Using Epiphany [the concept] as a segue

I’m going to talk about the books, interspersed over a series of upcoming posts, that I most enjoyed in the past year or so of reading.

I’ll be posting about books in three categories, here.  Possibly get to four.

Why is that?

Well, I have done extensive reading in Christian romance for my own study of that genre.

BUT, it turns out, that while I would recommend certain of those over others, the three books I would most recommend from my reading of the past year do not fall in that category.

I’ll recommend one Christian fiction that is not a romance, a set of contemporary romances that are serialized, and an older secular book that is neither a romance nor Christian-oriented.

So, if and when I get to it, Christian romance is actually that “fourth” category.

Of all the works I’ve read this past year, if I had only one to choose to recommend to someone, and it is precisely because of the epiphany of the book . . .

The number one Christian book I would recommend is The Cross Gardener.  Not sure of the author and the book is not handy, but I believe the author's name is Jason Wright.

I have to admit the author managed the epiphany very deftly.  I read it and thought “should have seen THAT coming.”  But I didn’t, yet it seemed very natural both that I didn’t and should have.

Especially if you know any one who is in a grief situation, The Cross Gardener stands out in my rankings as 2011 pick of the year for Christian fiction.

Epiphany . . .

Today is the actual day of the Feast of the Epiphany.

Nowadays, in the Catholic Church, the liturgical observance falls on the nearest Sunday.  Because of the timing of a Sunday Christmas and New Year’s, that means the observation this year is this coming Sunday. 

“Spirituality and religion” is one of my sub-category niches.  I’ve written in that area quite a bit, and while I don’t regard that as a direct product or service niche, in my spec samples for catalog copywriting I have tied that into three of my niche areas:  books, games and toys, and educational services.

So, because of the timing this year, I thought the general idea of Epiphany would be a good one to get a weekend’s worth of blog posts and that sort of thing out of. 

Further, from the writing perspective, the term “epiphany” has a name in terms of a fiction technique.  The word translates to something like “revelation” or “discovery” in writing.

Indeed, a well-made “epiphany” can form the most satisfactory element of a book.

I’ve read a good number of books over the past year, and I find that writers tend to go about this in one of two different ways.  A novel either has a succession of small epiphanies for one or more of the essential characters; or there is one real, major “ah hah!” moment for one or more of the most central characters.

Either of these approaches, if well realized, can have a satisfying impact on the reader.

I have had some very fulfilling reading experiences over the past year or so with each type, although for a wide range of reasons I would have to say that the book that I would recommend if I had to choose only one out of last year’s reading was the single epiphany type.

Which kind do  you prefer?

Travel theme . . . nostalgia

Another of the niche areas I have identified to try to build some copywriting work within involves travel.

I haven’t, myself, gotten to travel a great deal.  But I have done some traveling.

As a writer, I find the idea of travel starts the minute you walk out your front door.  Should you walk, rather than drive or take public transit, you may find things right outside your front door.  I believe it was Thoreau who referred in one of his works to having traveled widely just within the town of Concord.

You can also mentally travel back in time and recall how things were in the place you grew up as opposed to how things are now.  Several of the municipal electric companies in this area build their annual calendars around precisely this concept.  Sometimes, you can even do some of this vicariously. 

I’ve often tried to reconstruct the landscape of bygone days in my paper journals:  and from time to time I’d get an occasional assist in that from my older brother.

I grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts.  I remember when Lynn was still pretty much a GE town.  I remember the Hillside Five and Dime and Sandy’s Barbecued Chicken in

Wyoma Square

.  I remember the Elm Farm grocery store in downtown, and the A&P near the high school I attended.

I’m not quite old enough to remember the movie house heyday, which my oldest brother does remember.  If I’m not mistaken, and the height of the age of movie houses in Lynn, the city reached a total of 12 theatres.  At least one of those was a drive-in, but most were regular movie play houses:  smaller versions of what we today call the cinema.  I remember the Paramount, the Warner, and Lowe’s, and vaguely recall the drive-in.  I don’t remember the Olympia and any number of others.

Much the same when I do travel:  I like an element of old-time-iness to the travel.  This is why I’ve enjoyed visiting places like living history museums, taking cruises on old-fashioned steam vessels, or travel by horse-drawn carriage or steam locomotive.

In some ways, there are forms of writing that revive that spirit of nostalgia.  Handwritten journals capture the way of the life of those who kept them.  And there’s still a certain grace and elegance involved in correspondence that involves letters written and exchanged through the regular postal service versus using e-mail.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons people so look forward to Christmas season mail:  that remains the time of year . . . even if as some people I know do defer the mailing of Christmas cards until about this time of the new year.

This allows them to separate the preparation and mailing of Christmas cards out from the rest of the bustle of Christmas and give the correspondence the attention it deserves.

The niches we don’t choose . . .

When I began this Blog, I decided to focus on writing as a craft as well as those areas in which I’ve both written a significant number of articles and really enjoy writing about and would like to develop more in terms of web content and copywriting niches:  with the occasional ‘tips to those who need to write in business’ post. 

I had defined seven types of services or products that represented those niches, and some sub-categories of those. 

While some of those categories implicitly touch on another topic area I enjoy writing about, and I’ve done one blog post about the craft of writing that more explicitly touches on that, it’s interesting that a topic area I didn’t identify for myself as a niche area is that of heritage.

The Spirit of Place post did explore that, and I’m sure in other ways I’ll touch on it at another time.

But, this is a topic that not only interests me but in terms of my personal and literary heritage, it’s an area I’m always redefining.  The writings of contemporary Christian authors has, for example, become a much larger element in my heritage as a writer over the last few years than it had been before that. 

In one way or another, I learn something from any author I read:  both fiction and nonfiction.  It may not involve, for the nonfiction authors, greater awareness of crafting a writing project:  although it typically does for fiction authors.

So that, in a sense, brings this post back around to the topic of this blog:  a shared heritage for writers involves that they begin as readers.  And, indeed, one of my product niche areas involves books and reading.

I find it interesting that the general concept of heritage is enjoying a kind of heyday in Christian publishing today.  Historical fiction enjoys a great deal of popularity just now.  There’s a generally wider selection of historical Christian romance than there is contemporary Christian romance.  While this may have its genesis in the preferences of the authors, certainly agents and publishers would have less interest in publishing if it didn’t sell.

Historical Christian fiction, generally, and historical Christian romance, in particular seems to break down into two overall epochs.  One epoch involves what I’ll loosely call “frontier fiction.”  That is, per Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, any region within the United States qualified as “frontier” for approximately the first generation or so after initial settlers arrived.

Many of these historical Christian romances are set in areas that qualify as true frontier areas even now that Jackson Turner’s thesis has fallen out of favor among historians. 

The other epoch that has held an interest for authors, and readers, of Christian fiction involves the days surrounding the development of the New Testament itself.

At least two sets of collaborators have written series novels set around the time of Jesus and the early Church:  Janette Oke and Davis Bunn, and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.

I find it interesting indeed that, although historical fiction because it involves considerably more research that contemporary fiction poses a greater challenge to the author to write well, for the most part I have found the historical Christian fiction . . . and particularly historical Christian romance . . . better constructed fiction than the contemporary Christian fiction published around the same time.

There are, of course, exceptions going in both directions but as a rule, that is what I have found in my reading of Christian fiction over the past few years.

I’m not so up on secular fiction [there’s only so much time in a day and one can’t read anything] and have to wonder if this is a Christian fiction specific phenomenon, or if there is a wider society-wide sense of getting back to roots, and recalling bygone ways of life?

Avoid the pitfall that immobilizes most less experienced writers . . .

I had planned to mix things up a bit in this blog between three general topic areas:  1) things of interest to those who have a creative writing bent [which could be almost anything], 2) the areas I consider my “niche” writing interests, and when possible how they tie in either to business or writing concerns, and 3) useful tips for those who don’t care to write but sometimes must for business purposes.

So far, I have set a structure for this blog that follows that pattern.

However, given that today is technically the legal New Year holiday, and also prompted by the observations of one of my commenters, I thought I would do a kind of a New Year bonus and do two Tip style blog posts in succession.

So, although in a sense this post may be jumping ahead out of sequence on Tips, I thought I’d discuss an area that too many writers get hung up during their writing process.  I even know professionals who get hung up in this way, if through lack of proper instruction they developed a less-than-ideal habit.

To review a bit, the Blog covered that the first step in a good document creation process involves an in-tandem assessment of who the reader . . . or audience . . . is for your document along with what that reader(s) needs are from the document.

Then, the next part of the process involves planning:  as one of my commentors rightly observed, most without a good deal of specialized training will use a traditional outlining process to do that.

Assuming no research involved in the project, or that the research phase came in as a predecessor to the outlining/planning phase, this brings the author to the point where the composing, or writing, process phase of developing the document will actually begin.

Now, we’re going to reverse our perspective, here, from linear steps such as audience assessment to planning to writing.

What I’m going to discuss in this Tip post is:  the portion of the document you should hold off on writing.

Over and over again, I see writers get hung up because they pick up their outline, see “Introduction” . . . and try to write it.

That’s both an unwieldy and an unproductive writing process. 

You will immeasurably improve your writing process . . . and its outcome  . . . if you divest yourself of this routine.

Indeed, when you follow your outline to compose, you should choose one of your content points.  If you feel most comfortable in sequence, you can do that starting at the first content point.  Or, you may wish to tackle the most difficult, least difficult, or one with the greatest data volume and put the rest together like a puzzle.

One way or another, though, you should in your actual writing process dive right into your content points.

In an effective writing process, the writer (usually) puts off writing the Introduction . . . either until the very last piece of the document or to the last piece excepting the Conclusion.  Just skip right over that in your Outline, and come back to it later.

I was fortunate in my very first Technical Writing course, a pilot course and one of the first in the country, that the instructor of that course taught the class a rather logical concept:  “how do you introduce something when you don’t what it is you are trying to introduce?”  (For those who follow comments, this one was at Salem State College.)

Yet, I see even professionals trying to work sequentially starting with the Introduction.  And nearly all non-professional writers make this . . . well, if not an error, it certainly adds several degrees of difficulty to the writing process.

So, when you start to write from your outline . . . skip over the Introduction heading entirely.   [It bears purposeful redundancy on this point.]

Write your content, and come back to that later.  [In some types of documents, the Introduction can become quite clear in the writer’s mind about 3/4s of the way through, and if you suddenly have the light bulb effect at such a time, of course, go for it at that juncture.]

Try this technique if you have gotten hung up starting out with an Introduction section.

I think you’ll find it astounding how much difference this one technique can make both in your productivity and if not enjoyment, at least reduction of aggravation in crafting your documents.

If you have to write something when you don’t prefer to write, or you would if there weren’t so many other duties pressing but there are other duties pressing, wouldn’t you prefer to reduce the stress and frustration of the process by applying this kind of logical technique to your process?

Document Planning . . .

A commenter on a previous post brought up an excellent point.  I mentioned in that post that the place to start for those writing business documents only occasionally involves determining the nature of the audience for the document, and the nature of what you want your document to do for that audience.  That “what you want the document” to do is the rhetorical purpose.

The commenter responded by noting that outlining is also important.

Indeed, as I responded to her, structured documentation methodologies for the most part get away from traditional outlining methods.  However, most people who have to write business documents just on an occasional basis do not have that sort of training.  Therefore, outlining can serve such people quite well as an element of their planning process.

That, in the final analysis, is what it boils down to:  planning.  With rare exceptions, well executed business documents [or really any document, in this case even academic writings] come about as a result of a solid planning process.

Your planning process may take one stage or multiple stages.  Generally, if you have research or data gathering, you will have at least two planning stages:  planning the research efforts; and then, once you have the information, planning the actual document.

A good outlining or planning process involves sussing out the most effective order to present your information so that it most satisfactorily fulfills reader need from the individual document.

So, for the layperson writer, so to speak, who must write the occasional document on the  job, you will . . . as mentioned in a previous post . . . most effectively start with identifying who your reader is [or readers are], then you will next determine what that reader needs to get out of the document.

And then, your next step in creating the most effective document you can produce will involve planning how to organize your information and structure your data to meet your reader’s need in the document.

All of this goes on before you do any real writing, except for the minimal notes of making outline headings.

The better your plan for the document, the more effective your final product is likely to be. 

That is, the more solid planning you do "upfront," the more likely you are not only to find your final document more effective in terms of serving reader needs:  you are far more likely to find that actual composition part of the writing process easier to execute . . . and possibly even more enjoyable than you will with no plan or a poor-to-mediocre plan.

So, when you must write an occasional document on-the-job, take the time upfront for some good, solid planning using a planning method . . . such as outlining . . . that works well for you.

Speaking of New Year . . .

Another sub-niche of my article writing has involved writing about holidays and celebrations.

In a previous post, I talked about setting New Year’s resolutions.

That, actually, is not something I normally actually do.

I do try to do what I call a “look back/look ahead” activity.

Here, again, I hearken back to traditional in-a-blank book, with a pen, in longhand journaling.

I try to take some time . . . if possible, starting around New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day [I’m not into New Year’s Eve partying OR going to First Night events] to review any journaling I’ve done in the past year and make note and comment on things that have developed over that year.  I allow myself anywhere from a week to a month to complete the project [if I’m going to, some years I haven’t finished the full year review] and assess both achievements and disappointments in the course of that year.

From there, I try to define some objectives . . . ideas too loose to actually call goals . . . of what I want to work towards in the upcoming year.

I find this much more enjoyable than the traditional “resolution” exercise, and also, usually, more productive than the traditional exercise.

Do you plan to take time to review your past year and reflect on the things you’ve achieved, as well as project what direction you’d like to go for the coming year?