Current mood:

thoughtful

Essays for book
I'm all done writing my three articles for the Burstein book. Well, the initial writing, that is. Now that I've turned them all in, I have some rewriting to do on the popular culture piece, and I'm still waiting to hear the verdict on the personal stories piece.

From my perspective, the personal stories piece was much better written than the pop culture article. I had a difficult time inserting any commentary into the pop culture piece because it interfered with my ability to include song lyric examples and that sort of thing within the word limit. After talking with my editors yesterday, I'm going to approach it in a new way, with the emphasis being on commentary rather than cataloging as many cool examples as possible. Hopefully that will yield a more readable and distinctive article.

One of my editors' comments was that the piece lacked my voice. Going to sleep last night, I pondered this. In a way, although I've been writing since childhood with the intention of writing books as an adult, I feel that I still struggle with the "me" that I convey with my writing. My voice changes with my mood, with what's on my mind, with the depth of interest I have in the piece. It's a little like handwriting; ever notice how different your handwriting is in different situations? It's always yours, but maybe there are times when a third party wouldn't be able to identify two samples as coming from the same person.

Chris often says that my writing is much too formal and scholarly. Some of this stems from my desire to be taken seriously; I find it difficult to be concise and opt to include far more information than is probably necessary. I've come to a point though where I would really like to improve my ability to communicate effectively as well as thoroughly. One of the things I've learned in the last couple of years is that the two things aren't synonymous.