Watch What You Say
September in Royal Oak, Michigan
Never-Ending Stories
I’ve considered myself a writer for just about as long as I learned to read and write.
When I was a kid, one of my grandparents gave me a typewriter – one of those old, mechanical models, the kind you didn’t plug into the wall. As a kid, and with the help of a model sailing ship, I wrote out pirate adventures. Way before I knew what it meant, I was creating serialized stories.
Journalism came naturally in high school and college, and the habits I picked up from my reporting days stuck with me.
Today, most of my job, and a big part of my personal life, involves writing stories – mostly non-fictional stories, but there are protagonists and a plot, just like with those early pirate tales. To write a story, I start with good notes: what’s going on? What does a person have to say about the story? What is the order of events? What happens next?
From those handwritten notes, I type them up into a text document in the same order I wrote them down. These notes are the basic building blocks of the story – section by section, event by event, quote by quote. I use these notes to connect the dots, try to make the story more interesting, and outline a basic inverted pyramid structure: all the interesting stuff goes first.
Taking those notes and arranging them, Lego-style, into a story that makes sense is where the creativity of non-fiction writing comes in. You have the story as the person told it, but you also have to act as a go-between with the reader. What questions would they have? What info do they need to understand what’s happening? Is there a point or climax to all this?
Re-arrange the story blocks, throw in a quote or three from the subject, and start and end with something interesting – that’s how I write a story. You can see this process come to life in any of my Artists In Jackson subjects. Each of those profiles started and finished with this process.
The process has served me well, and every time I start a new story, I start with a conversation and good notes. The rest is arranging those building blocks until it’s a story worth writing.
Blurry Picture for Cameras
Om Malik brings some insight from the server industry to modern-day camera sales:
Sony and its brethren have taken a page from the Sun playbook. They keep pushing cameras that have features, like higher megapixels, that most people don’t use or don’t care about. And the executives don’t seem to get a key fact about the market reality: what we do with cameras and photos has changed
After peaking in 2012, camera and lens sales have slid downward. Not as many people need fancy cameras when a smartphone camera will do just fine.
Cameras may not disappear entirely, but they might be sold to fewer and fewer professionals and hobbyists.
As with Om, my 2005-era Canon 5D is all I’ll probably ever require in a camera (and I’m not alone). Why upgrade when I have all that I need?
True North
The trip has me thinking about growing older and the kind of life I’d like to live, even though retirement is a ways off. I have all kinds of thoughts about owning an orchard and living quietly by a lake. Up here, both may be possible.
Pictured Rocks
During our holiday, we spent time inside and outside the park, exploring the wooded paths down sandstone bluffs as well as cruising past the cliffs along Lake Superior. Both were scenic and humbling.
It’s a long drive, and a long boat ride, from one end of the park to the other. Along the way, we tried to take in as much as we could.
On the cruise, we sat next to a German couple, the guy had one of those big Nikon rigs with a couple of the big zoom lenses. I did the best I could with my aging (but still handy) Canon EOS M with a 22mm (35mm equiv.) lens.
Upper Peninsula On Mobile
(Also testing out a new image gallery plug-in!)
God’s Country
Cross the bridge into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and you come into a different world.
Vast stretches of nothing. Straight, empty highways for as far as you can see. Water and forests and wetlands surrounded by three Great Lakes. Quiet and old and wild.
After our trip to Door County, Wisconsin, last year, we wanted a similar upper Midwest experience. We picked Munising as our home base, with a little cabin out in the middle of the Hiawatha National Forest, and ventured out into God’s Country to see all of that different world stuff.
We started the trip halfway there, in St. Ignace, right across the Mackinac Bridge from Mackinaw City. Like its neighbor across Lake Michigan, St. Ignace is a tourist town, but much quieter, and much less gaudy. After one night, the sun came up over Lake Michigan and we made the long trek through the U.P. to see Whitefish Point, sticking out into Lake Superior, and then on to our cabin in the woods.
Each day was an adventure – and a drive, since nothing was close by up here. That meant a lot of time in the car, and a lot of entertaining little kids, but once we got out and into the fresh air, we did our best to tire them out.
We were all tired. That was the point.
Glass City Sharing
It’s hot here in the Glass City. My pal Neff and I get here right at high noon, when the pavement is radiating late June, and walk around downtown grabbing photos of this very quiet midwestern city.
Quiet, except for the speed boat races out on the Maumee River. That was a new one, and it drew a decent crowd.
By sundown, the heat had subsided enough for us to take in a Mud Hens game – a rare summer treat, with our combined kids and jobs and lives, that we haven’t been able to enjoy since our college days.