We might talk about parts, pieces and chips. But it’s not all about hardware and software. What about music, photos, poetry, novels, thoughts, stories, and dreams? There’s magic inside our computers. You know there is
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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What is Tuesday Open Comment Night?
Ah, the blank screen.
The blank screen. It’s an invitation to look foolish, to be boring, to write something that we’ll regret. Some of us can use the blank screen to scare the proverbial pants off ourselves imagining how badly we might screw things up.
The blank screen reminds us that our thoughts will be there for the world to see.
A famous Guindon Cartoon said it better.
Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.
Fear of a blank screen, writer’s block, really is — a subtle fear of exposure — fear that people will see things in our thoughts.
Combine that fear with the idea of marring a pure and perfect white screen, and a writer can get totally ‘whelmed. (Who needs to be overwhelmed? Feeling ‘whelmed is quite big enough for me, thank you.)
It helps to know what we’re up against.
The key to unblanking the scary blank screen is getting something on it we want to say. Some writers can type until they know what that is. I’m not one of them.
I find freewriting visually stressful. When I do that, all I see is a blank screen getting messier and messier. All I feel is me getting more and more distracted by the problem that I don’t know what I want to write.
What I do instead is look away from the menace of the vast white space. I get up and hunt down one sentence — only one — one sentence that says something I want to say. I use questions like these to help me.
The possible questions are unlimited, of course. I start with these, and look through books, cabinets and drawers, and the refrigerator while I’m thinking. The moving around and looking helps my brain unfreeze.
It’s not long before a sentence warms up to me.
I go back to my computer, and I write that sentence across the screen.
The screen is not blank anymore. I’m no longer distracted by its emptiness.
Now I can get to writing.
That sentence? It often becomes my headline. When it’s not, it’s usually my last line. Can you tell which one it is this time?
What questions would you ask to help folks unblank the blank screen?
UPDATE: IF you don’t read Joe’s post Liz Had My Idea Before Me, you’ll be missing a clever and entertaining blogger’s post.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you think Liz can help with a problem you’re having with your writing, check out the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.
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I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.
Is Net Neutrality A Myth? [via Light Within]
The advocates of net neutrality have, at first blush, one overwhelming argument in their favor. The Internet was designed to be a dumb network, with all the brains and innovation residing at the ends of the system. As such, all bits of data traveling over the Internet would be treated equally. This “end-to-end” design principle is the essence of network neutrality and, the proponents of mandated net neutrality argue, must be maintained to secure the Internet as we know it.
This essential characteristic, it is argued, precludes the owners of the Internet’s “pipes” from engineering any intelligence into the network’s architecture–and thus any differential pricing–since all the intelligence must reside at the edges. Proponents of mandated net neutrality managed to force the adoption of some net neutrality provisions into the recent merger agreement between AT&T (nyse: T – news – people ) and Bell South.
But in ” The Myth of Network Neutrality and What We Should Do About It,” Robert Hahn and Robert Litan of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies argue that, contrary to the claims of regulated neutrality proponents, “all bits of information are not treated equally from an economic standpoint.” They argue that “the Internet is not end-to-end now and was never designed to be strictly neutral.”
How can this be? The engineering architects of the Internet drafted the technical rules in informal papers called Requests for Comment. The early drafters of the Net’s architecture, according to Hahn and Litan, “recognized the need to offer priority to some packets over others.”
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE
It was a while ago when Robert emailed me that he was ready to be be a B.A.D. blogger. He warned me, though, that if I was as bad at small talk as I profess to be, the resulting conversation could be rather slow. He said that was because he’s writer, not a talker. I told him I wasn’t worried about my ability to people talking with me.
You might call it irony — that we started by talking about bridges — the bridges in Chicago and in Portland. I live in Chicago, and we have lots of them over the river that flows backwards through our city. Bob remembered them and then told me about the bridges of Portland.
I kind of liked the idea of two bloggers who don’t take to small talk starting out by talking about bridges. It seemed to lie a perfect writer’s segue.
Somehow from there we got talking about “the mysteries.” We discussed people who use the details of their job to cloud the issues by making what they do sound “mysterious.” You’ve run into them, I bet. We mentioned the print buyers who say, “Oh no, that will never work on the press,” nixing what they don’t want to do by using the mysteries of the equipment most people don’t know. We talked about folks across every industry who do the same thing.
Then, Bob told me about his grandmother’s attic where he found a love of reading. He said she had a window there with hundreds of books and magazines. He said he’d sit in the window and read. I could picture him perched in the daylight of the attic window, nose in a book, unaware of the rest of the world.
When he spoke of blogging, Bob was speaking of the cosmopolitation nature of the community. “I’ve met people from every corner of the world . . . It’s fascinating . . . I can travel with my computer . . . It’s really fun.”
So was talking our way across bridge with a guy who doesn’t like small talk as much I don’t.
It’s truly addictive to find a voice I didn’t know I had. — Robert Hruzek
Stop by Robert’s Blog, Middle Zone Musings, and say hi!
Thanks, Robert, you B.A.D. Blogger!
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want to be a B.A.D. Blogger see the. . . a B.A.D. Blogger? page in the sidebar.
Sometimes a few words can get a whole lot started.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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I once worked in a highly political culture. It took a while to know that politica played a huge role there. I had moved to a new city and a new job. I had to sort what was the company and what was the culture in part of the country.
As any new employee, I got to know the folks in my department. They showed me the “ropes” of the company, how things worked, and who was who. I took what I was told on face value.
Time went by. I found feet and my way around. I got to know what worked for me. I got to know what didn’t work too. I figured out that some of those folks who showed me around in the early days had political reasons for telling me things they told me.
I didn’t take into account how my beliefs about the company had been affected by conversations with those political people. It was a while before I woke to realize something about me I didn’t like.
I had opinions about people — people I didn’t know. I had become part of a culture that put people in little boxes.
My mind had people organized by one or two traits and their political clout within the company. It was part of the cultural organizational chart, the oral history handed down to me when I arrived there. I had bought it, as fishers say, “hook, line and sinker.”
That morning I started over. I started talking to all of the folks at work with clear intent of getting to know them. The more I talked, the more I enjoyed the folks that I was getting to know. I found that I’d been missing out on some pretty cool, intelligent people.
The world changed that day, when I let the people out of the boxes.
We can change the world — just like that.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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If you’re ready to change the world, send me your thoughts in a guest post. Feel free to take the gorgeous Change the World image up there that Sandy designed back to your blog. Or help yourself to this one.
. Email me about what you’re doing or what we might do. Let’s change the world one bit at a time together. Together it can’t take forever.