What’s Your Style?

This one is for those of you who already write in complete, yet not inexhaustible sentences, and wonder whether you have any style.

Of course, you do–just as you have a personality style, a speaking style, a breathing rhythm, a driving style. You can’t help it. You are an original because you are the only one. Whether you want to tweak your writing style is up to you. (My favorite book on style is Trimble’s Writing with Style.)

David L. L. Houston enumerates some of the features that distinguish one author’s style from another, and I liked his style. What’s Your Style?

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Text © Gwyn Nichols 2011

Handwritten E-mail

Handwritten E-mail–what a lovely idea! Pilot, maker of traditional pens, is working on it. It isn’t perfected yet–this is still beta testing–but they have a beautiful goal. I suggest you watch the demo video first:

The demo shows cursive handwriting easily edited and masterfully connected. Not so. I’m known for my calligraphy and its influence on my everyday handwriting. You wouldn’t guess that from this sample:

My Pilot handwriting sample 1. Translation: "This is the first draft--and it looks nothing like the connected, smooth, and polished version in the demo!

So I tried printing.

My Pilot handwriting sample 2: Translation: This is a new scan, of my italic rather than cursive. You can see that precision sizing is important and that an accidental space is appearing before each lower case o.

It took four scans to get this much clarity and to realize that the adjustment feature does exist. You click on each letter before you save the font.

"Here's the fourth attempt, printing with a thick pen, then adjusting every letter a little thinner. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Naturally, though, it hardly resembles my actual handwriting."

My attempt to write larger and more clearly improved the spacing between letters, but the lines overlapped because the leading (space between lines) doesn’t change. My “y” was missing, so that one was especially awkward and it turned out too thin.

It was time-consuming and not satisfying in its results, but it was fun to try on a lazy Saturday morning. I made it an artist’s date. If you want to try it, go ahead and read their instructions, then follow my additional tips for you:

1. Print several copies of the template. Sure, you’re more likely to get it right the first time because you have these tips–and if you nail it, you’ll have extra ones to share with a friend.
2. Use a thick marker.
3. Print neatly, with large open spaces wherever spaces should be.
4. Be as consistent in size and pen stroke as possible.
5. Be consistent in your letter placement baseline. If I tried this again, I’d mark baselines on one copy of the template and place that under the one I’m writing on.
6. Skip the Webcam upload. Use a scanner. (I would have tried the digital camera method as well if I could find my camera’s USB cord.)
7. Adjust each letter by clicking on it, and move the slider bar to the left, making each letter slightly thinner.
8. If a letter appears to be missing, use the slider bar to find it. It’s usually there, only hiding.
9. Use the eraser for any extra marks that mysteriously appear. That’s what happened with my lower case O in sample 2.
10. Fill sparingly. Maybe a stylus or an Etch-a-Sketch artist could manage this, but on a trackpad, I got only ugly pixelated lines, especially on diagonals.
11. Starting over a couple of times isn’t a bad strategy.

After you send your handwritten e-mail, this message appears:

This project is ingenious. By the time you fail to duplicate your handwriting, you’re downright eager to grasp a real pen and paper and write something beautiful. And you’ve just seen that Pilot name how many times? If you know me well, you know I often encourage pen and paper. It’s a personal touch when you send it to another, and it touches your own subconscious, intuitive, creative, receiving soul.

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Text © Gwyn Nichols 2011. All Rights Reserved.

Images from Pilot Handwriting and samples of my own experiments.

Disclosure: I have no relationship with Pilot, but only discovered this through my usual online serendipity.

In Case of Rejection

As poet Wesley McNair braved rejections, his mentor Donald Hall comforted him with these observations:

“These feelings simply do not end! Believe me I am sympathetic with your feelings, but let me tell you that when you have published a book–which you will–nothing will happen: or at least it will seem that nothing has happened. And this would be true whether it were published by New Rivers or Atheneum. Even if something happens, then you realize  that the “something” is truly nothing. And after you have published eight books of poems, you are still convinced that no one has read you, and that probably you are no good anyway. Or at least you are convinced of that frequently. I have been going through quite a bad patch, in my feelings about my own ability, my past work, and certainly my present work.

“There is only one place, or one moment, in which one finds happiness, and it is always momentary–because that is the moment of the actual writing, and of course that is not always true.

“So I do two things: I assure you that you will publish; and I tell you that it will not make any difference! But I do have a third thing to say: it makes a difference to me!”

 

Poet Don Hall to (not yet published) Poet Wesley McNair

If we hang all our hopes on any dream as the condition for our happiness, naturally, we’ll be disappointed. But it is possible to take joy in the process, the learning, the growth, these moments of creation.

I loved this line: “It makes a difference to me!” What a gift–when any of us has someone, at least one person, for whom it makes a difference.

Here’s Wesley McNair speaking about the poets’ correspondence on the United States Artists site, where you can fund artistic projects you’re excited about, or request funding for one of your own!