Scott Lax

 

Lydia and I are beyond thrilled to announce the birth of our son, Finn Scott Lax, born 1/11/11 (in room 11 of the hospital, no less). Mother and son are doing very well; father is over the moon.

For more about Finn in the world, and me being a first-time father at fifty-eight, you can read my monthly column in THE FATHER LIFE magazine. Click to your left. I'll have a new column up soon.

May Finn live in a world that moves toward peace. Read More 

Lydia took this photo with my camera phone tonight. I'm holding my son, Finn Scott. All of us - Finn's brother and sister and I - drove happily through the snow to see them. Tomorrow Lydia and Finn will be home.

I have a lot of stories to tell about all of this, and will, in a book I'm writing and a column I write for THE FATHER LIFE magazine. For now, I'll just say that Finn's birth was the most profound moment of my life.

I tell students never to write, "words can't express my emotions," so I won't say that. Yet, it's going to take a while to express them.

Welcome to the world, Finn. I love you.  Read More 

Remember the movie, "Alfie"? The first version was in the 1960s, starring Michael Caine, the second more recently, starring Jude Law. The was first a great film, the second a pretty good film.

Then there was the theme song, "Alfie." The song is a question: "What's it all about, Alfie?", and the singer poses a bunch of questions to the protagonist, making the song both original and poignant and a little bit sad.

Maybe youtube the song and give it a listen. That's my way of helping you remember the single most important question to ask yourself about anything you're writing. Any genre. Any form:

"What's it all about, [insert your name here]?"

I wrote this post because I read an essay today that zeroed itself out because it didn't know what it was about. The writer is skillful, but was all over the place, which diluted it and made it self-indulgent. As essay, a story, a poem, anything, has to be about something. Read More 

I'm not sure if this one is in Strunk & White's THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE as an overused phrase, but here's a phrase that I read again today in Cleveland's daily newspaper: "Truth to tell...."

It's a phrase that screams out many things, such as: "I love cliches," or "I'm afraid if I just write a declarative sentence you won't believe me unless I tell you I'm telling the truth," or "I am a lazy writer."

Don't ever use, "Truth to tell." It's amateurish, even if some columnists and other writers use it. If you're writing nonfiction, just tell the truth. No need to convince the reader beyond your own credibility. Read More 

Under the sub-title, "Omit Needless Words," Strunk and White's advice begins with one sentence. Burn this in your brain:

"Vigorous writing is concise."

Happy New Year, everyone, and for those of you who check this blog for news of our son's birth, please check back soon. As for what reading and writing advice I have, it's this: reading and writing is still unparalleled while waiting for that which is your heart's desire.

See you in this space again, and soon...and thanks for checking.  Read More 

I recently read A CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE, by Charles Dickens. It's of course what all the various film incarnations have been based upon, and has provided so many with a sense of what Christmas - for those who believe or sort of believe - is about. (Or don't believe in Christmas, it's still a great novella, I think.)

Partial as I am to the 1951 movie version of "Scrooge," above all the other interpretations, there is nothing like the novella. It took me inside of Dickens's sensibility and mastery of language, as well as into 1830's London.

How modern it is, in so many ways: Human nature hasn't changed much; nor has need, or poverty, or greed or love of family; faith remains, and cynicism does, too.

What has changed so much, I fear, is the pace at which opinions are formed and words are spoken. I don't want to imagine Dickens imparting wisdom in 140-character bytes.

If your means are small this Christmas season, and your mind is rushing, try reading A CHRISTMAS CAROL IN PROSE by Dickens. It sticks with you; it doesn't evaporate into the vapors. It stays, rather, in the mists of literary wonder, which, if you react as I did, enriches your life far more than a new sweater or a night on the town.  Read More 

If you're in college or graduate school or otherwise taking a creative writing fiction course, and you're trying to understand character development, you'd be better off studying Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly's rendition of "Little Drummer Boy" on YouTube than listening to an unpublished instructor try to explain it to you.

Watch Ferrell and Reilly. Then watch the original David Bowie and Bing Crosby version from 1977. Both are sort of insanely brilliant, both sort of just weird. But here's what you can learn from closely watching (facial expressions, voice control, set design, movement) both versions.

Ferrell and Reilly, two superb comic actors - if not geniuses - don't imitate the originals. They don't do impressions. They get to the truthfulness of the essence of that wonderful, freaky performance by Bowie and Bing.

That's what character development is. You get inside the skin of the character, and then you make that character your own. Do you see? That's why simply "observing" the human condition and "listening to real dialogue" and all those other clichés of writing teachers are not what creates good fiction.

Watch Ferrell's face. He's not Will Ferrell, yet he's not David Bowie. He's this other thing, a third thing. He's one plus one equals three. One (Bowie) plus one (Ferrell) equals a third thing, an original character. He and Reilly create characters. That's what you need to do in fiction. Create characters. Don’t get wacky, but don’t imitate. Get inside the character and run with it. He - just as your characters should be - is barely in control, yet perfectly in control. He appears on the verge of doing anything at anytime, but the reality is that he, as the author of that character, is completely in control.

Never once in that sketch/song do you see either actor "be clever." You see them "be." What are they being? When you know that, you'll know what it is to create a character.  Read More 

Activities on a snow day: Writing with a scarf tied around my neck and a few layers of clothing because I'm sitting by the window, which, though I recently weatherized, is still glass, and cold. Classical music on a head-set. I'd written late into the night; slept for a few hours; dealt with school being closed, wrote again until I conked out for a nap. Now back at it: A good time to write, my brain slowed down, making it all the easier to catch errors. Alpha waves induced by mental fatigue can have its literary benefits. So: If you're a writer, you do your writing as you can. Excuses are always there. Then again, so is the blank page. Read More 

It's a peaceful Saturday morning. I’m sitting at the dining room table. There's a low-slung, pre-solstice sun gently lighting the snow on the back porch. We're waiting for our baby to arrive; but that could still be a few days or perhaps more away. I'm on edge, but in a good way. Earlier, I read part of a short story in The New Yorker. It’s a longer story, and I’m enjoying it enough to go back to it. But concentrating for long on reading, with a baby in the near future, makes this a good time for me to edit.

I've been working on a book proposal for weeks now. It's just passed forty pages. I ran it off on the printer last evening before I came home from the office, across town, where I write.

Barely a page in and I've made numerous additions, corrections and edited one thing out. I'm certain I wouldn't have made these same changes if I simply edited on the computer.

I take notes by hand, in a notebook, but nearly all of what I write for publication I write initially on a computer. It flows easier, and it helps my fingers move as fast as my mind, sometimes faster. Often I write something before I think it, or so it seems.

Editing is a different matter. Seeing a page in the context of the physical world enables me to grasp its shape, form and essence much better. I don't know why that is; I'll leave that to a study that might be (or has been) performed at a university somewhere. I only know it's true for me. If you are a young or a new writer, maybe it would help you.

Think about avoiding the alternative: sloppy writing. I've noticed a lot of mistakes made in blogs, tweets and even articles on the Internet, including in Web sites of traditional newspapers. It's as if an Internet piece is somehow granted special dispensation from the elements of style. Even some highly accomplished authors that tweet and blog make mistakes that would be admonished in English class.

This isn't a good sign, because it means it's slowly becoming acceptable to make errors of punctuation, usage, grammar and spelling. It corrodes the written language, but it also stops you from writing your best. And the best you can write is usually not the best unless you edit what you write.

For this blog post, I won't print it out. But I will edit it. I've made mistakes before in blogs, and then tried to correct them later. No one's perfect, especially me.

But if you are writing a serious work – short story, a novel, a nonfiction memoir, a term paper, whatever it might be – you might want to edit it by hand. If you can, I strongly suggest you do that, at least once, then fix your work; and only then submit it.

Now, back to my own edit.  Read More