The questions I get most about writing are the practical ones. What do you write with? Where do you write? How do you find time to write?

Answers to these questions are supplied by novelist Ann Patchett in The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life. It’s like a FAQ for aspiring writers.

Do you need to get an MFA in Creative Writing? Not if it means going into debt, according the prudent Patchett.

Should you turn your desk away from the window, to avoid distractions? “Desk positioning does not a real writer make,” according to the author.

Are you really a writer? Spend one hour a day for thirty days writing to find out. Sit down and do the work. You’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish.

She also believes that writer’s block is a myth. If you were stumped by a complicated math problem, do you have math block? No, you’re still working on the problem, even if you have no evident progress.

Patchett also punctures the idea that “everyone has a great novel in them.” Would you say that everyone has a five-minute mile in them? Writing is a craft that must be learned.

Her description of plot is the best I’ve ever read:

The plot of a novel should be like walking down a busy city street: First there are all the other people around you, the dog walkers and the skateboarders, the couples fighting, the construction guys swearing and shouting, the pretty girl on teetering heels who causes those construction guys to turn around for a split second of silence. There are drivers hitting the brakes, diving birds slicing between buildings, and the suddenly ominous clouds banking to the west. All manner of action and movement is rushing towards you and away. But that isn’t enough. You should also have the storefronts at street level and the twenty stories of apartments full of people and their babies and their dreams. Below the street, there should be infrastructure: water, sewer, electricity. Maybe there’s a subway down there as well, and it’s full of people.

This rang true with me. A novel can’t be just about one thing. All your characters, even the most minor ones, are heading somewhere, pursuing their own destinies. They exist in a dynamic world and, if it’s a good novel, are worthy of stories of their own.

The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life is a Kindle Single. It’s a slim volume but at $2.99 is a bargain for anyone seeking answers on the craft of writing and the realities of the writing life.

It doesn’t have to be this way, despite what Microsoft may have you believe. There are alternatives to Sharepoint that actually work in ways that ordinary humans can understand.

One of these alternatives is WordPress. You can set up your own Intranet using WordPress with a minimum of technical knowhow.

It’s certainly better than learning the maddening intricacies of Sharepoint, as developer Ben Balter discovered. Given the dreaded task of updating the Sharepoint site, he instead decided to spend three hours to see if he could come up with an alternative.

The result was WP Document Revisions. This is a WordPress plugin that allows teams of any size to collaboratively edit files and manage their workflow. In other words, the core of what you probably would use Sharepoint for if it was actually usable.

Ben wasn’t done. He’s since gone on to craft additional plugins, as he described in WordPress as a Collaboration Tool, a talk he gave at the monthly WordPress DC meetup. The tools he created essentially improve upon all the functions of Sharepoint, but in WordPress, so you don’t need expensive licenses or pricey database experts to keep the whole thing from crashing.

By using WordPress, you turn “add this information to the Intranet” from a frustrating task into something as simple as blogging. And just think how good your Intranet could be if people actually wanted to contribute to it.

Improving internal communication does more than just lead to happier employees. It contributes to the bottom line by saving the time of staff. Do you want people spending hours trying to figure where their document disappeared to on Sharepoint or do you want them to do, well, something productive?

Most of us, however, have no control over what software we use at work. I asked Ben what to do in this case. He replied with the truism that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. He also demonstrated what WordPress could do and developed internal support for it. When presented with a credible alternative, rational decision-makers will make the right choice, if they can.

There’s a lot of caveats in that last sentence. I know. Big organizations choose big software for reasons that defy reason.

But life’s too short to use bad software. Investigate the alternatives. Anticipate objections. Present your case. Just something is ubiquitous doesn’t meant it’s right or destined to last forever. The way we work is changing, and software should change with it.

In past years, my fellow judges and I agonized over the decision-making process. This year, it was easy. We all agreed on one script.

That screenplay was Alpha by Christina Pamies. She wrote a thought-provoking science fiction script about alternate dimensions. In her story, people have found a way to travel from the “alpha” and “beta” worlds, encountering different and less perfect versions of themselves. Alternate Services is responsible for returning these “rogues” to their own dimension.

It’s hard to write a sci-fi story that you haven’t seen a hundred times before. Alpha kept my interest, especially as I realized that our world was the “beta” reality. Pamies did a great job at making this concept seem plausible and tragic.

One of the other judges described the script as “emotionally mature” which was an apt description. While the scenario was sci-fi, characters grappled with outlandish problems of identity and reality like actual people would. In other words, it’s believable, the most important test for science fiction.

See the rest of the winners of Visions 2012.

Also of note is Pretty All the Time by Annie Coburn, which won for Outstanding Narrative Production. This is a great script too – it won the 2009 DC Shorts Screenplay Competition – and now has begun its life as a short film on the festival circuit.

Looking forward to answering questions on May 12!

And past winners of the competition have gone on to do great things, like Mary Ratliff. Mary is working on a feature-length documentary on competitive video gaming, a huge subculture in this country that most people don’t know about.

Coming home after a Saturday night carousing, I used to love to see the trucks lined up outside your building on 15th Street. Back then (the 90s), the paper was printed right next to the Post’s HQ. Blue trucks would be double-parked along the street, waiting to deliver the news to the region.

And if I stayed out late enough, I could pick up the fat slab of Sunday’s paper while it was still technically Saturday night. There was a weird thrill to this, getting the news ahead of everyone else. The Sunday paper was an event, something everyone read.

This is all gone now. Where once stories were reported, fact-checked, edited and edited again before the presses rolled, news these days emerges in electronic form, often-rushed and incomplete. This is a good thing. I am for more news, more information, for the great cornucopia of the web. No more gatekeepers, let the public decide what matters.

But the Washington Post is an institution. It is a brand expressing journalistic quality and integrity. When they publish something, I expect it to be true.

I don’t expect the Washington Post to be running a digital sweatshop, where young journalists are expected to churn out regurgitated news items in the mad pursuit of impossible traffic goals.

How does this fit into the great tradition of the Post? The strength of the paper is its ability to really delve into issues. Why are they trying to be like some smarmy blog?

And getting a few hits on your site – what is that really winning you? Traffic rushes in to click on a link and then rushes off to some other site.

At the What’s Next DC conference, I watched Katharine Zaleski, the paper’s digital news director, give a presentation on the strategy. Coming from the Huffington Post, she brought a relentless focus on metrics. News was to be measured. And the measurement was site traffic. She had charts showing how traffic to the site had increased as the Post increased its “buzziness,” with efforts like news aggregation and blogging.

Does the Washington Post really want to emulate The Huffington Post? Do they want to “surf the trend waves on the Internet”? Shouldn’t the paper be making waves rather than trying to catch them?

And are ephemeral bursts of web traffic the right metric to follow? If so, why not just turn your site over to cat videos? But the Post is more than that, isn’t it?

Stay true to your mission – quality journalism. It’s what you do best. Stop trying to be cool. Don’t go for viral. Avoid “buzziness” and all its advocates.

Instead, simplify. Be the Apple of newspapers. Don’t add more web gimmickry to your cluttered and unusable web site. Focus on what you do best.

Don’t measure web hits – look at engagement. How long do people stay on the site? How many stories do they read? Try to duplicate the loyalty readers once felt toward the paper that they lovingly held in their hands. Better to have 100,000 devoted readers than a million casual followers.

No more second-rate social media. It’s beneath you, Washington Post. Simplify, focus on your strengths and pursue engagement with readers to be true to your news-breaking legacy.

There’s a reason why Amazon is such a titan in the e-book world – it delivers income to writers. It does so seamlessly, easily and without authors having to do anything. You don’t have to hound publishers for checks or wait for the results of some sort of mysterious accounting process.

Amazon posts sales results weekly. For me, it’s just beer money, as I watch my two novels sell in dribs and drabs. Still, it’s something. My work is getting out there and I’m making some cash, even if it’s not going to get me more than a six-pack or two.

And the company constantly innovates, like with their Amazon Prime program. Among other benefits, you can borrow select e-books for free. And authors get a share of a pool of money set aside for the program. In March, it was $600,000!

Each time one of my Kindle titles got borrowed last month, I received $2.18, according to the Amazon press release. That’s a nice royalty, considering one of my novels is 99 cents and the other is $2.99.

So if you’re an Amazon Prime member, borrow my books please! You don’t need a Kindle either. There are Kindle apps for the iPad, iPhone, Mac and PC.

Murder in Ocean Hall is a great read if you like mysteries set in DC. A reviewer wrote that it will take you behind the scenes of the city and show you how things work – or don’t work. It’s a mystery novel written by someone who actually lives in Washington and knows the neighborhoods beyond the monuments.

Looking for something fast and fun? Then check out Don’t Mess Up My Block, a satire of the self-help biz. Follow the adventures of Laurent Christ as he pursues success across an American landscape littered with greedy consultants, social media frauds and incompetent bureaucrats.

Check them out! And remember, borrowing my books will keep me in beer, an essential element of my creative process

I was there at the beginning.

In 2007, Twitter leapt into geek consciousness at SXSW Interactive. Monitors had been placed in the halls of this tech conference, displaying what people were tweeting about. I thought it was an interesting curiosity, like watching telegrams in real time. Little bursts of text scrolled across the screen, as people shared opinions about the workshops that they were in.

Imagine, prior to this epochal event of just five years ago, we had no easy way of getting real-time information from our friends, unless of course we talked to them. And when we went to events, we were fully present, listening to speakers without constantly checking our electronic devices. We paid attention, more or less. Or nodded off. Or wandered away, in search of something more interesting, guided only by instinct.

I blame Margie Newman. An early-adopter of social media, she sold me on Twitter, pitching it (she does PR) as a great way of getting relevant information delivered right to your iPhone. I followed her as she shared interesting articles about digital marketing, as well as her daily coffee runs.

And it was good, this small-scale tool, this curiosity that entertained and informed me during odd moments during the day. It was a niche web service, used by the super-geeky and wired.

The fact that it failed on almost daily basis (the Twitter fail whale became an Internet meme) confirmed the fact that it was not ready for the mainstream. No one talked about its potential – just having Twitter working seemed like a feat.

I found a use for it. I tweeted the news that I was writing a book, Murder in Ocean Hall. I tweeted how many words I had written. Friends replied that they were looking forward to reading the book. This type of public accountability ensured that I would finish the book, no matter what. And it built an audience for my novel.

While I was engaged in my archaic writing activity, Twitter took off. Tweetups were held. Celebrities began using it. Tweets floated down from space.

The potential of Twitter was fully-realized, as it tied the world together in 140-character chains. Which was wonderful. It’s a great and easy tool that’s perfect for the non-geeky.

Twitter was big, mainstream and it even worked. The fail whale was no more.

But as Twitter and social media took off, several insidious psychological elements of the experience became apparent.

Celebrity Syndrome

The idea of “followers” is contrary to our democratic ideals. We don’t slavishly follow our leaders, as if they’re Eva Peron. We’re not Argentina.

Early Twitter was a free exchange of information among equals. But now Twitter has become about popularity contests and numbers of followers. It’s about sucking up to some pseudo-famous person for a bit of recognition.

This is galling. It’s like recreating the world of high school cliques in cyberspace. I see the Washington Post’s top tweeps and I’m not sure what’s more absurd, a dead-tree paper defining Internet success or the dubious nature of their picks.

Social Media Expert is an Oxymoron

How can you be an expert in a medium that is so new? More than another media, social media is guided by zeitgeist and the fickle whims of the public. You cannot make a video go viral; only millions of people and their individual choices can do that.

You can train people to use social media but, in the end, it’s about knowing your audience and connecting with them in an authentic manner. And then hoping for the best.

The expert that promises that there’s some magic formula is not to be trusted. And if someone labelled as a “guru” or a “rockstar” comes waltzing into your office, then hold on to your wallet, for you’re about to make an expensive mistake.

The overhyped aspects of social media irritate me so much that I included a social media guru in my latest novel, Don’t Mess Up My Block. She writes only in lower-case and is constantly “crushing it” in everything she does.

The Collapse of Attention Spans

I worry about Millenials. Growing up digital once seemed like a gift. It may be a curse. I’m fortunate that I was young before the onslaught of attention-stealing electronic media. As a child, I could sit and read for hours. I still can, but it’s more of an effort now. I have to put the iPhone and iPad out of reach.

In the brilliant book Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky makes the point that the rise of the West can be traced to coffeehouses. Caffeine allowed us to concentrate and keep working. But if social media is destroying our ability to focus then how can civilization progress?

The Melding of Work, Life and Home

Facebook comes with one major misgiving for me – it mixes together people from different spheres in my life. Coworkers, high school friends, college buddies, family members and professional contacts are all thrown together in a boiling stew of political theories, recipe suggestions, kid photos, medical problems and news of the weird. It’s disturbing, this mix of people from different times and places, jumbled together and all sharing way too much information.

We used to keep different parts of our life separate, like Don Draper. I’ve known people who have quit Facebook entirely, unable to tolerate this blurring of social and professional lines.

So, What Do You Do?

My advice is to only use the tools that you enjoy. You don’t have to be on Facebook or use Twitter. For me, it’s Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and Facebook (with misgivings). I’m interested in tech, photography and events in DC.

Not on my list: Foursquare (why let people know where I’m at?), Pinterest (it’s just for girls, right?), Tumblr (don’t understand) and YouTube (cat videos).

You could spend all your time tweeting, retweeting, sharing links, rating videos and commenting on life around you. Or you can get out there and live.

After all, on your deathbed, you’re probably not going to say, “I wish I had tweeted more.”