Old Dog, New Tricks

You should know this about me: I’m not a joiner. It’s probably partly an innate characteristic (my father and my daughter share this trait), partly the result of being an only child who lived in his own head much of the day. Although not entirely without social graces, I’m not adept at party chitchat. I have close friends, but I don’t make new ones easily. I did join a fraternity during college, but not until junior year and only with a chapter that was pretty much the antithesis of the standard frat.

Here in the Aughts (that’s what we’ve decided to call this first decade, right?), connectivity is everything, and someone with my, um, antisocial tendencies is at a disadvantage, professionally and otherwise. Everyone is supposed to be into social networking, collecting friends via MySpace, Facebook and I don’t know what else. But I have a hard time in beseeching strangers to be my online “friends.” It just seems too needy to me.

I do, however, like LinkedIn. I find it to be a great way to keep in touch with people I already know, however superficially. I first started using it seriously after I read this article by Sree Sreenivasan at Poynter Online. Since then, I’ve accumulated around 40 LinkedIn connections, a respectable number, mostly with people who would be able to pick me out of a police lineup. I particularly like that LinkedIn occasionally reminds me of acquaintances who have dropped off my radar, finding them through some arcane process that mystifies me.

I also appreciate that the company has made a special offer to my Chronicle colleagues who are experiencing sudden changes in their employment situations.

I haven’t leveraged LinkedIn in all 10 ways recommended by Guy Kawasaki, but Mr. Kawasaki kind of scares me with his superabundant energy. Read his account of his Extreme Profile Makeover, though, to see how even the most accomplished media figure can improve his online imprint.

Penelope Trunk at the Brazen Careerist also has a number of posts about LinkedIn, including one directed particularly to journalists and an interview with the company’s co-founder Konstantin Guericke.

The Web Worker Daily has also written 20 ways for making the most of LinkedIn.

If you’re a LinkedIn member and want to trade contacts with me or get back in touch, please visit my profile and send an invitation.

Just in case you’re wondering, I don’t make anything near a living by being a book reviewer. I earn a salary as a marketing copywriter, creating ads, sales collateral, web banners and the occasional TV/radio campaign for a major West Coast daily. I intend never to discuss my day-to-day interactions with my employer. There’s no way I can afford to be Dooced.

But I don’t see any reason why I can’t point the way to interesting articles and sites about the newspaper industry in general, even if my employer is mentioned prominently. Here’s one from Business Week, which I found via Poynter Online, your one-stop site for journalism news and gossip. Jon Fine argues that the San Francisco Chronicle should scrap its presses and go purely digital. You first, pal.

I’m not sure I agree with all of Fine’s points, but they’re certainly worth considering. Meanwhile, one enterprising do-it-yourselfer at the Birmingham News has already invented the digital newsrack. (Via Clear Night Sky)

I recently joined the “secret cabal” at Blogcritics and today posted my first piece. You can read it there by clicking here, or you can simply keep your eyeballs on this page.

Donald Westlake, screenwriter of “The Grifters, author of “The Hot Rock,” “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” and many other novels, is one of my favorite thriller writers. Pick up any of his books at random, and you can learn something valuable from it, as well as be guaranteed hours of first-rate entertainment.

Under the pseudonym Richard Stark, Westlake also writes about no-nonsense thief Parker. The character has appeared, always with a different name, in a handful of movies, some of them good (”Point Blank”) and some of them not (”Slayground”). There are currently 23 Parker novels, and many of them epitomize what their author does best. They’re fast, lean, gripping and darkly, darkly funny.

Here are five lessons I’ve learned from Westlake/Stark:

1. Choose a strong title.
   Some of the early Parker novels have titles so terse that they don’t really stick in the memory: “The Score,” “The Outfit,” “The Seventh,” “The Hunter.” I have trouble keeping track of them in my head. But after a 24-year break from writing about Parker, Stark brought him back in “Comeback.” Which was followed by “Backflash.” Followed by “Flashfire,” “Firebreak” and “Breakout.” The titles are down to one word, but they’re evocative and the progression from one to the next is clever without being distracting.
2. Waste no time getting the story started.
   In the early books, the first sentence always started with “When…”
   When the woman screamed, Parker awoke and rolled off the bed. He heard the plop of a silencer behind him as he rolled, and the bullet punched the pillow where his head had been. — “The Outfit”
   When he didn’t get any answer the second time he knocked, Parker kicked the door in. – “The Split”Even without that gimmick, the openings are always active and compelling.

   Parker jumped out of the Ford with a gun in one hand and a packet of explosive in the other. — “Slayground”

   These aren’t books that begin with long ruminations about the weather. There’s action on the very first page.

3. Understand structure.
   Many of the Parker books are organized around a four-part structure. The first two parts are from Parker’s perspective. The third offers multiple viewpoints of a critical plot turn. The final portion wraps things up, again from inside Parker’s head.It’s a particularly effective technique. The third-person limited perspective keeps everything focused and leaves little room for extraneous business. The late-in-the-game breakout from the protagonist’s perspective allows the author to ramp up the suspense by dramatising conflicts that Parker can’t foresee.
4. Don’t be afraid to change your style. Westlake has said that he once grew frustrated with a draft in which Parker kept losing the thing he was trying to steal. Rather than bull his way through a book that wasn’t working, Westlake decided to turn it into a comedy, thereby creating his long-running character John Dortmunder, who first appeared in “The Hot Rock.”
5. If you don’t work to avoid obsolescence, you may wind up having to kill someone to keep working. Although not published with the Stark pen-name, “The Axe” is one of the bleakest novels Westlake has ever written. The tale of a middle-aged middle-manager who strikes back against downsizing by killing off his competitors, “The Ax” is cautionary tale for anyone who has become too complacent about their job security.

At The Onion’s AV Club, there’s a really good interview with comedian Patton Oswalt, vocal star of “Ratatouille” and sidekick on ”The King of Queens.” One paragraph in particular struck a chord with me as I muse about being happy in my work:

I already have one blog, Cheaper Ironies. I have fun with it. It’s a real hodge-podge, though, with posts about book reviewing, comic books, the plays of Tom Stoppard and the continuing travails of the Patterson family in “For Better or For Worse.” There’s no real organizing principle, other than the items amuse me on some (sometimes sophomoric) level.

This blog, however, has a more serious purpose. For a while now, I’ve wanted to take my freelance writing in a new direction, to find fresh methods of generating story ideas for new markets. I have a couple of steady gigs, but who knows how long they’ll last?

This site, then, is about learning new tricks about writing and passing them along to other writers. I want to learn about how to monetize a Web site, what SEO copywriting really means, what the best tools for digital marketing might be, where the exciting online markets are and how to break into them.

That’s sufficient throat-clearing, I guess. If you stumble upon this site, I hope you’ll stick around, post a comment or two.