Monthly Archives: April 2019

Your Passion for Writing

When I read the title of Stephanie Lee’s article in The New York Times, “Why ‘Find Your Passion’ is Such Terrible Advice,” I gaped in astonishment. Was she saying ‘Don’t Find Your Passion; Live a Passion-Free Life’? What kind of life is that?

Then I read her article, and I encourage you to do so as well. She’s really saying you should have the right attitude as you seek your life’s passion. Though she doesn’t provide alternative advice, I believe she would have you ‘find and develop your passion.’

The shorter version (“Find your passion”) may lead someone to believe it’s just about the search. “Ah, I’ve found something I enjoy. Now the gods will smile on me and I’ll simply display my in-born talent for the world to see.”

Lee’s article drew heavily from a study by P.A. O’Keefe, C.S. Dweck, and G.M. Walton called “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?” The study contrasted people with two views:

  • Fixed Mindset. These people are uninterested in things beyond their accustomed interests. When they do try new things, they don’t foresee difficulties and lose interest quickly when they encounter problems.
  • Growth Mindset. People with this viewpoint assume they must develop their passions over time. They know they’ll have to invest effort and overcome obstacles.

The study’s authors worried that if you tell someone with a fixed mindset to “find your passion,” that person will likely pour energy into a single interest and quit when the going gets tough. Moreover, the person may generalize that failure and conclude she or he won’t be good at anything.

Those with a fixed mindset are limiting themselves and missing an opportunity to enjoy some interest in life. The key, then, is to shake off the fixed mindset and adopt a growth mindset. But how?

First, I’d like to separate two things people often mix up. Let’s define passion as a strong interest in, even love of, some activity. Let’s define talent as a level of skill in performing some activity. This sets up the four possibilities illustrated in this table.

The key quadrants are 2 and 3. Quadrant 3 points the way out of the fixed mindset. By enjoying and celebrating the fruits of small achievements, you begin to associate favorable outcomes with effort and determination. Quadrant 2 is where all passions start. With any luck, your enjoyment of the activity will carry you through the inevitable difficulties and setbacks.

How does this apply to writing fiction? Like any other activity, some love doing it and some hate it. Some are skilled enough to produce good stories and others lack that talent. I suspect there are very few in Quadrant 3, who hate writing but somehow produce high-quality stories.

If you’re in Quadrant 2 and struggling to get to Quadrant 4, you’ll need that growth mindset to keep you plugging away, writing better stories and perfecting your craft.  

If you suffer from the fixed mindset, think about the Quadrant 3 areas of your life. You do have a talent for some things, after all. You didn’t become good at them by accident. You worked at them and persevered. Now do the same thing by writing some fiction.

In summary, find and develop your passion for writing fiction. That’s the non-terrible advice of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 28, 2019Permalink

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation Project

Humanity just doesn’t go in for long-term projects anymore. The fire at Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral this past Monday got me thinking about projects that extend beyond a single human lifetime.

The French are determined to repair their beloved medieval church. Estimates of the duration of repairs range from five to twenty years or more. Those timeframes would have astounded the laborers who built it. They needed 182 years to finish the cathedral.

That sort of project duration was typical for cathedrals of the period. It seems we’re no longer accustomed to ‘generation projects.’ We’re used to completing large structures (buildings, dams, tunnels, bridges, etc.) in spans of less than thirty years.

Imagine what it took to build something that required centuries. The original planners, designers, and workers knew they’d never see the completed work. The designers passed on their plans to others, and hoped the enthusiasm for the project would carry through. Laborers in the middle years worked on a project they didn’t originate and knew they’d never finish. Only the final generation of workers lived to enjoy the project’s culmination.

As an engineer with some program management experience, I marvel at such long-term projects. As a fiction writer, I try to understand the motivation behind them. How did builders sustain the guiding vision generation after generation? Let’s explore some historical generation projects, proceeding from most recent to oldest.

Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. When finished, this will be a Roman Catholic Church in Barcelona, Spain. Begun in 1882, the project encountered difficulties including war and fire that delayed it, though it’s due to complete in 2026, fully 144 years after its start.

Saint Basil’s Cathedral. Begun in 1555 in Moscow, this church took about 123 years to complete in 1678.

St. Peter’s Basilica. This Italian Renaissance church stands in Vatican City. Construction began in 1506 and ended in 1626, 120 years later. Construction delays included difficulties with its immense dome and a succession of architects redesigning it, among them Michelangelo and Raphael.

Leaning Tower of Pisa. This cathedral bell tower in Pisa, Italy was doomed from the start of its construction in 1173, as it stood on unstable subsoil and started to lean. The difficulty of compensating for that lean was only one of the factors delaying its construction. War with other Italian city-states was another. Despite these setbacks, builders completed the project after 199 years, in 1372.

Notre-Dame de Paris. The fire on April 15 reminded us all that all of humanity’s creations are subject to damage, and fire is perhaps the biggest threat to wooden structures. Construction of this medieval Catholic Cathedral began in 1163, and was mostly done by 1260, but modifications continued until 1345, a total of 182 years.

Angkor Wat. According to one source, the building of Angkor Wat (in what is now Cambodia) began in 802 in the Khmer Empire and completed in 1220, taking 418 years. It started as a Hindu temple and later became a Buddhist one.

Temple of Kukulcan. Also called El Castillo, this Mayan step pyramid, built as a temple to the god Kukulcan, stands in the ancient city of Chichen Itza in what is now Mexico. Construction started in the year 600 and continued in phases to 1000, a duration of 400 years.

Great Wall of China . On my list of generation projects, the Great Wall boasts the longest duration. One site dates its start as 400 B.C. and its completion as 1600 A.D., or two millennia. Ordered by the emperors of various dynasties including the Qin, Han, Qi, Sui, and Ming, the guiding vision seems to have been protection against raiders from the northern steppes.

Stonehenge. Now we come to the oldest generation project on my list, a Neolithic structure in England begun around 3100 B.C. and completed around 1600 B.C. The builders left no records, and the structure’s purpose is unknown. Theories include a burial site, an astronomical observatory, ancestral worship, a symbol of peace and unity, and a place of healing.

From the above list, we can see that, with the exception of the Great Wall and possibly Stonehenge, religion provides a strong motivation for embarking on and sustaining a long-term project. Also, it’s generally true that these projects took a lot longer than originally planned, encountering various disruptions and delays along the way.

If we graph the timeline of these generation projects, it’s clear the timeframes are shortening, likely a result of advancing construction techniques and laborsaving machinery.

Given the faster pace of modern construction, have we lost the ability to plan and accomplish long-term projects? Could we sustain the enthusiasm of a building project over centuries, as our ancestors did?

If we desire to build megastructures on a planetary or stellar scale someday, things such as terraformed planets, Shellworlds, Niven Rings, Dyson Spheres, and others, it’s likely we’ll have to reacquire the multi-generational mindset of those who came before us.

To sustain a project of that type we’d need a motivating spirit, a shared vision as powerful as the ones (like religion or protection) that inspired our predecessors.

Alternatively, we could work on extending the human lifespan. A career length of two thousand years, sufficient to oversee the entirety of the Great Wall, seems like a fine notion to—

  Poseidon’s Scribe

April 21, 2019Permalink

Twistery History

When writing fiction, do you set your tales in historical times? If so, you must resolve the inevitable conflict between The Facts and The Story. In other words, you’ll have to twist some history.

Author Colin Falconer expresses the problem well in a post titled “How to Mix Historical Fact and Fiction.” He says real life is chaotic. It doesn’t obey the rules of fiction. It’s filled with aspects that interfere with a good story.

Here’s a table that contrasts historical fact and historical fiction:

Historical Fact Historical Fiction
Chaotic, messy Planned, ordered
Mostly boring Mostly interesting or exciting
Has real people, with infinite complexities Has a protagonist, antagonist, and supporting characters
Events occur as they will, often by chance or coincidence Events occur in a believable order, in a way that supports the plot
How people lived is as interesting to us as what people did What characters do is more important than details of how they live
Historian’s aim is to get the facts right Fiction writer’s aim is to entertain and engage the reader

I should also mention an important distinction between historical fiction and alternate history. Colin Falconer writes historical fiction, where he takes a set of historical events and fictionalizes them. I write alternate history, set in another universe whose history matched ours until some Point of Divergence (PoD), after which things proceeded quite differently.

Even in alternate history, though, readers want to know the author took the trouble to study history and get some details right. If the story takes place in the past, readers expect the author to transport them there, and not jar them with anachronisms like the clock striking three in the second act of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. (I know, I know—Shakespeare might well have deliberately used a not-yet-invented clock as a dramatic and metaphorical device.)

Here’s how I twisted history in my most recently published alternate history tales:

In “Ripper’s Ring,” set in 1888, the PoD occurs the moment a troubled mortuary worker comes across the legendary Ring of Gyges, the invisibility ring mentioned by Plato. Other than that, I tried to remain true to the facts about Jack the Ripper. I did invent a fictional Scotland Yard detective, but the rest of history didn’t get much twisting.

Regarding my story, “Ancient Spin, (in the Hides the Dark Tower anthology) I hesitate to categorize it as alternate history, since it’s about the Biblical Tower of Babel. Still, I gave my characters Babylonian names and tried to depict the mood and scene after the collapse of a large ziggurat in that time period.

“After the Martians” takes place during our World War I, but the PoD happened sixteen years earlier, in 1901, when the Martians of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds invaded. Since the combatants in my story use Martian technology, that changes the very nature of the war, so my story doesn’t bear much resemblance to the actual conflict. Even so, my photographer character uses an actual camera from that period, and the old woman treats the soldier’s injuries using techniques of that time.

My story “Instability” (in the Dark Luminous Wings anthology) derives from a legend about a medieval monk in a British monastery around 1000 A.D. I tried hard to get details right about life in a Benedictine monastery including daily schedules and the layout of the abbey. I used one of the actual abbots of Malmesbury Abbey as a character. Aside from the improbable legend itself, I didn’t do much twisting of history in this one.

“The Steam Elephant” (in The Gallery of Curiosities, Issue #3) takes place during the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. The PoD is my assumption that the events and characters of Jules Verne’s novel The Steam House were true. Again, I strove to keep details of the Battle of Isandlwana accurate, including the names of British commanders and the Zulu king. However, since my story occurs twenty-two years after the setting of Verne’s novel, I stretched things by assuming his characters remained nearly unchanged despite the passage of years.

As you write your historical fiction, try to strike a good balance between getting facts right and telling an interesting story. If you have to twist some history to do that, well, you’re in good company along with—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 14, 2019Permalink

Writing Sideways

You have a problem. Perhaps you’ve written your main character into a plot trap. Or you’re trying to create an irresistibly likable character. Or you need a good motivation for the antagonist. Or you don’t even know what to write about. I don’t know what your problem is. Still, let me help you solve it.

By writing sideways.

No, that’s not what I mean by writing sideways

Well, it’s really called ‘lateral thinking’ but I like to think of it as writing sideways. I’m indebted to Shane Snow for the ideas in this post. He discussed problem solving in general, but my post is about solving problems while writing fiction.

His article starts with a clever problem to illustrate his method, but I’ll choose a different one. Your character is in a new house wired by a crazy electrician. The character sees three switches in the basement and knows each switch controls a different incandescent lamp on the first floor, but doesn’t know which switch controls which lamp. How can she find out, by making only one trip upstairs?

Shane Snow’s method has five steps, but you might not need all five for every problem. I’ll rephrase his steps in my own words:

  1. Examine the assumptions. All problems have assumptions, but some are so obvious most people ignore them. List all the assumptions you can think of, and examine each one. Is it really true? Are there other options? For our Switch-and-Lamp problem, the assumptions might include:
    • You need to know which switch controls which lamp.
    • Each switch controls a different lamp.
    • You can only make one trip up the stairs.
    • You can’t see the lamps from the basement.
    • You can determine a switch-to-lamp connection by flipping the switch on and looking at the lamp.
  2. Question the direct approach. Think about the way most people would solve the problem. Then ask, “what if I couldn’t do it that way?” For the Switch-and-Lamp problem, most people would flip a switch or two, then go upstairs and find they’ve only identified one of the three connections. They’re stymied by the limitation of being allowed only one trip upstairs.
  3. Re-write the Question. Often by examining the question, ingenious new answers emerge. Why is it so vital to know which switch controls which lamp? Why am I only allowed one trip upstairs? Does it matter that they’re ‘incandescent’ light bulbs?
  4. Approach the Problem Backwards. This is a common method used with mathematical problems. Imagine you’ve already solved the problem and think about what form that solution took and what route you must have taken to get there. In our character’s case, her solved problem consists of going upstairs and finding the three lamps in three different states, so she can know which switch controlled which lamp. That seems impossible, since lamps have only two states—on or off, right?
  5. Get a fresh perspective. Look at the problem from different angles and sides. In a problem involving fictional characters, think about how each of them see it. In our switch-and-lamp problem, look back and notice how we’ve constrained our thought by thinking of lamps as binary—either on or off, but we need some third state of a light bulb to know, in one trip, which switch controls each lamp. Is there a third state of a light bulb other than on or off?

Readers love books that break molds, defy conventions, and explore new ideas. They enjoy characters that are out of the ordinary, or who solve bedeviling problems in ingenious ways. Perhaps these techniques of writing sideways will help you.

Oh, yeah. I forgot about the lamps. By now, you know one answer: your character must turn the first switch on and wait a few minutes, then turn that one off, turn the second switch on, and go upstairs. Your character will find one light bulb off but warm (switch 1), one lamp on (switch 2), and one lamp off but just room temperature (switch 3).

That’s the problem’s classic solution, but what if the problem permitted no trips up the stairs? Then our character could drill a hole in the basement ceiling and construct a periscope so she could see at a glance which lamp comes on as she operates each switch.

If you apply the sideways writing techniques, you’ll come up with even more solutions to this problem and many others, solutions far beyond the imagination of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

April 7, 2019Permalink