Writing Gooder

For sale: Baby shoes; never used.

- Ernest Hemingway

Legend has it that Hemingway wrote the above when his colleagues bet him he couldn’t write a story in just six words.  After winning the bet, Hemingway called it his best work.

Whether that’s just an urban legend or has a basis in fact, it’s useful to analyze why Hemingway would call it his best work.  In fact, I could think of three reasons.

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There’s a good article posted on Wired discussing how usage of the Internet has rewired our brains.  Namely, while Internet usage does lead to increased visual-spatial ability, it also leads to shallower learning.  After all, just think how many times you’ve only skimmed an article on the Internet rather than read it as thoroughly as you would if it were on paper.  Why, I bet you’re skimming this now!

So that’s all well and good, but how does it apply to you?  Well, the article got me thinking how you could take advantage of human psychology in your writing. (more…)

There are a lot of writing sites that actively enforce proper capitalization as well as good style rules when it comes to titles.  In large part, such rules are enforced due to aesthetics.  Having a forum full of properly formatted titles is a lot like having a clean, organized room.  Yet, I’ve always thought it’s a bit misguided.

For one, an author may have a perfectly good reason for not following the proper style rules.   The Pursuit of Happyness by Chris Gardner is one such example.  There, the author based the title of the book off the name of a daycare, which misspelled ‘happyness’ in its name, that he used to leave his son at during the day.

But for another, the title is a good indicator of how an author feels about his own work.  Whenever I see a literary work on the Young Writers Society with a shoddy title, I know the author does not care about the work he posted.  Plus, if you can’t bother to write a proper title – something that only takes a minute – then what does that say about the likely quality of the work?

And that is why the title is so important: it’s the first indicator to the reader of how the author feels about his work and about the quality of the work.  That indicator is extremely important as it lets the reader know whether or not to spend the time necessary to read and review the work in question (which is why YWS doesn’t actively enforce rules concerning titles of works).  So if you’re not spending time on your title, you may want to rethink your priorities.