Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Writer's Notebook: On Creative Writing Courses and Writing for Publication

This weekend, the New York Times published a provocative article about creative writing classes written by Charles McGrath, formerly editor of the Times Book Review.   The article ruminates about the cultural change which has resulted in an explosion of creative writing courses.  The article's title, The Ponzi Workshop, succinctly captures McGrath's concerns in a colorful sound bite. 

I think the article is worth reading, but it gave me pause, and encouraged me to review the steps on my own meandering path toward being a writer.   McGrath's article talks about the profusion of creative writing programs in universities; fifty-two degree-granting writing programs in 1975 had grown to more than three hundred by the year 2004.  My own path to writing was quite different.  

My original interest in writing started as a reader.  I read voraciously through my childhood and that pattern continued in high school when a friend introduced me to science fiction.  I also had a teacher in my junior year who encouraged me to try my hand in early writing activities such as writing a journal.  

In college, I majored in Engineering at Rensselaer, but my interest in writing came in handy when it came time to write up various projects in subjects like management and production engineering, where I developed a reputation for being able to put words together effectively and get good grades on the finished products.  

After Rensselaer, I had a couple of years before my business career kicked off in earnest, giving me a chance to catch up on my reading.  This was the time when I read books like "The Brothers Karamozov" Mailer's "The Deer Park," and Tom Robbins's "Another Roadside Attraction," in addition to a steady diet of SF.  Writers like Mailer and Samuel R. Delany had encouraged would-be writers to write in a journal in their own articles on writing, so that is when I began to chronicle my own intellectual journey that way.  

I got busy in my information technology career after that, but always found time on weekends or over vacations to write about my experiences in a series of wirebound notebooks.   About two years into my career, I decided to take a creative writing course at WestConn, the local college.  Over twelve weeks, fifteen of us gathered, participated in writing exercises and shared the results with each other.  I took the occasion to finish my first science fiction short story, a 3000 word effort called "The Games." A fellow classmate, a woman near seventy, complimented me on the story and told me I was lucky to have a well developed fantasy life, unlike many of the men she had known who had no life beyond their careers when they retired.  I was in my mid-twenties at the time and I mentally filed away her comment for future reference.  

I continued my journal activities and branched out into other creative outlets such as songwriting, but I put my dreams of being a published writer on hold while trying to figure out the rest of my life, including what I wanted to do in the day job that consumed most of my time.  I also began to travel  extensively, both for business and on vacations, giving me a chance to get to places like Europe for the first time.  Everywhere I went, I'd take my pen along and write about my experiences. 

In 1986, I bought my first personal computer, an 8086-based model from AT&T, purchased the WordPerfect word processing program and decided to work on writing for publication.   Fortuitously, Westconn introduced a much more sophisticated writing course, called "Writing and the Path to Publication," taught by published writer Joan Gozzi.  Over the course of several months, Joan worked with us both on writing and the business side.  We learned about researching writing markets, understanding target markets and writing query letters.  During the course, I decided that I'd like to write articles on business topics that interested me. 

I did some research on the writer's markets for business and developed a concept for an article that would combine my experiences in business planning with personal reading that I'd been doing on the differences between the right and left sides of the brain.  I outlined the article, started to write it and prepared a query letter for a publication called Manage.  Rather to my surprise, the editor at Manage, said he'd take a look at it.  That meant I actually had to finish the article.  I wrote it up, did a couple of edits and then had Joan look it over.  She offered a few edits and then it was ready to go.  

I sent it in and a couple of months later, a letter and a check arrived in the mail.  In early 1988, the article was published and I had my first professional writing credit. Needless to say, I was very excited about all of this, but surprised that the road to publication had gone so smoothly.  I now knew I could write at a professional level, at least in the realm of business non-fiction, which buoyed my spirits and made me yearn to do more.    

That's how I got started as a writer, but I still had ambitions to write fiction.  I'll say more about that in another post.  

Learning about the IETF and RFCs

I've started to do a bit of blogging at work related to my job as a Voice over IP Gateway Product Manager.  My latest post may be of more general interest for people who follow developments in technology, particularly as it relates to the Internet.   The topic is on the 40th anniversary of the 1st RFC (Request for Comments), which is the term the Internet Engineering Task Force uses for the documents it publishes. 

You can read the post here. 

I have a personal connection to the IETF that goes back to 1996.  At that time, the fax community realized that the movement to IP networks was going to be big and we started discussing it among ourselves at the TR-29 fax standards committee of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA).  There were a lot of ideas, but the energy level really lifted when Dave Crocker of the IETF visited our committee.  Dave's older brother Steve actually wrote the first RFC (the one whose anniversary we are celebrating), but Dave was also very well known as an author of several key RFCs related to Internet Mail.  

Dave invited members of the fax community to get involved in working at the IETF to figure out how to do fax over the Internet and many of us took him up on it.  In my case, I volunteered to become a co-chair of the effort and officially took that position when the Internet Fax working group was chartered a couple of months later.  

One method for encoding images in email messages is by using an image format known as TIFF.  A couple of months into the standards effort, it became clear we needed to standardize this format, which had already been in use for many years and I joined Glenn Parsons of Nortel in attempting to edit the original TIFF-F document from Steve Campbell into a form that could be published as an RFC.   Normally, chairs are encouraged NOT to get involved in writing or editing documents, and I soon learned why.  

By the next meeting, there was already an alternative group that wanted to write their own TIFF standards document and include a whole bunch of brand new material.  Needless to say, my position as both co-chair and document writer got tricky very fast.  I can remember eating barbeque in Memphis as the six people involved tried to work out a compromise.  Later at the meeting, the working group voted against the wishes of the chairs and asked us all to work together. 

If you look on Google for TIFF and RFC, you'll find that we did somehow manage to work all of this out.  The original TIFF RFCs were 2301, 2302 and 2306, and were published by the IETF in 1998.  Later on, these RFCs were updated for a variety of reasons, so there are about 7 RFCs with my name as co-author, all on the topic of TIFF for facsimile. 

There are many other stories to tell about how TIFF got standardized, but I'll leave them for another time. 

Writer's Notebook: Getting Organized with OneNote

At work, I've been playing around with a software tool that is included in Office 2007, a software program known as OneNote.  Both at work and at home, I tend to spawn a lot of ideas and if I don't capture them -- quickly -- poof, they're gone. 

I started hearing about OneNote a few years back, as one of a wave of programs that try to help you organize your ideas.  I've been using a program called Ascend at home for many years for managing things like To-Do lists and capturing miscellaneous notes with their Red Tab feature.  At first blush, OneNote is a much more powerful way to capture notes and create links between related items.  I've been doing this kind of thing for years, but in an improvised way.   When Word added the capability of hyperlinking, I used it to manage projects that involved interaction between multiple documents.   When I took notes at a standards meeting, I'd create a master document and use it to link to all of the subsidiary documents.  Later on, the notes would be turned into meeting minutes and -- in somewhat different form -- into my standards newsletter, Human Communications Digest.  

So, what does this have to do with writing?  My newsletter example above shows what I did for non-fiction writing projects using Word, but OneNote is actually designed for capturing notes and organizing projects, so it is much slicker.  

I tend to work on multiple writing projects at once and ideas do pop up about phrases I want to include in a new draft, entire new chapters that coalesce around a new direction for my characters, or perhaps, entirely new novels.  I'm rather visual in my thinking style, so it really helps me to map things out before I get too deep into a new project.  In my writing notebooks, I have a couple of very interesting pages, where I drew a map of the dimensions I wanted to explore in new novels and then showed how the ideas connected.  In two cases, there was enough there so that I started thinking about the characters who would inhabit this novelistic world.  I then took the more traditional tack of writing a rough chapter outline and then started to fill in background information on the characters.  I did all of this in a hard copy notebook, but I really would have liked to have an electronic tool which could have supplemented my hard copy and helped me organize it. 

OneNote looks like a tool that would be very good for this application.  The GUI looks like a notebook, complete with tabs, so it's visually very friendly for a writer who has been working with paper notebooks.  It's very easy to start a new tab, perhaps to jot down notes about that project that's in your mind and then put them aside until you are ready to take the next step.  If you've already got other documents, it's easy to set up hyperlinks.  

I'm starting to use OneNote for some work projects, but really want to get it going at home for my writing as well.  I'll report back on my results.