Writing Tips at GarySpeer.com

I saw this interview with John Grisham on “Today” yesterday and I thought you’d enjoy a look yourself. There were some interesting things about Grisham’s writing and his creative process.

Go take a look at the interview for yourself, using the link above to the “Today” website and video. I have no idea how long they keep those videos up, so if you want to see it you might want to look at it soon.

I was especially impressed by the laid back attitude Grisham had toward a daily writing schedule. He apparently sets no daily goals for pages or numbers of words he writes. Indeed, he says he writes in a journal and/or sketching his writing plans pretty much daily, but that he doesn’t necessarily write on a specific book or project on any daily basis.

He also says he generally writes a novel starting every April and finishing around Thanksgiving. Not too bad a plan for the year, is it? Hmmmm …

Pod people are living in our neighborhood. Apparently just in the last couple of days they have moved into a house just up the block from us. I saw clear evidence of this when I was out walking yesterday — there was a large box sitting in their driveway near the house with the words “moving pods” printed in large letters on the sides of it. I don’t know whether to be amused, amazed, or openly alarmed that there are pod people still hanging around the towns and cities of America after they were so fully exposed in a novel (1955) and at least two movies (1956, 1978).

Shouldn’t they have gone into hiding, instead of broadcasting their presence on the side of driveway boxes?

What really startled me was that their moving pod was sitting in a driveway in MY neighborhood. Why in the world would pod people hang out in Springfield, Missouri?? Indeed, they are within three blocks of the international headquarters of a major Christian religious denomination. Don’t they realize the risks of discovery they are taking? What’s happened to pod people in the last couple of decades to make them so brazen?

Uh, or, uh, maybe that moving pod label meant something else?

I wrote last week lamenting the sorry state of journalism, and of print journalism in particular. In that post, I suggested that the Internet and widespread cable/satellite television were the chief factors that are killing newspapers (in America, at least).

Just since writing that earlier post, evidence continues where I live that daily newspapers really are going the way of the dinosaur. Our local paper is part of the Gannett corporation, along with about 100 other daily papers and television outlets. Not only is our paper cutting back radically because they are losing ad revenue, but nearly every paper in the Gannett group is taking big hits. They’re the nation’s largest newspaper publishers and even their flagship publication, USA Today, is hurting.

The only answer Gannett and other newspapers have found so far is to cut staff and cut the size of their daily news hole, hang on tight, and hope for the best. (The “news hole” is that amount of space a newspaper allows for each day’s news, based on the amount of paid advertising they have for that given day.)

The fact that you’re online reading this probably means you understand the fundamental problems plaguing print journalism and even broadcast media because of the Internet. Newspapers and even television cannot keep pace with all that’s available and the speed with which it’s available on the Internet. In addition, pretty much anyone can post news, pictures, and opinions on the Internet and find an audience of some sort. Just try THAT at your local newspaper or TV station.

If the Internet is hard on newspapers, you might say the various social networking tools online are making matters much, much harder on the poor print guys. Tools like Facebook and Twitter in particular — especially Twitter! — are ramping up the pressure on all traditional notions of journalism. Twitter is the Internet on fat burners, like the Internet bulked up on steroids.

And why is Twitter so effective? Because it lets anyone who wants to fire off 140 word “factiods” or snippets of thought — or thoughtlessness — almost instantly. Twitter makes sharing short messages and even photos almost immediate. If you saw any of the CNN coverage of last week’s airliner ditching in the Hudson River you may know what I mean. Every afternoon, one of CNN’s most tech savvy anchors, Rick Sanchez, does a show that’s mostly short interviews with newsmakers sprinkled with liberal viewer comments onscreen via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and blog comments.

Good luck, world, on the journalism that results from all this. Perhaps this is just part of the total “dumbing down” of our civilization. But it’s certainly an exciting time to be alive if you’re a writer. Many, many challenging opportunities are out there and many more are coming. We writers must be alert to seize every writing opportunity we can.