Natalia M. Sylvester

One of my first jobs was at a magazine that basically had a typo for a name. Of course, it was done on purpose, you know..because it was so clever.

So clever, that at a meeting with a potential client last week, I was asked if that was a typo on my resume.

This happened a lot while I worked at the magazine. I usually had to spell out the name mind numbingly slow (a as in apple, n as in Nancy, for ten whole letters) every time I gave out my email address.

And the thing is, half the time people didn’t get the play on words the magazine was going for. The other half would hesistantly ask, “You know that’s not how it’s really spelled, right?” So then we’d have to explain it to them, and they’d just nod and smile.

The thing with good writing is that it’s like a joke—if you have to repeat it and explain why it’s good, it’s really not that good. Writing shouldn’t need to be read twice (though people should want to), shouldn’t need to be analyzed over and over to find meaning. The message needs to hit a reader the second their eyes register the words, because they won’t often give it more time than that.

Now I know it’s true that being clever is often what will catch a reader’s attention. I’ll never knock clever. Some of my favorite writing is witty and funny and sarcastic in all the right places. But it has to serve the message first.

Otherwise you’ve just got a bad joke (in print!). And you’ll find yourself wishing you could put an asterisk at the bottom of your resume—

*To whom it may concern: I realize that this word is misspelled, but I assure you that it was done on purpose, and, more importantly, I was not in any way involved with that decision.

Last night I went to a reading by the poet Maureen Seaton, who read from her book of poems, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen, her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls and her chapbook, America Loves Carney. The theme of these readings at the University of Miami is “Lyric Hybrid,” because all the writers have stepped outside of their usual genres to explore new forms of writing. You can listen to last night’s reading and the previous one by A. Manette Ansay on UM’s Creative Writing website.

My favorite part of the night was when talk turned to whether or not Seaton had thought of writing a novel. She replied that she’d tried, that she had a lot of scenes written, but no plot. She joked that she was waiting for the Plot Fairy to bring her one.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I started this blog I aimed to post at least three times a week, and in the past couple of weeks I’ve only been able to post about twice a week. Even though I’m sure I have a readership of about ten (that’s being kind, I’m sure) I still feel a responsibility to update frequently, so I apologize. I’ve just been swamped. If you were to come into my office right now it’d look a lot like this:

While I’m excited to be busy I always feel sooooo guilty about all the printing my work requires. Reading on a laptop only goes so far for me, especially when it comes to editing. Tomorrow I have to buy a new ream of paper (recycled, of course) and fresh toner for the printer, so the guilt keeps piling up. My next mission will be to make my office more eco-friendly. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes…

It’s hard to vent about your work anxieties when there’s no watercooler in your home office, or when the only semblance of a co-worker at your job has four legs and doesn’t really talk much.

But recently I’ve had the pleasure of meeting several work-from-home freelancers and was so happy to hear I wasn’t alone in my pet peeves.  It’s true that we don’t deal with some of the more typical office problems like having a tough boss, clashing with co-workers, dealing with bad parking spots or disappearing red staplers (I love Office Space, can you tell?). But our unique working situations can lead to dilemmas that only other freelancers could understand. Here are just a few of mine:

People assume I’m not working since I work from home: It took some time and conditioning before family and friends got the hint that I can’t take personal calls at all hours of the day or hang out at their house to wait for a UPS delivery while they went to work. Just because we don’t have a typical 9-to-5 schedule doesn’t mean we don’t need time to work. A flexible schedule is not the same as an open schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

Circa 1995, I used to type stories and poems into Word Perfect and print them out on a ridiculously loud dot matrix printer. Every time I wanted to change fonts, there was the quick brown fox, jumping over the lazy dog:

“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was used to demonstrate different fonts because it’s a pangram, a phrase that contains all the letters in the alphabet. It originated as a practice sentence for stenography books in the late 1800s.

Maybe it’s time for some updated material. Here’s my shot at coming up with an original pangram:

A fuzzy pig weeps quietly whenever men joke of bacon and taxes.

Care to give it a try?