Because of the changes in how we spend our time reading stories, not to mention how we read them in the first place, writers are working desperately to keep a captive audience — not an easy thing to do with so much writing now available so freely and immediately.

Do I focus on search-engine optimization (SEO)? What about word count? What does my target audience (who is that anyway anymore?) really want?  What is going to hold my reader more than 90 seconds, when their finger is perched precariously on the tip of the mouse, ready to click me into oblivion as the search continues for something more entertaining?

With the exception of SEO and the ease of maneuvering from one piece of writing to the next, all with a click of the mouse, the questions I pose for writers above are no different than what writers have been asking themselves for decades. We still want to write for an audience that understands what we are saying, even if they don’t necessarily agree with it.

But how to do that?

It is precisely due to the ease of leaving your work that makes writers more desperate to hold on to your attention. Before blogs and search engines and RSS feeds, we just had to tease them enough to buy the darn thing. Once they got it in their hands, they gave us a fair chance — maybe a few chapters or up to 100 pages — before they made a decision to keep on reading or line the birdcage with its ripped-out pages.

In that desperation, I think we are sacrificing sensibility, the very essence of a writer’s passion for writing the piece in the first place. We are so concerned about getting to the point very quickly that we do not allow our purpose, our intent, to build in the story.

This is why, I think, we are seeing “flash fiction” and similar nonfiction subgenres continuing to emerge as a legitimate form of writing. How quickly can you get to your point and share that sensibility before you reach your last-allowed 750th word? At times, I feel like I’m reading stories that are more suited to fit in the microwave-ready Lean Cuisine dish.

Sure, these stories/meals are good on-the-go, but is it really possible to establish and sustain long-lasting and filling themes with such a diet?

As I wrap up the final edits on my book that goes to the printer next week for a December 9th release, I know that one of the best things going for me is that the story is short — a mere 51,000 words that barely pushes the 200-page mark.

But I am also making sure that, to the best of my ability, I didn’t compromise sensibility in keeping it short.

I guess it comes down to this. Go ahead and microwave my story, but please set aside the afternoon to enjoy the sliced turkey and corn niblets. I hope that what I have to share takes a little time to digest. :)

In February 2011, The Nielsen Company documented over 156 million public blogs in existence. In 2009, 1.5 trillion text messages were sent or were received (dhtech.com). According to Facebook’s statistics page (accessed at the time of this posting), there are more than 750 million active users, people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook, and they share more than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) each month.Twitter, by its own claim, boasts that members are now posting in excess of 200 million tweets a month.

People are using writing and social networking to communicate more than ever before.

Consider the following passage from Jeremy Norman:

If we go back to the end of World War II in 1945, the year in which telegraphic use peaked in the United States, Americans sent 236 billion telegraph messages that year, seeming a huge number relative to U. S. population at the time. With respect to the amount of information transferred, numbers may be deceptive since telegraph messages were charged for by the word, and tended to be exceptionally brief, while the amount of text, audio and video information that can be transferred or exchanged in one minute on the Internet is incomparably greater than the amount of text that could be exchanged in the same time by telegraph. Because of the availability of increasingly rich and diverse information over wireless networks, the nature of telecommunication has changed. As of May 2010, cell phones, used by about 90% of American households, were used more for data, such as text messages, streaming video and music, than speech, and during 2008 to 2010 the average number of voice minutes per user in the United States fell. In his book, The Information. A Theory. A History. A Flood (2011, p. 395), James Gleick quotes Jaron Lanier dramatically describing the scale of the ever-accelerating flood of electronic information we are experiencing: “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.” (“From Cave Paintings to the Internet” http://www.historyofinformation.com/narrative/index.php)

Finally! People are writing more than they are speaking to communicate! After all these years, the written word has become king of the communication hill!

Or has it?

It seems to me that quantity has nothing to do with quality here, and in fact — all this “writing” is actually working against the production of any meaningful and significant written correspondence or communication that will survive a cache-clearing data dump of trivial information. We’re so caught up in instant communication in under 160 characters that we’re skimming the waves of our life experience. We are losing our ability to kill the motor, sink in the waters of who we are and what we feel, and share that with others in a meaningful way.

One staff writer for the Independent , who wrote an article on the state of love letters in the 21st century, posted this question last February:

Do people send each other love letters any more? Or is the exchange of amorous declarations between partners now forever delegated to the insulting greetings card, the fluffy-bunny message in newspaper classifieds, the wholly unpassionate email, the economical salutation of the text message?

The documentation of our lives, as only we can accurately record it through our own experiences, is becoming nothing more than an eWhisper, a vanishing trademark of communication that leaves us with nothing but the news, so immediately reported that we have little time to think or react to an event before the next breaking story pushes the previous one from our memories.

I am not totally discouraged. I was reduced to tears this summer when a fellow writer/teacher taught us all the art of digital storytelling, and how we can empower our students to do the same in the classroom. The integration of writing and images can be a powerful thing, and such historical documentation in a simple, digital format was not possible just a few years ago.

But I think this is the exception and not the rule. Even before programs like iMovie came along, there wasn’t a whole lot of non-digital storytelling going on either, which leads me to believe that the technology explosion is not necessarily killing all aspects of writing; it is simply revealing the ugliness of our society’s negligence in writing authentically.

We can change that. We can help each other turn off our motors and sink into the genuineness of our being.

The first step is to recognize the absolute importance of our existence, as well as the documentation of our understanding of the world around us.

Hard? I guess so. As Tom Hanks says in A League of Their Own, “It’s supposed to be hard; the hard is what makes it great.”

So who’s with me? Let’s accept that challenge, turn off the tweets and the updates, and sink a little. Then write.

I wonder what we’ll begin to discover . . . .

I’ve been having some rather candid conversations with fellow writers in Towson and around town about the importance of authentic writing. Repeatedly, the same troubling concern rises to the primary focus of these discussions: we do not wish to offend, yet we know that, invariably, we will.

Offend whom, you ask?

There’s a book that I refer to often. It’s called The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. The message is simple and can be found in most “good book” manuals, from the bible to the cub scout handbook. But the simplicity with which this book is written makes the agreements themselves accessible.

One of the four agreements is to never take anything personally.

Good advice for both readers and writers, I think, when the latter is doing his job authentically.

On the reader’s end, authentic writing from a son, a father, a spouse, a friend, a colleague can be terribly enlightening, but often it brings contradictions to that “role” that the writer has played with that reader over, perhaps, many years. It took me a very long time to see my parents as individuals; they shared only a fraction of their true personalities to us when we were children. By no means did they not live authentically; I believe that, on many levels, they did, especially Mom. But I didn’t care about any of that; I didn’t know any of that even existed, to be honest with you.

It did exist, though. Despite my every attempt to keep them in their roles as Mom and Dad, much to my astonishment, they were Eileen and Charles, individuals, to the rest of the world.

I imagine it is the same for you, in some manner.

For those of us who do not write, it’s not as big a deal, I think. There are fewer chances for us to bare our true souls, put them on the stage for all to see in black and white. We find convenient ways to practice a “don’t ask, don’t tell” lifestyle where we keep our authentic selves from emerging.

We’re good. We play the game and, for the most part, choose our translucent masks from the jar by the door, where they mingle a little shyly with the others of varying thickness. We even find ourselves believing that we are the mask. It shows up in our actions, our words, our beliefs. We buy into these pop-fad crises of global warming and rush to buy our hybrid cars suddenly to save the earth. We are made to feel so good, our egos soothed by our acts, doing our part, living the good, right life.

I don’t mean to mock or offend. I don’t. It is me. This is my belief and it’s not about any one of you. It’s what I feel, what I think, what I believe. When I read that you are looking for hybrid choices, I applaud your efforts and want to know if you are free for a barbecue next Thursday. That’s your choice to make. That’s your place in this world, right here, right now.

I do not mean to offend. I mean to tell you what I think. Please, do not take it personally.

But as writers, we do this as well–we anticipate criticism that we will most assuredly take personally, and then censor our writing to make our audience members nod their head in agreement. That’s what we’re after, isn’t it? Approval? We sacrifice authenticity for approval. We sacrifice genuine honesty to protect the ones we love and to preserve the images they hold of us, near and dear to their hearts.

God bless us all for our efforts.

That’s not authentic, though. As writers, we’re faced with this dilemma on a daily basis. My blog is public. But my blog entries are personal. Do I wish to be conservative? Refrain from posting opinions that might offend? Censor my thoughts and censor who I am to save the ones I love from potential hurt because they choose to take my words personally?

We can’t help it, I know. It’s what we do all day long. We are trained away from seeing and sharing all things with love; we grow suspicious, concerned, filtering all that comes in, and all that goes out.

We are becoming the first generation of artificial intelligence (AI) life forms, higher-level thinking zombies, if you will, who walk through their days and surf in their nights playing the lifelong game of PC-Perfect individuals, never wishing to offend, never wishing to misunderstand.

So many of us wish to do neither. And yet, we do, and in so doing we feel terribly sad that our efforts to live and write authentically have somehow missed their mark.

Never take anything personally.

I know. I see myself doing it even now. It’s hard. So hard, when you know that your audience sees you in so many different roles: teacher, husband, father, friend, colleague. They bring those filters to my words and gasp, shake their heads, and maybe even do a little re-read to make sure they got it all right the first time.

Never before, though, have we lived such transparent lives for all our communities to see us so vividly. We’re all making choices, however conscious (or not) those choices may be. Some are retreating, staying low, under the public radar and wrapping themselves around popular causes to insulate them from the dangers of authentic living. It’s a genuine and noble drive, for sure. There’s not much awareness happening at this level, I believe; rather, there is much awareness happening for everything but who they truly are as individuals.

We’ve had our arts programs stripped out of our schools, we have our students practicing the art of hoop writing with perfecting the tricky craft of composing brief and extended constructed responses. We are regurgitating numbers and facts and formulas and processes at lightning speeds so that school systems can boast when the annual reports are published in the morning papers: We are in the XXth Percentile; we have many reasons to celebrate. So many other schools did horribly worse. Hoorah for us.

We are not celebrating the successes of our individual students in their desperate attempts to hold on to their individuality; we celebrate that, collectively, we play a better game of jump rope than half the other schools on our block.

When they graduate, those expert jump-ropers, what do they know of authenticity? Of individuality?

Perhaps that is why so many of them flock wildly to Facebook for a little breathing room, a little sanity where they can be a little dangerous with their words, say what’s really on their minds, and feel like they’re living authentically in a bead of water that rests precariously on a dewy leaf, overlooking the rushing waters of domestication and conformity.

Look, I know it’s hard. We both need to work on it, Reader and Writer. But maybe, just maybe, if each of us comes to the page with a little sensibility, doing our best to take none of this personally, then maybe, perchance, we will not have offended the other.

Just maybe.

New book. Outrageous controversy. Book shoots to no. 1 on bestseller list. Mission accomplished.

I would imagine that a person like Ann Coulter who has the audacity to write such claims also has the guts to promote her book so shamelessly. The whole riff with Lauer (“Are you getting testy with me?”) was all in the plans to spark such a controversy and shoot her book to number one.

Still, the irony is this: Coulter blasts the 9/11 widows for riding the coattails of their husbands’ deaths to become millionaires and further their own agenda.

But look who’s riding those coattails now. Coulter is guilty of doing the very thing she blames the widows of doing. But her ride is even worse (given that you believe the widows are guilty of this in the first place, which I do not), for she is like a second-generation leech, feeding off of the tragedies of others with whom she has no direct relations.
And we, the consumers of such folly, are helping her laugh all the way to the bank if we buy her book.

Me? I’ll hop on the library wait list to read this one.

Can’t anybody sell a book these days without such trickery?

Friday afternoon, I enjoyed a great discussion with a colleague on

1. the legitimacy of Ann Coulter’s statements specifically about the 9/11 widows and
2. her presentation of those statements, both in print and subsequently with the media.

Our discussion began from her reaction to what Ann had said about the 9/11 widows, calling them witches and money-hungry widows…I told her that I had to reserve judgment until I researched the story more. Basically, what I gleaned from news snips and our own conversation was that Ann Coulter believed it to be unfair that the 9/11 widows could hide safely from attack behind the emotional barrier surrounding them simply because their spouses were killed in the tragedy. Coulter’s point, I believe, was this: Don’t throw yourself out there to become political forces and then duck back into the emotional green zone every time somebody questions your arguments/cause.

On the surface, I can see Coulter’s point if this is the issue. My colleague believes it is okay to use appeal to emotion in an argument, and I don’t disagree. I do believe, however, that the use of that appeal to emotion is then fair game to refute if the other party decides to put it on the table. This, I believe, is what Coulter was attempting to do.

The problem with Ann, though, is that she is so rude and sarcastic that the argument jumps the tracks entirely, and we are left with Matt Lauer specials filled with questions that focus on what Ann was thinking when she wrote such outrageous statements, instead of focusing on the reasoning behind her original claims that the 9/11 widows shouldn’t be able to hide behind the emotional curtain.

The other problem with Ann is this:

First, the 9/11 widows use appeal to emotion to have their arguments heard.

Second, Ann Coulter responds with her own appeal to emotion slanders.

Third, Matt Lauer and others respond to Coulter’s appeal to emotion to have her arguments heard.

Fourth (and here’s the point): When Matt Lauer informs her that they never told her that she can’t respond to them, Coulter says, “Look, you’re getting testy with me.”

And that’s it, right there. Ann, the problem with you is you always want the last punch. You need to be able to play by the same rules that you complain others don’t play by. If the gloves are off with using appeal to emotion, suck it up and keep the train on the tracks. We’re all more interested in the battles fought on the field rather than those fought hiding behind any kind of barrier…

By the way, the 9/11 widows responded formally to Coulter’s claims. and their statement is reprinted here (it first appeared at crooksandliars.com). ….
We did not choose to become widowed on September 11, 2001. The attack, which tore our families apart and destroyed our former lives, caused us to ask some serious questions regarding the systems that our country has in place to protect its citizens.

Through our constant research, we came to learn how the protocols were supposed to have worked. Thus, we asked for an independent commission to investigate the loopholes which obviously existed and allowed us to be so utterly vulnerable to terrorists. Our only motivation ever was to make our Nation safer. Could we learn from this tragedy so that it would not be repeated?

We are forced to respond to Ms. Coulter’s accusations to set the record straight because we have been slandered.

Contrary to Ms. Coulter’s statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day.

It is in their honor and memory, that we will once again refocus the Nation’s attention to the real issues at hand: our lack of security, leadership and progress in the five years since 9/11.

We are continuously reminded that we are still a nation at risk. Therefore, the following is a partial list of areas still desperately in need of attention and public outcry. We should continuously be holding the feet of our elected officials to the fire to fix these shortcomings.

1. Homeland Security Funding based on risk. Inattention to this area causes police officers, firefighters and other emergency/first responder personnel to be ill equipped in emergencies. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.

2. Intelligence Community Oversight. Without proper oversight, there exists no one joint, bicameral intelligence panel with power to both authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence activities. Without such funding we are unable to capitalize on all intelligence community resources and abilities to thwart potential terrorist attacks. Fixing this will save lives on the day of the next attack.

3. Transportation Security. There has been no concerted effort to harden mass transportation security. Our planes, buses, subways, and railways remain under-protected and highly vulnerable. These are all identifiable soft targets of potential terrorist attack. The terror attacks in Spain and London attest to this fact. Fixing our transportation systems may save lives on the day of the next attack.

4. Information Sharing among Intelligence Agencies. Information sharing among intelligence agencies has not improved since 9/11. The attacks on 9/11 could have been prevented had information been shared among intelligence agencies. On the day of the next attack, more lives may be saved if our intelligence agencies work together.

5. Loose Nukes. A concerted effort has not been made to secure the thousands of loose nukes scattered around the world – particularly in the former Soviet Union. Securing these loose nukes could make it less likely for a terrorist group to use this method in an attack, thereby saving lives.

6. Security at Chemical Plants, Nuclear Plants, Ports. We must, as a nation, secure these known and identifiable soft targets of Terrorism. Doing so will save many lives.

7. Border Security. We continue to have porous borders and INS and Customs systems in shambles. We need a concerted effort to integrate our border security into the larger national security apparatus.

8. Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Given the President’s NSA Surveillance Program and the re-instatement of the Patriot Act, this Nation is in dire need of a Civil Liberties Oversight Board to insure that a proper balance is found between national security versus the protection of our constitutional rights.

– September 11th Advocates

Kristen Breitweiser
Patty Casazza
Monica Gabrielle
Mindy Kleinberg
Lorie Van Auken