Reasons why Stephen King is (over)qualified to tell us all how to write

I guess I need to admit it. Stephen King is my favorite writer. He’s not Shakespeare or Fitzgerald or Faulkner. But he’s never written anything I didn’t like. And I’m not sure anyone’s ever written as much. Simply put, you'll rarely go wrong with King. 

Now I’m reading his book On Writing, and who knows, maybe it will inspire me to complete my first novel. Meanwhile, here’s some of his advice from the long introductory section that he titles “C.V.,” which I think is his way of telling us that these are his qualifications for being a writer:

• Read The Elements of Style, one of the only writer’s self-help books that’s not full of shit.
• Read everything you can get your hands on and write a lot. (The back of the book has a great list of King’s favorite reads of the past 10 years or so. Not only how does he write so much, but how does he read so much?!)
• He was not formed as a writer and doesn’t remember much of his childhood, much like me. We both remember certain things, like the painful ones such as when I biked into a picnic table corner, my multiple other bike wrecks, getting stung by wasps while trimming hedges, and at least one of my parents’ blow-out arguments prior to their divorce.
• Blow up your TV. King learned to read and write before his family had a TV. Having one might not make a difference in your hopes of writing the great American novel, but it might. I suppose your phone might even be a bigger problem in terms of time sucking.
• As a kid, he loved movies he termed as "Poepictures," and after seeing The Pit and the Pendulum, he wrote a "novelized" eight-page version of it, made copies, and sold them at school. Edgar Allan Poe is in my upper echelon of heroes, so I can relate.
• King learned a revelation about drafting copy from his high-school editor: “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, you’re taking out all the things that are not the story.” This makes sense to me because I think tangents may be a good and interesting thing when in conversation (not everyone agrees with me on that) but they can be a real bummer in a book you're reading.
• Graveyard Shift, which was turned into a silly and entertaining horror movie, was one of his first short stories, based on the stories by his coworkers at a clothing mill about rats as big as dogs underneath the place.
• King could have easily given in to despair in those early years. It was very difficult for him to write when he worked at a laundry and later when he was a creative-writing teacher. But he credits his wife Tabitha with always encouraging him and never telling him any of his writing was a waste of time.
• King, who was an alcoholic in his early years of writing and even based much of The Shining on himself, would use the “Hemingway Defense” that he could be a sensitive man in his writing but had to otherwise be tough (drunk equated to tough). He was drinking a case of 16-ounce Miller Lites a night at one point and doesn’t even remember writing Cujo. He, lucky for all of us, writes that now he realizes “the idea that creative endeavor is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time” and that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Dylan Thomas are largely responsible for it.
• At one point early on, he bought a gargantuan desk and put it in the middle of a room. But he realized it made him miserable. He eventually replaced it with a living-room suite and soon the family was joining him there and keeping him happy. “Put your desk in the corner. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

Dude is wise. I can’t wait to read the rest of On Writing.

Storytelling has a direct result on building transit that could compete with cars

I recently wrote an article on Mobility Lab calling for transit agencies to launch a full-on effort to make commercials for transit that are as enticing as the many excellent car commercials that the auto industry has been pumping out for decades.

As a communications professional, it's often difficult to show exact influence and results of the blogs, videos, tweets, and other materials we create. But when The Rapidian, Grand Rapid's local citizen-run newspaper, published an article this week, Mobility Lab can be proud to see that our advocacy has had a direct success.

Brittany Schlacter leads off her article this way:

Paul Mackie, one of the nation’s foremost mass transit bloggers and the communications director of the Virginia-based nonprofit research organization Mobility Lab, recently posed this challenge to America’s public transportation industry’s leaders:

“Where are the Super Bowl-esque ads about public transportation? Where are all the transit ads representing freedom to explore and observe, safety, good health, cost savings, sustainability, community, patriotism, and happiness? Transit communications needs to catch up if transit and alternate modes ever hope to catch on.”

At The Rapid, we have embraced Mackie’s challenge. We are launching a new campaign that informs the Greater Grand Rapids region about the merits of public transportation through simple, powerful, consistent and, most importantly, positive messages about the experience.

Transit communications needs to catch up if transit ever hopes to catch on. The Rapid presents a start.

How to be an influencer with your stories

How to Be an Influencer With Your Stories from Paul Mackie

As I prepare to give a talk as part of a panel at tomorrow's National League of Cities Conference in Washington D.C., here are some of my thoughts about what I'll say.

Slide 1: Things like equity and making traffic bearable are things that government should be good at. That’s their rightful place and role. But something that the private sector, and increasingly businesses like Coke and Red Bull and Casper's Mattresses, to name a few, are good at and getting better at is what the mainstream media has been so good at for so long: telling stories.

Slide 2: Local governments can and should be: 1.) Their own media, and 2.) Hyper collaborative with their community.

Slide 3: Mobility Lab is based in Arlington, Virginia and is a project of Arlington County Commuter Services. This is just a small division that’s part of the transportation department, which is part of the environmental department. It doesn’t seem like there would be resources to have a media and research company, does it?

But, about five or six years ago, Arlington was smart. It wanted to get better at making its research about the incredible transportation work it had done be more accessible to the public. That home became Mobility Lab. A couple of years after that, about four years ago, Arlington wanted to start telling stories about the research, to make it even more accessible to the public. Those stories would be all about what makes Arlington special. Forty years ago, the county was an industrial, ugly, pass-through from the Virginia suburbs into Washington D.C. Arlington made important decisions to build Metro underground along a corridor that was not alongside Interstate 66. That gave the corridor room to breathe and grow for a completely walkable, bikeable five-mile stretch from the Potomac River at Rosslyn west to the Ballston neighborhood.

This corridor development has made Arlington famous, and Mobility Lab is a way to communicate that unique success to others around the world, while also bringing back the success of others so Arlington keeps informed, can learn, and can continue to become a better place.

Slide 4: So we built a media site because we identified that nobody else had a good website completely dedicated to the very specific topic that Arlington is great at. And the mainstream media was never going to give it the focus it deserves.


Yes, the corridor was built, but the key was getting people to continue using the transportation services offered. Tons of other non-profits, companies, and media are focused on transportation infrastructure and technology, but we wanted to focus on getting people to use transit.

Slide 5: We think we have been very successful, rapidly growing followers on Twitter, through our newsletters, and at our website.

There’s been a big media-relations push as part of it as well. We came up with our central messages and talking points, and have constantly worked to refine and update those. This work has led us to become national transportation experts, getting quoted everywhere from WIRED to USA Today to NPR to all kinds of transportation trade publications. We also focus when we can on other assets like podcasts and videos, while hopefully not hindering the growth our two or three top-level communications priorities.

One reason we've been able to do so much is because we have brought more than 100 contributors into our ranks. This is a topic that produces an endless stream of enthusiasts who want to get involved, and they are our army that spreads our message far and wide. Local governments have a duty to give these kinds of people a voice. We had to set our minds to not being afraid what people would say but to embrace what they say and try to learn from them.

Slide 6: And we’re not just aiming to influence the media, which of course in turn influences policymakers, business leaders, and the public. Our Transportation Techies group started from scratch less than a year-and-a-half ago and now has 1,400 members. This is a D.C.-only group. There are somehow 1,400 Transportation Techies in this town. I suspect other places would be similar. This group meets monthly to have a show-and-tell of the best hacking, big-data storytelling, and other innovations in this space.

Slide 7: And the Techies have influenced perhaps their biggest target: WMATA Metro, which runs buses and the subway here. The first Techies event ever held at WMATA headquarters just happened. The Washington Post wrote two features about it. And people are going to eventually benefit from the Techies’ work in helping agencies open data in order to tell better stories and get trains and buses running more dependably.

Slide 8: We also run a thing called TransportationCamp that happens every January in Arlington. About 400 attended this year, and these attendees consist of transit industry folks, but also of enthusiasts, and to see the two come together is heartening. People outside the inner circles of power have a chance to influence policy and planning, and they are doing it at this "unconference," which is now expanding to happen all over the country and world. You can organize them in your hometowns, and Mobility Lab will help.

Slide 9: Finally, don’t jump into all this without a plan, a vision, a strategy, and something you are sure you can do better than anyone else. Don’t give people reasons to leave you for your competitors. Be valuable and the rest will take care of itself. So how to do all of this? Take after Arlington and Mobility Lab.

The Blueprint for Better Storytelling and Writing the Great American Novel

I was recently reading Secrets of Story: Well Told by screenwriter William C. Martell, and it relates to a talk I've been giving at conferences called Telling Better Stories About Public Transportation (PDF of my presentation). 

And since I'm often beginning writing books but almost never finishing them, Martell provides an excellent blueprint to complete before attempting to put pen to paper.

The story begins with an idea. Ideas are really important, but it takes a whole bunch of them to make a story and to create one great concept based off of all those ideas.

Many people have a hard time getting through Dan Brown's books, but his concepts are what keep others reading and buying those books. His religious conspiracies and puzzles make up for his terrible writing. Screenplays, novels, magazine articles, blogs, and any other forms of writing are all sold on their concept.

Also crucial is conflict. Without conflict, a story is dead on arrival. Little problems must be part of a larger problem otherwise the conflict is weak, unfocused, and makes for a bad story. There are two kinds of conflict, and the physical kind must connect with the emotional kind or else the story will leave readers on the sidelines along with the protagonists.

One of the most important decisions for a storyteller is determine which character's point of view the story will be told from. A story must create an emotional connection between the protagonist and the audience, and of course the protagonist will have a very limited point of view. The story should only detour from that point of view when an antagonist's view is presented, and that still must be related to the protagonist's problem. Movies and books must, simply put, always be about a person with a problem.

Writers don't often think enough about the all-important character. It doesn't matter what that character looks like, it only matters what's inside that character. You can't just plug a great character into a great concept, one will flow from the other.

Many writers confuse plot and story, but plot is what happens. It's an element of the story. Plotting is often a lost art in today's blockbuster films. Plot is how one scene logically leads to the next.

Place and time are also crucial to consider. By using distinctive locations and times, writers can take us to worlds we've never seen before and give us an unusual experience. Focusing on one time and one location is important. Bouncing back in time or place can happen, but it is something to be dealt with delicately or the audience will get confused.

Tone is also important. It must stay the same throughout the story. In Pulp Fiction, there was both violence and comedy, but they were mixed well consistently throughout. The violence was funny, not serious. When Marvin gets his head blown off in the backseat of the car when they hit a bump, that's funny. Gross and violent, but not taken seriously. You can have a comic-relief character in a serious film, but just establish him early enough so that the audience can know what to expect.

As for genre, know your genre. Make sure your story follows the rules of the genre or at least acknowledges those rules when you bend or break them. Clint Eastwood's True Crime was a box office failure because it wasn't what the audience paid to see.

Arena is another important element. Caddyshack takes place in the arena of golf caddies. Network takes place in the world of network news. The fastest way to turn an old concept into a fresh exciting idea is to drop it into a new arena.

Every story worth telling has a point. That is the theme, which is all of these pieces working together. Every story has a theme somewhere, the question is whether you will explore it or ignore it. In The Matrix, the theme is that Neo doesn't believe in himself. Neo eventually realizes he has to believe in himself to save Morpheus. That theme ties all of the movie's scenes together and makes them a story. Theme is the glue. It isn't necessarily the moral of the story, it can just be some element of the human condition that your story explores.

Jot down really good outlines for each of these elements and you may be well on your way to writing the Great American Novel.

Tips for Effective Transportation Blogging

Here's an article By Paul Goddin from Mobility Lab that nicely quotes me at the end.

This article was also published by Greater Greater Washington.

Begin with your most important point. Use short sentences and clear, non-jargony language. Remember your end goal.

These were among the tips BeyondDC creator and Greater Greater Washington  (GGW) blogger Dan Malouff imparted at this week’s Lunch at the Lab. Malouff discussed effective blogging and how to get published by websites such as GGW and Mobility Lab.

Among his main points:

• Put the most important information up front, in the first paragraph, with more specific details and supportive facts following. The glut of information and competition demands clarity and incisiveness.
•  “Lead with the takeaway,” Malouff said.
• Inform before you persuade. The best articles use a piece of news or data as a starting point, and then use it to draw conclusions or make an argument. It’s important to explain the context, as readers are not all experts already.
• Transportation and city planners (not to mention lawyers) like to use jargony language. Blog readers respond better to simple language. Complicated, wordy prose can make an otherwise compelling article unreadable and/or suspicious. Use the rule that easier-to-read is better.
• Don’t use the passive voice much if at all. If you can insert “by zombies” after the verb, then you are using it. For example, the sentence “The use of passive voice is discouraged” is easy to identify as passive voice since one could add “by zombies” to its end and the sentence would still make sense. Instead, the sentence should read “Don’t use the passive voice.” (Avoid nominalizations, like “the utilization of this grammatical construction leads to complication of the communication,” too.)
• Keep articles short. A thousand words is typically too long. The “sweet spot” for web writing is 300 to 600 words.
• Keep the blog post to one main idea. If you want readers to remember more than one big takeaway, then split the article up into multiple posts.
• Mobility Lab Communications Director Paul Mackie facilitated the lecture. He called blogging an inherently democratizing medium. He said that institutions such as the New York Times are no longer the gatekeepers of information. Anyone with a keyboard now has a voice. Mackie described blogging as a way to “become a thought leader.”

(Author’s note: This article is 374 words long and, therefore, perfect.)

Pop Culture Lunch Box Gains Syndication at Yahoo!

Hi Pop Culture Lunch Box readers. Exciting news: As of today, Yahoo! is now picking up some of my blog posts, so please GO HERE and browse some of my early contributions to bump up my hit count, leave comments, and basically show the love so that my writing picks up steam on the Yahoo! Contributor Network.


Thanks for the help, and for continuing reading. My blog continues to grow, and readership is up over 3,300 hits per month, so I'm gratified that so many people are enjoying!

Paul

Pop Culture Lunch Box Goes For-Profit

The blog has done well enough that now seems like an appropriate time to take it into the big leagues. Hopefully the advertising you'll now see on this popalicious resource will be tasteful and even useful.

Please let me know your thoughts about advertising at PCLB. If you like it. If you love it. If you will never visit again. Mostly, you'll probably just realize it's the way the world operates. I am a bit of a publicity man myself, so I'm pretty happy to have advertisers and want to thank them ahead of time.

Have a great Memorial Day weekend!

Robert Novak, Centralia Holiday Tournament, Sports Reporting, and Me

Robert Novak died the other day. I always despised this D.C. talking bobble-head, but now that he's officially been silenced, it seems like a fitting time to mark the occasion by reading as much of his book, Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington, as humanly possible. Here are a couple of highlights from the early pages ...

I didn't really care to hear Novak's side of one of his most defining moments, the mid-2000s Valerie Plame CIA scandal. He goes on for several pages making excuses for becoming a central figure in the saga. Playing onto this drama, Novak says his close relationship with the evil Wizard of Oz Karl Rove was "built on self-interest, [which is] the rule in high-level Washington journalism, though journalists seldom are as candid about [this] as I will be throughout this book."

But I have to admit, Novak's writing is pretty snappy when he kicks into chronological autobiography mode. Perhaps I was enjoying the book because his early career paralleled my own quite a bit. He started out as a sports writer because he couldn't play any sports well himself (I was pretty good at soccer, tennis, and baseball, on the other hand). He even mentions the Centralia (Illinois) High School Holiday Tournament, which I covered for the Centralia Morning Sentinel for two years in the mid-1990s.

As a sports reporter at the University of Illinois' paper, he got his first taste of politics when he was beat out of becoming sports editor. "It taught me that politics for me was a lot like sports. I was a lot better reporting it than practicing it. I am not a person who is easy for a lot of people to like. No stirrer-up of strife is ever very popular." Again reminding me of my sometimes-toxic-to-the-locals writing in Centralia.

Novak got his first breaks working at the Omaha and Indianapolis bureaus of the Associated Press before being assigned to Washington D.C. in 1957, with the goal of breaking stories "nobody else had and explaining what was really happening behind the scenes." Political reporting, he says, "took more elbow grease and chicanery than cerebral brilliance." He got many scoops simply because he was single and hung out with lobbyists, legislative staffers, and secretaries, while many other journalists along his route were married and home in bed.

The writer goes into his formative ideology by noting how ineffective politicians are and his disdain for organized labor unions. He also discusses the differences between Washington D.C. in 1957 and now (then it had a sex zone on 9th Street, no "New York-syle posh restaurants," and a powerful men's-only hangout in the National Press Club).

Seems like a surprisingly good read if you want to figure out how the right-sided Beltway-journalist mind works. Definitely a mystery worth trying to unlock ...