empty. This percentage includes the space between pictures and text, between paragraphs, margins at the top and both sides, space between columns. Clutter is hard on the eyes and gives your site a “rummage sale” look. Do you really need every widget?
With camera in hand, exploring European lands, cultures, food, and drink...mostly with a plan, but sometimes enjoying the adventure of just getting lost.
