While I’m a little critical of the holiday season and the synthetic warm fuzzies that tend to fall from the sky like snowflakes, leaving a stickly-sweet and slippery layer of grey sludge on the floor, I’m also not an idiot. That is, I love presents. Who doesn’t, right? Well, that one guy, but he’s a jerk.
Anyway, my friends and family always wonder what to get me for Xmas, because, as a writer, I tend to have many diverse interests, and my personal library has recently been officially upgraded to “vast.”
My film and DVD collection is exquisite, featuring the best and worst films of the since the medium was invented. I’ve got a good pair of boots, and I just picked up some new wipers for the auto. Aside from a Roomba Vacuum Robot, what else do I really need?
Exactly the dilemma the friends and family of many other writers struggle with. So, as an unabashed capitalist, a collector of things technologically unique and everyone’s target market, I thought I’d write out some tips and advice for the giving of gifts to the writers in your life.
Know the writer
You have to be careful. Just like when you’re artificially inseminating sharks or performing a tonsillectomy on a crocodile, you have to be careful when buying a gift for a writer. When I graduated college, I would have loved a blazing yellow and black copy of “the idiots guide to being published.” Now, I would find that book wholly and completely insulting. I would accept the gift graciously, and subtly point the giver to several of my published articles, film reviews and short stories.
At my age, I find solid, tangible reference books to be much more valuable. One of the writer’s greatest threats is “not getting it right” (because there’s always some snot-nosed slack-jawed arm chair critic who will take the time to explain to you how you didn’t accurately represent the hockey-goalie on the back of the bus in the scene where your protagonist gets dumped via text message). It is for this reason that it’s important for authors to have a wealth of resources at their finger tips.
Facts are the basis of Fiction
There are always the basics: Dictionary and Thesaurus. But most writers work online anyhow, and have access to a myriad of Dictionaries and Thesauri that blow anything you could buy them out of the water. So then you’ve got to get tricky clever when buying references for writers.
One of the greatest gifts I received was a “Dictionary of Theories.” This impressive tome sorts all known theories by topic, by alpha, with a brief description of the crack pot who first wrote them down and what the hell they meant. This was an excellent addition to my battery of references books. I also have a “Dictionary of Superstitions,” and a dictionary of philosophy, both excellent additions to my reference set.
Language
While every writer secretly dreams of being as pretentious as the New Yorker or Playboy will allow, as they struggle to hack out columns and blogs and splots and crazzles for the local paper, their buddy from college and that dude who’s “got a great idea,” they’ve got to write slow. Easy words, quick sentences. Brief, digestible bits. Writing to be understood is a far cry from writing for the sheer pleasure of it.
However, when the hacking is done and they retreat to their intellectual tower of (insert sexy descriptor here – mine is hewn from a mighty rock that fell from the sky, shot through with silver and a strange alien material glowing a soft royal purple, its innards lined with every curiosity and mental accoutrement I can conjure), they want to slip into that hot steaming bath of pretentiousness. Nothing gets writers more excited than writing words and things very few understand. And when those rare few “get it, got it, and know it’s good,” well, the English lexicon lacks the words to describe the feeling.
Nothing says pretentious like slipping in a term from a foreign language. You’re thinking, “dammit, et tu, Eric?” Or maybe you were thinking “C’est la vie.” One of my favorite desktop references is my Latin/English Dictionary. Dropping in an exempli gratia here and there takes the pretentious cake, and I feel better about life every time I do it. Language dictionaries that seem to gel well with the written workings of a mildly mad mind are: French, Italian, Latin, Greek and only occasionally Russian. Swahili is just a bit too esoteric to flow on the page, no?
Quality Maps and Charts are another must have for writers. An up-to-date world map with political economic, religious and topographic information is worth a pound of gold or ten pounds of gingerbread cookies. A periodic table is useful, as well as a measure conversion chart. And for the sci-fi writer in your life, if you can find the elusive and rare “starship scale wall poster” you’ve made their light-year.
Gadgets and Gadflys
Gadgets are a slippery slope for writer’s gifts. Sure, everyone wants an iPhone. But would I rather have an iPhone or a Kindle? Ah… now the true dilemma becomes clear. Personally, I’ll need both, eventually. However, I also consider both to be rather short lived fads. Sorry Amazon, I love ya, but you do realize that the iPhone will doubtless be offering the same content plus be able to playback HD porn in times of emergency?
The Kindle of course, for those of you not so focused on pornography or the ability to access some anytime anywhere, is a mobile library device. It’s about the slickest thing I’ve ever seen (next to, of course, the iPhone). Sony offers a competing product, and the ins and outs of each product are too extensive to discuss here. Suffice to say, I vote against these products as gifts for writers, unless you are sure of their technological capabilities. I know one writer who struggles to check his email. Do you really think Amazon’s library of 10,000+ digital books are going to work for him?
Another common writer gift is the personal voice recorder. Those little MP3 recording dealies, they run on a pair of triple-A’s and can record 80 hours of audio. This is a student’s gift, great for recording that lecture on high-energy physics that you’re just too hung-over to focus on. As for writers, well, I’ve got one of these things, and I feel like an ass taking voice notes. I don’t know what it is, but by the time I’ve got the thing out of my pocket and am recording, I the moment has changed so much, the feeling, the mood, they’re gone-daddy-gone, and I’m looking down the bar at the bartender, who can’t quite see the device, and he’s wondering if I’m talking to him, myself or one of the winged demons I’m obviously toting around on my shoulders, from one nickel-blick swamp dive to the next.
Where was I? Oh, if you have to go gadget, go gift certificate. The Blue Shirt Butchers at Best Buy are more than willing to bleep-bling up a card for you, and then your giftee writer can pick out their own particular overpriced digital poison.
The Ultimate Writer’s Gift
Magazine Subscriptions. Seriously. Look, writers love to read, right? They fixate on topics and obsess about concepts. They love pictures. Magazines are topical, timely, loaded with pictures and tightly written thinking-bits. The best part is, unless your beloved writer has mastered time travel (don’t scoff, I’ve been independent of time and space since sometime in 2002), there’s no way they can buy the issue you’ve purchased with your gift subscription or have read the article in advance.
Magazines come in every conceivable flavor, size, complexity, paper stock, color, shape, topic or usefulness. Topics range from “Rural Telecommunications” to Screenwriting. For starters, checkout Scientific American (all writers suffer from a brutal understanding of only what they understand – see my entry “write what you really know, not what you think you know” – coming soon). It’s a great learny mag. National Geographic is the flagship of learny periodicals, but there are literally magazines for every hobby, interest and obsession, from cats to tattoos, from the asinine to merely contemptuous, that a person could imagine. And most subscriptions cost next to nothing (don’t say I never did anything for you).
He drank scotch because he didn’t like beer. He drank Glenlivet because he didn’t know anything about scotch.
Of course, there’s always booze. A bottle of Laphroig or Macalllan’s will fill any author to bursting with soothing, liquid gold and holiday cheer. Find me a writer worth his or her ink who doesn’t love a good bender and I’ll find you a goddamned liar.