Month: June 2011

Posted in Cross-writing, Writing craft

Cross-training, cross-writing, it’s all the same

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

I doubt if there is a person among us who hasn’t come across a magazine or newspaper article or online post on cross-training.  After all, we’re all obsessed with fitness these days – n’est-ce pas?  Not you? Even so, I’ll bet that you still have a pretty good idea about what cross-training is.  It’s that approach tofitness that involves a variety of training methods to improve your overall fitness level.  For example, if you usually run for its health benefits, by adding strength conditioning, you’ll improve your overall fitness level, which is likely to improve your running.  So, you already know this.  But have you ever thought that the same  approach might apply to your writing?

It doesn’t matter if most of your writing is on a blog, in magazines, in academic journals or even in your own personal journal, how you write matters.  How you write affects the way that both you and others understand your ideas.  As William Zinsser (whose book On Writing Well should be in your library) suggested, “Most people have no idea how badly they write.”

Go back and read some of your very earliest writing and you’ll quickly notice that if you’ve kept on with it, your writing today is so much better than it was when you started.   Your continual practice has, in fact, made you better.  But if you’ve gone a step further by actually working at improving your writing, it will jump off the page at you and scream: “I am better!”  One of the most under-appreciated approached to writing improvement in my view is the concept of cross-writing.

I’m not sure when I came up with or stumbled upon the idea, but it probably had something to do with a creativity course I taught a few years ago to a small group of third-year university students.  In that course we explored the idea of creativity cross-training: for example, if you’re a choreographer, then you could try a visual art such as photography or painting to keep the creative juices flowing – learn to see things in different ways.  This enhances your creativity.  The same holds true for writing.

I have great respect for authors who work in a particular specialty, but I’ll bet my next paycheck that most of them (if not all) do at least a bit of cross-writing even if they don’t cross-publish (not sure that’s a real concept for anyone but me). Many, if not most authors, keep journals in which they write a lot of material that they never intend for readers to see.  So, they cross write, too. But I’m talking about an even bigger commitment to this approach.

I’m talking to all you academic writers (including students) out there who don’t seem to think that your writing needs to improve – that it’s “good enough.”  But I think that taking the time to write a bit of fiction, to blog or even to keep a personal journal would help. You would improve your story-telling ability, and in spite of the parameters within which you must publish, at the heart of what you’re doing is telling the story of your research, or your theory, or your opinion.

I’m also talking to all those bloggers out there who free-associate in every blog post. I’m imploring you to take the time to do a bit of research for a change, and craft a piece that is more authoritative  I’m not necessarily suggesting that you post it on your blog – rather do it for yourself and your writing.

Perhaps all of this is to justify my own approach to writing:  a bit of academia, a bit of blogging, a few non-fiction trade books, a couple of textbooks, a bit of creative non-fiction (memoir) and, increasingly, works of fiction.  This apparent lack of focus on my part, I like to think of as evolutionary in terms of the quality of my own writing.  When I have the courage to open the pages of that first book I wrote  and really read, I am usually astounded that a publisher bought it.  My writing is better now, and gets better with every article and every book I write.  I don’t think you can ever stop improving.

What, then, are some of the skills that I learned by writing in one genre and was then able to use to improve another style?

  • First, I used to write feature articles.  One of the first things you have to be able to do (after gathering your material) to write a feature is to organize your material and write an outline.  That ability to think about how to tell a story has improved the way I’m able to write case studies in textbooks.
  • That ability to tell a story also became extraordinarily useful in writing the memoir.
  • The self-reflection skills that I had to engage to write the memoir became a key to opening up my imagination so that I could pick up on the rich possibilities of fiction that might come from an academic journal article (that’s the backstory about my upcoming book Grace Note which I’ll tell you about the minute I have it in my hand from the publisher).
  • My research skills that I honed by writing textbooks are the key to my ability to write historical fiction that is full of accurate historical detail.
  • And of course, all of the editors who have had a crack at my work have taught me some of the fine points of grammar, punctuation and style – even if I had to argue with them from time to time. In almost all cases, they won.

All of this makes me a writer who I think continues to improve, but one who has not yet arrived!

What parts of your current writing could be improved by trying out another form?

Posted in Co-authors, Collaborative writing, health care ethics, Writing books

To collaborate or not to collaborate…that is the question

Posted on by Patricia J. Parsons

They say that there is strength in numbers.  And if you read a CV of just about any academic around (but it’s not reading that I recommend unless you’re an insomniac), you’ll be struck with the extent to which the books and papers they list as their accomplishments are penned by groups – occasionally rather large groups.  My CV is probably shorter than some, but my list of publications is just that – mine. No one else got tenured or promoted based on the same list of publications.  As I said, they’re mine.

My first co-authored book

A colleague recently suggested that I form a committee to work on a report.  This is what I told him: “I don’t play well with others.”  And the very notion of writing a report by committee – well, let’s just say that I value my time and my sanity, and the little bits of both it would take for me to make nice with the collaborators just are not worth the effort – usually.

If you peer very closely at the descriptions of four of my past books, though, you will, in fact, see that I have on those occasions actually worked with someone else.  I have “collaborated.”  That someone with whom I worked was my husband, and we’re still married.  So, it can work.  But when is a writing collaboration a good idea?

And before you jump to the conclusion that collaborative writing only works in non-fiction, there have, in fact, been novels penned by duos (think: Emma Mclaughlin and Nicola Kraus of Nanny Diaries fame).  The co-authors’ names, however, are sometimes combined into one so that the reader thinks the book has one single author.  Think Judith Michael.   Browse through an online bookstore in the non-fiction sections some time and you’ll see plenty of co-authored books.  Then, if you browse a textbook site, you’ll see an even higher percentage.

There are good reasons to collaborate and publish a co-authored book – such as when the knowledge and skills of more than just you are needed.   There are also reasons that it’s not such a good idea.  One problem relates to the ownership of “the good  idea.”  Every book starts with an idea.  Does a co-authored book originate in the mind of only one of the authors (in which case it will always be her baby and she’ll feel that sense of ownership), or does it come about as a double brainwave?  I can only answer this in my case.

It all started in the very earliest years of our marriage when my husband and I used to go out every Friday night.  It was nothing fancy; it was just a chef’s salad and a carafe of house wine at a harbourfront watering hole.  But sitting there gazing out the window at the harbour lights, sipping a glass of mediocre wine that at the end of a long week tasted like the finest French vintage,  engendered in us a kind of romantic notion of leaving a legacy.  What better way, we thought, than to write a book together. We had compatible – if not equivalent – backgrounds.  I had a graduate degree in health education/communication and he was a physician.  Surely there was a common ground we could explore together. When we hit upon it, it was a Eureka moment – a collaborative one.  I can truly say that neither of us owned the idea. It was ours.

My husband was the chairman of the Ethics Committee of the Canadian Medical Association for ten years, a post he vacated shortly after we married.  I had studied ethics and written about ethics in health care.  He no longer had to stay on message as it were.  He could have personal opinions again.  It was golden.  We’d be the ones to simplify complex ethics issues in health care for everyone.  The public would be smitten and they would see the wisdom in our ideas.  Well… it’s a long story.

But…

This was in fact the subject of our first book.  However, it didn’t come together exactly as we had planned.  You know the old saying: if you want to make God laugh, just tell her your plans.  That was what sort of happened in our case.

As you know, I had developed these incredible book proposal writing skills (no self-promotion here – at all), so I took charge of the book proposal writing.  We put our two perspectives on the topic together and mined our individual knowledge to come up with what we thought was a well-rounded approach to helping the average, interested reader to understand the ins and outs of ethical dilemmas in modern health care.  At the same time, we decided that the same research could be recycled into another book aimed at a different audience.  We’d also write a textbook – an interdisciplinary textbook for all kinds of health professions students, and it would be a book that they would actually read, but that would be for later.  It would be unlike some of the ethics tomes we had to slog through as students.  But our idea was to be sure that the book for the general public – the trade book – would be published first.

I have but a fuzzy memory of how it all came about, but after pitching our ideas to suitable publishers, one small publisher in Toronto was interested in the textbook idea and offered us a contract.  So Healthcare Ethics was born.

Then the real work began.  At least four evenings a week, after our very young son had gone to bed, we’d hole up in our home office and work.  We’d discuss the organization, content, references etc of the book.  Art, my husband the doctor, would keep notes that he added to each day se he saw patients in the office.  We’d talk about each chunk of the book as a team and then I’d write it.  I think that collaborations work best when you are really clear about each person’s skills.  That realization needs to begin with an honest determination of your own skills.  So, I’d write and then it went back to  him.  He’d make copious and substantive notes and I’d rewrite.  This process happened a few times for each chunk of the material until we had a draft we were happy about.

In  the end, the publisher was really happy with the book and we had found our  writing rhythm.  This was the first of four books we would write together (and we’re working on a fifth all these  years later).  The most important lesson we learned is that you have to really like and respect the person you’re working with.