Meg Houston Maker

Writing: September 2012

I continue to try to encapsulate my observations about the craft of writing in epgrammatic form. I dole these out in coffeespoons, mostly on Twitter and Facebook. Below are those from September, 2012.

O N   N A R R A T I V E

• If you're a memoirist, yet you cannot be honest with yourself, why should anyone believe you?
• Find your lede. If you pose a question at the top, answer it by the end. If you find yourself pursuing other questions as you write, perhaps your lede is wrong.
• Your characters shouldn't act as if they know what's going to happen. The writer is the only one who knows the future.

 O N   S Y N T A X

• Essayists of the short form should read carefully the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town." Each essay is different, all are expertly crafted, all are instructive.
• Formal language has mostly gone out of style; good manners haven't. If you can be gracious using vernacular language, it'll feel more real.
• Dear web producer: you don't need to publish the ### or -30- at the end of the story. Those bits are for your eyes only.
• Buses carry people. Busses carry people's warm feelings. Don't mix them up. 
• Irrespective is a word. Regardless is a word. Irregardless is not a word. Relatedly, supposedly is a word. Probably is a word. Supposably is not a word.

O N   E D I T I N G

• The end will change the beginning. This is why you cannot write a story in only one pass.
• Write today, but publish tomorrow. Editing requires you to fall out of love with your story—and with the person who wrote it.

 O N   W R I T I N G

• Controversial positions will earn you notice, plus a reputation as a crank. Relatedly, your nonfiction writing will attract more attention if it's wrong than if it's right. This is not the kind of attention you want.
• If you're a writer, you can't just tweet and post status updates to Facebook. You have to write stuff, too. 
• Writing is, you know, hard.

 

 

Writing: August 2012

I carry on a nearly continuous internal deliberation on the praxis and poetics of writing. This meta-commentary is mostly prolix and rambling, but it periodically coheres into an aphorism, the gelled distillate of an idea, small enough to be fit into a spoon and swallowed.

Last month I began posting these to my Twitter and Facebook streams, because I was curious what response they might elicit. While there has been little true commentary, there has been evidence of support in the unvoiced enthusiasm that's peculiar to these media. Here are the posts from August. 

O N   R E A D E R S

• Writing is one of the most intimate and beautiful of acts, because it changes another's mind.
• If you're not interested enough in the story to work on it, don't expect a reader to be interested enough in the story to read it.
• When a writer starts wandering off into the rooms of his own head, he sometimes leaves his reader at the foyer, wondering.
• A common mistake is to assume your readers automatically care about your subject. They don't. You must give them something to care about.

O N   S Y N T A X

• Your character might use slang, but you should not. Your syntax must be flawless so the character's voice comes through.
• If you write on behalf of a business, you are the person who gives that business a voice. Tone matters. A lot.
• Let's bury—forever—the word "incent," and throw "incentivize" into the hole, too.
• Let's move beyond "gift" as a transitive verb.
• It's inadvisable to hoe a road. Roads are very hard, so you might hurt yourself. If you really want to hoe something hard, please hoe a row.
• Use contractions. Otherwise, you'll sound pedantic, and you don't want that. "Otherwise, you will sound pedantic, and you do not want that."
• If the score at the end is Grammar 1, Syntax 0, you have failed.

O N   E D I T I N G

• Editors inveigh against redundancy, but sometimes you need to say it twice—and even more simply—to get the point across.
• The writer's hand is visible; the editor's hand is not. When you read good writing, you're likely also reading good editing.
• Many editors aren't. Caveat scriptor.

O N   N A R R A T I V E

• To write, you must first have an idea. Remarkably, this step is often skipped.
• Having been raised by wolves makes a great story, but you'll still need to learn how to write it.
• Chronology doesn't always make the best storytelling. Play with time, mix it up; make your reader stitch the story together for herself.
• Sage quotes by others are all very well, but at some point you must devise a few of your own.
• Tell a story nobody else can tell.
• Be authentic. There isn't anything else.

Writing: July 2012

Writing begets thoughts about writing.

As I work, I reflect on language and narrative, on heroes, readers, and through-action, on the praxis and poetics of writing itself. These thoughts often come in a flash, unbeckoned. Lately, I've been posting one thought per day to my Facebook and Twitter streams, using the #writing hashtag. Here are the posts from July. 

O N   W R I T I N G

• Being smart and being a good writer are two different things. If they weren’t, simply being smart would guarantee success. It does not.
• Journal writing lessens the urge to infuse your public writing with your personal machinations. Focus your journal on yourself, so you can focus your writing on your reader.
• A good presentation is one in which your data is on the overhead, but your ideas are spoken aloud.
• The only writing in which one might legitimately expect to find cliché is that of William Shakespeare.
• Some people have something to say. Some people know how to write. Rarely do these features combine. That’s why we have editors.

 

O N   R E A D E R S

• Write for the reader, not for yourself.
• Of your reader, assume limitless intelligence but no prior knowledge.
• Don’t assume your experience is the same as your reader’s. Don’t resort to clichés. Nobody’s interested in reading clichés.
• When an author talks at the reader, rather than talking through the story, the story bogs down.
• Generate questions in your reader’s mind. If you can keep the reader asking Why?, the reader will keep reading.

 

O N   L A N G U A G E

• Say something profound. Use simple language.
• Rules of thumb, attorneys general. Remember to pluralize the noun, not the adjective.
• In Britain, one has a greybeard, a sceptical advisor. In the US, one has instead a graybeard, a skeptical adviser.
• In the run-up to November, expect a proliferation, in the pages of the New Yorker, of the pretentiously umlaut-decorated “reëlection.”
• Use powerful verbs. Make your prose move.
• The next time you think about ending a sentence with an ellipsis—don’t.

 

O N   N A R R A T I V E

• Position yourself in the narrative. How do you know what you know? Show the reader.
• The best fiction doesn’t seem like reality’s prettier little sister.
• The author does not tell the story. The story tells the story, and transforms itself by its own telling.
• The public’s appetite for private woe-is-me is extremely limited. Use discretion.
• No reader wants a passive hero. Your hero must do something. Now.

 

 

 

2012 Wine Blog Awards Finalist

I'm surprised and pleased to announce that a story I wrote recently for Palate Press has been selected as a finalist for "Best Blog Post of 2012."

The story was one of five finalists chosen as outstanding examples of feature writing on wine and wine-related topics. This is a new category for the Wine Blog Awards, and it reflects the organizer's aspiration to recognize individual stories as well as complete online publications. 

In making their selections, judges considered the "quality of the writing, the expression of the blogger’s unique voice, and insightful expression by the writer." All of the selected stories are fine examples of the genre, and I'm honored my article is among them. 

My piece, "You Just Opened a What? Tips to Make Food More Wine-Friendly," was a companion to an earlier story on wine and food pairing. Together these articles reflect both my belief that wine and food should be enjoyed together, and my passion for helping others learn how to enhance that enjoyment.

The award process is now open to popular vote. If you enjoy my writing, I welcome your support. Polls are open for only about a week, through 26 July 2012. Please cast your vote here. And thank you.

Heroes, Goals, and Readers

Every good story, fictive or true, has a hero. The hero is a character with whom the reader can identify or sympathize, or whose interior is at least somewhat transparent. He may be good or despicable, but he is the person who forms the lens through which the reader sees the story. She follows him, willingly. She wants to see what happens to him next.

The hero has a goal, and his actions toward that goal, sometimes called his through-action, form the arc of the narrative. He begins in one place, and ends, changed, someplace else. He encounters obstacles in pursuit of his goal, and dispatching these obstacles, acting upon them, is the stuff of real drama. Not only does he act—he must act. It’s what keeps the engine of the plot stoked and rolling. It’s what keeps the reader reading.

Even mid-quest, though, the hero may not be able to articulate clearly what his goal is. The reader often knows much more about it than he does. She may be able to deduce it via the context of the narrative, the revelations provided by other characters, a foreshadowing of story line, or by the author’s naked prose.

The hero, meanwhile, knows only he wants something, and wants it badly. But the contours of this longed-for thing can be fuzzy in his mind, and it’s through his encounters with obstacles that he understands more clearly what he doesn’t want, and what he does. Obstacles sharpen the image of the goal, and sharpen the hero’s will.

Fairy tales are a special case. Here, the hero’s goal is usually set forth clearly at the beginning:

Once upon a time, a [    ] decided he wanted [    ] and so he did [    ].

He wanted to marry the princess; he wanted to kill the dwarf; he wanted to capture the flag. Since this is a fairy tale, we know he’s going to get what he wants, although probably not in the way he’d expected. The princess was really a frog, the dwarf was really his father, and the flag turned out to be a dragon’s tail:

… and so he got [    ].

Fairy tales are mostly about the consequences of ardent desire. We read them to remind ourselves that we cannot master fate, that we are human.

In novels, the hero’s objective is usually more nuanced, and a good part of the exposition consists of both reader and hero trying to figure out where, exactly, the hero is headed, and what will become of him then. The author knows all, but she’s not telling, at least not at the get-go, because what happens to the hero in the meanwhile (all those messy complications) is so entertaining. We read novels in part to see what happens when the strange and special characters that populate them bump headlong into complexity, just like we do, sometimes.

In nonfiction—say, biography, autobiography, or memoir—the hero actually knows the goal, but only in retrospect. His actions are revealed as a series of expressed intentions, choices, trials, missteps. This is the stuff of real life, not fairy tale or fiction, although it can be profoundly dramatic. The reader, too, may know the goal, if she knows something of the subject’s life, but she willingly dips into the drama anyway, and, if the author has been skillful, is prompted to set her own life’s choices on the golden scale opposite her hero’s, and weigh them out. And since nonfiction tales usually do not begin in birth and end in death, the author must choose which portion of the story to tell—which part is the story, in other words—so that our hero, who started somewhere, arrives somewhere else at last, at the culmination of something, whether a day’s labors or a lifetime’s. And then the story is done. Or done for now.

 

On Narrative

There are a few essential requirements of narrative. Here are two.

The author must show us something of what she knows to be true. She must find something to say, something worth saying. The author does not tell this story; rather, the story tells the story, it transforms itself by its own telling. The author must simply stay out of the story’s way, mindful not to break frame.

By the end of the story, the reader will have moved from one place to another, riding the momentum of the narrative. Something must be changed, something must be different. The reader should be able to answer the question, “What was it all about?” His answer won’t be the same as the author’s. That’s okay.

 

 

One Line of Advice to Bloggers

Try referring to your blog as a "publication," your efforts as "writing," and your posts as "articles." Then watch what happens.

On the Journal

Writers: one of the best ways to improve your writing is to keep a journal, and to write in it daily. It works as do Czerny studies for pianists, keeping you flexible and practiced. Also, private writing will lessen your urge to infuse your public writing with your own personal machinations. By focusing your journal on yourself, you can better focus your writing on your reader.

A Letter to my Donor

 
Dear Mr. X, 

On Sunday, 12 June 2011, I received my Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies degree from Dartmouth College. It had taken me six years to complete my studies while working full time, but this spring I had at last finished my thesis, a nonfiction account of an effort to find, fix, re-make, and re-make again a house in Lyme, New Hampshire. So with my fellow graduates, under gray skies that threatened to soak us all, I donned robes and hood and mortarboard, and marched onto the Green. 

I was seated next to a colleague who had likewise pursued Creative Writing in the MALS program, an accomplished and talented writer who, like me, had undertaken graduate study in mid-life. The ceremonies are a lengthy affair, and the advanced degree candidates must sit through interminable speeches, plus forty-five minutes of undergraduate degree conferral. (Such is ceremony.) During one particularly slow moment, my colleague began idly perusing the printed program. Suddenly, she pointed to the page with a jolt. “Meg, look! You won the thesis award!”

When I enrolled in the MALS program in the winter of 2005, I had intended to focus my scholarship on studies in human-computer interaction, a field loosely connected to my career in software and web services. But my first course was in nonfiction writing, and in nine weeks I learned, first, that I enjoyed writing, and second, that it was one of the hardest things I could do. My professor was unfailingly patient, gamely reading through my novice efforts and pointing out the parts that were working well. But he also had an uncanny ability to see what was missing, to ask the key question that could crack open a piece at its hinge and lay bare its works for inspection. Writing is thinking, and thinking is hard.

As I worked my way through the creative writing curriculum, writing became part of my life’s mechanics, an essential process, deeply internal. It served as a kind of thinking-through in text of the subjects that most compelled me: nature, culture, food, wine, place, home, meaning, creativity. The results were usually shared only with one professor and those scattered others to whom it was assigned (like my classmates), or on whom it was foisted (like my husband). Working on my thesis these last several months, I expanded my understanding of the craft of writing, and developed techniques for planning and working out a book-length project. But I also learned more about myself, about what I know to be true about the poetics and praxis of home, and about what it means to make my own true place in the world—as a woman, wife, gardener, cook, and homemaker.

When my colleague blurted that I had won the award that bears your name, the news sent me reeling, delighted but also thoroughly astonished. I had heard about the award, of course, but that day the MALS program was graduating forty-one scholars, every one deserving of special approbation, and it was a great honor to be tapped by the faculty committee. Winning said, in essence, you are worthy, and your writing is good; it matters.

But in the very next instant, I realized something else, too, something much more important: that while writing is a deeply internal process, it is not merely internal. Writing goes forth, reaches with long fingers and toes, fingers its way into another’s mind, and maybe even changes it. Writing is, or can be, one of the most intimate and beautiful of acts. And so that moment on the Green I was suddenly forced to acknowledge that I now had yet another role, and that there was yet another dimension constituting my true place in this world: as a writer.

Thank you, Mr. X, for giving me a jewel that I will cherish always.

Faithfully yours,
Meg Houston Maker ’87, MALS ’11 

 

Words of the Day, 2009

When I encounter a word I don’t know, or don't know well, I look it up and write it on a list. Often later, reviewing the list, I've forgotten what the word means, this word that had such audacity as to be new to me—me, a word person, right? So I look it up again, and since I’ve read its meaning once before, the word is a little more familiar. But it's now bereft of context, detached from its original mooring, stripped clean, incorporeal. It's no longer noun or adjective or verb; it cannot do the work of meaning making. It just lies indignantly among its brethren, waiting.

I look at this list every day, lately, this impertinent, chanting crowd: violacious, adumbrate, exculpate, eidetic. And I pluck one word from its raucous company, and give it primacy that day. One day recently was cathexis. It was a deeply cathexis day. Another day was jejune, another revenant.

And so the word, connected to its day, re-acquires context, meaning, its queer significance. It can do some work, and so it lives again. 

addlepated adumbrate ambage ambit ambsace anent anodyne antipodal aperçu apothegm apposite argot asperse assay asseveration atrabilious augury bathos bight bonnyclapper carom cathexis cenobite chimera cidevant crepitate demotic dithyrambic doppelgänger dulcet echolalia éclat eidetic elision

enate endomusia equerry eristic esurient exculpate exiguous fantod farrago febrile felix culpa fixity folderol frit gelid gnomic grimalkin hamartia heliopause heuristic hight holpen hortatory ignominy illation inveigle invigilate isogloss jejune jeremiad kilderkin landrace lanthorn magus

malefic manqué merlon metonymy monitory noumenon nowell numinous panegyric parvenu pelage pelf pellucid percipience peripeteia perspicuous philter pinguid pis aller plangent plash pleonastic pneuma popliteal praxis prolix propinquity prosody punctilio purlieu radix refulgent revenant rubescent

runcible sanguine sapid sate sept shrive sigil solecism stilly stochastic stria sublunary surcease syncretize temerarious thew thill threnody Torschlusspanik triskelion twee ungual uxorious veraison videlicet violaceous virescent vocable wattle witting wont

The Everyday Christmas Miracle

Yesterday: Christmas day. The highlight, much more than the jollity of presents and family and music, was the companionship, throughout the day, of a barred owl hunting in our yard.

We saw him first at mid-morning. I had seen out the window a swoop of wings and a settling, and I followed the gesture to the spot where a large bird now sat, streaked and stony, just inside the wood’s shadow. The three of us—my husband, my mother, and I—gathered at the window in the back bedroom to watch him, using our small spotting binoculars to get a better view of his contours and expression. He was beautiful, enchanting, but after awhile this idleness of watching made us restless, and we quit the bedroom for the warmth of the kitchen, called in by the smell of fresh Christmas tea bread warming in the oven, and the tea itself on the boil.

We were eating and sipping and chatting when my mother looked up suddenly and exclaimed, “Oh! Now the owl’s right here by the door!” The bird had pounced on some unseen quarry, and was now half-submerged in snow, his wings lightly aloft. He was not more than fifteen feet from the house, and this time when we gathered at the door to watch him, he looked straight up at us, his eyes meeting ours. These eyes were a deep coal-black, glossy and round, and his bill was a curl of yellow just in the center of his face. Around each eye was a ruffle of buff and gray feathers, a corolla that gave him an awake, penetrating look. It was hard to look away.

Perhaps the lot of us spooked him, or perhaps he had simply missed his quarry, and he retreated suddenly to a high branch at the back corner of the yard. But he quickly settled there and began another scan, twisting his head nearly half-way around, first right, then left, and then looking straight down at the snow below. And then he pounced again, landing hard, feet-first in the snow with a little plash, his head hitting lightly, too, and then raised himself up and stamped his feet once, then paused, and stamped them again. He swiveled to look this way, then that, keeping an eye for his own predators now that he was earthbound. He gave a few more stamps of his feet, and then with one powerful claw hauled from the snow a long black mole, lifeless and sagging, and placed it in his bill. Then, jerking his head once, then twice, then a third time, he swallowed it whole.

Up, and up, he lifted himself again to the trees, and without any pause began to hunt again, scanning downward, scanning the landscape, listening for the minutely audible susurration of tiny feet under snow, of fur and tail brushing channel walls, of the purr and chatter of near-blind mice as they met in surprise and greeted each other in the blue-white dim of their snowy passageways. The owl pounced again, but this time came up empty, and he moved to another part of the yard. And then, after another few attempts, he lifted away, off into the mottled gray of the winter woods, and was gone.

He was back in the afternoon, though, startling me by appearing once again through the window of the back bedroom, this time perched on a thick branch of our towering sugar maple. He saw me again, too, and our eyes met briefly, his black gaze looking deeply through me, and I felt a transfixed chill, as if it were I that was his prey. Then suddenly he broke and turned, looked down into the open plain of the yard, folded open his wings, and glided in a flawless arc to earth, landing hard in the snow once again. But at this moment my cat Rhubarb joined me at the window, and the owl looked up suddenly, startled by the cat’s appearance, and lifted up into the woods again, and again was gone.

◊

Later, I pulled on my tall boots and my parka and gloves, and I stomped into the yard to look at all the places the owl had been. Each landing spot was a hole in the snow about six inches deep, with a small, concave indentation at one edge that could only have been the impression of his bill. Sometimes his wingtips had made a fan in the snow around the hole, and some holes were bermed with loose snow at the edge where he’d kicked his feet.

I dug into every one of these holes, looking, and everywhere I dug I found the tunnels, part of the sub-surface network of comings and goings we humans see only in late spring, when the snow is on its last breath and the channels lie half-open, the plain evidence of a once-vibrant under-snow community. But the owl sees these channels all winter, sees them precisely and with both eyes and ears, and then leaves his own tracks in the snow, his own evidence of the miracle, this everyday miracle of hunting and feeding.

Reading Glasses, Snow Shovel

Earlier this year I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker. The damned thing comes on like a snowstorm, all prose and folly, a blizzard of words. It's impossible to read it all in the time allotted, and the following week it comes around and hits you again. It seemed so bourgeoisie to subscribe and yet not read it all, almost unethical. I felt ashamed of the issues lying about, drifts of them languishing, reminding me of my inattention, my dilettantism. So I canceled.

Usually I feel better after a decision. Not so here. I missed it. Friends would occasionally remark on New Yorker stories they'd read, and while I'm never bothered when a friend talks about a television show (I haven't lived with a television since moving to college), I felt sorely left out. This mattered more. Here was compendium of our best writing by our best writers, the mouthpiece of our culture's mind, our collected ideas about who we are and what we are about. But I had willingly, willfully, set it to mute.

So today I re-subscribed. There was no one to stop me, to throw themselves, open-armed, before me, pleading sense and reason. I figure I'll read it at the gym while climbing my one hundred twenty-five stories on the stair mill (thirty minutes of slightly breathless vertical effort that always lands me, oddly, in the same place).

Batten down the hatches.

The New Corporate Website

Second generation corporate websites are looking pretty stale these days. The broadcast model, in which the website was roughly a hyperlinked brochure, lasted about a decade. Its days are numbered, and good riddance.

Social media has permanently changed the way we communicate with our customers, and likewise changed our customers' expectations of us. Customers expect dialogue. As I've written before, communications can no longer be one-way or even two-way; they must be multi-way.

We're also finally waking to the notion that companies are cultures, ecosystems of people. More enlightened companies acknowledge the interconnectedness among its people and between its people and their customers. They also acknowledge that it's no longer possible, in a multi-way connected landscape, to speak to one constituency with one message and to another constituency with another, or to hide conversations behind thick velvet curtains. They know their communications must be both transparent and consistent.

The company should seem humane, conversational, capable of speaking to the world in vernacular language. Their corporate website should let each group—customers, shareholders, executives, managers, staff—have a presence and a voice, and be able to talk to, and with, each other. 

Some might suspect that such multi-way conversations will generate chaos. But they'll be only as chaotic as any real community is, and anyway, healthy communities have policies, rules of engagement, and norms to cope with chaos. Policies can guide these conversations and guarantee a useful structure to work out differences, just like in real life.

In other words, the corporate website of today should stop being a fancy brochure, and convert itself into something more like a social network, one that supports varying roles and myriad conversations. Sure, a customer could still download a Features and Benefits sheet, or access a pricing table. But the real meat of the matter, the real communication, would happen between constituencies in a constantly evolving conversation. Meaning is made in the interstices, and the outcome could be a more organic, more genuine, and more gratifying experience for everyone.

Post updated 7 September 2012

Magazine Archives: Easier is Better

It must happen a thousand times a day, all across North America. Someone picks up a copy of The New Yorker, maybe in the hair salon, maybe while waiting to tell their psychotherapist about the latest development in their extramarital affair. She, or he, gets through three quarters of an article before her dye job's ready to be rinsed out, or his analyst's previous client exits discreetly through the side door.

So later, maybe much later, she, or he, goes online to the New Yorker website to try to find the article and finish it. Now, who was that author? Was it Atwan or Menand? And what issue was it in? Maybe the Fiction Issue—which was, maybe, a two-week issue. But which two weeks was it? I think it was in... June?

This happened to me, recently (I was the one at the hair salon). The article was in fact by Menand, and it appeared in the June 8th and 15th Fiction Issue. But I didn't remember all that when I began.

There is an "Archive" section of the New Yorker site, and I started there. But the archive doesn't present a list of issue dates, with articles contained therein. Instead, users are invited to search for contents. But search, of course, requires you to know something of what you're searching. My hair appointment was a week ago. I didn't remember all the particulars, so I had to poke away at it to coax the final answer.

Search is nice, but for my use case, a simple taxonomy of the last hundred or so issues, in reverse chronological order, would have gotten me there sooner.

MySQL Poetry

There's just something incredibly ironic and wonderful about this:

Lost connections, lost sessions. What can you do with this poem? How does your perception of these warning statements alter when you view them as art, not life?

Take its advice: "work with this poem."

Modify Your Posts Based on Search Engine Referrals

Last August I posted to my food journal, Maker's Table, tips for making really good turkey burgers. I provided two recipes, but introduced them with a long article about my personal experiences learning to cook meat. This exposition included information on safe cooking temperatures for both solid and ground meat, tackling red meat before moving to the somewhat trickier subject of poultry.

It was one of my longer posts, but it also become one of the most viewed. In the weeks after publication, I noted significant daily traffic to this page arriving from search engine queries about safe cooking temperatures for turkey burgers. In just the last 24 hours, for example, this page has been viewed by people searching for "turkey burgers still pink," "hot [sic] to cook turkey burgers," and "turkey burger internal temperature." 

The problem? I'd buried the lead. In order to learn the right internal temperature for turkey burgers, a reader would have to wade through 500 words of my personal narrative.

The solution? Put the most critical, most sought-after, information at the top. I edited the post, highlighting the key information in a "quick take-away" header with a link to the FDA guidelines. I made sure to include the words "internal temperature" in this introduction, since that seemed to be the keyword phrase most often used in searches.

The result? A clearer and more definitive summary statement in Google results lists (see above). And, hopefully, a better user experience.

Meaningful Titles and Clear Descriptors Drive Traffic

Last Friday I noticed a spike in traffic on my food journal, Maker's Table. A number of visitors had arrived from search engine results for Flaio, an Italian red wine I'd blogged about in March 2008. I'd assumed the wine had recently gotten some press.

That evening, opening our copy of the Wall Street Journal, I got my answer. Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher had focused their Friday "Tastings" column on Primitivo, the Italian twin of Zinfandel. One of the few wines they really liked was Flaio, and at $10.99, it was also the cheapest. The sidebar showed a photo of the bottle and listed it as "Flaio 2006 (Salento)."

Returning to my site stats, I found at least three search engine referrals for keyword searches of precisely that string. I ran a few of these to recreate the users' search experience—to see what they had seen. My post was on the first page of Google search results for that query, and both the title and search summary gave a good indication the page was a review:

 

I've witnessed similar outcomes when recreating my visitors' searches for turkey burgers, three ingredient meals, and Stella's restaurant in Lyme—three other popular posts whose titles reflect the main point of the story. This underscores that clear titles, good first lines, and detailed particulars in the post body help searchers find your pages.

Sisters

Sisters

My little hurricane,
my little thunder
storming
around the house.
Gray raincloud cats
with claws like lightning
eyes gold like fire.
In your legs,
the strength of
mountains.
In your paws
the speed of light.
Nothing can catch
one
except the other.
Sisters, you live
racing the moon,
winning.

Absolute Pronouncements Corrupt Absolutely

In the last few days I've been treated to an overabundance of blanket pronouncements by experts. Here's a sampling:

"There are only five or six, maybe seven, real authors alive today."
"There are really only three or four pieces of literature that have ever been written about the Holocaust."
"There is almost no literature now. There's a lot of writing, but little of it is literature."
"The Back button is the button of doom."
"Users do not come to browse your site. They have a purpose."
"Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

Okay, you're entitled to you opinion, and I'm entitled to mine. If you back up your opinion with data, you're more likely to convince me. But if you postulate easily disprovable axioms, or if you postulate axioms that are impossible to prove or disprove, I'm going to shut my mind to you. And that's not really what a pundit wants, is it?

Communicating Design

I'm reading Dan Brown's new book, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning (companion website at communicatingdesign.com). The book deconstructs ten core web design process deliverables, including usability test plans, strategy docs, wireframes, site maps, and flow charts.

Brown highlights the critical role process deliverables play in keeping team members, stakeholders, and clients harmonized. It's not enough for a team to focus on the end product—the website, web app, intranet, or microsite they're developing. It's also equally critical to develop clear, concise documents that describe visually, numerically, and structurally what's happening, when, and why.

Perhaps a topic many regard as soporific, but one that's kept me awake at night: How can I convey the complexities of the schedule without using Gantt? How can I show dependencies in the application while keeping the schematic diagram to one page? Should I break this project apart into constituent pieces or show it all together? Do I need more detail?

My key stakeholder-slash-internal client is visual and concrete. I think in Myers-Briggs parlance she's probably an ESFP. She's not going to follow me if I speak abstractions about what a site should be and do. She needs a diagram, and she needs me to talk it through with her. She also prefers to see a design comp early in the process, which is always fraught with danger, since graphic design is optimally done as a very last step.

So all my design deliverables for her and her immediate colleagues are detailed, complete, and convey visually as much intelligence as is available about the project.

Another client naturally inclines toward abstraction. She couldn't really care less about visual design. She needs a different kind of deliverable (and fewer deliverables overall)—outlines and schematic site maps work just fine for her, as do low resolution prototypes.

The point is to adapt your diagrams, designs, and deliverables to your audience. Any good experience designer knows to do that for the end-user. But the message of Brown's book is that we don't really have one client to please, we have two. Which doubles the work, but it also doubles the fun. What's your experience developing design deliverables?