Yes, it does, and it usually first happens when news reporters become columnists. They’ve spent their entire career up until then keeping themselves out of their writing. Merely mentioning themselves or expressing an opinion or using the first-person pronoun “I” feels like a betrayal of professional values. The secret is to create a new persona, not Janey the ace reporter, but Jane the personal columnist. Jane has permission to use those apparently “unobjective” techniques.

Their second problem is language. The wording of newspapers is deliberately flat, an attempt to sound objective by not using colorful terms. Journalists copied this technique from scientists in the nineteenth century, and escape it only in sports writing or light features. If a columnist sounds like a scientist, readers will not read the column. Even newspaper economists don’t sound like economists.

The last problem is form. Journalists learn to write in the Inverted Pyramid, stacking information in declining order of importance and interest. Readers pass out from boredom after three paragraphs, if the writer is lucky enough to get them to read that far. Most new columnists realize they have to escape the Infernal Pyramid, so they fall back on their high school English training and write essays. But columns are not essays, which generally get to the point at the bottom. Effective columns tell readers early what they’re about, and develop that.

Liv’s question was about shifting to fiction or memoir, not columns. The principles are the same. You give yourself permission to have opinions in public and to talk about yourself. You abandon the voice of the newspaper and create your own that fits how you think and feel, and want to sound. And you leave behind journalistic forms and learn new ones, usually by studying the genres you want to write in. In other words, converting journalists have to abandon the techniques that create the illusion of objectivity.

All of this is discussed in some form in my forthcoming book, Writing Your Way (Writer’s Digest, March 13, 2012).

[Care to share your experiences in changing genres?]

This passage reminds me of a startling discovery I made some years ago, when I first began to write fiction. I was trained as a devoted planner, one who figured out the whole piece before writing a word, then produced an outline, and followed it closely.

Then I heard the playwright August Wilson describe his composing method, which went something like this: write a sentence, write another sentence, keep writing sentences until you perceive two voices. Then assign the sentences to two voices, and keep writing and assigning sentences until you notice a third voice. Six months later, he had a three-act play.

“Weird,” thought I. But then I recognized that I pictured disconnected scenes in my head. So I started writing them down, and they eventually resolved into a narrative and then a plot and a novel. I’m now halfway through my fourth novel written without planning.

What does this have to do with Iskander the Potter?

If you have narrative materials in your head, let the writing staff in your brain write what they want to say, rather than forcing yourself on them. Just relax and type, and let it flow.

It works like this. Two characters are talking, and suddenly they’re digressing into things you hadn’t planned or imagined. I’m writing about two boys, 8 and 7, camping in the woods. They get into an argument about equipment they did or did not bring, which leads to deciding what you need to carry versus what you make on the spot. Their parents get lost in a park near their house, and slide sideways into discovering they’re terrified by the park, despite the fact that they bought their house to live near it. Later the boys find a .30-calibre machine gun in the woods.

None of this was planned. I just got the “feel of it and then watched it grow into something.”

Iskander the Potter finds it works “best just to mould it in the fingers for a short while.” The writing equivalent is an extreme form of drafting. Just type sentences, and watch what comes out. Don’t ask why the characters are saying and doing things, just let them act. As the text accumulates, the plot emerges.

Now I know this sounds like nonsense to you writers who are planners, and for you, it is. But if you’re a plunger, one who types to discover what you want to say, it might work for you. You might find that your story has “preconceived ideas about what it wanted to become.”

[Let me know if you have experiences similar to mine.]

[I will be speaking at the F+W Writer’s Digest Conference at the Sheraton New York Hotel on January 21, 10:00-10:50, on how to escape your writing teachers.]

Writers in my sessions asked me to add a section on memoirs. I asked my fellow voyagers in table conversations why they weren’t writing memoirs, and kept getting the same answer: “I’m not important.” Notice the wording: “I’m not important,” not “I’m not that important.” And the people saying it were mostly accomplished professionals.

I did some informal interviewing to find out what they meant. Most of the men said they didn’t have time. But the women, without exception, said they had been carefully taught not to take themselves seriously, never to think of themselves as important or even interesting. One quoted the Russian proverb: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

One of my favorite writer friends, Jim Nicholson, used to write a daily 18-inch feature obituary on an ordinary person chosen at random. I asked him, “If you pick subjects at random, how often do you fail?” “Never,” he replied. “Everybody’s interesting.”

“Everybody’s interesting” became the motto of the workshops, conversations, and coaching sessions. So I taught them how to write memoirs, starting on the cruise. Here’s what I said:.

First, you have to overcome a disparity in scale: little bitty you against a book-length writing job. Writing a memoir can seem like scaling the Matterhorn, especially for someone who hasn’t written anything since leaving school. So I told them to write just one anecdote, preferably a funny one from their early lives. Some said they couldn’t, so I asked them to tell me one. And they did, and then they wrote it, and others liked it, and they were launched. Writing little anecdotes is fun, like telling jokes, and contagious.

Second, you have to lower your standards. Your first attempts at anything don’t have to be good. You’ll learn more if they aren’t. Beginners have a license to write badly. More importantly, they can ask for help. And the help they need is a friend asking them “What works?” and “What needs work?”

Third, you just get it down, without worrying about spelling or usage or correctness. There’s no teacher and no grading when you write for yourself. And you can get it right later, after it says what you want to say.

Fourth, you have to shut out imagined reactions from your family. I warned everyone that inevitably, something you write in a memoir will piss off somebody, probably a relative, especially your mother. As you write anything, never think about what others will say; you have to shut up that voice in your head that makes you timid. I manage my demon by telling myself after every sentence, “This’s just a draft, Don.”

Finally, as my pal Roy Peter Clark says, you get started by putting your butt in your chair and moving your fingers on the keys.

That’s it. It’s that easy. Forget about yourself to write about yourself.

[If you’re writing a memoir, how did you start?]

You need four sheets of paper and a pencil. You write a partial prompting sentence at the top, such as “My Z made me Y…” or “I didn’t know that X….” Then you fill in the blanks (Z and Y, or X), and continue to write without raising the pencil. You scribble at top speed, never backing up, never correcting, never reading, never worrying about spelling or grammar or sense. You keep this up until you run out of steam, usually halfway down the page. Then you stop, stand up, walk around, shake your bootie, and sit down again.

Then, without reading what you wrote, you repeat the whole process, starting with the same partial sentence with blanks, and scribbling non-stop, borderline mindless, until you run out again. Then, without reading, you repeat the process twice more, or until you write to the bottom of the page. Then and only then, you read what you’ve written on the final page.

When I first tried this technique, I discovered I’d written, “I’m glad my father died.” I didn’t know that until that moment. Yesterday, I led a stuck writer through this process, and she discovered what she was failing to say was not at all what she wanted to say. It’s a quick and dirty coaching technique.

You can direct your epiphany a little by slanting your opening sentence fragment. Lately, I’ve wondered why I could never sing as an adult. (I can’t even hum!) So my opener could be something like this: “I sang as a child until ….”

N.B. Sometimes this magic doesn’t work.

[Ever experience an epiphany by writing?]

He never talked about what he did as a naval officer in World War II, but I’d gathered bits and pieces over the years and put together my own picture of what he did. I knew he helped develop the airborne radar used in hunter-killer teams. One plane (the Hunter) used radar to find enemy submarines, and the other plane (the Killer) carried depth charges to drop on the sub. When he was dying, I cornered him in his hospital bed and interviewed him about what he really did. He couldn’t escape me, and for once in his life, talked at length. I assumed, since he was an electrical engineer, that he had helped develop the radar itself. Actually he figured out how to train flying officers to operate the radar and find the sub. Later he led a group of radar specialists, and flew missions himself. I confirmed all this later in his service records.

And just as I finished telling this anecdote, I had an epiphany. I had never seen the connection between what he was and did (an engineer) and what I became and did (a teacher-scholar). But as I told the story to my participants, it hit me. He created new knowledge, recast it so others could learn it, and taught it to smart people so they could act on it. Which is exactly what I’ve done my whole life, and what I’m am doing right now on this cruise, and what I’m doing in this blog post.
[Ever had an epiphany while telling a story?]

Sometimes you have to include something that’ll jar the reader. Writers tend to explain it later, or just let readers bump on it. The better way is to signal the reader that something striking is about to happen. Even better, disarm the bump at the same time.

Here’s a model of what I’m suggesting, in an article about caffeine:

Hollingsworth compiled his studies in a 1912 book that used a contemporary spelling for the substance: “The Influence of Caffein on Mental and Motor Efficiency.”

The author, Murray Carpenter, warns us that an odd spelling of caffeine is about to startle us, and we don’t bump.

(Do you have any examples of handling this problem well or badly?)

Don Murray, the first writing coach, wrote as he drove his van. He dictated books to his wife Minnie Mae, who sat at a portable desk in the back seat.

Liu Ming, who teaches feng shui and Chinese medicine in Oakland, built an eight-foot cube on wheels in his 1,100 square-foot loft. The cube contains a bedroom, a meditation area, and his study.

He says he “added wheels for feng shui purposes. Now that it is portable, I can spin it on an axis, I can point my head and point my desk in different compass directions for different projects. If I am writing something and feel blocked, I can get up and move the room.”

He “wanted to design the work space so that it could also turn — turn it toward the light on a sunny day, or in a different mood, turn it to the wall and meet a deadline.”

He can even change the view, from downtown Oakland to “the hills and the sunrise.”

Now you might think that having a custom splendid view might distract you from writing, but remember that Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux for inspiration, and Wordworth made a career of writing about emotions occasioned by landscape.

George Bernard Shaw anticipitated Mr. Liu when he built his revolving writing hut at Shaw’s Corner in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire, England. It turned on a track to follow the path of the sun. Not a bad technique for the British Isles.

[Anybody use a moving writing spot?]

Why does this technique work? First, it distracts you from your own writing that you’re not writing. You can’t not think of something, but you can think about something else. Thinking about failing at the keyboard is not likely to inspire you or distract you. What better than an easy story?

Second, it lowers the level of seriousness. You stop failing to write THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL or THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN WORLD THOUGHT SINCE GILGAMESH, and start thinking about a damsel with tower-length hair. Many writers succumb to writer’s block because no matter how hard they think and write, they keep failing to produce a masterpiece. As V. S. Naipaul puts it, “Great subjects are illuminated best by small dramas.”

Third, you don’t have to come up with a plot or a thesis. The fairy tale story is fixed. Actually, it’s not. It’s only a skeleton ripe for riffing. That’s why you don’t write a fairy tale. You rewrite one.

Fourth, the tale you choose is one “that you don’t know entirely,” meaning one you haven’t read in a long time, perhaps since childhood. Fairy tales have an elemental power that will startle you when read them anew. In graduate school, I studied German by reading the Grimm Brothers’ legends in the original. These little kids’ tales were full of puns and profoundly obscene. “Rapunzel” is delicious smut.

Finally, if you’re merrily rewriting a fairy tale, you’re writing and no longer stuck in writer’s block.

[ Have you tried anything like this technique?]

Nothing would dent them. I couldn’t highlight them, delete them, or overwrite them. The only solution was to erase the whole passage that contained them, and type from scratch. Sometimes that failed. They spread like rabbits.

Here’s the secret. That line is the bottom border on the paragraph immediately above. So you have to attack it in that paragraph. Here’s how.

Highlight the whole paragraph before the line, even if it’s just one carriage return. Click FORMAT, then BORDERS AND SHADING, then BORDERS (1). Under APPLY TO, click PARAGRAPH (2). Under SETTINGS (3), look at the bottom item: CUSTOM (4). That’s the baddie. See that little line of four dots? You have to kill that. Click NONE (5) at the top of that column, then OK (6). Voila, the line is gone, adios.

Maybe it’s not. It’s still there, but moved up one line. The fiends at Microsoft designed in a defense against us. If there’s more than one dotted line, they stack on top of one another, but you only see one. So you have to repeat the whole process until they’re all gone. Last night, I rooted out seven of them masquerading as one.

By the way, if you want to create that line, type a carriage return, three asterisks, and a carriage return.

Different versions of Word may do this in different ways, but maybe you can figure out how to make the proper changes. I use Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac.

[Do you know different ways to get rid of these little monsters?]