By Elaine Viets

 This is my last blog before the holiday break, and I wanted to tell you about my favorite Christmas memory.

When I was growing up in St. Louis, I waited for my grandfather to bring home the Christmas tree. Grandpa had a real knack for picking them.

Every year, he had the worst tree on the block. It was skinny, scraggly and bald. The needles fell off when he brought it through the door.

It looked like a bottle brush.

Grandpa didn’t buy a tree. He rescued it.

He’d wait till the last minute on Christmas Eve. Then he’d stop at the local tree lot and buy one for a buck. He overpaid.

Grandma would take one look at the homely thing and burst into tears. “Just once, I’d like a real tree, like normal people,” she’d say.

We kids would burst into laughter. You had to work had to find a tree that ugly.

Grandpa looked bewildered. After all, he’d saved a poor little tree from a cold lot. And now everyone was mad at him.

Operation Tree Rescue kicked into high gear. Dad would get extra branches from the tree lot and try to drill holes in the spindly trunk to make the tree look fuller. He had to be careful. The tree’s trunk was skinny.

He strung the tree with lights, which made the branches sag. Now we had a bald, round-shouldered tree, like a bad blind date.

Grandma would Christmas cookies and Christmas cards in the wide-open spaces. She brought out the colorful glass ornaments. Then she’d fill the biggest holes in the branches with popcorn strings and beads.

The tinsel went on last. That covered a lot of problematic places. Grandpa’s tree ended up looking like Cousin Itt from the Addams Family.

Meanwhile, Grandma’s normally pristine carpet was knee-deep in needles. The tree shed needles we didn’t even know it had. Grandma vacuumed twice a day, and there were still needles.

Every holiday, Grandpa would surpass himself. No, considering what those trees looked like, he’d outstrip himself. “Next year, just bring home a broom handle,” we’d tell him, as we tried to rescue his latest find. He’d sit in his recliner, looking pleased with himself.

Year after year, the saga of the rescue tree continued. Until it didn’t.

My grandparents are long gone, and I can have any tree I want. Big, beautiful trees. Perfectly shaped trees. Trees that are decorator delights.

But none of them are as good as Grandpa’s rescue trees.

Happy Holidays, however you celebrate.

By John Gilstrap

I’ve mentioned several times in the Killzone corner of cyberspace that one of the great bits of good fortune I’ve encountered since moving to West Virginia was to nail a regular drive-time co host slot on WRNR/TV10 in Martinsburg. While the primary focus of Eastern Panhandle Talk Radio is on local politics–which are far more abundant than I would have imagined–we frequently feature authors, including our own Debbie Burke and Reavis Wortham.

The format of the interviews is informal and conversational–24 minutes uninterrupted by commercials. With that much radio wave real estate to fill, the interview has to be about more than just the book du jour. Authors of nonfiction have the benefit of being subject matter experts on the topic about which the book is written. It’s trickier with novelists, however, where much of the substance of their story is purely a product of the author’s imagination. It’s incumbent upon the writer to offer up a compelling hook. When Debbie was on to pitch Deep Fake Double Down, the interview was as much about deep fake technology as it was about the book itself. If I were interviewed about the latest Jonathan Grave books, I’d talk about weapons and the Mexican drug cartels.

Remember, the point of a long form interview is to make people interested in you. Of course, you want to hype the book, but the more important takeaway is that you as a person are interesting.

The stark reality of mainstream radio and television is that a relatively low percentage of the audience will be big readers of anything. Of that population of readers, fewer still will be readers of your genre, and a solid percentage will be exclusively fans of nonfiction. Being interesting is the most reliable tool in your kit.

Which brings us to the most critical interview error to avoid.

Those of us who travel to lots of conferences are used to giving presentations that are geared toward other writers. We all have schtick on outlining, character development, techniques to increase suspense and countless other writerly topics about which mainstream broadcast audiences care not one whit.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a local self-proclaimed literary author on the show who literally could not articulate what any of the 23 short stories in his collection were about. He praised his own prose as lyrical and he spoke about the beauty of his language. There was a long riff on synonyms. We know from the interview that the stories in the collection are about “the common struggles we face.” Less clear are what those common struggles might be. Despite multiple attempts to get him to speak about the specifics about the plot or the characters, the author couldn’t turn off his inner MFA-speak to communicate with a mainstream audience. We ended up cutting the interview off after 18 minutes and running the top of the hour commercial set a few minutes early.

My intent with the story above is not to make fun of the author, nor to criticize his book. In fact, I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that the book is brilliant. It’s a shame that he’d given so little consideration to how to pitch it to strangers.

And here we are at the end of another year. The older I get, it seems the faster the calendar pages turn. As we prepare for our annual hiatus, I think it’s important to impart upon our TKZ family how special a thing we have going here, and how grateful I am to be a part of it. Here’s wishing all of us a glorious Holiday Season and healthy, happy and prosperous New Year!

I was torn for the past couple of days, trying to come up with a topic for today’s blog. I started to pick up with my last post from a couple of weeks ago about book covers and their impact on buyers. One of the covers was Florida Roadkill, by Tim Dorsey, who passed a few days after that blog posted, at age 62.

Tim wrote to make us laugh, and to share the weirdness of Florida with the rest of the country. He was an outstanding storyteller who brought a unique character to the page, and frankly, the man entertained us.

That’s the business we’re in, but no matter what blog idea came to mind for today, it didn’t work. Maybe it’s because I just turned in a manuscript and needed a break, but no, that wasn’t it. I’m 5,000 words into a new novel since December 1, editing a short story, writing newspaper columns, and generally rolling just fine.

So what to discuss. Y’all get volumes of advice from this blog and the esteemed writers who support it. We’ve examined writing from a number of angles and perspectives, and listed hundreds of tips, which will only help if someone is truly wanting to get published. I say that because untold numbers of would-be authors are out there, attending Christmas parties and talking about how they’ll write some day when they get time.

I guess that’s the point of today’s post. 2024 is just around the corner. Some see the beginning of the new year as a fresh start, and it can be, but gyms around the country can testify how that burst of enthusiasm tends to wane a few weeks in. Oh, we set goals all right, and the spirit is willing for a short period of time, but then we slip back into our usual routines.

Here’s what I suggest, but it isn’t predicated on the new year. Just write, and do it now.

That’s it. Of course you have to show up for work, which means put your rear in a seat for at least a little while and type words. The words, then sentences, don’t have to be perfect at first. That was a problem I had in the beginning. I wanted everything to read smooth and absorbing like Stephen King wrote it.

It don’t work that way.

Get the words in your head down first and follow them to the next paragraph, the next chapter, and eventually to The End. There. You have a rough draft. Then you read it and gasp.

Holy crap! This is awful. Look at all the time I’ve wasted these past months. I’m done. I’m gonna buy some traps and go eliminate the gopher population around the house, at least that’s something productive.

Nope. Re-read and edit. Put that project down and start another manuscript and come back to it in a few weeks. Wait, it sounds a little better. That’s because you’re in a routine and your words are flowing better, and you eye sees that.

Work on it some more and get that old polish rag out. Y’all remember how we used to shine up our old cars. Mine was a 1969 Ford Galaxie with a 390-engine fed by a four-barrel Holley that sucked gas like Niagra Falls. It took a long time to wash the car, apply the wax, and then rub for hours until all that white glaze was gone, but it shone like a diamond when I was finished.

Don’t do what a friend did, though. Back in 1972, he and his girlfriend applied an entire can of paste wax on her dad’s Buick Wildcat and let it bake in the Texas sun for an hour or two. Oh, that’s not the worst part. They were hot and drove the swirl-glazed car to the Dairy Queen in it for ice cream. The combination of July heat, engine heat from below, and old Sol above turned the wax into concrete. Her dad was due back home at six that evening, and even with the liberal use of elbow grease, and finally an electric buffer, that football-field size hood was never the same.

But you just saw that car in your mind, if you’re familiar with those old boats, felt the heat, and the dread that washed over a couple of kids that hot summer day. That’s what writing does. It puts us in that place. The more you write, the better you’ll get at bringing those words to life.

Now that you have the manuscript finished, it probably won’t read like old Steve wrote it, but don’t give up. Apply some more wax and polish away. When you have it ready, find yourself an agent. That’ll take a while, but don’t give up.

Own those rejection notices. Hell, put ‘em on you wall and keep trying, but work on that next project.

You can do it.  There’s no reason to wait for a magical date that means nothing. It doesn’t take a new year, it takes determination. Get started now. One page a day. Half that if it’s too much, but write, then read someone else, then write some more.

Write.

Read.

Write.

Submit…until someone says yes.

Never. Give Up. That’s your present from me this year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Charlie Munger has died. Mr. Munger was ninety-nine and lived a long, brilliant life. He was highly successful in many fields. Making money, for sure, but he accumulated and distributed vastly more valuable assets of wealth such as life long learning and influencing others to think by writing.

Charles T. Munger was the multi-billionaire vice president of Berkshire Hathaway, one of the world’s leading financial institutes. He was the man who taught Warren Buffett how to invest and stood giant as a role model for many thought leaders. That includes writers—past and present—who used Munger mental models to help understand and articulate their thoughts.

Shane Parrish is one of those thinkers and writers. Shane hosts the Farnam Street website. It’s named after the lane in Omaha, Nebraska where Charlie Munger lived his entire life.

Farnam Street is a thought-provoking site and publishes every Sunday morning. Last week’s edition included a piece titled Writing To Think. Shane, being a Munger disciple and promoter of works like Poor Charlie’s Almanack and The Psychology of Human Misjudgement, encourages his followers to freely share his material. With that invitation, I’m going to repost Shane Parrish’s article, Writing To Think.

Writing to Think by Shane Parrish

A few weeks ago, my 13-year-old son asked me why writing was so important. He wasn’t happy. One of his teachers had asked him to write an essay and he would rather use AI to generate it for him and be done with it.

The question seemed as natural to him as using a dishwasher is to us. If there is a better, more convenient way to do this, why not use it?

Today’s kids are growing up in a world where they can generate essays in seconds. Many employees are already using AI for a lot of simple tasks like email, catching up after vacation, summarizing meetings, and drafting PowerPoints. While some of these tasks might be accomplished more efficiently by ChatGPT than by human effort, I’d argue there are times when inefficiency is the point.

The reason they teach writing to kids in school is not to generate endless essays on history or books but to create a space to practice reasoning. By delegating writing to AI, my son might be reducing his time spent doing homework. But he’s missing the chance to think more clearly about the topic at hand.

Writing forces you to slow down, focus your attention, and think deeply. In a world where attention is fragmented in seconds, thinking becomes more reactive than reasoned. Only when we have time to play with a problem can we hope to think about it substantially. Writing requires sticking with something a little longer and developing a deeper understanding.

Mortimer Adler once said, “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.” We all know someone with this surface level of understanding. They read an article or two and have the confidence of an expert. It’s as if you are having a conversation with someone who tells you they are a hockey player, only to find out they’ve never skated.

Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Of course, you can learn a lot about something without writing about it. However, writing about something complicated and hard to pin down acts as a test to see how well you understand it. When we approach our work as a stranger, we often discover how something that seems so simple in our heads is explained entirely wrong.

Most organizations see PowerPoint and writing as interchangeable. They are not. Powerpoint masks poor thinking. Just because presentations are easy to create doesn’t mean the person creating them understands what they are talking about. If my experience is any indication, about 30-40% of people giving presentations lack more than a surface-level knowledge of what they are presenting.  All the time spent making the presentation look good comes at the expense of wrestling with the problem and developing unique insights.

Pretty graphics don’t only drug the presenter, they also intoxicate the audience. When dressed up, even poor thinking can come off as well thought out. Writing avoids this because it strips away the fancy graphics. Poor thinking has nowhere to hide.

Other than reading them yourself, one way to test your ideas is to let others read them. Strangers reading your writing can’t see all the thoughts in your head, only the ones you put into words and share. It’s easy to assume the people who disagree with you are wrong. Sharing your understanding with the world allows you to not only test your thinking but gain the perspective of others (as the comments here will no doubt do). Writing forces you to step on the ice and skate.

Anyone who’s ever revised a piece of writing and done it well knows the pain of having to kill their darlings. But deleting, in writing and life, is a valuable tool. When you write, you develop an attachment to the text you produced only because you produced it. Choosing to discard writing forces you to reconcile between what is true and what you wrote, which can lead to tremendous personal growth both in writing and in life.

AI-generated text, on the other hand, is disposable by nature. It doesn’t force you to practice attachment and letting go. The most important key on the keyboard and in life is often the one that deletes.

Deciding what to pay attention to and, more importantly, what to overlook and remove, is one of the most critical skills. Breaking a problem down into its essential elements and reassembling it from the ground up helps you to discern fact from opinion. Wisdom is as much about knowing what to ignore as it is about what to pay attention to.

Perhaps the best reason to write is that it offers a vehicle for discovering deeper insights.

Practically speaking, writing forces you to take a complicated and ill-defined problem and compress it into something more manageable. This ‘compression’ is useful. Not only does it help you remember your ideas, but it helps you develop new ones. Paul Graham put it this way: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”

The insights you discover are not limited to the subject you write about. You also learn about yourself. Writing doesn’t just convey your ideas; it conveys a part of you. Your personality and worldview become part of the work itself. While the reader remembers the story, the writer is forever changed.

Many things can be done by tools that write for you, but they won’t help you learn to think, understand deeper, or solve hard problems.

When it comes to my kids, I told them, “One of the ways we learn to think for ourselves is to write out our thoughts.” When your invisible thoughts become visible, you are forced to wrestle with them in reality and not your imagination. “But Dad,” they protested as they continued to write in their summer journals, “It is so much easier to outsource to AI.”

They’re right. But they aren’t yet smart enough to see that in a world where intellectual labor is increasingly outsourced to tools, the human aptitude for clear thinking and unique insights will become all the more valuable.

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Kill Zoners — Does this piece resonate with you? Please share your thoughts on writing to think—and thinking to write—with our group.