Friday Speak Out!: Long Roads, Heartaches, and Why Can't l Just be a Writer?, Guest Post by Janet L. Cannon

At various times in my life, I've complained about my jobs. Yeah, I admit it publicly. I'm not always perky and silly and punny. Sometimes I yell and get angry and frustrated just like every other human being on the planet.

My current job is no exception. While I love working with children, love teaching technology, and love the people I work with, it saps nearly all my energy. During the school year when I come home at night I am a nearly lifeless husk of a pod-person. Being an introvert in an extrovert's world will do that. Sometimes I wonder how I drive home in my dazed stupor. I have no active brain cells left to write with, therefore, August through May, I write almost nothing creative at all. Which makes me sad. Nine months of the year lost because I have to eat, pay for a place to live, pay insurance, and fill my car with gas.

And I begin to wonder...wouldn't I be a better writer if I could quit my job and write full time? If my husband made enough money for us to live on, I could do the freelance gig to fill in the gaps while writing my stories and novels on the side and that would be bliss incarnate. What if we cut back a little more here and there, went out to eat less, and saved our money more? We could make it. It would make me a better writer. Really!

Maybe.

Then again, when I look at the YA novel I'm writing I couldn't have done that without LIVING around children who deal with real issues of abuse, neglect, learning disabilities, and social dysfunctions every day. Currently I have two people very close to me who are going through very scary medical situations. If I didn't take time off from writing and go visit them and cry with them and comfort them, I wouldn't see what going through those situations felt like.

Research is a wonderful tool. The Internet is my friend when it comes to many aspects of my books because I can't possibly know everything about everything. But when it comes to PEOPLE, nothing substitutes the actual living of your life to make your writing real. You will create more believable, more REAL characters when you really live. Sometimes that means you're not able to write as much as you want.

But some day, there will be a day when I won't have breakfast duty, lunch duty and bus duty all in the same day that I have three meetings, no prep hour, and have to break up a girl fight. (Girl fights are the WORST!) I look forward to that day.

Ah, retirement. Fourteen years down the road. Unless my husband suddenly gets a six-figure job. Which that works, too.

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 Janet L. Cannon is a happy wife, a technology teacher, an avid runner, an origami enthusiast, an obsessive crafter, a gaming nerd, a book hog, a graphic design enthusiast, and happens to have a little time between learning new hobbies to write stories, essays, and novels. She has both her BA and MA in English and is proud to have never had a job that required her to say, “Do you want fries with that?” She blogs at Revision is a Dish Best Served Cold and can also be found on Facebook.
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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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4 comments creative inspiration, Friday Speak Out, Janet L. Cannon, jobs

Choosing Your Language

Writing an airport crime novel? Know the lingo, but keep
your readers with you. | Credit: Elizabeth King Humphrey

When learning Spanish in my youth, I learned all the numbers, letters, colors, and so forth. As I grew older, I became fairly proficient at ordering beers in Mexican restaurants (and maybe a few other activities). Later, I moved to Europe and lived in a country where Spanish was not a very useful language.

In Prague, I worked in a law firm, an advertising firm, and a multinational news organization. English was not always the common, much less native, language in the office. Even worse, the language that folks often spoke was a specific language.

The language of their jobs.

When writing, you are trying to make your scenes as real and, at the same time, as approachable as possible. Police procedurals bring their readers into the action. But if the readers don't understand what is happening and what a phrase means, they are kept at an arm's length. Outside of the scene, not inside the scene, where you want your readers to be.

Even in fiction, you may find yourself having to learn about the language a character would speak in a law office or a nursery or an airport or a grocery store. To be authentic, understand that there's a good chance that gate change, for example, means different things in different industries. I once worked in a large office where it was common to ask "Where do you sit?" Your office location communicated an unspoken understanding about you and the hierarchy of the office politics. But that's not the same in other offices where I worked.

Sometimes in our non-writing lives, we encounter people who don't understand something that is second-nature in our daily lives. How do you explain the phrase to someone without insulting the uninitiated? Think about that and apply that to your writing.

Don't forget, as you revise, to have a reader who is not involved in the same industry read your work to make sure such specific language is understood.

In your attempt to be authentic, don't lose a reader on the page. Bring them in and show you know your stuff.


Have you used specific language in your writing? How did you keep your readers with you? Have you read any writers who manage to keep you with them?

Elizabeth King Humphrey is a writer and editor living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Some days she speaks several languages, especially to her kids, and she's not sure how she'd translate.

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3 comments Elizabeth King Humphrey, jobs, language