Primal fears and fiction genres: Plus I chew on ableism tropes

I’ve crossed the midpoint of my first year of the Master of Fine Arts program at Eastern Oregon University. A quarter of the way through! It’s amazing how quickly it’s going by, though I have a sneaking suspicion that the next two terms are going to be a lot more challenging.

Last term brought some interesting quirks, such as assignments to write in spirals, invitations to mimic other writers and the first time assigned reading included a gothic novel. That last wasn’t as much fun as it might sound, at least not for me. The book was We Have Always Lived in a Castle by Shirley Jackson, and it’s based on the idea that disabled people are supposedly creepy.

The story is about Merricat, an 18-year-old girl, who narrates with the eerie voice of an odd child of around seven or eight, She lives in the lavish ancestral home of her upper-crust family, the Blackwoods, except the whole family is dead except for Merricat, her older sister Constance and their uncle. The uncle has been left incapacitated by the arsenic poisoning that killed the rest of the family. The nearby villagers taunt the girls mercilessly, because they assume the older sister Constance murdered the family. The reader gets increasing hints that Merricat is out of touch with reality and possibly mentally ill and then most of the way through the story, she suddenly tells the reader that she was the murderer. She killed her family by putting arsenic in the sugar. She knew Constance didn’t use sugar, and she wanted Constance to live. The survival of the uncle was an accident.

“Oh, how delightfully creepy!” is the standard reaction of horror and gothic fans.

I don’t get the attraction. There’s none of the suspense of a mystery or thriller plot. You don’t get clues, just a story in which Merricat is the victim of ostracism and then suddenly she’s the murderer. I never personally find this tactic suspenseful as a reader,  but rather just plain irritating, because it is a cheap and lazy mechanism for writers. No actual subtlety is required to keep the secret and artfully reveal it, because the characters already know it and the reader can be teased at will.

Any spookiness or pleasurable horror in the book comes from the fact that Merricat appears to be dealing with a mental illness, a developmental disability or possibly both. What would in reality be a terrible tragedy and no laughing or shrieking matter—if it actually happened—is rendered as a caricature. In the beginning, the taunting villagers seem monstrously cruel but then the reader is apparently supposed to grasp their morbid fascination and share it.

I initially found the narrative voice of the book mildly charming, but as it turned out that it was the actual disability of the narrator that was the object of tittilating fear and loathing, my gut turned sour.

A horror image featuring a woman with weird glowing eyes - image from pixabay

It certainly isn’t the first time a horror or gothic novel used disability or mental illness as a convenient catalyst for supposedly creepy vibes. I have a very strong reaction to any romanticizing and fetishizing of disability and mental illness. To me, there is nothing better in literature than hard experiences told well in an authentic manner that gives the reader an internal sense of what it is like to undergo such an experience. Conversely, the worst thing for me in literature is the use of hard life experiences for titillation and othering, such as to portray a character like Merricat as “fascinating” but utterly unlike one’s self.

Whenever I feel particularly upset at a book, I always consider when it was published, because it does matter to me what social context the writer was writing from. This book was originally published in 1962, so it’s relative lack of sensitivity and unreasonable portrayal of apparent developmental disability and mental illness (likely more intended by the author) is somewhat more forgivable than something written in the last twenty years would be, but it is a portrayal that has lived long past its relevance. I wish it wasn't being presented as a classic worth emulating.

Jackson apparently intended to portray Merricat as a “madwoman", a term that would have been already somewhat outdated at the time, as a form of titillation, for which numerous critics praised her. For some people, it’s creepy and spooky to think about “madness” or “losing one’s mind.” The concept of inherent evil in a child or childlike innocent adult is also a particularly icky trope that has stuck with us until today in the horror genre. The literary analysis I read speculated that Merricat’s “symptoms” most resemble Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. However, her “childlike” demeanor in which Jackson stated that she was 18 but then proceeded to write a seven-year-old makes Merricat appear “developmentally delayed.”

The problem with these portrayals is not first and foremost in their inaccuracy. It’s a tricky thing to write. I’m in the midst of attempting to write a developmentally disabled character with a lot more scientific backing than Jackson would have had to work with in the early 1960s, and I can attest that it is a challenge. The much more grievous problem is the use of disability/mental illness, whichever was intended by the author, as a crutch to invoke an eerie vibe and an impression of “inherent evil” that is so far beyond anyone’s control that it leaves even the one carrying the evil utterly innocent. It’s a trope intended to elicit titillation, from Merriam-Webster defined as “the stimulation of pleasurable excitement.” Horror and gothic literature are often defined as genres in which fear and spookiness evoke pleasure, and this is the function of the supposed “madness” in this book.

From Frankenstein to Freddy Kruger and on to today, so many horror and gothic villains are physically or mentally different. As most of my fellow writers argue, this is just the way horror and gothic genres are. The genre is based on the fear of monsters, so it is “natural” that readers are drawn to stories about people whose bodies or minds are twisted out of normality.

And “natural” it might well be, though that isn’t necessarily a defense. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element too. Doesn’t make it less poisonous.

At first I thought my nonfiction reading this past few weeks was a nice contrast, until I started to see a connection. I’ve been reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, a cognitive scientist specializing in the biological underpinnings of human morality. In a nutshell, Haidt identifies five interlocking mechanisms that appear to be genetically hard-wired in humans which then lead to all the moral judgements, ethics, taboos and so forth that various individuals and societies have come up with.

He mostly focuses on how this affects the thinking of various groups in modern American society. It's fascinating, and I believe his five mechanisms can be applied to fiction genres as well. Basically, Haidt says the human brain is wired to respond negatively if 1. harm is done, especially to a child, 2. something is unfair in the group, 3. someone is foreign or disloyal to the group, 4. the order and hierarchy of the group is threatened, or 5. something is reminiscent of possible pathogens or disease. All of these responses helped humans to survive and pass their genes on. As a result, negative reactions to these cues were selected for as were positive responses to their converse (1. care for others, especially those who. may carry one’s genes forward, 2. justice and fairness in groups, 3. loyalty, patriotism and group unity, 4. good, responsible leadership, and 5. purity, pristine environments, perfectly proportioned people). Darwin and all... blah Blah Blah.

Haidt spends a whole book showing how every moral or ethical judgement we make is based on those genetically engrained mechanisms. But of course, some people are motivated by one or two more than the others, either due to genes or cultural focus. And some societies and subcultures teach us to control some of these impulses (or not). Say, American liberals teach their children to not be racist or nationalist, i.e. to combat any negative impulses toward those who just look a little foreign (mechanism 3). Or religious conservatives feel negatively about gay people because differences in peoples’ behavior trigger their anti-pathogen sense (mechanism 5) which was hard-wired primarily to protect their ancestors from people who behaved differently because they might be actually sick. Today’s right-wingers then exacerbate this inborn tendency through ever more explicit stories connecting LGBTQ people to feelings of disgust and fear. All fascinating stuff.

But here's the thing for fiction writers. All stories must have a problem to drive plot. I'm betting every genre relies primarily on one or maybe two of these mechanisms to drive its plots and the degree to which readers are motivated by that particular mechanism determines which genre they're likely to be most interested in. The boundaries between genres can be defined by how much a particular work uses a particular negative/positive response mechanism.

For example, stories with a lot of drama and romance tap into the negative feelings against harm and the converse desire for care (mechanism 1). Stories with a law-enforcement hero or disaster stories are based on the breakdown of order mechanism and the converse desire for order and legitimate authority (mechanism 4). Stories with big battles between groups, whether they're military or involving say orcs, work with mechanism 3. Stories about justice and societal drama work with mechanism 2. And then, horror and gothic primarily tap into mechanism 5. (Did you suspect I had a point?)

So, I think this is why I feel this reaction to horror and gothic genres and why I'm far from the first person to complain (google “horror ableism”) about the horror/gothic tropes that use disability and mental illness as the spur of emotion in horror/gothic genres. Really, which horror book or movie isn’t mainly based on the fascination with some monstrous human or monster? Just as readers get a rush out of the sense of threat from the other, the foreign or the disloyal in adventure stories using mechanism 3, readers of horror get a rush just from encountering what essentially horrifies and disgusts them in individual humans (mechanism 5).

This realization has helped me to better understand the underpinnings of why people read different kinds of stories, so maybe studying this book is a good thing, even though I wish this (zombie) trope would die, die, die. At the same time, I wonder if horror can get away from these tropes and still be the same genre. There are horror stories where the "person" who triggers the fear of contagion to drive the plot is truly a non-human monster or fantastically different enough that it clearly isn’t a medical condition. But if one were to say horror should never use body and mind differences as the spur, that would cut the genre by half or maybe more. On the other hand, fears of other races used to be considered standard and fair game for a lot of military and adventure stories. And our culture has largely managed to throw off that trope and make such manipulation of the fear of other nationalities and races an artistic taboo. So, it can be done.

I, for one, hope society moves away from the trope of spooky and creepy albino characters (Princess Bride anyone? I love that movie, except that part.), scary villains with weird speech, hunched backs and weird-looking eyes (across many genres), and mental differences (a lot of the horror and gothic novels and films).

I told a group of writers how upset I was about this trope and those few who made any reply said they love horror, precisely because of this type of characterization and that I’m oversensitive. Most people still don’t see disability being used as a villainous descriptor as a problem in storytelling. If people who look and sound like you aren’t regularly treated as creepy and villainous, you might have a hard time seeing why this trope would be disturbing.

I wonder how my fellow writers would feel if instead of being a developmentally delayed “madwoman,” Merricat was black and had a thick bayou accent and that was tinted to feel creepy and to account for why she had murdered her whole family. It may be hard to imagine because we don’t think of racial differences as spooky today, but there was a time not so long ago, when that trope was alive and well. I don’t mean to imply that black people have an advantage. Positive and genuine representation of black and brown people in fiction and movies remains inadequate. But when it comes to people with disabilities, it’s open season.

I don’t even have a disability anything like Merricat’s apparent symptoms. So, why do I care so much?

I’m irritated because this is far from the first time, and over time and repetition, that type of portrayal influences subconscious thinking patterns and social norms. Think of the squinted eyes of a villainous character which jitter and dart with no apparent reason, never making eye contact. Sound familiar? If you know me in person, that is how I look—other than the adjective “villainous” (I hope). I’d bet money that there are a few horror and gothic villains out there with characteristics like my eyes and that plays a role in why people get a general creepy vibe when they see someone like me.

It’s the effect on social ostracism of people with all types of disabilities that bothers me about this trope.

More broadly, we need to be aware of the primal fears that underlie our emotional responses both in entertainment and in social and political matters. Most progressives would acknowledge on some level that the antidote to the fear of foreignness and out-group threats is diversity. If we raise our children in a community where our friends and neighbors come in all colors, speak different languages and practice various faiths, then those children will no longer respond to people of other races, languages or religions with the primal fear of the foreign, because they will not be foreign. It is somewhat harder to do that with disability, partly because each disability is so different. It’s impossible for everyone to be wholly accustomed to every type of disability. But wider representation of people with various body and mind differences in our entertainment without making them out to be villains or objects of pity would be a start.

Why study writing or art in the age of AI?

And I’m off… out of the door and down the path, tripping along with a staff and a pocket handkerchief (or some such) on a new adventure that will likely be rather uncomfortable, but may eventually make a good story.

My Master of Fine Arts program is truly underway with readings for a couple of weeks at the beginning of summer term and then two-weeks of intensive seminars and workshops from morning ‘til night in the Eastern Oregon mountains. This has my blood flowing again. It’s been a couple of decades since I was last exhilarated.

And while this is tame compared to some of the adventures I undertook “back in the day,” it is a strange time to be studying writing or any kind of art, even if my ostensibly sensible reason is that I can always teach online if the market remains recalcitrantly focused on celebrities. With AI writing and art surging across the internet, the future of creative professions is more in question than at any time in the past.

Over the centuries and millennia, art and literature have weathered technological limitations, economic depression, political repression, the malaise of unsatisfying debauchery, black holes of inspiration, market saturation, celebrity obsessions and even the lethargy of widespread prosperity in the 20th century. There have been many times when writers and artists have bemoaned the state of the field or even cried the end of art.

Image of a young girl in a white dress drawing in a notebook on grass - Creative commons image from fawke of flickr.com

Yet, somehow AI is a whole new level.

If a lay person sometimes can’t differentiate between AI writing and the work of a skilled human writer, isn’t it finally all over for us? Why on earth would I devote the time, not to mention the money, to study creative writing at the highest level? The market has already shown that only a tiny fraction of publishing will include new, non-celebrity authors. Self-publishing is dead in the water as a means of livelihood, though it may be fun for family or interest-group memoirists.

And yet…

I am embarking on this course of study most of all because it brings me joy and delight, a rare feeling in this of all years. The prospect of spending two years discussing word-craft and story with fellow writers feels to me like I am seven-years-old again, entering the old general store at the end of the long bike ride from Pumpkin Ridge, gazing at the racks upon racks of bright-colored candy laid out before me—pure delicious sweetness and a much needed reward for a lifetime of grindstones.

Yes, some of us just love writing or art so much that the hope of making a living at it is mostly a matter of wishing not to have to have a day. job. We aren’t looking for riches, just a way to scrape by and write all day. But let’s try to be sensible or reasonable here. Other than childish self-indulgence, is there still value in writing as a calling, a profession or a high art?

The modern world is so full of cynicism and cliche that when I first contemplated this post, I found myself balking. A little voice inside me cried out that it doesn’t matter if there is any reasonable reason. We NEED art! I NEED writing! Nothing else matters.

But after wading into some of the initial reading for my courses, including for a workshop by Oregon writer Kim Stafford, I did find “good reasons” that we need human writers. To list a few:

• Good fiction is one of the few times we truly absorb someone else’s perspective. This world is in sore need of empathy and AI, for all its uses, will never be a substitute for that.

• Writing in all its forms is communication, a way to bridge gaps and impart both emotions and sensations. Readers may not always know where or how, but we still need that call from one to another.

• We need, for instance, to raise the alarm of climate change and ecological destruction, a theme that has become prominent in my courses. AI could possibly mimic this kind of writing, except that most of it has not been done yet, the field of environmental writing is still young.

• AI writing uses a set number of words to say a specific thing. It does not know nuance or how to write between the lines. It doesn’t do emotional complexity. In a polarized, black-and-white society, the capacity of human writers to say things subtly and in shades of gray is essential.

• In a media culture where facts have become mutable, corruptible and expendable, story is a desperately needed antidote. Facts may be obscured and statistics manipulated by those with money and power, but one’s own true story still remains in the hands of each individual person. It can be faked, but there’s a zing to authenticity that is palpable and hard to manufacture. It’s the weapon of the human writer.

• While one can stand on a street corner and shout or even post a shouting YouTube video today, writing still remains a uniquely empowering means of expression. Once an individual has versatile writing skills, that person will never be as trapped or as vulnerable to exploitation as they would have been without it. Teaching writing then is the work of empowering others.

These are just a few of the things that have come to me as I dive into my first courses. Can you think of any more “good reasons” to pursue writing? Post them in the comments. <3

I don’t know how financially lucrative the writing profession will be over the next ten or twenty years. That is unpredictable and likely rather bleak. But if past experience with artisan skills that have faded in recent generations carries over, it may well be that within a few decades, solid word-smithing skills may become rare and precious.

AI versus writers: Weighing both sides and ChatGTP's startling response

I am only the umpteen-thousandth writer to write about the impact of AI on writing as a profession. You might even ask what took me so long to pipe up about it.

But the widespread use of AI over the last several months was not a predictable or previously known process. Now some data and some real world impacts are starting to come in and I can make some educated guesses.

First of all, many writers are aghast at the ability of AI generators to produce life-like text in seconds on just about any topic imaginable. There has been a vehemently negative response to AI in online writers’ groups and I’ve seen more than one writer who admitted to using AI viciously excoriated by other writers. The majority opinion, at least among human writers, is definitely anti-AI.

And there are good reasons for that.

Creative commons image by Richard Patterson

While AI-produced text is banal and prone to factual errors, it is the work of a few minutes for a skilled writer to take an AI text and spruce it up dramatically. One of the most immediate impacts of AI writing tools is to significantly speed up technical or corporate writing. Work that used to require ten writers can now be done by one writer, who mainly just edits, checks facts and adds a bit of flare here and there.

A similar thing happened in automobile manufacturing a few decades ago. Technological advances increased production per worker so dramatically that only a few workers retained their jobs, which left large industrial cities looking like scenes out of a post-apocalyptic novel. The same could easily happen to the large section of white color jobs where writing plays a major role.

Jobs like marketing staff, copy writers, copyeditors, technical writers, medical or scientific editors, webpage content providers and speech writers are all likely to be literally decimated. One in ten may be left in five years and most of those jobs that do survive will involve a lot of checking over vast amounts of AI-generated text—not the kind of job most writers want.

It’s happening already. I personally know several people in technical writing who have already lost their jobs or seen their business gutted because of AI. Most of my editing jobs still involve assisting writers for whom English is a second language. It’s high-level work, where the author isn’t able to accurately check the text themselves, and the nuance required is beyond current AI capabilities. So, my gigs aren’t yet under direct threat, but even that is likely to become ever more rare, especially as language-translation AI improves.

Even so, there are writers who extol the virtues of AI. Some have made money by producing dozens or even hundreds of AI books and posting them on Amazon. Even if no individual AI book procures many sales, someone inevitably gets sucked in and with enough hooks in the water, there are apparently substantial returns, for the moment. The problem with that strategy is likely to be that Amazon and other self-publishing platforms will cease to be a place anyone goes to find good books, because the quality of these auto-generated books tends to be very low. The more the platform is overwhelmed with AI and other low-quality offerings, the less it will attract readers.

Another way to get the other side of this story is to ask an AI generator.

When asked, “What will be the positive and negative impacts of AI for people in writing professions?” ChatGTP divides its answer into two categories:

Positive impacts: “AI will streamline research, provide content suggestions, and assist in editing, saving time and enhancing productivity for writers. It can also generate personalized content tailored to specific audiences, potentially increasing engagement and reach.”

Negative impacts: “AI may lead to job displacement for some writers as automation becomes more advanced, and there's a risk of overreliance on AI tools, diminishing creativity and human touch in writing. Additionally, concerns about AI-generated content authenticity and ethical implications may arise, challenging the integrity of written work.”

I’ll take that as four separate points: 1. Labor-saving and enhanced productivity, 2. Personalized content to pinpoint marketing, 3. Job displacement and over-use, and 4. Ethical and authenticity concerns.

I’ve got to hand it to ChatGTP for being reasonably even-handed on criticism of itself. Now, let’s break it down.

1. Labor-saving and enhanced productivity

Few writers today can credibly argue that AI isn’t a helpful assistant in spellchecking manuscripts. We’ve been using that level of automation for decades and most of us would be lost without it. Today, writers can use AI to quickly scan for repetitive words, cliches, passive voice, inconsistencies in usage and clunky sentences. Few writers would argue that this type of AI use is unethical or much different than spellchecking, but it is going to gouge people who have made a living in copyediting.

The downside of this handy type of AI is likely to be that both students and teachers may rely on these tools to such an extent that fewer people will make it over the rather steep learning hump that most previous generations sweated over in high school composition classes. If you can just put down a general idea and let AI fix it—or even write most of it—how many high school or college students are going to actually know how to write an essay for themselves?

You might say that’s just fine. Millennials and even a lot of Gen-Xers are far worse in spelling than our forebears, thanks to spellcheck applications, it hasn’t really hurt us much. We don’t need to spell very well in the modern world. However, the higher levels of editing and even generating an essay in the first place encroach much more on the thinking part than the pure technicality of a spellcheck.

This blurs the line between this “positive” point and the "negative” point about overuse. To be fair, AI is offering tools. Those tools can be used for some good things, like spellchecking and checking for inconsistencies or repetitive text.

Advanced levels of AI, generally in paywalled categories at present, can help with checking academic or scientific sources for both correct citations as well as to ensure no inadvertent “plagiarism” occurs when a writer uses phrasing too similar to that of the original source. Conversely, those tasked with reviewing such work, whether as university instructors or in peer reviewed publications can use these same tools to require exacting citation standards, which may be a net positive, though it will mean cuts in the jobs of graduate students who previously assisted with much of this tedious workSimilarly, advanced levels of AI—mostly in paywalled categories at present—can help with more advanced tasks like checking academic or scientific sources for both correct citations as well as to ensure no inadvertent “plagiarism” occurs when a writer uses phrasing too similar to that of the original source. Conversely, those tasked with reviewing such work, whether as university instructors or in peer reviewed publications can use these same tools to require exacting citation standards, which may be a net positive, though it will mean cuts in the jobs of graduate students who previously assisted with much of this tedious work. There again, the line is blurred between the positive aspects and the negative of job displacement, which I’ll get to below.

Still, it’s hard to argue that these checking tools are negative uses and modern AI has made such tools better. So, I’ll give ChatGTP the point on the positive side.

2. Personalized content to pinpoint marketing

ChatGTP doesn’t word it like this, but I’m translating “personalized content tailored to specific audiences, potentially increasing engagement and reach” into regular English here. This means advertising and marketing of every variety, including that of a blog post, which is meant to help a lowly author like myself gain the interest of readers.

What if I didn’t just write my blog post but I had AI data on you as an individual reader and I could make sure that the post you see agrees with your personal opinions and selects interests you have personally expressed online? The post you see from Arie Farnam might be significantly different from the post someone else sees, if I used this type of “personalized content AI” to “enhance” my posts. (Don’t worry. I won’t.)

What the bot means when claiming this as a “positive” aspect of AI is that much of the advertising and marketing text we see is likely to become even more targeted to one’s specific tastes. Once advertisers know that you are a customer who prioritizes durability, for example, every product you encounter will likely be marketed as “durable” and “well-made” and “long-lasting,” whether it is or not. Marketing will likely reflect even less of what the product is and more what the customer personally wants to hear.

While I have to agree with ChatGTP that this might be a “good thing” for corporations who want to make money at all cost by misleading customers, it is definitely not a good thing for most actual humans.

As an example, I recently purchased a “Sporting Goods Protection Plan” for a $200 fishing pole. The ad popped up as I was checking out on Amazon and offered a warranty against accidental damage and broken items. Because this pole was going to be used by teenagers, I happily shelled out an extra 10 percent of the product price for a two-year warranty. But when it came time to make a claim for a broken pole 9 months later, the insurance company, Asurion, says the “Sporting Goods Protection Plan” I purchased only covers phones and tablets, not fishing poles.

The ad had automatically tailored the text to what I was likely to want to see, so I paid for an insurance plan for a non-existent phone while buying a fishing pole. I did actually read some of the terms and conditions, which stated that the plan covered “cracked, broken and scratched portable items.” Asurion now says a “portable item” refers only to phones and tablets and I should have known that.

Asurion’s representative went so far as to google “Is a fishing pole a portable item?” to try to prove to me that I was wrong. Of course, Google, at this date, still agrees that a fishing pole is portable, so Asurion had to take another tack to continue denying my claim. But what happens when Google provides “personalized” answers to questions like that according to what corporate partners need at the moment? You can see why Asurion would see this as a “good” aspect of AI.

3. Job displacement and over-use

We are already seeing the effects of job displacement. Just as automation and robotic assembly lines increased the productivity of manufacturing workers so dramatically that most of them lost their jobs over the past several decades, the same thing is now happening to that strata of the workforce where writing is a large part of the job. Projects and agendas that used to need 10 staff with writing skills, now only need one. What a writer previously needed ten hours to write, that same writer can now check and correct in one hour.

It’s less rewarding work and because there are so many similar people losing their jobs, those who still have a job are likely to be under immense pressure to process huge amounts of AI generated text in ever shorter time periods and without complaint. It is a terrible outcome both for those who lose their livelihoods and for the few who may still hang on. At least ChatGTP agrees that this is negative.

Of course, it isn’t just negative for the writers. It’s also a disaster for those who read such texts. A text written by a human writer and spellchecked with AI is like a carpenter using a power tool but still building customized furniture and homes by hand. Today’s AI writing is like building houses on an automated assembly line. We all know the difference between the work of a skilled artisan with power tools versus the stiflingly boring, poor quality work of modern prefab homes. We also know how such craftspeople have become scarce, as their jobs are subsumed by corporate automation.

And that’s where the “overuse” part comes in. While letting AI write a boring essay for you “just this once” may feel utterly harmless, especially since you’re an experienced writer and you can check the essay over and touch it up after AI is done, multiplied by thousands and millions, that “just this once” will mean that most writers may never truly gain the needed skills for themselves. Writing student essays, ad copy, website copy and even obituaries was a mind-numbingly boring rite of passage for most of today’s writers.

But that’s the thing. No one actually goes from being a young creative with stories swimming in their head to an experienced and skilled writer without that work-a-day journeyman’s stage of cranking out copy. Pure talent is a myth believed only by people outside the writing profession and by some early beginners.

AI is taking over that training ground. And even though, an individual writer could—through perseverance and tenacity—still learn the craft by writing every essay in school the old way, they will never again get a job writing basic copy fresh out of college. Those jobs that most of today’s writers cut their teeth on are truly a thing of the past, thanks to AI. My first writing internship was editing obituaries for my tiny hometown paper. My first paid writing gig was writing repetitive restaurant reviews. I didn’t love either of these jobs, but when I consider that the next generation will likely have no such toe holds to start climbing the steep wall of the writing profession, I feel grateful to have been born early.

4. Ethical and authenticity concerns

The number of ethical issues that have come up in the other points is already a bit overwhelming, from students using AI to fake their essays to the massive loss of good quality jobs, from the potential for abuse of “personalization” in marketing and customer service to the loss of craftsmanship and authenticity in writing. But there are still a few I haven’t yet mentioned.

One of the biggest ethical issues of AI is that the companies profiting from it are profiting off of stolen intellectual property. Today’s AI engines were trained on vast amounts of published online text, much of it in copyrighted works and periodicals. They may not copy them word for word as in traditional plagiarism but the basic concept of plagiarism still remains. AI copies vast amounts of text and then reshuffles it to create its own text and to determine what is correct usage.

For instance, I published articles in publications such as The Christian Science Monitor and Business Week back in the 2000’s. It is very likely those articles and those of my colleagues were part of the vast supply of published texts that AI copied in order to produce its own texts. Neither the publications nor the authors have been compensated in any way. In fact, if we want to use AI for tasks like checking documents for mistakes, we have to pay the companies that pirated our work to do it. That seems pretty unethical to me.

So, out of four sentences listing positive and negative impacts, ChatGTP gave me two true negative statements, one true positive and one sort-of positive that turns out to be a negative for most people. I’m not convinced that there are really two sides to this issue.

But let me try one last thing and give this post to ChatGTP and get its response…

Well, that took a dark turn. I have now been blocked from ChatGTP apparently. I can no longer use it without being logged in as it recognizes my computer and when I log in I simply cannot send any inquiries. The send button is permanently grayed out. I guess that’s response enough.

I am concerned about the impact of AI on writing, but I’m also very concerned about its impact on most aspects of public life. It is clearly ever easier to simply silence any voice of dissent.

The hidden threat from AI art and writing

Even those of us who live under metaphorical rocks—mostly constructed of the stacks of books we’re reading—have heard of the controversy surrounding AI writing and art. Actors and writers went on strike in Hollywood for three months. Artists are protesting across the internet.

To many outside these fields and even to some within them, the narrative goes something like this: Artists and writers work hard to create masterpieces and they are already under-compensated. Now companies are going to use AI to analyze vast piles of copyrighted material and generate similar work without compensating the artists and writers who produced the original art and books used in the analysis. If you love the work of artists or writers, you should be upset about this because your heroes are going to be robbed.

And that isn’t wrong. The fields of art and writing are notoriously competitive and underpaid for 99.99 percent of those who work in them. Adding extra ways for companies to unfairly exploit professional artists and writers is a terrible idea.

Creative Commons image by mu hybrid art house

But all that sounds theoretical and most AI experts, when pressed, will tell you that it hasn’t really happened yet. Well-known artists and writers haven’t actually lost any money to this phenomenon… yet. And at that point in the conversation, most people who paid attention at all, tune out.

It’s a theoretical future problem. I’ve got 99 problems that are acute today.

However, we almost never hear about the actual harm being done right now by AI in the fields of art and writing. It’s likely that that is because it does not affect anyone wealthy or well-known. It doesn’t plagiarize great or original works. It just silently takes the jobs which artists and writers don’t love but which provide the bread and butter for 90 percent of us working in these fields.

Take for instance the little line-drawing illustrations of goofy no-name characters in a child’s math book. A. Who drew those? B. Was that person a real artist? C. Could just anyone draw them?

Answer key: A. Someone you’ve never heard of. B. You better bet they are. C. No way! I dare you to try.

Take the description of a product or service on a website or in a brochure. Likewise, someone wrote that. They might have been just regular staff, but if they are, the copy is probably lackluster. They were most likely a writer or a writer in training. If that ad is any good, chances are that the person who wrote it dreams of writing a book or a short story.

There are thousands, even millions of these little unimportant writing, drawing and design jobs in our modern world. You never hear the names of those artists and writers and you’d have to dig very deep into the small print of credits to find them, if they are even listed. These writing and art tasks are sometimes combined with other roles in the corporate world, but the writing and art aspects of the jobs are often the part that gives the person doing them a sense of purpose and self-actualization.

And many working artists and writers use jobs like this as a “day job” to tide them over in hopes that they may someday be able to make a living creating independent art or stories. And many of those who do “make it” and become professional, full-time artists and writers got a lot of their experience and training from these minor, unsung creative tasks.

AI is taking these jobs. Not theoretically in the future, but right now. AI may not yet be able to create cutting-edge art or completely flawless, nuanced text. But it can and does create simple line drawings for every type of publication under the sun and rough drafts of a lot of technical and advertising copy. Writers become editors of AI text. Artists become technical designers, plugging AI-created images into templates.

And that may not sound so bad, until you realize that with this technology, one writer can edit the text that ten would have previously written from scratch. One artist can format images in an hour that would have previously taken them ten hours to create on their own.

I hear about the results of this daily. A friend mentioned off-hand that her sister who used to write speeches for a major corporate CEO as a full-time job is so “successful” that the jobs of seven other writers have been consolidated and she now writes remarks for seven CEOs and their public relations departments. My friend thought this meant her sister was moving up in the world, but the job she was doing before was also a full-time job. She got only a very small raise to do the jobs of six other writers. And this is because the companies she works for use AI to generate text, which she merely refines.

And the six other writers? They had to find other jobs and given that this is happening across the industry, the chances are that they didn’t find jobs that entail creative writing.

These basic creative jobs are disappearing. They aren’t the jobs artists and writers most want. They aren’t particularly fun or all that creative. They’re just jobs that use and foster writing and artistic skills, jobs that have provided basic livelihoods ever since the invention of the printing press.

No one gets very upset about this in public discussions about AI because those weren’t the sought-after jobs anyway. But the cost is going to be high.

First, writers and artists who have not yet broken into full-time professional work in their fields will have to find other jobs, often more exhausting jobs, often jobs where they can’t utilize their primary skills in writing and art. It isn’t the end of the world, but for many of us these jobs provided not only a bit of self-respect but also a way to keep our skills sharp even when life and “the market” didn’t allow for much time to pursue our writing or artistic calling.

Second, there will no longer be much of a training ground for new artists and writers. You’ll either learn to be outstanding at your craft and then become well-known or you won’t. And this will exacerbate the trend of writing and art being a business where you have to be born into the right family or socio-economic circumstances to have a reasonable shot at a career. It will feed the monstrous celebritization of writing and art, in which a tiny elite make fabulous amounts of money, while everyone else makes little or nothing.

Third and possibly most insidiously, with even fewer paying jobs that utilize the skills of creative writing and artistic expression, schools and universities will eventually cut back their art and writing programs. Surely, people will still dream of being artists and writers and some education in those fields will be available for those who can pay. But when the social usefulness of a trade fades, so does it’s infrastructure.

For me, this is not theoretical, because I saw newspaper journalism undergo a preview of this process twenty years ago. For most of the twentieth century, it was possible for writers, artists or photographers to make a basic living producing material for the many magazines, newspapers and other periodicals that connected the world of that era. There were writers, artists and photographers who were regular employees of these publications, but generally the insatiable hunger for variety meant that there were quite a few freelance opportunities as well.

It was still a competitive and risky business to be in, but it was one that gave many creative people an outlet for expression, a start in the profession and a basic income. Both the expansion of the internet and changes in international news focus after 9/11 changed all that within a few short years in the early 2000s. And nine out of ten of my colleagues in newspaper journalism had to go looking for other jobs.

Many went into completely different fields. Others took up copywriting, technical writing or graphic design in the online world—shifting to fewer, less independent, more constrained jobs. When old journalism colleagues get together, someone will often quip about our profession having gone the way of blacksmithing—meaning that technological and social change has rendered us obsolete.

At the time, many hoped that this was only a market shift. Creative jobs would come back in a different form, they said. We’d be able to write website copy and technical manuals or design ads. And many have, but those were not really new jobs. They existed before and the writers and artists pushed out of mainstream journalism were joining an already crowded pool of content providers in the advertising and technical fields, which migrated online.

In the past twenty years, I have not seen much recovery in the availability of journalism jobs. Mostly the growth has been in the least creative types of jobs that still require some artistic or writing skills—such as technical and advertising copy, jobs where the artist or writer has zero say about the content and is nothing but an engine of creativity, directed by executives.

Just as our old journalism jobs didn’t return and better jobs didn’t replace them, I don’t believe the assurances that AI will only take the drudgery out of art and writing and leave us with the fun parts.

Certainly, those who are at the top of these professions have little to fear from AI at this point. But most paid journalism jobs disappeared twenty years ago and stayed gone. These unsung creative jobs in copywriting and basic art and design are being gobbled up by AI because our societies have chosen not to regulate the way companies can use intellectual property to train AI. That train has already left the station and reversing it at this point would be an immense task.

To read or not to read

I’ve got a twelve-year-old struggling to read and a school that says they’re “done with reading,” meaning that they assume everyone has mastered the skill by now, and they are moving on to more in-depth uses of reading. Since this kid was in second grade, I’ve been told he had “symptoms of dyslexia,” but he was denied the diagnosis due to other disabilities, which meant he hasn’t gotten any particular help aside from what his blind Mama could give.

Now they’re saying that boat has sailed, and no help will be provided regardless. He also can’t get access to text-based accommodations, so he’s failing social studies and science, subjects where reading is now the primary access point.

And of course, this is hard on his self-esteem, the key component of the motivation to “work hard”—the school’s primary suggestion.

Teachers are likely to point fingers at parents in these situations, but some kids struggle, due to disability and the diagnosis of dyslexia is narrower than most people realize. I’ve read to my kids every day—stressed or not, exhausted or not—since before they could sit up. It wasn’t a chore for me. I love reading and I love kids’ books. I also started them on early phonics at age two and they’ve done practice reading every day. In short, it isn’t for lack of opportunity at home.

Image via Pixabay - A somber young man reading in a dim space

One of my kids was given a bit of school-based intervention for dyslexia, even without the formal diagnosis, and that one has now taken flight in reading, despite significant neuro-developmental disability, reading for fun and thus gaining the strength to also use reading for information gathering.

But the other one has been left behind, despite vigorous daily efforts at home. There have been many tears over it and plenty of pressure to “just let it go” from other adults who don’t want to deal with the hassle.

You’re reading a blog, so I’m betting you enjoy reading or at least don’t find it to be an odious chore. That actually makes this a hard topic to truly discuss because it may seem obvious that we all agree on it, at least here in this forum.

But the problem isn’t so much whether or not you personally read. It’s how important reading is, what we should do to help struggling readers, what resources should be devoted to making sure everyone has access, and last but not least, what you read.

Oddly enough, to explore these questions of reading, it helps to look at the numbers.

The separating gets serious by third grade. Third graders who can’t pass a basic reading proficiency test are 5 times less likely to graduate from high school. About a quarter don’t pass.

In sixth grade the divide sharpens. The vast majority (82 percent) of sixth graders who fail an English class never graduate from high school, even late or with a specialized diploma. And yet, the school tells me we have to “wait and see” for any help for my sixth grader.

By this age, 85 percent of the curriculum is taught through reading. Kids who struggle to read and don’t get the help they need have high rates of discipline and emotional problems because of the huge toll on their self esteem. They not only drop out at higher rates and don’t attend further education, but they have great difficulty in adult life, accessing information and employment. They become an easy mark for scam artists and debt sharks.

Now, I do know people who read well enough and function as adults, who even went to college but don’t particularly like to read. Despite the stereotype that bookish people are socially isolated, I observe that people who don’t read books are often noticeably more arrogant and unfriendly as well as less happy, something that large-scale research bares out.

A study by Kingston University found that people who read books (rather than watch TV or videos for entertainment) show significantly higher levels of empathy and cooperative social behavior, essentially the building blocks of civilization. The more a person reads fiction, the more empathy for others they gain, likely because one of the functions of fiction is to imagine oneself into a different person’s life, much more so than when watching a story on a screen, where we are still always on the outside looking in.

But so what? Isn’t it up to each individual to choose to read or not?

Pew research showed last year that 23 percent of American adults said they didn’t read an actual book (digital or otherwise) in the past year. On the surface, that doesn’t seem too bad. It’s less than a quarter and not everybody cultivates reading books as a hobby.

But if you break that number down, it becomes more troubling. A full 11 percent of college educated adults didn’t read a book in the past year. Given that they went to college, it seems likely that whatever field they’re in, it would make sense to read at least professional books or self-help or how-tos, but that 11 percent doesn’t.

It gets even more disturbing as you dig deeper into the data. While white adults (20 percent) and black adults (25 percent) reported not reading a book at similar levels to the average, Hispanic adults had a much higher rate of not reading (38 percent). And why is that so troubling?

Maybe Hispanics just don’t like to read. But that doesn’t make logical sense. As a minority, Hispanics still struggle in education, but not significantly more than African Americans or other minorities. Instead, it has to do with the fact that they speak a different language and yet live in a country with a very dominant, official language.

The very existence of the descrepancy between everybody else and Hispanics in America shows that it is NOT just that 23 percent of Americans are disinterested in reading (and by some people’s measure, just plain lazy). For a large part of them, it is a matter of access.

Yes, we can download digital books in Spanish, those of us with the money to have good phones and a subscription. But it’s harder to just go to your local library and find more than a handful of books to read in Spanish. It’s harder to get a Spanish-language book at a Scholastic Book Fair or a garage sale or even just from a friend.

Of course, if an individual Hispanic person focuses a huge amount of attention on obtaining Spanish-language books, they’ll likely get them. But it takes a lot more time and energy, so there are simply fewer people who end up going through it.

Similarly. the percent of people who haven’t read a book in the past year and household income shows an unfailing inverse relationship—with 30 percent of adults with a household income of less than $30,000 per year not reading and only 15 percent of adults with income greater than $75,000 per year not reading. In this case, both time and money may be issues, because people with lower incomes tend to work more hours and have less free time (one of those counter-intuitive facts of our economic system).

Of course, the causation does go the other way as well. People who can’t read well can’t get even trade education, can’t get jobs, can’t keep jobs, can’t navigate bureaucracies, and can’t pay bills, keep out of debt or avoid scams. They inevitably have far fewer opportunities in life, because of the society we live in.

Sometimes I’m frustrated with my sixth-grader who feels demotivated about reading, since he’s been struggling with it as long as he can remember with little help and no end in sight. At other times, I think of the life he might have had in a different era. Life was hard when people lived primarily by agriculture, but this kid is a hard worker, brawny and excellent with animals. He would likely have been fine. He’s agile, healthy as a horse and a good shot. He would have made a superior hunter-gatherer as well.

Just as with so many other disabilities, it is the society we live in that dictates which disabilities are the most limiting. Missing a hand, could have been meant hunger and even death in many ages past. Today, it isn’t considered much of a big deal. But a reading disability seriously exposes a person to our world’s worst dangers from health and safety to hunger and homelessness.

I see this kid with many other things that are important to him and the need for reading to get through the rest of school and to function in our society seriously cuts into the time and energy he has for other things. Struggling with reading often takes up the majority of our evening free time.

Even knowing the vast benefits of reading and my personal love of it, I do sometimes wish we could just focus on the things that this kid is good at and that matter to him. But how can I let it go as a parent, in good conscience, knowing the costs.

What I know is that reading is essential if one is to have choices and genuine freedom in today’s world. It is at least as valuable as a major sense like sight or hearing. If a child was blind and there was a sight-saving surgery available, it is hard to imagine that our society would just say “Tough luck.”

But this is essentially what our schools have told us for years. The expense and trouble it would take to do individualized work to help a struggling student to read is deemed unreachable. We’re either told it is too early for intervention or now suddenly it’s too late.

To read is the quintessential skill of the modern world. It makes a particularly enriching hobby. but it is also an absolute necessity even for those who don’t revel in it. To read or not to read. Now that truly is the question that matters today.

The Chalice and the Blade: How has the book stood the test of time and why it matters

The first half of this summer was my time to work like a dog, taking care of the needs and desires of both kids and bureaucrats. Even my Tarot card for the month indicated I had best let go of my own wishes and sacrifice for “the greater good.”

Well, I can survive drudgery but not boredom, so I listened to an audiobook every chance I got, often only a few minutes a day. The book was The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.

It’s a hefty book in print, a monumental work of multidisciplinary anthropology, psychology and sociology with some biology thrown in for kicks. And no, I am not implying that this constitutes “light reading” for me. I suspect that the heavier my circumstances, the heavier the reading material required to relieve my stress. (We can analyze my nerdiness later.)

Thus, this post is first a book review and second a contemplation of the broader significance of its claims.

I don’t write about books here unless they are extraordinarily good, so you can guess at my opinion on this one. Eisler’s book is one of those few that shake my foundations and persuade me to rethink some long-held beliefs and subconscious assumptions.

Creative Commons image by Chi Bellami

To be clear, The Chalice and the Blade is often heavy going. It is an academic text and I can tell already that I will need a second listen to be able to reliably quote details from it. It doesn’t have the entrancing lyricism of Braiding Sweetgrass, though I would put the two on the same shelf under “Books that rekindle the will to live” and it is relatively readable and accessible given the academic treatment.

What it has is substantial academic and scientific backing for a thesis that challenged growing cynicism even when it was first published in 1987. Yup, it’s a pretty old book, which I have only now discovered. I had heard whispers of its concepts, usually without attribution or sufficient background to be convincing, but this was my first time reading it.

The central thesis of The Chalice and the Blade is that between 25,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago human society was structured in a fundamentally different way from what has followed in the last 3,000 years. During the Neolithic and up until the early Bronze Age, Eisler asserts, the most developed human societies were largely egalitarian with a high degree of equity between the sexes and social classes.

Those Neolithic human cultures left behind a lot of goddess figurines, which is the part I had previously vaguely heard about. But in popular culture I had also heard a lot of statements claiming, “That old theory about ancient goddess-worshiping cultures has been debunked.” These were mainly on social media and they didn’t cite any sources, but the sheer volume of such assertions led me to believe there was probably something to it.

So, the first thing I did when I finished The Chalice and the Blade was to look up academic and scientific criticism, updates and/or confirmation of the book. And I found that it has largely stood the test of time.

Eisler’s work was made possible by the advent of carbon dating. Before the 1980s, archeologists mostly dated their finds relatively (i.e. this one is older than that one because it looks more primitive). And their dating method was pretty subjective and not all that scientific. They’d look at the technology of a culture they dug up and assess its level of technological and cultural advancement and date it based on the assumption that everyone started out primitive and both gradually and linearly became more complex and technologically skilled.

Carbon dating turned the field on its head—not that most of the old-school archeologists were paying attention. As Eisler shows through a survey of archeological data from around the Mediterranean Sea, many human societies developed significant technology and culture—with more sophisticated ceramics, water systems, script and egalitarian social organization—and then they lost it all, in some cases repeatedly.

The facts Eisler cites from archeological finds—the lack of signs of great social disparities (houses all about the same size and so forth), the many goddess figurines, the scarcity or complete lack of weapons in these Neolithic Mediterranean finds and so forth—are solid. Eisler’s interpretations are both intriguing and persuasive though not yet fully investigated.

Among Eisler’s analytical claims are the following:

1. The event (or rather repeated events) that changed relatively peaceful, egalitarian, goddess-worshipping societies around the Mediterranean into war-obsessed empires inspired by heavy-handed sky gods (Ra, Zeus, Apollo, Jehovah, etc.) was successive invasions by nomads from areas with less human-friendly climates such as the Eurasian steppe and the Saharan Desert.

2. Therefore, humans are not by nature warlike, selfish, cruel and power hungry. Apparently it was harsh environments that turned some in that direction and then they infected others with the social disease of Patriarchy or what Eisler calls “the Androcratic system.”

3. It is, then, possible for humans to return to what Eisler calls “the Gylanic system” with all the benefits of technological advance, egalitarianism, peace and goddess worship if we continue the trajectory of the women’s movement and promote egalitarian, cooperative and democratic values in childhood education and society at large.

The data and scientific facts laid out in The Chalice and the Blade are impressive, and fact checking didn’t uncover any major holes or earth-shattering updates in the science since 1987. Those facts caused me to question some of my assumptions acquired through popular culture and mainstream education. But how do Eisler’s extrapolations hold up today?

It is tremendous to look at the beginnings of human civilization from the perspective of relatively advanced cultures of the Neolithic that were then degraded to a barbaric state before what our schools tell us was the infancy of civilization in ancient Egypt and Greece. Our prehistory is not a seamless progression from primitive cave people bashing each other over the head with wooden clubs and stone axes to vicious tribes whacking one another with bronze and then finally iron weapons.

How is it possible that archeologists have known all this since I was a small child, and yet our schools still continue to teach ancient history in that tired and inaccurate linear form? Eisler would say that the “Androcratic system” and those who gain inordinate power from it have always suppressed information that might undermine its supremacy.

Eisler draws a lot of big conclusions from the data. She insists that nomadic tribes brought warlike tendencies, hierarchy and angry sky gods from elsewhere. There is some evidence for this, but it is a bit sketchier simply because wandering tribes with primitive technology leave far less for archeologists to find than people with cities, aqueducts, metallurgy, stone-carved script, sculptures and advanced pottery.

Part of me wants to believe Eisler’s conclusions, based on just the data presented, but there are implications that Eisler doesn’t explore, particularly in her second thesis claiming that the archeological record proves that humans aren’t hardwired for war, hierarchy and cruelty.

It’s nice to know that some humans didn’t start out that way. It turns out that when The Chalice and the Blade was translated into Chinese (among 25 other languages), Chinese archeologists embarked on a project to duplicate Eisler’s work in their region and found strikingly similar results. So, it is likely that it wasn’t just the humans of the Mediterranean.

But what then of the warlike tribes that invaded these cultures? They were just as human and arguably, since they murdered a lot of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping people, both around the Mediterranean and in ancient China (and most likely elsewhere as well), we have a lot of their genes today. Are we still really the heirs to a peaceful world or the descendants of those who destroyed it?

Eisler does document how after the invaders took over they generally went local and took up the leisurely and peaceable ways of those they had conquered after a couple of generations—only to be conquered in their turn when the next invasion came a few centuries later. So, there is some reason to argue that the tendency to be murderous and domineering was based more on environment than on genes, but still eventually the warlike tribes took over and stamped out the developed cultures of the Neolithic almost everywhere.

Even more tenuous is Eisler’s extrapolation, arguing that because humans once lived in a cooperative, egalitarian and largely peaceful society that we can do it again in our much more technologically complex age. I definitely hope she’s right, but the last thirty-plus years since the book was published, don’t do much to bolster that hope.

So, it’s a fascinating book—intriguing, well-researched and readable for an academic work. I was sorry when I came to the end and plan on rereading it soon. That’s the book-review part of this post.

As for my changing worldview, I am still observing the reverberations of Eisler’s facts and analysis on my thought processes and life. First, I am relieved to find that the social media trolls dismissing the study of ancient goddess worship are pretty much just plain wrong. I have long had a natural tendency to look to the older goddesses in my spiritual seeking. Now I feel even more confident in that respect.

Second, I have always had difficulty with anything regarding my own European ancestry, not knowing much beyond the last several hundred years of tyranny, war and injustice. Eisler holds out hope that if we dig deeper, there may be plenty of value to find.

Finally and most importantly though, there is my battered spirit of hope. I have been pushed—kicking and screaming but eventually resigned—into cynicism over the past few years. The world and personal circumstances have conspired to show me just how broken, un-evolved and selfish humans can be and how frighteningly common that state is. Eisler’s analysis offers a societal goal that I could choose to put my shoulder into—one with at least some basis in scientific facts and reality.

I’m at a point in my life where I’m shedding a lot of things that didn’t work out—a marriage, a home, an adopted country, a line of work—and starting over in a lot of ways. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing for the next ten or twenty years and before reading Eisler’s book, it seemed like the best bet was just to hunker down with the remnants of my family, try to live well, balancing ethics and sanity, and not put much stock in the future.

Frankly, that’s what I have been doing. But for the first time in a while, I have a glimmer that maybe that isn’t all there is left, that there might be a reason to keep pushing the rocks of social justice, spirituality and passing on wisdom and skills up the hill.

No guarantees mind you. It’s all just a theory. But I’ll take a life-affirming theory with scientific backing over dead certainty of doom whenever I get the chance.

On teaching kids boring history... and a few free not-boring texts

While my kids are now provisionally back in school after COVID-19 lockdown, I have homeschooled them in English for years because we live in a non-English-speaking country and I also tutor other kids, I have a subscription to Education.com, a major site for teaching materials and lesson plans.

Most of the time, I’m pretty satisfied with Education.com, including their online math and typing games, which come in quite handy. This isn’t so much a rant about one site but rather a critical look at the way history is taught in elementary schools in general.

Creative Commons image by Odleywonderworks of Flickr.com

I can’t even say that the US is particularly bad in this regard. At least, in some American schools, they incorporate projects, plays, dioramas and historical reading into history. But the basic teaching materials, the textbooks and worksheets, which get used to fill in the gaps are still excruciatingly boring.

A lot of progress has been made in the US to teach more truthful and balanced history, since I was a child. When I was a kid, I remember being terribly frustrated by social studies and history classes, as well as horrendously bored. I could tell that just beyond the droning on about pilgrims and pompous founding fathers, there were amazing stories that I wanted to hear. Maybe I sensed this because of the things I heard at home, but at least it kept me from condemning the entire subject of history the way a lot of my friends did.

Today, the standard materials for American history classes are much more diverse and include a lot of famous women and people of color. There are still parts where the focus is heavily on the lives of the rich and powerful at the expense of the people I can relate to, but there has been progress.

Still, that isn’t even the crux of my problem with history teaching in schools and I see the same problem in a vastly different culture, where the focus is on their own history. In the briefest terms, the problem with the history materials is simply boredom.

Don’t get me wrong. Now I love history. When I was in high school, I joined a medieval history club. When I was a newspaper journalist, my history graphs inserted into news stories to give background always packed a particular punch. I devour historical fiction and non-fiction alike. But the stuff we give kids in lower elementary grades is just a mishmash of mediocre writing, disconnected facts and cumbersome official terminology, not to mention the dates, which most younger kids are not remotely prepared to comprehend.

Most early elementary students have a shaky grasp of time beyond a few months ago, let alone the span of human history. Inserting a beginning date to any event can start students along the path to understanding timelines. Constructing a visual timeline will eventually help. But overuse of dates that kids can’t relate to turns their brains off faster than anything I know of.

The other thing that turns them off and results in a lot of frustration for me as a parent is the use of unnecessarily difficult vocabulary and official terminology. Granted, my kids are bilingual and they have learning disabilities. They speak English conversationally, but it is their second language and their vocabulary isn’t up to grade level, despite all of the bedtime stories I’ve read to them over the years.

But even for native speakers., elementary history texts are overburdened with official phrases. While adults may be hung up on the importance of terms like “received an honorable discharge” or “considered to be historical treasures” and have good reasons for them, the fact is that most kids will actually understand and care a lot more if they read that someone “left the military” or that “many people feel that this building is very special because of its history.”

I am likely to get a lot of pushback here from educators who insist that “dumbing down” the texts or oversimplifying harms kids. I’m not asking for a dumbing down and the level of complexity is really up to how long the teacher wants to spend on the subject. The question is simply whether or not you use vocabulary and sentence structure that most of the kids have any experience with.

I have little patience with those who argue that this is a matter of slower kids holding back the high achievers. I was a bookworm and a voracious high achiever as a child and I too found the history texts boring and irrelevant. Even I didn’t understand all of the official terminology and the texts were unnecessarily focused on things that I couldn’t relate to. The difference was only that I could slog through them because I had a large vocabulary and a steady attention span. I still suffered and would have preferred well-written and kid-friendly history texts.

I am unfortunately not in the business of writing history textbooks for kids, but I did rewrite several short history texts for my kids during COVID homeschooling.

In the process I also noticed that the “reading comprehension” questions on many history worksheets actually reference facts not included in the text. So, I made sure that my questions do reference the actual text on the sheet to check for comprehension, rather than requiring previous knowledge to complete.

I offer these few here for parents who find themselves homeschooling, whether voluntarily or not. For native speakers, they will be useful reading material for second to fourth grade. For ESL students they will work well even up to sixth grade.

I will add more as I have time to write them, but even these few are proof that historical profiles can be made easy-to-read as well as interesting without sacrificing the most important facts.

Coaching kids in writing and story-telling

From the Lawrence University Writing Lab to ESL students, from talented teens to my own child with a learning disability, I’ve coached a wide variety of young students in writing. I was also once a child, experimenting in writing with a minimum of instruction and support.

My experience isn’t all-encompassing, but it has given me some tips I would like to share about how to coach children and young people in writing.

An old saying contends that you should not “teach” writing at all: “Teach children to read and they will write because they cannot help themselves.” And there is something to that.

If you assume writing is simply the paper equivalent of speaking, it makes perfect sense. Once a person has the building blocks, they will self express. But writing (and speaking for that matter) are to skilled story-telling, instruction or persuasion as a slouchy walk is to the skills of a professional athlete. Barring disability, everyone will learn to walk just by passively observing others walk. Almost no one will become a highly skilled athlete, if left on their own.

The actual writing mechanics are important, though there have been excellent authors and story-tellers who did not entirely master them. There are also skills beyond that must be developed and honed. A teacher or coach can be a help (or a hindrance) in this development. For some, a teacher may not be necessary at all, but for most some kind of coaching is helpful and development won’t progress as fast or as far without it.

Creative Commons image by odleywonderworks of Flickr.com

Writing can be taught.

Technical forms of writing can be taught in a fairly standard way, in which inner motivation and self-confidence is important but not all-encompassing. However, technical writing without the creative spark is only adequate, even in computer manuals. Skilled and versatile writing, which can be turned at will from concise, clear instruction to gripping, emotive narrative, can only be fostered and developed with practice and dedication.

Today’s media-saturated, hyper-verbal world needs endless numbers of skilled, versatile writers in every field from business to science, cottage industries to Hollywood. The ability to write clearly and with spirit, to direct written (or theoretically spoken) words with deft and precise intention and to employ style, voice and mood as easily as a pro basketball player pivots and shoots is among the most crucial skills for professional success in today’s world. It is also a source of intense personal satisfaction and happiness.

Yet this level of skill is unlikely to mature on its own. There have been cases of amazing, untaught writers, but they are rare and thus all rather famous people. For the most part, writing can and should be coached. But still the most important tips for any writing teacher, coach or parent hoping to foster the skill in a child are the pitfalls to avoid.

The main reason we question whether or not writing should be taught is that it is easy to botch the process and do more harm than good. Here is my list of DON’Ts:

1. Don’t look over a child’s shoulder while they are writing. Every stage of writing, from the first tracing of letter shapes, through the arduous decoding of plot and tension is a process. Teaching and appropriate materials help, but there is always an experimentation stage. That’s the part where teachers have a tendency to peek and stop the process on the inevitable mistakes. But the process is necessary. Self-correction is much more powerful than external correction. Wait for a result, before commenting and correcting. My most telling example of this comes from my own experience. When I was seventeen, a teacher looked over my shoulder while I was writing a short story in typing class after I had finished the regular assignment. The teacher, who I had a close relationship with, made a comment that was only mildly critical and no doubt was meant as respectful collegial advice. I don’t remember the content of the comment twenty-five years later, but I did not write another word of fiction for five years. I became highly proficient in non-fiction, but I harbored a deep-seated belief that I was not cut out for fiction. I have now published ten fiction books, but retrieving my confidence was a struggle. Silly? Yes. It was a silly teenage reaction. It was also a sadly typical example of the overreaction of young writers,, particularly to unexpected commentary in the midst of the process.

2. If you must look, don’t comment over their shoulder. I can hear my child’s teacher mutter, “Yes, but we have to watch in order to correct the way the child hold’s the pen. Letting them get away with a sloppy grip is setting them up for a lifetime of pain and frustration.” There may be medical reasons like this to observe. I suggest, either gently forming the child’s fingers on the pen or gently reminding the child from the other side of the room. The fact is that over-the-shoulder commenting is so destructive that it must be avoided at all cost.

3. Don’t insist on reading everything a child writes. Even a small child will do some experiments entirely on their own. I used to find little scraps of paper with notes to dolls and stuffed animals scribbled in atrocious handwriting and bizarre spelling by my bilingual, learning-disabled child scattered around the house. Older kids will write stories and journals that they will sometimes not want to share. Sometimes we do have to reinforce good spelling, but doing it wrong in a bit of private writing is not actually going to set them in bad habits for life. The language center of the brain is mercifully more flexible than most. Experimentation is crucial to the process and some of it must be done unobserved.

4. Don’t focus too much on mechanics. Writing mechanics are important—crucial even. This is the medium writers work in, but mastering mechanics can take a long time and it varies widely individual to individual. There are other crucial skills that need to be learned at the same time and too great a focus on mechanics can stunt development in other areas. Far too many children lose all interest in writing at a young age because the focus of instruction is exclusively on mechanics until they have been mastered. But I will never forget the day my dyslexic daughter with severe attention problems first sat at a table for 45 minutes writing without even being asked in third grade. I was shocked. She struggles in every aspect of school. But that day she wrote a story with a beginning, middle and end, including conflict and resolution, in some of the worst handwriting, grammar and spelling ever combined into coherent prose. Her classroom teacher agreed that few among her high-achieving classmates could structure a story like that, though they were far better at the mechanics. And I had never coached her on this. Had I stopped her over mechanics, we might never have discovered that she has this hidden strength.

5. Don’t criticize beyond the level achieved. By the same token, it is important to restrict criticism to the general level achieved by the student. Many of my students have English as a second language. If I were to criticize their descriptions or sentence structure on a professional level, there would never be anything positive to say. And even the most talented children rarely have a good grasp of plot structure or tension flow. Coaches and teachers must keep comments confined roughly to the level the child is at with a light push toward the next level.

6. Don’t over-praise. It is not just that over-praise is sickly sweet and children can smell it a mile away. Over-praise also cheapens the currency of praise, which is crucial to coaching. It is essential to find whatever is positive in every attempt, even if it is only effort and one well-chosen word. But comparing the writing to others or inflating the child’s expectations is rarely helpful.

7. Don’t make blanket statements. It should not need to be mentioned, but unfortunately over time some teachers become overconfident and believe they can make predictions about a child’s over all writing ability based on the work at hand and they feel a need to make broad statements of criticism, such as, “You have a poor grasp of story structure.” This is no doubt true of most students at various stages. However, the comment is unhelpful. It is not specific enough to give useful instruction and because of the sensitivity of young writers (and most adult writers), it can too easily be interpreted as an overall condemnation of their innate talent.

8. Don’t avoid comment altogether. All this warning about how easy it is to completely mess up the teaching of writing might make you shy about saying anything at all. While comments don’t need to be lengthy, some comment and especially highly specific comments are truly necessary. Simply not commenting at all can imply greater criticism than you might think, and even if you can only comment with your own personal reaction, be specific and as precise as possible.

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Don’t let all the prohibitions get you down. There are useful things you can do as a writing teacher or coach. Keeping the DON’Ts in mind is simply a good safeguard. Now let’s get down to the DOs.

1. Do make sure the child is learning writing mechanics and reading, if not with you, than with someone else. While it is not the top priority at all stages of the process, a solid understanding of mechanics (if not necessarily perfect rendition of them) and copious amounts of absorbed verbiage (if not necessarily print to eyeball in reception) are indispensable for the mastery of writing. Reading is important not only because the child will learn by example the structures and possibilities of storytelling, but also because the more you read, the easier writing mechanics will be to learn. Children with text disabilities will struggle here. I was 90 percent blind as a child and have always read at about a tenth the speed of my peers. My dyslectic brother and I shared terrible handwriting and outrageous spelling—him because dyslexia plays havoc with the way the brain recalls and perceives letters in sequence and me because, although i absorbed vast numbers of books, I used an audio format and simply didn’t read enough words visually to drill the correct spellings into my memory. We both did learn mechanics eventually, but only after becoming pretty solid writers with the help of computer spellchecks.

2. Ensure quality and quantity of input. Do make sure the child has a lot of stories, non-fiction texts and other useful reading material in whatever format is appropriate. Regardless of the child’s ability to physically read, writing does share this with spoken language. The more a young child is exposed to diverse and skillful language, the more they will be able to express language flexibly and effectively. Read to the child, make sure there are audio books if the child is not physically reading with ease, and tell stories on the fly. Read letters, encyclopedia entries and anything else available. Not all of it needs to be high-quality and none of it needs to be in archaic, formal language, but a wide variety is desirable.

3. In the beginning, get the child forming sentences… any sentences. If you’re starting at the very beginning with a child or have an ESL student, the first major hurdle is forming sentences. This is NOT dependent on mastery of mechanics, although learning letters, handwriting, spelling and grammar is usually going on roughly in the same period. If forming sentences is a struggle, the surefire way to get it rolling is to provide a list of subjects (either as words—pronouns, names, etc.—or as pictures—a boy, a girl, a fairy, a cat, etc.), a list of verbs (again either as words or pictures), and a list of predicates (either objects in pictures or more complex sentence endings in words, depending on the student’s level). Then play with them together with your student. Mix them around on cards. Try different combinations. Point out how they have to go in a certain order and how that order changes if there is a question. Let the child draw lines connecting their choice of a subject to a verb and then to a predicate. Then gradually take away one list and then another to allow the child to choose freely. Emphasize that there are no wrong choices, as long as the correct type of word is used. Encourage silliness at this stage, e.g. “The elephant skates on the roof.”

4. Write out answers in other subjects only during the correct stage. When I was a kid in sixth grade science class I was irritated that my teachers always insisted that we write out answers in complete sentences, when a one- or two-word answer directly below the question would have sufficed for clarity. And at the same time, I could feel something very much like a muscle bulging and growing every time I was forced to write those sentences. Don’t give students useless busy work and if they are beyond the stage where good solid sentences are an issue, don’t require this, but for the vast majority of students through about 9th grade, this is good practice.

5. Write what is necessary. Get students writing letters to friends or family, shopping lists, notes to fellow students, calendars, logs of their hobbies, everything and anything. These things are not narrative writing and the mechanics don’t have to be perfect, but practice is still practice and the risks and emotional costs are lower in these tasks than if every time the child writes, it has to be laden with the significance of a creative writing project.

6. Do encourage independent attempts at writing. Some parents completely over- or under-react to their children’s writing experiments. Writing is much like drawing at this stage and the same reactions that encourage drawing will encourage writing. Comment warmly, make eye contact, smile and point out some well-executed detail. Praise effort and ask if you can display the child’s finished attempt without correcting it. Bad spelling here is the same as a drawing of a stick figure with only three fingers. Most of us know better than to criticize the drawing at this stage and the same goes for the writing. Instead say something like, “You put a lot of work into that. I see that robot really likes playing soccer. Is that right? Can we put it up on the refrigerator with your brother’s drawing?” Then you can lightly encourage other attempts when there is time and space. “I wonder if that robot from your story is having any other adventures that you could write about.”

7. Do encourage kids to keep journals, blogs and multi-media scrapbooks. I hesitate to make this a hard-and-fast requirement. Some students are reluctant writers and being forced to keep a journal may only demotivate them further. Others are already moving on to specific writing projects. There may also be structural reasons why journals don’t work in your coaching, such as irregular or infrequent meetings with your student. But if it is at all possible, journaling is a tried-and-true practice for the development of writing skills. Journals can be kept that simply record events, thoughts and feelings, or they can contain a series of writing prompts and reactions. Younger children may write one sentence per entry accompanied by a drawing. Even older children may use drawings, comic strips and artifacts pertaining to the text. These are all useful avenues. The world needs a wide variety of writers and writers of comics and ultra-short ad copy often make more money than long-form writers. If it is regular practice, it is almost guaranteed to be useful and skill-building.

8. Break stories down into basic parts. When you do get to the point of attempting a short story with a child, often in third or fourth grade, start by asking the child to identify the beginning, middle and end elements of a few short stories read aloud. Then introduce the idea that stories always involve a problem and someone who solves the problem. That “someone” is the main character. The problem and its solution form the “plot.” Whether or not you want to introduce those kinds of specialized terminology depends somewhat on the scope of your writing relationship.

9. Lead the child to story structure. Once the concepts are introduced, ask the child to try making up a story with you. Some will leap at the chance and want very little direction or involvement from you. That is your cue to withdraw and wait for a result the child is ready to show you. Many other children will be unsure and reticent at first. You can help by asking questions. “Who should solve the problem in the story?” Get a main character identified. Suggest a few ways to start by introducing the main character, such as “There once was a …. named …” Then ask, “Where is this character in the beginning?” Get another sentence worked out that introduces the setting. Then ask “What kind of problem does the character run into?” With some luck, your student will be able to form a few sentences more independently at this point. After one to three sentences about the problem have been recorded, ask the child. “How does the characters solve the problem?” And encourage him/her to wrap it up. This is a somewhat artificial starting point but after a few repetitions the child will be able to think of very short narratives. If the formation of sentences is still a problem, it may be necessary to continue with sentence-forming exercises of various types.

10. Decode non-fiction. The process for learning to write non-fiction differs mainly in the questions we ask. Ask the child to identify the main idea sentence in the beginning of short non-fiction texts for children, to list some details from the text and to identify a conclusion sentence. Then when a topic for non-fiction arises (a book report, a description of a nature scene, a log of a science project or similar), follow the same structure. Ask the child to start with a main idea sentence, list several details and conclude with a general statement again. These are building blocks a step beyond mechanics. They are also a frame on which the child will hang a variety. of other structures in the future.

11. Foster writing practice and discipline. Once the basics of mechanics and structure have been covered, if not perfectly mastered, you will find yourself in the tumultuous middle territory between beginnings and a basic skill level. Here the most important factor is practice, practice, practice. Make writing fun. Use creative writing prompts. Go interesting places to write. Set goals and make the sheer volume of words or pages a matter of pride and even competition.

12. Reward volume, rather than skill. This may seem counter intuitive but it is based on scientific evidence. You can set rewards but they should be focused on the completion of anything, rather than based on the merits of the writing. Studies have shown that rewards do not work well to motivate creativity or highly complex cognitive tasks. Praise primarily effort and the discipline of getting words onto paper. De-emphasize any sort of merit-based competition during this intermediate stage. Writing competitions are only helpful once older students start to demand them, and even then their usefulness can be questionable.

    (Note: This point is not supporting a soft-headed approach to writing that insists that all attempts are equal and students shouldn’t be steered toward excellence. It is simply strategic. While at very high levels of mastery, there may be subjective arguments about which author is better, there are also clear—even harsh—standards in writing as a craft. The goal is to teach kids real, versatile, skilled writing, and introducing creative competition to young writers too soon tends to stunt development, cause psychological stress and thus curtail the massive productivity that is crucial to practice.)

13. Discuss books, movies and stories in other forms that are important to their generation and culture. Dissect their plot, structure, characters, tension, mood, voice and style. Introducing these elements as something that can be discussed and decoded takes away a lot of the intimidating mystique they often carry. Even something as elusive as narrative voice can be discussed and understood.

14. Become a writing colleague. Once you have reached a level in which students are writing stories and/or non-fiction beyond a few pages, the teaching process resembles athletic coaching much more than academic instruction. Your role is that of mentor and role model as well as motivator. You provide direction, help to set goals and provide technical advice (i.e. correction and critique). However, there is a shift in the relationship to a less hierarchical teacher-student dynamic.

15. Present self doubt as normal and a long learning process as necessary to mastery. Some students may be impatient with their own progress at the intermediate and/or advanced stages and they are likely among the most promising writers for their age. They are self-critical and they absorb the false myth within the popular culture that writing, as well as acting and music, is mostly a matter of innate talent. Talent is helpful, but it is likely that students who are motivated enough to question it, have the prerequisites. The fact is, however, that writing, like any skilled craft requires huge amounts of practice, about ten thousand hours of practice in fact. This is a useful gauge that holds true for most creative and professional skills. Ten thousand hours roughly translates as ten years of working a full-time job. Below that limit of practice, even history’s most famous artists, writers and musicians were not skilled, even if they showed promise. Children and teenagers are pretty much guaranteed to be lacking in this area. Knowing that it is normal to need that level of practice can be both comforting and motivating to those who are committed to the craft.

16. Share struggles and frustrations. It may be helpful to share some of your own struggles along the path of writing. Students at this level find the fact that you had or may still have doubts or struggled with the discipline of writing to be encouraging and motivating. It is fine to admit that you don’t know everything and to show that there are things in writing, such as mechanics which are hard, cold laws, and there are things that are subjective matters of opinion. Eventually, you will even get to a point where you discuss the proposition that even those hard, cold laws should be broken by professionals at times, for specific reasons, such as using idiomatic grammar to portray dialect or general narrative voice.

17. Treat “writer’s block” as most likely rooted in anxiety. “Writer’s block” is a much discussed topic, but it is also largely perpetuated by myth. Many young writers may think they suffer from writer’s block. Certainly, a person’s mind can go blank from exhaustion, stress, anxiety or other problems, but it is not specific to writing. The most common issue behind complaints of “writer’s block” is anxiety and fear of failure. Part of a coach’s job is to instill an understanding that doubts and anxieties are normal, first drafts are easily edited and putting anything down is the first step on the road to writing success. If you have not had the teaching of this child from the beginning, there may be significant barriers of anxiety to work through. Creating sentences and even paragraphs according to prompts can be made into a game that results in a written narrative before the child realizes they have actually written something that works. This and other techniques can be used to crack open particularly hard cases of “writer’s block.”

18. Consider the possibility of exhaustion. With more advanced students who develop difficulties after a lot of writing, consider the possibility. of creative burn-out. Learning the discipline of taking breaks and returning to writing, incorporating exercise, food, water and proper breathing into the writing routine is every bit as important to developing writing skills as it is to a budding athlete. Writing saps a particular type of mental energy and either in the short-term—or worse over the long-term-this energy can be depleted. If a student was successful and highly motivated in the past, but is now flagging, this is a serious issue requiring significant breaks, physical activity and the development of healthy long-term habits.

19. Form a critique circle. Advanced coaching for teens can be done one-on-one and also in groups. A small group of two or three students at a roughly similar level may actually be preferable to individual coaching. Critiquing the work of others is excellent training and learning discernment while absorbing the criticisms of peers is crucial. That said, rules of critique need to be strictly enforced and shared by the coach or teacher. Criticism must be focused on a specific issue in a specific piece of writing. As mentioned earlier, it is not the place of a critique to make blanket statements about the abilities of the writer. At maximum, you may mention that a similar issue has come up before.

20. Question your own knowledge and assumptions. Coaches and teachers must also keep in mind that even on specific issues, we don’t always know better than our students, even if we have vastly more writing experience. For example, one of the best writing instructors I ever had was a professor at Lawrence University. I was consistently the student who produced the highest word count and other students were nervous about critiquing my work, so the professor was rightly a bit hard on me. My most advanced work at the university was a short story about Ukrainian border guards, using an experience I had while studying abroad in the former Soviet Union as research for the setting. The professor, who had never been in this strange and surreal locale, delivered harsh criticism of my use of setting and social norms. Fortunately for my shaky self-confidence as a writer, there was an Eastern European student in the class with the guts to tell the professor that he was wrong. I too have been wrong on topics my advanced students know more about than I do.

21. Require eventual sharing of some work. You may encounter students who appear to be writing, even writing large amounts of material, but never feel ready to share it. As you can see from other points, this is a tricky situation. Some solitary process is necessary and yet clearly there comes a point where not sharing one’s work becomes counterproductive to development. It is hard to know exactly where this line is with each individual student. But most of the time, a student who won’t share anything is suffering from extensive performance anxiety. Some students with significant ability will go so far as to fail writing courses that base the grade solely on pages filled, rather than turn in writing assignments. Try a variety of different methods to help students through this. Group critique sessions may be too intimidating at first, but a student may be open to sharing only with a teacher or only with a single peer. There are also peer, sharing websites today on the internet, where a student can choose an anonymous user name and share a sample of work to be critiqued by others. While this approach has it’s risks because some online critiques are intentionally harsh for sport, it can also alleviate anxiety as the student sees how reactions to his/her work compare to that of other beginning writers.

I hope these tips are helpful to teachers, coaches and interested parents. Writing, in the end, is a creative craft like all others. Practice is key and talent may manifest in unexpected ways.

Is a love of writing the mark of an amateur?

A long, unbroken, solitary afternoon before me; sunlight in my window or rain and a fire laid in the stove, as the case may be; a cup of tea at my elbow; and best of all, a blank screen in front of me—that’s what writing is on a good day.

There are few prospects I relish with more delight. But that isn’t something you want to admit lightly among writers.

It isn’t just that it’s fashionable to play the tortured writer persona. I’ve seen dozens of blog posts about the grueling nature of professional writing and the amateur nature of all enthusiasm. Writers forums are full of the self-important, who will tell you that the easiest way to tell an amateur from a professional is to ask if they really enjoy writing.

The typical explanation goes something like this, “When a small child first encounters a piano, they bang away at the keys in delight. It’s great fun and they think it sounds beautiful. They want everyone to be quiet and listen to their noise. But it is only painful, boring practice that can turn that banging into real music worth listening to. Writing is the same way.”

Creative Commons image by Richard Patterson

The proponents of this line of reasoning also like to insist that there is very little real artistic, musical or writing talent innate to anyone. Everything is learned and can be learned through practice, they insist. Writing at a professional level or playing music at a professional level must always be a carefully calculated task. and while some satisfaction in one’s skills is permitted, enthusiasm and passion is the mark of an amateur. And this holds some internal logic.

Except that it doesn’t fit my experience.

My daughter first got to sit at a piano when she was two. She’s a particularly active child and I was concerned that she would bang away at it. Instead she gently touched the keys, heard the sounds and began working her way up and down the keyboard. I have seen countless numbers of children pound on a keyboard, but not her. She immediately found that some notes go better together than others. Within a few minutes she was making cords.

I can’t do today what she could do at two. I can’t hear the sounds that way. Once in a while, I come across a writing student who is that way with words and story. The sense of it is there before any teacher. So, I don’t believe in the “talent doesn’t exist” theory.

At the same time, I know that talent isn’t everything. Talent won’t get you much of anywhere without practice. And for most people both solid musical skills and good writing proficiency are there for the learning. There are countless technical assists in writing, things that could almost allow a computer to generate infinite variations of entertaining stories using standard plots, characters, devices, dialogue norms and tension points.

A lot of modern fiction reads like that too. I could swear someone plugged in an algorithm and churned out a series of thrillers or romantic mystery novels with artificial intelligence. They all have perfect pacing, neat and tidy plots and snappy dialogue. But they also have predictable characters, transparent plot devices and lack-luster climaxes.

And yet. as the purveyors of writing as a miserable profession are eager to tell you, those cookie-cutter novels make money. Publishing houses recognize the same elements I do and readers are so accustomed to the standard fare that most of them, those who still read books at all, continue to read them.

There is a lot to be said for practice and the rules of the craft. Without a lot of practice my daughter will never have the full freedom and experience of music. And without a solid understanding of the rules, writers who break them do so badly. I have no quibble with that.

And there have been many times when i didn’t want to write and had to anyway. I would go so far as to say that that experience—writing under pressure when you are tired and disoriented—is probably a necessary step in honing the craft of writing, or at least a way to significantly speed up the process. I spent ten years as a journalist, forced to crank out endless “copy” on subjects that I usually found boring and almost always on too little sleep.

It was called “copy” but we never copied anything. Every sentence had to be crafted and polished. It took energy and determination and focus. Doing it while tired and bored ingrained the rules deep.

I learned the trade, so that I could sit down and write anything quickly and easily, conforming to whatever standard was required, short or long, technical or atmospheric, any structure, any voice. But that doesn’t mean that all writing must from then on be unpleasant or that all of the learning and practice was unpleasant. I still remember my days as a young reporter fondly. Despite the difficulty and tedious stories about small towns and the machinations of the ministry of transportation, I got to go to work every day in a room where I sat with other people furiously writing and I got to write all day long.

I grew up doing heavy chores. Then I spent years in academia, studying and taking tests. I worked at jobs that didn’t give me purpose or fulfill my intellectual needs. And the reality of writing every day, even if it wasn’t very exciting writing, was wonderful for several years.

Even today, while I prefer to write things closer to my interests, if offered a job at a cash register or a job writing technical manuals, I’d still take the technical manuals any day. But sitting down to an afternoon of writing on a subject I enjoy, or better yet fiction—that is pure pleasure.

Is it always easy? Certainly not. That is a good part of why it is fun. I don’t really go in for easy, even in my hobbies.

That feeling you get when you’ve been writing for two hours and you get three quarters of the way through a key chapter and the plan you had isn’t working and you feel a heavy drag on you because you ,know you’ve got to go back to the plotting board and probably rewrite several major scenes to make it work—yeah, that feeling—that’s when you know you’re in the thick of it. I do tend to go get another cup of tea but I eagerly plunge back in. It’s a challenge, a battle with word counts and plot holes, and victory is that sweet zing of a successful line of tension running through the story from beginning to end.

The preachers of the miserable writer theory probably believe what they are saying. It seems likely that they have followed a path of genre writing that leaves them burnt out and frustrated but in possession of certain skills. They assume that these two things must necessarily coincide. If someone comes along and argues that writing can be a lot of fun, even at a professional level, it is the easiest thing in the world to paint that writer as an amateur. No one wants to risk that, so few ever try to argue.

Getting past the beginning of a novel - Advanced writing tips

So you’ve got a bodacious idea and you’ve written the first 20,000 or 30,000 words! You’ve got the gumption to start and the grit to put your butt in the chair and write through the wee hours of the morning or on your coffee breaks or whenever it is you have manage to squeeze in your writing time.

Congratulations! You’ve already beat out 99.75 percent of the competition. A lot of expert writing coaches like to quote the “Five percent rule.” The five percent rule says that of all the potential novel writers with an idea only 5 percent of them will ever start on it. And only 5 percent of those who do anything with their idea will make the time and discipline themselves to sit down and write regularly.

Creative Commons image by Misticsartdesign via Pixabay.jpg

I’m not sure if the numbers are actually that exact. But if you’ve reached this point, the end of the beginning of a novel, you have fortitude and courage. That’s undeniable.

And you have also just run into the steepest and scariest writing hurdle yet. According to the five percent rule, getting past the beginning should only cull out another 95 percent of the prospective authors out there, but this one feels bigger to a lot of us somehow.

Maybe it is because the people who didn’t make the first five percent cut really weren’t serious at all, so there was no pain involved. They just had an idea and didn’t pursue it. And the people, who didn’t get around to making a real start and didn’t manage the discipline or time to put their butts in their chairs. didn’t really sacrifice anything beyond mental anguish and a fair amount of whining.

On the other hand, the writers—yes, now really anyone who got this far is a writer—who falter at around the 30,000 word mark have worked hard. They’ve disciplined themselves, made real sacrifices to get the time to write and faced down fear and shame. And still… only a few will make it.

Writing coaches are supposed to make it seem like all the others will fail but you personally are the star who will not. I’m not making that call. You’re one reader and the bitter reality is that if one hundred writers at this stage of a novel read my blog, only about five of you will actually finish that novel. Fewer yet will ever see it published.

BUT… (And this is a big but.)

These statistics are about the novel, not about you. Most writers—I might even say, “hopefully all writers”—will start at least one novel they toss before they finish their first book. If you don’t, how do you learn and become an awesome writer?

We need ten thousand hours of writing to make a master, just like every skilled craft or art. So, if your novel falls by the wayside, that doesn’t mean you fail as a writer—just that you need to succeed with a different novel.

But this post is for those who have an idea they are convinced is a winner, those who have reached the end of the beginning and have the proverbial genitalia to keep on.

Let’s face it. It’s heavy going. No one gets past this one without some sweat, tears and likely some blood, whether fictional or actual.

If you are an expert plotter and have spent years on world building and have a detailed storyboard, maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about and you’re sailing through your manuscript without any trouble. But then again, if that were the case, you wouldn’t be reading this post.

If you’re like me and most other intrepid wordsmiths, you know the dreaded 30,000 word marker. Very possibly you’ve been here before. Maybe several times. And it might as well be the grim reaper.

There is something about reaching this point in a manuscript that makes writers wilt like that houseplant you forgot to water since you started this novel. No, you didn’t just run out of gas. It happens to all of us.

You start with an exciting idea and all the enthusiasm that goes along with it. There is very likely at least one early scene and possibly an ending and several other scenes firmly in your head before you start. You have a character or characters you like, a great setting and a unique premise. That can get you through 10,000 words without breaking a sweat.

You’ve got the opening description, the initial action and the premise to describe. In short, you’ve got clear goals that anyone with a couple of years of dabbling in writing can handle.

But I hate to break it to you. That’s the easy stuff.

Beginnings are important and must be brilliant and all that, but you know you can go back and edit, so you probably didn’t sweat rivers over it. Now, however, things get hairy.

You get to a certain point in writing your novel (usually somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 words depending on the type of plot you’re using and how much plotting you did early on) and you suddenly feel like you’re slogging through thick mud while carrying a fifty-pound pack.

How did this happen? You didn’t start out carrying a pack. Did all that positive energy just evaporate? Are you just a wimp without staying power?

No and no.

There is some small comfort in knowing that your exhaustion is completely justified. And it isn’t just that you’ve been cooped up in your basement staring at a screen for too long, although if that’s the case, remember that pacing yourself applies to writing as much as it does to running a marathon.

The 30,000-word marker is a different sort of exhaustion though.

Here’s the first key to getting through it: That fifty-pound pack is real.

OK, you can’t actually weigh it on a scale. But you are carrying a massive load after writing 30,000 words. You are carrying around in your brain all the bits and pieces, character traits, setting details and subplots that you subconsciously or consciously know you are going to need to remember later on. Depending on how many notes you’ve been keeping and how organized you are, this mental burden can be enormous.

Hopefully, even if you’re a write-by-the-seat-of-your-pantser, you have written down some notes about your major characters and main plot, at least the basics up until now. Pantsers are more likely to collapse at this point than plotters. It is one of the places where plotters can be justified in a bit of their smugness.

But plotters will have a burden too. Even if you write everything down scrupulously, you will be memorizing where you wrote what and how to find each piece of information. And there are always details you didn’t put in your notes, which is why your notes are not actually the novel, though their word count may be pushing a close second.

So, the first thing to do when you feel the sluggish doldrums at the end of the beginning descend upon you is to update your notes. Even if you’re an avowed pantser, now is the time to do a bit of plotting. Write character sketches if you haven’t yet. Make an outline of your plot or a story board, if at all possible. As you put down some of these burdens on paper, you will feel lighter.

If you have extensive notes, look through them. Make sure they are organized and remind yourself where to find things. Think through any plot holes that may have cropped up. Untangle and discard what has turned out not to be useful. Lighten the load.

The end of the beginning is also a good time to take a break from writing if you’re an intensive writer, spending hours writing each day. Get out in nature, spend some time with people or sleep all the hours you want for once, whichever meets your needs.

But don’t let go entirely. Many a good book has died because the writer went on a break at this point and didn’t actually come back. The break may feel way too good.

Set a limit or a deadline to get back at it. And then sit down and get back into it, no matter what.

OK, not entirely “no matter what.” As I said before, some projects need to die. Every writer needs to leave a few unfinished novels on their creative compost pile. So, don’t break yourself on something you have realized wasn’t a keeper. But if you are still convinced this is a keeper, put your head down and power through.

That is the third thing—and possibly the most crucial—about the end of the beginning. To some extent, you just have to push through this difficult time. It is likely that your plot or your characters are more complicated than you thought. You’ve realized you need to go back and change some things. Or you’re worried because you still haven’t figured out some major plot points coming up.

Whatever the specifics, this is a tough stretch. It’s uphill and there is no second wind yet.

Remember again that you can edit later. Keep in mind that this is normal for writers. It’s a natural part of the process of writing a novel. Take your best shot at how the plot needs to go and write it.

When you get to the 50,000- or 60,000-word mark and those last few puzzle pieces drop into place in your plot conundrum, you can go back and fix whatever you’re messing up now.

Yes, puzzle pieces dropping seemingly of their own accord happens far more often than a purely rational view of the writing process would indicate. And yes, you are messing things up at this point. It’s pretty much impossible not to. Don’t fret about it.

Getting past the end of the beginning is almost always messy or rugged or both. But by putting down some of your mental burden, taking a carefully limited break and pushing through the urge to throw it all in the recycling bin, you can crawl over this hurdle.

How much is too much (or too little) description in fiction?

The echo of automatic gunfire bounced off the gray, cement buildings, making it impossible to pinpoint the direction of the threat. Trash scuttled along the gutter in a stiff jab of wind. Sand stung her eyes.

The girl crouched in a doorway, the stench of sour cabbage and old grease washing over her from inside. She gnawed on the nail of her little finger and tried to remember the map of streets between here and the old railroad yard. She couldn’t afford a mistake now.

The rapid cracking of more shots just a block back along the street forced the matter. She darted out, along the wall and away, slipping through the rubble like a little brown squirrel, lightning quick and nearly silent.

Some of the most common questions I get from students are on the issue of description in fiction—how much, when and where?

Creatove Commons image via Pixabay

Budding writers often receive lavish praise for description in school. Most general education teachers and even a distressing number of creative writing instructors, view almost all description favorably. It is creative, after all. It fills up assignment page quotas at a gallop and the students who use description are refreshingly motivated.

What isn’t there to love about it?

Well, lots actually.

Writing description is like playing the piano. Unlike most musical instruments, pianos make nice-sounding notes with the press of a key. All you have to do to feel like you are playing the piano and making nice sounds is to play the keys with a bit of grace and not bang on them. Once a small child learns to stop banging and to press individual keys, the sound is relatively pleasant and even pretty at times. It is motivating because it is easy and it garners praise.

But just as playing real music on a piano is a far cry from that gentle random tinkling, writing great description is complex, requires long practice and is immeasurably more rewarding than the initial experiments.

Here are the crucial questions to consider when writing description.

1. What is description and why do you need it?

After they discover that their initial descriptive prowess does not actually make regular people—who are neither their teachers nor their parents—want to read their writing, many beginning writers careen violently in the other direction. They strip all description out of their fiction and stick to action verbs and dialogue, like it’s a fundamentalist religion. Some very stereotypical fiction (and screenplays) can be done this way, but it has the staying power of popcorn.

Description is part of how we convey setting, character and mood to the reader. More importantly, it is the gateway through which the reader enters the world of your story. While a gripping plot and excellent dialogue are arguably more important on every page of a story, description opens the door for your reader.

We experience fiction primarily through our senses—sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. It isn’t the actual page we see or even the movie screen. In order for a reader to fall deeply in love with a work of fiction, recommend it to their friends and make sure to read everything else by the same author, that reader must experience the story to some degree physically. It’s description that jump-starts that process.

The reason why narrow genre fiction needs less of it is that there are already a lot of description assumptions that readers come into each story with. The entire genre aids in developing the sensory experience. Even there, description plays its essential role, only in a different way.

2. What description is not

Description is not plot or story and it never can be. It can’t even be character, though it can try.

It’s like the old adage that children do what their parents do rather than what they say. Description is like a parent telling a child to do something. If done well, it may be memorable and valuable. But if it isn’t backed up with coherent actions and purpose it won’t matter for long.

Description may be enough for a newspaper article in the features section. There we describe characters, locations, scenes and social dilemmas and leave them for the reader to resolve. But despite the literary-term “character sketch” description does not make a story.

Problems and actions attempting to resolve problems make stories. Description may help. That’s all.

3. How do I know if I put in too much description?

The grip that a work of fiction has on the reader is like a kite string. When I edit a work of fiction it feels as if I am flying a kite. The kite is the reader and the taut string is the pull that keeps them reading. The first rush of the opening must be a powerful enough burst of speed to propel the kite up. But then if the kite is driven only by the pilot running around on the ground and there is no wind (metaphorically plot), the kite would sail up for awhile and then drift dully to earth, just as surely as it would if you let go of it and let the wind take it entirely.

Tension in fiction is much like the tension in that taut kite string. It is the pull between the wind of plot events and the striving of the characters. It is the only thing that won’t let the reader drift away from your story.

All this is to say that description plays only an indirect role in the basic physics of the relationship between plot, character and tension. Description is crucial to the reader’s experience of the events of the story, but it must not interfere too greatly.

Excess description has the tendency to slacken the tension of that kite string. Too much and the kite falls, the reader loses interest and abandons the story for something more engaging.

So, as you read over your work in editing, keep that kite string in mind. Judging when the string goes slack is somewhat subjective and it certainly varies with tone and genre, but you can develop an intuitive sense for it. If you feel the line of tension through a scene slacken, look to the descriptive phrases in the scene. Too much description is not the only problem that can cause slack tension, but it is the easiest such problem to solve.

If cutting excess description helps then you have likely resolved the problem. Professionally this trimming of wordy text is called “tightening up the prose” and that refers to tightening the tension, just like a kite string.

Some writers today complain that classical writers had it easier, that they were allowed lengthy descriptions of landscape, clothing and the faces of characters, while readers won’t give us the same chance to develop depth in a story today.

There is some truth in this lament. Fiction used to be much more difficult to come by and readers were less likely to put a book down due to a bit of slackened tension. Today’s readers have a lot of distractions and even more options.

It is true that sometimes depth of description is sacrificed today to the gods of reader attention in ways that do not actually make for better writing. But the conditions of entertainment-scarcity of old were not necessarily superior. They allowed for some wonderful depth in some of our classical works, but they also spawned some very long-winded, boring drivel written by privileged white men who only got to be published and even mildly famous because of their random fortune of birth.

The bottom line is that today’s conditions are what they are. They force you to write tight, if you want readers, and that can be a good thing if you focus on honing description to be as powerful and evocative as possible.

4. How much is too little description?

There are modern examples of fiction with too little description. The plot may be snappy but it feels hollow and the reader cannot experience the story sensually. Any trend can become too extreme.

The basic role of fiction still hasn’t changed since ancient times. People read fiction to relax. While fiction often competes with various multimedia entertainments today, many readers seek out reading specifically for the quiet relaxation it offers. That means that we do need some description and quite a lot in literary, fantasy and romance genres.

All description, even in a literary genre where you can theoretically be more relaxed, should strive for brevity and power. The key is to provide a few “evocative” details that open the door of sensory experience and lead the reader’s senses to take over the task of description.

A story must have enough description, given all the circumstances of genre and readership, to start the reader’s brain on the sensory experience. This can often be done with a single phrase or even a single word if that little detail is well-known enough to the readership that the writer can be reasonably sure it will jump-start sensory memory.

If a fantasy author mentions “the smell of leather and sage” it is very likely that most fantasy readers will instantly connect to a sensory memory of just those smells and a lot of other details can be left out and assumed. This is because fantasy readers tend to be the kind of people to own leather items and to have visited places or shops that smell of sage. Such readers will start to see muted greens and earth tones in the clothing of the characters without the writer mentioning color. They may envision natural landscapes or faces roughened by weather, even if they aren’t described.

If a crime or detective author mentions “the blood and vomit spattered on the floor of the interrogation room” their readers will likely construct an entire scene in their minds complete with unfriendly, windowless gray walls, a single lamp, a bare table and a hard chair, even if they have never personally been in such a place because they read a genre in which such descriptions are very common.

This is a bit like cheating, but it is legal and in many cases desirable. You pick just the right detail and thus skip whole paragraphs of description, if your detail evokes a similar scene for your readership.

There are two methods in this kind of cheating—1. banking on reader experience and 2. exploiting genre conventions. The more you know your readership and your genre the easier it is to use details that will evoke sensory experience for those readers and thus free you from the need to provide further descriptive details.

Unfortunately, we can’t always count on enough shared experience between readers to do away with most description. This is another reason why some old fiction feels uninspiring to modern readers. Simply put, the author’s assumptions about our experience and what will trigger our sensual responses are no longer valid due to changes in our society.

There are also plenty of things you may want to describe in fiction which you can be pretty sure most readers have not encountered in physical life. In fact, if you are describing mostly only things that are so common to the genre that they don’t need much description, your work isn’t going to be very original.

So, description isn’t going out of style. Get used to it and use it skillfully.

5. How can I make my descriptions better?

Better in description generally means more “power.”

Power? Like short, snappy sentences?

Well, sort of. Shorter and more varied sentence lengths help, but when we say “power” in description it means the power to evoke and thus bring the reader into the story physically.

Fortunately, there are some fairly easy ways to increase the power of your description. This goes right back to elementary school, where you learned the parts of speech—verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

Verbs are inherently the most powerful part of human language. It is likely they were the first actual words, given that pointing likely took care of initial nouns for prehistoric people. Nouns are the next most powerful part of language, followed by adjectives.

The weakest of the non-grammatical, substantive parts of speech are adverbs. This is why your writing instructors and how-to books tell you to avoid them.

It is much better to use a verb that describes the entire action, as in, “The officers pounded up the steps and charged into the apartment,” rather than common verbs with adverbs, such as “The officers ran forcefully up the stairs and came into the apartment fast and furious.”

The first example happens to be shorter, but even if it somehow wasn’t technically shorter, it would more easily draw the reader’s senses into the story for reasons that go deep into psychology.

The same goes for nouns. It is better to be more specific with your noun than to use a common noun and an adjective. It is better to write “poodle” than “small, white dog” unless your narrative absolutely requires the vagueness.

Adjectives are weak enough that it is better to avoid them, if it doesn’t cause other complications in the text. Adjectives ending in -ly are notoriously the weakest of all. Many writers do a search for “ly” during editing and specifically analyze each adjective with that ending to see if they can safely cut any. This isn’t to say that you should never use them, only that it is worth looking to see if there is a stronger alternative.

If a paragraph was a savory soup, verbs would be the broth, nouns the meat and veggies, adjectives the salt and spices and -ly words would be things like protein powder and vinegar that you add to some soups when it is really necessary but would not want in any significant amounts.

This advice comes with one very large caveat, Almost every writer who has learned this step has at some point realized the wonderful tool of the thesaurus and been put under its evil spell for a time. Don’t get me wrong, your thesaurus is not inherently evil. It is a good tool for reminding you of descriptive synonyms you may have forgotten.

But whatever you do in writing, resist that temptation to go window shopping through your thesaurus and pick out a nice-sounding word that you aren’t otherwise acquainted with and stick it into your sentence because it is more interesting than its common alternative.

A good rule of thumb is that you should not use a word from a thesaurus if you have never encountered it in speech or in a written work that was not intended to describe the word itself. Your thesaurus is for reminding yourself of words you knew already, not for coming up with new words. There is nothing that screams “amateur” at readers more than a writer who appears to be using unfamiliar descriptive words.

Putting it all together

Honing your descriptions to make them brief and powerful will help your current story and boost your overall writing skills. It is also fun and just as description brings readers into the world of the story, it can transport you there as well.

And that crucial for coordinating scenes and writing great dialogue, but those are issues for other posts. Check out my other advanced writing tips here.

Winning fans is more than just hooking readers

As a senior in college I bombed out of my first journalism job interview on the question, "What is the most important thing in a newspaper story?" posed by a small-town newspaper editor.

I had given up on figuring out the "right" answers because the editor had already told me he didn't think a legally blind person (or even just anyone who couldn't drive) could be a newspaper reporter. He only asked this question to confirm his biases, so I told him my actual opinion.

"Good research and real facts." 

And arguably for many readers that is the most important focus of a newspaper story. But of course, I was wrong in journalism orthodoxy.

Creative Commons image by Glenn Strong

The standard answer to that question is "the hook." The hook is technically part of the lead, the first paragraph. The hook is often, though not always, the last sentence or phrase in the lead, something surprising, snappy, intriguing or shocking enough to force a good portion of readers to keep reading for at least a few more paragraphs. 

Journalism theory has it that it doesn't really matter if readers finish the article. The important thing is that they read enough of it and other articles in the paper to A. see the ads that fund the paper and B. decide they actually need the paper and subscribe. At least that was the theory, back when print newspapers were the primary form of journalism. 

There is a similar theory in the book industry today. The cover art, the blurb on the back of the book and the first few paragraphs of chapter one play much the same role as the hook in the days of old. And we still talk about "hooking readers." 

The idea is to give the reader a little thrill of recognition—"Ah! This is a book I'll like"—a sense of tribe. You play into the desires of the given genre and provide enough momentum and adrenaline to keep them reading. If you want to catch today's readers, swimming around in a bookstore or at an onlilne shop, you need something with some punch because there are a lot of distractions. 

Both the old journalism version and the modern book-selling version are true as far as they go. The journalism lead and hook got readers who were just casually perusing a paper to actually read it. I did eventually go on to learn to write a pretty good hook as an international newspaper stringer. Thank you very much, Mr. Small-Town Editor. 

But there is something that the doctrine of the hook does not take into account—a crucial factor that is the deal breaker in today’s book industry.

Let me illustrate with another story from the trenches. In 2007, I landed a prestigious Manhattan agent for a memoir. The agent loved my book but didn’t love my hook. She insisted that I rewrite it to put the most suspenseful and violent scene first and then handle the rest of the book as one giant flashback. This is done a lot and it isn’t actually as bad as it sounds, if it is done well.

Most of my memoir was about being a blind kid from the back of beyond who got scholarships and somehow ended up in the high-pressure world of international journalism. I started it at a crucial point of no return, while the agent wanted me to start it almost at the end of the chronological story because there was an incident that involved me running from a machine-gun toting mob in the midst of an interethnic skirmish in the Balkans, which is sadly a good part of my journalistic claim to fame.

I love to read memoirs in general. It’s probably the genre I read most and I am not the kind of reader who looks for shock and awe in the hook. I look for character and an engaging narrative voice. But I’m probably not the norm. So my opening, which focused on drawing the reader in through character and voice, made the agent nervous.

I rewrote the hook and made the agent happy. But the book still isn’t published.

It was well written as far as it went, but it was a journalistic memoir by a journalist who was never famous. It should have been a memoir of self-discovery by a blind person with too much to prove, because that would have at least stood a chance in today’s book industry.

But that would have required a different kind of opening, less the traditional hook and more voice and character.

What the editors of 42 publishing houses told the agent, which both of us should have known from the beginning, was that as good as the book was, no one cares if they don’t know the author. If it’s a book about a journalist, that is even more true.

In newspaper journalism “back in the day,” you were assuming the reader already had the paper in their hands. And many readers had no real choice about which paper they were going to read. They read the local paper and possibly one national paper. They could choose among the national papers but they weren't likely to switch just because of less than snazzy hooks. They were much more likely to switch if a paper proved to be either boring overall or full of shoddy research. 

No, the purpose of the hook was first and foremost about the ads around the article. Get eyes on the article and you had eyes on the ads. That’s what advertisers wanted and because they funded the paper, their interests were paramount.

Reporters also wanted to hook readers into their particular story, so their interests coincided with those of the advertisers when it came to writing a good hook. It was more important to a writer that a reader start reading their article than that readers would love them specifically. Bylines were small and usually unnoticed.

Today writers have to contend with a very different landscape. Audiences are much less captive. The hook may get a reader to start reading but if they stop reading immediately afterward because the writing is bad, the content is non-existent or the voice is boring, nothing is gained.

No matter how good your hook is, readers can and do pick up ebooks and stop reading them within a few pages. In some ebook systems, this even means that they don't have to pay for the book. Similarly blogs are only really helpful to the writer if readers come back again and again to the same blog. Hooks are still part of the equation but they are no longer the defining skill of a writer. 

Some ad-dependent bloggers will still use hooks in much the way old-school newspaper reporters did. There are snazzy, intriguing hooks and often a sad lack of any substance or resolution of the mysteries raised.

That isn’t my blogging strategy. The reason for that--beyond the fact that I'd rather work my day job as an ESL teacher than write boring copy--is that things have changed. Today the focus is on readers rather than on advertisers, and that's a good thing for writers. Frankly, writing to the taste of readers is much more fun than writing to the taste of advertisers.

Today a writer's job is not so much to hook readers for a few seconds but to win fans for years to come. We want readers to finish the post or the book and then reach for another one and another one by the same author. That is what keeps the lights on so that writers can keep writing. 

Don't get me wrong. There are still gimmicks out there and people making money off of gimmicks but ultimately readers will figure out when something is a gimmick. There are people cranking out "ebooks" which consist of just a few pages of new material, while the majority of the pages in the book are stuffed with the author’s old material, old blog posts, promos of other work and so forth. The writing, even what new material there is, in these "books" is also not great. For some strange reason, the Amazon algorithms favor lots of releases by the same author in a short period of time, so there are people making some money that way until readers catch on. 

But what is it that will win real fans? What will grab the people who will remember an author's name and seek out the author's work or recommend it to their friends? 

Three things:

1. Good writing craft,

2. Consistent delivery of what a specific group of readers wants. 

3. And a distinct and addictive author voice.

Readers become fans when the book or other material they are reading holds them in a kind of spell that feels very comfortable and which calls to them enticingly when they are doing something else. The elements that go into this spell are voice, character and story, usually in that order.

It can be argued that grammar, punctuation and spelling, the nuts and bolts of writing are an inherent part of voice. If your work is littered with typos, it is like your voice is squeaking. It isn't pleasant and it breaks the spell, no matter how lovely your characters or story are. But of course there is much more to voice than nuts and bolts.

Essentially, "voice" refers to the tone, humor, cadence, dialect and closeness of your narration. People read for a kind of human contact. It's like being friends and as such winning a fan is like being a good friend.

I don't say It's like "making a friend" because it isn't. Writers aren't friends with every reader. But readers feel a bond of friendship with favorite authors nonetheless. And if you, as a writer, can provide the kind of voice that your readers need to hear from a friend, then you're halfway home.

Naturally not every reader needs the same kind of friend or even the same kind of friend at all times. I sometimes read straight forward thrillers, sometimes epic fantasy and sometimes humorous YA, even though I'm over forty. Each of these genres plays a different role, much like different kinds of friends. Sometimes I need a more humorous friend, sometimes a serious one who gets the heavy despair I'm feeling in the world right now and has resilient grit.

So the first thing to remember about voice is that you can't please them all and you shouldn't try. The worst thing you can do to your writing--other than litter it with typos and convoluted grammar--is try to make it for "everyone." Something that is for everyone is necessarily bland. And while some authors may get away with bland, you'll notice that they are already famous. Not-famous writers like me and you will have to stand out and that means deciding who we're talking to (our target audience) and what kind of friend we're going to be (wry, dark, gritty, whimsical, etc.). 

Beyond that, voice is about making the reader comfortable. You don't want to be too long-winded but neither is this a contest to see who can use the least number of words, the way it often was in newspaper journalism. Readers today read to relax more than anything else. So your voice should be one that matches what your specific readers need and makes them feel good.

You want to have a clear and identifiable voice, so that a reader can pick up an unlabeled page of your writing and be able to name the author. That would be the ideal.

Just as the nuts and bolts of writing are a prerequisite in voice, understanding the specific needs and expectations of readers in your genre is crucial. It is possible to write in the gray areas between genres, though finding your readership will take longer. Genres need not be restrictive boundaries, but be aware that readers will latch onto you for something specific and the more you can consistently provide their the fix they need, the longer you’ll keep readers and the more they’ll turn into actual fans.

An old axiom says beginnings hook readers and endings create fans. My last post told you my low opinion of endings. I don't agree with the axiom anyway. It's a cliche that may have been true in another would where reading had a different position in our entertainment industry. Today, when you can access just about anything, anywhere, right this second, you need quite a lot of good stuff between the beginning and the ending.

On the bright side, what is hard for you is also hard for other writers. You don’t need all the fans, you just need your own tribe.

Fiction isn't life but a good book should make us live life more fully: The final book of the Kyrennei series

Light of the Shield (Book 6 of the Kyrennei Series) has been released.

I have never liked endings in books. I usually don't like them even in my favorite books. I don't mean that I don't like happy endings or sad endings. I don't even mean that I don't like when a good book ends because then it is over, although that has been an issue a few glorious times.

No, I just don't like what endings have to do.

In fiction, when you write an ending, you have to tidy things up, tie up loose ends, bring subplots in, show why this or that happened and wrap up neat little packages. Everything needs a reason or at least a purpose, even if that purpose is to show randomness. That's what fiction is. It's a way of making sense of life. 

But something in me always rebels.

Life isn't like that! Or at least the logical, linear part of me clings to that belief. If life was like fiction--if everything made sense--it would be an even scarier world than it already is. Maybe that's one reason why I don't like endings.

Beyond that, I find them to be too predictable, too convenient and too unrealistic. Endings are like sex scenes. There just aren't very many creative, original, non-cliched ways left to pull one off. 

Ending the Kyrennei series, a story I started when I was less than fourteen years old, was admittedly tough from a technical writing standpoint. This story grew and evolved with me, and traveled in the back of my mind as I became a freelance journalist. It's a story I poured so much of my imagination into for so many years that ending it by putting the last part down on paper where it no longer changes was one of the hardest tasks of writing I have ever completed.

I was determined to make the ending as emotionally real and creatively honest as the rest of the story, even though I often feel endings lack in exactly those qualities. In short, that's why it took so long. I know a lot of readers have asked me where the ending is. And I finally have your answer. 

The story that started with Aranka Miko and bound you to a dozen other characters in the process finally has it's conclusion. It's one that meets my high standards and I hope it will both entertain and satisfy you. 

This is the final book in an epic series. The fifth book was almost an ending, more so than some of the cliff-hangers early in the series. At the end of Path of the Betrayer (Book 5) there was some resolution. Kai Linden and Elias Miko completed an insanely risky mission and saved the lives of hundreds of Kyrennei. Although their world is tenuous and J. Company is forced to take refuge in underground caverns, they do find refuge. Aranka and Kenyen are also safe for the moment. Many readers told me they thought that was how things would remain.

The idea that the the resistance could truly overcome the Addin is as unthinkable as our chances of achieving world peace, healthy democracy and ecological sustainability in our world. It is what we want but there are forces that stand in the way that are far stronger than any of our known weapons.

The one major piece that is unclear and still really sad at the end of Book 5 is Maya. Kai did manage to rescue Maja during that terrible mission. But she is unconscious or at least unresponsive and has clearly suffered a lot. There are also plenty of loose ends that haven't been tied up throughout the series.

Thus Book 5 provided the ending we see as possible in our world. If we fight hard, we might be able to achieve a measure of safety for a few of those closest to us. We will then stand vigilant against the darkness and aggression in the world and mourn our losses. Many questions never get answers. And there are some who we cannot save, even those we love the most. 

The challenge of the final book in the series is how to create a vision of hope and also make it one that will not betray the authenticity and realism of The Kyrennei Series. How can Maya survive what she has undergone? Is this all we get? Like Kai, we are stripped of everything that truly matters, even our core principles, and left with survival and survivor guilt? Can those who fight for freedom and justice ever win a battle that actually matters in the long run?

These were the questions I set out to answer in this final book of the series. It begins with Kai as he enters the rebel base in an underground salt mine, holding Maya unconscious in his arms. His parents were taken by the Addin. He is a fugitive and because of the success of their mission, he knows the Addin leader Marti Bloom will expose the fact that he betrayed the resistance and the Kyrennei in his apparently futile attempt to save Maya. What little has been won came at great cost. 

While he waits for Maya to come out of a comma, Kai begins training as a scout, learning Kyren and the rest of Aranka Miko's dearly bought secrets from Elias Miko and other teachers. But he keeps to himself and spends every available minute sitting at Maya's side, even though she is unresponsive. 

It isn't a situation that can last and when Maya is finally taken from him, Kai has only one thing left to fight for, one person he might still be able to save. But with martial law declared across the United States, the attempt is an obvious suicide mission.

That might not sound like a promising beginning for this end game. But keep in mind what I said before. The situation is hopeless given the weapons we know we have at our disposal. It is easy to forget the weapons of solidarity and mutual defense. They have been lost in time, both in today's world and in the world of the Kyrennei Series, but they did exist once. And if such solidarity can be found, then hope will arise in places we never imagined. 

Read Light of the Shield, the final book in the Kyrennei Series, here. It is available in Kindle and paperback formats.

What they need to grow: An interview with children's illustrator Julie Freel

Here is another interview with Children's Wheel of the Year illustrator, Julie Freel. This time I want to let you in on her other life, which is as an expert on the emotional development of children. Her input has also been very helpful on the writing side of the books, ensuring that the stories and dialogue are helpful to children, even as they entertain.

Welcome back to the blog, Julie.

How is the illustrating for this project going?

It's getting easier and more fun.

You work with children for your day job, right?

I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker. I've provided services to children and families for 25 years.

We always say plants need soil, water and sunlight to grow. Can you sum up what children need to grow and flourish?

Kids need safety and security to survive. To thrive, children need a reliable someone paying attention, providing care and nurture. To flourish, kids need motivational opportunities such as new experiences and ideas as well as opportunities to develop skills and talents.

What role does self-confidence play?

At a certain age, kids need challenges. Shanna and the Goddess is a story about how challenges help to build confidence. Giving children an opportunity to meet challenges helps them develop a healthy sense of self, challenges that are genuinely meaningful within the context of their lives.

The opportunity to be needed and the feeling that your contribution is valuable can develop a sense of self, if it's not above your developmental level. A five-year-old without an available parent who has to figure out how to get food for his three-year-old sister isn't being provided with a helpful challenge because it’s beyond their developmental level, causing later emotional problems. But if it is a challenge that causes you to stretch and prove your abilities, where you get the opportunity to test your real limits, it builds confidence.

Self-confidence is what underlies motivation and the ability and willingness to try things, make mistakes, learn and grow. Many people have abilities and exceptional talents but are unable to find the motivation to express them. Some people say it's laziness but I would say it has more to do with lack of self-confidence. Self-confidence makes life more fun.

What is self-regulation and why is it important to children's development?

Self-regulation is the ability to manage our emotions and behavior within the context of the expectations in our situation. It includes emotional regulation; or the ability to manage emotions, to calm oneself when upset and to adjust to changes. These skills allow us to direct our behavior towards goals despite the unpredictability of the world and flux of our own feelings. Without adequate emotional regulation, children are less capable of succeeding socially and academically. Our abilities to self regulate are largely developed before the age of three, including prenatal development. With a safe environment and responsive caregivers, children develop the capacity to calm themselves under stress. Without a safe environment, our brains develop patterns of hormonal responses that last a lifetime and take a great deal of effort to manage, impacting our abilities to be fully present to our life experiences.

Do you think self-regulation is particularly important because of the emphasis of today's society on academic success in a sedentary structure?

Self regulation is important in any society. There is a difference between being able to regulate ones’ emotions and the ability to sustain attention. A societal emphasis on academic success within a sedentary structure is not conducive to sustained attention for many children. But being able to regulate emotions is essential to social connectedness and success with any endeavor that requires sustained effort. Our abilities to self regulate directly relate essential relationship skills: to our ability to be present to our own emotional experience and that of another person.

What are some ways to help kids who struggle with self-regulation in school?

It depends on the need. It is helpful to have a calm-down place where kids can self regulate. Children benefit from learning mindfulness skills such as body awareness and yoga. Emotional intelligence skills can be taught; for example, learning to identify and name your feelings and expressing them to others calmly. These skills can be integrated into social relationship skill building. Children need to be taught how to express themselves in ways that are sensitive to others and help in problem solving their daily challenges.

Help kids talk about important issues--such as bullying, social exclusion, difficulties keeping up
academically--with each other. Normalize the need for calming down and the need to help each other calm down. Teach children how to be there for each other when someone is having a hard time.

In addition, doing projects--just getting out and doing things--is a huge predictor of future success for children. That's one reason why too much time sitting in front of video games is such a problem for children. They aren't having opportunities for building the many skills that are necessary steps toward self regulation, confidence and competence.

The book Shanna and the Goddess has a lot about children gardening. Do kids gain more from gardening than just technical skills like other chores?

Gardening helps children connect to nature and the earth, offering a source of calm and connectedness to the environment as well as to one’s family. Nature is one of the greatest sources of internal peace and satisfaction.

With so many demands today--academics, sports, foreign languages, creative enrichment opportunities for kids and then those chores--do you have any advice for parents hoping to include some sort of spirituality in their children's lives?

If it is a part of your life, spirituality will naturally be a part of your children&#39;s lives. If you want spiritually based celebrations, you have to make that choice and put it into practice for yourself and your family. Living your spirituality has to be integrated into your daily life as well as your celebrations, in order to be meaningful.

Thank you so much for your perspective on this. And happy painting!

Summer is coming and the fourth Shanna book is here

The turning point of the new moon is just hours away. And that makes this a perfect moment to announce a new beginning.

The fourth book in the Children's Wheel of the Year has finally arrived. This is, of course, the long-awaited Summer Solstice story, the previous three having focused on Imbolc, the Spring Equinox and Beltane. 

The Summer Solstice is one of the nature-based holidays that gets the least attention and there are remarkably few books out there for kids on the subject. Of those that are available, most either teach about the traditions of various cultures in the past, such as The Longest Day, or mention the Summer Solstice with a host of other holidays such as Rupert's Tales or An Ordinary Girl - A Magical Child.

For many people who don't follow a major religion in our modern society, it is hard to feel connected to holidays that have lost much of their tradition and essential magic to commercialism. One alternative many people are now embracing is the celebration of naturally occurring transitions, such as the solstices and equinoxes. Some spiritual paths also hold these as holy days, but even for atheists and agnostics, these moments can fulfill the human need for bright gems of interest amid the routine of daily life. 

The summer solstice has been celebrated in cultures all over the world--from the equator to the poles--for thousands of years. It is the time of flourishing life in each hemisphere, a moment of fullness and a turning point in which seasons begin to swing back.

The summer solstice is the top of the pendulum, the height of a swing. And like a child's swing it gives us all that giddy feeling children get at the moment of weightlessness as the chains of the swing stop propelling them forward and hesitate before pulling them back. That is also the moment where the swing set is no longer visible and you feel most as if you were flying. The summer solstice is the cosmic equivalent of that giddy instant. Our faces are in the sun and for a moment it feels like everything is possible and we are far more capable than we knew.

The title of the fourth book in the Children's Wheel of the Year series is Shanna and the Goddess, and it is a story about the accelerated growth, confidence and courage that can result when we are challenged by adversity and we are capable and ready to meet that challenge.

In this book, eleven-year-old Shanna and her eight-year-old brother Rye take on grown-up responsibilities when their mother breaks her ankle at the beginning of the summer. Shanna is determined to save the newly planted garden from drought and neglect. Rye takes on cooking with some interesting and tasty results. Both gain confidence and skills, but their courage is tested when a massive hail storm threatens to flatten the garden. 

Instead of being primarily a teaching tool, like many other books about natural holidays, the Children's Wheel of the Year series offers adventure stories linked to the themes of earth-centered holidays that are fun to read and listen to. The Shanna books are not focused on teaching kids how the holidays were or are supposed to be celebrated. There are examples of traditions in the books because the family in the story celebrates the holidays. But the focus is on a kid-friendly story. 

Shanna and the Goddess is available in paperback and kindle formats here. 

Kids, household tasks and that feeling that the sun is inside you

About childhood chores, I remember mostly boredom--a million cherries pitted, a thousand apples picked, countless weeds pulled, endless Saturdays spent scrubbing the bathroom, vacuuming and--longest of all somehow--cleaning my own room.

But then there was apple juice spilling from the spout of the press. The first drink--so rich it makes your teeth ache, yet it slides down your throat like perfect music. 

There was the realization that my classmates in college didn't know what to do in a kitchen, being known as "the techie one" because I knew how to turn on a vacuum or unplug a drain--even though in reality I'm rather technically challenged. Today there is that sense of wonder at a basket of food grown with my own hands, food that was just seeds a few months ago and the realizations that I had learned this as a toddler. 

Creative Commons image courtessy of Georgios Liakopoulos

Viral internet videos have made famous the 2014 Braun Research study which reports that only 28 percent of kids today do chores. People watch the cute pictures of three- and four-year-olds doing chores and cooking, and they gush about how important the skills and the theoretical sense of responsibility they gain is to those kids and to the world. 

In my generation, just a few decades ago, the digits were reversed. 82 percent of the parents of today did chores as children. We have those memories of aching boredom, frustration and watching the sun slowly march across the sky, stealing our play time on a glorious, sunny Saturday. My husband recalls his own childhood on a South Bohemian farm as one endless era of forced labor in the garden beds, weeding and picking. 

Sure, there are people out there who think parents who give kids chores are looking for cheap labor and they put negative comments on those chore videos. But I can pretty much guarantee that those people either aren't parents or they have never asked a kid to do a chore, because any parent who has knows the exponential amount of effort and work it takes to teach and persuade kids to do chores than it is to do it one's self. Even if the task is something kids want to do, like cooking a special treat, the amount of work parents do to "help" kids learn, do and clean up from the task is massive.

But the Braun study found something else interesting. Even though only 28 percent of kids today do chores, 75 percent of parents believe chores would help their children learn skills and gain responsibility. 

So what is the problem in this generation? Parents believe it's good for kids to do chores but very few actually follow through. Why?

Creative Commons image courtesy of Darien Library 

I can think of several reasons right off the top of my head:

1. Parents are busy and over-stressed. It really does take several times the time and effort to teach or even persuade a child to do a task than to do it one's self. We don't have kids do chores in order to get things done faster, at least not for several years and even with older kids the stress involved can outweigh any minor time savings.
2. Kids are busy. There is a social expectation that good, responsible parents will provide their kids with at the very least a sport, a foreign language and a creative experience. That means that on top of school and homework, kids are racing between soccer, Spanish and ceramics classes. Some say parents then feel guilty about giving kids chores on top of all this. I contend that the 15-hour, kids-awake-time day is simply over. Guilt of no guilt. 
3. Attachment parenting is all the rage and forcing is unfashionable. Last but definitely not least. a myriad of books and media today tell us that it is the emotional development of children that is most important to their future success and survival and that the only way to ensure their emotional health is to defer to their pure and natural desires and ensure that harsh words never pass our lips. Discipline is supposed to be all about "natural consequences," even thought they don't tend to materialize in the insulated, safe worlds of our homes. That doesn't leave much room for persuading kids do do boring tasks that no one without a couple of decades of experience can see the value in. 

I am far from a perfect housekeeper, cook or gardener and not a day goes by when I find that I lack a skill that my mother tried to teach me. How do I make sure the meat is cooked all the way through? What cleaning tools or supplies might help in scraping and scrubbing some of those deep, dank corners? Why aren't my pumpkin plants sprouting this year? 

I do know the basics of gardening--soil, compost, seeds, water. It's simple right?

Well, actually it isn't. After ten years of trying, I'm now just barely a decent gardener. And when I remember my initial attempts to cook in college, having come from a mother who was famous for delicious and seemingly instantaneous meals, I laugh. I did know how to boil rice and fry eggs though, and watching young adults who don't have the slightest idea where to start with either task today is disturbing. 

More disturbing is looking at more studies on human behavior. One of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted on humans, the Harvard Grant Study, found that the factor most closely linked to professional success was the length and early on-set of childhood chores, i.e. the more chores kids did and the younger they started, the more successful they are as adults today.

It's an average, of course. There are a few kids who had it easy with no chores and were handed a high-paying job by their families and continue to manage not to screw it up. But most who didn't do chores, either don't make it to success or crash and burn if success is handed to them. 

Illustration by Julie Freel from the book Shanna and the Goddess--a story about growing maturity and empowerment

And that study was done on the 82-percent-doing-chores generation, in which many of the 18 percent who didn't do any chores "failed to launch" and became the modern joke of "kids" over thirty who still live with their parents and can't seem to find their way.  I'm not going to speculate about the generation with only 28 percent doing chores, because most disaster predictions turn out to be wrong. But yeah, it's disturbing.

One of my kids has special needs that make dealing with chores much more difficult than it would be with the average kid. The younger sibling is seven and still needs a lot of help doing household tasks. I know the stresses and strains and doubt I'll live up to a perfect standard or teach my kids even as much as my mother taught me.

But I'll try. Not just because I want my kids to be successful (or at least move out by the age of thirty). More important than that to me is the feeling I get from knowing how to do things that take care of my home and food.

It's primal, I think. It is one of the most intoxicatingly empowering feelings, the sense of competence. The sun is inside me when I cook a great meal in record time or pull in the first garden harvest of the year or take a deep breath and look around at that brief moment when my house is clean before the kids demolish it again. 

It is very good to be self-reliant and competent. And kids get the same sense of that, even with smaller tasks. Of course, I didn't love chores as a kid, but I did love the feeling of the sun shining inside that came at the end. Just like he endorphins after exercise, it is a reward you don't know will come until you've done it often enough. 

When I write children's stories, my goals are to connect with kids through fun, suspense and things that make them feel good about themselves and their values. Our latest children's story, Shanna and the Goddess, goes right too that feeling of confidence and empowerment. In this illustrated, chapter book, a brother and sister named Shanna and Rye must take on significant. grown-up responsibilities when their single mother breaks her ankle. These modern-day kids start out eager to help, but soon they face hard work, callouses, conflicts and a destructive hail storm. They weather these troubles and receive much deserved rewards. 

Shanna and the Goddess is also a story of the modern-day celebration of the Summer Solstice, the day of the longest and most intense sun. The story reflects the natural power and expression of the height of summer through the story of growing maturity and the children discover the sun within as a personal source of empowerment.

Young activists, millions strong

One day in seventh grade is etched into my memory. I was sitting in the second row in a dimly lit science classroom, bored as usual. Our teacher was uninspiring. He was droning on again, something about a military program to train dolphins to attach bombs to the bottom of enemy ships.

I wasn't sure what the science point of the lecture was. Animal behavior maybe? The chemistry of explosions? You never knew with this guy. 

Illustration by Julie Freel from Shanna and the Water Fairy

But then this sentence got my attention: "So then these morons from Greenpeace came along and started blockading, so that they had to stop the program and put the lives of our troops at risk." 

I raised my hand. Most of the class was half asleep anyway. I wasn't even sure what I was going to say until he called on me. I tried to find words for the wrongness I felt in the lecture. I think I said something along the lines of, "So you think dolphins should have to do the humans' dirty work?" 

There were a few snickers around the class. The teacher leveled his gaze at me and paced a few steps closer. At least to me as a seventh grader, his voice was low and intimidating. "And you think a dolphin's life is more important than a human life?" 

More snickers and a few derogatory comments were flung my way by some of my classmates. I wasn't one of the popular kids who would get support for mouthing off to a teacher. And apparently mine wasn't a popular sentiment. 

Illustration by Julie Freel from Shanna and the Water Fairy

I had all kinds of arguments, all lined up. But I also knew this wasn't one of those times where reasoned argument would work. You don't argue with teachers in front of the whole class, not if you want to avoid trouble. How many times had I been told that? I knew that if I got one more sentence in I'd be lucky. 

And for once I had it. "If they are so concerned about human life, what are they doing blowing up ships in the first place?" 

The snickers stopped. Everyone was watching the teacher and waiting for his reaction. He stumbled a bit over his words, told me I was out of line and went on a rant about "patriotism." But I didn't care anymore. I knew when to quit. 

It was lonely being a wannabe activist in 1988 in rural Eastern Oregon. Today it may still not be the mainstream, especially environmental activism. but at least there are places to turn. If I was thirteen now, I could get on the internet and find like-minded others. In the last few weeks, I could see and join the amazing youth movement for gun regulations. 

We scarcely had books about nature and PBS documentaries. If you were interested in activism for social or environmental causes, it was a long, lonely and mostly silent road. Today there is more media and more connection across distance, especially for teenagers.

For younger kids, there are books like Shanna and the Water Fairy. I wrote this story with kids and parents on the activist road in mind. It's a gateway for kids ages six to twelve, for those who might feel like lonely voices against wrongness in hopes that they may add their voices to the rising tide of young activists for a better future.

This is the third book illustrated with emotive oil pastels by Julie Freel. It tells the story of a sister and brother, Shanna and Rye, who discover a hidden spring on dry waste land behind their school. The spring is a magical pocket of vibrant life in a drought-stricken land, a sanctuary for wildflowers, butterflies and a being they call a fairy. When the children discover that the spring is slated to be bulldozed to make way for another shopping mall, they look for ways to call attention to what would be lost and inspire local activism of their own. 

Shanna and the Water Fairy is the kind of book I longed for as a kid. It is a story that reaches out to every kid who has wanted to be heard and taken seriously for concerns many adults think kids aren't bothered with.

You aren't alone and your voice does matter. This is the time of the rise of young activists, millions strong.

Pagan Book Review: Awen Alone

Awen Alone has a definite Celtic focus but it is not exclusionary. The book mentions at several points that people of non-Celtic background should not be afraid to explore this path and that it is natural for druids to explore other pantheons beyond the Celtic pantheon.

Awen Alone offers a straightforward description of modern druidry. The author Joanna van der Hoeven explains without obfuscation the differences between joining groups and taking on a solitary practice. She makes clear that druidry can be a practice for atheists as well as a spiritual path and she assuages common fears about doing it wrong. The book also includes a particularly helpful and non-judgmental section with straight talk about different perceptions of gods and goddesses.

Where the beginning of the book emphasizes an openness to different ways of following a druid path, later in the book the tone becomes at times heavy-handed with an insistence that daily walks are the primary way to observe changes in nature through the seasons.

There are chapters outlining basic concepts of meditation, inner path working, and prayer. The author places a significant emphasis on connecting with ancestors of blood, place and path. The focus seems to be on a very flexible druid path. If there are any rules on this path, they are about respect and care for the natural environment. The only thing that is non-negotiable to the author is that you must explore your local environment and care for it, no matter what it is, urban or rural. 

A loose version of the wheel of the year with Neopagan names for the feast days is promoted with the caveat that many people will adapt the dates to fit local climactic conditions. 

The path of druidry presented here is attractive to eclectic Pagans. It may appeal to people of various backgrounds who have felt a pull toward Native American spirituality but don't want to appropriate the beliefs of that culture if it is not their own. The solitary druid path as presented here allows the individual to adapt an earth-centered spirituality to local conditions and to choose from a range of techniques such as various types of meditation, prayer, nature observation and inner path working to gain spiritual insight.

Advanced Writing Tips: Problematic and irritating disability tropes to avoid in writing

I'm going to make an assumption here. I'm assuming you as a writer, whether you have a disability or not, want to write pedal-to-the-metal, amazing plots with characters that grab readers by the throat and don't let go until they cough up cash for your next book. 

Or something like that. 

So this is not a whiny post about all the bad, prejudiced books out there that treat disability issues poorly. This is an Advanced Writing Tips post to help you avoid pitfalls that distract, lose and piss off readers. I happen to be legally blind, but I'm a writer first and I have to think things through when I write about characters with disabilities just like anyone else. 

Creative Commons image by Tim Evanson

We want our writing to be fresh and original. That goes without saying. We don't want to rehash the same stuff people have been doing for decades. That's boring. We also want our characters to be emotionally realistic (i.e. relatable for readers).  When it comes to writing about characters with disabilities it is all too easy to get sucked into cliched tropes that not only drag the story into old ruts but also make the characters more annoying than relatable.

And in many cases, even when the writing is good, tired tropes simply piss off readers with disabilities, who are at least 15 percent of the reading population and thus a hefty chunk of your market. An even heftier chunk if you count their close family members, who will likely be just as pissed off by annoying tropes.

One of the sticky problems of disability tropes is that avoiding one cliche too vigorously can make you stumble into another by accident. The most important thing to keep in mind when writing about a character with a disability is that people with disabilities are much more like abled people than they are different.

So if your character has a disability, that probably isn’t their main characteristic. It’s something of side importance most of the time, even if the story centers on something related to it. Your character has many interests that aren’t what you would expect from that sort of disabled person.

For example, I am legally blind but I’m pretty good at graphic design because I happen to have a brain wired for visual thinking. Bad combo but I didn’t get to pick. I’ll never be great at graphic design, which I might have been if my eyes weren’t screwed up. I am, on the other hand, terrible at music, which is often a stereotypical interest for blind characters. I do like music and I tried hard to play the flute for five years as a child but I was never very good. It was way harder to memorize all that music than it seems when blind musicians do it.

Other than that, here are the most common story pitfalls to avoid when dealing with a disabled character:

Creative Common image by Wheelchair Basketball Canada 

1. Bounce-back magicians: Characters who become disabled and immediately (within months, weeks or even days) are able to function in amazing top form, handling everything without help and having better developed other senses or muscles. (Yes, people with disabilities find other ways of accomplishing things and can function fast and happily in almost every situation a abled person can but it takes years to learn the specialized skills, to develop different muscles and to learn to read other senses to compensate for a sensory loss. It takes years and often specialized training and education. There are already way too many stories and movies out there about a disabled character's miraculous recovery and given the propensity of fiction to speed up medical miracles, we come across characters who adapt unrealistically quickly. This is not only old and boring, it is also highly annoying to people actually struggling with these issues. There are very few stories or movies that portray a realistic struggle and show the grit of real people with disabilities. Possibly a good plot line or six there.)
2. Superheroes in non-magical stories: Characters with super powers or super sensitive senses where they don't belong. (I am legally blind and I can throw pebbles across a ditch to tell how far I have to jump by sound, I can often sense obstacles by echolocation and I can almost flawlessly tell what my young children are up to in the other room by hearing. But I am sick to death of the cliched character who is a martial arts master and totally blind, who can hear how their opponent is swinging a sword so precisely that they always win easily. Yes, blind people sometimes appear to have super hearing to sighted people but controlled hearing tests show that we have no better technical hearing ability than anyone else. What is true is that people who have lived without a particular sense for a long time (think decades) learn to pay much more attention to their remaining senses and interpret meaning from things others would ignore. People with various disabilities have adapted skills that abled people have because they are not forced to practice such specific skills minute by minute for years. But this is about skill and muscle, not super powers. Despite my abilities in interpreting sounds, I'm still pretty tone deaf and have a terrible ear for recognizing voices. There are things you can train and things you can't. Keeping this realistic and ensuring that your disabled character has had years to adapt to their disability, if you want them to be really skilled, are essential to making characters relatable.)
3. Gracious suicides: Disabled characters who nobly commit suicide to escape their unbearable existence and reduce the burdens on abled characters. (This is another type of trope entirely and it is the kind that will get your book or movie thrown across many rooms with enough force to break the binding. The movie success of "Me Before You" has made this trope famous recently but it has been around for decades, probably centuries. If you have any confusion on this, here's the crux. Being disabled is not an unbearable existence and portraying people with disabilities as a burden whose best shot at heroism is to commit suicide to lift their burden from others is wrong in so many ways. But from the writer's perspective it is just cliched, overdone and old hat. It is also maudlin and melodramatic, and it relegates a major character to a paper cutout prop for other characters. Just don't do it. Euthanasia can be explored in much more realistic and mature ways.)
4. Inspiro-porn stars: Characters whose primary purpose is to inspire others through their stoic courage despite suffering. (There’s a term for this. It’s called “inspiration porn.” It’s like porn because it is designed to generate a strong, involuntary emotional response in the reader/viewer and it makes the reader/viewer feel good and almost euphoric for a short time at the expense of reducing another person or character to a prop for the edification of others. People with disabilities are not any more stoic than other people and they shouldn't be expected to be. Disabled characters should be allowed to become overwhelmed and emotional about difficult things in their lives, related to disability or not, just like any other characters. Certainly, if you are writing about a hardened detective or other James-Bond type hero who happens to have a disability and he/she is stoic and doesn't complain when their arm is severed in a fight because that's just what kind of individual he/she is, that's a different matter. But it is not “courageous” to simply live with a disability and not go kill yourself (see trope #3). Most people with disabilities live pretty happy lives where their struggles are often not related to their disability. It can be irritating to deal with a society that isn’t ready to include our differences, but it isn’t like we lie in bed in the morning and muster the courage to live. We muster the patience to deal with ableist barriers and weird social reactions but that’s more patience than courage. It can take a lot of mental struggle for people who are newly disabled to see that their new situation is livable but people handle it in various ways due to temperament and all of those ways are normal and acceptable. Here too there are several good potential plot lines that have rarely, if ever, been explored.) 
5. The crip in distress: The dependent invalid or the one who must be saved. (This is less common today but it used to be a big trope. It is still very tired. No one really wants to read stories where a secondary character is a disabled child or other who the hero is going to save from their terrible fate. I'm not going to belabor the point. Just avoid doing this. When you need a hero to save someone in order to be heroic, it is always better to make the person being saved a three-dimensional character as well. What would be a cliched "rescue plot" can gain immense punch with more careful characterization.)
6. Last-minute cures: The plot arch in which the cure of the disability is the solution to the plot problem. (This is a huge one today,, which has kind of taken over the 19th and early 20th century trope number 5. I see stories far too often today where the plot revolves around a character wrestling with the psychological and physical effects of a disability. Sometimes the character is a mess and has to learn the courage and stoic fortitude in trope number 4 or the adaptations in trope 1 and toward the end of the story he or she does adapt and things look okay, tolerable and the disability is mastered. But the author betrays their internal belief that disability is still too terrible and the disability is cured in the end. So the character finds that they could live well with such a disability and then they are rewarded with a cure that takes the disability away so they don’t have to. This isn’t impossible in terms of a realistic event narrative but it has been done and done and done and it is far from the norm of disability. It displays an underlying assumption in society and on the part of the author that no adaptation or psychological resolution is actually good enough and the only positive outcome is to get rid of disability altogether.)
7. Pre-adventure cures: The disabled character who is magically cured at the beginning of the story so that they can go on an adventure or be a hero. (This is a minor but highly annoying fantasy trope. Sometimes my pulse will quicken as I read the blurb on a new fantasy book that says the main character is disabled, only to find that the initial plot point is that the disability is magically cured, so that now the formerly sedentary protagonist can now go off on an adventure or become a hero. That's what happened in The Last Words of Will Wolfkin by Steven Knight. The message in stories like this is all too clear. People with disabilities are seen as helpless and useless. They can only be victims or people to be rescued, never a hero in their own right. This is a problem and the whole premise of the disability being cured in the first chapter is just weak and disappointing as a plot spur in any case.)
8. Fakers and manipulators (This is one that will send me and many others into vicious bad review mode faster than any other. In fact, I’ll give a bad example right here as a bad review. Yes, I’m naming names. The Netflix series "The Good Wife" would be a fairly decent dramatic lawyer show except that it uses this trope several times. The one disabled major character in the show is a lawyer who slyly and manipulatively uses a tardive dyskinesia disability to derail arguments, manipulate judges, plead for sympathy from juries and so on and on and on. It is really all his character ever does. He is the only major disabled character and here this is finally a show with a disabled lawyer as a character. Another minor character is the son of a rival politician who has leukemia. The child is used as a media gimmick to gain public sympathy for an otherwise unsympathetic politician. The fact that this show uses both these "faker" stereotypes without including other people with chronic illness or disability points to some serious bigotry somewhere in the production chain. Abled people are likely to protest that “Well, this happens in real life!” In fact, it almost does not happen. It is exceedingly rare for people to fake a disability in public to gain sympathy and it is impossible to fake a disability medically given medical technologies today. People with real disabilities do not fake or exaggerate their difficulties to get attention or sympathy. Yes, I know some beggars pretend to be missing a limb or to be blind to get sympathy and donations. These people are rare anomalies who you see relatively often because they place themselves in highly frequented areas. They are a tiny fraction of reality. The trope in fiction and the stereotype in real life that some non-disabled people fake a disability and some disabled people exaggerate their difficulties to get attention, sympathy or advantages is so tired that the dead horse has decomposed. Furthering this trope is unforgivable today in a society where everyone should know better. Works that promote it actively harm people with disabilities and cause us to be accosted and accused of faking at random moments in public. Every time an book or movie portrays such a stereotype, real events result in which disabled children and adults are mocked and dismissed. Do not do it. It's like portraying a black person as a monkey. Sure, some black children eat bananas and jump up and down pretending to be a monkey, just like some white children do. It happens. But we don't do it in fiction for very good reasons. The same goes for fictional portrayals of people faking disability. Disabilities are extremely varied and you won’t always understand why a mother with a white cane on the train who uses a disability transport card is reading a printed book to her children (that would be me). But it is just the way optics work and no one is faking.)
9. Charity applause: Disabled protagonists who are good "for a disabled person." (This is a particularly tired one but it still comes up sometimes in children's literature. Much may be made of a character's accomplishments because they are pretty good at something "for a disabled person." There is a legitimately difficult line to walk for writers here. It is natural to write about the accomplishments of someone against the odds. We all know that it is an achievement for a wheelchair user to play wheelchair basketball. And a sports story about a kid's dream to be a star in wheelchair basketball is fair game. But it isn't attractive or interesting if the point of the story is that everyone claps for little Jimmy who tries to play with the abled kids but he's really very bad at it and the climax of the story is the one time he makes a basket. He was so good, considering he's disabled, but really he was awful by any other standard. Boring.)
10. Automatic no-threat sign: A character's disability used to show that they are not a threat in competition. (Sometimes a secondary character in a story has all the hallmarks of a good, positive disabled character. It's often the best friend or sidekick of the main character. The thing is that the secondary character is disabled, and the assumption is made clear in the story that this means the disabled character will always be the follower and is never a competitor for top jobs. This character is a great confidante when it comes to love interests because he/she is "obviously" not in the running for romance. This is overused and obviously annoying. It's also very boring.)
11. Prince or princess Not Sexy: The disabled hero who wins everything except love. (This is a special little trope that crops up every now and then. The most famous example is probably "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" Disney musical. The hunchback did all the things most Disney princes do and won but instead of getting a beautiful princess and everlasting happiness in the end, his great prize is that he is tolerated in public. Causing your readers/viewers to gag on vomit during what is supposed to be the heartwarming end is usually not part of the plan. Don't do this.)
12. Gimpiness as the evil trope: The villain who is obviously a villain because of a disability. (I am personally simply perplexed by this one. There are so many villains in modern culture who are disabled. They far outnumber the number of disabled protagonists. If any racial group was so universally portrayed as "the bad guys" it would be a topic of anti-discrimination activism. But today disability has replaced the dark visage as the quick and easy way to show who the villain is. They walk with a cane, breathe with a machine, need magic to keep their body together or whatever. There are theories about how this is related to a hard-wired human fear of deformity and disease. The first zombie movies were about AIDs victims and I am sure the cheap play on people's fears has something to do with it. But quick and easy or not, it is just as problematic as having all your villains be dark-looking. At the very least, we need to balance the number and major positioning of disabled protagonists.) 

I know this list might feel overwhelming. And contradictory. You shouldn't portray people with disabilities as too good but you can't make them villains either. You can't make your disabled characters too strong and resilient without risking them having "super powers" but you shouldn't let them become weak two-dimensional props in need of rescue either.

It often seems like it would be a lot easier to just not include characters with disabilities at all... which is what most writers have done for ages. The worst trope of all isn't actually on the list, because the worst message about disability that we can promote in our writing is voiceless obscurity. When we don't give a character here or there a disability we contribute to a society in which people with disabilities are ignored, dismissed and isolated. 

It may be hard to avoid the pitfalls, but it is worth it. Including a character with a disability in your story, even without making the story about that disability, opens up a large and hungry market for your work. When there is too little of something in books, readers want it. Write well about characters with disabilities and you'll get a boost in reader loyalty and discoverability. 

So do write about characters with disabilities. Just do it smart.

Pagan Book Review: iPagan

iPagan is a fascinating and challenging collection of essays, including multiple, diverse perspectives on Druidry, shammanism, goddess spirituality and witchcraft. These four major streams in the modern Pagan movement are described and explored in a variety of ways both theoretical and experiential. While there are plenty of books that will tell you what these paths are and even provide step-by-step instructions for going through the motions of their practices, I appreciate this collection's attempt to evoke the sensory and inner experience of each pathway.

Later in the book there is a selection of essays on more general topics concerning the Neopagan community, such as gender, Pagan politics and Pagan parenting. These went only tentatively beyond the boundaries pushed by previous collections of Pagan essays. Intercultural topics and disability issues in Paganism were still avoided by most of the authors and only briefly mentioned by a few. I continue to be disappointed by the lack of considerations in Pagan anthologies for issues which cause daily concerns within the Pagan community. However, what is discussed is handled well here, including complex issues of gender identity.

The overall quality of writing in this collection is excellent and there was no boring moment throughout the book. If enjoy reading thoughtful and lively essays, you will likely find iPagan both informative and entertaining.