video – Torg

I first heard about Larry Jordan when I was taking a Pro Lab course at the Apple store on 14th Street in Manhattan. Larry came up in conversation as a Final Cut Pro X guru several times. I think even the instructor of the course mentioned him. Because I was working on a documentary film called For the Love of Books, I was trying to learn how to use the video editing software.

Larry Jordan William Torgerson For the Love of Books Apple Final Cut Pro X

Final Cut Pro X: Making the Transition

I bought Larry’s book Final Cut Pro: Making the Transition. The word “transition” refers to all of those film editors who’d learned all the other editions of Apple’s Final Cut Pro. I wasn’t transitioning; I was just getting started, but I found the book very helpful, especially when it came to color correction and work flows. I had a lot of trouble with freezes and crashes of Final Cut Pro X as I was trying to export my film.

In my conversation with Larry, we focus on his writing of the book. You can listen to the podcast directly from this website, or you can download our discussion as an iTunes podcast from the Prof. Torg: Read, Write, and Teach Digital Book Club.

Click on the play button below to listen:

At the request of Campus Activities I agreed to participate in what is called “Storm Talks.” It seems the goal of the project is to initiate conversation between students and professors. I talked briefly on video and invited students to tell me about their writing before, during, and after the first year writing course. The video was published via YouTube and Facebook. Questions came in. Here’s one of them: “Any advice for a young writer?”

Click Here to Be Taken to Facebook Conversation

I usually answer that question by saying that the writer should read and write a lot. I suppose it’s a philosophy–PRACTICE– that I used back when I was eighteen years old and cared about my free throw percentage. Okay, I still care about how many I’d make out of 100 if I were to go shoot tomorrow morning, but what I’m getting at is that in order to shoot free throws well, part of that process was that I shot a lot of them. I remember in Donald Murray’s book, Write to Learn, he quotes writer (and Google fighter) Ursula Le Guin about this notion of practice:

“If you want to be a tuba player you get a tuba, and some tuba music…And you probably get a tuba teacher, because there are a lot of rules and techniques to both written music and to tuba performance. And then you sit down and you play the tuba, every day, every week, every month, year after year, until you are good at playing the tuba; until you can–if you desire–play the truth on the tuba.”

Right after I suggest reading and writing to the person who has asked for advice (who am I really to give it?) I say that the writer needs to learn how to read. People often laugh and think I’m joking, but I’m not. As a student at Georgia College in Milledgeville, a generous faculty helped me to begin to read like a writer. I learned to see that when Flannery O’Connor wrote “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she made a choice for conflict in her first sentence: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” O’Connor had many choices when it came to the beginning of her story. She could have delivered dialogue, oriented readers to the setting, or perhaps written images for the purpose of developing character. As I began to read in this way, all of the texts that surround me became my potential teachers, and I can read for lessons connected to dialogue, structure, endings, word choice, and many, many more.

So when asked to give advice I say to read and write a lot, and I say to learn how to read. That feels like a pretty “DUH” thing for me to write. Do you think so? If you’re in position to ever be asks the question, how do you answer it?